No don't go in there, Daddy's working.
Jonathan: Yes, yes, y'all. It is another one , where daddy's being lazy. I find it so much more fun to not talk to myself and what makes it even better is when I get to have very cool people on the show with me so I can talk to them, find out what they're up to. And did you, my dear listener, a different perspective, but I stack the decks in my favor. What I usually do is just find people who agree with me on everything, and then bring them on the show so they make me look brilliant. This is another one of those. This is Mr. Kevin Breeding. What is up, my man?
Kevin: Hey, Jonathan. How are you, man? It is good to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Jonathan: Man. Look, this is.. so what's interesting is that over the last couple of episodes, I've been talking to friends, talking to mentors, talking to people that I met in masterminds, and that's precisely where you and I met - what was it, maybe 2015 or so, where we actually were acquainted at a very high level mastermind. Is that about right? [0:01:22.1]
Kevin: Yeah, I think it was 14 or 15, somewhere in there. We were down in Austin with our good buddy, Ryan Levesque, and it was a great, great event, actually one that I have a lot of things that I took away from Ryan's mastermind. It was a great place to be.
Jonathan: I'm going to ask you about that. In fact, maybe that's where we'll start. But first, for our listeners out there who are wondering, "Who the heck is Kevin Breeding?" Have you figured who you are yet, Kevin?
Kevin: You know, I'm working on it. I ask myself every day. So, no, the short and skinny of it is I am a husband to Suzy; dad to Natalie, Mallory, Carly, and Abby; and granddad actually to Phoenix, which has been fun. [0:02:01.4]
But you know, in the daytime, I keep myself busy being an entrepreneur's mentor and coach. I came out of the corporate world, did a stint at Wal-Mart for about six years and worked all over the world for them. Then jumped into agency work and figured out that I really, you know, didn't like, you know, the crowd kind of stuff. I wanted to get into the mess of entrepreneur stuff. I like to get into the messy stuff, where you know, people's lives are really needing impact and so, now I work strictly with entrepreneurs and I wouldn't say that - a couple of corporate CEOs too - that are trying to figure out life.
Jonathan: Let's break that down a little bit. Let's unpack that. So you did the traditional path and you went to college. You went to corporate America, and how the heck did you get out? How did you escape?
Kevin: Actually, Jonathan, it's an interesting story. Mallory and I were talking about it last night, my daughter. I left Wal-Mart after six years because I was walking through the airport. I'd just come home. I'd been helping them with the European expansion and walked through the airport and they had come to pick me up and neither one of them recognized me. I walked right past them. [0:03:08.3]
Jonathan: What?
Kevin: Yeah, and in fairness, I had started a scruff, so they weren’t looking for a guy with a beard. They were 3 and 4 at the time and that day I decided I was done, and that Monday morning, I went in and talked to Don Soderquist, who was the CEO at the time and said, "I'm done." And he said, "You're crazy. You're the youngest P&L responsible director this company has ever had. You've got a massive future ahead of you." And I told him, I said, "Yeah, but my kids didn't recognize me last night at the airport." And he just stopped, stunned and he was like, "I get it." And that was it. I gave notice and stepped out.
Jonathan: Did you have a backup plan? Anything else to fall back on? What, what … how the hell are you so brave, man?
Kevin: Well, you know, it's a matter of just kind of the things that are so important to you. Some things move you so deeply that you're like, you know what? No. Absolutely not. [0:04:03.1]
And you know, some people might call that a flaw. I consider it you know something that is very self-defining. You know, I moved right out of the business… you know, I had great contacts and I mean, you know, at the time everybody was looking to hire a Wal-Mart exec and so, you know, it was pretty easy to go find. And I ended up as a partner in an advertising firm and a branding company in St. Louis. And so it was, it was actually a fairly easy transition but you know, I think back on it now and think, holy cow, that's crazy, but at the time, it made total sense to me because there's nothing more important than making sure that what is the priority is the priority regardless of the circumstance. Situational ethics don’t work for me.
Jonathan: I didn't even know there was such a thing as situational ethics.
Kevin: Eh, go work in corporate for a while. You'll find them. Every day.
Jonathan: That's the problem. See, I never worked in corporate, so I don’t know about these things. So what was the move there? So you're in Wal-Mart, you got the relative safety and security of a big, big company, regular, steady paycheck and you go to this agency, marketing agency. I mean, what was that transition like for you? [0:05:12.7]
Kevin: It was night and day because you know, I went from having a team of 150 people in nine countries administrating 280,000,000 in six currencies, and to a team of 20 with a little company that was trying to figure out how to break the $15,000,000 mark. And over the next five years, it ended up doing about 60,000,000 a year, and ended up rolling it up and selling it. So, it was a big transition because I realized, you know, I look back at it now and see that that was actually the beginning of my coaching career because what it was is I took both business partners, as well as a lot of the people that I worked with, and we had to just start thinking differently. They were looking for projects that were $100,000 at a time and we had to get out of that habit. We started looking for projects that were $500,000 and $1,000,000 and a $2,000,000 project, and going after those things, knowing that we were going to get rejected in the early stages because we didn't have, you know, we didn't have the game to play at that level. But you had to stop thinking you couldn’t go in business like that. [0:06:16.9]
And so instead of you know, doing so and so's insurance, you know, production or going after, going after Pfizer, you know, American Airlines or Boeing or BMW, and you know, we had to go around the block a couple of times with them. But ultimately, we did product launches for all of those.
Jonathan: Now you're talking about going after these big companies. I imagine that was a huge deal when you transitioned to that. Were you like the Don Draper of that operation?
Kevin: You know, my… every project that we delivered, ultimately, I had to touch it. It was, I had to make sure that, you know, the producers were there and that the technical teams were there, the touring companies were ready to go. And you know what? It actually jumps us forward into what I'm doing now because so much of the work that I do, both that I had to do on myself as well as the people that I work with now, is I have to help them shift the way they think. [0:07:09.5]
They have to stop thinking about going after clients who are broke. That's why they can't sell anything is because they're selling to broke people. And you know, and realizing that if you truly believe in what you do, then it's simple to sit down and have a conversation with what you would consider a whale at the time because you know what you've got to bring is better than anything else they have seen.
Jonathan: What was that mental shift like when you took that company from doing - you said they were trying to break 15,000,000 to 60,000,000 - what kind of things go on in their heads? What were the things that you guys had to work through to get to that next level, where that's like three levels up?
Kevin: Yeah, I mean, you know, there's the standard things - I mean, you had to look at systemization. You have to look at how to optimize operations, have to, you know, to figure out how can I take three level players and move them to sevens. You know, and how do you… well, and too, go back and assess - do I have all the right seats on the bus and do I have the right people in the seats, and that is an exercise and a process that's exactly the same whether you're a solopreneur or you're running a, you know, a billion dollar company. [0:08:14.0]
And then the partners had to sit down and say, "Okay. Are we willing to put ourselves out there? Are we willing to reinvest the biggest check we have ever made?" That is a major shift because what happens is people who think too small, they get a paycheck and they immediately think "How can I spend it?" An entrepreneur in a mind shift is thinking "How can I invest it and multiply it?" And it's, you know, so instead of you know, getting my first, you know, $100,000 gig and running out and getting, you know, buying an S Class Mercedes or leasing it and saying that I bought it, you know, you look at it and say, "Wait a minute. I need to figure out how do I take this $100,000 win and turn it into a $500,000 win, and then how do I turn that into a $5,000,000 win?" And it's the simple process of learning how to reward yourself but then how to lean forward and say, "Okay, what have I not been doing that I need to be adding into the process?" [0:09:06.7]
And for me, it all comes back around to kind of the stuff that hit some blueprint. I think there's those seven principle assets that are part of your life that I think are super important, and you pay attention to where you are with those seven things. And when you do that, one - business is attracted toward you and two - wisdom becomes your companion and you start to see things rather than being dazzled by things. You really kind of get to the heart of what's happening around you and you're more aware as success is coming to you, so that you're not glamorized by it and you're not taking off to where you're spending money way farther and way faster than you should have, and you're realizing that, hey, you know what, I've now turned an idea into a marketable product; now I have to take the marketable product and turn it into a business. There's a big difference in that string of things, and most people miss it.
Jonathan: I like that you talked a little bit about rewards and having a balance or affirmity in that. So how do you do that? So you get your win, you know that you have to invest in the business, but how do you reward yourself? What does that look like? [0:10:09.1]
Kevin: Yeah. You know, the big thing for me is you have to understand what your currency is. My personal currency is freedom. I want to be able to work on the projects that I want to work on, with the people that I want to work with, when I want to work. And so what I do is I reward myself with giving my schedule breathing time. I, you know, I don’t do… I'm not one of those guys that does, you know, 19-hour days and I'm not doing, you know, launches that are…
Jonathan: You're not grinding?
Kevin: No. No, no, no. In fact…
Jonathan: What's up, man?
Kevin: Yeah, you know, I realize that that may work for some. That is not for me. It's not…
Jonathan: No, no, no. Wait a second. Wait a second. Wait - I'm going to call you on some BS right now.
Kevin: Alright.
Jonathan: You just said, "I realize that will work for some." Do you really believe that those people out there, putting that out there, that they're working 24/7, eight days a week, 366 days a year, do you think they're really doing that? [0:10:58.5]
Kevin: I think they are working more than they believe they are working, but they're doing it because they don’t have anything else to do. There's nothing else to, that feeds them. And I think that, ultimately, that that's unhealthy. Here again, everybody makes their choice, but you know, I am a firm believer that in order to be the best entrepreneur that I can be, I've got to be working on things like my schedule. I've got to be working on my health. I've got to be working on my relationship. I, every, every person that I work with in my coaching business, if their business is struggling, 9 times out of 10, it's not their sales number.
Jonathan: You mean you don’t have to get more traffic and leads?
Kevin: You know, I … it's great for selling your next course, but my thing is is that, if there's an issue at home or if you're not functioning at a high level from a health standpoint, you're not showing up in your business - 60% of you is showing up in your business, and 60% is not going to get it done. If you're not investing in self-development. If you're not, you know, I mean, if you're not going to master… well… I'll tell you - it's not even about going to masterminds for your business. If you're not self-developing for something that makes you a better person, not just a better marketer or a better salesperson or a better coach… We do self-development for our profession all the time and we completely negate what makes us better as a human being, and so, that willingness to say you know what, there is more to this thing than just, you know, getting more leads, more Facebook ads, more you know, and more sales. [0:12:23.8]
Whenever I show up as a better me, the sales come naturally. People say, "Man, I want to know…" You know, it's funny - we moved into this house nine weeks ago and in the last month, I've probably had 12, 13, 14 people we were on calls just like this and they say, "Man, you look more relaxed than I've ever seen you look." And I'm telling you, you know, business is doing exactly where I need it to be. The house process - the move was tough, but honestly, I'm working far less, but far more effectively, than I've ever worked before. And it just simply is a matter of paying attention to the other stuff besides just grinding at the business every day and saying, "I'll eventually get to that relationship. I'll eventually get to better health. I'll eventually, you know, start working out" or whatever. Yeah, no you won't. You won't. I mean, I love this - it's how many people do you know that, you know, whenever health comes up, they say, "Yeah, you know, I need to lose about 20 pounds." [0:13:18.4]
Jonathan: Everybody.
Kevin: Everybody. How many people are actively, actively taking action, have a plan, are executing the plan and are being accountable to somebody to say you know what, I want to make sure that I'm going to get it done. Yeah. But you're the exception to it. Most people don’t have any plan at all. They're just words in the air. They're just throwing stuff out there and saying, "Yeah, you know what, I'm going to get to it and do it," and then they beat themselves up, wondering why they can't hit their goals. It's because they're not doing anything to make a goal become reality. [0:13:46.6]
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Jonathan: You know what it makes me think of right now is - I don’t know if you've heard of it, but I'm on this kick. It's called 75 Hard. Two workouts a day, one indoors and one outdoors; a gallon of water; you got to follow a meal plan; read 10 pages of a business book and take a progress pic every day, and not take a day off. [0:15:02.2]
So I shared it with a couple of my buddies, and these guys are younger than me. They have little children, little babies. We all hang out. Our kids play and all that. These guys are younger than me and they are fatter than me. They are all fatter than me. And when I tell them I'm doing this, they're like, "Dude, you're already skinny, man. What do you need to lose weight for?" And I'm like, "This is not about losing weight. This is about mental discipline. This is about being tough." And one of them says to me, and this guy is so, so, so successful, but he grinds his ass off for that success. Like, he's got total tradeoff of work being #1. I had explained the plan to him and he says, "Yeah. Yeah, man. I think I can get on that." And this guy, he's got mental toughness. I know because he's inspired me many times. And he's like, "Yeah, well, the two workouts - I don't know, maybe I can get one." "Oh? A gallon of water a day? Man, that's a lot of water." "Oh, man - a meal plan? I don't know." I'm like, "You can't. You can't do this, alright? You can't. You can talk about it and there's a difference between talking about it and being about it." [0:16:02.0]
Kevin: Right.
Jonathan: That's rampant in our world today. So, Kevin, self-development. You talked about that. What do you do for self-development?
Kevin: You know, the thing for me is I look at kind of the total picture. So I want to make sure that I'm involved in a mastermind, like, you know, like what we were in with Ryan. You know, I'm looking at going back to Genius Network with Joe Polish.
Jonathan: Oh - are you?
Kevin: And so I was in that for four years, I guess, and it's time to go back. You know, I needed to step out and execute, and now, it's time to go back and relearn again. The other thing that I focus on, me personally, is just my meditation time, my reflection time and it sort of gets over into the spirituality side, which is an intense, an intense piece of my life. It's something that has been part of me since, you know, forever. And for years, I would negate that and just kind of say okay, that's that thing over there that I do, then I switch hats and I come in and I get into my business. And I would like…
Jonathan: How did you separate that because we have talked about this over the years, and you've always kept that compartmentalized. [0:17:02.0]
Kevin: Always did. I mean, you know, it was interesting. In fact, I don’t even know if you know this. Actually, I'm a licensed ordained minister.
Jonathan: I did not know that.
Kevin: You did not know that. And for years, I've never told anybody about it. And you know, here again, I'm not working vocationally with the church, but it is something that I just, I would struggle with, you know - how do I, you know…I'm going to scare people away if I tell them about that. And actually what it is is I'm doing more what I consider ministry in my coaching work now than I ever did in the church. And it's not about religion. It's absolutely about getting somebody to get in line, understanding that there is energy and power in the universe, whatever tradition you happen to follow, and that how can you allow that to radiate from you. And it is, some people may call it, you know, charisma. They may call it, you know, energy. They may call it light, They may call it, you know, holiness, whatever. But whenever you… if something is that intricate and intensely personal part of who you are and you extricate it from your business, again, you're showing up now at 60%. [0:18:05.5]
Will you think about that for a second? If I'm only 60%, 20% of me is gone because I don’t allow my faith to be part of my work. If 20% is gone because I don’t, you know, I don’t play keys and allow music to feed me every day. Now I keep my piano in my office, you know. And if 20% is not there because I'm in terrible health, well all of a sudden now I'm showing up at 40%. Well no wonder why business sucks. I mean, you cannot operate at an optimum level if you are negating the things that make you who you are. You can't. It's impossible. But yet, everybody does and what they do is they do it through grinding. They go at with, "I'm just going to work more." And everybody, I say everybody, I need to be more specific about it - most entrepreneurs that end up coming to me have said, over and over and over again, "I'm going to work on my - and you fill in the blank - when I get my business to a number." "I'm going to work on my health whenever I get to $500,000."
Jonathan: Why doesn’t that work? Why doesn’t that "I'm gonna when" - why doesn’t that work? [0:19:02.1]
Kevin: It's backwards. It's completely backwards because what's happening is is you are taking half of yourself, pushing it as hard as you possibly can, chasing this thing that you're not ever going to do - and it's like the, you know, the losing weight thing - you know, it's like, well, maybe I can do one workout a day… you know, one workout a day. You're not going to get there. And here again, the thing for me is - okay, this is not about work life balance. It's not about, you know, having everything at 100%.
Jonathan: There's something right there than I want to ask you before you move on.
Kevin: Yeah.
Jonathan: Is that real? Is there such a thing as work life balance?
Kevin: No. No. I don’t think … not in the traditional terms like we have been told. I think there is a methodology and it's part of kind of what I do with Total Life Blueprint is this, this idea that says decide where you want these things to be. Like, you know, I would love to have health and my workout routine be at the absolute forefront, to where I am far more, you know, be in better shape than I am right now. I know, for a fact, that I'm not going to do that, given what else is going on in my life. So I'm proactively saying, "I'm going to go this far and I'm going to be good with that for this season, and that's where that has to be." [0:20:13.6]
Jonathan: Talk about that right there. There's another good point that I don’t think people get, that I want you to hit on. You said, "I'm going to be good with that for this season." What does that mean?
Kevin: Well, you know, it's, you have to remember that we are constantly evolving and moving forward and so we have to say, "In the situation that I'm in right now, in the season that I'm in right now." I knew, whenever we were doing the move, I mean, it took us.. from the time we bought the house midstream and did the final touches and moved in, you know, it was probably 120 days. I knew during that time, especially during the move, health was not going to be at the forefront because man, it's like, you know, you're, you're doing quick takeout and you're grabbing food on the run and you know doing all this stuff that you need to do whenever you got all the meetings and the contractors and you're coming out to the site and all that kind of stuff. And I just had to be okay with that. But then I also had to set a marker, and for me, I literally put a marker on my calendar that says, "Okay, we got to come back and get our health line back in order." You know, it's like whenever you do a launch in a business. If you're somebody who does launches. [0:21:13.3]
Jonathan: What's a launch, Kevin? I don't know what a launch is. Tell us. Our listeners may not know.
Kevin: You know, I don’t use them in my business but a lot of people do where they'll do kind of like a mini marketing series - a series of videos that go in sequence with orchestrated emails to where it's like this big hubbub where you're building interest and then you release your product and you know, have a set time that it's available. When people do those, because they take so much time in their business…
Jonathan: And effort.
Kevin: … it is going to absolutely steal time and availability from the other six principle assets. And you have to know that and plan for that. You have to know I'm going to have less time to spend with my wife. I'm going to have less time to spend with my kids if I choose this model of marketing, and being aware of that. [0:22:01.8]
But what happens is people go you know what, I'm going to fix this relationship. I just got to go make this money real quick. And so they go and do the money and then they come back and they want to celebrate it with somebody that's meaningful to them and nobody is even there because they're off trying to live a life and be a family, without you. And so, you know, it's understanding the seasons and how to let things ebb and flow that gives you the ability to show up 100% and be where you need to be. I mean, you know, the one that kills me, Jonathan, is you know, my kids are older now but I remember you know, going to the basketball games, going to you know, the soccer matches and all that other kind of stuff and seeing five or six dads down at the end of the bleachers on their phone. And I'm going, man, you have got life so completely backwards. So completely backwards because the very essence of what you're fighting for is out here trying to please you on the field, and you've got your head up somebody's butt. I mean, it just drives me nuts. It drives me nuts. You know, it's funny - I remember I went through a pretty difficult divorce and a bankruptcy. Now it's nine years ago. [0:23:06.6]
And I sat down with my youngest daughter, Mallory, who is actually staying with us this week but back when we were trying to figure out how to heal our relationship, I kept saying to her, "But you don’t understand, Mallory. I was trying to do this. I was trying to build the business so that you would have opportunities that I never had." And she looked me dead square in the eye and she said, "Dad, I never asked you for that."
Jonathan: Whoa. I hate that.
Kevin: "You weren't doing that for me. You were doing it for you. I appreciate the stuff but you weren’t doing that for me." You talk about a wakeup call, man. It's like, whoa, whoa.
Jonathan: I don’t know if you get my emails, man, but tonight I actually am admitting that in my email. Because I woke up to something yesterday where I'm like I'm living a lie. I've been living this lie. I even believed my own lie and I said that all these years I've been working for my family, and I'm not. I'm simply not working for my family. I'm working for my purpose, and so, it's a different thing and it might all fall under there, but what is my purpose? It's not that I'm working for my family. I've been lying and I realized that yesterday. So it's so weird that you're saying it today. [0:24:13.8]
Kevin: You know, that's one of the critical mistakes that freelancers, entrepreneurs, you know, business owners make - is we lie to ourselves all the time. All the time. And we tell ourselves that we're better at this than we actually are or we tell ourselves that we're doing better than we actually are. And a funny example - I had a guy that's part of my Catalyst program, and he was, he kept, you know, kind of really being down on himself and beating himself up and frustrated and all. And he's like, you know, I'm just not seeing the number of sales that I need to see and you know, I'm just not having the volume of revenue come in. And I said, well, I will tell you what. Turn on, screen shot your calendar - let me see what's going on. Well, he didn't have any prospect calls going.
Jonathan: What? How's he going to make sales? [0:24:59.1]
Kevin: Well, that's my, that's my whole thing, that's what… I was going dude, are you just expecting people to you know like poof right out of the sky? I said it doesn't work that way. I said you know, the next thing you need to be doing, and this is great if somebody is, you know, if somebody is just getting started or maybe they've had a lull in the business. You know, the first thing I did whenever I stepped out of the agency then and started my own business now, 15 or 16 years ago, a friend of mine called me and he said let me give you the best advice that you can ever possibly do. He says you're going to do two things: You're going to write, on a post-it note, and stick it on your phone - this was, you know, back you know, landline days and the question on the post-it note is "Is the person on the other side of this phone worth" and then you put your billable hour that you want to make. And at that time for me, it was, I wanted to be at 300 bucks an hour. That's the revenue number that I wanted to do. And so every time I'm on the phone, I'm asking myself, is this person on the phone able to be in a relationship that's worth $300 an hour, and the answer is no, hang up the phone. The second thing that he told me to do, he says, every single day, especially when you're starting out, you talk to 10 people you've never talked to before. [0:26:03.5]
Jonathan: Oh, wow.
Kevin: Ten people, and he said, now eventually, you're going, your capacity is going to be where you can keep up with 10 but in those early days, you absolutely talk to 10 people. So now, for me, whenever I go through, you know, whenever I'm like, okay I'm ready to kind of jump into the next growth phase, I'm on Facebook Messenger. I'm on email. I'm on, you know, I'm texting with folks. I'm on the phone with folks. You know, doing checkins and stuff like you and I do periodically, and just saying hi, where are you and what's been going on? When you do that, people - I mean, I had one happen last week with a guy that he actually bought my course the day before he was leaving on a six week trip to Bali, and he said, can we do this via remote. And I told him, I said, yeah, as long as you promise you're going to vacation when you vacation and you'll work when it's time to work. And then, so, the thing about it is - that was not a sales conversation. It had nothing, I mean, he was nowhere on my radar because he had been a past coaching client, but I was just doing a checkin. And he was like, you know what, I need this because yeah, the business is great but everything else is falling apart, and it just fell into that piece. [0:27:04.7]
So it's true - talk to 10 people every day that you haven't talked to before or that you haven’t talked to in a long time, and business finds itself. People are just attracted whenever you're in a spot that you know what you want and you know how to get it and you're executing it, people want that in their life.
Jonathan: Well, guess what? Time is up for this week. I know you were just getting into that, and I don’t blame you because it was just getting good, but we're trying to keep these episodes under a half hour, so let's split it up into two. We'll be back next week with part two of this interview. Make sure you tune in then, and if you love what you're hearing, why not share this episode with someone who will also love it.
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