EP:72 - Entrepreneur Inspiration - Resilience and Motivation: Insights from Entrepreneur Jayson Waller

Jayson Waller is a renowned entrepreneur and motivational speaker. Jayson is the founder of multiple successful companies, including Powerhome Solar, and the star of the reality TV show BAMFAM on Amazon Prime. His journey from building a billion-dollar business to overcoming significant challenges exemplifies resilience and determination.

Jayson shares his incredible story of rising from adversity, including the loss of a billion-dollar business and the subsequent rebuilding process. He provides insights into his entrepreneurial journey, discussing the highs and lows of his career, the lessons learned, and his new ventures, including his reality TV show. This episode is packed with motivational insights and practical advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders.

There is so much valuable knowledge on resilience, entrepreneurship, and business strategy. Jayson emphasizes the importance of perseverance, the power of personal branding, and effective communication in achieving success. Keywords such as "entrepreneurship," "business resilience," "motivational speaking," and "reality TV show" are woven throughout the episode, offering practical advice for those looking to overcome challenges and build successful ventures.

References:

• Jayson Waller Instagram
• Jayson Waller . COM

Three Potential Listener Questions:

1. How can entrepreneurs rebuild their businesses after significant losses?
2. What strategies does Jayson Waller use to maintain resilience and motivation?
3. How does personal branding play a role in Jayson's success and his reality TV show?

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Transcript

0:23

You better pay for some self-improvement so you can be the leader that you need to be in any industry that you're in. Welcome to a special episode here on the OWL podcast. We have Jason Waller to my left with my co-host Cindy Metzler to my left. She runs the Sisterhood for Success and of course the annual TEDx Boca Raton, which actually Jason Waller was one of the speakers two years ago that I attended. On fire on the stage, by the way. Absolutely, on fire. So Cindy, to start things out, welcome and do us the honor, talk a little bit about Jason today. Well, we are so incredibly lucky to have Jason Waller here, TEDx speaker, author. He's serial entrepreneur. He's gonna share his story and every time I hear it, I just get so incredibly inspired. So I don't wanna waste time talking about myself or we wanna hand it over to Jason and let him get going. So Jason, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, hey, thank you, Jason. And thank you, Cindy, for having me on. Super excited. I love this app, OWL. This is dope. It is dope. And if you're listening out there, you're gonna get to call in. We pinned them to the top. We've only done that one other time. So get into the OWL app and get ready. You could be on the show today. Yeah, I love this. This is cool. We downloaded it on the phone. Super excited to hear some calls and talk about the reality show. You know, I've opened a few businesses. I lost a billion dollar business, lost $400 million. I know what it's like to lose. I know what it's like to fail. I know what it's like to rebuild. And then now we've got some things going, some new companies out there speaking, motivating, doing some coaching, and then our cool reality TV show, BAMFAM, that launches on Amazon Prime in January. Super excited about that. So give us behind the scenes about this reality show, right? Everyone sees, you know, the television, what it's up to on Amazon, but they cut so much stuff out. This show's gonna go viral. I cannot wait. Give us the truth. What is happening right now? And tell us a little bit more. Everyone says it's scripted. It is not scripted. They annoy you with cameras everywhere. And this started because a friend of mine, attorney, a friend of mine, is the attorney and friends with the guys who created the show, Bar Rehab. Everybody seen Bar Rehab with Jon Temple? Yeah, okay. So they wanted me to go do a show where I can go out and rehab companies. Like business is failing, I go in there and help them scale and do those things. So they started to follow me around to different cities and look at companies. And then they started to film my family and they said, oh my gosh, we need to do a reality TV show. Like, really? They're like, yeah, you're like the Osbournes. You're this big, high powered, high energy, go kick some ass, do things. And then you go home and you don't get to run anything. Your wife, your three daughters, your son, they run everything. She's the CEO of the house. Telling you what. So sometimes guy needs to know when to check his stuff in at the door when he walks in at home. And that's the best way, happy wife, happy life. And so you gotta be able to be who you are out in the business place. And you gotta be able to be who you are at home. And so a lot of that kicks into that. They followed us over to Turks. We were on a family trip from Turks and Caicos. And they were there. We were there seven days. They were there five days. And my kids, so two of my kids, I have four kids, are jacked about the show. And two freaking hate me about the show. Like, they're so pissed. They're like, get me off the camera. They're yelling at the camera guys. And the camera guys ask, what's off limits? And so we'll tell them. And guess what they do? They put that in there and then they're chasing everybody around. Of course, right? They want the dirt. But the only thing that was semi-scripted, and I don't mind sharing this. Everything else is real because they probably have 80 hours of footage and they're gonna make episodes for season one on Amazon Prime. And they're about 54 minutes an episode. So what they did was scripted is the day before they got there, London, my 16-year-old, her jet ski broke down in the middle of the ocean. And we tried to tow it and the strap broke. So we had to get a boat to help us, right? We tell the camera people that, and they're like, holy smokes, dude. We're gonna have to redo that today. Well, the night before her boyfriend, who's kind of a douche, dumped her, right? So she's like, hell no, dad. I'm not going out. I'm not doing it, I'm not doing it. And I couldn't argue with her. I mean, she's kind of a bully. She's registered at bully.com. She bullies her older sisters, it's true. And- She's registered. Yeah, she is. They registered. I'm not kidding. Like London's such a bully. And they're older. Didn't know this thing existed. Oh, it does. Oh, it does. Yeah, the siblings are telling on each other. It's bad. And so we had to reenact. Christian and me had to go out there on our jet ski and break down so we can reenact what happened. So we did that. And it was interesting because I was filming some of it with my phone and I was putting it on social media and I'd have calls. Are you okay? Like, are you still in the ocean? I'm like, dude, like I posted it. You think I'm still in the ocean? Like, really? They have Wi-Fi and internet signal like- I'm in the middle of the ocean. Like, yeah. It doesn't work that well out there. But it like legit, it's, I mean, we were out there for probably 45 minutes. It looked like we were out there for five hours. Cause that's how it works. So that's what happens with reality TV. I've got friends that have done reality TV shows before and they had racewives out in North Carolina recently. And a friend of mine, Edwin Arroyo and his wife, Teddy Mellencamp is on Housewives of Orange County. So I know them very well. What happens is, is they have to have some kind of drama. With my family, they don't have to create anything. Natural. There is chaos all over the place. I had that similar situation in my family. My father was known as Captain Hook. He literally wore a whale's tooth and everyone visited his store at the South Street Seaport. And he literally put a Captain Hook hat on. So I was five years old at the Seaport, literally getting dragged into flea markets, garage sales, flipping merchandise. And he would just embarrass the hell out of me. And everyone knew me in Sands Point, New York. It was like, oh, those are the hills. Those are the ones. Be careful. You go to that house, his dad's going to put you to work. Right? It wasn't the typical Sands Point house everyone is used to. Like Arizona Iced Tea or Home Depot house. Famous people that had huge, huge businesses. But I know what you're talking about, man. It just naturally occurs right at the dinner table. I think most people have natural chaos. And the problem is you freeze when the cameras are there. Because after Turks, the cameras came to the house and they would sit there for two hours and nothing would really happen. Right? Because everyone's kind of uncomfortable. But then somebody has an issue going on, something happens and it escalates. And then you forget they're there. And then you're having depth conversations that are like just deep. And you're like, shoot, we probably shouldn't put that on TV. Now, we don't know what's going to be edited, not edited. And I think I get somewhat of a say so, but we'll see what happens. So what was the most uncomfortable thing that you went through? Like looking at the whole journey, you know, often, like you're saying, like your kids are on film and then now you're like in this like area where you're like, well, I don't know what they're going to put out there. They could add a one word here or there and make you look bad. Of course, we've seen that with a lot of other folks. I would say the bullying of my kids. Yeah. Right? So when my business closed, I was all over the media and they were painting me to be the bad guy. When it was a product liability issue, it wasn't mine. So it tainted my name, it tainted my brand and my kids were getting picked on. We were getting death threats. That was issue one. Turn that around. Here we are a year later. Things are, you're building new companies, doing coaching, rebuilding the brand. Things are good. Generac starting to pay the piper for what happened. Things are going great. But now my kids are getting picked on because we have a reality TV show. And it's full circle. Because when I was younger, I used to get bullied because I was poor. Because I lived in a trailer park, because my dad drove a car without air conditioning, because I wore fake Tommy Hilfiger's and I used to get picked on because I was poor. My daughters, they're 25, 19 and 16. They got picked on when they were, well, we didn't have money, but eventually we made a lot of money. They got picked on for having money. Now my son and my 16 year old daughter, my son's 13, are getting picked on not only because we have money and they're like, oh, is your dad bankrupt because the business closed? All the kids don't understand. But they're getting picked on because we have a reality TV show. And so my son's literally getting bullied at school. My daughter can deal with it. My 16 year old, she was a freshman and she beat the crap out of a senior who was picking on her. I'm sorry, she beat the crap out of a junior who was picking on her senior sister. So McKenzie was a senior in high school. London was a freshman in high school. And this junior in high school was picking on McKenzie who's very mouthy, but not physical. And McKenzie, London got upset and went over and started arguing with this girl, got punched, she ended up wailing on her. The video went viral. She beat the crap out of her, got suspended for 10 days. That's reality show TV. Proud moment, by the way. I'm like, dude, she just wailed on a junior taking up for a senior sister. But now nobody in the school ever mess with her. But they still say little comments about her Bronco. She's got a pink Bronco. It looks like a Barbie Bronco. And they're like, oh, it must be nice to be rich. And she feeds into it. She's like, well, maybe your parents need to make more money, right? She feeds into it to give him crap. And I know that's the wrong thing to say, but she's like, am I supposed to take the bullying? So my son is sitting here and he's upset. And he's like, look, he was at a private school for a long time. We moved him to a public school. He's a quarterback. He's a tough kid. Like he takes boxing lessons. In sixth grade, he got jumped by two eighth graders and he beat him up. Like he's in seventh grade now. He's tough. But he goes to this new school and he doesn't really know a lot of kids. He has a couple of friends. And all they know is now in today's world, we're not used to that. People can do research on the kids at school. Who are their parents? What do they do? Well, the rumor is, oh, there's this reality TV show. So like, oh, you've got a reality TV show. And they see videos of him dancing or singing and they start saying things to him. Like, oh, he's fat or he's that. And he's getting upset and he doesn't know what to do. And so he's actually telling me this. This was yesterday. And I'm like, he's upset. And I'm like, well, I was like, look, buddy, like I got picked on because I was poor. Your sisters got picked on because we had money. And now you're getting picked on because there's a reality TV show. Let me tell you about these kids who are getting picked on. These kids and their parents are insecure in life. These kids and their parents are irrelevant and they hate people who are relevant. So son, you've got three choices. One, you can completely ignore it and give zero Fs. That's where I'm at in my life. I used to care. People think, I want you to hate me because you're gonna follow me. You don't like me, subscribe. You love me, subscribe. Either way, I'm in your mind. I'm winning. I have no idea who you are. Sorry, not sorry, right? But it takes a special skill to get to that point. It took time. I said, one, you give zero Fs. You just smile. You don't give a crap. They're thinking about you. You don't know who the hell they are. You don't care about the social media handle. You don't know who their parents are. They're just irrelevant. They're like sheep. They're just going with the flow, right? They're just a herd. Son, you're relevant. You're the quarterback. You got a show. You're relevant. So ignore it. Two, fight back. Do like London did. Wail on somebody or, and I probably shouldn't tell my kid that, but I did, or straight up say, hey man, like, you know, why are you on my stuff? Get off my stuff. Why are you stalking me? It just reminds me of the Rocky Balboa TikTok that everyone always sees. It's like, son, you know, life is hard. I got news for you. Tough luck, right? It's right. And then three, I'm like, or we can turn them in and we can do that. And you just gotta keep going. And it's hard though. It's hard in today's world because bullying when we were little was someone's over there taking your lunch money and pushing you in the corner. Bullying now is all social media related. And it's so sad. And my daughter's still go through it, even my 25 year old. And I'm like, guys, the moment that the zero Fs go out the window, like you don't care, you're actually winning in life. And that is one of the biggest blessings I had out of all the nonsense that happened with my company closing. Well, the beautiful thing is though, and I think this is a thread about the show is the bond between your family. And I think that just what you just shared, Jason, is so incredible because, you know, what your son went through and is going through, he has you as an example to show him that, you know what, you have to be resilient no matter what. But it's still hard. It is hard. His feelings are hurt. He cries, he gets upset and it just breaks your heart because he's never going to be me and I'm never going to be him. We're different. And that's important. And, you know, it's like half of me is like, dude, you're just gonna have to figure it out because this adversity is gonna punch you in the face later. And then you're not gonna be able to survive as an adult if you don't. And then the other half wants to save him and say, what do you do? And so it's so hard. And he's a good kid. And he's like, well, I don't want to get in trouble kicked out of school. I said, you have my permission. Beat the shit out of all of them. Go ahead. And my wife's like, you can't say that. I said, I just did. But there's like nine of them. You can't beat up nine kids, right? And I'm like, well, I'll come over there. Where's their parents at? Like, you know, so the problem is, and that's why we have a show. I love at the beginning, like Christian says, our parents are not normal. We're not normal. People come spend the night and they're like, dude, your dad is batshit crazy. Like something's wrong. And look, I got a tattoo of all my kids and their personality disorders, right? One's got social anxiety. I'm sorry, separation anxiety, social anxiety, depression and narcolepsy and ADD. But you know, I think everyone's bipolar. I just talk about it. I mean, everyone hides. Obviously everyone puts what they want to see on social media, but everyone's got problems. We're all human, right? In fact, the better your profile is, the more problems you got. Yeah. Look, I'm in the financial service business and it's just a matter of like, you ask enough questions, you'll find the issues. Eventually like you ask enough and you find out like, oh, well there's this one child and they have this, they have that and everybody, like everyone who thinks that there's a perfect family out there, it's bullshit, right? We know the truth behind the scenes. And it's hard because I'm in your shoes. I had a nine and seven year old and he has a bad day and he's crying and sometimes the words, it just doesn't change his attitude, right? Cause you could say as many times as you want, you're being bullied, hit him back, do this. But sometimes they're in different shoes that day and that morning and they just don't, those words don't really push them to kind of change that quickly as you know. So how do you see yourself helping your children to get like really move past that when the words just aren't hitting, he comes home and he's still struggling? Well, the problem is I don't have a lot of sympathy and empathy, right? And that's one of the, I believe everybody, I believe God makes every, whatever God you believe in, the creator makes everybody equal, right? You may be six, four, you may be dumb as a box of rocks, right? I may be five, nine and I can make a billion dollars. I'm just giving an example, right? In my opinion, it's just my opinion, doesn't mean anything. God gives these attributes like a video game. Everybody gets a hundred points, okay? So you might be short and average looking, super smart. You might be great looking and not very sharp. You might be this and that. So in my opinion, you gotta find out what your abilities are, your superhero abilities, your strength, your assets, and you gotta double down on them. And you gotta evolve them and you gotta just continue that. You can't fix the things that you're gonna have deficiencies in, you just can't. I'm not gonna be six, five and play in the NFL. It's not gonna happen, right? It's just not gonna happen. But I can do other things. And so, with me not being to have empathy and sympathy, it's something I'm working on. God gave me the ability to have strength, to be able to overcome things, to be able to handle things, to be able to overcome adversity and have thick skin and have heavy shoulders, and not show so much emotion to the world when things are hurting me. But what he lacked in giving me is showing my empathy and sympathy to my kids. I'm like, wipe it off, you'll be fine. Well, the fact is, every situation is different in how it affects them, big or small. I may have lost a company for $400 million. It could feel the same way as somebody losing a company and losing $4,000. The feeling is the same, right? And I think we always, we forget that. And so, I rewind myself into, I was bullied as a kid and I didn't do anything about it. I would come home and I remember, this gave me flashbacks yesterday. I would come home and cry, these kids don't like me. I grew up in Arizona where a lot of my friends were Hispanic, right? And there wasn't a lot of African-American kids there. And so, my friends were white and Hispanic. I had like two black kids I was friends with and that was it. We didn't have a lot of black kids going in. When I moved to North Carolina and I bring this up, black kids didn't like the white kids and the white kids were redneck and bumpkin and they had Chewbacca in their mouth and they wore overalls. I didn't fit in with either. I went to five high schools. I got bullied and fought and got kicked out of every high school even though I had great grades. I couldn't find my place. I was picked on because I was white or I was picked on because I looked like I hung out, I hung out with gangsters and wannabe gangsters in Arizona. I got picked on because I was broke, all of those things. And so, I share it with my kids. I go, look, you can't control how the world is going to be. You can't control what these people are going to say or what they think. What you can control is how you react. And the problem is I put myself in their shoes. I didn't do anything about it. It still bothered me. I still cried. I still fought. So, for me to give them advice at 43 years old and say, you, this is how you need to do it. That's because I had to live through all of those battles to understand it. I can't expect my 13 year old for me to say those words and it clicked and he goes, oh, that's what I should do. All I can do is encourage and try, but ultimately he's going to have to navigate through this. That's the deal. And it's tough. And today's world, it is tough because people are brutal. Kids are so mean to each other. And social media, right? I mean, they're sharing things behind the scenes, taking photographs of things and then sharing them. And then things go viral behind the scenes and kids get bullied. You ever seen that movie 17 again with Zac Efron? Yeah, of course. I wish I could go back to my kid's school, right? And just tell all these little pipsqueak kids that are bullies, like just eat them up alive. It's because when people say negative things or hateful things about somebody, it's because they're insecure and they have the deficiency in their life. And your success is their failure and their failure is your success. And they struggle with that. I see it in adults. I see it in kids. I see it all the time. I feel like God gave me that ability to go through the storms that I've been through to see that. So the moment I meet someone in the way they're carrying themselves and they say, I can see if they're super insecure or if they're very insecure or if they're very secure, they're super insecure. I can see if they've got hate and jealousy or if they really want to see people succeed. I feel like I've got that gift now and I'm trying to teach my kids so they understand that because when it makes sense, when you know that you're in their brain but they're not in your brain, you're winning. And it's hard for kids to understand that. And so I tell my son like, do you Google any of these kids? Oh, they can't be Googled. Okay. Do you find it like this? How do you stay in such a positive mindset? Like I just, you know, I've met you a few times and I just see this energy. Of course, maybe some of it's due to this brand here Celsius. But like one thing I struggle with is like Monday through Wednesday, I am just solid. Right. And then all of a sudden Thursday comes around and like I ate healthy the night before. I did everything I was supposed to. I drank water and I was like, why am I exhausted? And I'm just in a bad mindset. And then today I came to work and I'm back to normal. And it seems like that's one of your gifts. Like you just stay, stay positive. And that's why just being around you is something that people benefit from, Jason. I mean, honestly, just knowing you for several years, it's like it is your gift. It's your gift to your family. It's a gift to all the entrepreneurs out there. You know? Well, I appreciate that. And I will say that I still get in a bad mood. I still get a little negative. I still get a little sad. I still get pissed off. But I'm more of a glass half full, right? I'm more of, hey, you know what? This is the news. I can't control everything. But you know what? At least there's, I'm, you know, optimistic. I've got this going. Let me keep going. And I don't know how I acquired that gift. I think it's because of all the verbal abuse and the bullying and the failures and learning things on my own. But I will say that, you know, I don't get negative per se. I don't go, I don't find excuses. I hate finding an excuse of why I didn't succeed. I hate saying, you know what? I wasn't able to do that because of this. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. Sorry. We had a live call in. Sorry for everyone listening. I went live on the owl up and we're going to call in. Okay. Call in. Here we go. Brian, are you there? I am. Oh, whoa. Look at that. We got someone in here. It works. It works. Hey, Brian. How are you? That's who you're speaking to. I'm good. How are you, Jason? I'm hanging in there for a, which Jason? There's two of us here. Yeah, that's a good point. That's true. There's two of you. Well, Jason Wall for this time. Okay. How are you doing brother? I'm doing well. So I was curious. I don't know if I'm supposed to ask you questions, but I wanted to know a little bit how you guys started into your public speaking and how that took off for you. Great question. That's a gift too. I'm just going to throw that in there. Some people have that gift. So, you know, I'll be honest. When I first opened my home security company, we did door knocking and I was 24 years old and I was hiring people that were 30, 35 that had college educations. I was very insecure. I was very intimidated. And these guys worked for me and they were taking advantage of me because I was intimidated, young and insecure. And I had to run the sales meetings and I would do a lot of the, all right, well, let's go and let's do this. And let's go and do this. And I would do the, um, so many times and that I would like, oh my gosh, what is wrong with me? Like I suck. And one of the sales reps royally pissed me off. I asked everyone to do something. He got really mouthy and I lost it. I went from, I go from zero to F-U real quick and I asked him to leave the office now, except I said it in very, very creative language. And I said, does anybody else have a problem? They said no. And at that moment I gained my strength and I said, okay, I've got to command the room. So then when I went out there, I would purposely make sure I didn't say, um, and I would find ways to motivate people. I'd listen to certain music and they didn't really have YouTube back then. It was like 2004, 2005, 2006. I started all these meetings and I would do one every day. So think about that from 2005 to 2012, I'm doing sales meetings every day. And then in 2012 to 2015, I'm doing them once a month. And then from 2015 to 2022, I was doing them twice a month for sales and for like 2,400 employees. So mine was really, it was repetition and experience and practice. And it's hard because you can't say the same thing. And a lot of people, they write out their speech and they write out their notes. I don't, like. I love that because I'm the same way. You got to talk from the heart. I have a struggle, like these whole, all these pitch competitions, right? I run a financial service firm. I just wing a lot of the conversations. Winging is the best way because it's natural. And then it's natural. And my podcast, same way. I don't do a ton of research. I don't just kind of have questions ready because then it comes out. Like I'm trying to sneak a question in during the show and same with my speeches. I just, I cannot just follow a speech because then I start reading and it just, it just, it looks unnatural. You know, I won an award. It's Brian, right? Yeah, yeah. Brian, I won an award for solar early on in Michigan. And I remember going up there and I had a speech writ. And I remember going up there and reading the speech and I was looking down at the whole time and I sat down, my wife goes, that was horrible. All you did is look down the entire time. And I took that to heart. I was like, you know what? I'm never going to look at a speech again. And I haven't. Now I'll have slides when I speak to remind me of stories because what I learned from Eric Thomas, who's a friend of mine and he's my mentor for speaking. And I try to do it at, you know, I'm a little bit more verbal with a little bit more R-rated language. But he's my favorite and he's a dear friend. He's a friend of mine. He's from Michigan. He's a friend of mine. He coaches me up all the time. And the deal with him is all about passion and inflection and how you talk about what's going on in your life. Like when you have that ability to do that and it takes time, that's what really changes. So like, but I use his stuff like to motivate me and kind of what I want to talk about. But I just talk about it from the heart. And, you know, I'm starting to do more stage appearances now, but when I owned a company, I didn't get to do it a lot. So I did with my team, but I didn't get to do it for other people. Yeah. And that's kind of where I was at for 10 years. I did it, you know, multiple times a week for my team and for the company I was working with, but I didn't go outside into other stages where now I'm starting to get invited onto other stages. So I was just wondering how you did it. And it sounds like it was pretty much the same thing. You get a lot of practice, you know, basically on a smaller stage and really get comfortable with, you know, public speaking. And then you can go on to bigger stages. Yeah. Look, my whole goal when I did sales meetings and install meetings at Powerhome, which is my solar company, and we had 2,400 employees, I'd have 600 sales reps or 600 installers. I had to do it. I let the other executives and directors do the meetings and go over all the stuff. And then my whole job was to get them to want to run through a brick wall. And look, my speech to sales guys is different than the installers. Installers is like, let's F and go. Let's work hard. Let's do this. You know, it's all grind. And for sales guys, it's money and it's be at number one and it's competitive edge. And you have to know your audience. That's the key. You got to know who you're speaking to and what they want. And to me, you got to give them what they want in some kind of, people love stories. When you tell stories, they're there. When you just kind of blab, people just blab about stuff. You got to tell stories and it's got to be real and it's got to be relative what's going on. Yep. Yeah. No, I'm with you. That's awesome. I love that you don't have to just read a speech because I'm not great at reading speech. Then I feel like I'm more robotic. So how do you get paid for, for, for bigger opportunities? Often we have so many people on the owl app and I see motivational speaker and they struggle with, with getting those opportunities. So what's the trick on that side? Well, so I haven't had a lot of speaking engagements. A lot of mine have been, you know, Hey, I'll do this to get, because you know, when you first start speaking, you got to get out there and get some stuff. But I have had a couple and, you know, I charge somewhere between 30 and 50,000, which not a bad lick to get out there. You don't need many when you know what Eric Thomas charges. No idea. 200,000. Now, you know, he charged two years ago, 50,000. So it's, you have to have a perceived value. Yeah. Right. David Meltzer was my coach for a while. He's a great speaker. He's not as good as, as Eric Thomas. And hopefully he didn't hear that. He'll get a little upset. Cause he's a good friend, but he, you know, he gets paid a lot of money to travel all over the world and speak. And he's still a mentor of mine in certain things, especially, you know, getting mentors. Isn't just about learning things. It's about connections. You know, when you get a coach, you get a coach for three reasons. You get one for access, you get one for status, and then you get what it's the same one. So it's either access status or knowledge. You're picking a coach for one or two or three of those reasons. And so like with Meltzer, it's like access mentors right now. Yeah. One of my mentors right now is John C. Maxwell. Yeah. That's a great mentor. In fact, we did an interview with him on office hours. Yeah. That's a great, he's a great guy. He is. I like him. He's really down to earth. He is. And look, he's the OG of this. He's an OG of speaking and motivating people. And he talks about giving away talks like thousands of them in the beginning. And same thing. I know Grant Cardone has talked about like speaking for free and that's helped build his brand. Yeah. And those guys, look, you get to a point, it's what people want. And I got to meet with Gary V's team trying to get in a bureau to speak probably like four or five months ago. It didn't work out. It was a mutual thing. They didn't want to pay me. You're trading time for money, but you want to be able to empower and help the right people. So for me, if I go and I speak for free, right? Like I speak some events for free. I want to push them to, hey, follow my podcast. Make sure you watch the show. And hey, by the way, I offer one-on-one coaching, but I also offer coming out soon community coaching, right? And so it's okay to not make money speaking. If you have other things that you bring to the table that people get inspired by and they go, you know what? I want to follow that guy and learn more about it. And it's not for everybody, but it's for some people. And I wish I had access to coaches 10 years ago. I started dealing with coaches about four or five years ago. And I always have a coach like at my, that's one of my coaches right now, as is David Meltzer, right? He's good. So that helps me. Ed's a great speaker too. Absolutely. Well, I gotta give Cindy Metzler some credit over here because she came up with the idea for Mentorship Monday on the OWL app. So every single Monday from nine to 12, we tell all experts, drop your price to a buck. We put, we pin the category at the top and people just love giving back. So it's not about the money and time part. It's just all about just connecting with people and then people in your shoes. If you're bored one morning, you're like, I'm just going to go live. You know, let people call me. And then you don't feel like, oh, you're devaluing yourself because it's right under the title Mentorship Monday. People know you're participating and you're making a dent on this world. Just share knowledge. I think, and I agree with you. And I think that when you can bring value to people and it not cost them anything, it's fantastic. And it's not like it costs the people you speak to. It costs these organizations. You know, if GMC calls me and says, we want you to motivate all our things. I'm going to charge them. I'm not there to elevate them, right? But if, but you know, if Cindy or somebody else calls, hey, want to do this? Like, I'm going to come out there. Yeah, we'll talk about it. Maybe we get some other subscribers and followers and people join the coaching. Okay. We ran out of time with Brian. So we're going to put great call here. And hopefully somebody calls in, in the next few minutes, because we got about 15 minutes left on the show. And then Jason's got to run because he's going to be on the news shortly. Yes, he is going to be on the news. Cool app. I like this. There were some great takeaways, Jason, at your Dragon 100 talk, just for some entrepreneurs. So maybe we can shift some gears because I know that you've had, you know, a $400 million loss. Not many entrepreneurs can say that and you bounced back and you've already built a multi-million dollar business in less than a year. So maybe you can just give us some quick takeaways for entrepreneurs out there. And I'm sure the people tonight will want to hear about this too. Yeah, I would say, you know, there's, when you're first opening a business, I have a rule of thumb and my rules change now that I've dealt with the loss that I dealt with. Yeah. But the rule of thumb is this, you can't open a business for money, right? You can't chase money. You have to chase success. But we have another call. Yes, we do. But finish your sentence and I'll come in in a second. So, you know, I always say when you open a business, you're going to create a service. You got to be excited to do something. You got to make a dent in this world. It's got to be bigger than you. You got to build the brand. It's got to be bigger than you. But the rule number one is whatever dollars you make, you pay your people first, your vendor second, reinvest into the business third. You get paid nothing. Zip, zilch. For all of my companies, I either wasn't paid or paid very little for two years. Like Powerhome Solar, I didn't get a paycheck for 19 months. No paycheck. Free working. People don't realize, oh, that's what it takes. You have to reinvest your money into the business to make money. And the number one thing I think people struggle with is they're so much closer than they think and they quit too early because they walk up to that mountain or they walk up to that building and they go, oh, smokes. In order to get up there, it's like 150 flights of stairs. Just get to level two and then get to level three. I agree with you so much. You got to stay in the moment. Everyone's like, what the fuck are you doing with Owl? Literally, they're like, you're crazy, Jason. You're investing all your money. You're a financial advisor. You're doing so well. Just keep going. Keep going. Why are you messing around with Owl? And so many people have come on, deleted it, deactivated their account, shooting negative stuff on social media messages. And I just like, no, we just got to keep making updates. We're going to get it right. We're going to get it one day. And look where we are today. Over 6,000 people have downloaded Owl or 2,000 have expert profiles that are searchable. And it just takes one step at a time. I saw the next step right in front of me. I ignored the noise, but I totally agree with you. And you're helping people monetize their time, right? I mean, so many, there's so many coaches. You happen to be an elite coach, but there's so many coaches out there that are trying to get to that six figure mark, right? And this is the perfect opportunity. You know how many times I've seen people on Owl, just like they do one call and they're like, eh, it wasn't for me. I didn't see much value. I only made $5 on the call. And I'm sitting there like, it's not about $5 for the call. You just met someone you didn't know yesterday. Paul is about to step in on this call. I didn't know Paul 30 days ago. He is now a brand ambassador on Owl. He does LinkedIn audio events every single week. And this guy took like a hundred calls on Owl within 30 days and has already built a book of business through Owl. But it's not through the money being made on the call. It's the relationship. And then he brings it over like a typical conversation you meet in person. So Paul, welcome to the Owl podcast. How are you doing? Oh man, Jason and Jason Waller. So good to see you. And this has been such a powerful conversation. I was dropping my notes on LinkedIn and it's always fascinating for me to have these type of conversations because a lot of times people think that there's some type of secret, right, to success. Like, oh, what is it? And then the truth is just do the work. Um, Jason, I'm, I'm curious for you because you shared a lot of things that really deeply resonated with me about looking at adversity as a gift and finding, I know for me, like I was listening to you talk about how age when you were younger, that was probably like my biggest insecurity because I've been in the adult world since I was 16 years old. And the question that I kind of have for you is I've spent the past couple of years training with similar mentors, not the exact ones for you, but I had spent like a year training with Grant Cardone. And a lot of times people get caught up in the lifestyle, right? And I know one of the things that I've currently kind of found out is that a lot of times people will create courses and programs that are, they're trying to monetize, but it's not actually valid information. Like there's been a lot of talk on LinkedIn about people using AI bots and engagement pods to basically kind of fake their engagement or make it look like they're having success type of thing. I'm curious for you, like, what is, what is something that you would share? Because one of the current objections that I get from a lot of people is, Hey, you know, I've invested in this before and it hasn't worked or people are kind of projecting their previous failures on the present. And I'm kind of wondering for you, what is some insight that you can share with that? No, great question, Paul. And I think, first of all, when I got into the coaching game, Dan Locke, who is a dear friend of mine, is the one that called me when my company closed and he saw the video and he's like, brother, what happened? Oh my God, are you okay? He was one of the only few people that called to check on me. You know, a lot of people like, I'm going to leave him alone. He's going through a lot. They won't do that. And I think that's the wrong move, even though that's probably what I at the moment preferred looking back. It's like, I wish more people had called and checked on me, but he checked on me and he said, brother, you got to get into coaching. I'm like, really? He's like, yeah, you have this talent to build these companies and lead gen. And so I got into the coaching a little bit early on, probably beginning of this year. And I started a BAM community. And when I did that, I had people in that community and I felt like, and I was keeping that going, but I started to do one-on-one. I started having these people in there and they would tell me, man, I was in this guy's program or this guy's program or Grant's program, whatever. And it wasn't real business advice. And the thing I learned is I wanted to stop my community and do more one-on-one because I felt like the community at the time wasn't enough. And I was still trying to build a business and trying to figure myself out as a coach. So I stopped the community one and only went one-on-one. And what I found out was, is most of these programs out there, even the ones that you've named, and I'm not knocking anybody, they're not business courses. Like you need to pick a coach who's actually ran a business. His business can't be you. His business can't be coaching. If his business is coaching, then he needs to teach you how to coach. But if he's trying to teach you how to run a business, then his business needs to be business. Grant Cardone is a real estate monster. You should learn real estate from him. You shouldn't learn business from him. You shouldn't learn scaling a business from him. You should learn real estate from him. And there's a lot of these coaches out here that are mindset that claim to have business experience. They've never ran a business. I won't say names, but a friend of mine, I went to his place, did a podcast, saw his entire community of coaching, and he's offering business advice. And at the dinner, I said, so how many companies have you ran? He goes, well, I've been a part of like 30. You ran 30 companies? Well, no, I invested in 30 companies. How the hell are you teaching people how to run companies if you've never managed a company? You're an investor. You should teach people how to invest in companies. That's different than running companies. So the problem is, and I say this all the time, I said it early on when I got into coaching, is you need to be able, my son plays football. He's a quarterback. I'm not going to have somebody teach somebody how to pitch, work with my son to throw a football. That doesn't make sense. I'm going to teach someone to shoot a jumper to go teach my kid how to throw a football. I'm going to go to somebody who actually has thrown a football or has coached people to throw a football. It's the same thing with your coaching. Be selective. Don't pick it because of status. Pick it because of their experience and knowledge. Everybody wants to pick it. You know, Grant Cardone, I'm giving an example, or Ed Milet's my coach. Like even me, like Ed Milet, I've ran more business than Ed Milet. He's an MLM guy, right? He's great. He's done more mindset than me. He's done more speaking than me. He has more relationships than me. I'm going to him for that. I'm not going to him for business. He could come to me for business. Like he hasn't ran a big company. So it's different. You got to know what it is you want, and then you got to select your coach for that. People get stuck in the weeds and like, I just want that guy because that's a big name. Well, if you're not, you're paying for nothing. If they don't have that experience, you're just paying so they can make more money of just you just being a part of their group. And that's sad. That's what I think is coaching bad, like a bad PR, bad, you know, press. It's just that hurt. To me, it hurts. And I see so many people like I spent all this money. I didn't really even learn anything. Well, you spent it because you were a fan and you can't be a fan. Yeah. You need to say, Hey, that's what I'm looking for. I want to learn how to do that. That person's done that. Ding. That's my coach. Yeah, that was, that was powerful. I really resonated with, uh, what you shared about, I noticed this too, a lot when I started speaking is like so many people come from a place of theory versus experience. And I know for me, everything that I've done professionally, I've always been my first client. And I find that you talked about it earlier, storytelling, and that's really where you build the instant connection with people is when you share your story and it's like that maybe one or two small pieces where they can kind of see themselves in your story. So this was incredibly insightful. Thank you so much for your time and your insight. And yeah, this has been awesome. You're welcome, man. Appreciate it. Paul, thanks for joining us on the show. You know, while he's talking about that, people seem to free. Is that another call? No, no, we're ending it. We're going to. All right. So people seem to forget what's the number one book ever. And who is the number one speaker ever? Does everybody know? Tell us Jesus. And they told stories. People don't realize that the number one speaker of all time was Jesus and his disciples. And the number one book of all time is the Bible because it's storytelling. Whether you believe in the Bible or not, and I'm a man of faith, so I believe in the Bible, but that's when people, when you have stories that resonates with people. Absolutely. You can't just sit there and just throw out stuff. You got to have stories tied to it. That's why we watch movies. Keeps you on the edge of your seat too. I love the part you talked about, Paul. It's like find the right expert, the right coach, because so often, you know, everyone, you know, just jumps to the Instagram following and the LinkedIn following. They have a lot of likes. They have a lot of followers. They must know everything. It's like, no, it's like. Listen, don't come to me for eating advice. Of course. It's like. I ain't got it for you. And that's the best part about this app, Al, is like literally you could go and filter anything. You could search in the hamburger menu there and literally. Hamburger menu. I love it. You could literally just find a specific niche expert and chat with them and find value connecting with them, networking, and just gaining knowledge because too often you're right. It's like so often, you know, people are sending messages to the wrong people on LinkedIn, right? They're like, oh, I got a meeting with this person. I'm like, okay, but like they don't know everything, right? Like you've got to. And it hurts. It breaks my heart because there are some really good people selling fake information, meaning like they're using their status, which God bless them. I'm not hating on them. I just feel bad for the people paying for it. It just kind of like, it gives it a bad name because they're not experts at certain things. Like if I want to learn real estate, which I'm not very smart at real estate, I'm like half-assed at best. Sure. I'd love to be with Grant because he is the shit at real estate, but I'm not going to use Grant in order to open up a damn home service company and do lead jet. It's just not going to work. It's a different model. If I want to build a coaching program, I might use Grant. I might use some other people too. Dan locks are great when like there's guys who build coaching programs. So you got to know whatever business you're in and what you're trying to gain out of it. Find those experts. It's so key. So how do you get help though? For 99% of people, right? They don't have access to the same network that you do, right? You, you obviously started somewhere and you knocked on some doors and found experts that would, would open up and share details with you how to expand your business. So like, where would you start for those 99% that don't have access, right? They send Instagram messages, they send LinkedIn messages, but they get ignored often. But maybe they don't. If you do it in the right way, you got, you got to pay. Like, I'm going to be honest. Like I didn't start using a coach till four or five years ago. And I wish I would have, because I'd have probably built a billion dollar company in four years, not eight. Yes. Right. I couldn't have stopped at closing. That was a product liability issue. Nobody saw it was catastrophic, but I could have built it earlier. And so I'm real big on self-improvement and in order to self-improve, you got to invest because you're taking people's time from them, providing for their families to help you. So joint find it and look, it don't look for just the biggest name with the biggest following. Cause that doesn't mean anything. Like I'll use Wes Watson as an example. He just moved to Miami from San Diego. He also pushed me to do coaching. He's a friend of mine. He's a great fitness guy. Yeah. Like ex prison, the guy's chiseled. His muscles are bigger than the studio. Okay. And he's got a steroid personality where he's angry at the world. Right. But if I want to get fit and I thought about getting fit for about five minutes, that's the guy I'm hiring. Mike, I want Wes, but he doesn't know how to build business. We had conversations after that. He knows how to build a coaching program because most of those guys in his program are doing fitness coaching. That's smart. But he told me like, dude, your business, you need to be getting into the business ponds of showing people how to scale their business. And so you got to, whatever your business is, if it's fitness, then you need to find fitness folks. If it's, if it's home services, you need to find that. And you don't need big names. Like he's a big name, but there's other fitness coaches out there that don't have a great following that can give you equal or even better knowledge. So you've got to determine, like I said, people pick coaching for three reasons, status, access, and then knowledge. In my opinion, you need to use knowledge as the first, but the other two follow. Bottom line is he said, Hey, right. So often, like I run an app, obviously it costs money to call people. And so often be like, Oh, I don't like your app. I don't feel like calling people, paying for people. I was like, you realize there's a once in a lifetime opportunity. We put people that are new experts like Jason for $1 and he has to get to 10 calls before he could change his price. So all these people right here on new owls are a buck, right? So when they come in, cause we're a new, new technology, you can access these amazing people. And of course they're going to start charging 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 30 bucks for 10 minutes to chat with them. And you could just literally build a Rolodex instantly. There's no other platform. You know what my one-on-one coaching is? Do you know how much it is? I would let me guess. A lot. I would say a minimum, a certain amount of sessions. So I'm assuming 12 sessions and I got to say, it's got to be a thousand dollars, a minimum per session, $12,000 minimum higher. So I will tell you this. I first, I first started my coach divided by 12, whatever that is. You know, it's more than that. So I first started my coaching. I'm like, I'm gonna be honest. Cause if you, you invest in me, Oh, I guarantee you're going to make 10 times what you're investing with me. That's a fact. Otherwise I'll give you your money back. That's how I roll. If I can't help you move the needle, you do not need to pay me because my whole job is moving the needle. That's how I look at it. But when I first started getting into coaching, I was like, I don't even know what to price myself at. I was pricing myself at like 3,500 a month for four calls. And it wasn't worth it to me. I'm building two other companies that are multimillion dollar companies. I'm doing these events. I'm doing this. And it's not that it wasn't worth it to me, like just time-wise, but it was like, I was helping people go from like 5 million in revenue to 15 now, God bless them. But it, for me to take four hours out of my month is expensive. So I started saying, and some of these people weren't listening. I had football players. I had people not listening that were NFL players, just wasting time. And I was like, I had to fire them. I'm like, I know you want to pay me for nothing. That's not going to happen. So what did I do? I upped my price. I talked to Ed, my let he's 30,000 an hour, by the way, 30,000 an hour. So I'm right at it. I'm 15,000 a month. You get four sessions. Okay. So I was a little off. I revamped my price to 50,000 or 12 sessions. 15,000 a month by three. I was close. Yeah. So I look at it that way. Like, what does that get you? Well, they get you access to me, my black, all these things, but why would you do that? Now I'm going to have a community. One's probably going to be about five grand, which gets you into being the group calls and do everything a month. But the one-on-one is I'm looking at your PNLs. I'm looking at your marketing strategy. I'm doing all these things. You're going to pay a consultant hundreds of thousands of dollars. And all they did is get an MBA from some school. And then they tell you what to do. They didn't build multiple companies. They didn't scale companies. They didn't make hundreds of millions of dollars in the business and then lose. Like, you got to be able to find someone with that. And you got to pay to do it. So I always say, like, if you're going to pay for marketing, you're going to pay rent. You're going to pay your employees. You better pay for some self-improvement so you can be the leader that you need to be in any industry that you're in. That is mic drop moment. And, you know, we have to wrap up because we have a TV segment. Well, Jason, thank you for joining us on the OWL podcast today. Everyone listening, follow Jason on the OWL app. And of course, at some point in the future, he's going to be going live. And again, he's got to get to 10 calls before he can change his price. So you get that opportunity, like he just said, what his rates are. And you get him at a dollar. So go ahead and pick his brain. Network with him. And of course, build some opportunities with him. And tell Jason, tell everyone where everyone can find you. Jason Waller BAM. That's J-A-Y-S-O-N-W-A-L-L-E-R, BAM, and Instagram. Or you can go to JasonWaller.com. Awesome. Awesome. BAM. Thank you. Take care, everybody. Post-production for the OWL podcast is done with care by Ocean Tree Creative.