How to Crush the Coming Crisis Part 2

This is the Momentum podcast. Today, we're going to do something completely different than what anything I've ever done on the Momentum podcast. And I have a friend of mine, Arnie Monahan, who is going to be joining me to have a discussion about what the world is going through right now. I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum podcast made for Empire Builders Game Changers, trailblazers, 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. Should 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. This is something we talked about because a lot of entrepreneurs think, oh, because we're going to be in a market pullback in a recession, I'm going to need to create new products. But one of the things we talked about was, I know we just need to potentially use a new angle to market the same product. We need to highlight different benefits that we were doing when it was a different competitive space. Yeah. So let's talk about that for a second. Yeah, for sure. So, you know, so you said it well. So in a market like this, people are looking for certainty. And so the product that was being sold because, oh, you can go make a lot of money and it's so fast and it's so this, you know, those products do really well in bull markets because, you know, what happens in a bull market, everybody believes everything's easy. Friends that you know, they have friends that made $1,000,000 on a property and they have other friends that made, you know, hundreds of thousands in crypto. And it's like, oh, of course, you can go start a business and make $1,000,000 in 90 days. Now, in a market like we're entering into, all of those fantasies go away. And people people actually look at the the person who's saying, oh, you can have a seven figure business in 90 days. And they go, Yeah, I don't believe that guy. That doesn't feel real. And so you go from, you know, this place where people are selling fantasies, where if you're willing to sell reality, like, honey, I'll give you some insight into just how much I sold real reality at the beginning of the CDP designation. And I want everyone to understand, because it's not just to show you how I did something, it's to show you just how far I was able to go away from the fantasy and it was attractive to the right customer. So here's what I knew about our product in 2008 that we were going going to only attract the real estate agents who were willing to do the work. That was the only people that were going to get through my product because doing short sales was really hard and we were only going to attract the real estate agents that really cared about their customers. And I'm not saying that any real estate agent doesn't care about the customers at all, but there's a spectrum and some of them are really emotionally involved and they feel like every home they've ever sold has a responsibility. And so when I first went out and started speaking about the CDP designation, I used it. I get an audience with like a realtor or a broker, and I would go out to sell this this product. I sold every one of them one at a time when we first started. And I would open with, I want everyone to understand we are in a completely, totally different type of market. What I'm going to sell you is not easy. In fact, here's what I want you to know. Short sales are going to be harder than any closing you've ever had. These are going to take way more time, about double the effort of a normal closing. Sometimes banks will close. It will cut your commission because you're doing a short sale and you might have to work for free because if somebody does a loan modification or something like that, you're not going to get paid on the other side of the coin. I want you to know that if you come to this course, you will have answers for the people who are calling you that are confused. If you own real estate yourself, you'll know exactly how to evaluate it to see if you can get out of it, or even if you need to. And you will be the go to person in your market for distressed properties, which if you're looking at the market like I am, that's the majority of what we're going to have and on. Here's what would happen. Occasionally I'd be in a broker's office and there'd be 20 or 30 real estate agents in the audience. And after I said that, one or two would walk out and I would always be like so excited that I got to walk out because I knew when somebody walked out, I could use them walking out to influence the rest room. And as soon as the door would close behind them, I would say, Good, now that we're serious, let me tell you about what's going on in the market and the people who are left. I was closing 50, 60, 70, sometimes 100% of a room because they were the ones who were saying like, okay, he's not saying it's going to be easy. He's saying it's going to be work. This sounds like a believable deal. I'm going to actually do this. And it's funny, you know, and I talk about classic couple weeks ago and one of the people in the room said, you know, the reason I first joined your membership was because we were in an event where somebody had gotten up and spoken and had talked about how easy it was to start a business. And they had this system in this process and all you had to do and then anybody could make money. And she she said, you know, I just I knew that they were so full of it because not everybody can succeed in business or he would. Right. And everybody else would. And then she said, I talked to you on a break me. And she said, you know, you told me that it was going to be the hardest thing I'd ever done and that it was going to stretch me and push me in ways that I had never had been before. And there was going to be days where I wanted to quit. But the quitting was just a fantasy for people like us, and I needed to understand the systems and structure behind it, and then I would be able to get through it. And I joined your program because it felt real. And in a market like this, people want you to sell them the truth. People want you to sell them what reality is. They want you to sound like the honest person who's actually talking about what's going on and selling the fantasy is not going to work anymore. Integrity, trust, honesty. I mean that. So what you just shared is a masterclass on how to sell the core thing. There is your selling. You are actually sharing very, very, very honestly the reality of the situation. And you were polarizing and you were unafraid to polarize. And that's a level of self leadership, because if you were in fear about losing a few a little bit of sales, then you wouldn't have been that brutally honest and you wouldn't have polarized that hard. And the people who truly, truly, truly resonated with that message wouldn't have loved you so much and you basically had the sale without opening. Yeah, yeah. It's funny, there was times where I had the sale with the opening where the door there was actually more than once where the door would close and somebody would go, I'm in. And I hadn't even shared anything. I hadn't been shared a price. They would just say, I'm in. So and this this really highlights how much of business and I talk about this so much but business is basically relationships and relationships require safety. And first of all, as entrepreneurs, if we want to convey safety, if we want to convey certainty, we can only transmit it, which means we have to be feeling safe ourselves. So if I'm feeling really anxious and stressed about the recession and I should open my business like that, my team is going to intrude into that. They're going to feed off of the lack of safety in my body. They're going to feel stressed and chaotic and it's going to throw the business system out of whack. My customers are going to feel that and it's going to ripple outward. But the flipside is also true. If I can lead myself, if I can lead my nervous system, if I can really hold space for whatever experience is coming up for me, and I can regulate myself and I can show up with safety, with certainty, then I can lead my team, that I can lead my business, I can lead my customers, I can lead my industry, I can lead the market. And and that's irresistible because when stuff goes sideways, when there's blood on the streets in terms of, you know, the economy, the stock market, inflation, what people want more than anything is to follow someone who's honest, who can be trusted, who has integrity and who is clearly able to lead themselves. Yeah, I think that's the most irresistible quality a person can have. I mean, that's charisma, that's leadership, it's it's entrepreneurship. Because you see this, a lot of entrepreneurs are basically going into the future and creating a reality and then bringing it back and then willing the people who are here to basically create that. Yeah. And that requires holding attention or tension between the current reality that's present that everyone's feeling and a future reality of things that could be better. And that's what you did in with the with the business that you're talking about in the real estate space, you offered a reality with so much certainty, with so much integrity, with so much honesty that it was infectious, it was contagious. And people really, really, really love that. And they vote with their dollars. I think they I think they love Anthony. But I also think that instinctively and energetically, they need it. You know, they really need it. And I want to I want to make a point. You know, this is something that I learned from from 2008, two and forward is that the world can be in crisis and you can be in momentum. And I think that, you know, that might sound obvious. That might sound like, oh, okay, that's that's kind of just that one of those sayings. But I want us to really think about that and internalize it. The world can be in crisis and you can be in momentum because here's what I here's what I came to understand after the research I did. Crisis is part of the human condition. We are always in crisis. But when we are in a healthy market, nobody talks about it. There's crisis happening all over the place. There's all types of things that are creating massive imbalances and massive challenges and issues, but they're not front and center. And so when crisis becomes front and center, what happens for a lot of entrepreneurs is they go, Oh man, I used to hear this all the time. 28, 29, 2010, 2011. People would say things like, Oh, my business is really struggling because of the market, or I'm not just doing well because we're in this recession or, you know, people just don't have any income than people don't can't do this. And I'm like, I'm selling one of the most expensive courses in real estate history. No joke. It was the most expensive to day course that was in the market at the time. And real estate numbers are a lot lower than a lot of markets. But we were sort of 599 where most people were selling real estate courses for $99 a day, and so $200 for a two day course. We were 300% the average in the market. And people were telling me, oh, the market doesn't have money and people aren't spending and they're not doing this. And meanwhile, we're having million dollar months. And Katie and I had a month in 2000 and later in 2010 where we had $1,000,000 profit month, we took home $1,000,000. And and this is again and I'm hearing all around me how like, you know, it just doesn't work. You can't do this and you can't do that. And you know what? I had so many different friends that were doing the exact same thing. They were selling the right type of product with a tremendous amount of certainty that solved someone's problem. And I think one of the one of the big things for everyone to think about right now is if you are selling, you know, Russell Brunson talks about selling a new opportunity, not selling an improvement. Like if you just sell an improvement, the guy who is selling a new opportunity is going to crush you. So it has to look completely different, right? Well, in a market like this, if you're selling an improvement, no one's going to even hear you. But if you're selling live a better life, you know, have more money, do all this other stuff. Do you know the person who's selling a solution to a problem is going to crush in this market? In a in a bear, in a bull market, you can sell the fantasy, you can sell the improvement, you can sell the lifestyle, you can sell all of those things. When the world is in crisis, people want a solution to their problems. And so everyone who's listening to this, you need to look at the product that you're selling. And if you're in information products or coaching or education like alternative education of some kind, that's where I've spent a lot of my career in consulting and information products, coaching. All of us can look at what we already saw and said, like, you know, do you have to change your product? When we were driving around the ranch, I said, you know, it depends on the product, but a lot of the time it just goes from selling one aspect of the product to selling the aspects that solve the problem, to just focusing on the problem you solve. Because in a market like this, people want certainty and they want pain to go away. And so we were 300% the price of the normal course. But the reason that we were selling so much is because we made pain go away. And not only do we make pain go away, we talked about it openly. We said, hey, we know you're in pain. We know this is challenging. We know this is going to be hard. You know this is going to be hard. We want you to know we can make it easier, but we certainly can't make it easy. And so we still were able to sell, even though our marketing was far more realistic and far more grounded than most of our competitors. And there's something about acknowledging the shared reality that creates instant rapport and safety. And you demonstrated that. And with that, with the opening of that page, you demonstrated that over and over again in many of the anecdotes that you've shared. You know, one of the things that entrepreneurs experience a lot is a state of dissociation. You know, whether it's not looking at numbers, whether it's, you know, not looking at some of the spending that's happening in the business or at home, whether it's, you know, just trying to perpetuate the things that have worked so far and being really afraid to question them or look at the the tactics or the angles. This is one of those times when the entrepreneurs that know their customer, that understand the exact problems and pain points that can offer a solution and actually talk about it and actually acknowledge the situation. If you're in the financial services or financial data information space, actually acknowledging the reality is going to go so much further than perpetuating the same fantasy. Yeah. So as you wrap up, any, any last closing thoughts on how entrepreneurs can navigate this? So we covered a lot. We talked about how a recession doesn't have to be bad news. It's actually a huge opportunity, both from an entrepreneurship and business perspective, but also, you know, individual personal wealth building, pay yourself, have money, set aside liquid so you can invest in a fire sale, start positioning yourself better, really understand your customer, talk about the exact problems and the solutions you're offering. Show up with certainty, embody the safety, embody the certainty in your own body so you can transmit that to everyone in your sphere. Anything else that you want to share as we as we wrap up, any parting thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's one last thing that that is so important at times like these is that. I have always preached that self-care is a gateway drug to success. And, you know, when I say self-care, I don't mean going out and spending a lot of money, because that's what a lot of people think. It's like, Oh, I don't have the money for a chiropractor and a misuse and acupuncture and this and that and the other thing. When I say self-care, I think of basics, hydration, having a really solid morning routine that gets you up and going in the morning and gets you everything you need before, you know, within the first hour that you're awake, walking and going out and being able to process and bilateral stimulation, working out of some kind, some types of resistance, exercise or workout practice that you have some type of spiritual or religious practice that you have. That's what I really think about is the basis of self-care. Bonnie and I spend altogether way too much money on biohacking and innovations, and like, we both have so many gadgets in our house that sometimes I'll say, Hey, I just bought this thing and I'll go, Oh, I had that for years. Is like, we could we could put together a facility if we wanted to. But when I think of the basics, it's morning routine hydration, eating healthy foods. This is a time to eat whole foods to do good, good for your going in your body and understanding where you're going. So having some type of a daily planning, daily execution system, you know, we help entrepreneurs with all of these and this is the time to double down on those things because the world is going to get very noisy and the world is going to get very loud. And because of the way we have this 24 hour media cycle, but with long term issues in the markets, the world is going to get very negative and challenging. And you're going to hear things you've never heard before and you're going to hear the sky is falling. And the more that you lean in and pay attention to all of that, the more distracted you're going to get from your outcomes. So I would suggest that you pay attention to those things. You absolutely must. When I was in real estate, I watched the real estate news. I didn't watch a lot of the other stuff because I didn't I wanted to build a bubble around me of momentum. I wanted to just know what I needed to know. And so this is a time to really focus on taking care of yourself, to make sure you're grounded, to make sure you're embodied, to make sure that you have the things that I just mentioned. And really, it's it literally can be as easy as staying hydrated, moving every day, having a morning routine and making sure that you have a good planning system that gets you through things. Because this is a time where we get distracted. This is a time where bad habits come into play. This is a time where self-soothing becomes something that we almost feel like we must do rather than we sometimes do. And so the more you take care of yourself as an entrepreneur in times like this, the more you will be ahead of your competitor. That isn't. So every morning when you get up and you go through your morning routine and you drink water and you eat good foods, you should just be telling yourself, this is my edge. This is how I'm going to stay ahead. Not, you know, you can do that in any market, but in a market like this, there is a disproportionate percentage of people that go the other direction. So I would suggest you double down on making yourself optimized and as healthy as you possibly can and taking care of yourself. Beautifully said. I just want to add one more thing. As an entrepreneur, the source of our power, the source of our leadership is our ability to control where our focus and our attention goes. And it goes where attention goes, energy flows and where energy flows is what's going to get created. And our ability as entrepreneurs to focus our energy and direct our attention towards the thoughts, the beliefs, the mindsets, the emotional states, the decisions that we think will help us is going to determine our results in life. It's it's going to determine our results in business. And we have to be able to resist this hijacking of attention that's only going to get more intense. And when we do that at a personal level, we thrive as entrepreneurs, as leaders. Our performance goes through the roof when we do that for the team and all our employees and we can optimize the business as a system, then we can essentially create a lot more value with a fraction of the inputs. So this idea of doing less but working on highly, highly impactful things, doing less but better, really applying the pro principle over and over again because it's a fractal. Because if, you know, 80% of the results come from 20% of the inputs and you can apply that recursively, which is you can apply the Barretto principle to itself, I think 64% of the outputs come from 4% of the inputs. So this is not a time where we need to do more. In fact, I would say one technologies need are already doing too much. They need to do less worry, hyperfocus, all their energy, their team's energy. The business is energy. One of the things that will actually move the needle for their customers. And if they can do that, they can not just survive but truly, truly thrive. I 100% agree on really well said, man. This is great. We should probably do a part two because I'm sure there'll be lots of questions. I'm with you. I'm with you. I'd love to have you come back and do this again. I love this. The format was awesome, as always. I always have an incredible time talking to you. And so thank you for for thank you for coming up with this idea. And thank you for showing up today and for having this conversation with me. I think we're going to help a lot of people. I agree, man. I can't wait to see all the people who get impacted by this. More to come. Awesome.