Living Your Legacy with Rudy Mawer

Episode: The Key To Replicating Success Many Times
Guest: Chris Mullins
Date: September 1, 2025

Overview

In this engaging episode of Living Your Legacy, host Rudy Mawer sits down with US Navy veteran and serial entrepreneur Chris Mullins. Known for building multiple global brands that have generated over $60 million in revenue, Chris shares his journey from personal loss to repeated business success. The discussion dives into the lessons of resilience, mindset, scaling across industries, and the ethos required not just to start, but to replicate and multiply success. Listeners will hear not only business tactics, but raw stories of overcoming adversity, shifting mindsets, and leaving a legacy that goes beyond profit.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Real Challenge: Replicating Success

• Replication vs. One-time Wins
  • Chris and Rudy agree: building one successful business is hard, doing it several times is rare and fascinating.
  • “Statistically, the hardest thing is going from zero sales to $100,000 in sales, let alone $1 million in revenue.” (Chris, 02:40)
• Channeling Adversity into Drive
  • Chris explains how significant loss in his personal life—losing his father at 13 and many friends—was the fuel for his comebacks, paralleling business comebacks to overcoming personal tragedy.
  • “Business is never going to fail me unless I fail the business.” (Chris, 03:29)

2. Turning Setbacks into Setups

• Victimhood vs. Victory Mindset
  • Both men reflect on the pivotal decision all legacy builders face: dwell on suffering or use it as a catalyst for change.
  • “A setback is a setup for a comeback.” (Host quoting Les Brown, 03:35)
• Processing Failure Fast
  • Success comes from being able to handle setbacks quickly—move on in 10 seconds instead of days or weeks as unsuccessful people do.
  • “You have to be good at detoxing that stuff quick or you die.” (Host, 07:15)
• Compartmentalizing Loss
  • Chris describes a process of taking pain and channeling it into working harder and learning not to repeat the same mistakes in business.

3. The DJ Journey: From Free Gigs to Five Figures

• Evolution from Hobby to Enterprise
  • Chris’s first million-dollar business was as a DJ, shifting focus from party gigs to high-paying weddings and events.
  • Mindset shake-up: pricing himself higher led to more perceived value and more business.
  • "When I said, you know what, screw it, I’m raising my prices... Ironically enough, more events picked up." (Chris, 09:50)
• Perception of Value
  • Social experiment: higher price points create greater demand via perceived exclusivity.
  • “There was this shoe shop… it was like $50 shoes, but they designed the store to look like Louis Vuitton… they sold for $1,000 and they were busy all day.” (Host, 10:19)
  • “If your schedule is so full right now, raise your prices till it evens out.” (Chris, 10:51)

4. Multiple Streams: Brands, Special Effects, and Opportunistic Pivots

• Continual Reinvention
  • After DJing, Chris ventured into special effects (Cryo FX), consulting, price-warring a competitor with a throwaway brand, and even selling sanitizer dispensers during COVID.
  • Rapid execution and willingness to test—without analysis paralysis—brought unexpected wins.
  • “The sanitized business...was a three hour case study. Let’s just see what happens… You don’t know what’s like two steps ahead of you until you take two steps.” (Chris, 12:15–12:53)
• Fail Fast, Win Fast
  • Chris and Rudy describe launching offers or products almost impulsively, rapidly iterating, rather than getting stuck in overplanning.

5. Scaling: Breaking Past the Plateau

• Lessons on Scaling Beyond $1 Million
  • The true barrier to big business is scaling operations—shifting from “all marketing” to seamless team communication and systems.
  • “At the very foundational level, if you have this pyramid, the foundation is communication and it’s behavior.” (Chris, 16:40)
  • Confidence and behavioral psychology are crucial at team and customer levels.
  • “We lack confidence because we just don’t understand. Confidence and communication is what I’m a huge proponent of. That’s what really takes it to the next step.” (Chris, 17:31)
• Profitability > Revenue Hype
  • Chris and Rudy caution against revenues as a vanity metric, emphasizing margins and true profitability.
  • “If you got revenues of that, but your margins are horrible, you’re literally working just to move shit around the room.” (Chris, 17:51)

6. The Mission Now: Building Community & Legacy

• Founders Field Day Newsletter & Community
  • Chris’s current focus is on empowerment—sharing two decades of hard-won lessons via a free founder’s newsletter, aimed at helping others scale confidently and communicate better.
  • “The cycle for me… the past doesn’t define me… How do I format all of that and put it into something that I can give back?” (Chris, 14:25)
• Identifying Problems to Buy and Fix
  • Chris also seeks to acquire businesses stuck at operational/marketing bottlenecks, leveraging his systems to turn them around.

7. Big Picture: Defining and Building Legacy

• Legacy as Ripple Effect
  • For Chris, legacy is about inspiring an emotional story in others that continues to spread—doing “dope shit that people will talk about in the future.”
  • “Legacy to me means evoking a story created by another person that will, when told, evokes emotion in even more people… it’s cyclical.” (Chris, 18:54)
• Winning the Game, Not Chasing the Money
  • Both agree that once basic needs and early goals are met, the game of business, helping others, and building something lasting far outweigh mere income.
  • “The main reason the car is still to go A to B. Now, if it has leather seats and seat warmers and looks good to me, that’s like a side thing.” (Host, 19:31)

8. Practical Advice for Aspiring Legacy Builders

• Master Your Product, But Speak Simply
  • “Focus on the technical aspect of your product and knowing it inside and out for you, but do not share that necessarily with the customer. At the end of the day, the customer doesn’t care about that.” (Chris, 22:43)
  • Use stories, taglines, and outcomes, not technical jargon.
  • “Craft the better story about your brand, about your product… be a media company first… we are all fighting for the story, for the attention.” (Chris, 23:07–23:27)
• Iterate—Sprint, Operate, Maintain
  • “Be completely agile. Sprint, Operate. Sprint, Operate. Sprint, Maintenance. Then you’re going to fall in the wayside and somebody else is going to come up.” (Chris, 23:27)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Adversity:
  • “Where there’s pain, there’s this weird addiction. And it’s the same with business.” (Chris, 05:32)
• On Pricing and Value:
  • “When I said, you know what, screw it, I’m raising my prices. I want to value myself more… more events picked up.” (Chris, 09:50)
• On Business Focus:
  • “Be a media company first. You do the loan second.” (Chris, 23:27)
• On Outcome-Focused Marketing:
  • “Taglines, jingles, and stories…The better story about your brand… the better.” (Chris, 23:07)
  • “Sell the outcome. People want the outcomes.” (Chris, 24:56)
• On Defining Legacy:
  • “Success is defined by how you feel when you’re alone.” (Chris, 19:30)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:40] – Chris on replicating the hardest sales transitions
• [03:35] – The common trend: suffering precedes legacy
• [06:41] – Moving quickly past setbacks in business
• [09:20] – Turning DJing into seven-figure business
• [10:19] – Perception of value and the $1000 shoe experiment
• [12:15] – Launching new brands and “seeing what happens”
• [14:25] – Founders Field Day and giving back
• [16:40] – Scaling beyond $1 million: communication and confidence
• [18:54] – What legacy means to Chris
• [22:43] – Tips for aspiring entrepreneurs: focus on the outcome
• [23:27] – Being a media company and agile operator

Find Chris Mullins Online

• Website: kriskraze.com
• Instagram: @chriscraze / @djkrazyk
• Facebook: TheChrisCrase

For anyone seeking inspiration, mindset shifts, and tactical takeaways for building multiple successful ventures—and a meaningful legacy—this episode delivers wisdom, humor, and practical frameworks from a true serial entrepreneur.