The Simplest Scoreboard for Success

This is the Momentum podcast.

Hello, I hope you're doing well. I am here in our Airbnb with my little dog, Cleo. It's really my daughter's dog, but she's my favorite. She's an awesome little puppy. And I'm checking in on a subject that I really haven't. I don't think I've talked about this in a while. You know, as entrepreneurs, there are there are things that we should track. There are metrics that we should track. There's measurements we should have in our lives that keep us doing what we should be doing as entrepreneurs.

And when I look at us as entrepreneurs who we are, when you look at the entrepreneurial personality type, who are we? What do we really want in life? We want momentum. We want to make things happen. We want to move forward. We want to we want to create new we want to leave our dent in the universe. You know, that that drive that restless agitation we have as entrepreneurs has been there since the beginning of time. When you look at the world around us, has all been created by entrepreneurs. This device I'm recording on, the device you're watching on the chair you're sitting in like an entrepreneur had a hand in all of this.

And this is who we are as entrepreneurs. And so how do we make sure how do we make certain that we keep ourselves in momentum and moving forward? How do we keep perspective of moving forward and feeling like we're achieving what we want? Well, the way that I've always done this as an entrepreneur, the way I coach my team, I coach my family, I coach my, my, my daughters, my my members is to track the right metrics, to have the right scoreboard in your life that reflects back to you. Are you making progress or are you moving forward? Are you making things happen? And so I track a lot of scoreboards in my life. I look at a lot of different numbers. But by far the metric, the scoreboard, the measurement that that has made the most difference in my life through tracking is actually relatively simple. It's net worth.

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazer, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop. And we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate. There could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

Net worth, how much money or how much debt do you have in the world, like what is what are you worth in the world? Now, I've had I've had, you know, a lot of people ask me about this, like, why is it so important to track net worth? Well, here's here's an interesting dynamic. So when I got in the last year, but when I when I speak in front of audiences of entrepreneurs, I can remember one of the last ones I spoke in front of was about probably 250, 300 entrepreneurs. And I asked a series of questions. I say to everybody, you know, all right, so how many of you believe that you are going to create wealth in your life? And 200, 300 entrepreneurs, all the hands went up. How many of you believe you're going to be independently wealthy during your lifetime as an entrepreneur?

A bunch of the hands went up and then I said, how many of you track your net worth? And like literally three or four hands, one up. And then I said, of those who have your hands up, how many of you can tell me where you were on your net worth to the penny last month? And two or three, the hands went down and one was still up. And that's basically how it normally there's usually one person who's tracking this incredibly critical number of net worth. And here's why I talk about this all the time. The first two questions like, do you want to be independently wealthy? Do you want to create wealth in your life? If you want to pursue those things, then you must have a scoreboard that reflects back to you whether you're doing that or not. You know, Wayne Dyer, one of my favorite people in the history of the world, one of the most amazing human beings, incredible personal development stuff, Wayne Dyer would say what you focus on expands.

And so here's what happens with most entrepreneurs. We do not understand our net worth. We don't know how much we're worth, but we do see all the bills coming in and we see the credit card bills and we see the money that's going out and we focus on those things. And so we get this inspired expansion in the negative, but we don't create a growth in the positive of actually holding and having and creating net worth. It is incredibly important for us to see that. And so here's what happens to us as entrepreneurs. When we start to focus on net worth, we start building this financial foundation, this financial backstop for ourselves that makes us feel more confident in the world. Now, I want to be very candid in my twenty. I'm 48 and in my 20s, I ran a business and I did not drag net worth. I didn't I didn't even know that I should.

Nobody ever suggested it to me. I kind of like fell into things and figure things out. And as a result, I just had this feeling in my 20s that and I used to even think about it, like no matter how much money I made, I didn't have money left over afterwards. And there was years where I made X dollars and I didn't have money left over. And then I made X times, you know, additional 50 percent still didn't have money left over then I was a year. I tripled what I was making and I still didn't have money left over. And the reason was I wasn't paying attention to it. I wasn't focusing on it. I wasn't actually putting money away because I wasn't really tracking anything. I was just doing what I needed to do and going, you know, and buying what I felt like I needed to buy. And finally, towards the end of my twenties, I started tracking net worth and everything in my life changed.

Let me just share some of the personal changes I've experienced. So no one tracking net worth has made me a lot more responsible in my business. I know that that that might not seem immediately clear, but here's what's happened, because I track my net worth and because I tracked my net worth back then. What I noticed when I first started tracking it, this one, an expense came up in the business. I was questioning it more. If there was a twenty five dollar expense in the business that I normally would have just done and written off. Now I'm asking like, what is the business really needed? I put more pressure on decisions. I made sure decisions were I made sure that the decisions had were the right decisions. When I made the purchasing decisions and it actually changed the dynamic, I became a lot more introspective. I looked at my numbers a lot more.

I understood my numbers better, and that 2500 dollar expense in the business could easily be twenty five hundred dollars additional on my net worth. So it really changed how I tracked, tracked and thought about things. And what it also did is gave me this new number to create confidence around, to create excitement around, to create momentum around. And, you know, my net worth has been all over the place in my career, especially early on. But when Cadey and I got together after we went through bankruptcy with the real estate collapse in about the next year after bankruptcy, we built back to having over a million dollars in net worth within a year of our bankruptcy being discharged.

And over the course of the next few years, we added to that aggressively and we've continued to add to that. And today I know that I'm a completely different entrepreneur because I actually have independent wealth. I don't I'm not dependent on anybody else or any other system or anything else right now for me to live. In fact, if our business shut down right now and we had no money coming in Cadey and I could survive for decades, like years and years and years. And if we cut back, we could probably just live on what we have for the rest of our lives, just on on the money that's made by our money if we really wanted to. Instead, we run a business and we're excited about it, and so we're building our net worth, we're building that foundation even stronger and it totally changes who you are. And here's what I mean by that. I always share, like with entrepreneurs.

If you're an entrepreneur and you have debt and you don't have a lot of net worth, then you kind of know yourself as that entrepreneur, as an entrepreneur. Once you start tracking your net worth and you pay off all your debt and you don't owe anybody any money in the world, you will know yourself as a completely different entrepreneur than once you paid off the debt and you put together an emergency fund and you have to say six months or a year is expensive and the expenses in the bank, it will lower the noise for you. It's going to lower pressure for you. It's going to make you feel more confident. You will know yourself is a totally different entrepreneur.

And then when you get that first hundred thousand dollars are, you know, sorry, not 100000 dollars when you get the first six months, then when you move on and you get the first seven figures in the bank, you will know yourself is a completely different entrepreneur and then eight figures and beyond. Here's what happens. You build this huge financial backstop that increases the confidence that you live with every minute. Think about that, there's leverage in every single minute because I show up in the rooms more confident, I'm not worried about my bills, I'm not worried about paying for things. I'm not worried that something might happen to Cadey.

And I am we won't be able to take care of ourselves or our kids like all of those things that used to be front of mind. They used to come up all the time. For me, that used to be thoughts that I had. Often they're gone. Sometimes I get a little hangover like Cadey and I will go out and buy something and I'll think, Oh, man, we need to look at the finances. And I'll remind myself like we're good. We're really good because those habits die hard. But when you have the wealth, when you have the net worth, when you put it in the bank, when you have the backstop, when you have the security, when you have the foundation, you will show up as a completely different entrepreneur.

So here's all it takes. It's sitting down and understanding all the money you have in the world and all the liabilities you have in the world. You take the difference between those two. And if you have more money than liabilities, you can have positive net worth. And if you have more liabilities and money, you're going to have negative net worth. It doesn't matter. The key is understanding the number, focusing on the number and moving it in the right direction. This is this is one of those simple things because it really is simple. You can track this once a month and just total everything up. In fact, there's programs like Mint.com that will do it for you, like literally that's where Cadey and I have a lot of our net worth information is in mint like breath mint.com, dotcom. It literally calculates our net worth on a monthly basis. It even gives us the value of our assets on a monthly basis. So we know exactly where we stand.

And when you start tracking this and start moving in the right direction, you will feel the confidence of increasing your net worth. You will feel the confidence of increasing your stability. You will feel the confidence of making it so that you don't have to worry about money like everyone else's. And you'll also feel the confidence of knowing when you actually become wealthy and independently wealthy and you have the money in the bank to do what you need to do and you don't have to worry about it. Net worth is an absolute life changer. Game changer.

I think it's going to be incredible for you to start tracking your net worth. You will see your life, your business and your confidence completely change and expand. And if you're interested in hearing more of this type of advice, if you want to be a part of a community with some incredible entrepreneurs in it, we are almost at 3000 people in our Facebook group right now. It is we I think we're like twenty nine hundred and change.

And so if you want to navigate over to the Charfen community on Facebook, go to Charfen community, join. And we have an incredible group where people ask business questions. We share our materials, we share our some of our most important content is in that group. Go to Charfen community, answer a few questions for my team. You'll get accepted to the group. And remember, if you're not tracking your net worth, this could be the measurement, the metric, the scoreboard that gives you more leverage than anything else right now. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for being here.