Welcome to The Get Real Podcast, your high-octane boost and in the trenches tell-it-like-it-is reality therapy for personal, business and real estate investing success with your hosts, power-preneurs Angela and Ron. It’s time to get real!

Ron:  Hey everybody, welcome to The Get Real podcast. We have another excellent episode. You know, when we have guests, I get pretty pumped. And you guys have already heard from our guest today, but I just want to man, I want to welcome back Shaun McCloskey, one of my best friends on earth and just an incredibly knowledgeable guy…This is going to get mushy. Let’s just not.

Ron:  Let’s welcome back Shaun. You guys already know him. He’s been on two episodes already. You obviously know that he’s important to me and to a lot of other people. Shaun, welcome back, buddy. 

Shaun:  Thanks for having me back, brother. You are here right next to me. I can kiss you  on the mouth. 

Ron:  Nice. Glad I’m not. Okay. This is also the first car episode we’ve done it. This is  not car karaoke, Shaun.

Shaun:  So don’t sing?

Ron:  Don’t do that man. But anybody who’s watching the video version of this, which you can find on my YouTube channel, is watching Shaun drive and he’s promised that he’s going to be very careful while we’re doing the episode. But he’s in his new Jeep, right, with the cool… 

Shaun:  No, I’m in my new truck. I got an F150, trying to be like Ron.

Ron:  Aw, that’s sweet dude. That’s sweet. I thought I recognized the double a sunroof  there.

Shaun:  Yeah.

Ron:  Nice. I love it, dude. Those are awesome trucks. Obviously. I should get some  kind of a promotional thing from Ford for that, right? 

Shaun:  I still have the Jeep, but I leave it in the garage with the top off. That way when the weather is nice, I can just take off and when the weather is not so nice, I can jump in the truck and don’t have to worry about putting the top on. 

Ron:  Love it. Love it. Well. So Shaun, I asked Shaun to come back because I don’t think anybody really knows, but Shaun and I have been discussing something for what’s it been like a couple of years, Shaun? 

Shaun:  Two years. Yeah.

Ron:  I mean we’ve been back and forth with trying to figure out what, if anything, we wanted to do with some of the things that we’ve already talked about on the show. And man, we went down to Jacksonville, Florida and we came out of a three days in all day meetings with something very, very special. And so anyway, I brought Shaun back to talk to you about what this is because man, super cool, what we’re putting together and this is a little different podcast because I’m actually going to invite you guys to sign up and come to this. Shaun, tell everybody what we’ve put together. This is really, really cool. 

Shaun:  Well for those of you that heard the last podcast, we talked a lot about business vision, a little bit about how to create it, and this is the process that I’ve been taking my high level leadership board room members here, which Ron obviously you know, if any of you heard the message, Ron is a member of the leadership order of mastermind and coaching groups that I run. So I’ve been taking people through this process now for the last couple of years. Matter of fact, for the last 10 years I’ve been helping people live their personal vision, but more specifically in the last two years, it’s really narrowed down to how does that look in business? How can your business benefit by leading your business, not just from the position of how am I going to make the most money, but how am I going to actually live my business vision? 

Shaun:  And so when you do this, the money tends to follow. And something else that tends to follow which is where you actually like your business. In the 11 years that I’ve been coaching, I’ve coached a lot of people that know how to make a lot of money. But it’s interesting to me how few of them wake up Monday morning just, I mean, crazy excited to get out of bed. And the ones that do are the people who’ve gone through this process of creating business vision. So instead of just making decisions from what’s going to make me the most money, they make a decision… certainly that’s a filter, but that’s a filter in, it’s like four or five filters down the line. The first filter should be, does this new idea or this business or this piece of the business that I’m doing every day, does this fit my overall vision for what I want my overall life to look like? 

Shaun:  And so what we’ve found is, is that when they have both of these sort of in harmony as corny as that sounds, but you not only have a business that makes more money than you ever thought possible, but you actually love it. And so very, very few people do this. So Ron and I got together with another gentleman named Craig Fewer. We spent a few days down in Florida together and we started thinking, why don’t we turn this into something instead of something  I’ve just been teaching people on a one on one basis; or in a very small group setting. Why don’t we turn this into an actual event where we bring people in. We turn this into an actual workshop where you, it’s not like a regular seminar environment where you come in and just hear a guy speaks for three days. This is going to be a workshop where we bring people in for three days and we do the work required to build your business this way from the start. And so if you don’t have a business right now, then you build it that way from scratch.

Shaun:  If you do have a business, you can start to tweak some of what you’re doing, preferably in a way that honors everything in your business vision. But we do it right there at the event. And so for three days that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to come in and teach you how to do this. We’ve got about 12 of my top students are from around the country. Some of these people, like Ron, for example, I know you’ve flipped close to 800 if not right at 800 houses in a year. We’ve got guys coming in that do $15 to $20 million a year in revenue, and all of the people that we are bringing in are just regular people. They’re like you and I that started with nothing. And they’ve built their business around their vision to where everybody that I’m bringing in to speak, they love what they do today.

Shaun:  They’re very specific with what they do, and they’re also specific with what they won’t do anymore, but they’re staying in a lane that they’ve designed just for them. And so there’s just gonna be a little bit different than what you’re going to design. But the purpose of you coming to the summit is to come design your business over the course of three days in a way that honors your vision. So we’ve got to create your vision. We’re going to come up with a game plan on getting there. We’ve got to figure out what obstacles are in the way or roadblocks are in the way of you being able to do that. And the goal is for us to do all of that in three days where you leave there with your vision solid, you’ll leave there with your plans solid, you know how you’re going to get there, and you’ve heard from a dozen people. You’ve got to hear their stories, not just, you know, me sitting up and speaking for three days. You’ve got to hear from a dozen people who have pulled this off and made it work also. So I am out of my mind excited about it cause I’m going to learn just as much as I think we’re sharing from some of the people who are sharing. 

Ron:  Yeah, I mean some of these people, like you said, I mean the quality of the individuals that are going to be in the room is unbelievable. In addition to that, the people who are signing up to be in the room or the quality of the people who are signing up to be in the room, also. I mean, so you talk about coming and hanging out with, you know, with people who are, who are better than you so that you can level up. This is going to be an excellent opportunity to do that. And I think the other thing, Shaun, too, is that I want to make sure that people understand that the 12 that are coming, it’s not like they all sat down before they started their business and knew that they should dream up a business  vision that worked for their life and that and that they just had this awesome straight line and that everything magically worked out. 

Ron:  Most people who are coming, because I know almost all of them, did it wrong first. Like we completely screwed this up. And then, you know, we met Shaun or someone who helped us figure out, oh my gosh, we can actually have this cool business, but we can also enjoy it. And oh my gosh, bonus, we can have a life at the same time. Right. The other thing I want everybody listening to understand, too, which you touched on, Shaun, is that this isn’t just for business owners who’ve got a big business. This is for people who want to start a business. This is for people who are in the corporate world who loathe their life. This is for, you know, people who have a small business, medium sized business, what most people consider a big business. And because these principles work on all of those levels. 

Shaun:  Yeah. Well let’s be clear on that. I mean, it’s your vision. And so my job is to help extract your vision from you during the event. But like my vision for how I run my business today is certainly different than it was five years ago. And it’s even different than Ron, what you’re doing. I mean, I have no desire to flip 800 houses in a year. My business right now is probably smaller than it’s been certainly in more than 10 years. And that’s by design. When I sat down and did my business vision, I restructured everything for myself two years ago and I got back to the heart of what we were, what I really wanted to do. So today, I literally have one part time assistant that works for me no more than 20 hours a week. I don’t let him work more than 20 hours a week. I want him to live his vision too. And that’s it. 

Shaun:  Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t have other help from time to time. I have a bookkeeper that does some things for me each month and so on. But I literally have one part time employee that works for me. It’s 20 hours a week. And I should mention I am more profitable today than I’ve ever been. I’m operating on an 83% profit margin to give you an idea. So my expenses are lower than they’ve ever been before. I have less overhead than I’ve ever had before. I have less responsibility than I’ve ever had before. And yet the income is still very, very good. And so now that doesn’t fit the vision of what some people want. Some people want to go crazy, build a huge organization, and I’ve helped many people do that too. So this is determined by your own vision. 

Shaun:  I’m not going to tell you what your vision is. What I am going to do with the event is help extract from you what that looks like. So I’m gonna ask you about a thousand questions, probably more. We’re going to answer those questions while we’re there in the room, and then you’re going to see different examples of other people who do this maybe even differently than how you want to do it, but you’re going to get little glimpses and nuggets and really important ways on how to structure things like that from all of them. I should mention this, too, we  have a dozen speakers coming in to share their piece of this message to help you take you through the journey. And I should mention, you know, this is not going to be the typical event that you’re used to where people come in and sell you stuff the whole time. 

Shaun:  I hate it when I go to learn from an event and it’s like this big pitch fest the whole time. So the 12 speakers that we have coming in are coming in out of the goodness of their heart. I should mention they are not getting paid to be there, which is why we were able to make those events so ridiculously cheap. They’re not getting paid to be there. They are coming in, flying in on their own dime, and they’re doing that out of the goodness of their heart because this message has impacted them so greatly now they feel a personal responsibility to help and impact other lives as well. And so this has never been done before. Right now we don’t ever have plans to do it again. And this is how we were able to keep the costs so low. Most of the time when you go to an inexpensive event, it’s because they’re selling you stuff the whole time. That is not the case here. The 12 selling speakers, I should say the 12 speakers, they’re not selling stuff. They’re not going to be pimping out products do the whole time. They’re going to be sharing good solid content of how they got from where they are, where they were, I should say, to where they are today. They’ve got some amazing stories. 

Ron:  Yeah. And I mean to go along with that, I think that it’s important that… The reason that they’re so passionate is not just because, at least for me, I’ll speak for me because I’m one of the ones that’s coming. And the reason that I’m coming is because yes, this has altered my life. Yes, I believe that what I’m going to share is going to impact other people. But the other reason is to counteract this ridiculous notion that’s being pushed all over social media and all over the internet that you have to kill yourself, destroy every relationship in your life, so that you can have a successful business, which is the biggest line of BS ever, ever, ever thrust on the American people. This is ridiculous. And I mean, every single day we see examples of people’s lives getting blown up. 

Ron:  I mean, you and I just had a personal friend who is going through this right now. And business owners get so trapped into their business and they get so headstrong into making this thing a success, by the way, that they’ve never even defined… They have no clue where they’re actually going to end up. They just put their heads down and plow forward and then they wake up 10, 15 years later and they’re getting a divorce. And everything they said they were doing this for is imploding all around them. And that actually, it pisses me off to the point where, and I think these other people, too, where somebody has to make a stand and say, you don’t have to do that if you want a $20 million business a year… Well, we have people who are coming that have that and have a life. And actually really don’t work that many hours. I mean, I know these guys and some of them work really, really hard and some of them have figured out how to have  people around them who let them do the part of the business that they love the most. Right? 

Shaun:  Yeah. You got it. You’re talking about specifically, his name is Gary Boomershine. He is just a wealth of knowledge. Great guy. And he of course has failed before he succeeded at this. He used to have a business that pretty much consumed every aspect of his life and, and all of that came crushing down in 2007 and 2008 when the market shifted. And so it’s one thing to have the personal aspects of your life crash down when you’ve also got some money behind you. It’s even worse when the personal and everything leaves and now you’re broke on top of it. The business that you were sacrificing, all those things for that you’re saying, I’m building it for my family, which of course that’s never the case. You know when you lose your family and then you lose the business too, it’s like, oh my gosh, I wasted all my time doing this. I now have nothing to show for my family and the relationship with my kids. I’ve got no time to do any of my hobbies, and that’s not what you want to do. 

Shaun:  So when Gary experienced some of this, which he’ll share his story at the event, but when he rebuilt everything, this time he said, I’m rebuilding it with my vision in mind. And then give me an idea, Gary, if I remember correctly, he does $15 to $18 million a year. He is the owner of realestateinvestor.com… Best domain I’ve ever heard, but he does this in a way that honors his vision. So to give you an idea what his schedule looks like today, he built… and by the way, he built it this way, you don’t just say, well, someday when it’s successful, then I’m going to get to… 

Ron:  Because it never, it never, ever works.

Shaun:  That’s right. Today, Gary is such a visionary for his organization. If you remember on the last podcast I talked about visionary, the engineers and implementers, and Gary has decided I am a visionary. That’s where my role is. That’s what I’m good at. So Gary is not allowed in his office until noon each day. And he does have staff. He has a pretty big organization, but his role is visionary and so he literally, his job is to go to the gym for two hours in the morning and then when he’s finished at the gym, his second job was to go swim in his pool for an hour or two each day. And some people look at that and go, what a complete waste of time. No, for a visionary, that’s the time that Gary needs to be able to think of the ideas that they’re going to implement in his business.

Shaun:  He’s not the implementer; he is not the engineer that’s going to figure out how all of it’s going to come together and work. He is the ideas guy and so he needs downtime like that in the morning, which is why he’s not allowed in the office until noon. When he has that time his business flourishes. Some of you think that’s a waste of time because that’s not working in the business. Well, Gary’s strength is not working in the business every day; it’s in working on his business. 

Shaun:  And by the way, that’s not the same prescription that I would give to everybody. Gary happens to be a visionary, but in his case, he’s sticking in his lane. Staying in his role. And because of that, he’s doing more business than he’s ever done in his life. I should mention with what seems like it’s easier than he’s ever done in his life. When you’re working in your zone and in your lane and you’re doing your area of gifting, that’s what happens. You make more money than you ever thought. It becomes easier to you than you ever thought. And all of that starts with creating the vision for what you want them to look like. And of course there’s some strategy that goes into that too, which is why we’re doing this and that. But that’s the kind of people who are going to be sharing with you.

Ron:  Yeah, and I was talking to Caleb the other day, two days ago who’s another of our buddies, and Caleb was saying, man, like I feel like I’m not doing anything, but there’s all these really good opportunities that are happening for me. And I’m thinking to myself, and I told him, I’m like, yeah dude, but if you were doing what you used to do, you wouldn’t even have… They would’ve still been there. It would have been around you and you never would have seen one of them, not one. 

Ron:  It’s amazing what happens when you get out of your own way and figure this out. Because when you have a little bit of time on your hands and you’re surrounding yourself with people who are also visionaries, then the opportunities that that just quote happen, it’s not magic. They were there all the time. You just didn’t have enough time to focus on them and see them before. That’s the reality. 

Shaun:  There’s another thing that happens, too, man, is that some people do see opportunities like that everywhere. And guess what they do? They try to pursue all of them because they’re opportunists, right? And so, you know, in Caleb’s case there was opportunity that he couldn’t see. But in most entrepreneurs case they see opportunity everywhere and they try to pursue all of those opportunities at once without having that vision crystal clear. It’s really hard to determine what to say no to, especially for an opportunist because an opportunist wants to say yes to everything. And pretty soon you find people that are working on, you know, 10, 12, 15 different things in their business and all of them may be going okay or more often than not, they all fail. But they have so many focuses and so many interests that they never excel in any one of them to the degree that they’re capable of because they say yes to everything.

Shaun:  So to me, the business vision is a tool that I use to determine what is it that I say yes to, what is it I say no to? Because I suck at saying no, but I suck because I see opportunity in everything. I want to say yes to all these opportunities. I mean there’s on any given month I have 10 different ideas of things that I could be doing to make money. You know, sometimes 50 ideas, if I say yes to all of those, none of them are going to work. And that sounds counterintuitive, but when  you say yes to the right things and no to the wrong things, the fewer things that you do say yes to, certainly in a business environment, end up making you way more money. And most people struggle with this, myself included.

Shaun:  I have to have that vision in front of me when I make decisions on what I’m going to pursue because if I don’t, oh my gosh, next thing you know, I’m all over the board. I’m pursuing all these different things. And I’ll tell you this, in the last two years I have had one focus, which is insane for entrepreneurs and opportunities to hear. I’m focused on one thing and that is the reason that my schedule is free. I took almost four months of vacation last year. I’ve never been able to do that in my entire life and we had a blast doing it. I have this big motor coach that we traveled all around the country with myself and my family, took multiple trips. That wasn’t just one four month trip. We took lots of week trips and then certain couple two week trips and so on. 

Shaun:  And I love my business, I love what I do, but I also love taking those trips, and I never built a business that will be able to do that before because I had 15 different things going on. Now I have one thing going on. I told you my expenses went way down, my profit margins went way up and I was able to make more money than ever. And I built it with the ability to have free time to take those trips and have fun. So there is a point in which you get to do it all, but it starts with coming and spending three days with us so we can say how to do this. I know that sounds ridiculous, but if you’ll come spend three days with us, we will take you through this process. You’ll have the process done while you’re at the event and you’ll leave there with a strategy that you need to pull this off.

Shaun:  And it may not happen, you know, the week after you get home. But if you put this in front of you, this document on a regular basis and you work a little bit towards it each time, I got there way faster than I thought I was ever going to get there and what I thought was going to be impossible just a couple of years ago, I’m living it today. And I’m not the only guy. I’m coming to share 12 other examples and 12 other speakers who are going to share their stories. And by the way, these aren’t professional speakers. These are regular people. They’re going to share their stories and I’ve got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other examples. 

Ron:  Yeah. This is gonna… I’m so excited about this. No, I mean you guys can probably tell by the rapid speech that comes out of my mouth, right, that I’m super pumped about this, but I’m really, really excited and I am truly excited for everyone else. I really am because as Shaun said, I mean this thing is so inexpensive. Nobody’s making a one-million bucks off of this thing. We hope we can cover our costs. We really want to get this message out. Everyone involved, all 12 speakers, there’s even more people who are involved in actually helping pull the event off that aren’t going to be out of the state. I mean, there are  dozens and dozens and dozens of people who volunteered to do this. No one is getting paid. 

Ron:  We want to counteract this ridiculous messages out there and help people understand that you can actually do this. That you don’t have to do what everybody’s telling you, but that you can have a really enjoyable, fun, profitable business and at the same time not make it a miserable experience for the rest of the people in your life and for yourself. This is an absolute game changer and I’m super excited to get everybody. If you can come, you should come. If you can’t come, you should figure out how you can come. 

Shaun:  Well, you know, it’s interesting you say that because every time I have done something like this in the past, and I should mention it’s been two years since I’ve done really an event of any kind and we used to sell out those three day events I used to do. This is the first time we have ever done one wrapped around the business vision. And every time I’ve done an event like this in the past, there’s always somebody that says, man, I would love to come. You know, I’m a single mom and I can’t find a sitter or I would love to come, or my businesses is too busy already. All of those reasons that you can’t come are the reasons that you’ve got to come. Now that sounds a little silly, but if you can’t afford to take three days away from your business, you don’t have a business. You have a crappy business. 

Ron:  You have a job.

Shaun:  If you can’t… That’s right. If you can’t spend three days away from work on yourself and work on your business a little bit, that is a clear indicator of why you need to be there. If you can’t figure out somebody else to watch the kids, I get it. I have three kids as well. It is not easy finding somebody to watch the kids. That’s why I need to be there as well, because the only way I’m gonna learn how to build a business that allows me to do fun stuff like this, is if I design it that way from scratch. So you got to come hear from people who’ve already put that into place, and then you got to design it. We have a video crew coming in. We’ve got sound and lights and all kinds of really fun stuff to make the event a lot of fun, but it’s different watching a video at home than being there and engrossed in it and having it done in three days. 

Shaun:  My goal for you is to get there, design your business. I’m going to take you through the whole step. I’m going to actually extract it from some of you there from stage. You see exactly how I’ve been doing this. By the way, I should mention, I’ve been doing this for my students, but those people will pay $23,000, $22,000 for me to extract their vision from them. This is what they pay in their first year. And I’m going to take you guys through this exact same process that they paid $22,000 for, and you’re going to do it right there in the room, and you’re going to go do it for less than 500 bucks if you follow Ron’s  coupon codes and the things that he’s gonna offer here on this page somewhere. 

Shaun:  So you can’t beat it. And it’s not going to be done again, we don’t have any plans to duplicate this process. It takes a lot of work to put together these speakers. People are coming in from all over the country in different areas of the world. And you get one shot to do it. It’s March 12th through 14th, right here in St. Louis and we’ll put the details in the page. 

Ron:  Yeah, I’m going to put them right below. It’ll be below in the show notes and it will also be in on my YouTube channel. Man, I look forward to seeing as many of you as have the creativity to make it happen. Because that’s really all it takes. I think Shaun’s, I think I heard an example, somebody was telling Shaun that they couldn’t make the dates work and he said, if I told you I was going to give you the winning ticket to the lottery, would you figure out how to get to St. Louis? And they were like, of course I would. That’s a stupid question. Well, in the business world and as far as life goes and just the ability to live the life that you want, this is the lottery. 

Ron:  I feel like sometimes when I’m sitting out in my hot tub listening to the waterfall flow into the pool in the evening and you know, it’s still 60 degrees while the rest of you are freezing your butts off, I sometimes feel like I have hit the lottery. Especially the family time, the personal time: lottery. And it’s possible for anybody to do it. So Shaun, thank you for taking some time and driving safely so we didn’t have to see your death on my podcast. And man, I look forward to seeing you in a few days. I’m headed out to the leadership boardroom where we’re all gonna meet and go over our visions and make sure that we’re living them and get help from each other. And I look forward to seeing all of you in March; March 12th through the 14th, right, Shaun?

Shaun:  You got it, man. Last thing I’ll say about that lottery comment that you just said, the reason I asked that question of people is to find out what their priorities are. And when someone says, I can’t make it away for three days to work on myself, but I can make it three days to pick up a lottery check, all that means to me is I haven’t done a good enough job convincing them of why it’s so important for them to be there. I hope I’m giving you a little bit of light on why it’s so important to be there, but there’s no way I can describe to you the benefits of this until you come. So here’s what I will tell you, last thing and then we’ll go: for anybody that ends up coming to this… And then first of all, we made it cheap enough where it’s a no-brainer. I don’t want finances to be a reason why you can’t come. 

Shaun:  Second piece of that is for those of you that are higher level experienced business owners, I don’t want price to deter you. Whether or not there’s value there because you kept it cheap. So everybody can benefit from this. But don’t  mistake cheap or inexpensive for non-value. This is the best of the best of the best that I’ve learned in the last 11 years in coaching some of the highest level entrepreneurs in the country and I’m sharing all of it here and so are the other 12 guests that we have coming. So I don’t want any of these things being excused, okay? You can find an excuse to not live a life that you want to live or you can just suck it up and get there no matter what. And if for some reason it’s not the best event that you’ve ever attended on earth, good Lord, I’ll refund your money; we’re not doing this to make a zillion dollars. I’m trying to cover costs and change some lives in the process. So that’s my guarantee that you get there if it’s not the best event, literally that you’ve ever attended, period, I don’t want your money. 

Ron:  I love it. I love it. Well, Shaun, thank you so much for joining us again. Thank you all for listening. If you… Whether you like the podcast or not, just hit the freaking like button because it’s the right thing to do, right? Share this with your friends and don’t keep us a secret man. Pass this thing along and especially this episode because it can help out a lot of people. This was life altering for me three years ago and so man, thanks again Shaun. Thank you everybody and we’ll talk to you next week.

Shaun:  See you soon, guys.

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