Leveraging in the Business Space – Episode 441

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[00:01] Prosperity thinkers, we’ve talked about other people’s money. We’ve talked about other people’s brains. We’ve talked about other kinds of leverage of how we can get the most out of our situations and really help ourselves grow, or it could be even with our finances. We’re going to dive deeper into this subject. Kim, welcome. I’m looking forward to this. Thank you, Spencer. I am too. Why don’t you start us off? Yes, wonderful. Here’s the reason why this is an important topic. So one, it tends to ebb and flow with what’s happening in the real estate industries. So we see a lot of people in the investing world talk about leverage and OPM, and then it will ebb and flow over into the startup world where they say, oh, you need to leverage. If you have a business idea,

[00:51] you need to get a co-founder and use the leverage there. Now, there are other sectors, which could be in raising capital and buying businesses or doing bigger deals and you’re syndicating capital or you’re raising funds and you’ve got leverage. Now, all of those pieces tie back to the networks that we’ve developed, the people that we have, and it actually ties into the previous episode talking about having that growth mindset. How does that work for a foundation where we start? Yes, it sure does. So the leverage space is so interesting to me because it is so much more than debt, right? I think that’s where people’s minds immediately go when we’re on a personal finance podcast. We use the word leverage and we just immediately think

[01:42] debt and while debt is certainly a form of leverage, there are so many things that can be levered. So think about it like in physics, where you use a stick to move a ball and if you have a longer stick, you can move a bigger ball. I think that’s basically the short-term summary of leverage or lever in physics and it is absolutely the same in life. So you can leverage your time, you can leverage people, and I mean this in the utmost respect and goodness about leveraging people. This is not coercion, this is not undertaken in any bad way at all. In fact, it’s completely the opposite. So let me just share a story with a team. So our team here at Prosperity Thinkers, there are three of us that the

[02:37] public see, there are at least five more people behind the scenes that are never, they’re not on our website, they’re not mentioned. Spencer, you’re actually one of them in a way. Our podcast community knows you, but there are marketing people, there is Mimi that helps us document everything, there is Gabe that does all of our IT, there’s Elizabeth that does the writing, the whole SCI marketing team. That’s leverage and it’s because those people are so much better at their work than I could ever be that all Prosperity Thinkers listeners as well as clients get the benefit of this awesome, what I call one plus one equals 11 exponential results. So everybody knows that one plus one equals two, there’s a saying that says

[03:32] one plus one equals three, implying a little bit of exponentialness. But when you really look at leverage and that is the word fulcrum, is that the right physics word? Do you know? I know what fulcrum is, I don’t know if it is the right word for that. No, I don’t either. You’re challenging my, what would that be, 10th grade English skills. Exactly, yeah, and physics skills. So anyway, I think people can visualize it, but that ability to use someone’s talent is how a one and obviously when you put it next to a one, it actually reads as the number 11. And that’s the kind of exponentialness that I’m talking about that we get when we leverage human talent. And we have a measuring stick for this,

[04:23] it’s called human life value. And human life value is kind of interesting because it is, it’s actual measuring stick is income or net worth. Yet we know that that is not the only way to measure human value. And I know that there are a lot of people out in the marketplace that try to figure out how to put a price on human value. Ray Dalio with his Principles U program that he has is trying to put a price on the value that human beings bring to the table. And so this is a really interesting aspect of leverage. And I really look at our organization chart, if you will, as backwards, like I want to be the support person, Teresa, Rayann, the other people you even because our listeners know of you are the people that our clients and our listeners turn to and pay attention to and

[05:29] get good results to. And I want to be the support person for that. Sure, I’m the owner of the company and I may know the most about life insurance, our product, but there isn’t any way without leverage that I could get done the results, the quality, the sheer numbers of people that we help. If Elizabeth wasn’t writing, Teresa wasn’t doing paperwork, Rayann wasn’t helping with scheduling, you weren’t co-hosting podcasts, etc. So my suggestion to each person is to look for leverage in all deals. So it might be in your own life. I remember when I first joined strategic coach and learned about the idea of leverage being an investment instead of leverage being debt or an expense. And I realized that hiring people, even on the

[06:23] personal level, like a bookkeeper in my case, was an investment and it could have literally an infinite rate of return because when you measure investment results, if you have no money in the deal, you cannot define the rate of return. The rate of return is literally infinite and a calculator cannot calculate that. It can’t do the math. Obviously, when you hire somebody, you’re paying them or maybe you’re trading something, your skills for their skills, but the good that they bring to the table could be so high and off the charts that it could literally be an infinite rate of return. That’s an amazing investment. Absolutely, it is. You’re mentioning the investment from a totally different perspective

[07:15] because you’re looking at everything as exponential growth, whereas I feel like the world and a lot of others are really just focused on linear type of growth. Yeah, it is the nature of human beings because we only think in terms of linear. Peter Diamandis has talked about this for years. It really messes with our minds. If you take 30 steps and I don’t have this math in my head, you can get from here across the driveway or whatever, but if you exponentialize that, you could literally get around the world. Maybe an easier way to visualize it is three plus three is six, but three times three is nine. Well, you have the same numbers, but that exponential impact of a multiplication versus an addition gets you so much further down the road. You can play with this if you

[08:15] just look it up like grains of sand or grains of rice or pennies. If you double a penny every day, that exponential nature, us human beings are not good at thinking about. We always think linearly. Leverage forces us to think more exponentially. It opens doors in the investment world because it lets you see things that you wouldn’t have seen before, ways to get deals done. I’m thinking of a real estate deal that my son is in the middle of right now. And back to our free day podcast that we did a few weeks ago, he took a day off from working on the deal so that he could just think about it differently. Some ideas came to him that enabled to move the deal forward again. This deal has been stalled so many times. It’s not

[09:11] even funny, but it’s moving forward again because he brought freshness and a different point of view to the deal. I think sometimes we get so amped up that we don’t think about the leverage that we actually have. Our minds are a source of leverage. People in our network are a source of leverage. I do know Robbie did take some time to talk to some other people, but I think in the end, it was just some good quiet time. You could call it listening, you could call it prayer, you could call it meditation, you could call it free days, but it was just some good quiet time that enabled him to think about another way to approach the deal to move it forward. And I think a lot of times if we focus on that in our lives,

[09:54] we don’t always focus so much on the end result that we think we’re going for, but just on moving forward one day at a time, one step at a time, we could actually end up getting better results. Yeah, absolutely. In the world today, there’s a lot of opposing views and it’s actually refreshing. And what I mean by that is the gray zone of living is starting to shrink. It’s a lot more black and white. Have you seen that as well? Yes, I believe so. People have woken up to say, I’m not okay with this and I’m going to do something about it. And there’s so much information about how to solve problems free on the internet that you can learn. And I think some good research enables you to think differently and then step away

[10:45] and make your own decision. Absolutely. Another part of the leverage is, as you’ve mentioned, the team and it is like the perspective that we have, because if you operate in certain circles, people will get mad at business owners and they’ll say, oh, well, a business owner is making too much, or they don’t understand that you’re the type of leverage that you’re getting from your team members, your employees. The prosperity way of thinking of it is that we’re making a better environment for everyone. It’s actually growth overall. And on top of that, what we’re bringing to the table in many cases, so for listeners that doubt the relationships that they have or for listeners that doubt the capital, maybe the capital constraints they have,

[11:37] there’s one piece to the equation that they could tackle today and get, which is leverage on your mind. And so I was having a conversation recently and then heard from a friend that they said they would care, they would not care as much for a person that would be a part of their close knit community about the skills they have as much as the attitude that they have and the growth, because it’s far easier to teach someone with a great attitude and a growth mindset something new than it is to teach someone that has a great skill set, a good attitude. Yes, really well said. And that is really our final aspect of leverage that’s so valuable, which is time. And somebody with a growth mindset can learn things so much

[12:29] quicker than somebody with a fixed mindset to refer specifically to Carol Dweck’s book on the subject. And this ability to leverage time also contributes to our ability to think exponentially. Those things go hand in hand. So, so true. One call to action that I would make for you listeners is for you to take the time to really be clear on where you can leverage, where you’ve developed those pieces of leverage in your life, and then share those with the people around you that you really care about. Now, one of the things that I admire about you, Kim, is that you’ve done this inside of your organization from the top down, from the down to the top. I love it. And one of the things that will be really helpful for any of you

[13:24] listeners is if you’re looking for something that’s more actionable, something that helps you to guide your leverage pieces in life is the seven principles of prosperity. You can actually get that from ProsperityThinkers.com. It’s right there on the homepage. If you don’t have it, you can download it. And there’s a lot of information there that’ll help you. And this time and age that we’re at right now, this is go time. And I just love it. So Kim, thank you for sharing this wisdom with us today on the podcast. You’re welcome. It was a joy. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode,

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