Mindset, Business and Life Advice From Some of the WORLDS Most Successful PEOPLE

How do you make it stick? Your biggest enemy is you. Hey everybody. Today's episode is brought to you by Impact Theory University's own business decision-making workshop. If you're a business owner looking to scale your company, I can help. I've created a four-week intensive workshop that's going to give you the decision-making strategies that you need to scale your company. It's the exact things that I used to take Quest to a billion-dollar exit, and it's exactly what I'm using today on Impact Theory that's allowed us to grow by 400% in just the last 2 years. This sounds like something that would be beneficial to you and your business, I want you to go right now to decision.impacttheory.com to apply. Once again, that's decision.impacttheory.com. You can apply today. All right, I'll see you on the inside. One of the great secrets in life to becoming successful, whether it's in a business, whether it's working with someone or for someone or your personal life, is be prepared in life for a lot of rejection. Uh my father left when I was 10 years old. I started working when I was 10 years old. I got left back in school. I never went to college. And half of my friends were dead or already in jail. What I chose to do is go a different route and say, "You know what? I don't think I'm that smart about investing." And I actually want to learn how fundamental basic investing works. Your product has to be amazing, okay? That there's just no substitute for that. Get great at something. Like get really good. What it means is in that process of okay, go to the thing and enjoy it. I was told I would never be able to do anything in life, and now I'm a motivational speaker, five-time author, best-selling author. I created a company that has influenced a good fortune to find, and I've employed thousands of people, and been able to change people's lives. What do you say though to people for whom the deck really is stacked against them? Like they're coming at it from a place that's harder than somebody else, you know, for better or worse, I I think we'd all agree for worse, that um the luck um who you know, all of that stuff, it's not evenly distributed, right? So, some people are they're they're certainly starting from a deficit. Um do you give them a pass or to you is it just sort of the nature of the beast that you have to outwork, outperform? I'm never going to give them a pass because um um my father left when I was 10 years old, raised by a single mother. I started working when I was 10 years old. I haven't stopped working ever since. I'm dyslexic. Uh I got left back in school. I never went to college. I didn't know anybody with wealth. I grew up in a community that was riddled with crack and half of my friends were dead or in jail by the age of 21. I'm short. I don't have no athletic skill. I can't sing and I can't dance really well. Um and I'm black. And I've been at the I've been at the I've been at the barrel of a cop's gun three separate times when my only crime was that I had t-shirts in my back trunk and I was reaching for the stars. Um I've told I'll never be able to do anything in life. And now I'm a motivational speaker, five-time author, best-selling author. I've been on a major network for 12 years. I've created a company that has influenced a good portion of the planet. I've employed thousands of people and I've been able to change people's lives. Um you know, the reality is I'm never going to get away from being black, short, and and dyslexic. That's just what it is. Uh so, let's get past that. I'm not going to get away from the fact that COVID is here. That's just what it is, right? Um so, if I can do it, and this is one of the main reasons that I do write the books and I put things out because I'm a prime example of simplicity, hard work, and common sense with morals, and uh and being able to embarrass yourself, take affordable steps, and learn from them. And you apply that, you can you can do it. I do know it's hard. And reality is I met people that are more successful than me that had it harder than me. People that grew up in countries where they have to drink out of the same water that the animals drink out of. You know, that they they seen tragic tragic things happen on a daily basis, you know? So, uh you know, it's out there. But, we have two choices. To sit there and say, "Woe is me." and just be another one of the statistics or if you sit there and give it our give it our best and learn from people like me who say, "If my dumb ass can make it, then you can you can do it, too." One of the great secrets in life to becoming successful, whether it's in a business, whether it's working with someone or for someone or in your personal life, and I learned this selling encyclopedias store to door in my early 20s, is be prepared in life for a lot of rejection. Because if you're prepared for a lot of rejection that comes, you don't get turned off, you don't get disappointed like, "Well, I'm not going to do this anymore. No one thinks this is a good idea." It's like I I say selling encyclopedias, knocking on 100 doors, they slap them in your face, you must be just as enthusiastic on door number 101 as door number one. Um and and getting to understand your technique in selling is easy once you get to Paul Mitchell and I do want you to walk us through that in a second, but how did you get through like tactically to a sale in the encyclopedia world? Like, people don't want to hear from you. So, like how do you overcome that? What a question to ask me. The average encyclopedia salesman lasted 3 days. I was at it for 3 and 1/2 years. And the way it worked in those days, it was commission only. So, the way it worked is you went for an interview, they told you all you could possibly make off commission only, and we were in training for 3 days. It was a presentation that was scripted. We'd have to memorize the whole thing. When we got in the field, you remember parts of it. You knock on doors, you're not quite sure of yourself, a lot of doors are closing in your face. But what happens after a while you start getting used to it and you see what you can say or do that'll make it better. Or when you go back the next day with your other sales people, what you see, what you do, what did I say? Uh so let's say knocking on 100 doors getting into one, give 10 presentations to sell one book. But then when you get better and better at it through your experiences and losses along the way, it sharpens you up. Where all of a sudden I got to a point where if I gave three presentations, I have no less than one order, commission only. But I believe that I could do that. I believe that Collier's was the best set of books because a high school student could read it. It wasn't like a college manual you had to read and I was doing something good for somebody. So you have to believe that what you're doing is good, it's going to benefit somebody and you learn as you go. Okay, do I look someone in the eye? See, a lot of people don't know these things. Look someone in the eye. All too often people say, "It's hard to look someone in the eye cuz you feel uncomfortable." Of course you do. They're not on the same wavelength you're on or the same frequency. So what do you do? How do you overcome that? You learn these things along the way. You look them right between the eyes or at their eyebrows. Looks like you're looking them in the eye. I've been working on a book for a couple of years with some of these tips and it's not ready yet. Maybe next year it'll be ready, but uh there's all these things and of course smile. Smile is the most wonderful thing God gave us and you don't smile when you first talk to somebody, you smile before you knock on their door. And if your day sucks, you fake it. Hi, how are you doing? Cuz when you smile, everything changes. People change. How did you build your brand with Quest and Impact Theory? Your branding and community has been so powerful. How'd you create it? Okay, so um Quest was really a company born out of misery. So before that I was chasing money and I was just hell-bent to get rich and I spent eight and a half years chasing money building a company that I didn't really care about and thought while we solved the problem for people, it certainly wasn't something I was passionate about. I don't think it was really something even the people buying it were passionate about, which oddly enough actually made it hard, uh and it certainly made it soul-sucking. And so, uh at the end of that, I realized I was not willing to do it anymore, and I actually went into my partners and I said, "I quit. I can't keep doing this." I gave them the equity back in the company. I said, "This is just total misery for me. Um I can't be a part of this." And long story short, since I only have 2 minutes per answer, um they said, "You know what? We actually feel the same way." And for three very different reasons, we decided to get into nutrition, and we agreed that it was going to be a company predicated on value creation for the employees and the customer, that it would be a passion play, that we would ask the question, "What would we do and love every day even if we were failing?" And by shifting our focus over to that and really focusing on something that um was fun for us, that we can enjoy in the moment, that was creating value for other people, um it was just a total game-changer. And it focused us on building community and making an amazing product that was actually good and holding ourselves to just a totally different standard, um than we had been holding ourselves to before. So, it really was uh a radical shift that made us think about branding. Up until that point, we'd never really thought about branding. It was always the product we were trying to brand, and not the company. And so, that was a big shift. Um with Impact Theory, I'm really trying to take that to the next level and really truly being entirely community-focused. How many people do you think are getting pulled in in a way that's exciting? Like, "Hey, now you've got 17-year-olds creating YouTube content around investments," which is real, and I am utterly shocked by that. And how much of this is like, "Oh my god, we're heading towards a cliff?" Um That's a great question. Okay, let me start off with what happened with my first investments. So, here it is. It's around 1999, 2000. Everybody thinks they're a tech genius. You put money in any stock, it goes up 26% the next day. So, what do I do? I take my college scholarship money and I put some of it in the stock market thinking, this is easy money. Yeah, guarantee and every day it's going up and down but mostly up. Was there massive euphoria? I wasn't focused at all at this time. Yes. Yes, everybody was um everybody believed they were a genius. So, in a bull market everybody believes they're a genius and um they all say the same phrase, this time it's different. It's so funny. It's it's such a funny phrase that in the investment world people make fun of it. It's a they're mocked because it's never different. It's actually the same thing. Bubbles expand uh but over time they mathematically cannot continue. So, here we have people making millions of dollars who would otherwise be working in a parking garage and they are giving stock tips out and telling everybody, you got to get into this. JDSU, this you know, all kinds of stuff. So, I take my college scholarship money, put it in the market and I very quickly lose half the money. Because of the crash or of the crash. And so, what happens is I realize, oh my god, I'm not as smart as I thought. It's not easy to become a millionaire through investing in 2 weeks. And so, here is where there was a pivotal moment. One, I could have doubled down and said, I just picked the wrong stock. Let me pick another stock. This is very similar to what you hear with people in the crypto world. Well, my investment quote investment dropped 50% but you know, I got to do this coin or that coin etc. What I chose to do is go a different route and say, you know what? I don't think I'm that smart about investing And I actually want to learn how fundamental basic investing works. So, things like low-cost long-term, things like reading about John Bogle's philosophy, etc. And I started to learn about it. You get whacked in the head enough times and you say I could be wrong. And how do you know I'm right? In my case, the the really big case was that in 1980-81, I had calculated that American banks had lent a lot more money to countries that would not be able to pay the debt back. A lot of money, banking crisis. And that was very controversial point of view. So, I'm talking about wow, a big thing happening. And then, so it got reported and then Mexico defaulted on its debt in August 1982. And I thought that we're now going to go into an economic crisis because a number of the other countries followed and that was transpiring in that way. And I sold my business in '75, by the way. And at '82, I think we had like eight people and we loved each other and we were doing that thing. But I I couldn't have been more wrong. It was the exact bottom in the stock market. So, I was very publicly wrong and even more painfully, I had to let go those people. And I was so broke that I had to borrow $4,000 from my dad to help to pay for family bills. I mean, it was so it was painful. But you know, okay, now you get a baseball bat to the head and to how many does it take? And then you think, okay, how do I know I'm right? How do I know I'm right? So, I was very audacious, you know, going after my goals and whatever my opinion. I didn't want to lose that, but you know, now you're faced with the choice. You know, like the way I look at it is I want a great life. How do I have the greatest life? But I can have the risk of being wrong. And then everything changed because figured it out. Um so, first and foremost, this is what I call the arrogance of belief. Uh you have to believe that you can accomplish it. So, I won't say that I ever allowed goals to seem out of my reach. There have been many many times in my life where I was really unsure of how I was going to pull it off, but I never let that stop me from taking the first step. Um and I think that's critical. So, here at Impact Theory, we're building a studio, a traditional studio. So, think Disney. And I think it's going to take a very long time to um outpace Disney. And I have no idea how we're actually going to pull it off. I have some theories, things we're going to try, um but that didn't stop me from taking the first step and taking a risk and knowing that I'll be looking for opportunities all along the way and that I won't be afraid to pivot or go in a new direction. So, that's really critical. And developing the skill, the willingness to even though you don't know exactly how you're going to pull it off, to have faith that taking one step after another is always always always the right answer. So, only execution matters. Uh being willing to take a risk is absolutely critical. Um so, yeah, that's always been my motto, always be learning and always be moving forward. So, first of all, nobody knows, and if you bring anyone on the show who tells you what's going to happen in the stock market, they're an idiot and and or they're lying. So, I'm not going to do that. Nobody knows. And you'll find this in politics and money. A lot of people want to be comforted by essentially a parental figure, somebody who comes in here and tells you it's all going to be okay. Or, conversely, it's all going to And they prey on people's weaknesses as to what's going on. The best investors are humble. They know that nobody knows anything. What do we know? We know that over time the market continues to return approximately 7 to 8% and that's over 100 plus years. We know that there are always people on Reddit and Twitter who've got these fanciful narrations of what's going on in the world and they all disappear once the narrative is proved incorrect. If you worry, you don't have to worry. And if you don't worry, you have to worry. Okay? Because what I mean is um if you're worrying about what can go wrong, you chances are you will create the protections against that thing going wrong and therefore that's good. And if you're not worrying about the things that are going to go wrong, then now probably the things you never expect are going to come and hit you. Okay? And so it sounds counter intuitive. If if you worry, you don't have to worry. If you don't worry, you better worry. But what it means is that process of okay, go to the thing. Go to it and enjoy it. View these things as puzzles. Your personality will change. You'll enjoy it. Okay? Because life is a puzzle. It's it's a going through the jungle. Okay? It's It's like that. I'll I'll I'll tell you a story. Yeah. Uh so I um I crash and I figure oh, risk and reward go together. You want to have a great life, okay, and you want to be safe at the same time, they sound almost like mutually exclusive. Okay? So I So I viewed it as okay, I'm like sitting on one side of a jungle and that if I can get to the other side of a jungle safely, I'll have a great life. But okay, but if I cross the jungle, oh, all sorts of things going to happen. Now, what am I going to choose? Am I going to be on this side of the jungle and have just an ordinary life or am I going to have the what I think is the best life possible, but ooh, I can get bitten and all those things. And that's just the nature of life. And then I And I said, "I have to, it's my nature, I have to have the best life I can have. So, I've got to go into the jungle." Now, the question is, how do I go into that jungle and be successful at that? And I could tell you the answer. The answer is, first, by worrying about what I don't see that I might be wrong with, and to do it with people who see the things that I might not see, and we are all doing it as a mission to get through that jungle well together. And when I went through that jungle, and we do that together, the thing I found out, which is so wonderful, is I don't want to leave the jungle. I don't want to get to the other side, because I want to be with those people on that mission, and that whole experience is becomes great. I love to be positive. How did that make the list? So, of all the things in the world that you could say are like the secrets, that being positive is one of the main things that people need to do, how'd you happen on that? In life, whether it's personal or people around me, when you see people that are positive, that look at it something good in something bad that took place, they move along in life faster, they're better, and and people want to be around these people. I mean, too often people gossip, then one gossip person wants to be around the other person that gossips, but they don't realize, when you gossip, you're saying something you heard about somebody else. You're telling everybody, what if part of it was wrong? You going to go out and tell every person you told this, "Op, I'm sorry, it was wrong." Tell everybody you told. It's not going to happen. So, it's things you learn about, don't gossip, don't belittle people if you don't have to. God, please don't. Try and look at the positive angle. What good could come out of something? And that positiveness is going to make you live longer, happier, and wake up in the morning happy, not oh my god I got I got to work. I can't wait till I get home. I want to retire because people were not positive. They were not happy. And what happens they retire? They hate their job. They retire. Three or four years later they're dead cuz they have nothing to do. That positive attitude, be around positive people, encourage positiveness. If you find yourself walking around just complaining all the time around people that complain a lot, man, move or just try and do something different. Change your life. Being positive and a positive attitude is find something positive in something bad makes you look for solutions. When I was down and out, okay, hmm, oh, pop bottles. Let's go get the pop bottles, cash them in. I love that because I until you said that I knew that people listening were thinking well it's easy for you to be positive, you're a billionaire. So, but the fact that you were positive even when you had to be looking for the bottles to recycle to make ends meet to get your 99 cent meals, that's incredible. I hope you guys are enjoying this episode which is brought to you by Impact Theory University's business decision-making workshop. With nine full-length classes and weekly live case studies with me, the business decision-making workshop is a hands-on approach to honing your abilities to scale your business. I'm going to be in there with you working through your hardest problems so that you'll be able to master how to overcome any impediment by getting the most foundational way to think through novel problems. And that, my friends, is exactly what you need to do if you want to scale your company and have the kind of crazy success you've always dreamed. I promise it is possible. This is teachable. This is something that you can learn. It is a process that you can deploy against your business and be able to move confidently forward. Just go right now to decision.impacttheory.com to apply. Do not delay, my friends. Spots are limited. Again, go to decision.impacttheory.com and apply today. I'll see you guys on the inside. Um, you know, when you're at that dark moment that there is a path out of this and that you have to look for that and keep pushing and smile. It's like all these like really basic things that you've stacked on top of them. So, how then do we go from that to the Paul Mitchell that we know today? Well, obviously it was hand-to-mouth for the first 2 years, but we knew we had the best there was and we just kept on working it and working with it. Telling hairdressers, we'll be the first one to never cut you out. Most people have gone in the beauty industry and said, "Hey, we're only going to be in salons." Lot of companies, all of a sudden they're in department stores, they're in drug stores, and supermarkets, but we kept on telling people, "If you ever" and you still do today, see Paul Mitchell in any drug store or supermarket, it's either counterfeit or from the black gray market. We don't put it there. We only put it in salons. But the demand for Paul Mitchell exceeds where you could get it. It's only in salons and maybe only in 10% of all salons. So, people know it's the best there is and people can actually pay full retail in the salon for Paul Mitchell, put it on their drugstore shelf, up it $2 and they sell every bottle they have cuz people don't know what it cost. They just know it's really, really good stuff. So, we kind of kept with what we had and always make sure any new product we came out with was the best it could possibly be. Well, what's interesting about the beauty industry and quality, my first three products are still some of my best sellers. We've had them now for almost 37 years. Wow. It's that quality. Make sure of your service or your products the very best it is. Plus, we gave back along the way. What was the single most valuable tool you used to create your business? Well, that's really twofold. There's only um you have to to give two answers that. One, your product has to be amazing. Okay, that there's just no substitute for that. And that's why I really encourage people get great at something. Like get really good. Focus on being amazing. Focus on being extraordinary, outperforming everybody else, having something that nobody else can match. Like that is so important. And I think that in the um with the millennial desire for immediacy and anybody quite frankly that uses social media, where it's so fast. Like there's you can get something out really rapidly. You can get feedback really rapidly. Um and even just the forget social media, like the mobile generation. I can order something from Amazon now and and it'll be delivered by the time I'm done like with this segment. It's crazy how fast. So, we've all really been trained to want things immediately. And that's why I think the people that are willing to go head down and do the work are still going to be the ones that win because there's the getting to the physics of the problem. The physics of the problem is the human condition. And the only way to uh get people's attention is to wow them, to solve a problem for them, to excite them, to entertain them, whatever. But that only happens when it's actually good. It's actually impressive. It captures their imagination. It captures their attention. It draws them into your universe. So, that is just super super critical. So, the people that go heads down, do the work to create an amazing product are going to win. The second part of that is that you really have to um leverage building a community. Community is everything because they're going to be the ones that help you spread that word. So, building a community, evangelizing them, making them love your product, helping them understand what what it means to use your product and what they represent to the world when they're using your product. That is um just really really important. So, those were the those are the two things. An amazing product and building a community around it. All right, I have a question. In today's environment where it is the business landscape is so crowded and it seems like all the good ideas have already been taken, how can you go in and create space and build a company in today's environment? The best way to explain it is by actually doing something. Let's take a huge business throughout the world, one of the biggest, telecommunications. You have giant phone companies. You have servers that are on your cellular phone. It's almost like a lifestyle now, right? Well, how does someone get in that industry and all of a sudden you got all the giants you're going up against that have multi millions and billions of dollars. How do you do it? Well, you look at what the industry is lacking and pull the industry into it. Give you an example. It's one of my latest companies, Rock, ROK Mobile. Rock Mobile, believe it or not, we found the opening. So, I'll tell you how we did it. For $49 a month on your cell phone, any cell phone, any smartphone, we found a way to give people all their telephone calls to the United States and Mexico, 500 international minutes free, their texting, their data, all their music, over 20 million songs, $100,000 worth of accidental life insurance, telemedicine, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, a doctor's on the other end of the phone with you talking to you see what's going on. Now, and pick your carrier. Who who works best for you here? Now, how do we pull this off? With these giants? Well, we did a little research. We know people want their lifestyle, if possible, to be on that cell phone, if possible. But, a lot of people can't afford a cell phone or they pay so much money. Average person that I talked to pays one, two, sometimes three hundred bucks a month. Go international, it goes crazy on you. But, uh so, we did this. We went to, for example, the music companies, the big music companies. You know, there's you have Warner Brothers, you have Universal, you have Sony, right? And said, "Guys, we'd like to be another avenue for you and your artist, one you don't have right now." Yeah, sounds pretty good. "We give you a piece of it all." Good. Went to 500 500 other labels, got them come on board. Went to a big carrier and said, "Look, we know that you have something called the churn, a new word I learned, where every year 20 25% of your business you lose to another carrier that has a better deal. Here's what we have." At that time we had just the music, we had the texting, the data, and and that, right? They said, "Yeah, we could probably get some people back with that." And then we were able to go to insurance companies and say, "We're predicting we'll have all these millions, and by the way, we took out a patent. We have the patent on an app that would have, whether it's uh medical insurance, any kind of insurance on there." And little by little they all got involved. All of a sudden now we're in telecommunications in a very, very big way. Wow. But the better part of it is this, how do I go back to my startup, tell those people out, Variety Boys and Girls Club in East LA, where I would pay 25 cents for wood and sell it for 50 cents as a big wooden flower pot, right? So we thought, let's help them out. Let's help the inner city in New York. Let's help Harlem. Let's help people out. So what we're doing right now is with our profit is we're saying, "Kids, we want to help you have a good allowance. So if you'd like to you have the service for yourself or your family or anybody you know, we're going to give you $5 every single month for a year. That's your allowance. If 10 people have it, that's $50 a month, okay? If 100 people have it, and people can cancel whenever they want, but if they're still on there, that's $500 a month for 1 year. It's how to have something so low everybody wants it and needs it. It changes the landscape. And for us, in volume we'll make money, but it shares it along the way. When you share success on shared is failure. And that's how Rocky is just exploding right now, just taking off. All underground word of mouth. That's one. I'll give you another one real quick. We found out that 3.7 billion people have the cold sore virus. Oh. Two out of every three people have it, right? So, somebody came to me once a few years ago and said, "JP, we've been working with Native Americans and universities on a gel that comes out of plants. It's plant-based gel, right? And someone has a cold sore, you put it on, and in most cases they feel the tingle, the cold sore doesn't come out. If it comes out, you put it on every hour, and almost everyone we gave it to, it's gone in less than 2 days." I said, "Really?" So, we started giving it to people. All of a sudden, people are saying, "Oh my god, this gets rid of that cold sore and it's invisible in less than 2 days." So, I spent millions of dollars doing the double-blind studies and everything else. So, now for like, you know, less than 30 bucks, someone can buy a tube of Aubio. AUBIO is what it's called. AU for gold, bio for nature. AUBIO. They go online and buy it. They go to Target, they could go to, Rite Aid, they could go to, you know, all all these people. You guys are already in distribution? Yeah, it's already in distribution. No advertising yet. Just got it out there because the people using it said, "Wow, this is something. This stuff is unbelievable, right?" And there's nothing, you know, large chains that have it, but for sure Rite Aid has it. Uh Target and CVS has it also. So, we could go in that industry and say we have something that we have something different. It's realistically priced. We're not ripping everybody off. So, as people think about it, look at even these big businesses. What niche would you like to see happen? Cell phones. God, we'd love to see it. Less expensive, no limitations, and we have all these other goodies. Look for that niche. What does it need? How can you put it together and help the environment along the way if you could do it. Bridgewater is is much the opposite of a lot of companies, meaning you could talk about anything. You could talk about how we should be together. You could say So, so that's a culture where the person who has to struggle with that, like where they can say, "Hey, I think you're a son of a bitch." They could say that to me. You could say anything you want, and then we try to find out is it true, and then we work ourselves through it. So, their challenge is almost the opposite of the other kind of challenge, which is the case in which you're trying to But in all cases, there is the notion of how are we going to be with each other and reaching that agreement. So, let's say you want to be a certain way with the people you're with, like your wife. It's the same path. If you cannot sit down and have a conversation about how we're going to be with each other because they won't welcome it, and that way of being is an unacceptable way of being for you and your development, get the hell out of there, okay? But you have to be able to sit down and say, "How are we going to be with each other, and will that be good for you and then will that be good for me?" And you got to be clear. That's why culture is so important. You know, what kind of culture do I have in a culture in which I can have those conversations, or am I going to be in a culture in which I can't? I hear so many cases cuz now now because of I communicate with people on social media, you know, I put the principle there, then we discuss each one of those principles. And I so often run into people who say, "But I can't talk to my boss that way, and I can't have this conversation, and I can't do this and that." And it's very simple thing, like, "Okay, so what are you going to do about it?" And the what you know, like, "If I can't talk to you and whatever and I'm going to not be able to even know what's true because I can't have the conversation, I'm going to have a terribly a terrible life. I'm having a life that I don't want. I don't even know the direction. I can't be in the mission with you. You seem to have a really strong internal set of values. When did that begin to take shape in terms of policies that you could implement in a company? Was it right away? Did that take time? When I worked for other companies, some of them, not mentioning names, were so bad. They would treat people the old way. I'm the boss. Here's what you're going to do because I'm the boss, right? Or there were times, for example, when maybe you had a dollar for lunch. You can't get a lot for a dollar. So, I just knew that that's how I was. And if I had a company that I had to control of, by gosh, everyone was going to be treated the way I wanted to be treated. So, the minute we could afford it, everyone had free lunch. Whether you had money or not, you have free lunch. We pay for it for you. Carpool will pay for that. So, we started doing things for people that I wish happened to me. Maybe that's part of fate. Maybe because a lot of things along the way weren't so good that as things started getting good, it was so easy for me to share with our people. So easy to do that. People sometimes don't save money. As soon as we possibly could afford it, we started profit sharing. We're at the end of every year, and we'll take that profit sharing and put in a retirement fund for you. It's yours. It's yours. If you're here so many years, it goes with you matter where you go. But it's yours. That's your money. That's really incredible. And how much do you think that that sort of golden rule approach has fed into your ridiculously low turnover rate, which is literally almost unprecedented. I mean, that's crazy. I try and treat people exactly the way they'd want to be treated, exactly the way I would have wanted to be treated. I'm happy with my people. I realize my people are the company. If my people go, my God, the company goes. People are your company. And they take care of the customer. The customer is always right, no matter what. So, what do we do so the customer is happier? If somebody's unhappy, we try and discover why. And because you treat people this way and we love them. You walk in our company, it's love. If you go to the front desk here in Century City, this girl just has the biggest smile saying, "Hi, welcome to John Paul Mitchell Systems." She loves what she does. Our big problem is we don't have turnover. We have so many people want to work for us and the thing is you you got to wait for somebody to die. Now, as we grow, we'll add one or two on obviously at at a time. And we're pretty big now because we're in 96 countries. Patron's the same way. We're in about 130 countries in the world. And even when I went to visit our people in Mexico at our facility where we make Patron, it's made with love. We have about 16 1,800 people down there. And I asked several of them, "Does it upset you about what's going on in the United States where they may close more of the border and you know, do you guys want to go to America?" And everyone answered, "Are you kidding? We get free lunch here. We work at night, we get free dinner here. You're so nice to us. You pay us good money. No, we're fine here. We don't want to go." But I never believed that no matter what job you were doing, were you ever beneath anybody else. You have to be able in my company, you talk to the boy or the girl in the mail room the same way that you talk with respect to the CEO. Because somebody dedicating themselves and you have no right to say that you are a better man or woman than that person. Because that person has family, that person has love and that person is a person. So, I think that that is where my leadership mentality has come in from. And as well as how can I have people be entrepreneurs in my company if they can't if they're not rewarded for potentially taking small steps and trying to do things outside of the box as long as it's morally correct with what we're doing and as long as nobody else gets hurt. So, I have those of That's just been my way of leader leadership and I'll be very honest, I don't like you know, when when my company was big and we had three or 400 people working for us internally and another couple of thousand externally. I didn't like it. Um so I also take my hat off to those who can move 10,000, 20,000 it that you didn't like? You know, I felt like at that time, you know, listen, I I came up, you know, in the streets and I wasn't as educated a lot of time in certain leadership and I didn't realize for every 50 people you may need one HR person. So I I had an open door policy and I felt like I was a shrink, you know, all the time and I did want my people to feel comfortable to come in and be able to speak to me. Um but again, I also and that is my leadership way, I also have a a massive amount of respect for people who can you who can move 10,000 people in unison um and and and and and lead lead people. So there's going to be a million different ways to to be a leader. And how do you systematize that? Like cuz I get it if you're there every day, like you like every everybody I've ever heard talk about you and some of them are people that like I know No, like everyone says you just exude like what you put on for the camera is you. Like that's really how you are and it's there's a warmth to it, there's a a sense of love and appreciation and but how do you systematize that? How do you make sure that it pervades your company even when you're not there? We let all the companies know what we do and why we do it. We have a culture. I'll give you an example. We have a God, almost 120 Paul Mitchell schools throughout the United States, cosmetology schools. Every one of them has to be involved in our culture. Not only do you learn how to be a great hairdresser or stylist, great colorist, right? But you have to be part of the culture. They raise money. Every school we have has to raise money every year. Part of that money goes to local community, part to the nation and part to the world. They learn in school while it's good to give and help others out and they also learn what our principles are. Now, we started at John Paul Mitchell Systems a very unique position. The lady that's running it, her name is Mara Corday, and she is our ambassador of corporate culture. So, what she does is goes around to our whole company, make sure everybody is reminded of our culture, what we do. All new people must go through indoctrination on what our culture's all about. And then recently, cuz we do so much stuff people don't know about, we started a magazine over the internet that goes through our whole universe and their universes that shows what we do as a company to share and change the entire world. Well, everyone connected with us is part of that, whether it's buying a new Coast Guard Cutter for the Sea Shepherd to protect whales in the open seas, whether it's taking care of 7,000 orphans in Africa whose parents have died of AIDS, whether it's redoing Appalachia, whether it's here in Los Angeles, Chris is getting homeless back to work. They're all part of it. They All the things we're doing in this country, so they all feel like they're part of it. Well, when you're part of something really big, and people take care of you and love you, and you know something went wrong, you can immediately get a hold of the founder, co-founder of the company, me, and talk to me directly. I live mainly in Austin, Texas, but if I'm traveling the world, which I do a lot, you get a hold of my executive assistant and say, "We want to talk to JP privately." Whether it's Paul Mitchell, John Paul Pet, uh Rock, Patron, all companies do exactly the same thing. Thank you for watching this episode, which again was brought to you by Impact Theory's very own business decision-making workshop. If you guys are ready to take your business to the next level by investing in yourself and learning the first principles of business, then I want you to take action right now and go to decision.impacttheory.com to apply. 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