Ron Caruthers 0:00
We got a lot to talk about the world has flat out gone crazy since our IG posts last week. Yeah. So anyway, we got we got Elon Musk via Twitter and fighting with those guys, which is kind of enjoyable to watch. We got the markets crashing. I got we got talking about a recession, we got to baby formula, shortage, all kinds of stuff. And so what we both agreed guys today on the make more keyboard podcast, that which is what you're listening to, which is all about keeping your money, right, making more, keeping more. That's Dominic are real business advisors. I'm Rob Carruthers of Crothers tax and financial solutions. But we thought today would be a really good time to, to talk about how to keep your mind right. And all this when we probably just did it a few weeks ago. But I think it merits happening again. Because again, it's I'm just hearing it from so many people that they're just like, nervous. Yeah. So I thought I'd give you guys first of all, I thought it first of all, give you guys my take on the market, Dominic. And then let's jump into running the business and investments and all that stuff. Here's something I want you guys to think about. Right now the markets are crap. What's interesting about this is on like 2000s 2001, or 2002, where the NASDAQ lost 80% of its value. In a three year period, it was just like a slow steep, it was like an airplane coming in for a crash landing with no engine, it wasn't dramatic, it was just you know, 33 months of just coming straight down. There was a real bubble that led up to that, right here in California, we kind of screw up everything for the nation. Sorry, guys. And what happened back then was the internet was the hot new kid on the block. And literally, if you put an E in front of anything, um, it would sell and get, you know, half a million dollars, or a million dollars or $50 million in venture capital. And the stock would go through the roof, even if they had no viable business. So there was some really interesting businesses back then d. Web grocer, which kind of morphed into Amazon Prime, so they were actually a little bit ahead of their time. But the idea was sound, they just didn't have the infrastructure to pull it off yet that that Bezos to his credit, even evil villain looking fellow that he is he really did a good job with. And there was some really good ideas that came out of that that just again, got so much money so fast. And it was the proverbial like they would go by massive company headquarters and hire a bunch of people with no product, no sales, no anything. And kids would be riding like scooters up and down the hallways, you know, and then have lunch catered and everyday and basket parties. But there was no underlying business. And then there were some terrible business ideas. And let me give you a perfect one. And I'm not making this up II funeral with the general idea that you would take grandma, when she passed down to the UPS store, I'm not making this up. And you would have grandmas shipped off and they would do funerals to her but grandma kind of doesn't fit in one ups package. So kind of put her in a couple of UPS packages, and then occasionally packages would get lost. So this is really good. By the way, guys. Like you now it sucks being old, which I don't think I am, but I'm older than a lot of you. But the flip side of it is you get to see some stuff. So a lot of stuff is a music. So back to business. There was a very good reason why the markets were overheated back then, and why we had this long protracted kind of meltdown that cleaned out a lot of the foolishness in the system. Then in 2008 You had the market meltdown tied to the collapse of Shearson Lehman which was a massive financial institution. I mean, again, if you didn't if you weren't around that and paying attention, you don't realize just how big these guys were. And they collapsed under the weight of their own stupidity. And then you had
the the subprime mortgages which if you guys haven't seen The Big Short, because all need to go walk shit. So people were getting mortgages, literally, you wrote your name, put in any number you felt like for your income, nobody verified deck, and you had a mortgage or $100,000 cash out of your thing. And in that movie, where they're like, Hey, we're looking for so and so. He's like, That's my dog, the sign the mortgage on his dog, that that stuff was real. When the guy said, Hey, man, we fill out the paperwork on Friday and it's sold off by Monday, nobody would look started when you had the stripper in the movie going like, I don't five houses in a condo. So there was some real foolishness in the system. Right now what's interesting is, yeah, we're having some supply chain issues. And yeah, there's not baby formula on the shelves here. Although if you've seen the pictures of Mexico, there's tons of it there and in Canada, and you've got some inflation component, but again, directly related to flooding the system with money, but at the end of the day, I don't see, I'm sorry, I'll let you talk to you, Dominic, you don't have to leave. I don't see the same sort of foolishness that led to those two real market meltdowns. So that's my two seconds on it. What I told a client the other night, who was literally concerned that his whole portfolio was gonna go to zero was like, No man, it can only go so low, you own solid companies that are still producing the overall economy as well. People still want to go and smoke and drink. So the casinos are doing well. And people still chillin there lose some lose during well, that puts kind of screwed up a little bit. But at the end of the day, what I think we're seeing is a lot of the same people who went nuts, buying toilet paper, for no rational reason, during the pandemic, are now just turning around and kind of freaking out over that. That's my take on the market. Dominic, if you went away, and now that I did a six minute monologue or whatever, sorry, guys.
Dominic Cummins 6:31
So what you're weirdly saying, and I don't know if I can get on with this is that people make irrational decisions. I just, I just can't even I feel like I can't really fathom that, that that's possible. No, I think there is a lot of irrationality in the market. But that's the interesting thing about the markets is they can function on irrational behavior. And there's, there's whole theories about, you know, like how crypto goes up is, you know, just basically because somebody else just buys more of it than it just goes, it's just this sort of self perpetuating sort of scenario. And it can go the opposite direction on us. But I think that's why it's so important for us to talk about mindset today. Because, irrespective of what's the cause the root cause of what's going on, there is no doubt that, you know, portfolios have probably taken a big hit. There's articles all over the place about people losing a big chunk of their, you know, crypto money that they put in and stuff like that. So I think mindsets really important and just for the sake of anybody joining on right now and then also, if this is maybe the first time you've caught the show, this is episode, I think it's 13 of our show, that make more keep more show but one of the really important things I think to keep in mind is you know, who are these guys that are talking to you right now and particularly not so much means actually more Ron, none of your freakin business who will shut up and listen. So Ron is interesting because you what you're going on 30 years of owning your own business, or 20 something 31 years, 32 years. Okay, so over, over 30 years of owning his own business started young
Ron Caruthers 8:03
yellow, I started in my way, early 20s.
Dominic Cummins 8:08
So, but the key here that is is you know, you're looking at you saw the.com crash, you saw the I lived you lived it right? Then actually money. You live to the 911 market corrections, you live the you know, great recession or whatever we want to call it 2008 2009 You've been through this and I think your perspective around this is really important for people that tune into and listen to because you've been through this now I haven't owned my business through all of those. My business about seven years old right now. But so, so infant compared to yours, but I also spent a lot of time in corporate America. And I was thinking about this this morning about mindset because, you know, it's interesting when you're in corporate America, some of you probably can appreciate that are listening into this, you know, especially as a sales guy, and a sales leader is your quota goes up by 20% Every single year, irrespective of what the market is doing. Totally. So, you know, you have to find a way a few over unless
Ron Caruthers 9:09
you over meet it, in which case it goes up by 40% of following because corporate America
Dominic Cummins 9:16
100% It's exactly what happened. So. So I think that those those elements of I went through the.com crisis, I worked at a mutual fund company during the.com crisis. That's right. I saw it. You were up in Franklin. Right, Franklin Templeton? Yeah, yeah. And it was really interesting, too, because you think about what you were talking about there as we were trying to hire people. And at the time, we had an office building, you know, which is you know, normal. So it was a nice office building. Franklin had to go create a campus with a private chef and a restaurant and a work gym, which the gym was unreal, and all the stuff in there. They had to create that in order to stay current with Google who was was a couple blocks away and Oracle at the time and you know, everybody else who had all of these things because of the.com era and At a $50 million infusion of cash, and you spent most of that on a plane, and then the rest of it on a gem for your office, like it was craziness at those times. So we've certainly seen all of those things go on. And I think what the and I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, there is always somebody making money in a down market, always. And maybe you could even say, there are especially there are people making money, especially in a down market, right. It's it's one of those things where there's somebody's benefiting right now. And I shared this example the other day of in 2019, the the yachting industry, was $6.5 billion. So that includes builds charters, just the yachting industry. In 2018, there was a survey done by I can't remember was like Boston Consulting or somebody respectable, said that, they estimated that that industry by 2030, by 2030, would hit $15 billion. That's what they said 2019 and 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, that industry exceeded $12 billion, it almost doubled in the course of a year. There's currently as of December of 2021, I put some of this on my Instagram posts, but I'm gonna give some context behind it is in December 2021, there are 1024 ships being built or on order that are qualified or classified as super yachts, which is anything over 80 feet. So you're telling me people don't have money, people have money, like there is money being made, there's money being spent. Now car some of those people seeing a couple of billion come off of their their net worth? Sure. Can they still afford the yacht? 100%. So my feeling on this, all of this is, is that if your mindset is right, and you realize that there is plenty of money in the world, you're irregardless of what the market is doing. You have to keep that mindset now, is it a little bit tougher to get some of that money? Possibly, depending on your business is a little take a little extra sales effort? Yeah, 100% of that. But keep in mind, you have your share, and somebody makes money. So why can't it be you?
Ron Caruthers 12:14
I would I would jump into that. I want to tell you guys a story on this. We did a video not that long ago, I don't know if it's been posted yet about my biggest financial mistakes. And unfortunately, I think it took two videos to get them all in. And even then I only covered the big ones. And so you know, it's humiliating to stand up there and talk about it. You know, and one of my, one of my dumb mistakes was buying a $2 million house, which I could afford, but then going and buying an $800,000 cabin and spending a bunch of money on that. And then that was all right before 2008. So you know, the house got sold for less than 2 million, the other one got sold for you know, it, I think we've sold it to someone, it was just a mess. And there was there was a few mistakes like that. Now, I've offset that by always saving a very disciplined amount of money. And in many cases coming close to 50% of our I should say 30% of what I made, generally is where I'm not so at least, and then I got divorced. But the biggest mistake I made in all this. This is the one when I got divorced was 2008. And so the markets were crashing, but our business was good. But I was getting hauled into court every week. I mean, pretty much I think I went to court 50 times in a four year period. So it felt like every week constantly having to respond to stuff. I mean, their lawyer did not play nice at all. And the number one mistake that I made Dominic was I let it affect my mind. Right. I focused on that, way disproportionate. Now since then, I've acquired a whole set of skills because I had not my business was kind of good from day one. We had clients. You know, I'd experienced success. I did great in school. This was the first major failure in my life. And I was not prepared to handle it. resiliently bounce back. And I would tell everybody listening to this. If you've never had like real failure, like you have no money in the bank, because they froze all your assets, and you're fighting all day. So you can't generate revenue and you got to keep your car moving. So they don't repossess it, which is where I was at one point. The problem was it affected my mind and it took me longer now if a financial setback hits from project doesn't work, like I'm over that stuff in minutes. And look, I don't ever want to go through what I went through back then again But I developed a much harder show to where things don't affect me the way they did back then. And so I would tell everybody, right now, listen to this, make sure no matter what happens with the economy, and what you see on the news, if you need to turn that crap off, do not participate, just make the decision to not participate it, because we rode out every other storm in that the.com meltdown and all of it because my mind was writing. But it was that one that got me because, and again, now it wouldn't. But that's the number one thing. So make sure you're feeding your mind a steady diet, biographies of successful people who overcome great odds, like Lincoln, and then we go on. And I don't want to say the bad orangish man's name. But I mean, if you read through some of what that man went through in the 90s, where he was billions of dollars in debt, and bounced back from it stronger, it's a, it's a great story. One of my favorite books is Self Made in America. And I think we've mentioned it on there. But that guy went through some stuff, and tells other people's stories. And it's a great it reads like a novel. It's a business book that reads like a novel. But I would just say, be very careful about feeding into that and letting it affect your behavior to the extent that you're like, oh, people will not buy. Therefore, I need to cease marketing at first, oh, the market is going to drop anyways, I will stop my investment plan, all those things are self defeating, and will really hurt you. And if you keep your mind, right, you can literally, there was a bumper sticker, you know, I've chosen not to participate in the current recession or something like that, you can actually be that person because like Dominic said, there's still people out there buying yachts and going about my, my friend just got back from Vegas. And she's like, it was packed, like, every square foot was alright, and she went on like a Monday and a Tuesday. So anyway, that's my little rant
Dominic Cummins 17:02
on part of this. You know, it's interesting, like so there are so many areas that are going so I got a couple of things. We, this year, one of my big projects with a client of mine in the luxury space. So already one of the most expensive products in their space, if not the most expensive based on certain parameters, we've helped them, I've helped them navigate a 25% price increase this year, without any loss of volume. So you know, when you said something like that, then you see that people can people can afford it. Golf, I like to golf, my buddy and I were looking for some some golf you know, tee times, and I live not too far from the Trump resort here in the west coast and Los Angeles area that Trump resorts I'm it's always expensive, it's beautiful golf course, don't get me wrong, it's right on the ocean, it's gorgeous. But that golf course typically in the past is averaged about $300 around so pricey, it's $650 around right now. And they're not the only one the most of the golf courses in our local area have darn near doubled their prices over the last few weeks actually, which is interesting, because that's sort of concurrent with, with with the market situation. So it goes to the point of somebody is making money. And some you wouldn't think that this is a good time to raise your prices, this may very well be the best time to raise your prices, depending on your situation, we could get into a whole discussion around evaluating that and whether that's makes sense for you. But you know, my specialty is around like expensive brands. And that's what I typically work with is anybody who's doesn't matter what like if you're a coach and you're just more expensive everybody else or your physical product more expensive everybody else. You know, that's that's the, that's the area I like to focus in. And people right now are raising their prices, Rolex went through a 14% price increase this year. I mean, it's across the board. Now some of that is due to the underlying expenses of running their business, their cost of goods sold and you know, products and all that type of stuff. But a lot of it just has to do with there is plenty of expendable cash. So that's what's making this market really interesting right now. And, and I also think it bears a lot of relevance to your mindset. Because if you can continue to remind yourself there's plenty of money and that you deserve your piece of it, you'll stay focused on the right activities, which is goes back to something we've talked about a few times on here. Make sure you have cash, you were just talking about that right putting 30% of your income aside as savings right now. Because regardless of what happens in the next three months or six months, opportunities are coming. Like they're they are going to show up you're gonna see maybe not everywhere, but you're going to see a real estate deal. You're going to see a business go up for sale. You No, like, I don't know if some of you may follow Cody Sanchez. And she talks a lot about like businesses and boring businesses and all that stuff. But she's like screaming about this right now, like, keep your cash because stuff is popping up like so. It's not just Ron and I saying this, it's, it's virtually every expert who makes any kind of money looks at these situations as a, an opportunity to make more of it. But you got to have your head right?
Ron Caruthers 20:24
You got to have your mind right. The number one by the way, this is for those of you just joining this as the make more key more show. We I'm Ron Carruthers of cutters, tax and financial solutions. That's Dominique of bright mind, busy advisors, he does a lot of sales, training and growth, I do a lot of managing of money and tax stuff. But we're talking today about keeping your mind right. And getting your mind set, right, when literally, you can pull on the news. And it's, it's just all how bad everything is. And so, one area in particular, before we leave, we are going to talk about what to do in places for keeping your safe money. So you're not you're getting to take advantage of different tax laws. And you're not just getting a point 00 1% Wait rate of return while your capital is just sitting there undeployed. But we were talking, I was listening to someone else the other day. And this happened, by the way in 2008, where people were able to take over mortgages, listen to this one d. So let's say a house went up to 800,000. And someone gets a mortgage on it for 700,000. Because they were again, everybody was going crazy and letting them refinance a lot. But now the house goes down to 600,000. People were going through and taking over the house, what they call subject to you real estate investors are probably familiar with that term. And all it means is, look, I'm going to take over your house, if you sell it right now, you've not only got to pay the real estate commission, you've also got to pay out that $100,000 difference on what's owed. So your net out of pocket 150,000. Instead, if you sell it to me with no realtor, I'm just going to take over your mortgage, I can't refinance this house right now. So I might need that mortgage for 10 years. And there were people who were willing to leave those houses, transfer the deed and leave it over and leave the mortgage in their name because it was their best option. Now, generally speaking, you need a little bit of cash to close that deal or get them to move out or whatever. But that's just one example of how when a market and by the way, I'll hold this up for you guys in a second. So you guys can see this since I had to move indoors, because that was absolutely freezing out there. You know, and it's been I look, I don't love the heat. So I'm pretty. I'm not necessarily, you know, super bummed out when it's not warm here. But it is downright, like, cold. But here's what I wanted to show you guys. Let me see if that works. Okay, boom. This is the California real estate market chart, I want you guys to take a look at this. And there's, there's the chart. So that's $100,000 purchase back in 1991. And notice it shot way up, around 2006. There that that's that middle bump, and then notice how long it took when the housing market drops here, how low it went. And then how long it took to get back to this peak right here. And then notice it's going crazy right here. And again, I think the numbers are probably all backwards, that that peak was in if you had $100,000 house that you bought in 1991, it was worth about 286 in the first quarter of 2006. It bottomed out at 153 in 2012. And then it took until 26 2019 To get back to 286. And then it shot up to almost 400 Since then, so there's a 13 year window where that house was underground underwater, here in California. Now I just ran that for a client in North Carolina. And those numbers weren't near as dramatic. But the idea is, I would say a couple fold. One is if you're going to play in the markets, any market that is anything more risky than cash, you're going to be dealing with losses at some point, which again you we wanted to obviously take advantages from from a tax standpoint and position you to pay the least taxes, but at the same time, the reason that we hammer on keeping cash is how would you like to have bought right down right down there and sold up here? Uh, you know, so that's kind of my two cents dominate from some of
Dominic Cummins 25:07
the people can obviously couldn't read that which wasn't the point, I think you were just more showing the graph, but just a quick thing. Where would you find that? Where did you
Ron Caruthers 25:15
wait? Yeah. Oh, that was the F hfa.gov. The Federal Housing and Finance Administration. So these are, this is a government website, government data that they track all that. And if you just go down to the Home Price Calculator, it's about halfway down on the left hand side of the page, if you just log into that and go down free website, you don't need to log in or anything. But that's a good resource racket, you can track it for your state. And again, we have to have the real estate guys on and we've had Matt, the mortgage guy on, and we've talked about this, but this is one of the reasons that you want to keep your powder dry, or at least some of your powder dry is because when these opportunities present themselves, whether it's crypto, if you're a fan of crypto, I have some I don't know, do you have any? Whether it's the stock market? And by the way, I'm putting some more money before I leave town into my the market account like it's on sale? Why would I? Why would I not. And I made sure to not put myself or any of my clients in a position where they need money, they might have to sell at a loss because what makes you a bad investor. A good investor buys low sells high. We've said this before on this show, a bad investor buys high and sells low. What's the difference? Its timing, and it's how much other resources you have. So you don't ever need to sell low. Interestingly enough, you guys can look this guy up. And we'll get to the business side of it. And then at the last few minutes, D if it's alright, I want to chat about place, places to store your cash. There was a guy named Tobin. Let's see if he still comes up Nobel Prize. James Tobin, he was an American economist. He won the Nobel Prize in 1981. For according to his Wikipedia page, for extensive creative and extensive work on the analysis of financial markets, now I gotta go with the Wikipedia page. He advocated government intervention to stabilize output and avoid recessions. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But his academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal and financial markets. And basically, here's what he got the Nobel Prize for. He figured out that if you married cash, with your savings, you had a better rate of return than if you had everything in the stock market. Sorry, I should have said married cash with your stock market investments. Rather than just having the whole thing in the investments. He found that those people did better. That's really kind of what he got his Nobel laureate for. So interesting thing on that don't have all your capital deployed at any one time. If you can avoid, it would be my financial tip to that everybody's situation is different. Consult your advisor, shoot a DM if you want to chat. But just keep that in mind there. Dominic, from a business standpoint, what would you say? Business owners and salespeople which is every business owner, right? Because every business lives or dies by new clients? What would you say that you want to? What do you see as the biggest opportunity? And how should people be handling this right now?
Dominic Cummins 28:50
Yeah, so I think the biggest opportunity is to get your head right. And I know that sounds like that's not you know, really the the right answer, but like, you may be asking, like, specific, like, what businesses are killing and, and you know, what, what are those types of things, but
Ron Caruthers 29:09
just more like, Hey, if you got a business, what would you be doing differently now, and you weren't doing any good and a good economy. And I'm not really saying the economy is bad. But if you log into Netflix, go to CNN right now, while you're doing that, so let's see what they have to say.
Dominic Cummins 29:25
And I think that that's so I've shared this example, I heard it from from a guy named Mike RC, who's a great marketer, and awesome business owner in the like, gym, gym space. So if you don't want to do in a fitness studio, you should definitely follow Mike RC. But the mic it was when I had him on a show I did a couple years ago, we did a whole virtual conference before that was cool. All right, we can have a pat on the side crypto, beginning of similar volatility. So and I had him on and he had this expression that I absolutely love where he said, we've been bowling with the bumpers up for the last however many years, you know, 14 years because in 2008 2009, the bumpers went down. So if you're not a bowling fan, which is which is fine, I only really do it when I'm an Uber created. But is that the bumper so usually when your kids go play bowling, you put these little bumpers up so that the ball doesn't fall into the, into the gutters on each side. And like he said, it's such a great analogy for business that you could basically just toss the bowling ball somewhat towards the middle. And if it kind of bounces off the edges, it's fine, it'll still get down there to knock over some pens. In other words in business over the last 14 years, if you've done a halfway decent job, you probably made some money. Now the challenge to that, and like the undercurrent of what I read into a little bit of what Ron was sharing earlier in the show about like his financial things. And I'll tell you from my own experience of times that we've struggled to the point where we're almost talking about where you're like, dang, I don't know, should we count some quarters out of that old jar, and you know,
Ron Caruthers 31:05
you've got on the couch? Yeah,
Dominic Cummins 31:08
I mean, you have to you have to go through those moments. But those teach you a lot, it's tough, but then our kind of our hope with the show is to help you avoid some of those moments, actually. But, you know, you learned that you have to make smart decisions. And in over the last 14 years, you just had to do a decent job to be able to make it what this if this is a true market correction are a true recession, which I'm not prepared to go say it is. But if it is, or it's a bear market, which I think it's already technically qualified is one of those, but, you know, I'll let you speak to that you're the expert. But if it's any of those things, you have an opportunity now to not back off, not give up, but rather ramp up, like everything that you're doing like you might have been able to get away with. And what I was saying is like, when you have those success, you get something called confirmation bias, which is actually literally a cognitive bias that our brains have. There's a whole psychology behind why that happens. Oh, I like to entrepreneur, I'm actually wearing my Dodger shirt right now. But anyway, but um, so the the psychology behind that is you think that just because your things are going well that they will continue to go well, and it's never that way, it just happened to go for 14 years. Last time, which is kind of remarkable. Really, this time around, though, what we're seeing are 16 years or however you want to put that but since 2008 or so, if you look at the, the current reality is, is that it's going to get difficult one way or another. But fundamentally, people still need to do business. So if you're in a business to business environment, the businesses that work with you probably still need to work with you one way or another. Like if you're a marketing agency, you may find that some customers are slowing down their marketing. And I'm going to tell you, like, Hey, I don't think I'm gonna run ads this month, whatever, okay, but your smart customers are going to be like, I feel like I need to double down on my ads. If you're a financial advisor, right? You're getting phone calls left and right, that are like, oh, man, should I sell? What should I do? And you're probably you just have to keep pressing forward and say, No, you should actually be adding, so you have an opportunity to make more money. You know, there are people if you're in a service based business, that's, you know, of any sort, people probably still need those services. Now, if there's certain services where people consider that a luxury and an extended down market and might get rid of it, then use this time right now to think about what your backup plan is, and how to get some people into those things. And all of that comes down to a mindset that you are not going to lose in a down market. In fact, I would say we go into this survival mode, in markets like this, or certain people do. And people who go into survival mode often don't. But people who go into a mindset of abundance, you know, you hear that term of abundance mindset. People go into a mindset of like, No, I'm gonna make money during this process usually do. So it's gonna take maybe more sales calls than it took up to this point. It's gonna take more follow up than it took to this point I talked about this on one of our first episodes is pre pandemic, it took on average, eight follow ups to get somebody to agree to one appointment. The current statistic is it takes 18. So it just takes more effort, but it didn't say what's interesting is if you study all the I'm a data nerd. So I tend to look at all the data after the fact. But once you get somebody to meet, none of those statistics from conversion from the initial meeting into conversion have really changed for the worse during the pandemic. The only thing that's changed is it's harder to get a hold of people. So that tells me that people are still buying it's just most sales people and Business owners everywhere else are too damn lazy to do the required fit follow up needed. So if you want to succeed in this time period, step it up. Like just step up your activity, push more, make more phone calls, do more follow up, do things that make you uncomfortable text when you would have called, like, you know, if you're, if you're a salesperson, or like, well, I'm used to call it I don't know if all the texting but it's screw that just text them. Like, get on social media, if you're not on social media right now put out content content, like it, it makes a difference. But you're gonna have to lean into it harder than you would have before.
Ron Caruthers 35:37
I went on how to surf, but I love it. You know what it? Well, first of all, give me a little break. But it was a good rant Dominic, I approve of your rant. You know what I was thinking of when you're talking about mindset and things like that. It's like that old difference in football, because I love football. We love football. Yep. And, first of all, the prevent defense, you know, where the defense all of a sudden tightens up. If you look at the statistics on that, the other team scores more than if they just played loose the way they've been playing. And it's the same in life, at least the last time, if any, you guys are football coaches, last time, I looked at the stats, or somebody showed them to me. And, um, you know, that's kind of like the Henry Ford thing, whether you think you can or think you can't do something, you're right. Right. And what I would think of is, particularly for you business owners, we'll get to the money side in a moment. But this is your chance to go like Scarface, but not with the blaze of glory and mountain of cocaine, but where you just expand out. Because it everybody else is scared, like, ooh, it's scary. And I don't want to work that hard. Even if it takes you more calls, let's say you get a call twice as many people, but you're building a pipeline now. So when some of those people aren't gonna want to do business with you right then. But you're the guy who or gal or whatever, who reached out to them, and went through, and was like giving them content and keeping a positive message and, you know, providing value. So even if they don't do business with you, you're creating that contact, and contacts, so that maybe they're scared right now. And you do have to reach out to more people to get them to do business with you. But you're also creating a pipeline of people who will do business down the road with you, when conditions improve, or when they get over some of their concerns. So it's literally when when and if your competitors are staying home, and just totally nervous about doing anything, you move in that direction as well. Because on that direction, you turn around, and you're now the only person or one of the only people that showing up in the marketplace. So I think there's, I think there's a huge value to that.
Dominic Cummins 38:05
For sure. And one thing that you kind of made is that you brought up the sports analogy and you know, that's a slippery slope at times. But you think about every single great athlete, especially in team sports, especially when there's a championship on the line this has been studied over and over and over is the ones who are considered greats. You know, your, your Jordan's, as much as it pains me to say it Tom Brady's the other, you know, people that are great in that moment, a Tiger Woods in his heyday, and not so much yesterday. But time at Tiger Woods in his heyday on a Sunday, their heart rate slows their vision gets clearer that their whole entire mechanism of their body doesn't look at that moment as fear but rather opportunity and they they've studied their heart rates, like it's shocking what their heart rates do versus other players, and what their overall you know, mindset is around that as they tend to calm down. And so to me, when you're when you're in this market, this is championship football. No matter how you define football, whether it's, you know, on your foot are thrown around, like it this is championship time. And so if you're running around freaking out, like, there's that movie six days, seven nights, it's one of my favorite movies just for just slight viewing with Harrison Ford, and he's like, he runs into a bush and like shaking it and he's screaming and she's like, do what just happened? And he was like, well, it doesn't really benefit me to run around yelling Oh shit, we're gonna die does it now, you know, and it's like, if you have that mindset of Oh crap, we're going to die. Then you're you're going the opposite. And you're going into that place that you just talked about that place of fear. And you're going to start to operate from fear, which means you're going to hold on to cash when you should. Now I know you just said hold on to cash but you're going to hold on to cash. When you look at an opportunity. You go Hold on to think you're not going to make a smart business decision or you're going to operate from this place of you make rash decisions that have no like bearing like it, people tend to I see this like go, either they make no decisions, because they get frozen in fear, or their fear causes them to create, like rash decisions, which are just stupid. And then it like, you just have to stay in that same place bowl down the middle of the bowling alley, don't rely on the bumpers, just stay down the middle, do what you're doing, and if you're going to do what you're doing, but do more of it. And it's how you weather the storm. And it also helps your brain a lot. Like, if you remember the first couple days of the pandemic and when, you know, our governor locked us all down. I mean, I admit I had a moment of panic, like, holy crap, what are we gonna do? How am I gonna feed my kids? I just started a business. This was another business I'd started I'm like, Oh my gosh, like, what am I shoot? And then I was like, Yeah, that's what everybody else is gonna do. So I'm gonna do the opposite. I'm not gonna freak out, I'm just gonna go for it. I'm gonna double down my efforts. And you know, it turned out, we had our best couple of years, this last two years.
Ron Caruthers 41:12
Love it. Love it. So I think it was, by the way, Dominic, I'm gonna have to wrap this up a little early today. Because I am not packed, I am not anything and my rights coming in a couple hours. And I still have three more client meetings today, just stuff that couldn't wait. But I think for you guys, my number one advice having been there done that seen this before, which some of you may not have really experienced before. And like I said, if that's if there's one advantage that comes with getting older, it's that you've seen stuff. And I would say absolutely kind of what we said, which is if you are a business owner, lean into it. Go Don't, don't slow down if you're a salesperson, don't slow down on any of it viewed as a time where the competition will walk off the field. And just like the hockey playoffs are there I love hockey too. You know, it's like when they pull a goalie, it's a lot easier to score. So if you don't have competition in there, even if it requires more work to make the same or more money, you're building that database for the future. Next time, if it's alright with you d we will chat about creative things to do with your cash that generally aren't mainstream where you can, you know, grow money tax advantage, have it earn more than a point 001 rate of return have it available to deploy. We'll talk about some of those strategies. But the other kind of closing thing if it's alright, with you, I brought this up is I would just say make sure that you're feeding your mind a steady diet of what you want, not what you're scared of. And so again, those biographies and business books and success books and all that stuff. And look, I'm not a manifester. And if you guys don't know what a manifester is, it's kind of like, if you ever saw the movie The Secret. Where they were like, Yeah, I just thought it it happened. No, work has to go into it. But the work is a lot easier. If you're thinking about what you want, and visualizing what you want, and setting those goals and going after them. The work becomes easier. And if you're talking to yourself about how it's going to work out, it's going to be great. And you're you're you know you're doing things that other people won't, that's going to help you out a lot more, you're gonna have a lot more success than someone who constantly watches the news and constantly thinks about how bad it's going to be worries about it. And I know there was a stat years ago, I'm sure you guys have heard it, but they're like, 90 something percent of what people worry about on a daily basis never comes true. So Dominic,
Dominic Cummins 43:57
that's garbage in, garbage in garbage out, right? Like if you get let's think about this for a second. And I'm not saying advocating for dawn, I read the news, and I read it typically more, because then I can control it a lot more than watching it. That's just me. But like, if you start your day listening, I don't care if it's Fox News, CNN, MSN, it doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. You can start your day watching that stuff, you're going to set your mindset, you're going to set the course for your day. And if you finish the day watching that you're probably going to sleep on it. Because you know, we've all had those moments where we're chewing on something when we go to bed and we wake up with a solution because your subconscious is doing it. That does not lead to good sleep. So garbage in garbage out. Fill your brain. I love how you said it. Like, it's all about what you put into your brain right now. This is a great time to read biographies. It's a great time to read business books, you know, fill yourself I mean, yeah, keep up on current events. It's irrelevant, but like, don't kill yourself and worked
Ron Caruthers 44:53
out. If World War Three actually breaks out they'll tell you. Yeah, well, Maureen, I
Dominic Cummins 44:59
had a client of mine I mean, who I literally the smartest guy, one of the smartest people I know, watching the start of the Ukraine thing for four, four or five hours a day. And I watched him make bad business decisions based on that. And I gave him some advice as a friend and was like, dude, just cut, set a timer. Watch it for 30 minutes, man, I know you want to watch it. You know, he's from Europe. So it's closer to home. Like just watch it for 30 minutes, and then turn it off. And all of a sudden, his whole mindset changed. So just careful what you're watching. Stay positive on stuff and trust, that if you set your mind to it, you can make money in this time period. You just have to, you have to put in the work.
Ron Caruthers 45:40
And don't panic sell if you if you have money in the markets, I would not panic. So you want to stay solid. Now what's the markets come back because they always do. You may want to turn around and we may need to rebalance because you may have taken more risk than you. You're comfortable with. We'll fix that after right now. You know, when the markets are doing this, and we are officially I confirmed it in a bear market because we've had more than a 20% loss. I think the market is down like another 6%. But you know what, it can only go so low before the institutions jump back and start buying and then it turns and goes the other direction. So now's not the time to liquidate. And again, if you need the money, try to figure another way to get it. Buy a line of credit or something so you're not forced to sell at a loss and become not bad investor. Listen next week, Dominic, I'm going to be overseas but I will find time to make this happen. And we will chat about what are some smarter options going forward. And anything else that's on your little heart?
Dominic Cummins 46:44
There's no sound we should get a good because you probably have done some wine tasting it's gonna be a whole nother run that we're gonna see less espresso more wine by that point the day
Ron Caruthers 46:52
not even. Not even I don't, dude, I'm not a day drinker. So it'll be like five o'clock over there. When we're doing our am thing like I'll still I'll still have an espresso and head. Now about 730 or eight. I might make it over to the cocktail bar and stuff. Let's say guy, I gotta run. Hope you enjoyed it. As always, if you just tuned in, we're ending a little bit early today, but it kind of makes up because we went over last week. But there's the Make Work. Keep more podcast every Fridays IG live ATM. No matter where we are. We get it done and unless I don't have Wi Fi in which I'll hopefully be able to texture something but I don't plan on it. And we will see you guys next week. And thank you lovely CJP and we will look forward to chatting with you guys that
Dominic Cummins 47:36
awesome take care. Have a good one safe travels. Thanks
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
