478 | How I Grew 7 Franchises to $1M+ in Revenue Before 30

Sep 23

00:00
Chaz Wolfe
I can have desire. I can have a definite chief aim. I can have persistence. I can create a plan. I can do all those things. If I don't surround myself with actual humans, my wife, and other people that I find valuable, then I can't validate my plan upgrade, or uplevel my plan. I can't agitate the thought around my plan to make it either better, or maybe that plan doesn't work at all and I got to scrap it and I got to create a new plan.

00:22
Jake Isaacs
Hey, Chaz, thanks for taking some time to chat with me today, dude.

00:27
Chaz Wolfe
It feels a little. It feels funny to be on this side of the mic.

00:32
Jake Isaacs
Yeah.

00:32
Chaz Wolfe
I appreciate you. The listener may not know who you are, so let me actually. Let me do an introduction. Even though you're gonna ask me questions I want. I need to do an introduction. It actually brings me great joy to introduce you. I love introducing you. And so for the listener, you might have been hearing me. This might be your first show. You might have been listening for the last several years as we've built, driven to win, and had all these hundreds of guests on the show. But this one's a special one because Jake Isaacs is here with me. Jake Isaacs is co founder and partner inside of gathering the Kings. And really, what that looks like is a friendship of almost 20 years culminated in. Now we get to run together in business, and of course we've got an amazing team behind us.

01:23
Chaz Wolfe
But the specialty of this friendship is kind of cool. Everybody kind of can see it inside of the organization. But you've got a background in running multiple large organizations. We call you the serial integrator. So for all you eos fans out there, Jake is a serial integrator. He's been the guy to run multiple organizations and scale multiple organizations. And so now he gets to come in and help lots of entrepreneurs like you through gathering the Kings scale their businesses. And we have a really cool dynamic back between the two of us. Serial entrepreneur and myself, serial integrator and Jake. And today, we just get to do that.

02:06
Chaz Wolfe
I get to create the mess, and he gets to create a process out of the mess in the midst of gathering the kings and all the fun stuff we get to do with this podcast, driven to win. And so the only last thing I'll say to the listener, which is what I say every single time when I introduce Jake Isaacs, is that Jake is the best human that I know. That might sound like a little bit like, cheesy. I'm 100% serious. I'll look you straight dead in the eyes. He's better than my wife. He's for sure better than me. He's for sure better than any other human I have ever met. It's so far beyond, like a hundred x beyond. He'll give you the shirt on his back. He would absolutely give me the shirt on. He'd give you. He don't even know you.

02:45
Chaz Wolfe
He literally, the listener right now doesn't know your name. He would give you his shirt on his actual back. But I'm dead serious. This. This man is full of all kinds of value, and I am just blessed to know him, let alone blessed to run a business with him. So, Jake, thanks for being here, man.

03:04
Jake Isaacs
Thanks, man. I appreciate that. I receive all that. It's always difficult to sit back and listen to someone give you flowers like that, so. But thank you. I appreciate it.

03:17
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, man. Roses is the best I got. Sorry.

03:19
Jake Isaacs
No, it's good. It's good. You know, Chaz, I'm a product of the formal education system here in the United States, and I know that it's designed to do a really great job teaching young men and women how to be a part of this industrialized corporate machine that runs our economy.

03:37
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah.

03:37
Jake Isaacs
But it's not very good at teaching business ownership and independent thought. And so what I'm kind of hoping over the course of this conversation is that you and I could talk about what being an entrepreneur has taught you over the last 16 years of your career.

03:53
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah. Now, I think that you're spot on with that, especially the thinking part. The free independent thinking, bro. We can go on a tangent just on that, but. But I'm excited. Let's roll.

04:03
Jake Isaacs
I also know that you're like most entrepreneurs, and you were bitten by that bug at a very young age. And so I say the last 16 years of entrepreneurship. But I know that you've been identifying as an entrepreneur for years and years and years. So tell me about what that very first little Chaz wolf business was that got you started.

04:23
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah. Well, I don't know if I first call this one a business, but I did door to door candy sales. You know, like, every young kid, you know, was trying to sell fundraiser stuff. I played. I played basketball. And anybody who's ever played a competitive sport knows. Well, you as a kid may not have known how expensive it was because your parents are paying for it all, but growing up in a single mom household, I was part of the financial solution, which was, hey, we got these candy bars. You know, those terrible ones that they'd sell for a dollar or whatever, the ones that had no names on them and come in a box. And, bro, we had to sell boxes and boxes to pay for trips and stuff because that was really the only way. My mom worked two and three jobs.

05:05
Chaz Wolfe
And of course she did everything she possibly could and. But, but selling candy bars was one of the ways that I was able to help, you know, play basketball. And so selling candy bars was the first legit deal and just going door to door and going to my mom's office and she would take the box, you know, but really what she wanted was she wanted me to come, which I did, and carry the box. I'd go around to all the individual offices there at her business that she worked for and make my ask, make my pitch, you know, outside of that, I did some landscaping and some lawn care. My wife jokes and says that wasn't a real business, but I tried to tell her I had paper invoices.

05:49
Chaz Wolfe
My mom bought me a little invoice book, and I'd write their name, I'd write the amount, you know, like they were my neighbors. And then this one construction company that I did several of their properties, you know, so, I don't know. I was doing a business, but just making money, man, that's all it really was. I never thought about being a business owner, per se, or an entrepreneur. I was just trying to make money because we didn't have much. And if I wanted the new J's and, you know, my mom was gonna try because she just is such a giver. She's such a giver. But from like twelve on, if I wanted it, I was pretty much gonna have to go get it. And, and on top of that, I wanted to go get it. I didn't want her to get it for me.

06:29
Chaz Wolfe
I wanted to get whatever it was. The new J's, my car when I turned 16, like, all of that, I just took immense pride in being able to, one, take care of myself because it meant she didn't have to. And then on top of that, there's just an immense sense of accomplishment with drivers like you and I when we can check the box and there's autonomy and going, you know what? I did that. And not that I need to like, pat myself on the back because I'm really like, this whole, like, being in front of people, being on podcasts and all that, like that. This is pretty new for me. I just wanted to freaking win. That's all. It really was make some money.

07:08
Jake Isaacs
You know, when we first met, and you said about 20 years earlier, it's hard for us to kind of put a time frame on how long the relationship is. But shortly after we met, you became a very, very successful sales professional for one of the top home service companies in the United States. And by the world standards, you had made it. You were making a ton of money. You had all the things, you know, you were checking all the boxes off of that metrics listen list, and it's at that time that you decided to really get serious about pursuing business ownership. Can you talk to me a little bit about what the desire was to leave this corporate, cushy, comfortable, safe environment to strike it off on your own?

07:56
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, I don't think it was like a decision to leave. I had made a decision even when I got the job, that. That the job was the temporary thing, you know, and so for, to circle it back, I guess I had some. Some environments that I was in, you know, around 17, 1819, even 20, where I had been around some thinking, some entrepreneurial type thinking. I'd read some books. I had some mentors at the time that just got me thinking about what it was like to have freedom to do my own thing that just fit right in with the autonomy that I was kind of just describing that I desired as a young kid. As a young kid. It was just, I wanted to make money because I didn't have any, but really, I wanted to do my own thing.

08:38
Chaz Wolfe
And so it just fueled the fire that was already in me of how maybe it is possible that I can go build something to have a business or to create, you know, like, I can think about the cash flow quadrant. I read, you know, Robert Siacock, Robert Kiyosaki's book, which I now have shared with many people and kids. And my kids and all kinds of fun stuff in that. In that way. But getting them to think from the left side of the quadrant to the right, you know, that employee, self employed over to investor business system. And that's really what it was. I was an employee there. Yes. Making top 1% money. I mean, I could have done anything. And even at that time, I wasn't. I still lived very humbly.

09:21
Chaz Wolfe
And I kind of funny when someone says they do something humbly, it's like, well, just the fact that I brought it up probably isn't very humble. But what, you know, if you'll just hear me, what I'm trying to say is that during that time, I wasn't living like I was making that type of money. I was stashing it away. I was saving it. I was investing in businesses. I was investing in real estate. And that was really almost all of my twenties, and I did both for a very long time. I held even onto the job after I had been investing in businesses and real estate much longer than I even had to. And I never saw it as that was the thing, and I left the thing to be a business owner.

10:01
Chaz Wolfe
I always knew I wanted to create a business system and have investments again going to that right of the line of the quadrant, and the job was just fuel. And, and if I could be in sales or sales leadership that could facilitate more of that active income, great, I would. I was just dumping it to the left side of the quadrant, into the systems that I was building with my franchises at that time and other businesses since, and our real estate. And so that one day when I wanted to not have to do that anymore, I didn't have to, which obviously gives real freedom.

10:34
Jake Isaacs
Yeah. When you were going through that process early on, evaluating businesses to purchase, what were you learning? What were the things that you were looking for in that business venture?

10:46
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, good question. I looked at a lot of things, and I'm the type of guy who doesn't necessarily need to do a specific type of business. I looked at a lot of widgets, a lot of service, a lot of products. And to me, business is business. Now, not everybody thinks like that. And I don't know if one way is necessarily better than the other. I'm just giving you my experience. I have met many of entrepreneurs who are like, yeah, I really couldn't see myself doing that. And I guess I've always been building the system. I've never been doing that thing, whatever that thing was. Now, granted, I bought my first business. It ended up being an edible arrangements franchise. But I had looked at other franchises, I had looked at furniture, I looked at moving service company.

11:30
Chaz Wolfe
I mean, I looked at a lot of stuff. I almost purchased a two location dry cleaners. I mean, it was all over the map from like, what type of business? Really what I was looking for was something that I could, that would either allow me a, to keep the job that I could facilitate a system and not have to be in, or something that I could purchase, and then scale where I leave my job, and then scale big enough to where, again, I would be back to working on the business. And I don't know where that came from necessarily, other than those early freedom components that kind of just shared and then on top of that's just how my brain works. My brain works in systems. And so it never made sense that I was there making the baskets, although I did.

12:11
Chaz Wolfe
I've made every single basket that we've got. I made. I've dipped the strawberries, I've cleaned the toilets. Like, there's not one task that I would ever ask an employee to do that I haven't done myself, but I'd never identified myself as, like, I couldn't imagine myself making fruit baskets or I couldn't identify myself, you know, putting a roof on a shingle or a shingle on a roof. You know what I mean? Like, to me, it was, is this the right type of vehicle? Is this the right type of business? And so, for me, I ended up deciding on edible arrangements because I felt like that business fit my sales and marketing background where. Although, yeah, I would need to make some baskets and learn kind of how to do the innards of the business.

12:46
Chaz Wolfe
But really, my sales and marketing, where I could call local businesses, I could drum up accounts, I could, you know, I could. I could expand the business with my already developed communication skills, really. But leadership and sales skills, and that just fit what I knew how to do, and I could grow the business. So I felt. I felt comfortable leaving the job at that point to go all in.

13:10
Jake Isaacs
You talk about that period, and at this point, we're a decade, almost two decades past that. But I remember being in a room with some of our mutual friends, right when you were in the process of signing the contract for your first edible arrangements, and someone made the comment that, Chaz, why do you want to be known as the fruit guy? And till my dying day, Chaz, I will remember your response. You looked him square in the eye and you said, I'm not going to be known as the fruit guy. I'm going to be known as the guy who learned how to develop a business system and blew the roof off of this thing. And you did that.

13:50
Chaz Wolfe
I'm glad you remember that, because I do.

13:53
Jake Isaacs
I mean, I can tell you what room were in and whose house and who's, like, all of it. It's very. It's an indelible memory for me, for sure.

14:01
Chaz Wolfe
That's awesome. I mean, it's everything we just talked about, right? Like that. That. That ride of the line quadrant. So for the listener, grab Robert Kiyosaki's cash flow quadrant. But that right of the line system, everything I was, everything I had learned or had developed over a course of probably three or four years were kind of part of the same, you know, business training system there for a couple years. And really what it was is me reading a bunch of books. It's really what it was. And some people that were speaking into my life. But really I readdeze probably close to 200 books in three years. It was a lot. But again, my personality is one where I like, absorb knowledge. And I'll read and I'll listen and, and I just. I just love taking in knowledge.

14:40
Chaz Wolfe
And so that was like, that was my university. I'm a college dropout. Like, I started to go to school and said, nah, this isn't really for me. I really didn't really want to go to begin with. I started, I went to kind of go down a certain path. And that all made sense to me when I dropped all that. And it was like, oh, okay. Like, this is education to me. Like reading, you know, think and grow rich. I remember reading that first time at 19. I didn't have a clue what it said at 19 like I do now. But that was one of the books. That was one of the 200 books that I read back then. So that for me, when that moment that you just described was just probably a culmination of regurgitation, really.

15:16
Jake Isaacs
What do you mean? A 19 year old doesn't understand transmutation and sexual energy.

15:21
Chaz Wolfe
Like, oh, I believe that's chapter eleven. And a good one. It's a good one. It's a good one.

15:29
Jake Isaacs
Speaking about that learning, you have this great story that I love to tell people, and I'm hoping that you'll share it with us. But college dropout in corporate sales, you taught yourself how to read financial documents so you could evaluate businesses before you purchase them. Tell us the story on how you learned how to read P l s and all that stuff.

15:53
Chaz Wolfe
That's a good question. And I appreciate your gentleness around that question because especially with your background, you've seen just big P l s and you've made decisions as an integrator in many businesses from the P and L. And so you get the importance of. It is really kind of the irony of all this. But you're right. I'm 24 at the time, I'm looking at businesses, and we had looked at a lot of businesses. In fact, were about to buy that two location dry cleaners. And I asked the business broker, he was such a great guy. He had many businesses and sold them all. And then he just owned this firm where helped people buy businesses. And he was probably in his late fifties, early sixties, and I was like, hey, Tom, this p and lithe, can you tell me what that is?

16:41
Chaz Wolfe
And I'm sure in that moment, that two location dry cleaners was, like, a probably $300,000 business that were looking at, roughly. I was gonna have to get an SBA loan. I mean, like, it was a real deal. I mean, I ended up getting. Buying a more expensive business than that. First. The first edible was about a half million, and I got an SBA loan, and it was, like, real serious money, especially at 24, turning 25. And Tom was like, oh, yeah, we should go through this. And so he was very kind and went through the p and L and the balance sheet, and I didn't understand the balance sheet for a long time. I probably, to be truthful, I didn't understand a real balance sheet till a couple years ago. The p and L, I understood in, out, bottom line. Got it.

17:24
Chaz Wolfe
But I didn't understand that then. And I'm looking at businesses. I had no idea, really, how to run a business, except for I knew that I would figure it out. I just had immense belief in myself that whatever it was, I was going to figure it out along the way.

17:37
Jake Isaacs
Yeah. The takeaway for the listener on this story that I love so much is, you know, most people get their pride all caught up in their decision making and don't want to admit what they do and do not know. The fact that you were humble enough to ask someone who is a little bit farther down the road than you to for help, for education, it speaks to the character that you have.

17:59
Chaz Wolfe
I appreciate that. You know, I think that it's. It's. It's freedom, you know, it doesn't mean that I'm not the typical guy, you know, the typical man who doesn't ask for directions. I really don't. I don't. My wife, she was here. She'd be like, yeah, that's right. You just pull over and ask, no, no. Let me figure this out. I want to. I want to navigate, but. But that was one of those moments where I was like, you know, I should probably know what this is. And in the quiet of our little meeting, I was able to learn without, you know, too much shame. But that same principle, though, of asking for help, I haven't actually always held onto that well. In fact, it's a big reason why gathering the kings kind of started along the way.

18:37
Chaz Wolfe
I had help, and eventually, I started to invest in help, coaching and events. And groups and stuff like that. But the early years, I had a couple of buddies, you being one of them, where I would kind of like, ping stuff off of. But, you know, it wasn't really like a, it wasn't really much to, like, press into my growth. And so I knew personal growth was a big deal. I had read the books and I was doing all the free stuff, like the free YouTube university was in my ear all day, every day. So it wasn't like I wasn't learning. I just wasn't investing in my learning or investing into other people who could help me.

19:13
Chaz Wolfe
And so that was really the thing that accelerated, even though that principle that you just described, I did that at a young age, and it did help me. I didn't always go right to that, especially when it cost me money. That's probably the difference. In that moment, it didn't cost me any money to ask Tom, but later in life, when it cost me money to go to an event or ask someone or a lunch, you know, like a particular lunch, like, hey, let me pay for your time, or like a coach or anything like that, anytime it had a dollar amount attached to it, I just either a thought, like, I could do better myself or that I could find it free online. And a lot of stuff can be found, especially knowledge piece. It can be found free.

19:48
Chaz Wolfe
I mean, they're getting good stuff right now, I think, from a free podcast. But it's really the relationship and the press, when someone else is in relationship with you, they understand the scenario, whether it's a coach or in this case, for us, gathering the kings is a community where, you know, I was just on the, on the call yesterday with one of our members, one of our original members, and he was, you kind of having a bad day? And he was like, hey, man, no question, really? But just like, I was like, cool, thanks for sharing. But now come back and give me what the truth is. And that's what pressing is. That's what relationship is, whether it's a coach or whether you're just running with people, kind of like we say we do in gathering the kings.

20:25
Chaz Wolfe
You need help, and you need to pay for that help, because it's got to cost you something in order for you to get something out of it, very much like the scenario that you just gave with Tom. So I know I just did, like a whole rabbit trail on that Jake, but I really felt like it held me back for a long time. Honestly, I wish I had paid for those types of moments like I had with Tom, even though I didn't have to pay for that moment. If I had understood the concept deeper and been willing to pay, I would just be much further along.

20:51
Jake Isaacs
That's awesome. That's good. So you've purchased your first edible arrangement store, and what the listener doesn't know, you bought one, and then in very short succession, you bought two. You bought location two. So tell me what the hardest part of going from one business or one location to two locations was for you.

21:12
Chaz Wolfe
Good question, really. Probably the hardest part was just getting the bank to do the loan. It's not typical that a bank does a loan within a year. They want to see your history and that type of a thing. And so I had just been blessed in those first six months to have some good track record, and it's a franchise, and so they like that. And the next one that I wanted to buy was, you know, existing, and it had a good track record, and I had already kind of proven some things over the six months, and so they took a chance, and I'm thankful that they did. It really, honestly wasn't until the third location, which was just twelve months later. So I bought one. First one in April of twelve, second one in November of twelve. A year later was number three.

21:55
Chaz Wolfe
A year later was number four. And then, so that would have been three years. A year later was five, six, and seven. So at the four year mark had we had seven. So scrolling back to number three. The major difference, though, was that I physically couldn't be in three locations, even though they were in the same metro. They were in three cities and said, the metro, I could be in two locations at once. That that's like the, you know, people say you can't, but you totally can.

22:21
Chaz Wolfe
You totally can be two places at once because I can be physically in a place and then monitoring in the other, and then, like, later that day or 15 minutes later, go over to the other one and I could ping back and forth and I'd, you know, I hit inventory in between and I'd be, you know, just bopping around. And that's how a lot of entrepreneurs, especially in multiple location type businesses, operate. They got two, three places, and they kind of just bop around, you know, but that was still very much me being in the business. And so that was the first little taste that I had to work on the business because I couldn't be in three places at once. I had to be more systematic than I had been.

22:53
Chaz Wolfe
I had to be more prone to building good people on the team and leaders to do the actual functions of each location because I literally couldn't cover, in the worst case scenario, couldn't be in two places at once physically covering a shift type of a thing. So that was the first taste. There was many times after that where I forced me up. I can think of when number seven in that mix I just gave to you was a location in Florida which was nowhere near any of my other locations. And so a lot of people ask me, why did you do that? First off, I answered, it was Florida. Why wouldn't you? You know, right there next to the beach. Why wouldn't you? But the, but the challenge there was that I couldn't get there all in the day.

23:33
Chaz Wolfe
Like, I could emergency type situation. I could cop a flight, maybe get there today, but most likely going to be tomorrow. And so I had to raise my thinking yet again to on or further on the business or the business system or the team, the things that were moving and, you know, the machine of the business. I couldn't be in it at all, actually. If I did, I was neglecting the things that I needed to do on the business, which then there were people counting on me to do those things. And if I was in the business at all, it was just basically a clog in the, or a, you know, cog in the wheel, you know?

24:11
Jake Isaacs
So anyway, yeah, you know, I think when we look at entrepreneurs that we've interacted with over the years and you, even some of the members in gathering the kings, that concept of working on the business and working in the business, it's so hard for them to get to that mental shift that you did because there's satisfaction in working in the business. You're part of the revenue generation for the business. You're doing the things that are providing for your family in that moment when you went from two to three in this example, and you couldn't be in all places all of the time, what was the number one thing, mentally, that you had to get over to create this business system and start working on instead of in the business?

24:56
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, I mean, the satisfaction, I mean, I don't know if I ever got satisfaction from dipping strawberries and putting them in a bouquet, but what I got satisfaction of which, in essence, what you're saying is a hard day's worth of work, going somewhere, working hard. And I had worked retail, you know, even when I was a teenager in high school, you know, I was a, worked at foot locker and sold shoes and I worked twelve hour shifts on the regular. That was a very regular thing for me at 16, 1718 years old. And I would outwork everybody. So that out work mentality is really the baseline of that, what you're saying. It's not so much necessary. I've never got my hands dirty, you know, I never, I got satisfaction from, you know, being on the job site, if you will.

25:44
Chaz Wolfe
But what that looked like for me really is same principle of just doing the work or working hard or sweating even. Like there's just all those things are, that's the same, it's the same circle, right? And so for, I never got satisfaction in the actual tactical pieces but the satisfaction of just being busy. And so when I was forced to up and to work on the business, my mindset had to go not so much where are you going today or physically, what are you doing, but what are you orchestrating or what are you organizing or what are you planning or what are you thinking ahead for?

26:26
Chaz Wolfe
And so if the machine is covered, if I've got, for example, edible arrangements, if I've got folks that are in the stores making the baskets, doing the deliveries, taking the phone calls, ordering the fruit, like all the tactical things, then what is it that they need? Well, they need marketing because we don't want the phone to dry out. They need, you know, market and or sales, you know, for corporate accounts and they need, you know, they need a schedule making or planning for the holidays. They need inventory. Like even some of those things are kind of still in the business. They were the next layer up at that time. And so I had to find the same satisfaction in me doing, quote unquote, my role to be able to support those other folks.

27:08
Chaz Wolfe
I didn't want to do their jobs, not that I didn't want to. I had been doing it. I shouldn't do their job. If I did their job, then they wouldn't have a job. I hired them so that they would have their job and then I would have my job. And my job was to support them by doing some of those other elements I kind of just mentioned. And if I didn't do my job then they wouldn't be able to do their job well. So it was really just a, in order to serve the business the best. I'm the person that does these things, not these things any longer and not that these things are any worse or bad or it's just you get to do these, I get to do these. We get to work together in harmony to make this thing go.

27:44
Chaz Wolfe
And I would even just expand that out today. Like, I don't even do those things. Like, I don't import inventory. You know, the planning of the holiday is, you know, like, pretty minimal because the folks that we have in place on our teams now know how to do that. And again, every little step along the way, I'm thinking of a couple of our managers that have been with us for a long time, and it's like, hey, so I'm gonna. I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna bring you into it. I want you to watch me. And then next holiday, I want you to do it. I'm still gonna be right here with you. Don't worry. And then eventually, like, they don't need me. In fact, I'm just in the way. Yeah.

28:18
Chaz Wolfe
And so hopefully that answers the question in kind of a full, like, multiple different examples there.

28:23
Jake Isaacs
Yeah. Let's fast forward a little bit and get out of just the edible arrangements franchise system that you were in. Right. Since being a part of edible arrangements and learning the things that you've learned, you've owned short term rental properties. You started a construction business in 2023 and grew it from zero to a million dollars in the first seven months of that business, which is wild. We can talk about that in a later podcast. But you've. You've built sales teams for some of the biggest names in the business influencer space. You know, you have a multitude of other business industries that you now have in your portfolio and in your background. When you look at business as a whole, what is the thing that you've learned repeatedly over the last 16 years? It just keeps coming up regardless of the industry that you're in.

29:23
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, well, the first thing that comes to my mind is the four elements of any business, marketing, sales, operations, and finance. And there's subsets to that. I'm sure someone has a seven step category or whatever, but pretty much everything can be broken down to those four. You need leads or you need people interested in your product. You need to have a way to sell them, a predictable way that takes them through a process of a decision, and then you need to. You need to help them get the thing that you said that you were going to give to them. And you got to be able to not just take the money, but you got to count the money and organize the money in a way that you don't lose it or go bankrupt.

30:05
Chaz Wolfe
And so I would say that comes up often, and not many people know that. It's not like I learned that again, I didn't go, I didn't take any finance classes in college. I didn't take any admin classes or management classes. I didn't do any of that. And so a lot of that came from either books and or leadership, and then also just running the businesses. And then now talking to thousands of other business owners, it's all the same. And so that's the baseline. There's some elements around, like, you know, you need leadership, you need good communication skills, you need, you know, a level of poise and flexibility. As a leader, we can get into some of the characteristics of a good entrepreneur. Like, you need to be organized. All of those things are always going to be the same, no matter what industry.

30:49
Chaz Wolfe
And so we could probably categorize them in, like, four stages of a business and keeping things simple and really just honing in on each one of those and mastering each one and then building teams in each one, and then helping your teams master each one. And then over here, it's just personal development, self mastery, and there's all kinds of places that, and that's gonna be a journey that we're on forever. But I'm constantly trying to master me from a communication, a mindset, a perseverance, like all those things I kind of just mentioned a minute ago around character and personality and, you know, all those things.

31:25
Jake Isaacs
Yeah, kind of around that self mastery topic. You mentioned that the first time you ever read think you grow rich was at the age of 19. And what the listener doesn't know is since the age of 19, you've probably read that book, not an exaggeration, a hundred other times. I know that you're a student of Napoleon Hill. Not only thing go rich, but, you know, master Keter riches, outwitting the devil, all of Napoleon's great stuff.

31:48
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah.

31:49
Jake Isaacs
As a student of Napoleon Hill, what have you learned from this concept of the mastermind principle?

31:56
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, I mean, that all things come from this principle. Like, all of his other work is on a baseline of basically just this one principle. If you don't have desire, then none of it matters. And so that's really the baseline principle, is you got to have a desire, and that flows into definite chief aim and all the fun things that come after that. But the mastermind principle is basically how we move forward towards anything that we want. And so I'm going to give you a couple examples here.

32:27
Chaz Wolfe
Because most people, when they hear mastermind today, because of all the funnel hackers out there, mastermind has been just completely overwhelmed with wrong usage and so a lot of people might think a certain way when they hear the word mastermind, but the definition that Napoleon gives is two or more minds working in harmony unto the specific achievement of an aim, a definite focus. And so, and so if we take that and apply that, I mean, that's in essence what we've done here today. You and me are in a mastermind right now. My wife and I have the ultimate mastermind. I think the marriages is the most important mastermind that we have. I have a mastermind with my family, my kids. I have a mastermind alliance with other business owners.

33:14
Chaz Wolfe
That's what we would call gathering the kings, where we've chosen specifically to align with other people that are like minded, that we can operate in harmony. For us, the definite chief aim is to live the exceptional life, to win in all areas. And so if I know that Derek or Matt or, you know, Dave or Caleb are after living the exceptional life and winning in all areas, and we start interacting together on Zoom or in person or on text, and we're just like, living life together, they're going to keep me accountable to that, I'm going to keep them accountable to that. We're going to spur each other onto greatness. We're going to spur each other onto the exceptional life. That's what the mastermind is. Something that didn't exist before, but now, because we're together, it does exist. It has an opportunity to be created.

34:04
Chaz Wolfe
And so when you and I got together here today, who knows what these answers would have been if someone else would have been interviewing me. Same background, same history, same stories, but maybe it would have come out differently. Just two days ago, I was on the phone with one of our members, and he was asking about something else that other than the answer that I gave to him. But in the answer I gave to him about this other topic, I said something that sparked an interest, sparked an idea. And he was like, oh, my gosh, dude, if the way that you said that solves this problem, which actually is the bigger problem to this whole thing I'm asking you about, oh, my gosh, my mind is blown.

34:37
Chaz Wolfe
And he came back to me a couple hours later and was like, dude, I've been racking my brain on this. Like, this solves so many of my problems. And it was one little phrase, and I didn't even know what it, I didn't even know what I was saying. I just made sense to me based on my experience. And it agitated the thought in his mind to go, oh, that's the mastermind something that was then created in that moment that we didn't have before. And that's why the principle is so important that Napoleon Hill breaks down is because I can create a plan. I can have desire. I can have a definite chief aim. I can have persistence. I can create a plan. I can do all those things.

35:10
Chaz Wolfe
But if I don't surround myself with actual humans, my wife, and other people that I find valuable, then I can't validate my plan. I can't upgrade or uplevel my plan. I can't agitate the thought around my plan to make it either better, or maybe that plan doesn't work at all and I got to scrap it, and I got to create a new plan. How do I even know or have any sort of feedback loop or have any sort of accountability if I don't have the mastermind?

35:39
Jake Isaacs
Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome, Chaz. Our time today is always brief. I always want more. Wish we had a three hour block where we could do a Rogan esque type, you know, sit down around some of this stuff. But thank you so much for your time, and I'm excited about doing more of these in the future and kind of diving into some of this stuff that we talked about today a little bit more in depth. We'll be good.

36:02
Chaz Wolfe
I appreciate you, Jake. Thanks, Mandy.

Working on your business to make it grow feels amazing. But you know what isn’t amazing? Feeling tied to the day-to-day grind. Driven with the thought of building business systems rather than businesses, Chaz Wolfe, made his way to the top with a multi-location franchise and several other ventures in his back pocket. Want to learn the biggest takeaways from his journey as an entrepreneur over the past 16 years? Join Jake Isaacs & Chaz Wolfe — the leaders of Gathering the Kings — as they take a deep dive into Chaz’s beginnings as an entrepreneur. From selling candy as a child to running successful franchises and multiple businesses, Chaz’s story is the perfect example of what it takes to work on the business instead of in it and how building solid systems leads to sustainable growth. If you’re an entrepreneur seeking the right strategies for growth and freedom, this episode is for you. Tune in!

Chaz Wolfe:

Link tree: https://linktr.ee/chazwolfe
Website: http://www.gatheringthekings.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chazwolfe/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gatheringthekings
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gatheringthekings/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chaz-wolfe-86767054/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gatheringthekings/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@chazwolfe_kings
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM1-6UfgrdBzqk1k20VJgXQ