Josh (0:05)

Wake up. Your competition is asleep. It's you against the world. And if you want to win, we need to get a few things straight. Your business is a mental war. Your success is a mental war. And making money is a game. And the game of money starts in your mind. This podcast exists to help you weaponize your brain through advanced marketing mindset and money concepts. To have what others don't, you need to know what others won't. Your future fortune awaits. Welcome to the War Plan podcast. Hey, my friend. Welcome to the War Plan podcast. Josh here. I'm going to share a few parts of my past, a little bit of the backstory. We have a lot of new listeners to this and maybe you've heard I, you know, I've built and sold four companies. I've done some magical things. Soldiers, I don't know exactly, but way over $20 million, just worth of stuff on the Internet the last few years. But before that it was a service company, a local business. I grew a window cleaning business to like $186,000 a month. And it was this big deal because I came from nothing and I built this reputation with some window cleaners on an online forum and started helping them. And all these things happened. But I want to fill in some of the details because it's not as fancy as you think for me right now. And it was nowhere near as easy as you might think for me back then. And I think and basically encourage you. And I want to share some of the epiphanies I've learned when I was really young. I'll call that my shy, scared season of life. I'm definitely an introvert. Was then too, but was more timid. And I used to get beat up every day by a bully when I was in elementary school. And so my parents got fed up with it and they enrolled me in karate class. When I went to, it was actually American kickboxing, which sounds fancier. It's basically karate, right? I go there, I work hard. I loved it. Really, really well at it. I excelled at it. I don't know why, but I did. And I started winning these tournaments and I built up confidence and, you know, I had a little more bravado. And then by the time I was going into middle school, I was fighting a lot and I moved into my cocky, arrogant phase. When I met my wife, it was actually in fifth grade when we first met each other, and she did not like me at all. We didn't start liking each other until 10th grade, but she thought I was like this bully. And the truth is, I was not a bully, just to be clear. But I would purposely bully bullies because I was overcorrecting for all the fear that I had when I was little. And now that I could fight, I would go looking for it. So I did. I did that. I had a lot of rage right now. In high school, I started delivering pizzas. I started dating Ashley, who's my wife now, and my football coach also owned the pizza store that I worked at. And he was the first entrepreneur I ever met. We got married at 20 years old, pretty young. Just after high school, a couple years after high school. And I delivered pizzas. But I would drive around listening to cassette tapes of, like, Robert Kiyosaki and Tony Robbins and stuff like that because I was so inspired by my one entrepreneur mentor, whose name was Lowell, that I just got obsessed with it. I read Rich Dad, Poor dad even before I graduated high school because he had recommended it to me. And I was also in a band. We don't have to talk much about that. Okay. But our band was pretty good. We got offered a record contract with Universal Music Group when I was 20 and on my honeymoon with Ashley. We actually went to Nashville, Tennessee, for our honeymoon. And we got wind and dined by A and R reps from Universal Music Group. And it was like a legit thing. Ended up not quite happening, but it took about six months. We had entertainment attorneys. I recorded in private studios in Nashville. There's. That was a whole part of my life. But when it didn't happen, I just focused on my family and making money. That's when I got involved in window cleaning. Now, here's the thing. I was shy, scared Josh. Then I became cocky, arrogant Josh. I'm about to go into shame and guilt, Josh. Okay. Because here's the reality. In high school, I was the quarterback of the football team. I was confident. I could fight. I was making money. In high school. I was in great shape in high school, I was in a band. They would play our songs on the radio. People thought I was cool. I was prom king in high school. I thought I was really something, let me tell you. But I wasn't. And then I graduated. And then you realize that all of that stuff meant less than nothing. And now, Josh, you're a pizza guy that lives in a trailer park, and you're married. And at around this time, too, I started drinking a lot. I just liked it. It tasted so good. It made me feel good. Because I'm a thinker. I live in my head Maybe you can relate. It's a way to downshift my brain, right? So I'd be drinking beer and whatever, and it gradually escalated, escalated, escalated. We ended up filing bankruptcy in our very early twenties to get out of that trailer park. And I had a lot of guilt and shame around that. You know, I was cleaning windows, but not running it like a real business because I just didn't have the maturity and the discipline. And so I ended up getting a job at a bank, which was kind of a big deal. And the only reason I got that job is because my same football coach, Lowell, that owned the pizza store, he hooked me up with a job at Chase Bank. And I would sit in my cubicle at Chase bank, and about 18 months went by, and it felt like I was dying inside because I had been introduced to this entrepreneur idea, but I'd also fumbled the football, metaphorically, with my window cleaning venture because I was lazy and I didn't know anything. I didn't know any of the tactical how to do anything part. I just knew that these other people did stuff. And I. I would go home and drink and overthink things and live in my introvert head and not do anything. Well, I'm sitting at this cubicle with Chase Bank. I called that job the soul sucker 9000, and I finally get the courage to quit. And the reason I quit was because I was going to start my business back up, and I was going to take it really serious this time. You know, we were going to have a baby, and it was going to be Josh 2.0. The problem was is that I carried the shame, guilt phase right into the new business again, kept drinking. I did work way harder, and we survived and we got a little bit of traction, but it took two and a half years, the second time I started cleaning windows to really have any big epiphanies. And then I finally did. I started understanding systems. I got obsessed. I turned my company around. The thing grew really, really fast. And at this time, my marriage was falling apart, but my business was actually starting to work. And Ashley and I share this story when we speak together sometimes because, you know, no amount of success in business can compensate for failure in the home, number one. But I just see so much pain with people. You know, people have all these secret things going on. You know, their wife and them feel like roommates and they're trying to build a business or they're hitting good revenue numbers in their business, but they actually have absolutely crippling debt. That's embarrassing. And, you know, it's a lot. Business is hard, marriage is hard, parenting is hard. All of it's hard. Especially when you're drinking and you're not living right. Now. Here's the other part of my story is I've known Jesus my whole life. There's one thing my mama introduced me to. It was God my whole life. I mean, I had encounters, I got healed when I was a kid. I had a miraculous, crazy, impossible healing. I saw a lot of crazy things. I saw some demonic stuff growing up, deliverances with my own eyes, people flopping around on the ground. I saw a lot of crazy stuff. But I had just drifted away. Getting in the band, playing, thinking you're really cool, and then just feeling sorry for myself for years. Even through the entrepreneur part, I had gotten really kind of out of control. And I had this life changing moment where I was in my garage about to slam about six beers. I drink them real fast. And God talked to me. And here's the thing, God doesn't like talk to me. It's not a thing. I'm not one of these people that walks around saying, God, talk to me. But I'm telling you, God talked to me. I was by myself and went to open the mini fridge in my garage. And God said, stop it, I'm warning you. That's what I heard. And I heard it so clear. And I heard it so clear. I wasn't thinking about God. I wasn't thinking about anything. I was just like, do, do, do, do, do. Gonna go out here and do this thing. A lightning bolt, completely out of the blue. That's what he said. And I knew that, I knew that. I knew that. I knew that he said that to me. It was the first time I'd ever heard something like that from God. So clear. So here's the thing. It scared me so bad. I was shaking. My hands started shaking. And what I ended up doing, I didn't tell my wife for over a week. I didn't tell anybody for a long time. But I got on my face and I prayed to God and I said, God, okay, I'll obey you. But God, I don't think I can stop drinking. It feels impossible. But yes, my answer is yes, you tell me to stop. Because the thing is, when he said, stop it, I'm warning you, it was not in a mean tone at all. It was very warm, loving. But it still terrified me, if that makes sense. So as I'm sitting there laying on my face by myself in my bedroom, saying, God, yes, I'll quit. I'LL stop. I just don't think I can stop. So I want to say yes, but it's impossible that I can stop. And I'm having this schizophrenic breakdown here. In the middle of that prayer, I felt boom, boom. Right in the middle of me praying that I felt something leave my body. Leave. That's called deliverance. And this happened to me by myself, in private. And that freaked me out, too. Then I went to bed. Here's what's crazy. When I woke up the next day, it's as if I had never even had a sip of alcohol in my whole life, ever. It's like I had forgotten what it was. It wasn't hard at all to not drink. I didn't even want it. It was like I had never done it before. And what was crazy, this is a core memory for me. That's. It's important. I want to put it in the podcast because when that happened, my business started exploding. And it wasn't because I drank or didn't drink. I'm not religious like that. Okay? What it is, it's God leveling me up. It was me obeying a thing because he loves me. So I did that and my business exploded. Now, at the end of that part of my story, the shame, guilt story, right when I had this encounter with God that goes into my God training part of my life. I'll call it the God training part, where I became way more aware that I was being taught lessons, I was being given upgrades so that I could live into the purpose that God made me for. And so the business grew. I sold it to someone. I never even listed it for sale. I sold it for more money than it was worth to a person that I didn't know. And I never listed it for sale. It makes no sense. And the people that bought my business, I told them I wouldn't even sell them my business unless they gave me another six figure investment in Send Gym, which was my first software company. And they said, fine, we'll do that too. So we moved to Costa Rica. I'm on Cloud nine. I start working on Send Gym, I launch a podcast. I start teaching people the business systems that I had learned with my window cleaning business. And it works. And I start getting thousands of downloads, and I'm selling thousands of dollars in courses. I mean, I made $30,000 the first hour that my first course went live. It was unbelievable. But there was another problem. Because, look, there's a new devil at every level. Maybe that's what I'll title this podcast There's a New Devil at Every Level. And so I had this growth. I had this encounter with obedience. It leveled me up, it brought me closer to God. I took, I ran with it and then boom, I hit a wall. And what happened was the software company I started cost a ton of money and I didn't know what I was doing. It was very hard and complicated and it almost bankrupted me for a second time. I mean, real close. It was so expensive to build and maintain and market this. And I didn't understand anything. And so I was making all this money with courses. I was living in Costa Rica and I had money because I had sold my business. But all that money, I was pouring that capital into. Send Jim, because I had faith. Like, hey, this is just the beginning. I'm going to do this now, and then this will be a huge thing and then I'll do the next thing, right? The eternally optimistic Josh. Right? And it was hard. And so what I did was I ended up spending $25,000 to hire someone to be a mentor to me. And his name is Russell Brunson. And he wasn't just a one on one mentor to me. I wish. I think that cost 250 grand at the time. But I joined his mastermind group and he's an Internet marketer guy, he's a founder of Click Funnels. And when I joined his group, I was terrified out of my mind. I felt like a fish out of water. I felt like the poorest, stupidest, dumbest person in the room. But it was the smartest 25 grand I ever gave, and it was 25 grand a year and we stayed in it for years. I still, I still pay $18,000 a year to be on lower program, just to still go to clickfunnels events and be around Russell and all these people I've met. So I've spent hundreds of thousands just with him total. Because this is back in 2017, right? So anyway, I get in there and there's a new level at Ever devil or new devil at every level, right? So all this stuff happens, I end up doing a bunch more stuff. And then it brings us here to War Plan. And maybe I'll tell more of this story with more of the nuance. The main point I want to get across to you is that the Bible says that before the foundations of the world, God prepared good works for you to do. And so what that means is that there's stuff for you to do that was made before he made you. And so the stuff that you're going to do, it's not about stuff. It's not about appeasing God, but there's like brilliant, beautiful, epic, just amazing things waiting for you to step into. Just like a dad is proud of their kid for learning how to ride a bike. That's what God is doing with you. He ain't mad at you. He wants to give you a noogie. He loves you. And no matter how hard your business is, what I've learned is that you can't progress until you learn the lesson. And so some people will learn the lesson quick and they'll progress, and some people won't, and they'll wait 10 years being stubborn, not learning that one lesson. It could be an addiction thing, it could be a pride thing, it could be a ton of different things. I have no idea what your thing is, but business and your calling and your family, all these things are inextricably linked together. And the heart Behind War Plan this podcast, my software company now, everything that we do, it's all about family. It's all about Jesus. It's about you making more profit. I mean, inside my company, with my staff, I openly talk about the sneaky Jesus strategy. Because the reason I teach you how to make money and make more profit and how to think different is basically to earn the right to be heard, to talk to you about this stuff. Because this is the stuff that actually matters, you know, I want you to build a system. Sure. I want you to raise your ebitda. I want you to know what EBITDA is. I want you to know what your CPL is and your CAC is right. I want you to know what your close rate is per channel. I want you to know your revenue curve. I want you to know the difference between a profit and loss and a balance sheet. I want you to understand how to sell and market and persuade and all the things that we talk about here. But the real reason I'm here is to teach you that so that you think I'm pretty cool. So then maybe you'll listen to this other stuff. Go date your wife, go play with your kids. Understand that God's not mad at you. You have a purpose and you have a mission, a mandate, a purpose, and a destiny. That's what you have. And I've worked personally with over a thousand people. The other day, my wife and I were. What were we doing? Maybe an old website or. I can't remember if it was a Google Doc, but I saw that thousand people number from like 2019. That's when I started saying a thousand people was back then. So it's like way more than that. I just don't know how many. But here's the thing. I'm a dot connector. And the way that you feel right now is not unique to you, even though it feels like it is. And the answer to your problem is not a mystery. It might be a mystery to you, but it's not a mystery in general, there's people, probably me. If you have a local business, if you're doing less than 5 million, I can make you a ton of money, okay? And it's not because I'm the Wizard of Oz. It's because I'm obsessed. I live in my brain. I've built and sold four of my own companies. I didn't tell you about all of them. I did the highlight Cliff Notes version. But here's the thing. It's because I've helped a thousand people. And I can see under the hood of all these things and I can see all the similarities and the siloed information and how I can borrow something from this industry and apply it to this industry. There's an answer for you. You just got to get connected. Got to get connected. Lean in. Right? The Coast Guard is trained to only rescue people that are swimming towards the Coast Guard. So, look, if you need help, lean in. We have tons of stuff you can buy. We also have tons of free things that you can participate in. If you go to warplan.com, there's a school community with some trainings and courses. You can book a call with Elizabeth on my team. She's awesome. We have this profit brainstorming session thing with a quiz called the Marketing Audit. There's all kinds of stuff, but swim towards us because we want to know you, we want to serve you, we want to help you. Even if you don't buy anything from us, we just want to give you a high five and a noogie and send you on your way because we actually care. And I'll end with this. Between every anointing and every appointing is a season of disappointing. And this is something I heard Myron golden say, who I met by joining Russell's $25,000 group back in 2017. And let me break this down for you. When I was young, I knew I'm going to do something special. I didn't know. I felt embarrassed that I even thought that thought. But I just knew in my soul, I knew I got to do something big. I knew I had a Calling. Let's just say that maybe you do too. You know, that you're supposed to write a book or be on a stage or you're supposed to help someone or serve somewhere, do something, give a certain amount of money away or build whatever. You're a creator, you're a builder, whatever that's called your anointing. You're anointed to do something. But here's the rub. Between every anointing and every appointing is a season of disappointing. Now, an anointing is that call. It's that purpose you were made for. And appointing is when you are living in that purpose, you are wearing the crown of your assignment. You know, King David became the king of Israel, but when he was 16 years old, approximately, he was anointed to be King of Israel. And so he knew that he was destined to be king when he was young. It didn't happen for 15 years. And the whole time in between was pretty terrible, right? And it's not terrible because God is a sadist, okay? It's terrible because God is giving David upgrades. He's helping him pass the tests. He's helping prepare him to be able to handle the weight of his appointing. And maybe that's what's happening with you because that's definitely what's happening with me. That's the story arc of all of our whole marriage, our whole business story, all of it having five kids and all of the things that we've dealt with and lots and lots of bad stuff, lots of stupid mistakes, all kinds of pride. The thing God's working on me about right now is basically repenting of leaning on my own intellect. And maybe we'll talk about that a different time. But between every anointing and every appointing is a season of disappointing. So here's the thing. Be encouraged. Thank God for the wind of your life. Because the wind is what makes your roots strong and the roots are what keep your tree from tipping over. Right? Yes, there's a new devil at every level. But you have such an unfair advantage because you're going to win. You cannot fail. God never starts something that he doesn't finish as long as you participate. I hope that was helpful. I hope there was a nugget in there for you somewhere. Take care. God bless. Do you want to weaponize your brain and turn it into a money making machine? Consider joining Warplan Coaching. You'll get thousands of dollars in exclusive courses and training, a private community, a chance to come to in person meetups at Warplan Studios, and access to myself for Q and A every single month. Want to know the best part? It's free. Plus, we'll send you a private weekly newsletter full of money making tips and cutting edge ideas. Just go to warplan.com to sign up. Hey, I'm your biggest fan. I'm rooting for you. We'll see you next time.