Welcome to the CEO Nation podcast, where we believe that true freedom is being able to do what you want, whenever you want, with whoever you want, by building a business that works for you rather than you working for it—and, now, to start uncovering how to get out of your own way and start building that business of your dreams, here's your host, Steve Richards.
Hey guys, welcome back! You’re listening to second part of last week’s episode. Let’s jump back in!
Steve: That’s really good. What’s funny is probably once a year, I’m at our [unclear 29:59.5] or I’m at one of our meetups and literally marketing comes up and I'm like, There are three Ms. I've never forgotten you talking about that 15 years ago and I've used that so many times, it's so good, and I would add to that--
Richard: And I learned that from Dan Kennedy and I now have the seven Ms, by the way, but go ahead. [1:05.0]
Steve: You one-upped him, I like it, or you four-upped him. I was going to add to that, you guys, if you're taking notes there, Richard has given some really good practical stuff to write down. I would say that one thing that I learned going out of the real estate world, that I was inherently doing what you're talking about, but once you understand your avatar so well, you kind of forget, and it's also kind of just getting experience, and so you're like, Oh, this worked and this didn't.
It's less about sitting in a room saying, Who's our avatar? What do they eat? What are their problems? What's their name? Some people tell you to name the person or whatever and it's like whatever, Larry the Loser, and there's a picture of a guy and he's the guy who can't get his business to work, and so what do I have to offer him?
But I would say that one thing that really helped me as I’ve got out of our real estate businesses and started these other businesses, the first thing we did with the marketing agencies that I brought in was to create an avatar, and if you guys are taking notes here from Richard, I'll just add this. This is when you're building your avatar, some things to consider is why are they doing what they're doing?
Why do people get into whatever business that they're in or why do they end up with the problem that they have that you're trying to solve, just to understand their situation better? But what are the pain points and what does it mean when you bring a solution to the table? What are the benefits that they'll receive? And that will help you guys with a lot of subject lines and emails or headlines for meetings or ad copy, because it's like, look, dealing with this pain, we can provide this solution to provide this benefit.
Richard: That’s exactly right.
Steve: Right?
Richard: That's exactly right. Okay, when I write a sales letter or an ad, I would say, Are you dealing with this? When this happens, does this happen to you? Wouldn't it be great if you could do this? In fact, wouldn't it be wonderful if you could do this, this and this? By the way, I have a way to do that. Let me show that to you. Right? [3:05.8]
Yeah, people have to have a need, so what are the biggest things that you can offer people with a need? Now, you can't go after people with no needs, selling ice to Eskimos or whatever, right? You’ve got to go after people that have something they want to change.
And, ideally, if you think about it, Steve, when you're creating this avatar, just think about the best clients that you've ever worked with. They might have been someone, they had a need and they were actively motivated about solving it, and they had money, time and motivation to work on it and you enjoyed working with them as opposed to a pain in the customer or client, right? That's your ideal. Create that ideal avatar, the perfect thing, and then again you'll attract what you focus in on.
Steve: Yeah, absolutely. That’s really good. Some of these podcasts don't get as practical as this and, hopefully, we’ve talked about some relatable stuff today, so people understand what you might go through as a business owner, but I think there’s some really practical stuff.
All right, man, this is my favorite part. Let me rapid fire a couple of get-to-know-you-better questions. At the end of these podcasts, I like to just ask some questions. Let’s start with this one. What are you most proud of? It doesn’t have to be business. Just in life.
Richard: You know what? The first thing that came to my mind was my sons. That was the first thing that came to my mind, but every father is proud of their sons, and maybe, maybe not, but that's the first thing that came up. What am I proud of? I think it's pretty cool. I mean, do you know JT Foxx? [4:50.6]
Steve: Yeah.
Richard: For the first time ever, he told me the other day that I helped him get to where he is. I mean, the guy is a superstar. I couldn't even remember he was in any of my events in the past, right? Same with a couple of other people that recently told me, “You were my inspiration” or “What you did really helped me and made a difference.”
Ross Hamilton with Connected Investors, he said on Clubhouse the other day, he said, “Oh, Richard Roop is here and it was his strategy, his free and clear strategy that allowed me to launch Connected Investors because I did this land deal and I’ve got a substitution of collateral, and instead of making 100 grand, I made 300 grand,” and he launched this social platform for real estate investors. I had no clue and that's 10, 15 years ago, and then, again, I see all of these superstars out there and these are old clients. Then I get to see what they're doing with their clients, right? It's this -
Steve: Ripple.
Richard: - multiplying effect, ripple effect. I'm pretty proud of that and I've never really known that, but it's nice. I'm just kind of learning it. If I knew that when I went into my two-year funk, I might've gotten out of my two-year funk earlier, but I was just busy doing my business. I wasn't focused in on trying to lift myself up. But after I went through that funk, I was looking for ways to lift my cell phone up.
Steve: If you didn't say this, I was going to bring it up. I mean, your fingerprints are all over the CEO Nation, too. Okay, so the next question. What do you worry about? What keeps you awake at night?
Richard: What keeps me awake at night? Over-promising. Over-promising. I mean, yeah, over-committing, taking on too much stuff and not keeping all my promises, because I'm really big on that integrity, keeping your word, only making promises you can keep, and if you take too much on and you can't do it, then you have to go back and you're just like, Hey, I know I said I was going to do that, but I can't do it right now. [7:02.4]
My coach tells me I’ve got to start saying no to people and so I do have to start, because I'm getting a lot of requests and I just got to prioritize and focus. I have a boot camp coming up next week and I had to reschedule that a couple of times just because I wasn't ready.
Steve: Yeah, so you're telling me the guru of the gurus as a coach?
Richard: Look, as you know, the definition, you can't coach yourself. You can't. You’ve got to have someone from the outside perspective showing you what's going on that you don't see and it's nice to have that accountability, right? Because I have my coaching appointment tomorrow with Brandi Veil who is my coach.
I'll tell you who my coach is, BrandiVeil.com. She's a CEO mindful coach. She's for high-level entrepreneurs and high-level people, and she's an intuitive coach, too, which creates more balance for me because I've always been into the businesses’ stuff and less into working on spirituality or my health. I have an appointment with Brandi tomorrow and she gave me an assignment, and if I didn't have an appointment tomorrow, that homework might not get done. So, it's nice to be held accountable and to get that guidance. We all need coaches. I mean, the most successful people I know have multiple coaches and support networks of high-level people, people they want to be associated with that are mastermind groups and stuff like that can be really helpful where people are supporting each other.
Steve: A hundred percent. A little sneak preview here, but there's a guy named Corey who I met on Clubhouse—at the time we're recording this, Clubhouse is blowing up and dominating my earwaves, my brainwaves—but I was in a mindfulness room and one of the beauties of Clubhouses, like, I’ll check this out. [8:57.7]
I don't even know why that showed up in my hallway, but I went into that room and I heard this guy talking and I was like, Oh, that's really cool, and it switched a little bit to business and I got up and introduced myself and I said, “Hey, man, I had a business, and when things didn't go, as I could have gone into the funk you went into, I already was in this personal development bend of becoming a better me, so I didn't go down to a funk. I mean, I was stressed and all these other things, but I hired a therapist, a counselor, a coach, a nutritionist and a workout partner.”
Anyway, I was telling this story and he and I clicked, and I ended up DM-ing him on Instagram and he's going to be on the CEO Nation podcast here soon. But literally then I was reading his bio and I was like, Oh, crap, this guy he's been on Dr. Oz five times and he's been at Good Housekeeping, and I'm like, Oh, he's kind of a big deal. So, get ready guys. That's another episode coming soon.
But I think this is going to be a powerful episode for business owners because of what you said, mindfulness. I think our mind controls our actions. I mean, another thing I learned from you, was it “behaves”? There was an acronym.
Richard: HABEs.
Steve: HABEs, your habits, attitudes.
Richard: Attitudes, beliefs.
Steve: Beliefs and expectations.
Richard: That's correct. That's what filters your potential. Your potential is limited only by your habits, attitudes, beliefs and expectations. Those are your filters of perception, okay? If any of those are not supporting you, you can change them, so that's what we teach people in coaching, how to change their habits, their attitudes, their beliefs and their expectations to support their goals.
What’s really important is to have a compelling goal that you're working on. A lot of people just don't do that. They've been told, Show me your written goal. What are you working on? Right? Does it have a deadline? When's it going to happen? How does it look? that it just works so well. [10:50.0]
By the way, Steve, I want to tell you, the reason I was in a funk for two years is I guess I fell into a victim loop because we teach what's called, and you can look this up on the internet, personal accountability model.
Okay? A personal accountability model is you take ownership, right? You hold yourself accountable and you can change and you can adjust, right? What happens is you can fall into a victim loop, which was what you were talking about.
When I had my issue with Colorado State, nobody can figure out why I was targeted, why everything happened and I couldn't figure it out and I was trying to figure it out, so I was stuck in that loop because I was trying to figure it out. But guess what? Nobody can figure it out and I finally just gave up, but I just waited too long.
By the way, if anybody wants to know about that story for the first time ever, because I was under a gag order, wasn't allowed to talk about it and I still am but I talked about anyway, I did an interview with Joe McCall. It's on my website at RichardRoop.com. Typically, it's on that front page there at RichardRoop.com. It's a very interesting story and there are some lessons, but, yeah, there is no failure, only feedback. [12:07.0]
Steve: Yeah, absolutely.
Hey, guys, Steve Richards here. After 20 years of consulting and coaching, and scaling my own businesses, I get asked by people to pick my brain all the time. Not only would I never have time to connect with each of you individually, but several years ago, I stopped doing lunch, dinner and drink meetings for business appointments just to better protect my time. The problem is, to serve my purpose of creating impact, I know you guys need direct access to me to get help tackling issues and to take advantage of opportunities.
So, what I’ve done is make myself available every Monday at 3:30 Eastern to connect live with all of you. During these sessions, I not only deliver in-depth trainings, but most importantly, I make time to engage in live coaching Q&A. What's awesome is that these are all totally free via Zoom and they're piped live into the CEO Nation Facebook group.
To gain access, just go join “The CEO Nation” Facebook group. In the group, you’ll be able to sign up for these sessions and you'll find replay videos to all past sessions, too. We'll drop a link to the group in this episode’s show notes, so be sure to get joined up in the Facebook group and I’ll see you on a live session soon.
Steve: I was going down a path with a handful of questions there, but that was way more powerful anyway, so I'm just going to end it with one last question and then I'll close this out and this is a harder one that I ask people sometimes.
But I've learned lately that, especially with what's going on in America, if we want someone to change their mind, we have to be willing to change our mind and we have to be open-minded going into a conversation to hope that someone else can maybe make a change. So, we don't go in to change their mind; we go in with an open mind to have a discussion. It's the only way to do it, right? It helps in sales and it helps in all kinds of relationships. [13:55.2]
I've been really wondering and trying to think and understand the psychology side. We started his company called Team Architects, where we do all this psychological-behavioral cognition testing to help people build teams and I've been so into the side of it and then I'm watching this big disconnect and divide in American, and I don't want to get polarizing on the podcast here. But in therapy talking to our therapist with one of my kids, we were discussing this concept of people, even if someone is a racist, it's small-minded of me if I was mad at them because that's not a choice.
Richard: I'll tell you right now, if you were in their shoes, you'd feel exactly the same way.
Steve: Yeah, it's because it's a belief system.
Richard: It’s because their habits, their attitudes, their beliefs, their expectations, their memories, their history, okay, their learnings, so nothing is right or wrong. It's either does it support you or not? Okay.
Steve: It’s part of a belief, right, the belief system that you've been raised in? Would you agree with that? [15:01.8]
Richard: It might have supported them to be… If you have these racial tendencies because you were brought up in a racist family, you might have to act racist just to be part of the family, so that could support you, but eventually you might decide it really doesn't support me and it creates these problems, and then you can evaluate it and you can change.
To discriminate based on all these different factors, it's just learning and programming, and a lot of this divide you see right now, it's programming from the mainstream media. I do not watch the news and then I have family members I love so much, like my step-mom, she watches TV all the time and she is programmed, and I love her to death and we don't argue, but she says these really illogical things. It doesn't make any sense, right? I point them out to her in a nice way and she goes, Oh, yeah, you're right. It's like I woke her up. There are people that are mentally manipulated from some of our societal media.
Steve: Yeah. I just want to know and I'm just going to circle back because, quite frankly, one of the more powerful things that may have come up on this whole podcast is the HABEs idea because they go in order. The habits push the attitudes. The attitudes push the beliefs. The beliefs, once you have a belief, you have an expectation.
I remember talking to Coach Marian Orlando, Richard, that she's talking about when you do your affirmations, you don't even have to believe them. You can literally be self-talking. This is a bunch of crap and it's not true, but your brain is digging a neural pathway for these new thoughts, and we talked about prayer and how that's the same thing. It's just interesting to me that I wanted people to hear this, so we don't gloss over this. It’s that you can start creating habits. Even if they don't feel right and you don't let imposter syndrome get in the way, act as the person you want to become. You said that earlier, the be-do-have, right? So, be the person first and then do the things you have to do. [17:09.8]
Richard: To have.
Steve: Believe this -
Richard: Yes.
Steve: - to have the life, right?
Richard: Be the person that you want to become, so that you do the things to get the things you want to have. Right. A lot of people do it backwards. I want these things, so I'm going to do this, so I can become this, just do it the other way. I learned that from Coach Willie Hooks. In fact, I was just listening to a program we did together 10 years ago called “Million Dollar Mindstorming: the secret of creating your financial future.” I don't know if you've got that, Steve. Do you have it?
Steve: I have it, yeah, because it was like, you don't have to have $10 million to have the lifestyle you want and you would go out, and you don't want to own that vacation home and have to pay for it all year. How much is it to rent it? Is it that?
Richard: Oh, no that's Billion Dollar Mindset. That’s a different one.
Steve: Oh, okay.
Richard: No, but what we did is we took a group of our high-level second- and third-year coaching clients, got together at a resort in Colorado Springs, Cheyenne Mountain Resort, for two days. We had everybody set a goal for financial independence because that's just a notion. It's a dream, okay. It's not a goal.
But so we created it as a goal. We got them very specific on their vision of how that would look, why was it important to them, what would that allow them to have, do and become, and walked them through that process, and what was holding them back, the HABEs. So, how do you change your habits through affirmations, repetition? But also a process that we use called timeline. It's an NLP technique, timeline, timeline technique. It's a secret of creating your future technique that I've shared over the years, so we applied it. It's kind of advanced goal-setting. [18:51.6]
That was an amazing event. I've been going through the audience. I'm going to publish and re-publish that and it's evergreen. It's totally evergreen. I mean, I just wish everybody would just go through it, but it's eight audios. People won't spend time listening to eight audience that is going to change their life forever. How do I convince them? I’ve got to write some type of sales letter to convince them to spend eight hours listening to the audio and doing the exercise.
Steve: Here's how I easily spend eight hours of my day currently. It’s just open up a room on Clubhouse and just read it all out loud, and I'll sit there and listen to you as long as I can interact a little bit along the way.
Anyway, joking aside, let's end with this. What I was setting up there is, and by the way, that's a great sidebar and this is episode probably got long enough so we'll make it a two-parter now, which is cool. That means it's one less week I don't have to create a podcast to keep on schedule. But what I was setting up there is there are these beliefs we have that are absolutes because of the way we were raised and brought up and whatever, and our experiences. Nurture and nature, right?
I'm always curious if there's something in your life—and I'll give you a second to think about it. I'll give you mine so you can be thinking—is there an absolute truth that you thought was totally absolute that you’ve now learned isn't true at all?
For me, there are several, but one that I like to give as an example is that, as a parent, I thought the parents have to teach the kids all the way up until they're 18 and you raise them up and then you send them out in the world, and then they begin to interact and kind of go on their own with your guidance. But when their children, through their adolescence and teen years, it's a hundred percent on you to be teaching them everything, and what I've been learning over the last two or three years, which is extremely powerful is, man, there are times, Richard, where it's 50/50.
I'm learning as much from my kids as they're learning from me, and I don't have all the answers and I don't have to, and sometimes they know some stuff I don't know. So, I have to have an open mind that when they say something that doesn't agree with me or how I was raised, I need to realize like, Hey, I’ve got to take stock of this, and once I opened my mind, it actually helped me grow and it made them feel good and be more empowered and confident, and they're actually growing at the same time and it actually is so much more powerful. [21:03.2]
Now I've got that my kids will listen to this. They'll say this isn't true. My dad doesn't listen to anything I say, but that is an absolute truth that I used to think I had to teach my kids everything and it was a hundred percent me, and I'm learning that they're teaching me sometimes as much as I'm teaching them.
Is there anything that you used to hang your hat on for a long period of time that, maybe through or after your down period, now you realize maybe certain things that don't matter or whatever?
Richard: Yeah, I mean, after losing everything, for 30 years, everything I built, $6 million portfolio of properties, stellar reputation, two great businesses, million-dollar house, everything just taken away from me. Okay? And I always thought I'd hear these hard luck stories and I'm going, In their bio, they go speak and they're talking about how they were born in a shack and then this and that, and they walked across glass to get to school and stuff, and now look at me today.
I'm going, I can't do that. I don't have that bad background. Yeah, I grew up in an alcoholic family and all that, but I don't think of myself as a victim and I just don't use it. But I thought that I could just, if you do really good business, if you have high integrity and you're honest and everything that, I don’t know, for some reason that you won't become a target. Okay? I became a target and I lost everything, and guess what? I'm still here. See?
The biggest fear of losing everything, guess what? As long as you're still around, you’ve still got you. You’ve still got your relationships. They can't take that away from you, right? All they can take is the stuff. They take the stuff. You can go get more stuff. Guess what? I'm just as happy now doing this with you today in a very modest lifestyle.
See my office back there. I live a very modest lifestyle right now. Now I am building up. I would love to live back on the beach. I'd love to go body surfing every day. Right now, I don't have the financial resources to go live anywhere I want like I did before, but that's going to change and it's not that important to me anymore to have the nicest house or the nicest car and all that. If I want to travel, yes, I'll travel. So, I have less needs now that I've had everything and then lost it all, and now what's important is what I teach.
I teach the same technical strategies on how to make a lot of money as an entrepreneur with marketing, sales and business strategies, but I think it's really important that people realize how they really get fulfillment out of life and it's great. Money is a lubricant and it does make things easier. In fact, most problems that people worry about could be handled with 10,000 bucks. Ninety percent of the stuff that people fog up their mind with worrying about stuff, if he gave him 10,000 bucks, it would handle 90% of that, so it’s the little stuff. Don't sweat the small stuff because it's all small stuff, okay? [24:07.4]
All right, I would say, get really clear and this is what we did in that program I was telling you with Willie, “Million Dollar Mindstorming: the secret of creating your financial future”, we had people get really clear on what's important to them about their financial freedom, but I say in your life, and we did this recently as well, six months ago, getting people clear on what's important to you about if you could live the ideal business, what is your preferred lifestyle? Right? You were talking about Billion Dollar Mindstorming.
But create a business blueprint, a vision in your mind of how exactly you'd like your business to look a year from now or five years from now, but make it exciting, exactly how you want it, and then put together a plan. Forget about how you're going to do it because that will limit you. Create the ideal situation. Suspend your beliefs. What's ideal? Then you can create a plan. Don't worry about how you're going to do it. Create the vision first.
I think everybody listening to this, spend a few minutes today, spend five, 10 minutes just thinking about, If I could have anything I wanted for me and my family and for my life, what would make a big difference for me? Then go ahead and set that as a goal and put a date on it, a dream with a deadline, and then go for it.
Steve: That's awesome, man. I want to jump on two or three of those points, but it'll make this thing even longer. That was so good and that's Pillar 4 in the Four Pillars of Freedom, which is our core product or training product, building your perfect day out and then reverse-engineering back.
All right, cool. Right before I close this down, Richard, if people want to follow you or learn more about what you do, how do they do that?
Richard: The easiest thing is RichardRoop.com. But I have some free stuff for you guys, okay, and it's on my digital platform. It’s Roopodia.com. Roo.Podia.com. Roopodia.com. [25:58.6]
Steve: Linking.
Richard: R-O-O-P-O-D-I-A [dot] com [forward slash] free. Roopodia.com/free and I always have a number of very powerful programs that I'm just giving away for free because I want to give people some value. Ideally, I could put some money in their pocket before they ever sign up for one of my events or hire me for mentoring or anything like that, right, or buy one of my home studies. I'd like to give out people on marketing, business strategies, entrepreneurial strategy, success strategies, high-level stuff. We were talking about sledgehammer techniques before we’ve got on the line here.
Usually I'm kind of guilty and known for giving away way too much for free and not selling enough, but, again, I get fulfillment out of giving stuff away for free and I call it selling in the backend, Steve, and I've done this all my life. Just give out tons of value, focusing on how you can help others. Give them lots and lots of value and it'll just come back in our law of reciprocity.
Steve: Absolutely. That's a great point to end on. Guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know that Richard will be at some… When live events ever come back someday, I'm going to have to send him a plane ticket and make sure he's there. But you guys will see him again connect to the CEO Nation. That's for sure.
I want to finish with this. If you guys aren't connected on the Facebook group, it's the CEO Nation. Jump in the Facebook group because that's where you can find a link to one thing that I think is super powerful for you. It’s that every Monday at 3:30 Eastern, I'm on a Zoom that you can log into and engage with me live. It's my way to let you pick my brain, and we do a training session every week and I do free coaching and I answer all the questions that you have about business.
Here's the cool thing. Once you sign up once, you'll get an invite every week. It's all free and you can get on and engage with me live. If you miss any of those or you want to go back because you couldn’t take notes, because sometimes I get rolling and we cover a lot, but we're connecting that Zoom. It's piped into our Facebook group, so you guys can just [connect there]. All of the videos, the replays are all available in the Facebook group, so it's a great community of many, many entrepreneurs that I think would be helpful. [28:13.5]
That is the best way to connect with us. You can always go to TheCEONation.com to see the other episodes for our podcast and to check out the different information that we have on that site.
With that, I'm going to end us Richard. Thanks.
Richard: Yeah, I look forward to…people who have never heard of me, hopefully they're now interested in going to Roopodia.com, and let's get to know each other. I enjoy active entrepreneurs who have some passion in their life.
Steve: Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I think your name is going to be surfacing around a lot more that you're back in action. All right, that's it, guys. We'll see you guys in the next episode. Thanks.
We hope you enjoy this episode of The CEO Nation. Be sure to give us a rating, leave a review and subscribe on iTunes. And to connect with Steve and learn more about this movement, visit TheCEONation.com. That's TheCEONation.com. Until next time, take care, be safe and live free.
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