The Ultimate Blueprint for Extraordinary Success: Mindset and Transformation with Jason Roberts

Josh St. Laurent: Welcome to the Wealth in Yourself Podcast, a show dedicated to helping you master the complex subject of money by simplifying it through stories and actionable advice. I'm Josh St. Laurent and this is Wealth in Yourself. Welcome to the Wealth in Yourself Podcast where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. I'm your host, Josh St. Laurent. Today, we're joined by Jason Roberts. Jason is a national speaker and peak performance coach who has dedicated his life to studying the formulas for success and implementing these habits to create massive results in a fraction of the time. Despite growing up in a broken household and being a college dropout, Jason has successfully built 11 of his own companies, 10 of which generated over a million dollars in revenue in their first year in business. His businesses have brought in well over 100 million in revenue and he has helped tens of thousands of people grow and scale their businesses in industries like real estate and investing, medical practices, insurance, construction companies and medical spots. Josh St. Laurent: Jason, welcome. God you're here. Thanks man. Good to see you. Jason Roberts: How you doing? Josh St. Laurent: Really good. I've been looking forward to this. Jason Roberts: Yeah, let's just dive right in. Like for the people listening who maybe aren't familiar with your journey, can you just tell us about the journey like from starting your first business to now being the business in mindset coach? I don't know how much time we have, but I'll keep the story from short. It's a long story. I grew up in a small farm town. Troy Missouri, about an hour outside of St. Louis. Parents split when I was 12 and so my daddy kind of disappeared from the scene and my mom was stuck raising three boys with, you know, not a lot of money. She was full-time nurse, beautiful woman and she did everything she could do, but I mean three kids and no financial support. Jason Roberts: You know, it wasn't an easy thing. And so I think kind of, think kind of from a young age, man, I got, I saw her struggle. You know what I mean? Like I saw her sacrifice. I mean, she didn't buy herself clothes. She didn't buy herself anything. And I saw somebody that was sacrificing their entire life for the benefit of someone else. Yeah, it was her children, but like, you know what I mean? Like just the sacrifice of that. And so from a young age, my mind was always thinking about what could I do to bring in money that would take some of that burden off of her? Jason Roberts: And I think that's, you know, I didn't have entrepreneur role models. I didn't have any business owners in my family. I didn't have, I didn't have anybody to look up to. I looked up to the people I saw on MTV that, you know, had nice cars and big houses, you know? Jason Roberts: And so from a young age, I kind of, kind of thought about that. As I turned 18, my mom said, you know, you either need to get a job full time job or you need to go to college full time one, the two, but I can't support you, you know? And so I enrolled in college, community college. And I got a full time job, a first job, first real job I had was at a collection agency. And I don't know if any of the audiences done that job before, but it's not a really fun job in the scheme of like, unless you like getting cussed out and yelled at for eight hours a day, you know what I mean? Like you're calling people and they're six months old to discover Carden. Surprisingly enough, they're not super excited to hear from you. And you're on the phone from them. Jason Roberts: So side note of that was my first year there, I made $70,000. And this was in 98, 99, you know, long time, 25 plus years ago, whatever. And so my buddies there at Mizzou, they're getting a four year degree and they're hoping that when they graduate with their four year degree, that they could land a job that paid half as much as I was already making. And so, you know, I didn't have any role models. I didn't really have an sounding board. I didn't have a mastermind group. I didn't have a coach. You know, I just as 18 year old kid, I said 70 grand a years better than the 40. They're going to get when they graduate. And I won't have four years with the student loans, not the college is bad. But I mean, that was my 18 year old mindset, right? And so I dropped out of college and at the same time, though, man, I remember walking into that place every day was it was an ocean of cubicles. Jason Roberts: And I remember walking in there every day and, you know, I see people that are 30 years old and 40 and 50 and 60 and 70. And I remember thinking to myself, like, I don't know why God put me on this earth, but I know it's not for this. And not that that was wrong. I just felt like there was something else that I was put here to do. And it wasn't to walk into an ocean of cubicles for the rest of my life. And one of the guys that I worked with, I mean, and this is how this stuff happens. One of the guys that I worked with left the collection and so you got into the mortgage business and he was good friends with my boss. Made like a hundred grand as first year doing home loans, which was awesome. But I mean, it didn't really, didn't really trip my radar ton. Jason Roberts: His second year, he had made almost $300,000 writing home loans, you know, for people to buy a house. And I went to lunch with him. I kind of called him out on and I was like, no, wave in. And he threw his paste up down on the table. It was like 286 or something. This was October. And it was in that moment that I thought, you know what? Helping people buy a house sounds like a whole lot more fun than calling on these Lincoln credit card bills and 300 grand a years better than the 70 or 80 that I'm making. And so I called down to the Missouri Division of Finance and I said, what does it take to open a mortgage company? And they sent me this packet in the mail took me a couple weeks to go through the whole thing. But after I went through all of it, there was only two things I didn't have. One was 50 grand in cash and one was a million dollar surety bond. Jason Roberts: And I found out through my insurance agent, surety bond was easy to get as long as he had good credit, which they did. And I just needed 50 grand in cash. So I saved up $50,000 of the next year. And on April 15, 2001, a couple of weeks after my 21st birthday, that was my last day in corporate America, man. That was my start of entrepreneurship. Part of the reason I've had the success that I've had is just because I probably screwed up or made more mistakes than most. And so I hope that through some of these stories of mistakes and things that we learned from some of you guys can save 10 or 20 years from doing the same thing. That was kind of my start, man. That was the first business that I created. I woke up that morning and I thought, Oh my God, what did I do? Jason Roberts: You know, I spent the whole year trying to figure out how to open the business. And I didn't spend any time figuring out how to like run the business, how to grow the business or even you're going to laugh and things that I'm crazy. But I didn't even know how to completely take a loan application the day that we were open for business. You know, I opened a mortgage company. I don't know how to take a damn loan application the first day that we're there. So I mean, this is just the things that you do. I'm a big proponent, though of action of, you know, jump out of the plane, build your wings and the way down. That's that's how we learn. That's how we grow. Josh St. Laurent: Yeah, absolutely. So it sounds like the very first business was the mortgage brokerage. Something went right, right? Because you enjoyed it enough to go start 10 more businesses. Josh St. Laurent: I do want to go to the big lessons, though. You mentioned like, man, I made some mistakes along the way. Learned from my mistakes. Can you talk about, you know, throughout the 11 different businesses? What were some of those big lessons that you learned? Jason Roberts: Man, I've got a lot that I could talk about. One of the biggest ones that I can think of the first one would be, we grew that company from the spare bedroom of my condo to about 100 employees. We went to about $20 million a year in annual revenue, just to give perspective, you know, with the number one rule housing lender in the state. So I mean, we did some things right. I was just a kid, you know, I mean, I didn't, I knew early on that I can try to figure this out all by myself or I can go find somebody that's already getting the result that I'm trying to get and model that behavior. Jason Roberts: You know, even young, I at least knew that then 2007 came and we went from bringing in millions of dollars a month in revenue to lose in 100 grand a month in revenue, like overnight and every month, month after month. And we had room for 100 people, you know, that was a machine that you can't just shut off because revenue shuts off. And over a two and a half year period of time, I went from being a multi-millionaire to being homeless. I mean, for real homeless, like chapter seven bankruptcy lost my house to foreclosure, cars repossessed. And I wasn't financially irresponsible, man. I mean, it took two and a half years for me to run out of money, but it doesn't matter how much liquid reserves you have. If you've got debt and you've got those payments every month, at some point, if the tide doesn't shift, you're going to run out. Jason Roberts: The three biggest lessons that I took out of that are, you know, when I got to that place, I said, okay, enough's enough. Like I've got to figure out a new plan. There was three things that I kind of extracted out of my success that I think people should model. Number one is you have to have a recipe or blueprint. I don't care if you want to be a real estate investor. I don't care if you want to be a home builder. I don't care if you want to own a law firm or a dental practice. Whatever it is, you've got to have a recipe or blueprint. I don't mean goals. I mean, like a clear, decisive plan of what needs to be done on a daily basis in order to achieve the result that you're trying to achieve, right? It's a math equation. It's not luck. Jason Roberts: It's not like wing it. What I've learned is that, you know, 90% of new businesses fail within the first five years. 10% of them succeed. I for some reason have had success in everyone that I've done, not success all the time. I'm not saying, hey, look at me, but we've had extraordinary results. So I'm in that 10% and I really started digging to like, why? Why? You know what I mean? What? What did I do differently than somebody who fails? What are the people that are failing doing differently than the ones that went? And so the first thing is a clear, respire blueprint. It's going to be a wholesaler and a real estate investor find somebody that wholesales 15 houses a month and is profitable and model what they do. If you want to be a national championship bodybuilder, find somebody that won the national championship and model what do they eat? Jason Roberts: What do they work out? What time do they work out? What time do they get up? You know what I mean? Like that's a respire blueprint. A goal would be to say, I want to win a national championship. A respire blueprint would be to know what to do on a daily basis in order to you. The second thing would be massive action. You got to condition yourself to take massive action. This is one of the things I see people, they have the recipe, they have the blueprint, they know where the goal is buried. But for some reason, they're not taking action on it. And what I have found over time is that the reason that people are taking action is fear. Fear of the fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of loss. You know, any of those types of things and lots of times their stories, man, they're things that we have built in from the time that we were kids. Jason Roberts: We can talk more about that. The third thing I want to give them real quick is a coach or mentor. And I'm not here to sell coaching or mentoring. What I'm saying is that successful business owners hire the mentor first and then build the business. New entrepreneurs that don't know what to do, they say to themselves, once I have some success, then I'll hire a mentor coach or join a mastermind. Once I start to make some money, then it's an if then thing. And the problem is that's why 90% of them fail because by the time they muddle through for six months, they reaffirm their own story of this doesn't work or this is too hard. I don't have the money or I don't have the time. And the reality is you just didn't do it right. And I'm not making it. I mean, you're talking to the guy that screwed this up for the first 12 years. Jason Roberts: So I mean, I'm certainly not casting judgment. I'm trying to help. But every business that I have ever started and grown, the first thing I did was found someone that already is getting the result that I'm trying to get. And I brought them in from the very beginning. Josh St. Laurent: Yeah, I subscribe to that too. Like, honestly, I give a lot of credit there for my own successes. Like I go, I go find someone doing it at a high level and I partner with them. I pay them for their time if I need to. Whatever it takes, it's important to have that person on your team. I'm curious about the blueprint that you said, is there a certain structure or format that people should be thinking about when they go to actually put pen to paper for their blueprint? Or is it maybe different for everybody? Can you talk a little bit about the blueprint for success for the newer entrepreneurs who are listening and want to actually build that out? Jason Roberts: I teach four M's metrics model mindset mentor. And you know, I've been in front of 10,000 plus entrepreneurs at this point. I coach and consult for some Fortune 1000 companies. I'm not saying, hey, look at me. I'm saying that when you see something that often, you'd have to be an idiot to not see patterns over time, right? Like you start to notice the things that after you see it a million times, it's like a doctor seeing patients all day long. You're not right every time. But at some point, you say, I know what that looks like. I've seen it 3700 times before. You start to understand what it is. And so most entrepreneurs, even some big multi-million dollar businesses don't know their numbers well enough. And it's a game of math. And so I say, even if you're an entry level entrepreneur, if you're just getting started, you've got to track your metrics. Josh St. Laurent: If you're tracking your KPIs, you would keep performance indicators. People like to call, if you're tracking those things, I can probably in 10 minutes figure out where your business is broke when you're saying to yourself, this doesn't work. So I tried. And what I mean by that is just even base level metrics like column number one, marketing out, right? So let's track on a daily basis. How much marketing is going out, whether that's an email, whether that's a letter, whether it's a Facebook message, whatever it is, how much is going out? Com number two would be like inbound response. So now we're able to measure out of our marketing out, how much response is coming in, right? So we can start to get into, are we getting a 10% response rate, or we get a 2% response rate, maybe the problems with our marketing, maybe it's with our data. Jason Roberts: We don't know that if we're not measuring it. Out of the inbound response, column number three could be appointment set or meaningful conversations, you have with the prospect, come four could be out of those meaningful conversations. How many offers for your product or services did you make out of the offers you made? How many were accepted? Other ones were accepted. How many were closed? You just keep those six or seven categories. We can figure out where the problem is. You know, if we had 30 inbound responses, our 30 meaningful conversations and we made 30 offers, but we didn't close anybody, then we know that there's probably either a problem with our product or more, more likely there's a problem with the person that's doing the sales. I had a lady from Tucson that owned a big CPA firm. She sold it for millions of dollars. Jason Roberts: She saw me speak at an event and she said, Jason, I want to do some real estate stuff. I want to build a business that I'm not a slave to. I've worked 10 hour days for my whole entire life, you know, 20 hours a week max is what I want to do, but I want to build a successful real estate business. I'd never done this before at the time she wrote me a check. She came to St. Louis for a week and I built the whole business out from my office in St. Louis, like in a box, basically, that she could go back right to Tucson and implement. And she called me after the first week and she's like, oh, my God, I'm so happy, Jason. We got 76 phone calls our first week. Everything you said was going to happen came true. I couldn't be happier as best money I ever spent. Jason Roberts: I'm like, sweet, you know, this is really cool. She called me the second week. Now she's mad. She's pissed and she feels like, you know, like I took her money and I didn't deliver what I promised and I said, well, hold on. What's the problem? And she said, none of these people want to sell their house. Man, I knew this. The second the words came out of her mouth. She put herself in the sales role of her business and she had spent her entire life as a CPA locked in a room by herself. And I'm not making CPAs bad. I'm not seriotech. What I'm saying is that like if you do any personality profile testing, Myers-Briggs, Strengthfinder, Colby Index, any of them, we all have a profile of what are kind of default is. Some people are naturally better at communicating. Some people are naturally better at selling. Jason Roberts: Some people are naturally better at systems and processes. Well, this was what I was using at the time and she was like a zero or a one on the eye, which is influence. If you don't have the ability to positively influence somebody, it makes it very difficult to convert your prospects, to convert your customers. And so here she had a model, a belief system that said, this business doesn't work. When in reality, the only thing that didn't work is the assembly line where it landed in the sales department. We had somebody that never shot a basket in their whole entire life trying to play for a championship NBA team. And we ran an ad, we hired an acquisition person, we subbed it out and she went on to make a millions of dollars a year in revenue in that business from that one simple change. Jason Roberts: But had we not been tracking that man, we were never known. Wow. I love that story. And honestly, it's a perfect segue into something else I wanted to ask you about. So I subscribe to this concept of who not how, you know, dance all of it in book. And it sounds like you do too. Like you talked about finding the bed door, finding the person who is done. And I think that makes a lot of sense. A question I get from a lot of entrepreneurs who are newer, but also seasoned business owners is like, who should they be adding to their business? And I think you touched upon it a little bit. Maybe it comes down to their personality, their strong suit, right? But can you talk a little bit about like, you know, solo, pranour to building out the team that's going to be required to scale? Jason Roberts: This is a great question, man. So I love this. And it makes me laugh because I get the same response every single time. So I built a gambit of companies outside of my own stuff from like I said, from a hair salon to a medical spot to gym, you know, to just all different crazy kinds of things. And every single time I go into one of these businesses, they say, you don't understand Jason because you've never been in the medical field. You don't understand because you have never worked with a lot. Every single time their belief structure that they hold is that you don't understand. And my response every time is, you're right. I don't understand how to be a doctor exciting to go to medical school, but your problem isn't with how to be a better doctor. Your problem is with how to run and grow and scale a professional business. Jason Roberts: That's where I'm the expert. You're right. I don't know how to be a doctor, but your problem isn't how to treat your patients better. Your problem is that you're working 80 hours a week and you're a slave to this business and you can't grow and scale it because you have a belief system that says you're the only doctor that can do this job. And I mean no disrespect, but it's just simply not true. And if you don't believe me, I know some people are listening to this and they already are probably having resistance to it. Don't believe me. I know you have a million examples of businesses where when I came in, they were working 80 hours a week and by the time I was done, they were working 20 and they went from $2 million a year in revenue to $6 million a year in revenue in two and a half years. Jason Roberts: You know what I mean? Like I could show example example. We really have to look at and that's where the second M of model comes in. If I can understand where it is that you're trying to go, I can create a pretty good map and how to get there. But by that model piece, what I mean is, so I'll give a medical spot that I work with for example, when I came into it in the beginning, the girl that owned it, I mean they were doing about a million dollars a year in revenue just under it. But the girl that owned it and ran it, she was the primary provider and she was working 70 hours a week. I mean, she got there first thing in the morning and she left it seven or eight at night and she has a child and a life and you know what I mean, all these things. Jason Roberts: And from that side looking in, she was doing great. She was doing great. She started from nothing and built that business by herself to $7,800,000 a year. But she was a slave to it. She couldn't go on vacation. She couldn't shut her phone off. She couldn't be present for her kids. You know what I mean? That's not a life. That's not freedom. All of us, I think at our core, the reason why we open our own businesses from freedom, but the majority of entrepreneurs that I come into contact with, man, they don't have any freedom. It's actually kind of the opposite. And so, you know, she had the same story. Well, you don't understand Jason. All these clients come here because of me because they trust me. And I said, no doubt. I believe that. What you're failing to understand is that you can transfer that trust. Jason Roberts: You can transfer that trust and you can grow the practice. And so the first thing that we did was we started running ads to hire another nurse injector, right? Because this process fruit super resistant to it. Well, what if they don't go as good a job as me and I'm like, well, that's why we got a hire for and keep on because the other three aren't gonna be good. And this is another thing, man, I mean, there's so much that we can talk about, but entrepreneurs, including myself in beginning, you know, we have this mindset of nobody can do it as good as me. And so if that's your belief system, then you're subconsciously looking for reasons to affirm that belief. And so you hire one person. And that one person that hired it. And so great. And you keep them longer than you should. Jason Roberts: It's super painful to fire. I mean, by the time that whole process is over, you throw your hands up in the air and say, doing it myself was way easier than that. Like this is what everybody does, right? What I can tell you is that, you know, you might have to go through eight people to get one or two that are good. But the second that you get one or two that are good, now you can build again, now you can build again and to show you proof in that story, she hired four. One of them was a rock star. One of them was really, really awesome. And she stuck and the owner was able to transfer probably 95% of her book of business to that new nurse injector. So now she's completely free. I think she just worked like for two hours a week on Wednesday with clients and everything else, she didn't lose anybody. Jason Roberts: As a matter of fact, they grew. This is about working on your business instead of in it, right? So now she's not working in anymore. She's able to work on it. So now she was able to focus on some marketing. Now she was able to run ads and get an interview more nurses. So then she got a second nurse and then when you started working on marketing, we started working on sales process. We started working on all the things that you can't work on when you're working in it. And now we had a second nurse and that second nurse got full. And so within a year she went from 700 grand to 2 million. And the next year she went to 3.5 million and she's probably over four or five million at this point. It would have never grown beyond 700,000. And I'm not taking credit for it, you know what I mean? Jason Roberts: But I'm saying that it would have never grown beyond that. Had she not been able to get herself out of the way, we are all the bottleneck in our own growth and profitability. Like as entrepreneurs, as owners, we're all the bottleneck myself included. And as we learn new things and grow our skills and go down that path, we can make changes really, really fast when we start making some different decisions. I completely agree. I'm curious about how that process starts. I mean, we can continue with that same example or use a different example. But I'm wondering, is it examining the business and where all of her time is being spent and what can be delegated out? Or are you looking at different tranches of the business who is doing the marketing, who's doing the sales? How do you kind of back into who's my first hire, second hire, et cetera? Josh St. Laurent: This is cool too, this is one of the things that I do with any new client that I bring in. And this is another, this just goes to show you how crazy our minds are and how we think like none of us experience reality as it actually is, we experience it through our own map of the world. Our own map that we've created since we were five years old. We have these stories and over time, we adapt them as beliefs, right? And all of belief is, as a story we've told ourselves over and over again to the point that we actually believe it, it doesn't mean that it's true or real, but we believe it to be real. And so one of the very first things I have, I ask anybody that knew that I work with is, what's your unique genius zone? What's the one thing that you're like really, really good at and you love to do? Jason Roberts: Because that's what moves the needle the most, right? And then my next question is, what percent of your week do you feel like you're operating in your unique genius zone? And every time the answer that I get is between 70 and 80% every time. And now that I've done this a thousand times, I know that that's never true, it's never true, but they believe it to be true. And so they're operating as if it's true. And so I give them this simple document, it's just a work log, it's the dumbest thing that you would think would have no positive impact, but it is absolute game changer. The whole premise of it is, when you get to work in the morning, when you start your day, you document the time and you document what you start working on. So let's say you get to the office in eight o'clock and you open up your email. Jason Roberts: So you're gonna write eight o'clock email. And you don't have to make another journal entry until you shift task, until you start to do something different, right? So let's say 805, the phone rings, now you should test it, you gotta write 805, answer call from client or whatever. And then maybe it lasted five minutes and eight, ten you went back to email. So you only have to document when you change things. And I want you to just do this for a week. I did this with a guy who's got a $78 million of your business, just not all that long ago. And he swore to me 80% of his time spent doing what he's what he's genius at. At the end of the week, he called me, I could hear it and he's got a laugh. And he's like, damn it man, I said what? Jason Roberts: And he goes, I'm 10% at best, 10% at best in my unique genius zone. 90% of my week is spending time doing things that I absolutely should not be doing. I share that story because anybody that's listening to this thing now that isn't for me, I'm spending 80% of my time where I'm good. Maybe you are. And if you are then hell yeah, congratulations. I would encourage you though to just try it and see and kind of the formula for all of that is once I'm able to extract people from spending time, you know, I do this dollar per hour exercise that are live events. Have everybody, how many hours a week do you want to work? That's how many hours a year? How much money do you want the business to pay you within the next 12 months? And then we divide that out and it gives you how much, how many dollars per hour you need to be earning during your time. Josh St. Laurent: And anything that isn't paying you a thousand dollars an hour or whatever your number is, then you can't do it. And it's a really cool filter because like in corporate America, there's different departments, right? And there's employees and there's structure when we go into open up our own business, we for some reason assign ourselves to every single job. We're the salesperson, we're HR, we're accounting, we're bookkeeping, we're lead gen, we're all the things. And most of the stuff that it takes to make most businesses operate is not thousand dollar an hour work. And so every minute that we're spending in it instead of on it, we're screwed up that math equation. We're taking our dollar per hour from a thousand dollars down to $20. And if we do that, then we have to multiply our hours per week by like 50 or whatever, you know what I mean? Josh St. Laurent: We would have to work a thousand hours a week to make up the difference. Even super experience entrepreneurs, that's a really good trick that you can just kind of implement right now and see, where am I really spending my time? I love that example. You know, like basically figuring out, how do you spend the most amount of time in your creative genius? Be able to delegate out the stuff, especially if you're not good at it, right? I want to switch gears a little bit. Like we've talked a lot about like building out the team, getting the mentor, the person who's done it well, all the things that you should be doing. Are there mistakes that you see commonly, a lot of business owners doing that they should just stop immediately? Jason Roberts: That's a good one. One of the big ones is just that the mindset of, nobody can do this better than me, or I can do it better than anyone else. Jason Roberts: Like delegation, no, I had a mentor. We were in an event one time. He said, you know what my superpower is? And everybody's like, what? And he said, I have this like invincible shield. And he made this shield like this. And he's like any task that ever come my way, I blocked them thing. You know what I mean? It was really cool and really funny, but really hit home for me because he's like, I do not do tasks. Anything that is a task, I have to block. And I see so many entrepreneurs that are constantly bogged down with task-related stuff with things that should be delegated with. Even some of the entry level entrepreneurs that I work with, I'm helping a guy that has a construction company in Texas. And he's one of the best builder, the quality of work, top notch. But he's a one man band, it's him. Jason Roberts: You know, when the call comes in that I want my basement remodel, he's one answer in the phone. He's the one drive over there to do the bid. He's the one drawing up the plans. He's the one submitting the paperwork. He's the one collecting the invoice money. He's the one doing his books. And he just had this belief system around. He was the only one that could do those things. And if he didn't, we would get messed up. One of the very first things that we did was just hiring assistant, you know, and I think everybody's mindset is, well, where am I going to get the money to hire these people, Jason? Like you're saying that we need to build the team and all this, but where's that money going to come from? I'm just getting started. Jason Roberts: Five or 10 hours a week with somebody at $15 an hour can make an enormous impact at how quickly you get to positive revenue. Jason Roberts: You know, if you were to drop me off in a city that I've never been to in my life with no resources, no cell phone, no money, no nothing. And so, hey, you need to start a million dollar business from scratch with no resources. Nobody, the very first thing I would do is find a right hand and assistant. And they was like, well, how are you going to do that? You don't have any money. Not everybody works for money. Like we have this preconceived notion because if we're listening to this podcast, we're probably money motivated to a degree, right? But like the rest of the world, one of the best employees I've had out of literally thousands of employees, her husband worked for MasterCard corporate. He made really good, well in mid-six figure income. And she applied for a marketing position for $10 an hour and she didn't even want the money. Jason Roberts: She's like, it's not about the money. She's like, my kids finally got to the age where they're going to school. I've been a state-home mom. I want to have some human interaction. I want to be part of a team. I want to laugh. You know what I mean? I want to be able to spend a couple hours of some adults getting fun. And within a couple of years, she was running. She was running four different companies and had a really good salary for us. And so I say that in that, shift your mindset up a little bit. Five or 10 hours a week for somebody at $15 an hour could move the needle immensely for you right now today. And even if you don't have that to pay, not everybody is money motivated. What if you could create a relationship where somebody got paid when you got paid? Jason Roberts: There's loan officers, realtors. I mean, any commission, like we don't get paid till the deal closes. Where are you used to that? It's not this crazy thought to maybe do it like that. Josh St. Laurent: I love that idea. I think at Hammer's home, the whole point of building a team, you got to start somewhere even five, 10 hours a week is going to free up more time for you to do the thing that you are good at. Let's spend more time on the mindset. I know that was one of your abs. Like how should people be cultivating the mindset are there books or courses that you suggest? Or is it really just, you know, an idea that they need to kind of focus on and wrap their head around? How do you usually coach people to build that mindset that's actually going to serve? Jason Roberts: I think this is the most important part of everything that we're going to talk about. Jason Roberts: And I know that sometimes people listen to that and they say, they don't feel that that's the case. I'm going to tell you right now from my own experience, from working with thousands of other business owners, 80% of success in anything is psychological and 20% of mechanics. Everybody wants to go learn mechanics. Everybody wants to go to a business seminar. They want to go to a training, they want to buy a course, they want to buy, you know, like, and I'm not making that wrong. Like the right mechanics will get you to finish line 10 years faster. You need the mechanics. I'm not saying that you don't need them. What I'm saying is I can show 100 people on a map where there's a million dollars for the gold buried under the ground. And all they've got to do is get in their car, drive to the store, buy a shovel, and then drive there and dig the gold up. Jason Roberts: And maybe five out of 100 will do that part. You know what I mean? And so it's not always the mechanics that are stopping us from getting the result. Like there's no shortage of information on how to lose 20 pounds. But yet America as a country is the obese. It's ever been in our history. We're like 70, 80% of America, it's some crazy number. It's not because we don't know how. It's because this is messed up or mindset's messed up. We've identified ourselves with who we are. And so I really encourage people to pay attention to that mindset part. And so there's three things that control your mindset. And ask yourself, like how many hours of your day are you showing up in a peak state, like a 10 out of 10 state? You know, I don't have time to do it right now, but I do this kind of meditation exercise where it's like, close your eyes and envision a time where you felt the strongest that you've ever felt, where you could like bulldozer or anything, where you could have any obstacle out in the way you were just gonna crush it. Jason Roberts: Think about a time and you're like close your eyes, like relive that moment. And in a short period of time that you couple minutes, I can bring somebody from a level five state to a 10. And it's not just about bringing it, but it's about showing people that how quick can you change the state that you're showing up in? How quick can you change it? You can change it in an instant, right? You can also go from a 10 to a two when you're on the highway. We were driving back from St. Louis to Michigan last night and these truckers thought that I have my bright lights on, I guess because my lights are, but I didn't. And they're all flashing their lights and they're getting pissed and they box me in, through them, and they're flashing their lights and they're slowing down. I mean, I went from being level 10 happy to like, wanting to run people out. Jason Roberts: And I'm not even that guy, you know what I was so mad. And then I had to like, Jason, what the hell you do? Like nothing good comes from that deprived state, nothing. And I have a choice to be pissed for the next hour, two days, two weeks or to instantly change it. But think about that in your business. Think about it in your marriage. Think about it in your relationship with your kids. Like where do you reside? What is your kind of emotional resonance? Is it a five, is it a six? Where is it? And what are some things that you could do to shift that state? And then ask yourself, how could things be different if I started showing up as a 10? And you know, I work with sales teams all the time. They went scripts, they went this, they went that. Jason Roberts: And I'm not saying those things aren't important, but what I can tell you is if I can teach them how to get themselves into a peak state quickly, because we're all gonna have things that suck. We're all gonna have bad days. We're gonna have the email that comes in, it says we owe the IRS 50 grand, or whatever, you know what I mean? But like how we respond to that is what determines everything. So I said there's three things to control your state. Number one is what you focus on, your patterns of focus. The second is the meaning that you give it. And so what I mean by that is two people can experience the exact same thing and have drastically different accounts of what happened. And so we get to choose the meaning that we assign to it. You know, and I'm gonna keep this short. Jason Roberts: I watched this Oprah episode where she interviewed these two twin brothers. One of them, the first one she went to was in prison. And long story short, she asked him one question at the incident. If you were to attribute one thing to a life in and out of prison, your whole entire life in and out of prison, 20, 30 plus years, what would it be? And he said, I can tell you exactly what it is. When I was raised, my dad was an alcoholic. He beat the crap out of me. He beat my mom. He hit me in my brothers. It was emotionally, it was horrible. And I'm like, listen to this, like no wonder this guy's like this. You know what I mean? Like I got it. Then it pans to her, pulling up to this big old mansion. And she interviews this other guy who looked exactly like the guy that was in prison. It was this twin brother. Jason Roberts: And she asked him a bunch of questions. And at the end, she said, if there was one thing you would attribute to having this beautiful family and three beautiful children in this mansion and all these millions of dollars, what would it be? And he said, I'll tell you exactly what it is. My dad was an alcoholic. He beat the crap out of me and my mom. He gave the exact same answer. And so I say this because I want like everybody to think about what are some limiting beliefs? What are some stories that we have attached to meaning to? When we needed to attach that meaning to it, when we use it as defense or maybe we were kids or maybe something bad happened and we attached a meaning to it. But what if we gave some of those things to different meaning? What if we change the meaning? Jason Roberts: And then step number three is the action that you take. So what you focus on the meaning that you give it and then the action that you take, one of the things that I do, I have a 16 week training where I help entrepreneurs and business owners reprogram their subconscious and identify what those beliefs are and then retrain new beliefs. People don't not lose the 20 pounds because they don't know how to do it. They're not losing 20 pounds because their identity is tied to the person that they are right now instead of the person that's 20 pounds less. If I can train their identity, there's some conscious to believe that they're the person that's 20 pounds less, they'll lose the 20 pounds in no time at all. Like in three months instead of three years and same with business, you know, one, the guy in Texas, I told you about he had this set of beliefs that nobody can do it as good as me. Jason Roberts: If I hire people, they'll steal from me. If I hire people, they'll copy my systems and be my company. Yet all these beliefs, those are the beliefs of somebody that's a solo per newer, right? That's all it can be. What is the guy who has a $10 million year construction company with 50 employees? What is what are his belief system? Because he doesn't believe that if he hires someone, they're going to, you're right. Because if he believed that he wouldn't, he wouldn't have 50 employees in a $10 million business. So if we can identify what those things are on this side and we can train ourselves to realign with that now, we will automatically and subconsciously gravitate towards it. I know that set sounds woo woo, but I promise you that is the key to everything, man. Josh St. Laurent: I think it's spot on. I've got this background in financial therapy and we see it in clients all the time, these money beliefs, you know, money doesn't grow on trees or you have to grind and work 60 hours a week to get ahead. Josh St. Laurent: Right. And, you know, you'll never change their mind. They have to do it themselves. They have to kind of reformulate that belief. So I absolutely believe in that. I'm thinking through to your four M's. I think we still have one to kind of dig deeper into. So you've got the mentorship, right? You got to find someone who's been there, done it that you can learn from, whether that's a coach, you know, or just someone achieving at a high level in your industry. You need to who not how kind of build the team out free of your time or your genius. You've got the mindset and you need to really focus on your own belief system and how that's probably getting in your way and how you're the bottleneck in your business. What am I missing? I know there's another M that we hadn't. Jason Roberts: Yeah. I think we kind of indirectly covered a man just in conversation. Jason Roberts: It's metrics model mindset mentor. And the model one, I think is the one that we were kind of missing, but we got into that a little bit where you're kind of just talking about putting the right person in the right seat on the bus. People always say, well, isn't isn't the motto slow to higher, quick to fire? And I've always been a proponent of quick to higher, quick to fire. What I mean by that is like I used to associate pain. Once you understand human psychology, you'll start to understand why you're making the decisions that you're making your business. I used to associate a lot of pain to hiring people because that wasn't the fun process to me. I used to associate even way more pain to firing people. And so man, think about think about that model. And I'm sure most a lot of people listen and feel the same way. Jason Roberts: So if that's your model of the world for business, you're going to be in that 90% that failed category. I don't, I'm not casting that on you. I'm just simply saying that if that's your belief structure, then those are the results that you're going to get. And the results you're going to get is that you're never going to grow and never going to be profitable because you believe that it's painful to hire people and you believe it's painful to fire them. So what that means is you're going to drag out hiring somebody forever. And then you're finally going to hire somebody and they're not going to be good. And you're going to let them stay there for six months because you don't want to feel the pain of firing them. And then what you're going to do is you're going to tell yourself, see, this is why I didn't want to hire anybody because I knew this was going to happen. Jason Roberts: You're going to reaffirm your story that it doesn't work because that's why it's inside your comfort zone. And you're going to be on this perpetual cycle of this, you know, over and over go over again. What I would condition you to say is, and this is what I had to do to my own self. So I'm not talking to me too. But I had to condition myself to say, I love hiring people. I love bringing in new people because every time I bring in somebody new, it's an opportunity to make my team even better. And so now when I know that we have to let somebody go on our team, it's still not fun. It's still not easy. Like I don't look forward to it. It gets easier and never gets easy. But now it kind of becomes exciting because I'm like, oh my gosh, if we get rid of Julie who's showing up at a five, we could have somebody attend in that spot. Jason Roberts: And what would happen? What would happen to our business? What would happen to our team if this five became a 10? This person would be happier. This person would be happier. I'd be happier. We'd make more money. We'd change more lives. We'd help more people. And so I think it's just exciting of like upgrading my team. You know what I mean? If we're trying to win a national championship and we've got a guy who broke his arm, you can't leave him on the team. Like he might have to be on the bench, but we got to put in somebody that can shoot. And so think about your business kind of in that same way. And instead of viewing it as this horrific, painful thing, view it as like, this is exciting because if we had somebody showing up as a 10 in that spot, I'll give you an example. Jason Roberts: I own a 94 bed assisted living facility in Milwaukee. We bought it two and a half years ago. I'm from St. Louis. I don't go to their works. We have 94 residents. We have about 50 employees. We run it, not own it and run it remotely. My partner, Rachel and I are 70% owners. What I can tell you about that is like the mindset from when we took that over to what we shifted into now, we had three administrators. And the one guy just wasn't doing a good job. Was it we knew we needed to get rid of him. We left it go on way too long. And this is crazy. We knew we needed to replace him, but we were rehabbing it in real time. We made all these excuses. We got all these different projects that we're trying to, we can't lose him right now. Jason Roberts: He quit, he ended up quitting and him being gone. The other two administrators and some other people that were already on staff were able to pick up what he did. We are running better, more efficiently, more happy, more profitable. We didn't even replace him. He was slow in the train down more than he was. And that's like, it's crazy to think that that's possible. And you got three administrators for 94, like everybody needs to be carrying their weight. Him being gone and the other people that were good picking up his task is more efficient than it was when he was there. I had to bet my paycheck against that. You know, these are all like real time lessons that we learn and we see that like putting people in the right seat on the bus, but getting people off the bus, if they're not good, not a good fit because we tell ourselves, well, at least having somebody there is better than having no one there at all. Jason Roberts: Not all the time. We've kind of adopted this. We only work with A players. We only work with A players. If you hired somebody in two weeks in, you're saying, I just don't know if they're the right fit. They're not the right fit. Get rid of them now. Be done. It is very rarely ever a training issue because this is all the stories here. Well, I haven't really been there a lot to train them. I haven't really been there a lot to work. I think if I spend another couple weeks with them, I can make them better. Probably not. I know that sounds like negative and pessimistic, but people to a degree are who they are and they only change when they want to change. What I have found over thousands of employees and helping other people with their businesses, when you hire somebody and then you have a meeting with me in two weeks and I say, how's this new higher work and your response should be, oh my God, I wish I would have done this 10 years ago. Jason Roberts: What the heck was I thinking not doing this? When you get that response, you know you got the right person. Anything short of that? I can just tell you from experience, there's a 99% chance that they're not the right person, regardless of training, regardless of anything else. When you get the right person, they figure the problems out. You don't have to do it for them. I love that perspective. Even for me, that's kind of a perspective shift that's really, really helpful. I have a lot of conversations with entrepreneurs or even new real estate investors where they have no managerial experience. They've never had to hire or fire. They've been an independent contributor, W2 job. You know, I'm going to invest in real estate. First property, I can manage this. Second property, I can manage this. Eventually, you hit a wall. It is way too much for one person and you spend it all this time doing admin work and hiring, firing, so daunting. Josh St. Laurent: To your point, you hire, doesn't work out. Hey, I'm just going to put this back on my shoulders, on my back, and you've recreated the proud mullover again, your back square one. So I love that perspective shift. That's powerful. I want to transition a little bit to the last three questions that I asked towards the end of the show, more personal to you. Question one is really, what is living a wealthy life look like for you? For the first 12 years I owned a business. I was an absolute slave to it. I mean, I was there 5, 30 in the morning. First one there last one, I believe, 6, 7 days a week. I was on this if I work really, really hard right now, then someday I can have this great life train. And I think there's positives to that. But it was built into me that your job as a man is to work and provide. Jason Roberts: I still believe that, but I associated that with hours. You know what I mean? I associated that with 10, 12, 15 hour days. And I had a guy, I had a mentor come into my office and he looked right at me and he said, you know what? And he said it kind of with an attitude. He goes, you think you're really special, don't you? And at first I thought maybe it's getting him like, I'm like, you know what do you mean? And he goes, he's got an attitude about you. Like, you really think you're somebody. Like, he was challenging me and I didn't know why. I mean, I'm nice. I don't know why he's like, you know what I mean? He goes, I know all kinds of guys like you. I know all kinds of guys that are really good at business, that anything they touch turns the gold and this and that. Jason Roberts: And you know, and make millions of dollars a year and think they're cool. But what you're doing, you know, what you're doing is you're, you destroyed a marriage you're a crappy son, you're a shitty brother. You're, you know what I mean? Like, and like, he's saying all this stuff like in my face, I just met this guy and he's like, you're sacrificing everything in your life that you told me matters. And I'm like, what do you mean? This is why I'm, this is my argument, right? I'm working 80 hours a week for all those things so that I can take them on vacations and I can buy nice and do all the stuff and he's like, did you ever stop and ask them what they want? You think they care about a, a new Mercedes in the driveway as much as they care about you being present? Jason Roberts: If you think your mom cares about going on trips to Mexico, more than she cares about you showing up for a birthday, you know what I mean? Like he got in my, got my business and goes, I'm not impressed at all by you. You know what would be impressive? What would be impressive to me is if you could figure out how to make more money, grow more business, help more people in three hours a day instead of 10. Now that would be impressive. And man, that was, and I was pissed and we kind of got an argument and he left and I was mad, you know what I mean? Like, I was mad about it, but it started to eat at me every day because no one had ever told me that before. And it was that bit of advice. People think that when I get there financially, then I'll start working three hours a day. Jason Roberts: When I, it was me in that moment, deciding that I was going to figure out how to grow my business bigger in three hours a day than I could in 10 hours a day that turned me from a solopreneur to entrepreneur. A lot of other things, but the main thing was the mindset shift of, I still have the goals. I still want to hit these numbers, but now I got to figure out how to hit them in three hours a day instead of 10. You make different decisions. You delegate more. You create up systems. You build processes. You get yourself from working in it and you start working on it and that time constraint forced me to do it. And then there was this whole process where we like, you said your health's important to you, but you haven't, you've been saying every day that you want to go to the gym today, but for the last 10 years, but you never go to the gym. Jason Roberts: I know a lot of people can resonate to that. So guess what? You're going to the gym at two o'clock and my brain was like exploding. I can't go to the gym at two o'clock. Two o'clock's work hours. You're going to the gym at two. And so that, that was my first step in remission from being a workaholic was my work day cut off at two. Now I work three, four days a week from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Period. End of story. And we've got, you know, we've got six or seven companies. We're into the eight figures in revenue annually. Not saying hey, look at me. I'm saying that I did all this the wrong way. I heard a lot of people. I made a lot of mistakes. I sacrificed a lot of life. Man, I don't want to give anybody any business advice without the caveat of you can do it the right way and have all the freedom that you want, but you've got to design it that way from the beginning. Josh St. Laurent: It's not a destination that you arrive at. That's so powerful. The time is the resource you, we can't get back, right? So trading time for money is just not not worth it, typically. Jason Roberts: Absolutely right. So if you could give one message to someone working to gain financial freedom, who isn't there yet, what would it be? People aren't going to like to hear this, but I'm going to say it because it's what I believe. Get rid of debt. I, we can have a whole day long debate on good, debt, bad debt. I don't disagree. I believe that debt can be used in a positive way for some things. What I will tell you is 78% of America lives paycheck to paycheck. So most debt is bad. It keeps you enslaved. The reason why you can't leave corporate America isn't because you haven't figured this business thing out. Jason Roberts: It's because you've got to pay your $3,000 a month mortgage and your two grand a month for the car payments and your $500 a month motorcycle payment and health insurance. You know what I mean? That's why you can't take a risk or that you feel like you can't take a risk. That's the golden handcuffs, right? I've helped hundreds of people, thousands of people at this point transitioned from corporate America into into full-time real estate investing or self-employment or whatever it is. One of the first things that we do is create a debt elimination plan. I help people figure out how to make their side hustle, make more money in 10 hours a week than their corporate job makes in 40 hours a week, take some of this side hustle money and instead of going buy more shit, we take that money and we pay down, you know, we pay off a car, we pay off a credit card, we pay, we pay off the house over time. Jason Roberts: And you know, most people think if I could be out of my corporate job in five years, I'd be a static. Like that's just the number that people put on it. What I have found is that when people really focus in on what is it they want to do, they created that elimination plan, we get this, usually within two years, I asked people the question, if I were to tell you you have to call your boss right now and quit, what would be the first thing you'd freak out about? And what do they say? How am I going to pay the mortgage? How am I going to pay the this? When we can eliminate those things, think about it right now, you wake up in the morning and you don't owe anybody anything. It's a drastically different feeling and like even if you only had $10,000 a month and income coming in, but you had no debt, I'm not saying you're 10 grams of beer, you're only gold. Jason Roberts: And I'm not saying that if you didn't know anybody at dime, 10,000 bucks a month goes a long way. It just doesn't go a long way when you got to give three to the mortgage and two to the car payments and all that kind of stuff. Josh St. Laurent: Absolutely. So I'm curious on this last question. So if you only had a thousand dollars and you were starting over, what would be the first thing you would do with that money? Jason Roberts: I think no matter what type of business that you're in, first thing I would do is find the data, my leads, right? This is a map for making a million bucks in a year. Okay. First thing you got to do is find out like if you're a real estate investor, you've got to pull, you're going to find data of people that may want to sell. If you want to start a dental practice, you're going to find a data of people who want to get worked at, you know, whatever it is, we got to pull the data. Second thing that we've got to do, if we've got to skip trace that data, we've got to get contact information for the data that we pulled. Third thing that we need to do is create a marketing campaign around how are we going to reach those people once we have their information? Once we reach them, now we've got to convert into the prospect. So if I had a thousand dollars, I would invest it in data that I'm going to market to getting the contact information from the people and building it into some sort of system where I can sell those people into the opportunities that I'm trying to create. If you could just only focus on that and the assistant part of like somebody's going to do a much better job than me of point, I mean, you can hire a VA in the Philippines for five dollars an hour that can pull your data, that can skip trace, that can do all these things so that you don't have to do it. That's where I'd spend my thousand bucks, man. And then I'd do a transaction. I'd make twenty or thirty thousand dollars. And now I would take part of that and I'd add to my team, add to my team. We do a couple more transactions, build the team, build the team. Yes. Eventually I'd work myself out and have a business that makes money whether I'm there. I'm not. Josh St. Laurent: I love it. For the people listening who want to track you down online, where is the best place for them to connect with you? Jason Roberts: I'm coach Jason Roberts on Facebook or Instagram. We created a sixteen week train. I kind of mentioned that earlier. We were talking about something else. But if there's anything that I want to give to you guys, go to www.ultimatesuccessblueprint.com. The sixteen week training, it's pretty expensive. It's a whole rewire, you're subconscious. We can then sit down to about three hours. It sells on our website for thousand bucks. I want to give it away to your listeners who are completely free. You have to put in the coupon code Josh. You've got to put that in as the coupon code. If you don't put that in, it'll charge you the thousand dollars. Make sure you put that in. It's my gift to you guys. Start there. It's absolutely a game changer. We also created a Facebook group called Transformation Nation. It's free. We just pour value. We just pour from meditation practices to mindset work to business tips. Anything like that, we just want to create a community where everybody gives to each other. One of the things I found is on for New Year's, we often feel like we're on an island by ourselves. I wanted to create a community where somebody needs some help. We can help them. Josh St. Laurent: I love it. That is super cool. We will link it in the show notes, make it easy for everyone listening. I just want to say thank you for being here. This has been really fun. Jason Roberts: Thanks for having me, man. Super cool. Appreciate your time. Josh St. Laurent: This has been The Wealth in Yourself Podcast, where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. Our guest today was Jason Roberts. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. The Wealth in Yourself Podcast is hosted by me, Josh St. Loren, an edited and produced by Ray Haycraft. To learn more about how to make your money work for you, visit us at www.wealthinyourself.com and connect with us on all social media at Wealth in Yourself. This podcast is educational in nature and is not meant to be investment advice. Please do not construe anything said to be advice, and the opinions of the guests may or may not represent the opinions of Wealth in Yourself. This podcast and the information presented are separate from my employment at Goldengate University. Still, they are part of my mission to make no-cost financial knowledge more accessible. If you like the show, please take a moment to leave us a review. We read all of your feedback, and we want to make sure we cover the topics that matter most. If you have a specific subject you'd like us to explore, or a guest you'd love to hear interviewed, don't hesitate to shoot us a direct message. And as always, thanks for listening.