[00:00:00] Speaker A: I realized that like, I, I, the more I understood myself, the not only the more efficient and effective I was at work, but the less guilt and shame I had about not doing something that didn't really feel aligned for me. You can do hard things, you got to do hard things. You're going to keep doing hard things. There's a, there's a huge benefit to doing hard things, but doing hard things in a very intentional way is completely different than just banging your head on a wall because it doesn't, it doesn't align with who you are.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Welcome back to Innovate and Overcome. Today we welcome Corey Gladwell to the he is a four time bestselling author, a speaker and co founder of Authors IO, a book publishing agency for busy professionals. He has scaled unique companies and with the four bestselling books, those include the Human Experience, Enlightened Entrepreneurs and what if. Corey, I'm really excited to have you on the show today and to learn all about your entrepreneur journey.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you about, about it all. Yeah.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Now, you've been around the world of business since a young man. You started in the real estate game early on in your career and coincidentally, that timing might have seemed really good, but there was this big thing that happened right around that phase called the Great Recession that everyone's been talking about.
I know a lot of people I've interviewed on the show, they're still licking their wounds over that a little bit. So walk me through some of the lessons that you started to get early on at that stage of the game, not just from an economic standpoint, but kind of coming out of the gate early as a young man forging ahead in the real estate business.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I, I actually got licensed in real estate when I was 18. I took all my tests, everything right before I turned 18. So I was like ready to go right when I was 18, you know, got my license, I was still in high school and, and then did sales for, you know, a couple of years, a lot of new construction. By the time I was 20, started a real estate brokerage, had about 30 agents and we were doing like, you know, number one, a new construction for King County, Stonewish county in Seattle, Washington. And, and it was great. I mean, it was like, you know, 2005, 6, 2007, everyone, we're like just riding this amazing high and, and everyone was talking about how the market might change and I'm like, nah, it's never, you know, it's Never going to change. You know, you're young and you're, you're full of, you know, sometimes unearned, sometimes earned confidence but, but just optimism. And as, so as that happened, there's a lot of lessons to learn throughout just having a real estate business and you know, it's all commission based, it's all sales. When you have agents, it's all about them getting sales and you get your piece of the pie and you have to help them succeed. And, and so we did that really well, you know, and it worked.
And as the, you know, the recession was starting, I was still kind of like, okay, well that doesn't have to affect us. And this was, I think one of my early on concepts that I still believe today is like, you create your own economy. You know, like I think right now, you know, right now at the time of this recording, I don't know when it will come out, but there's a lot of stuff with the tariffs and the markets and you know, there's a lot of things going on and obviously some very valid concerns and there's also a lot of hysteria on both ends of the spectrum and things.
Irregardless during that time I was like, I have to create my own economy. I can't let whatever's going to happen affect me. So how do I, you know, to the point of your, your podcast, like innovate? How do I, how do I adapt? How do I iterate, how do I find ways to adjust? And, and so while the market was going absolutely insane during the Great Recession, we had no idea what was going on. We're hemoging hundreds, thousands of jobs. You know, everyone was kind of freaking out that new construction, all these builders that we were selling for, you know, listing their, their homes, hundreds of homes, well they defaulted. A lot of them were local builders, you know, so they defaulted to the local banks that had the construction loan. So now I'm meeting with local banks, you know, Frontier bank that no longer exists and a bunch of other different banks that no longer exist because during that time as they defaulted, those local banks couldn't sell the construction. They didn't know how to sell new construction. So we're trying to help them offset, you know, selling these homes. They eventually defaulted on their stuff. So then the nationwide banks came over and took them over. WAMU became Chase and know, bank of America took over Frontier and a bunch of these different banks and, and then eventually I was sitting on, you know, board meetings for, for, for bank of America and working with the FDIC on how do we sell, you know, hundreds of thousands of units to offset this recession and, and not make everyone homeless, you know, because there was a lot of people that were still, you know, getting notices and we worked on a lot of like the Cash for Keys program didn't really exist back then. Of you know, someone's on a short sale, they're going to get evicted, you know, they have to get out of the house. They haven't been their mortgage. How do we get them enough money to get them on their feet? That was a whole program. A lot of us sat there and tried to figure out. I was again very young at this time. So to be, to be sitting there doing that, I look back and I'm like, it was an amazing experience to somehow continue to adapt and iterate and got myself to that situation. But it was by force that I kind of had to because, you know, the 30 agents that we had at the real estate brokerage weren't selling real estate anymore. So there's no money from the agents. We still have our same overhead. You know, listings aren't selling like they, they used to.
You had to continue to adapt and iterate and change. And for me, when I was going through that, not only was there the lessons of owning the brokerage, of the sales and, and adapting to the market, but also I realized there's this amazing opportunity. Everything's on fire sale. Like everything is on sale. So what can I do differently during this time when everyone's, you know, panicking in the market? Is there something I can find as an opportunity to buy?
And so I bought a nightclub, seller finance nightclub and negotiated with these brothers that were going to go under for their, their club. They had bought that from them and then bought a restaurant, launched my own vodka brand. Like all these random things. It's like New Year's Eve 2009, you know, spring 2010, like right in the, the heat of the market, still not knowing what it's doing.
And, and then, and I learned a lot of lessons from that. You know, I had those for about a couple years and was a 23 year old nightclub owner. You know, it was like every, every boy's dream but which was, it was great. I don't regret it at all. But after a couple of years of your job being to party and, and trying to own a restaurant, own a nightclub, still have the real estate business, somehow had a vodka business because I, you know, I thought I was a rapper or something, I don't know. But all this stuff going on, you know, I. I made. Made money, but also I had no idea, again, what I was really doing, owning all these businesses as acquisitions. You know, like, there's. There's this unconscious competence that I came into it with of, like, why can't I do this? You know, what's stopping me? Because everyone said, oh, you can't do that. You can't do that. We can't do that. We're this age with that age. You can't do that. Why not? You know, And I think because I grew up very young. I grew up very, very poor as a kid. From the time I was born until I was almost 7, Section 8 welfare. We had absolutely nothing. And then my parents dug ditches, my dad dug ditches. My mom was a clean lady. They, like, worked their way up to starting to make money. By the time I was 17, we were in the 1% of income earners. So I saw this crazy swing throughout my life of, like, you know, there's a lot of money you can make, and you just get to figure out a way to do it and, you know, find a way. And so.
So I think I just. I just would always try to figure it out. And I never was able to get any investments from them. Not to knock. Anyone that does get investments from family or trust funds or anything, I support it. I wish I had it. It would have been great.
But I. I went through all of it and I. And I failed miserably. I failed miserably in so many ways. Real estate was great.
That went well. Eventually we merged with, like, a General Scott office because it just wasn't sustainable.
None of the agents were producing. The restaurant was six months. Like six months. And I was like, this is absolutely the worst idea ever to own a restaurant. Anyone who's ever owned a restaurant could verify that fact.
The nightclub I owned for two years, I actually had to get rid of the vodka brand because in this time, this 2009, 10, 11, 12, Washington state was like prohibition. Kind of like, you couldn't actually manufacture alcohol in the state. I had to get it made in Bend, Oregon, from Ben Distillery. And they would ship it up into the Washington liquor store and the liquor board would hold on to your liquor, and then you had to pick it up and, like, check off that you got it. That never changed until they legalized marijuana, and then the alcohol department became the weed department. And so they just got rid of the alcohol concern, which I'm like, I don't know. That's. I don't know what's better there, but.
But during that time, because I had a vodka brand, a liquor license for that, a restaurant and a liquor license for that, a nightclub, and a liquor license for that. The liquor control board came to me and said, well, you, you know, you kind of have this monopoly. And I'm like, I don't know what you're seeing, but I wouldn't call this.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: My numbers don't reflect what you're. What you're suggesting.
[00:08:28] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. I don't know if I call it a monopoly. I mean, I like the compliment. It sounds cool, but.
But I, you know, they were like.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: You picture yourself with a monocle when they said that.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. I was like, I'm the first Bezos. You know, I really felt like I. I had it all together.
But no, they, they. They said, well, you can sell your liquor at your restaurant, your nightclub, and so that's a monopoly. And I'm like, I don't think Grey Goose is worried about the sales I'm making from. You know what I mean? Like, knowing Kettle, one isn't concerned about, you know, my little vodka brand. But anyways, I had to get rid of the vodka brand. I had to sell that, which was. Which was fine. Got rid of the restaurant, and then I had this nightclub. And so for two years, again, my job was to party, having music artists out and all kinds of things. And so I always joked that I had my midlife crisis from, like, you know, 22, 23 until I was, like, 20.
It's like I got this full, you know, experience out. Learned a lot about failure. I learned a lot about what I don't want. I ended that with that. That kind of run there, feeling bankrupt emotionally, spiritually, you know, mentally, I was just drained and wiped out.
And so, yeah, so I took a lot of. A lot of lessons from that and. And shifted. But I'll. I'll pause there because I know I just kind of fire hose that entire story at you, so I'll pause there.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: You know, I think firehose is appropriate because fundamentally, in the experience of your life, why it might have only been a couple of years. It's the equivalent of a fire hose of activity and experience in a short period of time.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: So. True. Yeah.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: You know, relating it to our listeners that way, I think is okay now, you know, I mean, you mentioned, you know, getting rid of those things and selling them off. And, you know, those are almost like.
Like. Like sentences that you just cut off before they were finished, because it's not necessarily like someone just knocked on the door, so, oh, hey, you selling vodka, I'm going to buy that from you. Like, there' there's a component to selling each of those individual items. And some of those might have been good, and some of them might have been easier. An opportunity came about, but, you know, each one was slightly different. And I don't imagine that, you know, you know, the person that bought your restaurant also bought the vodka business. So, so how would you go about finding a way to get rid of those? And you purchased the restaurant at a discounted price during that recessionary period as a test, as an opportunity. And, you know, what was your experience upon selling it? If you had it for a short period of time, did you, did you fire sale yourself? So you could say, you know what? I, I've just realized after my experience, this is not where my energy needs to be.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: No, it's a really great question. I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of really, you know, zooming in on a lot of those, those situations. There's so many lessons that at the time I just kind of passed by because I, I, you know, I wasn't absorbing all of them. And it wasn't until later reflecting all the lessons that were learned. But, but during that, yeah, with the vodka brand and with the restaurant, even buying any of those, you know, there's, there's this thought when you're not only younger, but I think, I mean, because there's, there's grown adults, there's, you know, grandma's and grandpas that you try to tell the stories to, and they're like, you can't do that. You can't do that. There's a sense of what's possible when it comes to acquisitions. It comes to buying a company, buying a business, your risk tolerance, your, you know, how do you do it?
I don't have a half a million dollars to go buy this thing. You know, I got to. And you think you have to have all the cash on hand and, you know, no one knows seller financing. So now, I mean, I've done acquisitions since then and own different businesses and sold different businesses in a much more intentional way. Not the, the fire sale. Like, I just got to get rid of this thing with the vodka brand. It was. I had gone to a nightclub and bar convention in, in Las Vegas for all three of those things. You know, the restaurant, the nightclub and the vodka brand.
And I'd met someone there who had another vodka brand, and they were scaling it up and they're getting all these bars and restaurants and nightclubs and we just touched Basin Networked and then, you know, a handful of months later when I, when I had to sell it, I called them and said, hey, would you like to, to, to acquire this? And they did.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Are you looking for a great book to read?
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[00:12:32] Speaker A: It wasn't a huge amount of, of profit by any means on that, but I mean, there was just me and no one else owned that with me. I, it took me, you know, a couple of years of researching, you know, working out, branding and labeling. It was called Pure American Grain Vodka. I wanted to do pure vodka, but you know, the fda, you can't say pure. Nothing's pure. So you had to put American Grain really small print. And you know, there's all these little things that you learned around the way, and packaging and pricing and bottling and you know, all these different distribution, you know, all the different things to learn along the way there. Same thing for the restaurant. The restaurant I actually bought from these brothers. I won't say their names, but these brothers who own, owned at the time this like 100 plus million dollar franchise of a taco company.
And we're making a lot of money and they owned a handful of restaurants as well in that area.
And so they sold that one to me. And again, same thing. It's like, well, how do you go and buy a restaurant when you're 22, 23 years old, being able to communicate with them and find a way, knowing it was for sale, negotiating, bringing in investors, um, and, and it worked for, it worked for a handful of months. But again, a restaurant, unless you are the owner, operator, it's like owning a FedEx store. I mean, it's way different. But owning a FedEx store, you buy those things with a SBA loan or whatever else you do with a FedEx store, you got to work for three years just to, just to get in any kind of profit. And the only way you're ever making money on those, if you're paying yourself as the main employee, the manager, like, they're good for someone who just wants a small business and they want to just be in charge, but you're buying a job, you know, for a lot of types of companies or franchises like that restaurant, very much the same way. At least my experience, again, I know some people do Very well in the restaurant business. But that was my experience. The margins on alcohol are way higher than food, so on and so forth. So after that handful of, of of months, I mean, it was either I get rid of the business or this business goes under. And there was a lot of great people that were there. And so there happened to be. And I wish I would have kept this because this restaurant, this is one of the things I kick myself in the butt like at least every six months whenever I, I think about it or talk about it or remember it. This restaurant was right in South Lake Union in Seattle, Washington. About four to five years later, Amazon moved in and they built up this whole area. I mean this whole area is just sky rises and all this. I mean, and again this. And so the person that ended up taking over, that bought the restaurant was a, they changed it to some kind of sandwich place and whatever else. It was big, it was two stories. I mean it was a nice restaurant.
They took it over, did some other stuff, but they took over the contract. If I had held on to that, that probably would have been a huge money maker. I just didn't know at the time.
But they ended up having a whole bunch of other stuff with those same brothers because they took over that contract.
Those brothers had a whole other issue with all of the restaurants. It was a whole thing. So even though it felt at the time like a fire sale, I actually saved myself from, you know, and again I kicked myself for what could have been the future. There was a whole other mess of things that happened on the road that again, you don't know, you don't know how positive it can be. You don't know how good it can be.
And so finding the right people, especially when you're in like a nightclub or restaurant industry, there's like the same five people who own everything in almost every city. Right? In la. I live in Orange County, California right now in la there's probably five to ten guys or, and we know women, whatever groups of people who own every nightclub, every restaurant, every whatever. Same thing for Las Vegas, same thing for Seattle. Even though Seattle is a small city, obviously there's these one off shops. But it's just like with anything, the coaching industry, the digital marketing industry, you know, consulting, there's a handful of people and once you're kind of in that group, you just kind of make a few phone calls and it's like, oh yeah, I know so and so and so and so would love to buy that or love to invest in that or love to do whatever.
Same for hotels, you know, besides the big owners, there's a handful of other ones, you know, so.
So, yeah, that's kind of. Kind of the process. And I think it's. And I'll wrap up with this. On this part, it's not only the being able to adapt and innovate, but just thinking beyond what you think is possible. Just because we can't feel like I know the steps or I don't know how to do it, or I don't know what it is. It's like, just think. Imagine if you were the person that could do that, that knew exactly what to do, what would be the first thing you do? Put yourself in that position. And just that mindset of you being this person who knows all the answers, who knows exactly what to do, how to do it and make it work, and then just try to think about what they would think about.
Easier said than done, but that's how it kind of breaks out of the mold of our, like, limited mindset that we have from our just personal experiences. So.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: Well, that was rule number five of my mentor Nelson Nash's five golden rules, is rethink your thinking. So, you know, hit that one on the head. A couple of things I heard Corey about, you know, number one, that you can. You couldn't do it, or that you can't do it, hearing that. Not that you could, but the mindset of almost as that being like a tackling fuel for you. You know, there's a. There's a connection of, well, why can't I do it? Who's going to. Who are you to tell me that I can? Because I don't even know if I can or not. But now that you said I can, I think I'm going to go find out. Sort of an attitude. And I sense in a lot of entrepreneurs that that's a common theme where they're able to rise to an occasion they didn't even know existed until the question came up, almost.
And then additionally, you know, one thing I'm recognizing in your story is that by being proactive, fundamentally, that decision to exit businesses right away is almost as powerful a decision as to seek the opportunity in the first place.
Because while you might have missed out on some opportunity or some potential down the road, you were able to liberate or free up mental power.
And by cutting bait, essentially on a business that wasn't serving you in the difficulty, you are able to move forward and forge ahead on something else with not having, you know, I think about, like, you know, in your Google Chrome windows, you got too many of them open and pretty soon you got the spinning wheel or you know, the spinning timer on windows.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: The spinning wheel of death. Yeah.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Too many programs running. And that's a common theme that happens, I think, for especially young entrepreneurs who are trying to do more than they realize. You know, there's nothing, there's no such thing as an unreasonable goal, maybe just an unreasonable timeline.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: That's it. Yeah, that's, that's such, it's such a good point because I, again, during that, I mean this was two, three year period of just, you know, and all that happened, the, the, the, the vodka brand launching. So I bought the restaurant, launched the vodka brand about the nightclub in like a three or four month period. Like that was this boom, boom, boom, boom. And then, you know, obviously did the exit. And I, I think you're absolutely right that being able to cut the losses and just say, hey, I'm in the restaurant. I lost money, absolutely lost money.
And, and, and not even the potential upswing as well, but like, yeah, just lost money. But it was the only way to, to, to not let it dig itself, this crazy hole. And I think what you said is, is really, really important because I, one of the things that, you know, being a young entrepreneur, I mean, I sold, I sold apples when I was like 4 years old. My mom go to the grocery store and she would go buy groceries and she'd come home and go get ready or take a shower, do whatever she's doing, and I would just take the bag of apples and I would go sell them for a dollar each. You know, that was my first kind of sample of entrepreneurship. And I'm like, oh, here's your, here's your $125 back. I'm going to keep the five, you know, and, and knowing that entrepreneurship money in my, in my four, you know, five year old mind was like, this is the way out of where we're at. This is the way out of the situation. And again, I know money doesn't solve all problems. It gives you more options to be able to solve the problems though. And so when I got to that point of, you know, trying to do these acquisitions and do all this stuff, it was, it was this loot, this kind of, not, not loose definition. But I guess I wasn't, I wasn't clear at all. At 22 years old, even though I wrote all these things down, I wanted to buy and build and companies I wanted to start and you know, the vodka brand was on that list. When I was 17, I wrote that down. The nightclub was on there, the restaurant. I had this whole list when I was 17 of everything I wanted to buy, do, and create.
I think a car company was on there. This is before Elon, before Tesla, before you could just do that, you know, um, and.
And again, it was more so like, how much of that is coming from ego? How much of that is coming from ambition? How much of that is even. Not. Not even realistic, but just healthy? You know, what am I trying to prove to myself, to others? You know, those questions come later in life. But if I had been able to be a little bit more strategic, so if I was speaking to someone who is younger, who is 18 and has the same ambition as I did, is try to define. And this could be someone who's 30, could be someone who's 90. Whatever it is. If you're an entrepreneur and you're. You're building a business or wanting to build a business or wanting to acquire a business or whatever it is, knowing what your day looks like, like, figure out your perfect day, figure out your perfect week, figure out your time with your kids or your family or whatever, figure out how you want to spend that time, and then reverse engineer that to get to the business you actually want and the money you actually want.
Because I didn't need all those businesses. That wasn't the. My. My goal was get rich and retire my family and live life and be. Have the freedom, right? And so we make enough money, we'll have the freedom, and then we can go do whatever.
But there's a lot of different paths to get there, and a lot easier paths to get there than just buying up everything, starting everything, scaling to the moon. You might not need to, you know, And I can talk about scaling a bit later too, because there's a lot of people that get confused between that 2. 3 million range and 10 million range. It's a lot. It's a lot different than I think people realize it is. Doesn't mean you make more money. You get more money, you actually start making less money for a handful of years before you make a lot more money. And no one really tells people about that part, so.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and. And Dan Sullivan, one of my coaches, he talks a great deal about the impact of. Of the level of your thinking and 2x thinking or the idea of doubling your business, you know, is really just putting yourself in a position where you're working twice as hard or you're working everyone else in the business twice as hard to reach that.
But a 10x level of thinking. You can't 10x something with the same thinking that it takes to double it. You have to change the thinking fundamentally to create a 10x outcome. Because the same skill set won't get you to a 10x model. That will get you to a 2x model.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: That's it. That's it. I absolutely love that. And there's the using that as an analogy. It's like when you get from the 2x to the 10x, that path along there, there's, there's this wave that, that happens where like you want to make, you know, everyone starts off. I think a lot of people I know in entrepreneurship and their early whatever years are starting. It's like, if I just get 10k a month in this side business, it'll be great. And then they do that, then it's 20k and then it's 50k, then it's 100k a month, and then it's whatever. Even people just the number keeps growing.
But the margins are a lot different, especially any difference. It changes depending on the business. But like if you want to make a hundred thousand dollars in your pocket, you know, depending on your business, you probably need to make three or four hundred thousand dollars, if not more. Right? And that's like very minimum. Right. A lot of businesses, there's a 10, there's a 15, 20% actual net after tax, everything, you know, money that you're going to pay yourself. Then you also have to have your cash reserves and your, you know, all the different things that you need to do as you're scaling and growing. So you might be making a lot more money with a business that's making 6, $700,000. Personally, you might be making more money in your pocket than if you grow that same business to 3 or 4 million, you know, or, or along the way, at least, you know, because there's this dip in personal income as you're investing to growth and your team gets bigger. And so just knowing what that looks like, knowing what your time looks like, knowing how you want to spend it, what's the actual number you want instead of just this whatever number out there that's not really specific, like know your day, know your week, know your life, and then look exactly at that number and then build the business around that and, and the opportunity you're giving other people as well at the business and just making it bigger than ourselves, I think is, is, is the core of what I'm trying to say, because that's the only way it's going to, it's going to last longer. So.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: Well, one of the things I appreciate about what you identified also is early on you started to recognize and you're, you're passing some of that guidance on here about setting up that ideal day. And the ideal day is based on the things that you want to be doing. But sometimes it's a lot easier for people to define. And you indicated this, what are the things that you really don't want to be doing? So you know, not that you want to put focus on those things, but it's easy to have them pop into my mind and, and write them down. And then, okay, these are the things on the eliminate list, which means the opposite of that is probably what I want more of. So we're going to seek to get some of this by getting rid of some of this. And it doesn't mean that those things go away. It just means that you're trying to remove yourself as the who, as the individual or the person of the system that's making those things take place in whatever the operation is.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: No, that's. And that I think is so true that the contrast, right, if you can find the things you don't want to do, you don't like, whatever that is, that list is always easier for us right as humans to go, actually, I don't like this. I don't like that. It's such a good point. And then you go, okay, I guess there's these handful of things either left over or they are that opposite of the, the don't want to do list. And then as you're able to kind of delegate those things and get, and get people to be able to, to, to handle those things, knowing what that difference is, you know, like right now my schedule is I work Mondays for a handful of hours, or Tuesdays a handful of hours. And then I work in the mornings. On Wednesdays really just meet with my business partner, we talk and do our hikes and walks. And then from like Wednesday afternoon until you know, Monday morning, basically I'm just playing with my five year old daughter. We're hanging out, we're going to Disneyland, we're, we're doing whatever. I will try to, you know, maybe I'll hop on a call or if I, you know, something in between during those days. But most of it's just hanging out and it, it won't last forever because she's going to be in like, you know, big school, like actual school school, you know, this fall.
So I'm not going to get those hours back I'm not gonna get those years back ever. And my life I've tried to build around lacking, you know, what's the least amount of regret that I can have?
Right? That's like my, my overarching thing. It's, you know, it used to be when I was younger, I thought it was freedom. I thought it was this and I want to take care of everybody and I want to, you know, whatever. And then I just realized, like, I want to have the least amount of regret when I die. You know, I read the five regrets of the dying I don't know how many years ago, whenever it came out. And it was like, I wish I would have done this, I wish I would have done that. I would have spent less time doing this or more time with family or whatever. And I'm like, I'll just do that. Let me just do the opposite of whatever those regrets are and spend that time with my daughters. I, you know, spend that time with my parents did retire. My parents got to spend that time with them.
And you know, and again, I'll still be sad when my parents eventually pass away. I'll still be sad when my daughter gets into school full time. I'll still have that, those moments. But I think I'll, I'll minimize the amount of, of distress that I'm gonna feel at, at those levels. And, and, and so building my schedule to Ry brought that up. Is that the, the schedule of. Here's what I don't want to do. Here's what I do want to do. Another step of that too is like. And again, people don't have to believe in personality tests, but you know, I have everyone that starts on our team. Our team is like 47 people at this point.
And everyone that starts does this, you know, kind of onboarding get to know you form. And so it's not just like the Myers Briggs, but we also do the Enneagram. We also do the human design, their astrology, like, you know, no one has to fill it out. We're not going to force them. But it's really good to get those that information because I know for myself I'll combine. I've combined all of those different types of personality tests from again, the human design, my manifest generator and enogram. I'm this. And now I, I know a little bit more about myself, about how I work when my energy management is at its highest. You know, those peak hours in the morning when I'm going to get slumped and kind of like out of it or when I Should probably work out instead of doing calls and, you know, trying to build that energy management schedule, I think is. Is. Is so important. And then knowing that about the team, I can have empathy. Like, I'm great at starting a lot of projects, being the CEO, being the visionary. I'm never going to finish those things. Like, that's not me, you know, and instead of trying to force myself to do that, you build the team, let those tasks, let the builder come in and do the building, let someone else come in and finish this. Everyone gets a little bit. I mean, it's not perfect, but everyone gets a little bit more of what is in alignment with who they are, how their energy is managed, the time that they. They work, all this different stuff. And then, you know, we get to have that schedule that really gets to fill your time up and your days up and. And your life up with the things that really matter.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: So. Oh, I love that. We're going to talk more about that and how you're working with your teams when we come back after these important messages.
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[email protected] we are back here with Corey learning about his incredible story, all the businesses that he's shaped and formed over the years. And before our commercial break, we talked a little bit about the impact of how he's created some uniqueness around his teamwork and hiring system to really start to understand at a deeper level what makes the people that works on his teams tick. So you talked a little bit about Enneagram, about human design. I'm familiar with those. I'm a projector in human design, and.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: So my business partner.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: Yeah, great. So I knew I reconnected for a reason.
What I'm wondering is, first of all, what prompted the decision to do that and how are you finding the decision to kind of incorporate those things, whether they're optional or what have you? What do you see taking place with your team as they become to learn those things? What kind of discussions are taking place around the water cooler, as it were?
The more that your teams are familiar with these things, deeper understanding of both themselves, but then starting to have an understanding of the people that they work with very closely.
[00:30:51] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's a great question. So, you know, I know for me, when I kind of discovered them, so I'll do a little backstory and kind of lead up to the answer just for some context. So post the, like the nightclub, the restaurant, the vodka brand, and get, you know, all of that kind of being done. And feeling just super burned out, I turned to meditation. This was like January 2012, and.
And I. I asked a series of questions and I had this profound spiritual experience. There's like three weeks of enlightenment is the phrase we use, where my personality was just kind of gone. It wasn't there. So there was no. There was no judgment. There was no filter of likes and dislikes. It was just this oneness with the table, with the, you know, with you, with anyone very much like you would read in a. Either a Sci Fi journey or some very deep spiritual text. And so up until that point, I had thought those were really cool. I studied religions, I studied philosophy when I was younger, but it was more of like a theory. It was like, oh, chakras are a thing. They're an idea. Or, or, you know, enlightenment is. Is a. Is a thing, you know, like all of those things. Whether people believe, whether it's, you know, it's Jesus or it's, you know, the religions, whatever people, you know, Buddhism, it all felt like that was some kind of story, you know, they didn't feel any. I didn't have any real connection to it as like a real thing. So with that spiritual experience, I felt something I'd never experienced. This unconditional love, you know, complete oneness. And. And everyone I talk to about it would, depending on what religion or philosophy they're. They're connected to. It's. They have a name for it, right? There's a name for it for everyone across the board.
And after that, I was like, okay, what was that? I started to come back to myself and be really connected with, you know, me as in Corey Gladwell again, because of that, knowing that, like, there's so much more to my life and to my experience into this experience of reality than there is. Just what I'm thinking is me that led me into meditation. So I've meditated not every single day, but almost every single day, missed days or A few weeks. And here and there, since January 2012, I began writing my first book, the Human Experience, during that year, most of it was written that year. And my next book, you know, what if? And then, you know, so on and so forth. And those. The books initially were just journals. It was just me writing, trying to reflect on the thoughts that were coming through, downloads of meditations or ideas or experiences I had and trying to understand myself and the actual experience that I'm having as being a human.
And a lot of those things I was able to put into, to practice so that, like, fast forwarding as I was building businesses and building a media agency and trying to figure out to launch my own books and then launching my own books, and then from there, you know, ended up building the publishing company because so many people were asking about, like, how'd you do that? You know, that kind of started to happen.
I realized that, like, I. The more I understood myself, the not only the more efficient and effective I was at work, but the less, like, the less guilt and shame I had about not doing something that didn't really feel aligned for me. And at times, I hate to say that because I don't want to sound like I don't like it if people sound too entitled, right? It's like, oh, that doesn't feel good. I'm not going to do it. It's like, that's not the case. Like, it's not. Not about, like, you can do hard things, you got to do hard things. You're going to keep doing hard things. There's a. There's a huge benefit to doing hard things, but doing hard things in a very intentional way is completely different than just banging your head on a wall, because it doesn't, it doesn't align with who you are as a person and the way your energy flows and the way your time is and all these different things.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: So doing them for the sake of doing them isn't the ideal, you know, scenario. Doing them because they need to be done and no one else is available, different story. But just because it's hard and you can do it doesn't mean you should be doing the hard thing.
[00:34:25] Speaker A: And that I, and I think that's really important just as like a segue and then I'll come back to the personality test and, and the team and all of that, what the benefits have been. But it's a really important thing because a lot of entrepreneurs and I think we all have experiences at some point, we get this identity, right? We get an identity to building a Business, we get an identity to working really hard to making it happen. And then your identity gets wrapped up in the company itself, right, and the business itself. And then what happens when you're trying to scale a business? If you think you are the business and the business is you, the business can only grow to as big as you are. If you fail or you have an off day or a tired day or whatever else, the business suffers. Everything suffers. You become a bottleneck because of course, no one can do it but you. You know, there's no way anyone could do this the way I do it. And it's like, yeah, you're never going to have a real company. You what ends up happening. And. And then we all experience it to some degree. So, you know, doing these things with these personality tests and, and you know, Enneagram and human design and Myers Briggs and all these different ones and that you start to really, again, not only understand yourself and how you work, but when I had the team do it, it's like, oh, well, like you said, this person's a projector or this person's a generator. This person's a, sorry, a manifest generator. This person's a manifestor. You start to figure out. And then they're also like an ID or a DI over here. And it's like, okay, well, they would actually work really probably a lot better on the marketing team than over in fulfillment. Or they would work really well with this team over here on when this project here.
And you don't have. I mean, I've never, I haven't built the whole business with some kind of perfect mechanism that ties it all together. I'm sure that exists somewhere. But as far as the personality types, but we have three amazing departments. We have our marketing department, we have our sales department, we have our fulfillment department. We have the directors of each department and they're crushing it. And they understand how to work in their own flow and they understand how to work with their team in that way. And it also. I think this is the biggest part is it gives you empathy, right? Like as a projector, you would probably look at me as a manifest generator. And me just like starting a bunch of random projects and you know, and just adapt. In middle of it, just going, you know what? I'm going to change course. That would probably, you know, you'd be like, what is he doing? You know, like. And I think there's all these different, you know, things where it might, it might not make sense to the other person, but it makes sense for me. And then it helped me be go, okay, well I know that if, if I'm different than they are and I don't want them to, to look at me like I'm not doing it right. Right. I have to do that for them. They're going to do it in their way. That makes sense for them. So again, it gives this level of empathy of understanding and, and it helps empower people to go, hey, this is not my zone of genius. I'd like to work this way. I'd like to do this and making sure the projects align with the personality type and the way that they, they go about things. And so, so yeah, I think again and then it additionally to the point of the identity, it really begins to help you understand the business is not who you are. Your work is not who you are. Right. Who you are is completely different than what business you're trying to grow and what projects you're working on or what you're doing and part of the team. And that little sense of separation allows you to actually be more aligned and more authentic and more connected to the work because you're not trying to get your sense of self from the business itself. And you know, you can scale it, it can grow way beyond you. It can be bigger than you. It can be a vehicle for every single employee that you have and every single client. And that's the goal for me with the company is like I want everyone to be as successful as they want to be. I want to make my world big enough to fit everyone's world within it and keep growing and growing and growing to where I, that's not about me anymore. It's about every single team member and every single client having the platform to be able to grow as, as, as, as wide and as far as they want. And so these little things like these personality tests and the, and, and the team structures and, and the, and the fun things we get to do on our zoom calls and our all hands and getting to be able to play and you know, kind of like joke about it and have fun with it and sending memes to gifts and like you get to kind of poke fun at yourself a little bit and, and have, have a, A, an interesting way to be self reflective and like bring more awareness to the work you're doing and to yourself without it feeling like a very deep philosophical thing, you know, like it can be joyous awareness if that makes sense. So yeah, I love that and I.
[00:38:25] Speaker B: Think that's really important and we've done something similar in our organization and, and many of the organizations I work with around the Colbia index, which is a measurement of instinctual aspect of the human brain, a conation.
And another type that you might be familiar with would be the sixth type of working genius. So really developed fundamentally for teams working together and those two things, what's great about it is whatever the system is or the reporting mechanism, it creates an awareness of self. And then the more that you understand that, the more you start to be curious about the other people that are around you or that you work with and you start asking different questions and it creates almost like a, a like, like a language. It's like whatever the industry is. And in the vodka business you had all your conversations were about grains and liquor and purity and level and distilling and the types of equipment. So there's, there's a whole like vocabulary attached to that or I'm in the life insurance business so there's a whole vocabulary attached to that. So as you look at those things and well, when you get into a team environment and they're now sharing or they're creating commonality of that vocabulary, both what your business needs and the terminology and the acronyms you use in the day to day activity of the business, but now around personality, around people, around the uniqueness of individuals. And so there's a camaraderie potential that exists there that, that doesn't exist without adding that into the mix and you know, and putting it in the blender and whipping it around into that amazing thing that you're creating with your organization.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: Absolutely love it. Yeah, I absolutely love it. And yeah, I think it is one of those things that's just super important to, to get everyone involved to the degree. Again, I'm not a big fan of like trying to force all of them to do it, but I highly encourage it. Right. We want to, we want to push them as far as we can so that way we can really get them dialed in and, and get them all working together in a fun ways.
[00:40:11] Speaker B: I know for us one of the things we incorporate is of course we, we, we bring it up pretty regularly on, on team meetings. But also you know, I'll even change like on my Zoom or whatever platform we're using, I'll change my name and add the numbers in that that are unique to me. So you know, people can see it right away and it creates conversation. And another fun step is that you know, we encourage especially new team members when they come on available.
We first of all we have a master document with everything and it's all linked to their report so that anyone can review someone else's report. So if you're working on a team with that individual, you can say, okay, how might I communicate with, you know, Richard or with Corey in this example? You know, based on what their instinct is like, is there something I could do where I could leverage them and their natural gift inside of this project? And it really creates another way of thinking about teamwork and hey, maybe I need to bring some energy.
You know what, I feel like we've got a system that's getting a little bit overly bureaucratic here. I think we need to cut through it a little bit. Oh, who's the guy on the team that does that? Oh, it's Richard. Let's, let's bring him in on Zoom and see if he can. We'll just show him what we're working on and see if he can see how we might be able to cut some things out that are unnecessary. And it creates a really interesting dynamic when the team is empowered to do that. So something that I think, you know, obviously with all the amazing things you're doing with your team, making that it's optional, you may find that the more you start to embrace it, the more you'll start to see people utilizing it and wanting to do it at a more and more basis. Now with that in mind, when we come back after this break, we're going to talk all about this incredible business and the publishing that you're doing for high powered entrepreneurs. I can't wait.
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We are back with Cory Glavel. We're talking about his incredible job journey is incredible entrepreneurial experience.
He's hit everything across the board and now having written several best selling books, he's showing up and teaching other people how to do that. Not even teaching more so just making it a reality. So with authors IO this new project that you've got, you're helping high performing entrepreneurs create the book that's going to take them to the next level. Walk me through what prompted you to develop this business and, and why do you see it being so timely in this day and age?
[00:42:54] Speaker A: Yeah, no so it's, it's funny how it all kind of happened. So after I, I started writing my first books, you know, in 2012, 2013, I, I was like, okay, how do I, how do I publish a book? Like, I have no idea. I've not had. Again, one of the things I had to figure out, I got to figure this out, you know, So I began buying courses and coaching and masterminds and researching and, you know, trying to figure out, okay, how do I create a digital product, not just like a book, but maybe there's a course I want to do and how do I do a launch. So I brought, you know, Jeff Walker's product launch formula, the four, four part video series, you know, and figure out how to do a webinar. At the time, in my mind, I thought, this is going to be great for selling books. And I'm sure it has some, some, some way of doing that with the book sales. But really what I ended up doing was learning how to build a media agency, learning how to do launches, learning how to do paid ads, learning how to do X, Y and Z, all these different things. And throughout that, learning how to do publishing. And so it took me five years to handwrite my first book. I still have all my, my journals of my first books and all.
And, and as I was sitting there writing, you know, trying to figure it out, I got the books done. I found an editor from a friend of a friend. She, she did a, a great, you know, kind of light edit. I didn't want it to change too much.
And then I finally figured out how, you know, I got to format it, I got to get a cover design done and I got to publish. And, and so by the time I launched my first book in, in 2016, I launched the Human Experience. And, you know, it, it did fairly well.
I went on tv, you know, I went on Good Morning Austin and Good morning Virginia and 4 million live viewers, but not like a single book sale, you know, not a single book sale from these live TV shows.
And I was just like, I don't know what's going on here, but, but because of having a book out and because of, you know, making sure I was talking about it, I got invited to speak at a few Masterminds. And then I was, you know, I had started doing some coaching during that time. So I was doing some consulting clients and business coaching, helping one client go from just an idea of what she wanted to do for consulting to $36,000 the first month, 52,000 the next month, 84,000 the third month and several of these kind of success stories of helping clients. And I didn't, you know, for me it was like, this is just what you do. You know, I, I took what I learned and I applied it not only to myself but to my clients. And, and by the end of that first year post publishing my first book, I brought an additional $365,000 in new annual revenue from, just directly correlated from this book, from speaking and consulting. And so by the end of that, people were like, hey, what was that? Like, I know you do this other stuff, but what was that? What, What, How'd you do that? What did you do?
And I said, oh yeah, let me, let me show you how to do it. And they said, well, could you just do that for me? And I said, okay, all right. You know, so I had this media agency where we were doing, you know, websites and we're doing paid ads and, you know, we're doing all these different branding and, you know, different things for different people. And, and then all of a sudden I had book publishing. It's just like this random thing on the side that wasn't necessarily a business, but it was just there. I was like, people want to help with it, I'll do it.
And, and it was just referral after referral after referral.
It became kind of so popular for that, that section of it, and people were getting such great results that we're like, listen, let's start. I'm going to start a separate company over here that is, you know, it's just a publishing company called Authors I.O. and it's, it's always wanted to sound techy, so it's a U T H R S IO so we've been doing, I've been doing it for nine, I think, you know, maybe coming up on 10 years, nine and a half years, something like that.
Not only my own books but, but, but publishing for others for, for a while. So, but Authors was kind of about three years ago separated out as its own business.
And so we've done 200 plus, 200, maybe 250 something now clients.
And so what I, what we built was what I wish I would have had, right? I was trying to write my own book while I was owning a real estate business and all these other companies and building a media agency. Why, that's why it took me five years. I, I didn't know how to do it, what to do. And I was a busy professional making, you know, quarter million, a half million dollars a year. But then I Wanted to write a book over here. And so, you know, for our, our clients, all of our clients are some of the most amazing people in the world. One of our, one of our clients took a little break from working with us and he was like, yeah, I had to get my. He's an international lawyer, he's a veteran and he was doing, working on his thesis for his PhD and he did some 400 million dollar arms deal between the United States and some other countries that I won't mention. And I'm like, that was your little break, you know, that was your little, your pause.
And we amazing clients at, you know, they're from the Navy or from, you know, xdea. We have amazing clients that are from like Livestrong or Bank of America or Google and Alphabet, all these amazing huge companies. And all of our clients sign in NDA. So I can't talk about every single one of them. Some of them do release that and you can find those on the website and different places. But we, we honor the idea that we are a ghost, right? We are ghost writing. But we're not only doing that, we're, we're, you know, they, they come on board with us, they get a client success manager assigned to them, do this incredible onboarding process to build their client profile. Then they get assigned a real human writer, a real human that actually writes the book. They get an editor, they get a designer for their cover.
And so we're working with them on just doing a handful of interviews, just like this interview, handful of interviews where their client success manager talks to them. We record those interviews, we create their outline, we create their, their working, you know, rough working title for the book and then we record the content of it and each chapter. And then they get to approve everything, every step of the way, from the title to the covers, to the outline to the writing. Get all that feedback with them back and forth and create this best selling book on the inside first, right?
And then we publish them and then we launch them. We guarantee a bestseller, which to us means top 10 on Amazon and at least one of their categories.
We do Amazon ads during that time. We do emails to our JV partners, we do a bunch of PR campaigns, Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, and then we guarantee six podcast placements in their niche.
And so all of that is a done for you process. Again, it's what I wish I would have had if I could have shown up on a handful of calls and just talked about, you know, myself like I'm doing now and someone would have made a book out of it I would have done in, you know, a handful of months versus five years.
And then on top of that, the one last thing I want to make sure I clarify on is that, you know, having a best selling book is very important. I think it's, it's a, it's a key thing to being able to, you know, unlock things like speaking on the stages, like doing a TED Talk, like having consulting clients, like moving up in the space and the niche in the industry you're in. Even if you're staying in corporate, if it's you versus another guy and it's like, who do we want to hire for this new position? And this guy has a best selling book in this personal brand, it's like, well, maybe that guy's going to get a little bit, few more seconds of a look than, than the other one.
And so how do you do all of that? Right, so that, that's, we, we do all that done for you and then we show them. Here's how you land speaking engagements. Here's how you write a TED Talk. Here's how you apply for a TED Talk. Here's how you build a five step VSL funnel. Here's how you run paid ads. Here's how you land consulting clients. Here's how to package up your consulting offer.
Whether it's one to one or it's corporate. We want to make sure that everyone has every single thing that they need to take that bestselling book and all that PR and all those cool logos you get to put on your website and you know, all those interviews for social media and actually make money on it and create an roi. Your mom will be proud, your family, you know, your spouse will be proud, but let's make money on it, you know, and I think that's where we're a little bit different than most places. You know, it's not like we just do, we don't do piecemeal, we don't do like a, you know, maybe we'll just do a little editing. This is what we do. We do the full thing, start to finish and we do it really, really well again. We have an amazing team of writers, of editors, you know, marketing team and sales team and all the people in there. And yeah, we don't hold anything back. We don't kind of gatekeep the, the, the process or the solutions and, and get to give them kind of the keys to the kingdom in that sense.
[00:50:44] Speaker B: So yeah, yeah, amazing. I mean, it's such an incredible service because having gone through A number of books now and have a few on the go presently. We got about three in the, in the hopper that we're working on right now.
There is a lot to it. And the experience, I mean the first experience I had, we actually went with a company called 90 Minute Books, which great, great company from its, from concept, not so much in the reality from our perspective of what we got as the end result, but it got us moving forward. We went from, from being stagnant and moving and sitting still to momentum. And that was really, really important. So it kind of released the logjam, as it were, and, and got us into momentum. That was, that was the, the domino really to get, to get things going. So I love it. The things you're talking about, you know, the idea of being able to help people with, you know, getting a TED Talk or figuring out how to even do that process. So there's a lot of things that people wouldn't even consider that they could do or should be even looking to do, you know, depending on what the content is. So that sounds like a really incredible service that you're providing. And you said approximately 250 people. I'm, I would imagine a number of those people are working on second books or have done more than one book even at this stage of the game.
[00:51:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there, there are, there's, there's ones that have done second books or, and, and a few that are doing third books. And you know, I think one of the things too is that again with a, with a bestselling book, there's a lot of ways to make money, right? It's not like it's just book sales. Like book sales. When I tell everybody, I'm like, book sales are a good cherry on top. There's definitely money in book sales. We have some clients that make 80, $90,000 a year in book sales, but they focus on that and, and then they make two or three hundred thousand dollars from coaching. Right? Like that to me is where the real money is. We have other clients that sell, you know, 20 books in a year, make peanuts, but they make 1.5 million from consulting and speaking. You know, so there's a, there's a lot of avenues, a lot of ways to create those revenue streams, but it's, it's having the best selling book. It's knowing that you are the expert in that niche. You've done whatever the thing you've done for years and you know, you get a package that up, we get to package that up and distill that gold from inside of them and put it into a bestselling book, showcase their expertise and then they can take it and run with it in so many different ways. And I, I think that is why it's so important in today's day and age. It's not, not just because with the rise of AI and the, and the, and the rise of like kind of just. And again, I'm not knocking AI. I think people use it to a degree. There's certain things I can use it for that I think are very, very exciting to use it for writing a book. I just I. Something and maybe I'm old school, but I just love having real writers, you know, and I love the idea of, of the competition that's out there. When you look at a really good, well written book and you look at something that's not, you can tell the difference. And this ties into people's personal brands, when people have a personal brand. And I think that's kind of what the end result is. You have a best selling book, you're going to be a consultant or a speaker or whatever that is, and you have a personal brand that you can take with you anywhere and, and go everywhere. So whether you're, you know, someone that is, you know, working. One of our clients worked for bank of America for like 35 years.
Amazing executive, did their, did their duty, made a lot of money for themselves and for their business and for that company. And now they get to say, hey, this is, now this is me, this is what I did, this is who I am, this is what I can provide as value. And maybe now they're only going to, you know, work that 10 hours a week or whatever it may be. And I think I. The concept of the second mountain, right, that first mountain of ambition, right, like I had. And then you move into the second mountain of really having that meaning and that purpose and, and working the hours that you want to work and focusing on your family and being able to share your expertise and share your wisdom in a way that doesn't have to take away from the lifestyle that you have or take away from your passion and purpose for your work. And so the book really does that for a lot of people. And I get excited that that's what we get a we could be a part of.
[00:54:33] Speaker B: All right, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing not only your journey, but what you're up to right now and how you're helping entrepreneurs make a difference by getting a lot of books out there in the marketplace, appreciate everything you share with us today. And for those of you tuning in, make sure you tune into next week's episode as we continue to unpack the amazing entrepreneur stories and the ways that we're innovating into a powerful future.
