A (27:14)
So there were people who were outperforming me on setting appointments on that team at that time, but there was nobody that was outperforming me in terms of the volume of appointments that I had set that went to sale because I'd been doing it for like three years and I knew how to qualify people and I knew that whole process. So I was like, I'm already out producing everybody on your team. But you're concerned with the fact that I was sitting down during an hour of dead space when I should have just been standing up talking to nobody. Like, it's not affecting my productivity negatively. You didn't tell me that it was a rule. And now I'm getting berated for something that I just don't even believe in at all, nor was ever spoken to me. And that like, that experience was one of the things that I pointed to when I was just like, this is not going to work. Like, I can't. I cannot stand this type of corporate nonsense just because somebody made some arbitrary rule sitting in a desk chair somewhere that has never actually done this job before. Now you're going to enforce it even on the people who are actually doing the real job, which is selling more of your shit, which should be the top priority. You know what I mean? So that, that as soon as I close, we closed escrow on that house. I think the day after or two days after we closed escrow on that house, I called my manager and told him, I'm not coming back in. And then I went directly back in, 100% commission, door to door. So, yeah, that, that was, that was probably the moment where I realized it wasn't ever going to work for me. But if I go even further back, it might have been in high school, when I realized the value of creating relationships for people and how much you can get paid for being the one who initiates the contact and gets the sale in through the door. Because I was doing. I had a small landscaping. You know, calling it a business is. Is overvaluing what it was. But I. A buddy of mine and I were mowing lawns, and then we would work with people who were flipping houses, and we'd go in and put lipstick on the front yard for them, basically, like, you know, install sod, fix the sprinklers, and, you know, do a bunch of manual labor essentially, to create a landscape job. So during the summer before my senior year, it was me and my buddy, we were just doing all the work, right? So, because that's just what we did. We would land a job, we'd go do all the work, and we get paid. And the hourly wage was pretty high because we were selling the full job and doing all the work. And then when I started my senior year again, I was in school, and I had football practice and I had homework and all these other responsibilities, but I had sold, like, two or three jobs right before I started school again. And so I was. I. I hired college students to do the manual labor on the jobs for me. And then one time I was sitting in Bible class, and I remember just, like, sketching out on a piece of paper how much money I was going to clear on a job that I had sold but did none of the work for. Basically, I just drive over there after school and make sure that they're making progress and, you know, help fix a couple of things that they didn't know how to fix or something. And then that was my entire involvement. And I was realizing, I was like, wow, I. I'm going to make more on this job than all of the money that I'm paying out in labor combined, right? So I was going to make, like, 600 bucks on this job when I was paying out $300 in labor for the job or something like that. And that was the first time where I realized, like, oh, there's so much more value in landing these jobs and, like, being the salesperson than there is in actually doing the labor, which is basically when I stopped doing manual labor and started outsourcing it immediately to other people that were willing to do it. So there's a couple, like, aha. Moments that I had along the way that were like, first of all, there's a lot of value in being the salesperson here. But then, second of all, there's no way I'm ever going to be able to fit inside of this corporate world because I, I cannot stand, I cannot stand arbitrary authority. And even in high school and college, like, I'm not, I wasn't somebody who would buck up against all authority. It was just when it didn't make sense, you know. So I had a teacher in college one time who was, she had a, she had an ego essentially. And there was one time in class where we're, we graded a test and I, one of the answers to the test was like, she had marked it as wrong. And I raised my hand, I was like, I'm pretty sure this is right. And she was like, nope, it's wrong. And I was like, she kept talking. And then like two minutes later I found it in the textbook that she had used to teach us, you know, and raised my hand again and I was like, but the book says this. You're telling me this is wrong, but this is actually right. And then she stuck to her guns. She did not even admit in that moment that she was wrong. And then, and then I find out later she was teaching two classes that were the same class. And we're doing research papers. You know how research papers you had to write like note cards. Did you ever do that?
