Do you ever feel stuck in the rat race? Life doesn't have to be that way if you're willing to put in the work. In “Bigger Vision”, Chris Garrison helps you discover the keys to abundance, freedom, and personal growth that let you live the life of your dreams—and now here's your host, Chris Garrison.
Chris: Welcome, welcome, welcome. It's Chris Garrison with the Bigger Vision Podcast. This is where we talk about mindset. We talk about business and we talk about investing. This is Episode No.1, super-excited about this. We'll get a little bit into my story and background, so you know where I'm coming from, and we'll try to make some good key points to you. [00:52.7]
I do have a request. If you'll please go and give me a five-star review, and you can also like and share this on your social media, I would love that. There is a Facebook group called “Bigger Vision” and it is a free group that you can join. It's a good community of people that post all different types of tips and tricks. We also have weekly live interviews, so a lot of good resources for you to soak in. You can also check me out online at MyBiggerVision.com and we’ve got some content there as well.
Let's get into it. I grew up with a dad that was an entrepreneur and he exposed me to all the wonderful things of owning a business, running a business for yourself. He had had some employees on a few businesses. On the other business, he had not. He did the pawn shop. He did the used car dealer. He did real estate. He did disaster cleanup and restoration, and that's what kind of I got started in when I went out on my own and started creating my own business. It was the disaster clean up because that's what I knew from 14 on up to probably about 15 or greater. [02:08.7]
I had that influence in my life and I hit my twenties, got married at 20 and had my first child at 21, literally conceived a month or two after we were married. How fortunate, huh? Then, at 23, I had my second child. Married for 10 years, went through some depression there. I was not in a happy marriage the entire time, just a different conflict of viewpoints. Finally, at age 30, I decided to go ahead. Mutually, me and my ex-wife decided to go ahead and call it quits.
At 32, I had been operating in my disaster cleanup company, just keeping bread on the table, not really pushing myself. It was more the survival mode of me just being able to be happy in life. I found myself five days out of the week unhappy and just wishing for a different life and that's when I knew, finally, nothing else was going to change. I had nothing else to give, so it was time to move on. [03:17.4]
At age 30 to 32, I hopped in the car business with my dad and that didn't work out either. It's hard to get past that father-son mentality and relationship when you go in the business and I jumped back into my disaster cleanup company. I had started it and just peddled it around between, I think, it was 20, age 26 and 30. I had a few accounts, handed it over to my brother. He was in town at this point. He operated it those two years, 30 to 32.
Then, once I hit 32 and a half, 33 years of age, in 2016, I decided to jump back in it with my brother, and I told him, “Listen, let's take a little debt on. Let's turn this into a company that we can retire from and be proud of.” [04:09.8]
I just started busting ass and going door to door. I had zero. I didn't have any money. I had a lot of ambition and I had more time than anything, and I knew commercial accounts would be repetitive, so I wanted to go to a repetitive area so I wasn't having to kill and eat constantly, and build that book of business up, so that it would support at least our limited, very frugal and meager lifestyles of me and my brother, and also cover the business expenses.
After the first six months and really just getting a week's worth of night built up, of night work built up, I was answering the phone during the day and it was just like I was a zombie, working, working probably 16–18-hour days, at least that. [05:05.8]
What happened, though, that transition, I was able to hire someone to cover the night shift. They worked with us, so my brother worked with them, got them trained up, and I went to day shift and I was selling, trying to get more day cleanings built up—and that's kind of how we started transitioning. We would build ourselves up to capacity to where I couldn't do anymore, and then we would hire somebody and delegate some of those responsibilities off to them.
But the reason I was able to grow in that capacity was because I began to make sure the influences in my life were positive and had big viewpoints. How I got out of my depression, how I got out of this just lack of confidence and just a beat-down mentality of 10 years of a hard relationship with a lot of stress, financial stress, raising kids, personal stress and not performing, it was just a lot I had to get rid of. [06:14.7]
I began to just immerse myself into content. I started looking up, and I remember as clear as day, I looked up on YouTube motivational speeches and I grabbed a few of those and started listening to them, and so, throughout the day, I would listen to them anytime I was in the vehicle. When I woke up in the morning, I would listen. When I was on my travel to work, when I was on my travel to a job because we had different locations that we would move to, whatever and any opportunity I had, I was soaking in this positive influence.
Influence like you've got control of your life as soon as you start taking the responsibility of everything that happens in your life. What a powerful statement, because, at that point, I said no longer will anyone else control my life, because if I take full responsibility for everything that happens in my life, then nobody has control over it. I'm not stuck in a cage. [07:16.0]
I began to really watch my decisions and look at everything that was happening in my life, including my failed marriage. It was my fault. It was my fault that I wasn't the man I needed to be when we first got married, that I wasn't strong enough to stand up for myself, that I wasn't strong enough to just push past attitudes and do what I knew I was supposed to do, like work a 40-hour week and strive to make as much as possible, and learn as much as I possibly could so that I could be a better asset for whatever I was doing in whatever industry I was working in. [07:56.2]
I took responsibility for my life and, at that point, everything started changing because now my influence was different. I was pumping myself full of positivity, full of big ideas that talked about taking massive action and taking full responsibility for everything in your life.
Then I began to believe in myself and I started finding confidence, and that confidence allowed me to push into the marketplace and sell myself. We're all salesmen. We're all sales ladies. Every one of us, I don't care if you've got a sales job, you're selling something at some point in the day, whether it's your desire to go eat at a certain place or something that you're wanting. Throughout that day, we sell ourselves to our spouses. We sell ourselves to our coworkers, our bosses, to everybody that we interact with. We sell ourselves to ourselves. Are you selling yourself to yourself or is someone else selling? That's what it boils down to. [09:01.0]
I began to use this confidence that I was gaining from these positive influences and I was able to push myself into a better place financially, and then began to see that people that were living in wealth and happy, they were building a lifestyle based on assets and not trading time for money.
I began to notice most of them were in real estate and I started listening to podcasts about real estate, YouTube videos about real estate. I started in a single-family and then I moved into multifamily. I paid for a course to go and learn about buying apartments and syndicating apartments.
Then I began to look in my marketplace, my local community, and I was searching for individuals that were operating in the space that I wanted to operate in in real estate, and I began to create those relationships—and I started to learn the power of relationship capital. [10:10.8]
If I lost everything today, if I lost everything today, I would gain it back much quicker because of the relationships that I have around me. One thing I'm not going to lose, the knowledge and the experience that I’ve already been able to catalog, and my relationships, those connections will help me.
That is why it is so important to make sure that you never burn any bridges, to make sure that you are always fair and true and honest to someone. Do what you say you're going to do, because we've only got one name and that name takes a lifetime to build up and only a moment to kill. That is your legacy, your name. [10:57.0]
I went through and began to find this new world of investing and, at this point, I'm starting to make a little bit of money on my disaster cleanup company. You can see it right there, Absolute Cleaning & Restoration, on my shirts, branded. I’ve got to get me a Bigger Vision shirt, so we'll have some apparel at some point come out and you'll be able to grab some of the Bigger Vision apparel, and when people ask you, What is bigger vision? man, I'm seeking my potential.
When at the end of my life, when I get to see what I myself should look like in a perfect life, I do not want to be dwarfed smaller than my potential self. At the end of my life, I want to look like a twin of my potential self—and that's what Bigger Vision is about.
So many times we hit that point to where we just decide to quit because we've gotten complacent and happy. We can take the vacation. We've got the car. We've got the house and we've got the nice little family, so we get content. The thing about it is, if you hit abundance at that point, you can really start to make a change in the world. [12:06.8]
Let me digress from that and get back on topic. I began to see investing and investing into assets that paid you passively was how everybody was starting to create wealth, because there's only so much time that you can trade for money and that's what I was doing at my company. It was trading time for money.
But then I began to learn a whole other lesson in that process that I needed a team. I needed a bigger team that could take on more of the responsibilities that I held in my disaster cleanup company, so that I can now focus and brainstorm and dream about buying assets that were going to pay me. Real estate was one of those assets. Crypto was one of those assets and e-commerce business was one of those assets.
Another business that I partnered up with another team and they do all the operations—I only come in as a capital provider, and it's not even my money on the e-commerce—it’s the credit card company. I just had good credit, so I was able to leverage the credit card company. [13:12.0]
There are so many ways to make money in this world, but if you don't get in the right influences, you will never know about them. You will never have the confidence to push into those and believe that you can achieve. I have found out that some of the dumbest people are wealthy through real estate investing. You don't have to be the ACT 36 and IQ of whatever.
See, I don't even have that high of an IQ, but the whole point is that if you get around someone that can tell you the Step 1, 2, 3, and then you begin to believe that you can do it the same way, because these people out there with money, they're just average folks, the majority of them. The thing about it, though, is they have structured their life to take certain actions, different actions than the normal population does, and those actions drive them to success. [14:08.2]
The tagline on bigger vision is “Live in success”, and that's what it's about, living in success, hitting the potential and finding those avenues by changing up your environment, by changing up your influences that you allow in, that you see, that you hear, that you speak, even—your words are so powerful—and then making sure that you start applying action to the things that you're learning.
Every single day, you should be trying to learn and gain new knowledge for a new future for you, because the goal is to hit abundance and to pull out of scarcity. The goal is to have more than enough for you, so that, at that point, you can start to change the lives around you.
I was watching on my Facebook, this was the second day after Christmas and I was looking on my Facebook, and I saw how a few of my friends on Facebook were buying their parents their dream car, and I thought, one day, one day I'll buy the dream car. I'll buy the dream house. One day I will take care of my parents in the manner and even better than the way that they were able to take care of me as a kid. [15:18.5]
When you start impacting lives around you because you have abundance, then at that point, you begin to change the world because that person starts to change, and then that person will influence someone else and it becomes a chain reaction.
There's so much in this world that needs you and wants you, and if you're not pushing for your potential and you're not getting around the right influences, you'll never be able to make that difference. Those people will be disappointed and you never know what lives will not be changed because you didn't do what you were supposed to do. [15:54.0]
Don't want to get heavy on you, but at the same time, I want to encourage you to begin to push positive influences in your life. Begin to take full responsibility for everything that happens in your life. Begin to look into new knowledge in new industries, and focus on investing, because the wealthy do not trade their time for money. They trade their time for assets and those assets accumulate and build up and begin to pay them back in a dramatic way.
I want you to live in success. This was Chris Garrison on the Bigger Vision Podcast. I can't wait till the next episode. Please leave me a comment. Let me know what you thought about this episode. Let me know what topics you would like to hear about and I’ll try to touch on those. Going forward, we're going to get more in-depth on certain things like mindset, business, and investing, and I'm going to tell you what has worked for me and what has allowed me to grow at such a rapid rate. [16:58.4]
One thing I did not say is I started my disaster cleanup company with $500 and today it is a seven-figure business, and I’ve got 15 team members that support that business. I'm still in the operations and I'm looking for a chief operating officer to come in and take that position to free me up to do other things at this point.
Thank you again for listening. Bigger Vision Group on Facebook. MyBiggerVision.com on the website. Leave me a comment. Leave me a five star review, and please share this on your social media—and until then, live in success. [17:36.8]
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