068 | From Startup to 8-Figure Exit: The Wealth Strategies That Work and Pitfalls to Avoid with Jason Schappert

[00:00:00] Patrick: Are you on the path to building a business that scales, or are you unknowingly setting yourself up for failure? The difference between success and struggle often comes down to how well you manage your money, both personally and professionally. Welcome to another episode of the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast.
[00:00:19] Patrick: I’m your host, Patrick Lonergan, and today we have a powerhouse guest joining us, Jason Schappert. Jason is a seasoned entrepreneur who not only built and scaled a thriving business, but also successfully had an eight figure exit. Now he’s taking everything he’s learned and applying it to his new venture, Moola, a cutting edge financial management tool designed to help entrepreneurs take control of their finances.
[00:00:43] Patrick: In this episode, Jason shares the hard earned lessons from his journey, the costly mistakes he made, the strategies that fueled his success, and the financial guardrails every business owner needs to avoid losing it all. Jason also gives us a behind the scenes look at Moola. And how this innovative tool is helping business owners digitize financial buckets, track investments in real time, and leverage AI for smarter financial decisions.
[00:01:08] Patrick: If you’re serious about growing and protecting your wealth, you won’t want to miss this conversation. Plus, if you think the free insights Jason is sharing today are valuable, just wait until you hear what he offers inside Moola. So let’s buckle up and get ready. This episode is packed with insights that could transform the way you manage and scale your business.
[00:01:25] Patrick: Business. Let’s dive in. Quick heads up before we get started. At Vital Wealth, we help high income entrepreneurs keep more of what they earn. If you’re tired of handing over six figures to the irs, head to vital strategies.com/tax and let’s change that. Jason, thank you so much for joining us here today.
[00:01:44] Patrick: I’m excited to have this conversation for a couple reasons. First, you’ve grown and scaled a business and exited that, and, uh, I’m looking forward to getting into. I’m also interested in talking to you about your current venture, Moola, which is a, uh, I’m going to call it financial management tool. And, uh, most people think if I just earn more money, uh, I’ll be in better shape.
[00:02:06] Patrick: And, uh, the thing that we’ve seen is it doesn’t matter if you’re making 30, 000 a year or 2 million a year. If you don’t have a financial management system in place, you’re, you’re going to be in trouble. So I’m looking forward to diving into all the, those topics. Thank you so much for, for joining us.
[00:02:20] Patrick: Yeah, I’m excited
[00:02:21] Jason: to be here. And like you said, you make all the money you want, but if you got a hole in your pocket, what good does it really matter at the end of the day? I know we’ll get there, but that’s a great preface to it.
[00:02:30] Patrick: Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you. So I’d like to just start off framing the conversation.
[00:02:35] Patrick: You know, we, we think about, um, how hard businesses to, to grow and scale, you know, the, the number of businesses that, uh, fail are, uh, there’s lots of them and the number that actually exit is a really small number. So I’m looking forward to getting into, to that discussion. And, you know, I, I feel like as entrepreneurs, we feel like there should be a payoff at the end of the day for all this blood, sweat, and tears we’re putting into today.
[00:03:00] Patrick: So if it’s okay, can you tell us a little bit about your. Your first business M zero a, um, and, uh, what that business is all about and, and how you grew it to, uh, the point where you could sell it.
[00:03:12] Jason: Yeah, absolutely. You made a great point there. If you’re just, uh, you’re just starting a business to start a business without a plan, you just made yourself a job.
[00:03:19] Jason: And at the end of the day, what, what good is that? Right. We have to always be planning, uh, for that exit. So, uh, our first business was in a very obscure niche. You’ve heard the phrase, you get rich in a niche. Well. We eventually were living proof of that. We weren’t at the very beginning though, but we are the one of the largest providers of FAA test preparation for pilots.
[00:03:38] Jason: So everything from you want to just become a hobbyist to you want to be an airline pilot one day, my wife and I, we produced all the curriculum. Uh, at our largest point, we had 36 team members and, uh, license our curriculum to colleges and everything else, but it, it did not start out that way. I’m jumping to the sunshine and rainbows end of the story there with the eight figure exit and everything else.
[00:04:00] Jason: In reality, where it all started was there was a tow truck at the end of my driveway and they were coming from my car because I had poor financial management. Here I am, you know, newly married, new baby, uh, trying to figure this business thing out. And I’ve got the tow truck man trying to take my car.
[00:04:18] Jason: I’ve got the foreclosure notice on the door. And I didn’t put it together that if I’m a bad steward of my personal finances, my business finances were a wreck, um, as well. And that took, I mean, there was so many wake up calls across that and so many lessons, um, across that as well, but it was 16 years of work.
[00:04:37] Jason: So I mean, don’t let anybody tell you things are an overnight. success, uh, usually the good things are not, um, it was, uh, it was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. You said it very well, uh, to get to that exit point.
[00:04:48] Patrick: Yeah, I love that. And, and I think it’s frustrating to me to see some of the, the social media stuff, like, Oh, Hey, you know, make a hundred thousand dollars a month, you know, with no employees just by, you know, doing some YouTube videos or something along those lines.
[00:05:02] Patrick: And it’s like, that’s a cute idea. And I think in America here, we’re hooked on the drive through breakthrough. Like, I’m just going to like. I’m going to get the five minute abs, you know, the, the great marriage if I just, you know, uh, download this app. And so I, I, I love the fact that, uh, you’re acknowledging that, you know, business is hard because we we’ve been in the same boat.
[00:05:21] Patrick: We’ve been, um, you know, we, we owned a bunch of real estate, uh, early two thousands, the market turned down in. 2008, nine, 10, and, uh, you know, it had some cash flowing assets, but all of a sudden the valuation wasn’t there. And the bank’s like, yeah, we’d be happy to refinance this for you, but you’re going to have to come with a hundred thousand dollars or 200, 000 to refinance it.
[00:05:40] Patrick: And it’s like, I don’t have that cash. And, uh, so we were again, similar looking at foreclosure on a, a number of different, uh, properties and we, we, we hustled our way out of it. Uh, but, uh, We got real serious about stewardship. Uh, I remember my wife and I sitting down and, um, Cause I was robbing Peter to pay Paul, like just making it all go.
[00:06:03] Patrick: And I remember taking a dollar’s worth of, uh, coins and going, okay. Uh, and I heard this concept from T. Harv Ecker, um, and he said, have all these different buckets for your money. So 10 percent just goes to, to charity. Give, give the, to the church, right? 50 percent for necessities. Like it just pays for your.
[00:06:23] Patrick: Living lifestyle, your rent, your car, your necessary clothing, food, that type of thing. Uh, 10 percent to the financial freedom account. Just start saving some money for the future someday. Uh, 10 percent to play, like go have some fun with it. Uh, 10 percent long term savings. And what that means was I would put money away to put down on, let’s say a vehicle or a house, and then my, the payment on that could still fit into that 50 percent bucket.
[00:06:48] Patrick: Um, 10 percent for my education, like let’s develop me as an individual. Um, so I, I took a dollar in like dimes and I just put them in these like little envelopes and I was like, okay, like Lord universe, whomever I am, uh, I am, I’m going to show that I’m managing my money. And uh, it was sort of from that point forward, it was like, all right, we’re just going to be very serious about how every dollar is going to flow in a way that, uh, Allows us to stay out of this, this pain from not being good stewards of our resources.
[00:07:21] Jason: It’s so true. So many people are because of the social media society as well, they’re searching for these home runs. They’re searching for that next big client. They’re waiting for that tax refund. They’re, they’re expecting all these home runs yet. You and I both know the game of baseball is won by a series of base hits.
[00:07:39] Jason: Now, guess what? A bunch of base hits. Don’t make it on ESPN each and every day. It’s the home runs. That make it on, on ESPN and Instagram and YouTube and everything else. Not a bunch of, a bunch of bass hits. That’s not sexy enough. So, but at the end of the day, like you said to quote, uh, Jim Collins talks about in good to great, the 20 mile March, you March, if you’re trying, if you’re racing across the United States, he says.
[00:08:03] Jason: The best way to do it is to march 20 miles every single day when it’s cold when it’s rainy when it’s beautiful It doesn’t matter. It’s 20 miles Whereas the other team tries to go 80 miles when it’s pretty and stays inside when it’s cold and everything else who wins is The person who’s consistent 20 miles one foot in front of the other every single day And that is how personal finance business finance really works at the end of the day that there’s no Five minute abs.
[00:08:32] Jason: Like you said, there’s no, there’s no quick thing. And, and even, and even Moola as an app, like I am just the guardrails. Jim Rohn used to say, knowledge isn’t power. It’s potential power. I can teach you all this stuff. You can teach all this stuff, but if they’re not willing to put it to work. Right. What, what good is it at the end of the day?
[00:08:51] Patrick: Right. Absolutely. I love it. Thank you for, for sharing all of that. So I would like to get into some of the foundational things that you used to, Scale M zero a to, uh, an E figure exit. That’s, uh, I think those are things that, that people, uh, dream about. Do you have some maybe core principles that, you know, when, if we’re to lean into these, this is, this is what it takes to get a business to that level.
[00:09:19] Jason: Yeah. Um, it’s easy to jump in and we’ll get into marketing and everything else, but. For us, the biggest turning point in that business is when we truly discovered our purpose, truly discovered our why, to quote another popular book. Um, but it kind of came to us in a, in a funny way. At this point, we’re a team of just four or five of us.
[00:09:41] Jason: And we just believe we’re creating curriculum to help pilots pass their tests. And you know what, we, we were doing that and we were doing a great job at that. And then one day the, the one support team member we had came over and said, Jason, I think you need to read this. That wasn’t every day that a support ticket got escalated all the way to me.
[00:09:59] Jason: There was a filter or two there before it got to me and I came to read it. And it was a gentleman. I’ve had the privilege of meeting this gentleman. And he said, Jason, I was flying the other day. I had an engine failure on takeoff at about 400 feet. And the moment that engine stopped and all I heard was the air whistling around me, he said, I heard your voice, you, I remember watching the in flight emergencies video on what to do, and I just heard your voice through my head, and you guided me all the way down to this safe landing, talking to me and fictitiously in my head, and I landed in some farmer’s field, didn’t hurt his field, didn’t hurt the airplane, everything was great, and he ended the email saying, Okay.
[00:10:41] Jason: I’m alive today because of you and MZeroA. And I thought, Whoa, wait a second. We’re not just making videos. Like we are saving people’s lives. And I’ll tell you, it seems so crazy, but when we flip the script, when we add it to our Monday meetings, Hey, what are we doing today to make safer, smarter pilots?
[00:11:02] Jason: What are we doing today? Is everything on your to do list working today to save lives? Because that’s what it really should be. Because if it’s not, you should lower that priority down or outsource it to somebody else or something along those lines, because that’s how you need to start prioritizing your day.
[00:11:18] Jason: And when we begin. As a leadership team to make that shift, right, that’s when things begin to really change for us. So hopefully some of the listeners are thinking, you know, and you may say, well, I’m just a plumber or I’m just this how I’m not, I’m not changing lives, but yeah, maybe you are because you’re saving the day from that disaster that would happen on their daughter’s 16th birthday when the toilets backed up and you solve that issue.
[00:11:42] Jason: So that wouldn’t happen, right? This is how you have to think about what you really do. When it comes to business, and then when you can rally the team behind that, the marketing becomes very easy, right? The leadership becomes very easy from that standpoint when you get the team around the same rally cry.
[00:12:03] Patrick: Yeah, I love it. I love it. I spent a minute just looking into M0A and some of your background there, and it looks like you, you took this, um, this framework around education and it, it changed from passing the test. Like, let us, let us prepare you to pass the test to save your life. Right? Like there’s a huge difference there.
[00:12:24] Patrick: Um, and, and really, I think one of the things you, you highlighted was let’s, let’s get away from the memorization and let’s get towards like taking this content and like making it a part of you. And I think you, you gave us a fantastic example of, of that. It wasn’t something like this guy was trying to recall.
[00:12:41] Patrick: He’s like, I remember Jason and these, you know, the way he educated me in a way that I could like apply these things and it, it saved me. So. I think back to Seth Godin a little bit and, um, Seth Godin is a famous marketer and Seth talks about the purple cow, right? Uh, like I can be driving down the road and I see all these like black and white Holstein cows.
[00:13:02] Patrick: I live in Iowa. So we’re familiar with cows here. Um, you know, and they all start to live the same, you know, you see your first cow, you’re like, Hey, that’s kind of cool cow. Uh, but now when I come across a purple cow, I’m like, now that’s remarkable. That is something we’re talking about. And, and I think the thing that people don’t recognize is like, I can spend all the money I want on marketing, but if I don’t have a, a fantastic product out there, the, the community and the marketplace is really, uh, is going to bring tremendous value, I’m, I’m wasting marketing dollars.
[00:13:31] Patrick: And it sounds like once you define that purpose, uh, saving people’s lives, you know, everything we’re doing is focused around that, um, it makes. It make pushing that product out into the world, uh, a little easier. Well,
[00:13:44] Jason: and imagine it from a marketing standpoint. At this point now in our business, we’ve got a little bit of competition.
[00:13:49] Jason: We’re really a pioneer, uh, in the idea of doing an online ground school. Sometimes pioneers get arrows. We have plenty of arrows on our journey, but now we’ve got a little bit of competition. We’re a few years into this thing and the competition is all pushing. You’ll pass your test, right? Guaranteed.
[00:14:05] Jason: You’ll pass your test just like any other test prep. You know, company out there and instead our marketing message was, listen, of course, you’re going to pass your test. That that’s a no brainer, but I’m in the business of you and your spouse flying to go see the grandkids and doing it safely. Or you, when there’s 300 paying passengers sitting behind you and you’ve got your dream job.
[00:14:29] Jason: Like that’s what I’m in the business in, and you’re doing it safely, right? When you can sell the vision, when you can sell the dream, and it’s so fascinating, we just have kind of a similar instance happen, uh, in Mulan. I’m, I’m skipping well ahead in stories now to, to a whole nother business. Um, Um, we spend a lot of time and I know you to talk about what is wealth and so I’ll do it.
[00:14:51] Jason: We’ll say, well, I need millions of dollars and I would argue you really don’t probably. Um, someone left a comment the other day and said, you know what? Wealth for me is I want to make every single football game for my son this year because I’ve missed too many of them because I’m working so much. I thought, Whoa, like we, that’s a goal we can help you with.
[00:15:12] Jason: Like I got you covered, man. Like. Yeah. If wealth is spending more time with your family, loving on your kids, when your son comes in and says, dad, can we go through the football? And you go, no, I got the zoom call. No, I’m too busy. All this stuff. Instead you go, yeah, let’s go through the football. Like that’s the business we’re in with Moola, right?
[00:15:28] Jason: That’s a, you’re in the same business, right? That’s what we’re really after with all that.
[00:15:32] Patrick: I love it. I love it. And one of the things that we talk about when it comes to wealth is the most valuable things in life are this acronym called reach. Okay. The R’s for relationships. E’s for experiences, A’s for advancement or growth, C’s for contribution.
[00:15:46] Patrick: The scriptures tell us it’s better to give than receive. And then H is our health and that’s our physical, emotional, and spiritual health, right? Like you can’t give me cancer for any amount of money. If I’m depressed, I can’t get out of bed. It doesn’t matter. And I think what all of that revolves around when we think about it is it’s not a new shiny fill in the blank.
[00:16:02] Patrick: It’s, it’s really time freedom, right? It’s, it’s the ability to say, I don’t need to take that zoom call. I can go to the football game. I don’t need to finish this report. I can go spend time. Uh, watching my daughter’s recital, you know, so, um, I, I love all of that and I’m really excited to get into Moola and hear more about, you know, how, how the program works.
[00:16:26] Patrick: Uh, I think it’s. Uh, it’s tremendous. Most people think if I just make more money, I’ll be, I’ll be okay. And we’ve had clients making 2 1 and frustrated that they, they like can’t get it together. And it’s like, well, um, you know, Parkinson’s law of money says, you know, expenses increase with income, you know, and so if we’re not careful, we will just keep finding a newer, bigger, faster, shinier fill in the blank, cause we’re like, Oh, you know.
[00:16:56] Patrick: I need that. And there’s, I’ve had a client say to me once, you know, um, you know, once you go, once you go private or once you go first class, you know, it’s really hard to, to go back. And so it’s like, that is the new standard for how we’re going to, uh, uh, to travel and live. So this is great. So I’m going to bring it back to growing and scaling a business.
[00:17:17] Patrick: Um, and I’m curious because, you know, we’ve seen tremendous products out there. Great products that don’t have the, the marketing background. How did you get the word out? What were the Tool strategies you use to, um, to really market M0A to, to the general public. That not to the general public pilots, people that are training to be pilots.
[00:17:40] Patrick: Yeah. You
[00:17:40] Jason: got, you got, that’s interesting. You say it that way because you got to think there are 600, 000 pilots in the United States. Like talk about when I say a niche, I mean, a niche, like it was very, very small, uh, to, to do so well in, um, marketing was always a passion of ours. And to go back, we, we always preached a give first type of mentality.
[00:18:01] Jason: Now we also were very blessed and we wrote a great opportunity, which back then was YouTube. Um, this is, you know, YouTube’s not owned by Google yet, but it’s out of the garage and it’s a growing type business. Now I live in Florida and when you live in Florida, you go to the beach, uh, quite a bit. And, uh, I had a lot of buddies that surfed, I’m an 18 year old kid at this point, I surfed a little bit as well.
[00:18:24] Jason: And all these surfers had this GoPro thing attached to their surfboard. I thought, Whoa, they can take it in the water. It’s it’s doing all this stuff. I bet I can put that on my airplane and start filming videos from the air. They’re filming surf videos. I’m gonna go film airplane videos. So I saved up, bought two original GoPro hero ones, probably still have them sitting around somewhere.
[00:18:48] Jason: Strap them to the airplane and begin to teach my flight lessons as if you were sitting there next to me, but you weren’t right. I framed a camera, right? Like where your head would be and everything else. I left the left seat, the pilot seat empty. I sat in the copilot seat as the instructor. And flew everything and did the entire video and began to release that content on YouTube with this simple premise If you think the free stuff we’re giving away here is good Imagine how good the paid stuff is and that became the whole business model.
[00:19:22] Jason: We weren’t doing pay per click We weren’t getting and I wish I would have done pay per click back then because it was much cheaper than it is today But that was the whole Marketing business model, we gave away, people say you gave away a taste. Now it wasn’t a taste test. We gave away some good content to the point that we had people saying, I don’t know how you can afford to give away such good content to which we would say we couldn’t afford not to give away that kind of content.
[00:19:48] Jason: So if you ever feel like in your business, in your marketing, you are giving too much away, you, you probably are not because what happened was we quickly positioned ourselves as the experts in the field. And still to this day, even exiting this business, we still, you know, they, they still utilize that method of we position ourselves as the expert in this particular field and people keep coming to us.
[00:20:14] Jason: And there’s still, you know, we’re over thousands of videos on YouTube now. Um, you know, 250, 000 subscribers, again, in a niche of only 600, 000. It’s pretty cool to have that much market share following you on, on one social media channel. Um, but that brings me to one more interesting point. You can’t have all your eggs in that basket.
[00:20:34] Jason: And a huge mistake I made early on is I was all in on YouTube. We’re around 30, 40, 000 subscribers. Business is finally getting good. Tow trucks are leaving me alone. Like life is getting good. And then, um, early on in oh nine, maybe 2010, um, there was a widespread YouTube hack where majority of accounts got hacked, lost all their content, all their subscribers, and the MZeroA original channel was one of those victims.
[00:21:03] Jason: And I lost. Everything I wasn’t collecting emails. I wasn’t collecting phone numbers. I was all reliant on YouTube yet. YouTube held all that data. So here I was trying to scale, trying to scale yet. My ability to scale was contingent on someone else. So I say this to, especially you, I see it so often now with, you know, I hate to date this recording, I apologize, but the hot topic is banning Tik TOK.
[00:21:30] Jason: And I know, I know there’s a lot of young kids that are making their living on Tik TOK right now. Who have, they’re not sweating it. They should be. I don’t know where that’s going to go with things. If you’ve got all your eggs in that basket, you need to be still, I know you do it very well. Collecting emails, collecting phone numbers, hold that even people who sell on Amazon, Amazon keeps that data.
[00:21:49] Jason: You don’t, it’s very hard to scale and create leverage when you don’t hold that data.
[00:21:54] Patrick: Yeah, I, I love it and I think we’ve seen this over time consistently, right? The platforms can change the rules on you and you can be out of business tomorrow. Right? Like I had a friend, um, that was, had a huge following on Facebook for his business.
[00:22:10] Patrick: And then all of a sudden Facebook basically shut down all the business pages and we’re like, okay, if you want any exposure, you’re going to have to pay for it. And it was like, Oh my goodness. And then we can go to talking about things that were shut down. Uh, vines used to be a thing, right? These really short clips, you know?
[00:22:25] Patrick: So it’s like history’s littered with not even that long ago, history’s littered with, um, you know, these platforms that are shut down. So it’s like own, own the platform, right? Email’s not going anywhere. It’s decentralized phone numbers, you know, not going anywhere decentralized. And so, uh, you know, I think the, the more of that you can collect.
[00:22:44] Patrick: Uh, taking people from your platform into your ecosystem, you know, uh, that, uh, you own and control even communities that you control, I think are, are, are important, whether that’s on, you know, uh, teachable circle, you know, some of those other platforms, I think are spot on
[00:23:02] Jason: and it was really that idea that caused us to launch one of our first books, which was called the private pilot blueprint.
[00:23:09] Jason: And you better believe, I mean, now it’s commonplace back then, it wasn’t that commonplace that, Hey, for your email address and your phone number, here’s a free book called the private pilot blueprint. Everything I wish someone would have told me before I started my flight training. Um, and we released that book and we just collected email after email from that of the right clientele, people looking to learn to fly.
[00:23:28] Jason: We implemented, and this is important too, for scaling a business for those. that are thinking generational or even just long term is the rule of primacy, right? Who I interact with first Is likely to keep my business for a long time, right? If your dad was a Ford guy, there’s a high probability you’re a Ford guy too.
[00:23:49] Jason: Or, or, you know, my dad, uh, was a huge Green Bay Packer fan. I don’t follow a lot of sports, but if I did, it’s the Green Bay Packer. Like there’s, this is the rule of primacy, who you were imprinted on early enough. So those thinking about where I’m thinking about with Mulan now is how do we market to Gen Z?
[00:24:06] Jason: How do we, how do we be that? First, you know, financial freedom app in their, in their phone, right. For that rule of primacy as well, building that long term strategy and that scaling doesn’t happen overnight. Back to our analogy. It’s a series of a bunch of base
[00:24:20] Patrick: hits. Yeah, I love that. And I think I’ve got a couple, uh, I’ve got three daughters, uh, two of which are in high school and athletes.
[00:24:29] Patrick: And, uh, the thing we, we keep talking about is. Between Monday and Tuesday, the work you put in, you can’t tell the difference. Like the incremental improvement is so small, you can’t see it. But between January 1st and July 1st, you can look back and go, okay, I’ve made real progress. You can’t see it in any one day, but it’s like all of those increments like stacked up.
[00:24:52] Patrick: And I think the same thing’s true with how you’re managing your business, your finance, your health, you know, all the, those, those things are, are, are great. So can you talk a little bit about, Uh, what’s your infrastructure look like? Did you have a bunch of employees that Uh, we’re teaching and helping people become pilots, or was it all, uh, online content?
[00:25:11] Patrick: This is
[00:25:11] Jason: an excellent question that relates right back to scaling. So when I first started, like every entrepreneur, it was, it was the solopreneur lifestyle. And someone told me very early on, and this still sticks with me. You don’t have to get it right. You just have to get it going. And I know it’s tough in today’s society.
[00:25:31] Jason: You see this Instagram, just remember, trust me, you don’t have to get it right. You just have to get it going. So early on, I was the guy on camera. I was the guy that edited it. And in fact, it’s so funny. I lived with my parents at the time. This is before we had like auto focus on cameras. This is 06, 07. I would focus my mini DV camera on my office chair, so I had a focal point.
[00:25:55] Jason: I’d press record, I’d run around, I’d sit in my office chair, Hey everyone, Jason Schappert here with MZeroA. com. I would do the whole video, I’d get up, I’d undo it, I, I would hook it up to my, my MacBook Pro with a firewire cable, if anybody remembers that, where you can’t touch it, otherwise you’ll drop frames.
[00:26:10] Jason: And I would edit the thing in iMovie because it’s the only thing I knew how to do. Um, you know, that’s, that’s basic, certainly by even today’s standards. I got the content out there. Now it took a long, it took me all day to do one video, which brings me to the leverage point of my first hire. That same smart friend that sat me down and said, you don’t have to get it right.
[00:26:30] Jason: You just have to get it going. I’m now making enough money where I believe I’m ready to make my first hire, but I didn’t know I, I mean, I needed help with video and you’d help with support. I needed help with leader. I need help in so many areas. And that same friend said, hire somebody to shoot film and edit all that content because look what you’re doing by making like one video a day and how it’s taken you all day.
[00:26:54] Jason: Imagine that guy could be doing four videos a day for you so you can be working on other aspects of the business. And that’s how it all began. My first hire who was with us all the way through the sale of the business, which was pretty cool to say, employee number one was a video editor and, um, found among this is back when Craigslist was really actually a thing.
[00:27:12] Jason: I don’t know if it still is anymore, but I found him on Craigslist. And, and, and that’s how we really grew it. He came with some equipment. So I was like, man, this is, this is awesome. So, you know, when you’re looking to create leverage and you’re looking to hire, you have to also say, okay, what hires. Are going to give me greater leverage.
[00:27:31] Jason: And when I say leverage, I mean, like grabbing the crowbar way outside to create more leverage on whatever you’re trying to move. That’s what I really, what’s going to move the needle the most
[00:27:40] Patrick: for you. Yeah, I love it. And, uh, I think about Tim Ferriss. Tim has a quote where he’s talking about, um, You know, if you were to follow me around, my days look actually fairly boring, but what I’m trying to do is figure out what, what is the big domino.
[00:27:56] Patrick: If I knock that one domino down, that’s going to really make a huge impact in all the other things that, uh, I have going on in there. And I think you’re saying that like. I’m going to outsource these other items. So when I do something, it’s an absolute leverage use of my time. And it’s going to make a huge impact.
[00:28:14] Patrick: You know, we think about a task matrix, okay. Uh, level five activities, the only thing Pat can do, right. Uh, a one activity is something anybody can do, like opening the mail. Right. Uh, so it’s like, as soon as I stop opening the mail, doing those ones, twos, threes, even fours, and I’m just leveraged myself to like.
[00:28:34] Patrick: The max on those number five activities, that’s, that’s when the business can take off, but it can be, it can be challenging there because it’s like, well, I can’t just go hire everybody to do all the stuff because I don’t have enough revenue coming in. So it’s a, it’s a process.
[00:28:47] Jason: Well, you have to also, and boy are entrepreneurs bad at this one.
[00:28:50] Jason: Unfortunately. You have to be willing to let go of those tasks to a lot of times. We have romanticized a lot of these things and, and we believe the lie. And it is a lie that nobody can do it as good as I do. Nobody will, you know, help steward this aspect of my business as well as I will. That, that, that is a lie.
[00:29:10] Jason: And it’s a limiting mindset that will hold you back the rest of your life. There are plenty of, not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur. Not everyone is out to steal your ideas. Not everyone, all these things, right? There are so many good people out there. If you’re willing to take the time to do the right interviews and everything else, not just hire from the hip and find the right people.
[00:29:31] Jason: There are people that will steward your business as if it were your own business. And there’s plenty of them that work for your business. There’s plenty of them that work for our business and they absolutely love it. Um, but you have to be willing to say, you know, I’m going to train you for this task and I’m going to let this task go, um, from that standpoint, and that can be challenging for entrepreneurs.
[00:29:49] Jason: We love to hold on to things.
[00:29:51] Patrick: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Jason, this has been fantastic. Before we started recording, you mentioned something and if it’s okay, I’d like to dig into it. You said you, you sold your business, uh, but your books were kind of a mess. Your financials weren’t as cleaned up as they, they should have been.
[00:30:07] Patrick: Uh, so a congratulations for still getting the deal done. Cause oftentimes that, that can be a deal killer, but can you just talk a little bit about. Uh, maybe the shape that your books were in and how all of that came to be and why you feel like you maybe left a little, uh, money on the table.
[00:30:21] Jason: Yeah. Well, uh, it, it actually was a deal killer because the opportunity we sold to was the second private equity firm that came by.
[00:30:28] Jason: So I’ll give you the full scope of things. Um, although we’re a 30 person something team, my wife and I still ran this business as a mom and pop business. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But we took mom and pop to another extreme. I, I was reconciling QuickBooks every single talk about here. I just preached everybody on how you have to let stuff go.
[00:30:47] Jason: And I’m again. I am a product of my own mistakes. I was the one keeping all the books and I’m sure no one from the IRS is listening to this because I’m sure I’m the only business person who’s ever done this, but you go to the grocery store and you use your business credit card and you go into QuickBooks and you call it an office meal or whatever it is, but you bought groceries for your family.
[00:31:08] Jason: Like I’m, I’m sure I’m not the only entrepreneur who’s ever done such a thing and, and co mingled funds like that. Well, we weren’t looking to sell. We were approached by a private equity firm. Of course, you get all excited. You’re like, Oh my goodness, this is the moment. I knew it was going to come. I didn’t think it would be now.
[00:31:24] Jason: This is great. We’re under NDA due diligence is asking all these great questions. These fancy lawyers are asking us questions. And then all of a sudden. They stop and they say, Hey, Jason, you know, we’re looking at your books. And it’s, it’s very clear. You have a good business, but we just can’t see it from the numbers.
[00:31:41] Jason: Like we read everything, we see everything. I’m sure this is a great business, but your funds are so commingled. You stayed at the Ritz Carlton here for this event when you probably could have stayed at a holiday Inn, you know, and I, and I know we’re buying this thing off of EBITDA and that’s just hurting you at the end of the day, by the way.
[00:31:56] Jason: Um, Clean up your books and call us again, you know, when you clean up the books, like, And that was devastating because in my mind we had already sold we had already been thinking about the trip We’re going to take to celebrate like we had all this stuff going on And we my wife and I were genuinely heartbroken when it happened if you believe what napoleon hill says in the book think and grow rich, which was written in 1937 by the way and still so relevant today He says, in every adversity, there’s the seed of a greater advantage.
[00:32:27] Jason: And we said, okay, this stinks, right? No doubt about it. What can we do about it? How can we turn this to our advantage? Well, we went out and we hired a fractional CFO and then we needed a full time CFO just yet, but there’s plenty of great remote fractional CFOs where we get a quarter of their time. And it’s like having a full time CFO.
[00:32:47] Jason: Amazing decision. We hired a full time bookkeeper. So it wasn’t Jason keeping the books and there was a lot of training that had to happen because I kept QuickBooks a certain way and everything else to bring this, especially all the, the weird aviation vendors we had and everything else. It was a lot. to bring this person up to speed, but they institute a lot of great QuickBooks rules and things that even I wasn’t doing.
[00:33:07] Jason: They, they made the system better. Well, sure enough, nine months go down the road, a different private equity firm, uh, comes back at an even greater multiple of us, a higher number and our books are squeaky clean. And we have not only a year of not co mingling our funds, but we even had the proper ad backs of back when we did co mingle funds.
[00:33:29] Jason: So they could get a good, honest EBITDA number and everything else. And that was the deal we eventually closed on. And it’s, um, it’s, we lost a deal literally because of that. And I share that, uh, humbly because I know I’m not the only entrepreneur who’s co mingled and made these mistakes before.
[00:33:48] Patrick: Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s, that’s true.
[00:33:50] Patrick: And it is one of the things that we, we do spend a lot of time talking to our clients about, you know, we, we think about the four cornerstones of what we’ll call the entrepreneur private office. Uh, and the first one is cashflow and just really understanding that. That cashflow and getting it as clean as we can get it because we, like we pay a fractional CFO to have on our team to just look at all of our clients books and, and just give us feedback on, Hey, you know, if a sale is coming down the road, here’s things they’re going to look at, and this is going to be a problem.
[00:34:20] Patrick: Like. You, you gotta get some things cleaned up and cost of goods sold. And you have one revenue line item. I’m pretty sure you don’t have one product you’re selling, you know, let’s like, let’s, let’s, you know, get all these things, these things done. And I think that’s, um, I appreciate you sharing that wisdom because it, um, it really is, and I think like that Napoleon Hill quote, uh, at church on Sunday, we were talking about blessings and sometimes we think blessings are in the form of good things that happen to us.
[00:34:50] Patrick: But I think there’s plenty of places in the scriptures where, uh, we need to rejoice in the trials and the suffering that comes our direction, because there’s so much that we can learn from those situations. When everything’s going smoothly, I tend to not look around and pay attention to what’s going wrong.
[00:35:05] Patrick: It’s when things are sideways and I’m like, okay, we got a lot of stuff to clean up around here. And, uh, uh, I think this is one of those examples, like, okay, fantastic. Let’s get things cleaned up. And then to see how all that played out down the road, clean books, higher multiple, you know, it’s like, all right, this is, uh, just to stick with your
[00:35:22] Jason: theme.
[00:35:23] Jason: My wife and I have learned through our years of you, you praise God for what he gives you, but don’t forget to praise him for what he takes away too. Right. And cause it, cause it always works out.
[00:35:34] Patrick: I love it. I love it. This is fantastic. All right. So I think all this talk about money leads us right into Moola and just, if you could give us a A 30, 000 foot overview of what Moola is, and then I’d like to just dig into the details if that’s okay.
[00:35:48] Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, great analogy to use, 30, 000 foot. You’re sneaking these aviation analogies in here. I like it already, Pat. It’s good. I’ll, I’ll lead with another aviation analogy. The really the nexus of Moola started when my wife and I sold our business. Uh, the wave of emotions is off the charts, by the way, originally, you’re very, very excited.
[00:36:07] Jason: Then you’re like kind of sad. You just sold your baby, it feels like. And now you’re the next wave is what’s next. You know, we’re 30 something years old. Like, what are we going to do next here from that standpoint? And my wife said, listen, you are a great teacher because at the end of the day, we were very good at taking complex subjects and breaking them to plain English.
[00:36:26] Jason: She said, you have steward this family’s finances with, you know, I, I love algorithms and math and everything else from an investing and a savings and everything else standpoint. Why don’t you build the technology that you’ve been, you’ve always been using and share it with, with the world. And this is where Moola came from.
[00:36:42] Jason: Because if you think about it from an aviation standpoint. In my airplane, I have six instruments and those six instruments at any given time are showing me what just happened 30 seconds ago, what’s happening right now, and what’s likely to happen in the next 30 seconds if I keep doing what I’m doing.
[00:37:00] Jason: And that’s how, that’s how aviation works. Where is that in my personal and business finances for that matter? That’s why we created Moola here. Here’s what’s happened over the last 30 days. That’s great. Here’s what’s happening right now. And Hey, dummy, this is what’s going to happen the next 30, 60, 90 days.
[00:37:16] Jason: If you keep doing what you’re doing, do you realize you have Netflix, you know, Hulu, Disney plus Paramount plus HBO max prime kids, and your shows aren’t even streaming right now. They’re out of season. They’re still filming them and you’re paying happily for it. Like, this is the kind of intelligence. We want to give people and that’s the nexus of it.
[00:37:34] Jason: And then to go back, you didn’t even realize this when you teed it up at the show, talking about your, your. I’ll use the word envelopes. We call them pockets. That’s really where this all started My mother still to this day uses the envelope budgeting system with physical envelopes with cash And I remember as kids we used to we used to always joke mom’s envelope never runs out Well, it did we just were kids and we thought 10 bucks was a million dollars back then um So we have essentially digitized what we’re calling pockets and going back to these these simple things like You gave the example of the entrepreneur making two million dollars, but spending 2.
[00:38:10] Jason: 1 I guarantee that person’s not paying themselves first and and we you and I know the power of that So on the personal and the business side, for that matter, we implemented a cashflow waterfall every time income comes in, we will auto waterfall it based on percentage to the pockets of your choice, whether that’s you want to tithe from it, you want it, whatever you wish to do in the syntax and the order you wish, we will just water cascade that thing on down.
[00:38:37] Jason: So it’s done for you at the end of the day. Moola is the guardrails. You don’t have to turn any of those features on if you don’t want to. It is the guardrails to go back to the quote where we started, knowledge isn’t power, it’s potential power. Moola is just potential power if you want to use it appropriately.
[00:38:54] Jason: It’s, we’re not trying to be all things to all people. We’re trying to be the financial freedom tool for the people who really want it.
[00:39:02] Patrick: Yeah. Cause what is hard about in our digital money society today is. Not many people are dealing with cash, right? Like I go to my daughter’s events now and they actually won’t take it.
[00:39:16] Patrick: I have to use some sort of like digital payment, credit card, Apple pay, something like that to get me, uh, in the door. So it can make the, the budgeting process more challenging, you know? Cause I remember my wife and I, we were. Uh, again, digging out of a little bit of a hole with the real estate stuff. And I remember we had our play money effectively.
[00:39:37] Patrick: I would go get the amount of cash every month that we would use to just go on date nights. Right. And sometimes that was, we are coming down to the office building and just turning on a movie. You know, we’d rent a movie, you know, this is back when, you know, there’s still a movie store and, uh, uh, 10, 12 years ago before all the streaming services and where it was popular.
[00:39:55] Patrick: And we, we just put a movie in and we’d watch it at the office to like. You know, pay the babysitter when we get home, but it was just a hard time. And that’s all we had money for. And that was, that was okay. Uh, and I think the, I love what you’re doing with the envelope system in a digital format. So can you walk us through a little bit of, let’s, let’s say I’m like, all right, Jason, I want to, uh, I want to invest in dollars, right?
[00:40:20] Patrick: Can you, how does that work? Can, can Moola help me with that? Can they tie into some of these platforms and get some of my dollars? Yeah,
[00:40:27] Jason: absolutely. And let me just go back one step and finish on the pockets and the envelope budgeting system, essentially there too. When you set up a Moola account, you really get two accounts, checking in a savings account.
[00:40:37] Jason: How we have set up the system is I actually want you to keep a minimal amount, a couple hundred dollars in the checking account because it’s associated with your debit card, right? We don’t want to reduce this fraud and everything else. I want you to keep everything in your pockets. Let’s say you and the wife have that big concert you want to go to whatever it is.
[00:40:58] Jason: So you’re saving in your ticket pocket, your concert pocket, whatever it is. When it comes time to go on Ticketmaster and buy those tickets. You grab the 200, that’s the price of the tickets, from your ticket pocket, you move it to your spending pocket, then you enter your debit card on Ticketmaster, and you spend it.
[00:41:15] Jason: Well, by doing that, You’ve done what we do on QuickBooks, usually 30 or 60 days in the rear. You reconciled in real time. So now I can see, Whoa, look where my, look how much I’m spending on Uber Eats, right? Because you are reconciling everything in real time, assuming you use it that way to get that data.
[00:41:35] Jason: Whereas most businesses are. Reconciling QuickBooks 45 days in the rear, and then you get a P& L on your desk on day 50, and you are flying the airplane on 50 day old data. Like, that’s ridiculous. We need the real time data from that
[00:41:51] Patrick: standpoint. That’s so true. And we’ve seen people come in with year old data, you know, they, they, they are still not sure if they’re profitable or not.
[00:42:03] Patrick: And I’m like, yeah, they, they have the equivalent of the literal box of shoe, uh, of receipts. You know, I’m like, why don’t you spend the 30 bucks a month or whatever it is to get QuickBooks online, have it tied to your bank account. And then we can see real time what’s going on in their business. And, uh, I think there’s a little bit of poverty mentality there.
[00:42:21] Patrick: There’s also, I think. I think it’s also scary, right? Like, I think we have to acknowledge, like, if I know the data, data kills denial, which prevents disaster, right? So if I’ve got the data in front of me, I can’t deny what’s going on, right? Where if I don’t have the data, I can just keep my head in the sand and pretend that everything’s okay, that they’re not going to foreclose on my house and they’re not going to hook the tow truck up to my truck and take it.
[00:42:45] Patrick: And so, um, so I think having good data and I think about this and. Almost every area, right? My, my business, right? Like it could be my finances on my business. It could be marketing numbers. Like, you know, what, what do we have in the funnel? It could be my, my health metrics, right? Like what is my. Blood pressure, right?
[00:43:02] Patrick: Like those are all, uh, good pieces of information that, uh, It’s
[00:43:06] Jason: so interesting you say that. I know you asked me about investing. I promise we’ll come back to that, but you just led to a really great point. I was just leading a webinar on goal setting, right? We’re, we’re into, into a new year, into goal setting, everything else.
[00:43:19] Jason: And. People are so good. It’s not a hard thing to set a, set a goal. The hardest part is to tell yourself the truth about where you’re really at on the map. Everyone puts X marks the spot for the treasure, but they lie about where they are on the map and you can’t get to the treasure if you lie about where you’re at on the map, because then you can’t create the plan to actually get there.
[00:43:39] Jason: So, um, your, your analogy is, is, is perfect from that standpoint. You asked me about investing and I took a hard left turn. I apologize. Moola is your, your, your basic investing tool as well. And I use basic very purposefully not to sound boring. Because I take a very basic strategy at the end of the day, we take the Warren Buffett strategy.
[00:44:02] Jason: Warren Buffett said for his foundation, for his family, for everything, Hey guys, put it in some low cost index funds, mimic the S and P 500. If you, if you want to play around with one or two outliers, that’s totally fine. But the majority of my assets, he said, I want in a, in a, you know, I’m not won’t name any index funds or anything like that, but in an index fund of your choice, um, low fee to no fee.
[00:44:23] Jason: And that’s essentially what we push at Moola as well. Yes. We’re your full brokerage. Yes. You can go buy Nvidia and Tesla all you want. I personally wouldn’t recommend it. I’d much rather you in an index fund. And, uh, if you want to play with crypto by all means. 1 percent of your speculation portfolio.
[00:44:40] Jason: Sure. Go have fun. By the way, do you have an IRA? Cause that’s where I’m forget everyone was talking about crypto and AI and everything else. Do you have an IRA? That’s the real question we need to talk about. Right.
[00:44:51] Patrick: Yeah, no, I love this. And I, I think asset allocation, like you’re talking about is the key, right?
[00:44:58] Patrick: Like Warren Buffett made a bet. And he said, okay, I’m going to take the S and P 500. You pick whatever hedge fund managers you want. I’ll bet a million dollars. The S and P outperforms. Guess who won Warren Buffett one, right? The guy that made the bet with him, he had to give a million dollars to Warren’s charity.
[00:45:15] Patrick: So, um, and so I think if we just look at that base level, like picking stocks is so hard, the hedge fund guys make a ton of money trying to outperform the markets. And very, very rarely do they do it. And if they do do it, they don’t do it consistently. And so it’s like, all right, let’s just, let’s just lean into the indexes and.
[00:45:37] Patrick: I think if anything there, we can start mixing with asset allocation a little bit and go, all right, we’re going to add in some alternatives. I don’t mind, like you said, having Bitcoin be a percentage of our portfolio. Let’s just make sure that we’re doing good things like rebalancing that portfolio, taking Bitcoin into consideration.
[00:45:53] Patrick: So when it runs up to 115, 000 per coin, like we’re. We’re selling off some of those gains and moving them in because we’re seeing it drop off. So
[00:46:02] Jason: you’re exactly right with asset allocation. Even look, look at the top 25 stocks in the S and P 500, which is weighted by the way, with this AI boom, most of them are some sort of technology related with NVIDIA leading the charge right now.
[00:46:16] Jason: The reason the S and P 500 is, you know, up and down so much is basically what’s NVIDIA doing right now because of the weight it’s pulling on the S and P 500. So. Is the S and P 500 a perfect asset allocation? Not always. So you need to be mindful of that with some real estate. I’ll let you play with some crypto and maybe you’re saying, I can’t, I can’t do real estate.
[00:46:37] Jason: What do you mean? It could go, I can’t go buy a duplex. Can you do a REIT? Can you do something please? Just to diversify a little bit.
[00:46:42] Patrick: Yeah, no, I, I, I love all of this. And, uh, you know, when we think about our, our levels of investing, we want to see typically people get a brokerage account, not even IRA dollars, cause they’re not very liquid.
[00:46:54] Patrick: We think liquidity is so important, you know, this is after our, I’ll call it safe money is sort of taken care of. Um, you know, now let’s, let’s look at, let’s have one year’s worth of brokerage, uh, one year’s worth of income in brokerage. Now I can start looking at some of these other opportunities. I don’t necessarily have to, but.
[00:47:11] Patrick: Like I can start looking at, okay, do I want to go invest in real estate? And I think the thing that, you know, we’re involved in about 150 million for the projects. Now my wife runs that full time and has 400 employees. Right. So it’s like, you have to understand if I’m going to go buy a duplex, it’s not passive income.
[00:47:28] Patrick: It’s like owning another small business. Um, so, uh, again, I love real estate because of the appreciation, the amortization, the depreciation, the cashflow, all of those things, I think are tremendous asset. Um, Even the leverage, you know, that we, we can apply there is, is good. But leverage cuts both ways. You know, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve seen that personally, uh, when, uh, if you’re over levered and things go sideways, it’s, uh, uh, can be a problem.
[00:47:55] Patrick: So, uh, this is, this is wonderful. So we’ve talked through a lot of things. Uh, let’s, let’s talk about Moola and AI and how that factors into. Um, helping me manage my money is, is AI brought into this equation?
[00:48:13] Jason: Absolutely. It is. And I want to, I want to give an asterisk next to this right now, because I feel like especially now everybody and their brother are calling things AI that really isn’t AI, like it’s, it’s like my, my 10 year old can see it now.
[00:48:27] Jason: Like that’s not really AI, but they’re calling it AI dad, like. That you see these things because it’s such a hot buzzword. So I almost like I was talking to the marketing team the other day. I’m like, I almost don’t want to use AI in our marketing anymore because it’s, it’s become such a cliche that just everybody says it, whether it really is, or it really isn’t.
[00:48:44] Jason: Um, we genuinely are using, well, I’ll say a large language model, uh, that learns you, learns your tolerances, learns and understands your goals, knows where you’re at. Geographically knows the, the. Ethical things that you would and wouldn’t like to invest in as well when making these different recommendations the majority of them index funds as well But we are providing an algorithmic scoring system based on everything We call the Moola meter as well because at the end of the day, I’m not trying to make a bunch of day traders I’m trying to help people that earned the money Make informed decisions is what I’m really trying to help people to do.
[00:49:21] Jason: And we use AI to do that. We use AI almost like we would use, like you mentioned earlier, the, the level five tasks to the level one tasks. I’m using AI to pull all the news articles related to let’s say Tesla right now. And then to read it and give me a, Hey, is this good for Tesla stock? Bad for Tesla stock, neutral for Tesla stock.
[00:49:43] Jason: So you can very quickly scan and go, Ooh, there’s, there’s six bad articles about Tesla. I better check this out real quick right now. And I’m not trying to tell people to time the market. You and I know it’s about time in the market, but still. We also believe, right? The Bible says we need to know the condition of our flocks.
[00:49:59] Jason: Well, I think, you know, the condition of your investments as well, and that’s a great way to do it. So they don’t have to sit and read the wall street journal with their coffee for an hour. Every single day. We helped to really kind of automate that process for them.
[00:50:10] Patrick: I love it. This is fantastic. Anything else we should talk about Moola before we, before we move on?
[00:50:15] Jason: I mean, obviously if anybody, before anybody even downloads the app, I want them to fall in love with us. We’re taking the same model. We did the last business. We give a lot away. So go check us out across all social media from Tik TOK all the way through YouTube, uh, we are Moola. Co pilot. I had to sneak in the aviation term in there.
[00:50:33] Jason: Um, Moola Co pilot. You can find us there because that’s exactly what I want to be. You are the pilot in command. You’re the pilot of your finances. I’ll be the co pilot. I’ll make some calls for you. I’ll help you with your checklists. I’ll do all that stuff. But at the end of the day, you’re in charge. I’m just a tool to help you out there.
[00:50:47] Jason: That’s why I was just the co pilot.
[00:50:49] Patrick: Fantastic. And we’ll have links to all the social, uh, tools that, uh, you’ve got out there. And I was, I was spending some time on your Instagram and, uh, really. Really informative. I, I do appreciate, uh, the, the information you’re putting out there. I think it’s great. And the website is moo.
[00:51:06] Patrick: law. Yeah. Moo. law. You got it. Uh, so we’ll, we’ll get and have that in the show notes. If people are ready to go, uh, get started there. We think that, uh, is, is just something great to check out. So Jason, this has been, been wonderful. I’m just going to think about a few things, you know, you, you’ve taught us about, uh, bringing value to the marketplace, like understanding your purpose.
[00:51:29] Patrick: And we’re very much believers in, uh, who, not how, like, if you’re giving all this stuff away now, I need to engage with you because I need the framework, uh, sort of handed to me. I need somebody to step me along in the process versus me figuring it out, watching the YouTube video. So, uh, I love what you did there.
[00:51:47] Patrick: I think that was, um, uh, fantastic. And then, then thinking about all the lessons we talked about on managing your finances in the business and doing that well, and then thinking about it from a personal perspective, like. It doesn’t matter how much I can’t out earn my stupidity when it comes to my spending, right?
[00:52:03] Patrick: You know, like, uh, I, I, I tried that trick. I thought if I just go hustle and make more money, it’ll all be okay. And, uh, I’m glad that was in my past. And now we’ve developed some, uh, good tools moving forward. So, um, you know, I just think about what comes with all that, right? Like. The peace of mind of, uh, of knowing where I’m at financially is, is so good.
[00:52:26] Patrick: And the fact that I know I’m moving towards financial freedom, I think is, uh, uh, is exciting, you know, all those things lead to success when we start, uh, Engaging with tools like Moola. Yeah. I, I don’t really care what the tool is. I don’t care what the system is. You just have to have one, you know, if you, if you just use the system of the money’s going into my bank account and I’ll save what’s left over.
[00:52:49] Patrick: It’s, it’s, uh, it’s not going to work. Well,
[00:52:51] Jason: it won’t work out. And you know. To your point, um, we spend so much time focusing on what we see on stage, what we see on Instagram, all these people succeeding, but we forget in business and life and everything. It’s chaos behind the scenes. And that’s why I appreciate your podcast with the willingness to pull back the curtain and say, Hey, listen, even behind our stage, it’s a little bit crazy.
[00:53:14] Jason: Um, why don’t we put on a brave face, but that’s just how it is. I just, um. For our daughter’s 10th birthday. We had a daddy daughter day. We flew to New York, uh, for her first Broadway show, love singing, dancing. So daddy daughter day went to see the lion King. And during the intermission, her name is Ella.
[00:53:29] Jason: Ella looks at me and says, um, wow, dad, they must practice so much. I mean, everything you see, it just looks perfect. I said, you’re right. What you see on stage is perfect. What you don’t see behind that curtain is people are yelling at each other. They’re moving sets in and out. Someone was running around half dressed.
[00:53:45] Jason: I mean, it is. chaos behind there, but they come out on stage and everything looks so good. And unfortunately we judge our reality based on someone else’s stage. And that’s wrong to do that. My behind the stage is messy. Pat’s is everyone’s is. Right. We just have to, we have to work through that and we had to clean up that mess sometimes, but it’s this ongoing cycle of just getting better, putting one foot in front of the other every single day, stop looking for home runs and just take one foot forward on your financial freedom journey.
[00:54:16] Patrick: I love it. That’s so true. We’ve seen clients that have had a hundred million dollar offers that, uh, You know, on the surface, you know, the duck just nice and smooth on the surface, but underneath, yeah, there’s, there’s constantly paddling, just, just trying to keep up with all of it. And, and I think if you’re a growing enterprise, that’s, that’s never going to, to go away.
[00:54:34] Patrick: So I think it’s good to, to acknowledge it and embrace it and just go, all right, we’re just going to just keep failing forward. It’s, um, It’s good stuff. And then I think about, you know, if we don’t embrace these things, you know, we’re, uh, our business won’t grow. Uh, we, we’ve got the frantic and maybe confused state that we’re in just hopefully, you know, that it’ll someday all work itself out.
[00:54:58] Patrick: But, um, you know, oftentimes we’ve got to get ourselves out of the business to, to work on it for a minute and just make sure that, uh, everything’s going well. So Jason, this has been wonderful. I appreciate, uh, Uh, all the wisdom and knowledge you’ve, you’ve shared with us from, uh, both growing and scaling a business to an eight figure exit to, um, how to just manage our, our, the dollars that come through us, uh, stewardship is, uh, Is a valuable thing.
[00:55:23] Patrick: Anything else to add before we wrap up?
[00:55:25] Jason: I just want to remind everybody as, as a closing thing, you don’t have to get it right. You just have to get it going. So if you’re listening to this and you’ve got that idea, that new product, you’re ready to launch towards your financial freedom. You’re tired of the stress.
[00:55:39] Jason: It’s, it may start out messy. That’s fine. Just get it in motion one foot in front of the other.
[00:55:46] Patrick: Yeah, I, I love that. Uh, again, going back to Seth Godin, he just talks about ship it. Just get the, just get the first iteration out there. And the cool thing is when you first start, nobody’s watching anyway. Right.
[00:55:58] Patrick: Like I, I’m sure if you listen back to my first podcast episode and watch your very first YouTube video, you’re
[00:56:04] Jason: like,
[00:56:04] Patrick: Oh, I wouldn’t listen to me doing. Right. This was terrible. You know, I think my mom and my sister and my wife are the only people listening, you know, and so, um, Yeah, it’s, uh, so that’s the good news, right?
[00:56:16] Patrick: You don’t have a huge audience when you get started, but, uh, you’re, you’re learning, you’re growing, you’re, you’re figuring it out day by day. And, um, I. Uh, there’s something to persistence, just being in the game long enough, um, those that are willing to, to endure, uh, they’ll, they’ll find success. So Jason, thank you so much for, for being here today.
[00:56:35] Patrick: Thank you, my friend. Good to chat with you. I’ll see ya. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast. I hope you found tremendous value in today’s conversation with Jason Schappert. His insights on scaling, financial management, and leveraging the right tools.
[00:56:52] Patrick: Can truly transform the way you approach your business and wealth building journey. If you enjoyed this episode, I encourage you to share it with someone who could benefit fellow entrepreneur, a business partner, or anyone looking to level up their financial game. And don’t forget to subscribe and tune in next week for more strategies to help you grow and protect your wealth.
[00:57:11] Patrick: And remember, you’re a vital entrepreneur. You’re vital because you’re the backbone of our economy, creating opportunities, driving growth and making an impact. You’re vital to your family, creating abundance in every aspect of life. And you’re vital to me because you’re committed to growing your wealth, leading with purpose and creating something truly great.