Aug 13, 2019
Today on the show we have Caleb Guilliams. Caleb is an author, speaker, and the Founder of Better Wealth Solutions. He is changing the game of wealth management for many different entrepreneurs.
Caleb has a really unique story because he is much younger than your average financial advisor. This has offered him many different disadvantages and some unique advantages in which he will be sharing with you today., This will be really, really valuable information for anybody who is new to entrepreneurship, or who is younger and wants to break into entrepreneurship.
We're also going to learn a lot about investing, not just in terms of where you can invest but in terms of rate of return. But how can you invest in yourself, in your business? How can you overcome big challenges? Where is the best places to be spending your time, your energy, and your money?
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What You Will Learn On This Episode
- Finding Mentors Through Linked In and Maximizing the Relationship
- Knowing Your Value and Giving Yourself an Hourly Rate That Reflects That Value
- Delegating Tasks to an Assistant or Team That Let You Stay Within Your Expertise
- Questions to Ask to Become Clear on Your Motivation for Financial Success
Links and Resources Mentioned in this Episode
Book Recommendation: Think and Grow Rich
Book Recommendation: Dad Poor Dad
Transcription
Kyle Gray:
Hello and welcome to The Story Engine Podcast. My name is Kyle Gray and today on the show we have Caleb Guilliams. Caleb is an author, as a speaker, and the Founder of Better Wealth Solutions and he is changing the game of wealth management for many different entrepreneurs. He has a really unique story because he is much younger than your average financial advisor and as such has many different disadvantages and some unique advantages with his age and his position that he's going to share with us, which is going to be really, really valuable information for anybody who is new to entrepreneurship, maybe is younger and wants to break into entrepreneurship.
Kyle Gray:
We're also going to learn a lot about investing, not just in terms of where you can invest in a market to get a rate of return, but how can you invest in yourself, in your business? How can you overcome big challenges? Where is the best places to be spending your time, your energy, and your money? He's got a lot of incredible insights that I think are going to be valuable for you today, so without any further ado, let's turn it over to Caleb.
Kyle Gray:
Caleb Guilliams, welcome to The Story Engine Podcast.
Caleb Guilliams:
Oh my goodness, dude, thank you so much for having me on your show. It's such a pleasure.
Kyle Gray:
Caleb, you have a fascinating story and I'm really excited to get into many different aspects of it, but I want to introduce you properly by asking you the same question I ask all of my guests. Can you tell me about a moment or a time in your life that has really defined who you are and how you show up in the world? How you make an impact in the world today?
Caleb Guilliams:
That's such a great question, and really I'll take you back to 12 years old at Riverside Bible Camp, Central Wisconsin. I'm 12 years old, I'm dyslexic, so I'm not a very competent reader and super short for my age, but I have the kind of personality where people like to be around me anyways. We have the last night. Everyone gets together and we have talent shows and I at 12 years old have a small little role because I'm kind of nervous on stage and so I have two lines that I can memorize, but Kyle, I wrote them down just in case I forgot because I could actually get away with reading them.
Caleb Guilliams:
I remember that night, getting up there and totally forgetting my lines and then going to read and sounding out every single word in front of the whole group of people, and while no one probably remembers that but me, I remember being totally defeated. Going to my Mom the next day just frustrated at my reading, about my height, and just kind of at the end of my rope at 12 years old. My Mom took me under her wing and said, "Caleb, you can't do anything about your height, so learn to laugh about it. There's genuinely nothing that you can do, but your reading, you can control that. You can do something about that."
Caleb Guilliams:
Then, that really got me in the mindset of the things that I can't control, don't worry about, but there's so many things in our life that we can control, the things that we can control, like go all in. I go back to that and I'm so grateful for my Mom and how much she believed in me and how much she encouraged me and I'm doing what I'm doing what I'm doing now because of that mindset of like we can control a lot of things and why don't we go all in in that?
Kyle Gray:
Well, and I'd add to that your 12-year-old self, if you could go back into the past and tell them what you'd be up to now, you would have blown your own mind. Can you tell us a little bit about how this lesson has shaped you? What are you using it today? How are you impacting the world? What does the world look like for you now?
Caleb Guilliams:
Thanks for asking that. One of the my Dads... one of my Dads, my one and only Dad, what he taught me was to be proactive. My Dad is in the science industry and he really taught me to be proactive and I'll say that and that idea of taking control of the things that I can control really shaped who I am to this day because what happened was I went on from Riverside Bible Camp to go gut chickens, and my first job was working at a chicken farm. That got me into like the whole money game and we could probably talk about an hour's worth of stories just there. Then, I got a job at a bank at the age of 17 and I worked there for four and a half years. At that time, I did everything I could to figure out different ways to make myself more valuable, and I ended up taking over the investment department at the age of 19 years old.
Caleb Guilliams:
That really threw me into some crazy opportunities, and again, it went back to proactiveness. I'm going to do the very best thing. I have a mission that hangs on my wall that states, "To help people see and reach their highest potential." How can I truly help people? I just became fascinated with how money works and how people viewed their lives and how people just view themselves, and that's what got me on this obsessive like road trip, roadmap kind of deal of like, how do I learn from the best people? Garrett's been on your podcast, right?
Kyle Gray:
Yes.
Caleb Guilliams:
He's one of the guys that I admire so greatly and look up to. How do I learn from people like that and truly help people live out their highest potential? Use money as a tool and that two-and-a-half-year journey didn't happen overnight, but it was because I started taking control, was proactive. I'm so grateful that my two parents taught me that, and now at 23 years old, I run a company called Better Wealth Solutions and we help people all around the country take back control of their money and we do that through education and implementation. If you would have told me at 12 years old that I'd be talking to you right now, doing what I'm doing, I wouldn't believe you at all.
Kyle Gray:
That's powerful stuff, and just in case anybody listening, the Garrett we are talking about is Garret Gunderson, and we've got a video interview with him,
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but really brilliant wealth advisor. You've experienced some interesting challenges so far. Now, when I was 22 years old, I got a job at the University of Utah working as a study abroad advisor, and it was really, really challenging. As a 22-year-old looking like a college student to deal with... I had maybe a dozen and a half of professors of various ages and statutes and egos that I had to deal with and draw boundaries with and say, "Hey, if you're going to go to Spain, you got to do these things. If you're going to go to Africa, you got to talk to me." I had to own up to that to the same people that a year earlier I was taking classes from.
Kyle Gray:
It's a big challenge to be able to stand in your power at a relatively younger age, and I think especially in finance where this is a market that's very conservative, very slow to change. As a result, this is typically an industry that is dominated by older men. How do you navigate these challenges of staying in your power in an industry when they expect to see a financial advisor they see probably somebody who looks different than you?
Caleb Guilliams:
This will mean a lot more for those of you watching us doing this interview because I look like I'm 15 years old, and if you could imagine, I call it The 10 Minutes of Horror when I first took over the bank's investment department at 19. People coming in and realizing that I was going to be the one helping them with money, I think they were having an internal panic attack. It's always been something that I've had to kind of work around, and I'm so grateful for that, man, because what it's allowed me to do is it's allowed me to have to be the best in the industry of what we're doing.
Caleb Guilliams:
I've learned from experts around the country and they are like the best at what they do and I've learned from them, number one, because of my age. I was able to get in and download their secrets kind of deal, but then the second thing is what I had to learn when I was in front of clients is, "Listen, I want to help you get the results you want to get and I want to understand, number one, what result looks like for you and what does financial success look like for you. If I as an individual can help you get the results that you're looking for, that's financial success." That's success in our book.
Caleb Guilliams:
Even at 19, 20 years old, I had people in my office. I'm going to the white board and I'm drawing Simon Sinek's Start With Why Idea. Like, "Listen, I could talk about products and if we do that we're going to go down some bad routes because I don't know everything." I didn't tell them that, but I was like, "Products are not the most important thing. Even how you become wealthy is not very important until we understand your why." One thing that I'm pretty good at and I'm continuing to hone is like when people come and work with us, they feel taken care of and that we really get down to why this matters to them, and then I call it The 10 Minutes of Horror because when people start working with us, they get to a point where they're like, "Okay, you're understanding where I'm coming from and now you're actually pretty competent, too."
Caleb Guilliams:
People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care, and as clichéd as that sounds, we really do live that. Now, I'm 23 young, but I wrote a book, I have a course out there. I speak around the country. I have seven team members and we're growing, and so right now we have enough social proof. We have enough people that are endorsing us. We have some really cool opportunities and business partners that it's like that's been less of an issue because people are going us because they've read my book, because they have seen me on YouTube or heard me speak. Early on, when I had no credibility, it was tough and I had to go back to people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. You actually have to know your stuff on the back end. That makes sense.
Kyle Gray:
That makes so much sense, and that's something really useful and really empowering to anybody just getting started in any kind of career or new endeavor. One of the things that really caught my attention, you just briefly mentioned this before you got into this, but you were able to get mentors and experts and download all of their secrets. Can you tell me a little bit about this? What did that look like? What does that mean?
Caleb Guilliams:
I've been interviewed a lot and you are the first person that's ever asked me this, and I will say I credit what I'm about to share with you the reason why I have success right now. I read Think and Grow Rich and I was reading also Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad, and it became very evident to me that money follows value. It also became very evident to me at 19 years old that I didn't have a lot of value that I could give to people, but I also knew at a local scale I would go to networking events and I would go and I didn't even have a business card. I would right my name on the back of one of our banker's cards and it was caleb@gmail.com. It was like I cringed that I gave out my email like that.
Caleb Guilliams:
I would go and I would introduce myself to people and I would learn a couple of things. Number one, everyone would talk to me because who's going to be the jerk that doesn't talk to the kid who look's like he's 15? Everyone is going to pretend at least that they're interested, and then number two, people really do want to transfer their knowledge. Then, number three, this is like a bonus, I would ask them for lunch. I would be like, "I'll take you out to lunch, pick your brain." None of them would let me pay, so I got a ton of free lunches out of the deal and I started sitting down locally with CEOs, top people from our university, the CEOs that would run different companies, and I was thinking like, "Wow, this is amazing", and then I'm like, "Why isn't everyone doing this?"
Caleb Guilliams:
When I took over the investment department at 19 years old, I just took that on a national level. I just read books. If someone reaches out to me, I will talk to them. Most people aren't as big of a deal as you think they are, and I just started looking at leaderboards, calling authors, looking at people that I admire and just asked them and I would just share them the story. I would lead with my why. "I want to help people see and reach their highest potential. I have no clue what I'm doing. You're the best. Could I learn from you?"
Caleb Guilliams:
It's like the compound effect. I was nervous at first, but then once you start getting some of these amazing people that care so much about you, oh my goodness, man. I am where I am today because of the many people that went before me and gave me 30 years of wisdom and experience in two weeks, and I'm super grateful for that.
Kyle Gray:
It's a huge advantage. It's something I talked a lot about and wrote about in my first book The College Entrepreneur. I called what you described there as The Student Card, and it's not just to get a discount on your next Subway sandwich, but it's just approaching somebody as a student leader, literally or figuratively, and it works really well if you're young.
Kyle Gray:
It still works no matter where you are, but because of your why and what you're doing, but I feel like people do feel a certain sense of satisfaction when they can share their knowledge with somebody. It's also pretty rare to find people that are actually somebody of 19 or 20 years old who would be willing to say, "Hey, I'm actually interested in more things that getting most of my homework done and playing Xbox."
Caleb Guilliams:
Yeah, two things-
Kyle Gray:
Go ahead.
Caleb Guilliams:
Supply and demand. The supply is super low. There's not a lot of people that you're going to be competing with, and number two is one of the best compliments you can give someone is asking for their advice. When I figured those two things out, and like you said, I loved the name that you gave that.
Kyle Gray:
How did you reach out to some of these people? Was it just through email? Were you using creative tactics to make these connections?
Caleb Guilliams:
Right. I use LinkedIn, and one of my favorite stories in this is a dear friend of mine, Ross Morgan, who's a great friend of mine now, I reached out to him and he was someone that I wanted to learn. I wrote down like, "This is the guy that I want to mentor me." I remember I reached out to him on LinkedIn and he calls me and we're like five minutes into the conversation, okay, maybe 10 minutes... We're like 10 minutes into the conversation and I go, "I'm going to ask him if I can come stay with his family." The guy has no clue who I am. I'm in Birmingham, Alabama, and so I ask him.
Caleb Guilliams:
I was like, "Listen, man. I have a conference that I'm going to." I wasn't going to that conference, but if he said yes, I would get to go to that conference. I was like, "Listen, I'm wondering if you know anyone in the area that I could stay with. I don't know anyone from Birmingham and I would just love to learn from you" He was like, "Well, man, I really like you. I'm going to talk to my wife and see if we would be open. We don't really know you. We have young kids. Let me get back to you." He hung up and I'm like, "Oh, no. I just blew that up."
Caleb Guilliams:
He called me back like a week later because I followed up with him, because that's another thing, you need to follow up because no one is going to reach out the first time. He was like, "You know what, Caleb? I can't believe we're saying this, but we're going to let you come over. My wife is a little bit nervous, but we'll just see how it goes." That week was the turning point in my career. I did go to that conference, but after leaving with what I learned from him, I wouldn't be where I am if I didn't have that uncomfortableness, and I was just LinkedIn and a phone call, and I always will try to get a number. My pitch is to get them on the phone because I knew my unique ability is if I can talk to someone for 10 minutes, they'll want to help and they'll hear my vision, whereas it was harder for me to type that out.
Kyle Gray:
I think so, and I love that tactic and that strategy and that connection. I'm certain that whatever the price of the conference was, just being able to stay at his house was worth the cost of the ticket on there.
Caleb Guilliams:
A hundred percent, man, 100%.
Kyle Gray:
Another thing you mentioned that was really important and really crucial was your follow-up, and managing follow-ups can be a challenging and tedious task. How do you keep clear on everybody in touch with? Who do you need to follow up with? Who do you need to keep in contact with? This is a really, really important skill.
Caleb Guilliams:
It's so important and it's really where the money is at in whatever industry you're in is follow-up. I would say up until a year ago, it was all in my head. It was terrible. I would drop the ball all the time, but I have this ability. I always work, so I would kind of like get away with not having a system, and now we have a CRM system that we use .. you're actually in the CRM. It's every relationship that I have, I put a follow-up. Maybe it's six months from now, but it's like, "What's the next step?" When that day comes, we address it and then I also personally have an assistant and it's kind of like you'll hear everyone say that.
Caleb Guilliams:
You might be someone listening to this and be like, "I know I need an assistant but I don't know if I can afford one." I'm telling you, just by having someone that helps you not let follow-ups slip through the cracks, it's 100% worth it. For me, now I do have a CRM and I have someone to help me follow up, and that's the most important thing that I can do as a CEO of our company is making sure that I'm working on the wildly important and making sure that I'm following up with the people that we have relationships with. If I'm doing those two things, our company will be more profitable and will impact more people.
Kyle Gray:
I want to get even more granular with this. With our assistant, maybe she is writing emails for you, but I imagine that she's probably looking through this system and keeping things tracked and organized. How could somebody who wants to hire an assistant to help with this... What are some of the key ways that they can work with this?
Caleb Guilliams:
A couple of things. Sometimes when I'm talking to someone, when you know someone introduces you to someone, like, "Hey, let's get together"? There is so much wasted time that goes into trying to schedule a meeting, so we use Calendly, and I also will cc my assistant on those meetings or those responses and say, "Hey, Kyle, it's great to meet you. I'm connecting you with my assistant and she is going to help us find a time that works where we can connect." Then, there may be some emails that get exchanged.
Caleb Guilliams:
Then, in our business we have our A list and then everyone else, and everyone is important, don't get me wrong, but we have the people that are really important to our business but everyone is important, so everyone deserves a follow up. Bethy my assistant is in my email and she is responding to some people on behalf of me or starting emails that need my approval.
Caleb Guilliams:
We actually meet every day in the morning and we go over what's wildly important and then who we need to follow up, and then I report at the end of the day on what I did or what I didn't do, it's very intensive, and by the way, the first month, you're going to feel less productive, but as you know you've got to train someone to kind of figure out how you think which is kind of scary when you think about it. When you have someone in your email flagging things and responding to 80% of the messages that don't necessarily need your response, you get to focus on the wildly important.
Kyle Gray:
How do you get clear on what's the wildly important for you? Do you have a process to track that? To think that? To come up with that?
Caleb Guilliams:
Yeah. We have what's called WIG Meetings, Wildly Important Goal Meetings, where as a company we communicate what is important to the company and then every single person communicates what the most important thing that they can do this week to go to the bottom line. Our big vision as a company is we want to insure a million people by 2025. That is super audacious. I don't think we're going to be able to do that alone, but that gets me focused on figuring out, "Okay, whatever I'm dealing with, if it's not helping us go into that bottom line of helping a million people get insured by 2025, what am I doing wrong?" It gets me clear on the big picture, but then our mission is more happy clients.
Caleb Guilliams:
Our goal as a company is we want more raving fans and we want to figure out a way to capture more of them and make them happy. That's our WIG and within that what I can do, what my Wildly Important Goal within that is building relationships with affiliates, having meetings, and following up. Those are the three things that I can do and then working with our marketing department to build like copy, build videos that are leverageable, so the word for me is leverage. What can I do once? What podcast can I get on that us having this conversation is going to go out to more than one person? That's for me, and then there's other people in our company that their Wildly Important Goal is to do X, and by them doing that, that's going to allow everyone to be able to help us get more happy clients.
Kyle Gray:
You mentioned earlier... you gave us some advice if you don't feel you can afford an assistant, just go for it. That's more or less paraphrasing that. You said it better than I just did. Anyway, that is like an example of a scary kind of leap forward investment that you can make that at first is you can feel it in your stomach and you're like, "I don't know about this", and then like in six months or 12 months, or maybe even less time, you're like, "Wow, that was a really good move."
Kyle Gray:
What were some of the investments that you've made in your business journey growing your team, growing your practice? Maybe at first you were like, "Oh", but turned out to be some of the best moves.
Caleb Guilliams:
Can I go back and actually go through like a quick process that you could go through listening to figure out if you should hire an assistant or not?
Kyle Gray:
Sure.
Caleb Guilliams:
It's all about Pareto's principle. The 20% of the work that we do usually produces 80% of the revenue. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're thinking like, "What's the most important thing that I do that actually produces the majority of the revenue?" The cool thing is, figure out what tasks that you do and then put an hourly wage on that. For instance, I could speak on stage and that brings in 80% of the revenue. I could say that speaking on stage is like a $5,000 day for me versus filling out paperwork, which I'm not even good at. I could hire someone to... pay them $20 an hour if they could do that job.
Caleb Guilliams:
For me, I had to get really clear on, "Okay, what was I good at? What is the value to our company?" You got to take yourself out of it because we're so emotional and there's that sickening feeling of like, "Oh, can I afford that?" If my day is worth $5,000 and I'm doing $20 an hour work, wow, we are holding back our mission. The idea that I had to do was stop doing the things that you can do... if someone can do 80% of the job just by them doing it, then you don't necessarily need to do it, especially if it's that kind of work that drains you. For me, it's I had to get clear on that and then it was really like, "Okay, this is an investment."
Caleb Guilliams:
The other thing that, and I'm now answering your question that you asked, is one of the beliefs that I 100% have is especially as an entrepreneur, you are the greatest investment personally, like you, and your business or whatever that you're working on, whatever project is number two or number one investment. We have to value ourselves. What I found is so many people devalue themselves. They might be investing in other retirement accounts, but they're starving their whole business. They're starting their ability to produce.
Caleb Guilliams:
In growing, and this has been from day one, I have seven people on my team. How in the world am I able to afford seven people? Well, it didn't happen overnight. It was every decision and it comes down to people. For me, it was the people I surrounded myself with and the things that I invested like Advance Your Reach, like different conferences and masterminds. It's like, "Man, is that really worth 10K to go to that thing?" Well, then I would go and meet a person that would change my life. It's one of those things where after looking back, coaching is super important and the people in my life are super important and they help me be more productive and produce more and we've made more money year after year even though we're spending more money.
Caleb Guilliams:
Garret Gunderson probably talked a lot about this in your interview. That's a very abundant way of thinking about your life versus the scarcity of like, "Oh, if pay for an assistant I'm going to have less money." Well, you have to see everything as an investment, and maybe as sad as that sounds, everything that we do has a cost to it or an opportunity cost to it and if I'm going to put $50,000 in this investment I want a rate of return of X. What's a typical rate of return? If you're 10% you're happy, right?
Kyle Gray:
Yeah.
Caleb Guilliams:
Well, if you invest in an assistant and you can double your revenue as a company, you start doing the math on that. It's like, "Man, why are you investing in other things you don't understand when your business is starving?"
Kyle Gray:
That's powerful and I think that's a really challenging for people to master, especially with lots of different kinds of information and philosophies on how to spend money out there. I think an entrepreneur needs to be kind of quite deviant from the normal narrative of that. What are some of the biggest money myths or maybe mindset blocks that a lot of the people that you are working with have experienced? What do you try to reinstall once you uninstall those?
Caleb Guilliams:
That question is going to get me going, so you'll have to hold me back. The biggest thing that I hear entrepreneurs say or creatives is rate of return. They go down that road with me. Like, "Well, I can get a better rate of return in X, Y, and Z", and I've gotten very clear on this that ROR for me is return on result. As an individual, that's why I think it's so important about someone's why and what does financial success actually look like for you? Most people listening to this don't actually know what they want. Once we get clear on that, then whatever we do with our money, if we don't go down the shallow like, "I can get a better rate of return in this investment versus this and so that's why I'm going to decide", no, what do you do with your money that can give you the best result?
Caleb Guilliams:
The biggest pet peeves that I have is number one, is people turn off their brain when it comes to efficiency. We are told to be efficient with our time. We have amazing things like cell phones and cars so we live in a world where we're fishing in some areas, but we don't even think about wealth efficiency. That's number one. Number two is we let the rate of return totally control our lives. If something will give you a better rate of return, we totally turn off our brains and say, "Okay, that's awesome", versus taking it and reverse engineering it and being like, "Well, actually I need to invest in an assistant because I could maybe get a 10% rate of return here or I could double my revenue over here."
Caleb Guilliams:
It's like we turn off our brain there, and then the third area is so many people don't value themselves, and so as a result they don't value control. We live in a world where people are controlling one side of the coin and making their money, and then totally giving up total control after and it makes us enslaved to the system. Over and over again, people don't put a rate of return on anything other than the percentage or the growth rate, but we need to start putting a rate of return on safety, control, end game legacy. Once we start doing that, and I have 16 ideal benefits to doing a perfect investment, once we do that we just start seeing a bigger picture of how money works and less about just one little function.
Caleb Guilliams:
I'm going to hold back, but those are like quick overviews that get me going.
Kyle Gray:
Tell me about some of these 16 benefits. I'm sure like more money and, like you were saying, rate of return is one of them. What are some of the unexpected or often overlooked yet very unimportant benefits?
Caleb Guilliams:
The ability to leverage your savings. Banking is the most profitable business in the world and think about, what do banks do? They control our capital and they use leverage and they're making billions of dollars off of our money. No one has ever talked to you about how you could be a banker in your own life. One of the things is like, "What's the value of leveraging a dollar that's going to continue to grow the rest of your life?" What's the value of having safety of your dollar? What's the value of having lifetime growth versus retirement growth? We don't think about our dollar growing to 85, but it's like a dollar today is not just worth a dollar, it's what that dollar could have been the rest of your life, so that's key.
Caleb Guilliams:
Another thing is like the term of velocity, money in motion. We live in an economy where money needs to move in motion, and just like a pool that's stagnant, it's gross and not great, that's where people's monies are. You look at the institutions that are really winning, businesses, banking, Wall Street, they're like money is constantly in motion. The person that can control that velocity of funds will always become super wealthy, and so that and then also just getting really clear on, what does a result look like for you? That is really profound because if you can get in an ideal world, financial freedom is where I can live life, blink, blink, blink, on my terms. If you get really clear on that and you reverse engineer what that actually takes, it takes a lot less money and it takes a lot less than you think if you are smart and efficient with your money.
Kyle Gray:
That's really, really powerful. Getting clear on the why, you've come back to this a couple of times. This is where you started in the bank. This is where we're coming with your current clients. Tell me is this something that you work on with people right away? Is this kind of the first step? What are some of the questions you ask them? How do you get clear on this why?
Caleb Guilliams:
First question we ask is, "If money wasn't an issue at all, what would you be doing?" Then, we ask, "Why did you give that answer?" We will ask another question. It's, "What does financial success look like for you?" This question I didn't ask right away, but it's been something that we've incorporated because what someone will say on the one hand they'll say, "Oh, I want to do this, this", but then all we're talking about is how much money they want at retirement. Well, it's like, "What does financial success actually look like?"
Caleb Guilliams:
Another question that I learned from Dan Sullivan is this idea of like, "Okay, in five years where you have the best five years of your life, what happened? What went on?" It's getting them to think future pacing, it's getting them to think about what the future could be, but then also for us to be realistic. It's like, "Okay, what had to happen for that to be?" I also within that creating their why, "What do you love about what you're currently doing? What do you not like about what you're currently doing?" Those questions, like the future questions but then also the present questions, ultimately you need both to formulate your why.
Kyle Gray:
I think that's really important, and I think too few people really incorporate their why and even things like.. Where can I make the most impact? Where is my $5,000-an-hour contributions land? This also has to line up with, "What brings me energy? What is something I can wake up and be excited to do?" A lot of us I think, taking in there is so many gurus, I've seen so many lectures, so many articles, so many everything, and there's a lot of great strategies out there. There's a lot of great ways to grow a business, to spread your message, to create a brand, to do whatever you want to achieve. If it's not the right alignment and fit for you, then even if it's an excellent strategy, it's probably not what you should be doing.
Kyle Gray:
Personally for me, I think one of the best investments I've been making in the last year or so is definitely getting clarity on like work, and I make my highest impact, and where can I work in a place that doesn't feel like work?
Kyle Gray:
Caleb, we've explored a lot of different areas of communication, of follow up, of storytelling and for kind of finance. We've explored a lot of different things and it's been a lot of fun. Do you have any closing thoughts to leave our audience with today? Where can we go to learn more about you?
Caleb Guilliams:
My closing thoughts is this. I had a dear friend who is like a second father to me that I thought was going to live forever and passed away this last year of cancer, leaving his family of three boys and his beautiful wife. One of the things that he encouraged me is to cherish every moment and be intentional with the days that we have. Kyle, I've found that most people are not intentional, and it's just we don't think about that. Something happens when you think about death and you think about as fun as life is, there's going to be a day, and I don't know when that day is, but there's going to be a day that's going to be done. How do I want to show up? What do I want my funeral to be like?
Caleb Guilliams:
The quote that I'll end with, is by a guy named Andy Stanley and it's like profoundly changed my life and I heard it when I was 14 years old. It was, "The value of your life is always measured by how much of it was given away." The value of your life is not measured in the successes, the trophies, the money. It's about the value of your life is always measured by how much of it was given away, and to have that mindset and be like, "Wow, I want to live a valuable life, and so I need to give of myself and give of our services and have that change people's lives like that", that's why I'm so passionate and love what I do. That's the closing thought is like we only live once. Let's be intentional with the times and talents that we have.
Caleb Guilliams:
I would love to connect with anyone. I wrote a book called The AND Asset, and someone could get a free copy, andasset.com, and then our website is betterwealthsolutions.com, and then I'm on all social medias. If you guys reach out to me and said that you listened to this interview, number one, thank you, and I would love to connect with you and hear your story. Kyle, again, I feel so grateful to be here with you.
Kyle Gray:
Likewise, Caleb. You've shared a lot of wisdom with us today and it was so much fun discovering what you are doing and you're a genius. Thanks again for joining us on The Story Engine Podcast.
Kyle Gray:
Thanks for listening to the Story Engine Podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes and resources mentioned on this episode and every other episode at thestoryengine.co. If you're looking to learn more about how to use storytelling to grow your business, then check out my new book, Selling With Story: How to Use Storytelling to Become an Authority, Boost Sales, and Win the Hearts and Minds of Your Audience. This book will equip you with actionable strategies and templates to help you share your unique value and build trust in presentations, sales, and conversations, both online and offline. Learn more at sellingwithstory.co. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.