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Welcome back to the Business with Beers podcast, your home for daily episodes Monday through Friday to help you build an eight figure business. My name is Brian Beers. If you're new here, over the last 10 years, since I've owned franchises, I've built a company that does over $50 million a year. And now I help other people build eight figure businesses. So today I want to talk about a couple things, but the first, let's think about the environment that we're in. It's tough out there, right? Right now gas prices are near five bucks a gallon. Prices are going up, oil's going up, there's the war, there's AI threatening to steal jobs, there's inflation, right? There's so much going on right now. And it's very easy for a lot of people to look at everything and be like, this is proof, right? This is proof right here that I can't grow, that the system's holding me back, that I can't do this and I can't do that and everyone's against me, right? Why does this happen to me? It's always unfair. They view everything through the world in a very negative way and everything is everyone else's fault. And maybe that's an extreme, but there's people that fall in that spectrum, right? And then there's another subset of people, very small, very small. Probably you though, if you're listening to this is. And you think you're in the same environment, right? You have the same constraints, but your approach is different. Your approach is what can I, what constraints can I solve for to win in this environment? Because there will be opportunities, the chips are going to fall. Like there are going to be people who are lose. Yeah, that sucks. But there's also going to be some people who massively win no matter what happens, right? You just look through time and no matter what has happened to the dawn of time, there are winners and losers. And I can guarantee that the winners are the ones who saw opportunity, found opportunity in whatever situation they were in. And it doesn't come down to strategy. And this is what people get wrong all the time. People think it's all strategy, strategy, strategy, strategy, playbooks, tools like this is what I need, I need the next best thing, right? But it's really is reversed. Tony Robbins claims it's like 20% strategy and 80% is mindset, which is like the way you see the world, the way you think about problems, right? 20% strategy plus 80%, that's equal success. Most people get this reversed and I mean it's true. Think about your phone right now. On our phones we literally could do anything we want with AI. We could build anything. We can get any amount of data or information. And yeah, some of it's a little silly and some of it's maybe not totally accurate, but we have way, way more than we did even like two years ago, let alone five or ten or a hundred years. We have no limit on the access to information and the strategies that are people sharing of success and finding your path. And like, I mean even me, like I have, you know, I've scaled my company. We'll do 55, 60 million dollars in revenue this year. And I could literally give you my playbook step by step by step. And I mean I actually do inside eight figure franchisee. Like I've documented a ton of, of the exact systems and processes that I use to build my company, right? Acquisition, how we identify acquisitions, how we negotiate seller financing, how we fund things, how we attract people, how we create culture, how we sell, how we get leads, how we approach problems. Like every single tool that you can imagine, I literally hand it to people. And the problem is even if you get all that, if you don't know what to do with it or you don't see the world like the right way, I could say it's great to read. You're like, wow, this is really cool. I wish someday this could work for me versus you say this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to go find a way to execute this in this environment no matter what. That's a mindset thing. And a lot of it just comes down to when you face a problem, how do you respond to it. And you know, years ago, for example, like your best manager quits, right? A guy that's making huge profit for your company, top 10% profit quits, right? And goes to work for a competitor, you can't get him back. You try all these things, you're upset about it, why does this keep happening to me? Why do they steal my people? Blah blah, blah. But and you can be mad and then you move on, you hire somebody else, right? And then maybe you put in some things so that doesn't happen again or you try, maybe you have to wait. Maybe if they're like way, way overpay, possibly, I don't know. The approach that I've taken, cause this has happened to me like a couple years ago is we get to the bottom of it and what we find out is yeah, we're mad, yeah, we try to save it but at the end it doesn't work and we find out, well, what happened? What can I learn from this? That's a really important question. You have a negative event, something bad, something quits, you lose money, like whatever it is, right? What can I learn from this? And so we realized in this process that this guy had a specific multiple problems with his direct superior. And all of them, like he had promised some things, days off, additional pay, whatever it was, and he was just getting the run around, he wasn't getting answered. And he thought that like it, you know, that the, that the company didn't care and that he just like, you know, I guess we didn't want him. Cause we didn't care about addressing these things. But to us or to this guy's superior, none of those issues, none of the things he wanted were like crazy. Like we would have happily given all of it, right? But the problem was it never got to us because he respected the chain of command and felt that like if a message were to be passed up, it would be passed up. And it clearly wasn't. And so we learned the system was like, okay, well we need to fix that. A, we need to fix, to make sure these superior people know, like, if your key person has a problem, you fix it. You don't just brush it under the rug. Like, that's a, that's a problem. We also added skip level meetings. So now we have a direct line of communication occasionally to skip a superior from, you know, me to a district manager, from our COO to a store manager, from a district manager to a tech. Right? We skip the person in between in this like, chain of command. And that allows us just to ensure that we have all lines of communication. There's transparency and there's nothing that's like, you know, no issues that are going to boil into losing some of your best people. So bad situation. What can I learn? We put these systems into place, all right. And so the same thing goes to approaching a deal, right? So, you know, inside a figure franchisee guys are bringing me deals every, almost every week. And there's this question that I always want to ask, which is like you have this, like, let's say you have a problem or actually this case there's a deal. So it's a deal that he's looking at and he's working on a, it's another acquisition. And the question was around negotiation strategy. How should I try to negotiate and structure this deal with seller financing and earnouts and like these different things, which is a great, great Thing like, you gotta have like the tactics and there are definitely some things that work better than the others. But then there's other bidders of this deal too, right? He's not the only one. And so my question to him was, how bad do you want this deal? Like, does it really fit into your thing? And if, let's say you're trying to get $20,000 or $30,000 cheaper, like, whatever it is, would you be upset if you lost this deal over 20 or $30,000 that was financed too? So it wasn't even additional cash out of pocket. It was like a couple more months of payments in years from now, would you be upset over this deal? And if the answer is yes, like, yeah, I would be pissed off if I lost this deal. Like, it reframes then how you go about the negotiation because you don't want to go at it like you're being a super cheapskate and you're a hard line negotiator. And then all of a sudden you lose the deal and over 20 grand that was seller financed over eight years or something, and you're like, now you just lost the opportunity for that location. That's putting another, I don't know, 100 grand, 150 grand, 200 grand in your pocket a year over $20,000, right? So sometimes that's the approach too, where again, like we're sometimes so focused on the technical side of it that we lose sight of the bigger picture, which is like the mindset of, do I really want this deal? Would I be upset if I lost this deal? And it's the reverse too. So say someone brings you something and you're on the fence on it. You kind of want to do the deal. You think it fits it, but you're scared. You're like, I don't know if I can make this work. I don't want to lose money. I don't want to be worse off than I am today. And the questioning that I go through is this one, which is, what would I need to believe to be true in order to do this deal? What would I need to believe to be true to do this deal? So, for example, this happened to me like literally 2021. I approached another franchisee to buy one location of his that was in Philadelphia area. And he owned seven total, but his other six were in New Jersey, about an hour and a half away from me. And he said, you know, instead of buying my one store, why don't you buy all seven? Like, just take me out completely. And at the time I was like, I don't know if I want to do this. Like, I've never bought or run stores that far away. Like, all of my success is like, I'm hands on, like, I'm not going to be able to do this. And I went through that framework where I asked myself, what would I need to believe to be true for me to do this deal? And I thought, all right, I think I'm successful because I am a hands on owner. I am in the stores every day. I have a tight process. I'm good at hiring people, I'm good at training people. I'm good at like creating a customer experience. And I don't want. I'm also proud and I'm competitive, but I'm proud of the results that my stores have. And I'm competitive. Like, I don't want a bunch of loser stores just to have more stores. Like, I want every store to do well. And otherwise it creates this stress. And I'm afraid that if they don't have good process and it creates all the stress and now it's stealing cash out of my other business to pay for that business. Right? Like those are the fears, right? Has that ever spun in your head? Probably. And so then I asked myself, well, what would I need to believe true to this, do this deal? And it came down to, okay, I, I know that the actions that I take are what makes it successful. Hiring great people, holding them accountable, following a system that we know is proven. And yes, I can't be there five days a week, but could I find somebody else who's 80% as good as me at those specific things? Hiring people, holding them accountable, following a process in those stores, right? They don't have to be good at 80% as good as me and everything else that I do, but in those specific categories. And yeah, I was like, listen, there's guys that run, there's corporations that run thousands of, you know, Chipotle's, Starbucks, right? Firestone. Like, there's, there's lots and lots of companies that have a thousand, two thousand locations and they run successful businesses remotely. They have similar systems, right? And, and even looking at other franchisees, there's guys that have 100 locations, 200, 300, and like, they figured it out. And so if they can do it, why can't I? Like, if that's all it takes. And so I ended up doing the deal. We ended up finding obviously now like a great person to start. Now we have a whole team. But there was that continued process of what Can I learn from this? How do I get better? So that's been a great one that I've used to. When you face one is to ask yourself, what do I need to believe to be true? And then you can kind of isolate your fears that you have of why you're not moving forward and then just figure out, well, what would I need to overcome this fear? For me, it was like, confidence in my ability to find somebody in that market who could execute at 80% of the level that I would. And I believed I could find that person, and I did multiple times now. So then, oh, yeah, by the way, once we unlocked that fear and didn't have that fear anymore, got another opportunity, another hour and a half away. So same distance, another five stores the next year. And that wasn't even. There wasn't even a flicker of fear because I knew I did it once, I could do it again. It was just like picking up weights, riding a bike. It was no big deal. So these things you gain, they stack on top of each other. A couple questions here, if you want to arm yourself. By the way, what am I avoiding? This is a great question. What decision am I avoiding? What conversation am I avoiding? What's an uncomfortable situation or an email I have to respond to? Or just, like, something that, like, is on your mind and it's weighing on you, and it's like, man, I just gotta, like, why am I avoiding this? What's the fear? Why don't I just do it? Do I not want to do it? Should somebody else be doing it? Is there, like, a better system that I could put in place to do it? And so that one, for me, I'm asking all the time, and if I feel that there's, like, friction, I feel things are heavy or things are, like, you know, like, weighing on me more than they should, then I'm attacking those to be like, all right, why do I feel this? Why do I do this? Do I need to continue to do this? And again, that's not like, oh, I need a better, like, AI system to organize my email and, like, handle all this, like, bullshit things that I don't want to do. No, the system is, I need to figure out how to remove myself out of this, like, thing so I don't even have to think about it. Right? And so that's a big one. And then I also constantly think about this idea of, like, who's the person that I want to become? How do I want to spend my time? What are the challenges that I want to be facing? Why aren't I facing them today? And you know, for a lot of people, like one of the exercises we're doing now inside of eight Figure is I want to help people map out a three year roadmap to say, where are you at now? Where do you want to be in three years? Right? And just like this evolution of picture yourself in three years from now, like I did the 10 year exercise, if you listen to that podcast. But like even three years from now, right, that's all along the way. And it's like, what's the gap from here to where you want to be? And can we accelerate that? What if instead of three years from now, you could realize that world, that income, that freedom, that sense of culture and fun? What if we could shorten that timeline and we could achieve that in 12 months? Would that be worth it to you? Probably. I would love to. I have big goals. I would love to do that. And so now I'm thinking of where do I want to be three years and then boom. How do I just compress the timeline and then move forward with it? And so success. 80% mindset. Mindset in terms of how you view the world, the way you view it, how can you find your competitive advantage, how can you exploit it in a good way? And 20% strategy. That's the tools, the AIs, the CRMs, the worksheets and all the other crap. But you got to think about it, right? Then you can execute hard. And if you want my help in doing any of this, then there's a link. It says, send me a text. You could shoot me a text, tell me about yourself. And if you're interested in joining eight figure, you want my help. I'm working with a few people per month. We're adding to the program here. And my number one goal is helping them. You build an eight figure business. So I'll see you tomorrow. Cheers.