Freedom Before Finance: How to Re-Think Your Business / Investing Strategies w/ Chad Corbett

Chad Corbit,

my man, this time we press record, we didn't talk for three hours without recording it this time.

so far so good.

We're doing all right, buddy, but how are you doing man? How's life.

doing well. I just got back from part of the world where you are. We took the better part of a month off and traveled Scandinavia. And now I'm settled back into West Virginia, living the calm life after an intense trip through Europe,

an intense trip. How is it an intense trip?

We hit, so we hit four countries, but it went, we ranged from, old town Stockholm to up in Northern Sweden, touring timber, like forestry land to renting motorcycles and riding the FDS of Norway to, playing teenager at playing 20 somethings. And. The Copenhagen and Amsterdam, like we just, we would average probably 10 to 12 miles a day of walking on foot. And we would be, I don't know, we had 16, 18 hour days just getting out, squeezing every drop out of the trip. No, no lounging by the pool on that one. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually wanna hit on that point. That's where I wanna start. All of this conversation off is on the point of lounging by the pool, because that would make you a relaxed gentleman. I wanna talk to you about the word relaxed and how it applies to a certain question that you portrayed to me. Let's start with there. And then I wanna work backwards from.

I guess for context I completely changed how I set goals back in 2014. I had been following Verne, Harnish and Geno Wickman, mastering Rockefeller habits, EOS, and I had KPIs and metrics for everything as the top line filter of, how I was living my life. You need to hit this KPI in order to do that. You need to do this many hours or this many calls breaking it down in the bite size chunks. What I found is I was working seven days a week, harder than I'd ever worked. I fortunately had, I had good revenue, my net the net margin. Wasn't good as what I wanted, but what was really bad is the lack of return on lifestyle I had gone from. Pretty much a year of, living like a hippie and transitioning from a quarter million dollar Jo position in Maui to becoming unemployable, taking a year off, to live through, British Columbia, Alberta, and most of the national parks in north America. So I'd gone from like that get it feeling like I'd gotten that being really adventurous and not like letting lifestyle lead to building a real estate team flipping houses, having a, , single family portfolio doing private equity deals. Just. I got really good at being really busy and broke my rules. So in 2014 I in one day I made a hard decision to shut down three companies, reset my goals and really focus. And the number one focus became on lifestyle. And what I did there is I switched to feeling based goal setting, which I had never really heard of. I was driving back from a wedding in. and I heard a lady named Danielle LaPorte mention that and I went home that night, basically didn't sleep. I listened to her. I just took that inspiration. I just kept going round and round in my head. I couldn't get rid of it. So finally at four o'clock in the morning I gave up, got outta bed, went to my desk and I wrote down about a hundred words that are how I want to feel in life. What actually drives me to do anything fun business, otherwise. And I did a, combine those if three were synonymous, I would pick the one that had the most feeling to me, but ended up coming up with with only five. So those became my five core desired feelings, which were relaxed, adventurous, loved, respected, and significant, and relaxed is always at the top of that list , and it's also what made me hit the reset button in a major. Because I was working seven days a week, 16, 18 hours a day from the outside, it looked like it looks sexy, right? Like the metaphor I use is riding a line. It's everyone looks at you and you're like, holy shit, that guy's a stud he's riding that line. And you're thinking you're chested. I'm gonna have to pee at some point when I get off, I'm pretty sure there's lines gonna eat me. And that's what I was doing. I was rat the. And it was just a matter of time until, metaphorically maybe having to pee is getting cancer or having anxiety issues or what, however, our body manifests, that level of acute stress. And I just realized I was out of alignment with who I was set. I was going to be so relaxed, , became the predominant one of those core desired feelings. And for me, that really means. Not feeling guilty. Not feeling stressed or obligated and just being comfortable with your own lifestyle choices. So that's what relaxed means to me. It's those core desired feelings are what I pass everything through first. And then we hit KPIs and I now run all my companies on EOS. So we literally track hundreds of metrics per week, per month, per quarter. So it's not that I could say that KPIs aren't necessary. What I'm saying is that the way you wanna feel in life is far more important than the KPIs that it'll take to get there. So I encourage you to rethink, like, how do you wanna feel. And then what KPIs do you need to help achieve that feeling? So if you wanna feel relaxed, you're probably not gonna be a a syndication sponsor. And that was one of the things I had to say no to. I pulled back. I was trained by one of the nation's top syndicators. I was gonna go into multifamily and mobile home park, syndications build a fund. I had the relationships, I had the knowledge. But when I looked at it, it's, I'm not a detail guy. If you're doing private placements, you really have to watch you, you have to make sure you're compliant. You have to watch a lot. And sometimes you get stuck in deals, even if you don't like it, it's your deal for the next 10 years. Cuz you have that, your, Maybe not legally, but I feel like a fiduciary to my investors. So for me that was something that was a quick, no I, I don't need to be a deal sponsor because I don't want that much responsibility. It doesn't make me feel relaxed. It's challenging. It's fun. Like I could do it, I'm capable, but it takes me away from those goals. It really shaped what I invest in, what my investment strategies were. Ultimately I ended up closing three companies, liquidating a real estate portfolio, transitioning to a passive investor versus an active investor. And just focusing on travel, last year I lived in 23 states in an RV and I've met hundreds of new people, went to all kinds of cool places, practically lived in national parks or national forest and spent a whopping total of 27,000 bucks. That is what I spent last year. So it's somewhat of a game at this point to see. Just how much you can continue production. Like how many people you can impact, how much money you can actually stash away, but how simple you can make your life and how comfortable that can be.

Yeah. And that's huge because I remember you and I were speaking and I was telling you my goals and I was super proud of everything that I was doing. And I had just done a new vivid vision and . I'm all in all the chips are on the table for the vivid vision now, because I've done it. And I've got proof of concept. Cause it works because I'm recording this one in Belgium. So right now it is September 8th, I'm over in Belgium. As I recording this and I accomplished my vision, cuz that was my first vision was to be able to quit my job and go do what I want when I want with who I want. And so I was writing out this vision, I'm talking to Chad about it and he's like, how do you wanna feel, dude? I was like, what the hell are you talking about? I was like, I guess I'll feel happy when I do all this stuff. That's on the page. and so it's just a really cool flip flop and that really stuck out to me so much that I went and I did. I did the edits immediately. And now it's I get where you're coming from to where it's, you want to begin with the emotion and you wanna begin with how you feel and then add KPIs. We're not saying throw KPIs out the window. We're just saying, instead of leading with the KPIs and hoping you feel a certain way, you lead with the emotions and then you attack the KPIs to get there. I like that.

Yeah. And I'll say this, like not only did you take, not only did you take action, like you were inspired by that you went, you edited it. You also immediately sent it to me as an accountability move, right? So that's something I think that is worth mentioning. You can have all the visions, all the versions of visions in the world. What I find is until you actually put it out, I don't know, I make a commitment to myself and then I share it with other people and say, Hey, look what I've done here. It makes it more real then and it's one of the other things like in sharing those things with people, we, as a culture, especially as young entrepreneurs, you're expected to answer your phone when it rings, you're expected to constantly be staring at text messages. And that was another thing that I don't even know if you and I have talked. Wow. In that same year in 2014, I changed my voicemail greeting to essentially say good luck finding me I'm somewhere in the world, doing what I wanna be doing, but here's a way to reach somebody on my team. I'm not gonna leave you hanging, but here's how you get what you need without having to have access to me. The other thing I did was put in email auto responders that Chad is Vaga bonding was up almost all the time. And I removed my phone number from everything, and I set up multiple different types of Calendarly events and the amount of time that I regained from that and the lack the, how much of this, the expectation of urgency just disappeared from my life, not the expectation from me, but the expectation from everyone else. So I was afraid that I was gonna lose respect and that people would think, that guy's not professional to hell with him. I'm just not gonna do anything with him anymore. The opposite actually happened. I think people respected my time more and they when I, when they had a spot on my calendar or when they had me on the phone, they took that more seriously and it was a more productive. Conversation and usually a better bond than a relationship.

So I, I need to take down that billboard that I put up with your cell phone

number. please. I prefer not to have it ring either.

that works. Hey, so I've got a a question about your transition period, because it's something that I'm going through and people go through it a lot. People talk about getting their time, freedom back. And everyone listening to this that's in your car driving to work, driving to work, driving away from work. And you hear me on here talking about, complaining about having too much time on my hands have too much free time. You're like, oh dude, shut up. Must be nice. I can't relate to that. This is helpful for all of you guys, because , this will help you get a better idea of what it looks like when you get where you want to be. So like for me, Chad, it's been difficult having so much free time because I'm so mentally conditioned to be busy. And I'm curious about your your, if you had any friction going from that quarter, a million dollar position to becoming the Vago bond and then figuring out like, what the heck are you doing next? And you were just still for the first time, I was curious. I'm just curious about what that process was like for you.

It was a really stark contrast. So I had, when I decided to leave Maui just for context there, I was living on CPA beach, just finished closing over a billion dollars worth of pre-development real estate and sold a hundred million. So I was working maybe. I don't know, realistically, six hours a day, five days a week, I'd gotten so bored. I was, free diving and just to see how deep I could get and hunt, like bow hunting pigs in the jungle, just to see, because everyone said they would kill me the locals and the pigs. So I was, I found myself just trying to entertain my brain. Like I'd run out of island, Maui for three years. I just constantly. Got everything I could from it. But so I knew that it was time for me to go. I had 12 days to go back around the island one last time, say goodbye to friends or do all the, a adventurous things. And then, so I was living this, the first transition of not having a job, not having anything was 12 days of just traveling Maui one last. And that was a good primer. So I went to the airport, got a rental car, cuz my truck was on a ship. Rented a car for 12 days and just ran around doing all the things that I had been doing, taking pictures, scuba diving, just having fun. So that was, but that was very familiar. The transition. was one of my best friends in the world is now on he's 83 now, but he's a hippie that's lived off grid in Washington state for the last 40 years. So I transitioned from living in a multimillion dollar house and, right above the K poly golf course, overlooking the ocean. To a home built from recycled construction materials. That was all the electricity came from vegetable oil, running a diesel generator it wasn't as glamorous as Maui, but there's so much value in that. It was a really great time for me to actually spend a month with him because it really showed me. He's one of the happiest people. I know he probably lives on a budget of. I would say less than $75 a month for him and his wife. And he is one of the happiest people. I know he's got a 5,800 square foot house. He's got five or six different vehicles. He literally takes a wheelbarrow out into a flooded field and harvest fresh salmon when they get stranded. Like he elk hunts off of his bedroom. Veranda. He literally has everything he wants in life. So that was the first part of the transition was coming from that Maui lifestyle to an off grid hippie lifestyle in Washington I decided to cast off into Canada. I loaded a motorcycle with a backpack. It was grossly under prepared, but I didn't care. And I lived on a motorcycle out of a backpack for two months in British Columbia. And. . And that's when I finally that's when I really let. I'm like, you should be sending emails. You should be looking for what's next in your career. You should be. And I eventually, one, one evening I was up above Whistler, British Columbia and that night I had by a Topo map, chosen a campground that was a flat area where two rivers converged. And when I got there, I realized it was a damn apple orchard. And it was in may, which is when bears wake up and bears go to sleep in their apple orchards. So I'm like this was really smart. And I got in my head and I started, I, that little voice in my head started telling me how stupid I was, how this trip was just the dumbest idea how everybody else was. Right. I And how I should just turn around and go home. And that right there is where Chad killed that, that ego voice. I had, I made a choice and I literally sat there. Just I don't think I was in a panic attack, but I just couldn't stop thinking about, you're under prepared. You don't have the right tires. You don't have panniers on the bike. Nobody knows where you are. If you crash, you're screwed, you're gonna die here. The bears are gonna eat. You. And I said, you either quit right now. Or you commit to relaxing and enjoying this. So I made a decision, I killed it right there and I've never had a night like that. Ever since I've never been afraid in the woods. I've never doubted what I'm doing. I've learned to trust my, I. And I know when my ego is useful and that's not most of the time, it's very rarely that an ego is a useful tool. In that relaxed state and it came to me like always help others more than yourself, net six figures. So you can live and give the way you want and be able to do it from anywhere in the world with an iPhone. So you can have this feeling. You can be in control of this feeling. Yeah. That relaxed, adventurous. Everyone thinks I'm crazy, but this is one of the best nights of my damn life feeling when you're looking at the stars with the three sisters peaks and interior British Columbia watching, six pound trout suck flies off the surface. How do you get control of this? How do you not feel like you did six weeks? When you were , by all external measures, extremely successful but unfulfilled compared to now where you're unemploy, like literally homeless and unemployed sitting on a mountaintop but I, it felt better to me. So I asked myself, how do you know, like, how do I make sure I CA I'm in control of this? And those were the three things. And from there I let go of that and I just continued on, and at the time I had $125,000 to my name and about 75 of that was locked up in a 401k. So I didn't have like financial security. What I did have was I trusted myself to really take the time to do this right. And to do it deliberately. So I didn't build another damn golden cage for myself and so I decided to come back here. And I went to Roanoke, Virginia where I didn't know anybody but there I set up multiple businesses, broke all the rules that I just told you about and then had to relearn those lessons. But that was the transition. Like it was

this man comes on this show and goes on a 15 minute dialogue about finding himself in the British Columbia wilderness, and then finishes the story with yep. Then I went back home and did all over

again. it did. That's what happened. Had to learn all over. Between 2012 and 2014, I built five companies. I built a lot of complexity into my life and I took the ability to have that under control away from myself. And in one day, I had to go fix it all. And I did. So it's, I didn't get it right. I got it right the first time, but then I let that fade and I started violating my own principles. And then I had to remind myself of that and it's. It's all part of a learning experience. If you, you might find yourself, , one deal can change everything, right? The formation of one company and that business model, if it doesn't suit your lifestyle right now, you're like, oh, I'll just make an exception until I get it off the ground. The next thing, you've got six other people's lives wrapped up in it. You've got, you've got leverage, you've got a personal guarantee. And , you've built yourself a golden cage, just thinking you could get in and out of a deal real quickly. And that's what a real estate team represented to me. I had this vision, which I think every team owner does. Okay. All I have to do is teach them what I've been doing. I have to find the right people. I have to pour myself into them and have them do what I've been doing. Then I'll have time freedom and financial freedom, and anyone who's ever owned a residential brokerage real estate team knows that is not how he, it. That's not how it goes. Oftentimes you're training your competition for six months. You pour yourself into them and then they're like, Hey man, I'm gonna go compete with you. I don't wanna split. So that was, that's how I made the mistake. I made those mistakes with good intentions. I was still pursuing financial freedom and time freedom. What I didn't realize. I wasn't as good at identifying golden cages at the time. Now I'm a lot better at that.

so walk us through the transition of this and the breakdown to where you had that pivot point. And you said, okay, cool. Did this once. Figured it out or so you thought, and then you went back to it and then you defaulted back to it because you're really good at building businesses and making income. Like you're just an income machine and that's what you just defaulted back to. So what pivot did you take from there to create the cash flow and create the positions that you have today that allow for that relaxation?

Yeah. So at that time, like in the 2014, like the second time that I had to build it, burn it to the ground to rebuild it. I had a real estate investment company, a brokerage company with a team holding company, a lending company. And I just formed a leads company called all the leads and all the leads that was, was trying to get off the ground. It was, I think we did 60,000 in revenue. In the first six months and all my other companies were, they were doing high level revenue, but the net sucked and I looked at it and I'm like, you just you can't do all of this. It's your lack of focus? Like your spread too thin. Cuz I was running even within the investment company, I was running multi. Strategies. I was buying sub two under finance, wholesale flip all those things. And so I actually have a mind map of this. It's crazy when you actually look at what I was trying to get out of myself as a solo entrepreneur at the time. And I just I realized I'm like, you have completely taken away from yourself, what you work so hard. And so passionately said you wanted, you gotta do something. and it was, I remember it so clearly, cuz I was like, you, it's not fair to go through a strategy meeting. And then, and if you go through this strategy meeting, you can't quit. You need to continue for another quarter. So my team was scheduled to come in all UN person for a, at that time we were using Verne harnesses mastering the Rockefeller habits. So we were working on our one page strategic. and it was time for the Q2 meeting. And I just, I used that as the, to find the courage. Like I called each of them in individually. I had conversations. I'm still friends with all those people. I still support those people. It was one of the worst days of my life, honestly. That's one of the hardest things in business is the people aspect of it, especially when, like, when you have to let people go or time for companies to no longer exist. So I offered them all mentorship and I offered them all, the access to me in any way I could help them. And everybody, like lots of tears were shed that day, but then I started shutting down. And liquidating, assets, anything that was taking me away from the way I wanted to feel. And I didn't think would help me get any closer. So for example I quit being a landlord. I quit holding single family homes because I don't care what anyone says. They're not passive. Even if you have a manager. You have things to deal with you they're always in the back of your mind, you're waiting for that call. They burned it down last night. The wash machine just fell through the back door because it flooded the whole, that whole end of the house. There's always something that you're waiting for. So for me, like I had aspirations to go do philanthropy work and developing countries and be gone for more than a month at a time with no cell service. If you have a big real estate portfolio, your manager can't get ahold of you. He's not authorized to spend over X amount of dollars. You're gonna come back to vacant units and hotel bills for your tenants and everything else. So for me, that part of it was getting rid of the houses because they threatened lifestyle that I said I wanted to build. So all that happened in a. It, all the decision happened in seconds. The implementation happened within a day and the one company that was left was all the leads. And in the next 16 days, I sat down, I designed this course probate mastery was a course that had been trapped in my head that I knew people needed, but I was so damn busy. I was like, I'm not a course creator. I'm not gonna do that. But in 16 days we built a new website. I figured. Finally out of Facebook market got up to a 10 X row ads launched this course. And we took in the second, remember in the first half we did 60,000 in revenue and the second half we did over a million in revenue. So by focusing, I got myself so much closer to. To my goal in six months, it was amazing. So I created over a million dollars in revenue for the company. This course has done probably close to $900,000 in revenue. It was created in that same 16 day period. And I just, I went and bought a BMW or 1200 GSA as a momentum. We can talk more about what that means here in a second. And during that six months, while I was producing a million dollars in revenue, and a course that's done almost a million dollars. I camped off of my motorcycle, 117 nights. I became a motorcycle trainer. I became a a photojournalist for a magazine. I started working for different charities. Then I've traveled the world literally for free. I've gone on motorcycle trips and taken my camera shot photos, and written for magazines, developed water systems for P for, Like societies that literally no one has ever been able to reach because of the skills I've built in riding offroad motorcycles. I've been to parts of Nepal that national geographic hasn't been to NGOs can't get there. And that i, when I did those hard things, look how much space opened up for me to get a much different result. So instead of busting my ass working seven days a week for a hundred thousand in revenue and a real estate team, I made a million dollars in revenue working one out of every three days. While for the most part, all of my visionary work was done swinging in a hammock after I was exhausted from riding a, an off-road motorcycle, all. . But when I got back to being true to Chad and who he wants to be the ID, there was no shortage of ideas. Like I've figured out I've done over 15 million with that company. And in the next three year, five, four years, we did over $15 million in revenue, off of Facebook and YouTube ads. And that ad came out of me that week like that, or like shortly after this one ad did over 15 million at a 10 X row ads. Over a four to five year period, and anyone who's ever done Facebook marketing will say that guy's full of shit. So did Facebook, but I had them analyze the account and they're like, how did you even do this? And I don't know the answer, like my only answer is I was really clear. On what I on my vision and what I wanted and how I thought I could get it. And I was in charge of Facebook marketing. So the universe made one work out for me, but it literally was like, that's, there's I can tell this as a failure story or I can tell it as a success story for me, the failure. Was doing what I thought everybody else wanted me to do. Getting inspired at real estate conventions and masterminds and going that's sexy. I wanna be like that guy. I'm gonna build a real estate team. I'm gonna flip houses. I'm gonna do this and that. And I was not focused on I wasn't checking in with Chad. Like at my core, I wasn't checking in with him and I was building something I didn't even want. I was building a busy business and what I really want is a passive business, a real business. I built myself a job and I didn't. Now I do

talk to me about the momentum move.

A momentum move is when I get really clear on something I wanna achieve or I want to have or a place I want to go a way I wanna feel I do one thing, no matter how small, like it's to put things in motion to move you in that direction. So for example, we talked about in the beginning of this, I just got back from Sweden. During COVID I wanted to travel and I, you couldn't internationally. So I bought a sweet, a t-shirt with a Swedish flag on it, and that's just a really small example. So it was a momentum move to help get my particular activation system thinking about that. Like the day I wear my Swedish t-shirt I think, oh, wait, I still haven't been to Sweden. The motorcycle was a big momentum. It was, I bought it used because I wanted one of the last air cold GSAs. So I bought it for 18,000 bucks. When I did felt like I was in an aggressive saving mindset because I was trying to achieve a million dollar net worth so I could make passive investments. So it threatened my savings goal. Like one of those KPIs of get to accredited investor status as fast as possible, but the reward. The potential reward that I saw and the mindset reward was worth it. . So the motorcycle was a momentum that I said I wanted the test drive of that motorcycle was a momentum move to move me closer to that. For example, one of the things I said I wanted to do was actually I think it's ridiculous that so many people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, and I've contributed a lot of money to charity, water, water.org clean drink adventures, a different foundations. But I wanted to physically contribute, like I wanted to actually be there and see it and meet the people. So the momentum move for that is I bought a Pelican case for my MacBook pro because I said, if I'm gonna be doing adventure, be out for months on a motorcycle and remote areas, I need to, have be able to take photos off of my, to be able to do something with the photos. So that was a small one. Like how do you, how do. achieve getting someone to say, Hey, I'm gonna buy your meals and motorcycle trip and plane ticket. If you just go here and do these things, like how many people have ever, how many people do you know that get that offer? So , the waterproof Pelican laptop case was a momentum move. I had no idea who was gonna ask me to ride a motorcycle for free and take photos and pay for it. Funny thing I bought the laptop case. I put it in my I put it right below that photo on my desk. and it wasn't, I don't know, maybe 60 days I went and I ended up being a motorcycle trainer. I was at a magazine event doing a training class and they said, Hey, we need someone to go ride Costa Rica. We'll pay for it. Can you go do ? So here I am with my waterproof laptop case, my camera and they paid for everything and I got to go do a photo journalism shoot and somewhere I'd never. and literally, I didn't go asking for it. Like it was I set the vision. I said, that's something I'm willing to do. I'm capable of doing, I'd like to do I the, I was like what can I do? I'm like, what do you buy? So I bought waterproof crush proof, laptop case, and the opportunities just fell into my lap right after that. So I've got other, Literally hundreds of these stories, but when you get really clear on what you want to prove to you prove to your subconscious, you're not full of shit. Take the first step. I don't care how small it is. If you say you want to take a year traveling the world. Oh, this is another one that I did actually for real. So if, if you want to take a year to travel the world, you're gonna need a passport with extra pages. So you have to actually apply for that and order the passport with, I don't remember how many, but I have the fat passport, like it's twice as thick as my last one. And that was a momentum move. And I've been to 23 countries now. Since that passport. So it is no matter what your vision is. If you're 100% clear on what you want, just take the first step, do something small, tell other people that you did it they'll think you're crazy. They'll tell you're full. Don't listen to it. Like it, it will start to, to open up opportunities. We'll start to show themselves. And maybe it's as simple as the, the neurological explanation or the is, or the. It's your reticular activation system. You're seeing things that you didn't see before because you made that first move, whatever the neuroscience or reality of it is it seems to work really well for me. Yeah.

Worked for me too. I think we should probably end it there, brother. I don't think there's anything better that we can say on that one. I would normally ask the question where could people find you, but I don't think you even want to answer that one. where could people find you?

No. I So I'm not I do have Facebook mainly for the community aspects. It's Chad Corbit on Facebook. I'm on LinkedIn. The easiest way to get to me is through my team. It's support at Magnum Opus, project.com. Love

it. All right, brother. I appreciate you appreciate our friendship and thank you for coming on. And I just, I didn't even have anything to say this episode. I just shut the hell up and let you go so that sometimes, maybe this is gonna be some people's favorite episode. so I appreciate it, buddy.