[00:00:17] Speaker A: Today, we are joined by Randy Mullen. He's a visionary founder of the Go Big to give big brand. He decided to dedicate his career to helping entrepreneurs create more purpose in their business by attaching a philanthropic component to it. He started his first business at the age of 22. We're going to talk a little bit about that. He also runs the go big to give big community and podcast. He's an avid endurance athlete, and he's the creator of the fractional chief giving officer, which makes strategic philanthropy available to all businesses. Welcome to the show, Randy. Pleasure to have you here today. I'm excited.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Rich, this is going to be a lot of fun.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Now, we've known each other for a little while. We got connected through some mutual contacts. We hit it off in a number of fronts. Not only do we live in the same general area, we share some similarities on our Colby index being both high, quick start individuals. But we also have this background with an electrical career, which is kind of interesting. So I didn't know that about you until we were able to sit side by side on an airplane for a few hours. And I found it interesting because we had some similar experiences in that environment. Now, in your world, you got started in that career, and you became a journeyman electrician, and that prompted the beginning of your first business. And really, we're going to talk a little bit about that. But it's. It's what that first business created for you, what you learned in that and the challenges of it that led you to go on and start creating more and other things. So what are some of the important things that you started to learn and realize earlier on as you at a young man at 22, you're forging ahead in this world of construction and as an electrical service company, as.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: And thank you for that incredible intro. Um, I I was very fortunate to be very motivated and driven at an early age. And so during high school, I spent a lot of my time saying, I don't want to sit in a classroom and just do paperwork and stuff. I wanted to be out there on the field learning and growing. And so I was very lucky to get into the trades at a. At a young age, when I was 16 years old and was able to build up a lot of hours, which allowed me to be ticketed by the time I was 22. And that allowed me to go on and start experiencing life and creating a lot more of what I wanted in life because I had some of that experience early on, and the. To clean the story up in a full capacity. There at 22, I was building a, a bit of my side hustle electrical business. And then what happened was at 25 years old, one of my best friends passed away in a job site accident. He was my mentor in the industry. Him and I were going to just merge together and buy the company we were working before because we were both kind of like, had our side hustles on the other side that were almost taking over our main business. And once he passed away, I realized that I didn't want to just be in the hustle. Monday to Friday, nine to five, grinding, you know, to try and retire by the time I'm 50 and be free. I wanted to do it sooner. And that led me to, uh, googling how to make a ton of money and never work again. And the key component there was never work again. When I started my electric company, it was great. I was making great money, but, man, it was taking all my time. And anybody in the trade industry knows this. You're basically on demand 24/7 somebody calls, you answer, and you got to make sure the work is always coming and everything's there. I didn't want that anymore. I wanted some passive. I wanted something a little bit different. Somewhere I could work remotely on my lifestyle and on my terms. And so that's the beginning of my story and some of the challenges that I started to face early on.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Well, and you expanded on that a little bit for me last time we talked about this, and so you were again building up that side hustle, as we call it. But I think you're underplaying it a little bit. And you were building it up to a really substantial degree where it didn't make sense to do anything, really, but that. And so the idea of merging with your friend and creating a bigger company, bringing your skill sets together, capturing a little bit more market share, made a lot of sense. And you were, you were right on the doorstep of completing that. Where you guys were, I think, really, you were signing paperwork. You're basically at the stage where everything was coming to culmination when, when the unfortunate incident occurred with, with your friend.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: Yeah, we were literally that week, uh, addressing the final business things we had. Uh, there was my partner, my business partner and I were going to partner, we're going to buy another company and amalgamate everything and become kind of this conglomerate of, of, uh, electrical companies in town. And, uh, unfortunately, he passed away from a job site accident and really changed the trajectory of everything. You know, when you're sitting there of like, this is the life plan, this is where we're going, we're ready to take this on. And then also you lose one of your best friends and soon to be business partners. You're like, do I even want to be in this industry anymore? Do I want to go down here? Like, what is life?
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Even?
[00:04:57] Speaker B: You start contemplating a lot of stuff. So it really got to a point where we were on the verge of breaking through and building what was going to be a very reputable, very big electrical contracting company to have it halted overnight. And then I got goosebumps deciding, what's the next move? Do we still want to go down this route? Do we still want to, do I still want to buy that other company? Do I want to make all this happen? Or what did I want to do, Preston?
[00:05:21] Speaker A: And what were some of the, I guess, ripple effects of that other than the decision making process? And when a traumatic event like that happens for us, it tends to bring us into a thinking mode of and emotional decision state on a lot of things. And that clearly happened for you, but there's also a little bit of vested energy in all the effort that you'd put forward because, you know, we're kind of glazing over it here, but I don't imagine it's like, hey, it was three months that had gone by of some. Some conversations over a couple of beers at the pub where you guys said, boy, oh, boy, wouldn't life be grand if we just joined companies? Let's sign some paperwork. Like, this is probably an experience over a year or so of you guys delving in, deciding, does it make sense? Can we work together as partners? How are we going to structure everything coupled with the opportunity to now buy an existing company? Like, not all those things happened at once. This is a. This is an accumulation effect, and so I don't want to overstate, you know, the. The impact that this had on you and the trajectory of your life.
[00:06:21] Speaker B: Yeah, and absolutely. I mean, me and this guy, you got to think, we worked together. He was my journeyman for a lot of years. He taught me everything. And we spent, you know, 8 hours a day, five days a week for 52 weeks a year, times four years. So you can imagine we had spent a lot of time together working in capacity, and our boss had worked very hard at the time. He was the guy we were going to partner from and buy our company from. He worked very hard to make sure we had all the skills and the tools to learn how to take over the business. So he put a lot of prep in to make sure that we knew how do you actually run the jobs? What is the complications? As an electrician, I wire houses very easy, right. But when it comes to running the business, it's, how do you quote jobs? How are you building relationships? How are you getting those contractors in? And so he had started to groom us to understand what we were going to be taking on, how we were going to be in that capacity, the leadership skills you needed running teams. And remember, I'm 22, 23, 24 as I'm learning a lot of this. I'm managing guys that are 40, 50 years old, teaching them how to run job sites, and they're having to put their trust in me as a young hustler coming up. And. And so there was a lot of emotion, there's a lot of mixed, um, knowledge that was having to come down from all three of our sides to make this deal come together. That, like you said, was years in the makings, was years in the works, and was finally at a point that week, like I said, well, we were at like, cool, let's agree to some terms and put this through to lawyers. And so there was a huge shift that I had to take. But one of the best things that happened to me about Richard was that it gave me so many life skills that allowed me to go on to where I am today, because I had to mature really quickly. I had to start thinking about business very differently than just, hey, I go and do some work, and I get paid, you know, dollar 40 an hour. And that was great. I had to start thinking about, well, how do you hire people? How do you work overhead? How do you quote jobs? How do you bring it all together? How do you be a leader? All this stuff came together. So on one side, I'm very sad that it didn't happen, but on the other side, I'm very grateful for what it taught me of how to become that person that needed to show up. So the challenges that I faced allowed me to become who I am today.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: I think that's an important takeaway for our listening audience, is that whatever it is that you are doing or you've done in the past, these create the building blocks of your bigger future. And part of that, though, is a decision to make. The decision are you going to have, do you want a bigger future? And then what do you want it to entail? And that's really point that you were faced with after this incident happened with your business partner. And so in the aftermath of that, I would imagine, obviously, there was. There was some time needed and you didn't probably didn't come to this ultimate conclusion that you weren't pursuing down the electrical career path instantly. There was probably a bit of a period of time and, and, you know, when we go through times like that, I know for me there's an experience of some regret that can, can occur and like, well, what the, what if scenarios start to play out in your life when you invested so much of your time and effort down a career path. And similarly, I had a, not unlike you, career path in being a young person, being a reputable leader, learning a lot of those skills, figuring out how to navigate and negotiate with other trades on job sites as an electrical individual. So I recognize some of the things, and it hits me personally because of my own experience, but what I really fundamentally recognize is that the value of the life that you wanted and the things you wanted overtook some of those other feelings, and you got to be that clarity of how can I do something different in life that's going to provide more fulfillment. And so that led you to, of course, everyone's favorite Google machine. And so you made this type into Google and it came up with some results. So talk to us a little bit about the results that you saw.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll go a little bit more granular than I normally talk about on this. Um, normally, it's, it led me down to real estate investing, and that's how I built my real estate investment company. But the truth is, it led me down self development. It led me down the path of understanding that if you want to build a business, you need to become a certain type of human. And a lot of stuff when you look up entrepreneurship and business owners, you learn about self development. Who do I need to become to run the business? And it's, it's a lot of that space of learning about that. So, uh. Uh, I heard a book, and it was the lifesavers by Hal Elrode, and it talked about the savers, and it was silence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, reading, inscribing. And that's something that I started doing every single day. And that was actually a lot of the cure for me to go through some of the trauma and pain that I was going through was I had never done any of those things before. I had never, you know, I did a little bit of exercise, but I had never done scribing or affirmation or visualization or things like that, or silence and meditation. Those principles are things that allowed me to start focusing on myself and allow who I want to become. So I actually started building the person I wanted to become before I actually found real estate investing along the way is where that combination came from was, wow, im so confident in myself and what id overcome to hey, now I can actually go use these skills in a very different area.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: Amazing. And were going to talk more about the incredible journey that you went on to lead you to your next business. Foraye when we come back after these.
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[00:12:08] Speaker A: We are back with Randy Mullen and we're talking about his journey as a young entrepreneur, transitioning his life after a major event, after the death of his friend and his soon to be business partner, and moving down a path of self development to find out what was the next thing that was going to grab his attention and provide some fulfillment. Now, this led you down the real estate investment path and building up a successful company and growing into this real estate development world. So that is an interesting journey and theres much more to that story. Lets talk through some of the things that happen as you start to begin this business. And like many things that happen for a lot of people is we get very busy and that busyness tends to turn into a lot of pressure. So youre in a pressure cooker of a whole new business industry. Whats some of the things that happened as you started to build up a real estate business?
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Yeah, you always think it's so easy where you're like, I'm just going to go buy ten rental properties. They cash flow $500 a month each. And then cool, it's five grand a month in passive income and you're feeling really good, right? That is so easy. And then all of a sudden you realize that it's not that easy because there's expenses, there's CRMs you have to pay for, there's advertising you have to pay for and all these other business expenses. And you're like, wait, that cash flow does actually, the passive income life isn't as easy as you thought. And so the financial pressure that comes when you're buying real estate for cash flow purposes was, well, where do we make our active income from? Because you can't just live off of. You can't be actively building a business and live off a passive income. Now, if we had had active income coming in, that passive income works very nicely to build your retirement. And everything was great, which is what I googled, but we didn't realize the active income needed to come in as well. And so I had a lot of pressure on myself that I created this goal that I want to be like, financially free by the time I'm 30. We wanted to buy, you know, ten or 15 rental properties, cash flow between five and $1,000 a month, and that would just pay our life. And once that was in, id be golden. I could do anything I wanted and life was good. As I started to get a little bit further through the career, when I got to 27, 28 years old, there was a lot of stress and pressure that were coming in of paying the bills, growing the business, having to manage rental properties, buy rental properties, talk to investors, grow the business, be at every networking event, as well as still trying to maintain self development and awareness with the pressure of trying to retire at 30.
And the caveat was also not addressing and dealing with the pain and trauma that I lost from my best friend earlier. There was a lot of anger, building of businesses, of like, I'm going to do this because I'm going to get so rich that I never have to worry again, that if I lost one of my best friends, nothing would change. And so all of that rich left me down this path to my body, completely shutting down to zero and not being able to handle the stress. And, and I ended up having what's known as a non epileptic seizure, where your body physically cannot handle any more stress, any more pressure, or has no energy left. And it's this defense mechanism as a awareness sign, like, hey, something needs to change. And so at 28, I had a second awakening in my life that, you know what? Uh, trying to achieve financial freedom by the time of 30 led me to having some of the biggest health scares of my life, um, and ending up in the hospital. And fortunately, the doctors ran all the tests and everything came back that I was actually very healthy, very in shape, and very much, uh, not in any medical conditions. My body just literally couldn't cope with a stress, pressure and trauma that it never dealt with inside.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: Thats incredible. And to have two major events happen in a short timeframe, again, I think theres a bit of importance for people to understand that this is the result of not eight hour days of effort, but probably 1416 hours days of effort consecutively every day for a three, four year timeframe. Thats cumulative building up. And so if you think about the timeframe, its almost one and a half to two times the average persons working day without a lot of weekends and breaks. And so really, it's. It might be three years, but it's actually the equivalent of six years of energy.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: And, and we're talking about no time off. You know, when you're in the hustle culture and the startup grind phase, it's seven days a week, 24 hours a day. I lost a lot of my good friends because I was so focused on building. I lost all my family because I was so focused on this. It was like my life revolved around it. It was wake up at four in the morning, work, work out, work, maybe eat a five time, work, try and maybe, you know, hit a, hit a networking event, work, eat some dinner, and then work until I could literally falling asleep with laptops in bed. It's not healthy. There's no health in there. There was no vacations. There was no getting away. There was no going away for a weekend camping with friends and stuff. It was on 24 7365 for a few years, like you said, working 16, 17 hours a day. I don't ever recommend that to anybody. Now, it is not healthy in any capacity.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: You know, at the time. There's. And even I recall in my, in my younger days, going through a very similar experience, falling asleep on a few laptops, uh, you know, there's. You're making notes about something, and then all sudden, you can see as you go back, you look at the notes, how that the pen trails off down the side because you've fallen asleep. There's a little bit of maybe some drool on your pages, uh, these kind of things that happen because you're. You're in that grind mentality, and I. There's some things you can do when you're younger. You feel that you can persevere. You have that superhuman superhero kind of mentality of, I can do this, I can push through it, and it creates this environment and this focus for you to be able to do those things. But we all have the same amount of energy and the same amount of time in a day. And there's a reason that we're able to work with other people, build teams, find other human beings. And Dan Sullivan, one of my coaches and mentors, he wrote the book who not how and the concept of who power. If we can find another who so that they can do the hows or help us accomplish the hows, in our mind that weve, that we visualize, we can create not only a lot of leverage, but we can actually raise people up in the process. And thats been a hard learned lesson for me, as I suspect it has for yourself, because I was very much in that same mindset of just grind, grind, grind, and lets, lets persevere and push through all these things. Push through the pain. Oh, your back's a little sore. Don't worry about it. You'll sleep next week. For how many? If I had a dollar for every time I said I'd sleep next week, man, I think my bank account would be very healthy at this point in time. So I could totally resonate with your experience, and I think people watching this will resonate as well. Now, after this health scare happened for you, you probably went through a period of introspection and introspection. How did you start to overcome and start to pivot and change the way you were doing things after that secondary event?
[00:19:00] Speaker B: Yeah, it was. Again, everything that happens happens for me, not to me. So it was like, wow, what an incredible experience. You know, learning this, it really shifted my perspective. I sat there one day and said, like, cool. Well, retiring at 50 wasn't in the plans for me. You know, building a company and just grinding it out for another 30 years wasn't the plans. And, you know, trying to get absolutely filthy rich and retiring at 30 wasn't in the plans for me. So what were in the plans for me? And I heard a quote that changed, uh, my world, that said, if you want to make a million dollars a year, build a business that is 2 million, give a million dollars away and you'll be the happiest millionaire on the planet. And for whatever reason in the season I was in the time that I was in, that landed with you really hard, that said, I don't want to just build businesses to get filthy rich anymore. What if I did them to actually make a massive impact in the world? What if every business that I built just had a serving component, a giving component, whatever you want to call it, so that every time I made money, I got to do good. And now I could be motivated, not by trying to get rich and lose sleep at night to try and fill my bank account, but what if I did it to go help people? What if I actually built the businesses to serve people? And the benefit that I got was that I was going to build a lot of wealth on the back end.
And that led down to a completely different journey. It became a healthy relationship to wanting to get finances and financial freedom, because it was, if I achieve this, that means that I had done more good in the world than I was trying to take from it. And it really just released a lot of pressure that was on me. It released a lot of the stress that I had. I no longer cared about trying to get rich by 30. I cared about, wow, how do I go to serve more humans? And if I do this in the right capacity, I'm going to be able to find my financial freedom. But money wasn't going to be the thing that made me happy. It was a serving that was going to make me happy. And if I was happier, I could. It was sustainable. If I was happy and healthy, I could sustain the business for life. And so suddenly, it changed my whole perspective and also gave me this inclination that if something were to happen to me, remember, I'm operating under fear that I could die tomorrow. Watching one of your best friends dies, that's kind of your. Your mo, your operating system becomes, I could lose it all tomorrow, so what am I going to do? And at the time, it was, how do I get rich so that I can live life and, you know, travel the world and do this kind of stuff before I die? To all of a sudden, well, what's the legacy that I want to leave?
[00:21:18] Speaker A: I'm.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: And if I started today building impact into businesses and growing them to make a bigger impact in the world, even if I got 510 years down the road, I'd have a way stronger legacy. And people might feel differently about me than if I was just filthy rich traveling the world. And that's what really changed a lot of my perspective was just how were people going to view me for what I built based on what I was doing now versus what I was doing before?
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Preston, what was the first iteration of that? This idea comes to you. You have to begin the implementation process somewhere. So how did you start to take on this initiative in this new way of thinking and started incorporating into your business life?
[00:21:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I was modeling under different organizations, like Tom Shoes or bomba socks or all these different things, where it's like every time x happens, y happens. Every time a transaction happens, this happens. And so it originally started by saying, well, every time somebody bought a ticket to our free meetup group that we had in town, what if we just made it a $10 donation? And so we had about 30 and 40 people on a monthly basis showing up to our meetup for free. But as you know, when it's free, people don't want to show up and it's hard to get them to be accountable. So we started charging $10 per door. Sorry, $10 to come into the door to come to our meetup group. And that was where we started saying, like, well, that's kind of cool. Now, instead of putting 30 people in, we want to put 100 people in that room, because it means we got to donate more. And that's when it clicked for me that said, well, what if we did this for every unit we bought a instead of worrying about the cash flow and the passive freedom it gave us, what if we donated $10 for every door? And the more doors we bought, the more people we got to help. And so that's where we came up with this concept of $10 per door per month that we would donate for everything we did going forward. And now we're motivated by how many doors can we buy? Because how many people we can help, not by the financial freedom number that we were trying to track. Preston.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Yeah, very big important difference. I would imagine. When you started to charge for people to come to the door, what started to take place and change with the caliber of the meetings and the quality of the meetings you began to have?
[00:23:18] Speaker B: When people pay, they pay attention. So obviously, people were actually showing up because they want to be there. But the coolest thing, rich, was I stood at the front of the room, and I'll never forget it, the first one, and there was 30 or 40 people in the room. And I said, because the 30 of you showed up today, we were able to put one kid through organized sport. It's $300. Put one kid through organized support, through kids sport, which we supported. We were able to one kid through sports to give ourselves a pat on the back, a round of applause. By just showing up, you made a massive impact. From that moment, we never looked back. And we scaled up to 120 people at one point before, uh, before we weren't allowed to do events anymore. And that was when we realized it was in that moment we could create a really cool sense of purpose, community, humanity. And it changed our perspective of, hey, people in these rooms aren't just here to learn from us. People in these rooms are here to actually make an impact with us. And that changed our whole perspective of how we were attracting people in the marketing, the messaging, and everything was come be a part of our really cool mission that helps a lot of kids. And while you're here, learn real estate investing.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: Amazing. And we're going to learn more about making an incredible impact when we come back with Randy after these messages.
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[00:25:14] Speaker A: Right before our last break, we were talking with Randy and he started to talk a little bit about some of the events that he was running and things he began to discovering in that process. And of course, we had this little thing come up, global issue here, something about a COVID virus. I guess it impacted some of the ability to meet with people in person. So you're running some events, you're using that also to add value to people, grow your real estate networking base, and that's a great way to do marketing, but also to build relationships. And that was working really well for you, but that came to a screeching halt here. Weve talked a lot about certain life events that have impacted you drastically that youve had to overcome and the mindsets required for that. But now were also starting to talk about economic things that have gotten away and stuff thats outside of your control. So walk us through what was happening with the event side of things and how did that shut down impact really start to affect you and your business?
[00:26:08] Speaker B: Trey we were probably at the peak of where we ever were going to be. We are. We had a room. Rental is 120% maximum. We had sponsorship for it. We had some of the best speakers flying in, like speak and teach and train. At this event, we had 120 people. You know, that's $1,200 donated every month for kids. We were putting through sports. We were kind of like the hot thing in town for real estate. And we're in a small city. Like we're, we're in a population of, you know, 300,000. So it's not even, it's not even like we were massive and we, we thought everything was, you know, unbreakable. We were raising money from that community to go buy real estate. Everything was going so well, and then all of a sudden, overnight, we weren't allowed to do in person meetups anymore, and we were like, well, that kind of sucks. So we had to pivot to online or virtual. Well, it's very hard to get people to put a credit card number in to come, uh, just virtually show up an event. So we lost as soon as we said, hey, it's $10 online to come, virtually. People like, I'm not paying $10 for online hangouts. Uh, we never knew how to ran virtual events, so we didn't know that. And everything kind of just went down the wayside. And, uh, you know, that was kind of obviously February of 2020, March of 2020. And my business partner were sitting there, and I said, well, look, we have an audience of people. We have a huge network. We've been a part of a lot of, like, masterminds and online courses where people will pay a premium to be around premium people. What if we took this opportunity where all these other groups were shut down and everybody's moving online? What if we just found the best of the best, put them together in an online training that was high caliber, high humans, and we tried to just run one event. This year, when it's over, in a few months, we'll just run a lab event, and we'll be back to running high caliber events. And so we started an online mastermind training program in March of 2020. That's where the concept came. And we launched it in June of 2020, completely oblivious to what was actually going on in the world. And it was a high ticket item. It was a $10,000 item to come in. But what we realized in the innovation side is that solves a lot of our cash flow problems. Now, we had a very viable, income producing business that was able to pay us consistently, knowing what we're doing. We were now becoming authorities in the industry across the entire nation, instead of just in our local communities. So we went and found the best people, found 50 of the top people across Canada. Canada. Now, we had that authority, and it also allowed us to continue to build our business, but without having to run meetups every month. Now, people just looked at us like, wow, they founded one of the best mastermind groups in Canada that now investors, when they were looking at us, we like, oh, they must be trustworthy because they can't, you know, put a lot of stuff at risk because of the group that they built, the credibility they had, they had a lot to hold up to. So that allowed us to just market in different ways than we had before, globally, as opposed to locally as well.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: Preston. Yeah. So a lot of ripple effects came from basically making, again, a pivot decision.
The proverbial world threw you some lemons, and you guys squeezed lemonade out of the situation. But I like the comment of how well, in a couple of months we'll be able to go back to live events. And of course, everyone knows that that was not the case. And there's many people who are in the event industry, event scenario, that, that, that was the same situation for them. They were looking for ways to pivot, or they say, you know what? This will be over in a while. We've got capital in the bank. We can with, we can withstand this for a period of time. And unfortunately for many of them, that that ended up not being the case. So, uh, you know, you were able to create something brand new, an iteration, a new iteration of what you were already doing, amplifying it, uh, getting the right kind of people on the bus. So again, there's a lot of pieces in there that you identified, which, although maybe they sound really easy when they come out. And two, three sentences, I dont want to underplay the amount of work that was involved in actually making that a reality. So while that was running and the COVID scenarios tended to extend and then extend and then extend some more, how did that progress with that group? Because, again, youre still in this virtual environment. It was growing a little bit. Did you ever have any issues? At what point were you able to get people back into a live room? How did you see that start to progress over that extended timeframe of the COVID dynamic?
[00:30:33] Speaker B: Yeah, so we sold it as a one year membership, and we said, our goal this year is to run one in person event. We don't know when it's going to happen. We don't know where it's going to happen. We're going to do one in person event. And so we, um, we planned this event, and we had everything ready to go for it. All the contingencies were in place. Everything was backed up. Everything was good. And, and we did everything we could to make sure that, you know, all the precautionary items were in place. Everything from, like, literally like, four different styles of masks. Because when you go to a networking event, if you have a blank mask, it's hard to conversation. We had, like, clear, like, we had everything figured out for, like, how are we going to make this event the best one possible, only to have it canceled three days before people had paid flights. Everything was confirmed. Speakers were confirmed. And, you know, running events, when you get top name speakers, like, it's hard to. You're paying for all their flights and hotels, and they're taking time off to come in and everything. And three days before, there was an unfortunate circumstance at the hotel that they had to shut down.
And so all these people had non refundable flights and everything, and we're like, we don't know what to do. So we had to pivot, and we scheduled it again for ten days later, hoping that it could work. And by then, they hadn't fixed it. So then we had to delay again. So we canceled everything, scrapped it, and said, well, what can we do? So then we repurposed again three months later and actually was able to go and execute and run the event and ended up being better because they had reduced a little bit of the restrictions by then, and it allowed us to actually perform and be in a different space. But as a business owner, some of the most challenging things when somebody else is controlling your circumstances, that your clientele is now losing money off of the fact that somebody else is telling you how to run your business.
Sheesh. That was one of the most challenging moments of our lives, um, because he just didn't know what was going to come next. You're prepping, you're planning, and having to pivot and run customer service. And it was. It was probably one of the hardest moments of our lives, um, outside of, you know, going through, like, personal issues and business issues, was that on the flip side, we talked a little bit about this. Our real estate was booming because in 2020, everything skyrocketed. So on the other end, we're like, hey, we're all becoming multimillionaires overnight with our portfolios. This is great. And so it was this weird inverse of challenge on the educational side, because our meetup went away. We had this really good thing, but then it went away again, and it kept getting pulled away from us. But our real estate was skyrocketing. Like, this is really cool. Life's great. One goes up, one goes down. It's just the levers of life, Jeff.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: Well, and following through on those levers of life, the levers pivot sometimes when we least expect it. And so real estate was going good, but then there started to be challenges on that side as well. Living in the area. We are in western Canada, near the Vancouver area. You yourself, out on the island, we had a problem with lumber, and lumber prices shot through the roof, and construction costs change, renovation costs change, inflationary pressures. So how did those things, again, things completely outside of your control.
When you buying a piece of real estate and you do a performa, you look at all the numbers, you're making your decision based on these reasonable numbers, and you do your best to plan for contingencies. There's contingencies that you naturally and normally plan for, and then there's ones that you have no possible way to plan for, like a global pandemic, its impact on the supply chain of the market and how that could impact in different areas of a nation or, in fact, an entire continent, really. And so what were some of the things that started to happen on that side that you had to overcome? Some challenges as well.
[00:34:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Believers switched at some point where we were doing really good in real estate, and the mastermind was challenging. Then all of a sudden, a year and a half, for two years later, all of a sudden, the real estate went well, everything that you promised, you can't deliver on now because lumber went up 300%, construction went up 300%, job sites got delayed by a year and a half because nobody could work on them, and everything just completely got pulled away from you again, 100% out of our control. We raised the money right before all of this. We bought the land and started the projects at the beginning of 2020. And then we watched everything rise, thinking that we were the most brilliant people on the planet, and we were going to retire by the time we were the next three years to then having it all swept away from you, because all of a sudden, the performer didn't make any sense anymore because your construction costs went through the roof. We had CCDC contracts with contractors that were like, we're just pulling out of the deal. We will lose our entire company if we follow through with this contract. Now you're into, you know, dealing with the legalities of, well, you're supposed to fulfill at this price at this contract. And if you don't do that, our investors are going to be out of the project money, and our project money is completely different. But at the same time, now, our events came back, and now our mastermind shot up, and we were able to scale and grow that. And so now my real estate went down, but the mastermind took back off. And so we went through a weird. That was, that's all in three years. That's 2020 to 2023, where it was. Everything was going up and down and left and right, and one place was doing great, and the other one sucked. And then all of a sudden, that was doing great, and this one sucked. It was chaos, man. But you had to adapt. You just had, and all of it out of our control. It wasn't like we were bad marketers or bad, you know, real estate investors. Everybody, and still, now everybody is still feeling the effect of what happened in the real estate industry and is trying to mitigate whatever they can to survive.
[00:36:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, it's. And you're right. So for people who are watching this that are having that experience, it's, it's important for them to know that they're not alone. It's, it's something that's impact many, many people and industries and the construction industry in different areas. And so there's, there's all these levers that you say, and we think often of real estate as this long term thing, which it is, but there's also a lot of short term impacts that happen along the way. And so I think it's important that you identified that. And it's nice to know that one of the areas started to come back for you. And so it was in that process that when we come back after our break, we're going to talk more about the next iteration of how you're looking at business today and the things and the projects you're working on to serve the world that you most want to serve. So we'll be right back after these messages.
[00:36:49] Speaker C: There's certain moments in our life where we know that things are going to change.
That happened to me in August of 2009.
My life completely and totally changed forever for the better. I learned about this incredible concept called the infinite banking concept, becoming your own banker. It was created by R. Nelson Nash. Nelson became my friend and my mentor. I loved him dearly.
I now have the blessed life of being able to teach his incredible message, his incredible concept to the people I love to serve.
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[00:37:36] Speaker A: So how exactly do you make a maximum impact in the world? Find a way to increase your giving and do it on a scale that's never before been seen. That's the vision that you have, Randy. That's what one of the reasons I was inspired to talk to you and to share this message. And I think what you're doing now in business is truly innovative. And it's innovative in a way that it's about outwardly centric, looking at who can be served and how can we help the people that have a larger impact in the world businesses go about creating that service model in a way where its really a win win win situation. And so when we reflect back on your journey that weve heard all the different challenges that youve had to overcome, and in a 1213, 14 year period of time, theres been some tremendous experiences there. So how would you say that those experiences, and recognizing that there was a way you could look at business differently to try to create more giving, how has this transition and formulated to the path that you find yourself on now today?
[00:38:37] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of what I learned over those years was how to pivot and adapt, right. I was going one way and got robbed of it, and then I had to pivot, and then I was going another way and then got robbed of it and had to pivot. And a lot of it is uncontrollable life circumstances, losing a friend or a pandemic or whatever it was. And something I learned along the way was just that I had a gift for looking at innovation, looking ahead, finding trends, and just kind of being ahead of the curve. That's what we were able to build in Canada's top real estate business masterminds, because there just wasnt anything coming. But I saw that that trend was starting to grow and I saw the opportunity with the marketplace and where we were. And so as I started sharing a lot about this $10 per door per month, everybody in our mastermind adopted it. A lot of other people adopted it. We probably had 30 or 40 real estate investors donating dollar, ten per door per month and all their portfolios. But I had a lot of other businesses asking me, how do I do this? Or what is the stats of it? This makes a lot of sense. As I looked into it, I realized that is the way the world is going. People are going to the way of like, especially millennials and Gen Zs are like, I only want to buy from companies that do good. And the research that I started to understand in very simple terms is people are done with greedy capitalism. Why are we building businesses that just serve ourselves now? What about a little bit of the socialistic ass point of what about the homeless people on the streets? What about the people that can barely feed themselves? What are the people that don't even have water? What about the kids that can't afford to go through sports? If we as entrepreneurs have that ability to go make as much money as we want and go earn a nice income and build businesses that are making us a profit, why shouldn't we use those to do a little bit of impact in the world. I'm not saying you have to give away all your profit, but just a little bit. And so as I studied that and learned that, I realized that's a big trend that was coming. And I had a really good coach that looked at me and said, randy, your purpose on this earth wasnt real estate investing. It wasnt to build a mastermind. It was something bigger than that. It was, how do we make giving a non negotiable in every business on this planet? And it was just a long journey to get there. And so as I started to explore that, I started to realize the bigger everything went, the more people can give. We need to go to give big. So thats how our company was formed. But what I realized is that theres a massive gap in the marketplace right now between the impact people want to make and their ability to execute on it. Thats where I saw my gap, to come in and be what I call a fractional chief giving officer, but help people add that impact in to then grow their businesses and continue to scale. But what I realized the biggest thing, Richard, was that once I started adding that impact into businesses, they had the same change in perspective that I had when I added impact into my business. I'm less burnt out, I'm more excited, my team's more excited, there's a new purpose. And all of a sudden, I could flip the switch from people from wanting to be, or from being exhausted and burnt out and kind of giving up on their companies. You know, this, we spend five, six years as an entrepreneur, you're exhausted by the end of it. And I was able to take them from that to being excited again, to say, well, what if every time that you did something, you were able to go help more people? And that's how I was able to do that. So now that's really what my focus is on, is, you know, helping consulting companies is really cool, and adding impact is cool, but it's really about that mental shift that we can create for people where they go from, ah, being business is cool, but why do I need to make more money? Or what is the point of it to saying, hey, if you actually scaled this business larger but added an impact component to it, you could do a lot more good in the world? How would you feel if that was the case? And everyone's like, well, of course I would do that. Makes a lot more sense. And so that's where I've taken all the skills and all the history and the ten years of ups and downs and lefts and rights and everything that I've been through and now compiled it into a company that I'm very proud of and something I'm really excited to continue to grow and innovate in the space.
[00:42:33] Speaker A: Clay yeah. And I think there's so many businesses that they do, they give every year they give to something. Usually it's something that they do have an interest or a passion in, but it's often maybe for the main business owner or shareholders, or maybe they divvy it up in different ways because they just think it's the right thing to do. But maybe it's sporadic. It doesn't necessarily have a lot of intentionality to it. And from my vantage point, it seems like that's really where you're coming in and you're filling the gap and saying, hey, let's get crystal clear and intentional about what it is that you're doing. And so that your business, your team, your employees, the people that work with you, they can all rally behind this concentrated message of how you're all as an organization going to make a big deal and versus like, hey, we're going to give a little bit over here and a little bit over here and a little bit over here. It's like, hey, we're going to pool the resources of our giving capacity. We're going to pool the time, the effort, and the energy of our teammates and see how we can incorporate that into this giving model so that we can take what we were doing at this level and we can ratchet it up to this level. Am I on track with how I visualize this?
[00:43:42] Speaker B: 100% on track. And, um, it's crazy what people can do when they have a different motivation, right? When it's your own personal derivatives, it's like, cool, what's an extra 100 grand a year make me at this point? You know, as, as you get successful in your career, it's like an extra hundred grand. It just goes into the bank. It's just some savings. It's not really there. So you're not as motivated as you are. But when you take that and say, well, if we closed all those deals and that led to 20 more kids getting put through organized sport, someones like, well, thats a very different motive. And all of a sudden its like, well, how would you want to help 40 kids then, or 60 kids? Oh, well, we need to take the business up to this level. Great, well, lets do that to go help those 60 kids that dont have the opportunity that you do. And lets get your team on board with it now your team, instead of sitting there saying, well, im making my boss some more profit today, is saying, wow, we just helped five more kids get through sports. That's really cool. I'm part of it, and that's what we've seen. Statistically, I could rattle off 100 statistics, but, you know, 89% of consumers want to work with companies that are doing their giving initiatives. But 93% of employees said they're happier with their employer if they see the impact that their company is making. So if you're an employer and you have overhead, turnover or employment turnover or your staff's not, you know, maybe as engaged or as involved as you'd like, you can add a giving initiative and flip that whole script on their head and do some good while you're doing it. So you're 100% on track. It changes every metric or lever in the direction that trends up by just giving it new purpose and passion behind it.
[00:45:16] Speaker A: There's a difference between those employees, uh, knowing that you give to something versus seeing what the words you use was, seeing the impact. And the way that you see the impact is you actually have to be visually shown it, or you have to be involved in that impact creation in some way. That's how you see, and you recognize that value. And I think there's a big difference between that and just, hey, we gave. This year, we put a bullet point on a PowerPoint at the annual Christmas party. Hey, this year, we gave $200,000 to make a wish foundation or something. It's like, no, we had our teammates involved in creating this make a wish scenario. They got to participate in it. And in the process, we gave 200,000 to that. Cause that's a very different bullet point. And it has a feeling and a connotation that you just can't really match.
[00:46:06] Speaker B: And. And then go one step further. How do you provide the photos, videos, and stories of what that $200,000 did, what kids did it help? Show a photo of it, share a story of it, get them vested in it emotionally, personally. That employee can't leave the company now because they're like, I love helping these kids. I love doing it. We incentivize our team now where we, for one of our products, we sell a $2,000 membership to a community, and we donate $150 from every membership. And I went to my team and said, look, you're a part of this. You're part of this, and you're a part of this. Why don't we just donate dollar 50 to all three of your favorite charities? Of choice. Now, every time that you close a deal, you get dollar 50 donated to your charity. That was good. But then I said, what does that dollar 50 do? And they're like, oh, well, for every $300 but one kid through sport, great. So every six memberships that you sell, you're able to help one kid. How does that make you feel? Well, that's really cool. Great. Go sell six memberships and let's go help a kid. And all of a sudden, it was just like, it changed everything. Well, now my team's so vested in the growth of that company now because they understand that we're not just doing it for profit. It doesn't go into my bank account. They don't care. They care about how much they make, but now they care about this product, makes this impact. And that's how we re inspired them. They get to see it. They get to feel it. They get to watch those donations happen. So in your example there, how do you not just tell them? How do you get them involved? How do you send them the photos of it and ask them why it means something to them? I've seen Gary Vee talk a lot about this lately, but, like, learn about your employees, understand what motivates them, understand what drives them, and that's when you can actually start using impact in your business to really exponentially grow.
[00:47:42] Speaker A: Now you're in the process of incorporating some technological components to this. This model and this idea. And is that something you're able to speak on? As we, you know, close out the end of our show, I'd like to hear a little bit about what you're building to help support this impact initiative.
[00:47:59] Speaker B: Yeah, from an innovation standpoint, we're trying to find, there's a lot of similarities in the consulting that I do. It's a very. It's a very streamlined process that I can take somebody in, put them into a program, hit go, and coming on the other side is very repeatable. We've also found that the number one thing is that people have a hard time getting paired with charities. I don't know what it is, but people don't know what charity donate to. They don't know how to vet them. They don't know what to do. And on the other side, charities don't know how to talk to businesses. They don't know how to go into a business, say, hey, we want you to support us, instead of saying, hey, donate to us. It's like, look at this really cool impact we made. Would you like to be a part of it? And so we're finding ways to create, um, technology that helps pair that together to make it easier for these companies to get connected through AI, through machine learning, through different compatibility stuff, uh, different, uh, um, uh, trainings and all these different things. So, uh, I can't get too deep into it, but we're. We're trying to advance giving. It's an archaic space. The. The, um, uh, nonprofit space is very archaic. And the way businesses give is just starting to come as a trend. So we're trying to be ahead of that curve, create the technology, and allow that to, uh, drive this movement faster, further, because our whole goal, in the end is how many businesses can we make giving a non negotiable in their business?
[00:49:19] Speaker A: Amazing. And final thought before we close the show. Randy, what would you want your message to be for someone watching this who either works for a business or has a business, on how they can start making an impact in the world?
[00:49:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
This is a simple exercise. I want to think right now of something that you could do in your life that make a massive impact for you. I'll give an example. For me, helping kids through sport, if I were able to, you know, donate $50 per child, and every, uh, for the events that I sold and every six that I sold helps one child go through sports. In six months from now, I could probably help ten kids go through sport. That's great. I want you to go into your calendar and put in there in six months down the road saying, I had helped ten kids go through sports, and in six months from now, if you haven't done that, you will get that notification, and I want you to see how it makes you feel when you get that notification saying, I could have done more. That's what I want people to understand, is that we have this ability to do more. It doesn't change our lives that much, but that emotion is something that will drive you to do it different. It'll allow you to build in a different capacity. So, six months down the road, what impact could I have made? Put a note in your calendar, and then in six months, if you haven't done that impact, I want you to check in on yourself and see how it makes you feel and then solve the problem.
[00:50:39] Speaker A: Amazing. Thanks for being on today, Randy. Really appreciate everything that you're up to. And tune in next week as we go through more incredible stories and journeys of the entrepreneurs who are changing the future.
