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Welcome to the Million Dollar Sellers podcast. I'm your host, Nick Shucet, and today we have Paul Hersko on the call. Paul's been a long-time member of MDS. I know he's got some other great things going on, but he's very well-known in the group, has come out to a lot of the events, and has some pretty amazing things going on in his life.
I'll let him introduce himself a little bit, give his origin story a bit, and let us know what he's into these days. With that being said, Paul, I’ll kick it your way and let the listeners know a little bit about yourself.
Sure, I appreciate the intro. MDS has a very special place in my heart. I could truly say that it's probably, I've been to a lot of events, I've gone to a lot of conferences, I've met a lot of people and I could say that MDS has probably had one of the largest impacts on my life since joining it, I think in 2016 or 2017. We could definitely get into that later, but I think it's just had a massive impact on my life in so many different ways.
I think the business side of it is the least important of what I've gained from MDS. I wanted to start with that because it holds a very special place in my heart.
Nice, I feel the same way and have even said that a couple of times. The business stuff is great, but that's not the best thing I get out of it either. We'll definitely dig into that a little bit. That's where we met. We met through MDS. I've made some great relationships in MDS that I value outside of just business. It's just a great place for that type of networking.
I always felt like it was growing up “round two”. I grew up with a lot of great people that I connect with in a lot of ways, but as I've gotten older and more focused on performance and business and entrepreneurship, I've shifted away from some of the people I grew up with but then comes MDS, and man, I can do some of the stuff I used to do with these guys back in the day, and I can also talk business and better myself at the same time.
It’s like the best of both worlds.
100%. We can get into it later, but I'm also in a real estate mastermind. It's like the equivalent of MDS for real estate. Just going to the events and meeting the people, it's like, I have this benchmark that's so high and nothing has lived up to the value and relationships and connections that I've made through the group. This is the top real estate people and I don't vibe like how I vibe in this other group.
I think it's just very hard to replicate what has been built with MDS.
That's good to know man about the real estate group. I had this assumption that there would be similar…
I thought all groups were the same too. It's not. It's really not.
That's cool. That's good to know, man. I know you've been on BiggerPockets too. Didn't you go on that podcast? That's so cool.
Yeah, I was on BiggerPockets last year.
Nice. That's a good one. I have that on my list of podcasts to listen to. It's just good content about real estate, but it's also just a good podcast. I really like that one.
That's actually part of my origin story. I was listening I think in 2015, I was listening to BiggerPockets and then, I'll get into my story in a second, but I was between, do I wanna start in real estate or Amazon? I learned about real estate through BiggerPockets and I chose Amazon to get started. Just a little bit about me. I am now getting old, I'm 31.
Shit, when did I join? 2017 I joined MDS. Was that six years ago? I was 25 years old when I joined MDS. I think going to other members' weddings and some of my best friends are in MDS. A lot of my life now is through relationships that I built in this group when I was 25 years old. I've been in the group since 2017. I was probably one of the original 50 or 100 members.
I remember the very first conference in Mexico in 2017 where we all just showed up. Were you on that first Mexico trip?
I was in the group, I had just gotten in maybe two or four, maybe a little longer. I got in there pretty early, but I think you were already in there. I didn't go to Mexico though.
We show up, I think we flew into Cancun. I can't remember where we flew in, but we flew in and we all are on the same flight and there's this guy at the airport, we're the gringos, and there's this guy with this sign that says “Million Dollar Sellers Pickup Zone”. Everyone's like, yo, this is not a good look in a foreign country to have this sign that says “Million Dollar Sellers”. We are just a target waiting here.
I'll never forget that. Then that was how the trip had started off. I think Michael Quinn showed up with a unicorn horsehead the entire trip. I'm sure you've seen those photos. It was a wild time. That's where it all began. Then David Ghiyam's just standing up and being like, yeah, I started this supplement brand. It's starting to go well. I think maybe I want to scale it.
Now he's got this massive company. That was the room that we sat in. These huge, massive direct-to-consumer brands that David built, and I remember Allan was talking about, yeah, I just started this protein company called KOS. All these guys were there talking about, they had just started their brands, the very beginning. We were all there.
There was no organization at the conference, but we all just showed up and talked, and we all just became really close friends. That was one of the most magical trips and it just blossomed into so many, branching off into so many different relationships from that very first trip.
That's so cool to hear you talk about that now. What pops into my head as I go to Harris Teeter, the grocery store here, and I see KOS protein powder in there. I go to Whole Foods. I see Mary Ruth Organics in there. It's crazy to hear you talk about that back then. It's also crazy to just think about how much you really can accomplish in a business.
I think those guys are probably at like 10 figures now or something. They're crushing it in their business. David's doing speaking gigs. It's cool to see him doing what he seems to be really passionate about, like on the Kabbalah side and stuff like that. He gave a speech at the last Inspire event we did alongside Prosper. Everybody was just raving about David Ghiyam's speech.
It's just so cool to see that that journey unfold. Tell us a little more about your journey, Paul. You chose to start on Amazon. What was that like for you? What kind of money did you invest? What did you struggle with?
Sure. I'm 31. I live in South Florida, originally from Chicago. I think I joined the group while living in Chicago. That's a little bit about me. Rewind to 2015, the golden era of Amazon, I think late 2015. I graduated from college in 2014. had my first job doing sales, no training program or anything. It was like, they handed me, do you know what a Dun & Bradstreet book is?
That gray book lists all the types of businesses. Now all that stuff's online. Even in 2014, it was like this old school company, moved out for the job, handed me this book and they're like, go find us business. I actually found them business, but I got fired within the first three months of that job. Then I got a pretty sweet gig. It was a remote job in 2014, which it was, that wasn't a thing back then.
People in the US didn't have remote jobs unless it was a really specialized thing. I had this job, my boss, the boss of the company, my boss didn't live anywhere near. I didn't have to go into an office. I was literally on my own 23-year-old kid. This job required me to drive probably 100 miles a day I was driving. It was a pharmaceutical company where I had to go and inventory their drugs.
I get a percentage of profits of how big the job was, but it was just me, and my car, I would drive there, and inventory their stuff. I would sell the job and then service the job. It was sales plus manual labor. I had all this time while I was driving and one day, I don't know what spurred it, but one day I had all this time, I'm listening to music, I'm listening to dumb people talk.
How could I maximize all this time in my car? I'm gonna start listening to different podcasts. I think the classic I read, is Rich Dad Poor Dad. That was the catalyst. I have a lot of entrepreneurs in my family. My dad, my grandpa, my uncle, and a lot of cousins own their own businesses. I knew that's where I would end up, but I didn't know how I would get there.
I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, opened my brain, and then well if I keep doing the same things, I'm gonna just keep working this job. What can I do with this time? I started listening to different podcasts. I was always interested in real estate because my dad does a lot of real estate. Alright, like let's start listening to BiggerPockets. Then one thing led to another.
I discovered the, what was it called? Was it Scott Voelker? Was it The Amazing Seller?
I think it's The Amazing Seller. Yeah, I'll double-check real quick. I think so, though.
I was learning a little bit about that. There wasn't any, dude, Jungle Scout didn't even exist in 2015. There was no software. There was no Helium 10. People didn't even know, you had to guess on a BSR. I was listening to BiggerPockets. Real estate is really cool. I went to my dad. I was like, hey, I'm thinking about learning about doing a side hustle.
Do you think I should do real estate or this e-commerce thing? He's like, well, why don't you just do the e-commerce because you need money to do real estate? Why don't you just look at that? Then he's like, you could do real estate later when you make money from it. Okay, that's fair. I started listening to The Amazing Seller. I had this job where I was in the car all the time.
I would listen to the podcast, walk into a client and a job would take maybe two, four, or six hours. I'm in the back and throw my headphones in, wired headphones, my white wired headphones, and do my job. I don't really care about the customers. I was addicted to The Amazing Seller podcast. Then, I don't know if he was in there, but do you know Travis Ross? Travis Ross, he's pretty well-known in the industry.
I do know. I know who you're talking about.
He’s an awesome dude and if he's listening to this, I haven't talked to him in many years, but I need to reconnect with him. I'm listening to The Amazing Seller. I was really into it. Well, actually that's a little bit further. I started listening to the podcast and I'm super into it and I need to find a product. For whatever reason at the time my uncle had a two and a four-year-old.
I started looking at like baby products I'm like this 23 or 24-year-old kid. I don't know anything about babies or kids. This led me to see this guy on Amazon who was selling a shoelace with a piece on the end to lock cabinets, to keep kids out of cabinets. This was 2015, and I looked at it and I think I found my product. This is a dumb product.
I could definitely make a better product. This is the product, but I'm gonna make it better. Instead of going to an engineer or an inventor or whatever, I'm gonna make my own product and do it better. I go to Alibaba, again I'm still at my full-time job, I go in Alibaba and I saw that they had a shoestring with this attachment piece on the end, and for whatever reason I reached out to this company and they make end pieces to your jacket, the stretchy pieces on your jacket.
I messaged them on Alibaba chat and I said, can you send me every single accessory piece and nylon in your catalog? They sent it over to my house and I literally assembled the product myself. No engineer, no nothing. I found there's this locking mechanism piece that people use on jackets that works for a cabinet lock that'll tighten it, but you can also loosen it where a kid can't open it.
I put it together and, holy cow, this works. I sent it to my uncle to have his kids play with it and it worked. This is it. I throw a logo together. I think I got someone on Fiverr or I think maybe it was someone from my high school to make a logo. I literally did everything on my own and then put the product up and the thing just took off. It's a relative term now to the size of business, but at the time it was holy cow, I could sell a couple hundred dollars.
I think the first day I sold $200 worth of this little thing for $12 or $15. This is awesome. I got addicted to just checking the seller app while I was working on my job. I think after 30 days of it being live on Amazon. I couldn't live off the money. The revenue was doing, the first month was maybe a couple of thousand dollars, but I think I have something here.
I talked to my parents about it. Hey, I'm going to quit my job and do this. My mom was like, don't do that. My dad was like, go for it. The worst case is you'll call them up and get your job back. That was the only time where I told my mom, looking back, you gave me really bad advice. I was mad at her for a while. Long story short, in between that, so I launched this product, sorry, I missed a part.
I launched this product and I learned about the Rocky Mountain Reseller Conference. I think they only hosted it for maybe two years or three years. I found out about it in a Facebook group. I didn't even take off from work. I just flew out to Denver, Colorado. I had no money. I stayed at a family friend's house. House went to the conference. Met all the players.
Andy Slamans was there Jeff Cohen and all the original guys were there. I was showing them my product and everyone was oh, this is great. This is a good product. This was 30 days into launching the product. I made all these connections at the conference and then that was my moment where there were all these other people doing this full-time.
I can do it. Then I quit my job and then the rest is history. Long-winded, that's my origin story. I don't know if it's more interesting than most people's or not, but I think it's pretty interesting.
Yeah, man, I think it's cool how you just did so much on your own. Like, it's easy to get sucked into, the idea of needing the...
I took no course either. I literally taught myself everything. I refused to pay for a course. I didn't talk to any gurus. I literally study Facebook groups. There was no one making content on YouTube period. This was 2015, 2016. The only stuff that was paid and gated in this pot was the free podcast. I did literally everything on my own to start.
Nice. I remember those days of just manual when I started out doing arbitrage and manually scanning product detail pages and then going on to a website and comparing prices and jumping back and forth.
Chris Green, right?
Yeah, Chris Green was big and I think he still is. I think I used to see him talking about a lot of books and stuff, but yeah, Chris Green was big on the arbitrage. I went out to a conference in Chicago and met him a few years ago. That was a cool experience. There are a lot of interesting people in the industry to meet and kick it with that I haven't seen in a while.
That reselling group versus the private label group it's an interesting cultural difference too.
Oh yeah, it's totally different players.
I can navigate both you know whether I'm at a reseller conference or a more private label-focused one. What did you do with the brand? Did you start to add more products? Are you still selling that product? How did that go for you?
I did that and then I'm going to the baby safety niche. I just was at the right place. I'll give you two multiple right places, right time setups. The first product's going, it's going well. Then my second product was another cabinet lock. I was the first dude to sell an adhesive sticky thing. I was the first guy to start selling it on Amazon and I had such a monopoly.
I basically got an exclusive with the factory. For almost a year I had this product that no one had. Within six months I basically was able to do seven figures and it was mainly just with this one product. That was back in the day when it was really easy to do that. I signed an exclusive with this factory. I had this product no one else had and then for a year, I had this really high price point because no one else had what I had.
Then I started getting knocked off. I didn't have any IP. I've pivoted a lot since then obviously, but that was my first huge home run was my second product The first product was cool. The second product was an old-school home-run product. I rode that out for like a good year That was how I got started. Within that year, the end of 2016, this is a really good story, too.
I'm sitting at one of my best friend's brothers, a big-time hobbyist. He forges knives and does stuff like that. We're at a dinner table, and he's just sitting there spinning this thing in his hand. This was in November of 2016. What is that thing? It's called a “pepyaka”. You can look that up, “pepyaka”. What the hell's a “pepyaka”? It's a Russian hand toy or something like that.
You'll see exactly what that product is. It's now what is considered a fidget spinner. He had a fidget spinner when absolutely nobody had a fidget spinner ever. Wow, that thing's really cool. That night, for whatever reason, I wonder if these things sell on Amazon. There were two dudes shipping them from their house and the BSR was super low.
No one was selling a fidget spinner on Prime. That night stayed up all night on Alibaba and I saw that there were some people selling it. I don't know how many orders I ordered that night, but I went all in on fidget spinners that night. There were zero people selling fidget spinners on Amazon Prime. There are two people selling it, shipping from home.
That night, stayed up all night, I ordered a bunch of different types of fidget spinners and shipped them in. I was selling them for $30 a fidget spinner. On the first day, I sold 100 of them. Just boom, the first day it was up, no reviews. Oh my God. I just kept ordering them. I was the first person to sell them on Amazon Germany, 100 a day, and Amazon UK, 100 a day.
That was insane for a couple of months. That was back when Amazon wasn't really policing the platform. For a couple of months, it was the most exciting time ever. Then the Chinese came in and just destroyed everything. I remember when they would attach 100 variations to my listing, take it down, and flag it. After about 60 to 90 days, I gave up.
I can't do this. I don't know how to do this. I can probably say I was one of the very first people to sell a fidget spinner before the whole trend took off. Then nine months later, it was the most popular thing in the fucking world.
Yeah, that's wild, man. That's cool. I didn't know you got into that early.
I was literally one of the first people to sell it on Amazon. That's my big claim to fame.
Nice, man. I think those opportunities will always be there. As consumers just change, their behavior and shopping habits and stuff like that…
I think the opportunities are always there, but I don't think there'll be anything like that phenomenon. I don't know if you remember, literally, it wasn't just an online product. It was like the beanie baby of its time for a six to 12-month period.
I agree man. I think they'll still be there, but it's harder to capitalize on them. People are finding stuff faster these days versus back then.
Yeah, there was no software. This was a chance encounter of sitting at a dinner table and then looking at Amazon. I didn't need any data to tell me. This thing is crazy good.
What I like about that though Paul because I think about this often. I think this applies it does apply to anything. No tool or software or anything is gonna keep up with humans.
Intuition.
It's always just a little bit behind. I think with AI we're getting closer but I think what you mentioned is just a perfect example of that. If you can really get in touch with other people's desires and wants, then you're blazing the trail, so to speak. That's really where I try to keep myself from a marketing perspective. Think more about what people are doing their habits and what they're shopping for.
Do you think about stuff like that? Or do you just naturally operate that way?
I saw on the question list, what are you really good at? I have a really good intuition in seeing, maybe not seeing the full future, but just seeing where the ball needs to go. I think that's how I've been able to be very successful in the business venture that I'm in now. Anyway, I had those random products and then found my niche after a little while.
I made some really good money in the first year. I didn't really know how to operate a business. If I had come to Amazon with previous business experience, I think I would probably be very wealthy now because the guys that were there in 2015-2016 and knew how to run a business, it was so easy back then and they set themselves up for massive exits.
I think basically after that first year and a half, it was so good and I made so much money and I took all that money and I tried launching all these different brands and I was in a million different places but I didn't know how to run a business. I didn't lose all the money, but I wasn't really making money for a good two years because I was trying all these things.
The revenues were high, but I kept failing and failing, and it took a while to get my business in a really strong place again. That early success and not having real business experience led to a struggle for multiple years. That's the background of how the Amazon business was and is. Now the business is really good. Found our niche and it's more of a side venture for me now.
I have a totally different business that I run day to day now.
Nice. Why don't you let us know a little bit about what you're doing these days?
Sure. Now I run a really interesting business with a business partner. I was running my Amazon business and then crossed paths with this guy, my now business partner. He was a friend of my brother-in-law. They had grown up together, and he was telling me about how he sells real estate, specifically land, but online. This was in 2019. That's really cool.
Started learning about what he was doing. I saw what he was doing. I think there's a bigger opportunity and convinced him to partner up to form a new company. I put my Amazon thing to the side and focused on this. We both put capital into it. Basically what we do is sell real land online. It's my e-commerce experience plus real estate. That decision came full circle. Do I go into real estate or e-commerce and now I do both?
Life works out in a really funny way. All that's come full circle now. I run a company called discountlots.com. We sell land online. We started it in 2019 and now we have 70 employees and it's doing large revenue and it's a pretty big business at this point. I never dreamed in a million years that I would be where I am today with what I do. Now I consider myself more of a real estate, e-commerce.
My background basically helped me lead me to where I am today. All the different sort of struggles and caveats in Amazon is now like, okay, well, I don't have to answer to terms and service anymore. I can do whatever I want and there's not going to be any consequences in real estate. I think I've been very successful because I spent six years playing in someone else's sandbox and now I own my own sandbox and it's paid off.
What are some of those lessons you took from your Amazon experience that you immediately applied to your real estate business?
That's a good question. Definitely building a brand, being consumer friendly, customer first. That's the basis of everything on Amazon. Customer-first, pushing hardcore for reviews. No one in real estate is thinking about reviews. It's very important. Focusing on reviews, focusing on really strong branding and marketing where other people are only focused on the real estate and thinking about like, how do I make this the very best customer experience possible?
I think most people didn't come at it from that angle.
What does that look like for your customers? Is it like a B2B type of business? Who do you end up selling to usually?
No, it's consumer-facing. People learn about us online and then they realize anyone can buy a piece of land and you can buy it online. It's marketing directly to customers. A lot of the stuff is transferable that I've learned in the Amazon world.
Do you have any weird real estate stories? I have weird Amazon stories, weird customers, and return reasons, just weird as hell. Any stories so far?
There are so many stories. I'm trying to think of a good one. Give me a little bit more direction
I remember when I was still doing customer messages, I got a return request and this guy wrote a long message. He said demons have been haunting his family for generations and that this product, the product broke or something because of these demons. I was tripping out, man. What the hell is this guy talking about? I showed my wife.
Babe, come over here, you gotta look at this message. I showed her that. I'm just gonna copy and paste this and send it to where I bought it from so I did that and they refunded the money. No questions asked. I refunded that guy no questions asked. I wasn't gonna screw around with that guy. Just funny stories of buyer’s remorse maybe or what motivates these people to buy a piece of land.
That was something that popped into my head.
We have a wide variety of customers, but a lot of the people that come to us, they're like doomsday prepper people. They want to own land in the middle of nowhere. I'm so far removed from that aspect of the business just because of the size that we are. We have a lot of crazy customers. I don't know. I can't really pinpoint a really good story for you on that.
Makes sense, man. You probably didn't come into that business doing how you came into the Amazon business.
What I can speak to that is I knew how an Amazon business is run and I literally did everything for so long. I think that was one of the really good skills that I brought in. For the first two months, me and my partner are going to do everything and we're going to hire people ASAP. That's one of the things that set us up for success. I know what it's like to be the guy that wears all the hats, but now we have capital and we know how to scale a business.
Let's hire all the people immediately. I've never had to do customer service. I think I sold properties our first year for a couple of weeks when the business was taking off. Other than that, those parts of the business, I wanted to stay as far away from it as possible.
Do you remember the first couple of roles you hired for? We have to get this off our plate. What were those first few roles?
Me and my partner shouldn't be doing sales, and we shouldn't be doing customer service, and we shouldn't be doing any of the paperwork. There are a lot of logistical things with someone buys a property, and you have to get the title to the property. There's a lot of paperwork involved, and we shouldn't do any of that. Get rid of that, and then marketing.
We should try to find the people who are the very best at marketing for ads and for building websites. I'm not gonna go and build my own website. I'm not a Shopify developer. Hire all those people immediately. Don't try to teach me anything at all. We just pimped out Upwork so hard on everything when we first started. We found all the best people, brought them in, built them up, and then it took off.
Upwork is such a great resource for finding people. What do you find yourself focusing on in the business? What do you enjoy doing in the business, and where's your focus?
For me, I'm a deal guy. Even though we have 70 employees, I'm still in the trenches. We have an acquisitions manager and all that, but I'm still looking at a lot of the deals. My partner doesn't look at any of the deals anymore. He just leaves it to me, the acquisitions manager. I love the deal, I love the negotiation. I love telling them, no, this is our price, and then they come back, and then telling our acquisitions team, you gotta get them down to this price.
That's one of my favorite parts. I'm really focused now on our capital stack. I was terrible at finance. I didn't know anything about finance. Now I talk to hedge funds and I talk to private equity firms and I'm talking to large banks and institutions every day. Now we're just playing in this, whoever has the best capital stack is gonna win. I never in a million years thought that I would be working with our CFO who's building sophisticated models.
I'm looking at the financial models and then communicating that to a bank and sitting in the middle of that conversation and never imagined that I would be doing stuff like that. Do I love it? No, but that's what I'm spending a lot of my time on because like we're scaling our business so we need to have this capital in place. Now it's just totally different.
From the humble beginnings of building an Amazon listing to speaking on the phone with UBS Bank. I was talking to the fund division, the CEO of that. That's not what I learned in school, that's not my history. You just evolve as a business owner. You gotta evolve to what the business needs. If you just stay stuck in, for example, doing customer service and you're three years into your business journey, there's something wrong there.
It's finding the holes in the business and then fixing it and then bringing someone in to stay in that hole. The biggest takeaway and lesson learned is like stay out of your own way. Find the people who are really good at what they do and bring them in, learn from them, and move on to the next thing within the business.
Man, that's cool to hear you talk about the finance side of things. I know for me, I always told myself I'm not very good at finance stuff. I really didn't want to mess with it. I didn't like it,
Same.
Then I shifted. I'm going to figure this out. Now I'm looking at the profit and loss, I'm looking at the line items. How can I lower this cost and stuff like that?
I was scared of it for so long.
It's crazy. We kept ourselves there for a while and just said we were not good at it. At least that's what I told myself. Then there's always part of me that's like, I can be good at anything I put my mind to. I truly believe that. I truly believe that for anyone, honestly. I kept myself there for way too long. It's good to let go of that way of thinking so it's interesting to see that you were going through the same thing and where you're at with it now is cool too.
Nice man well what's the big vision for Paul? The way that I see these businesses they're vehicles for a lot of MDS members to really live life on their own terms. What does that look like for you and how do these businesses fit into that?
I think Amazon was my vehicle for learning business. It was basically my vehicle for where I am now and my vehicle now, the business I run now is going to be the vehicle for whatever I do next. I think for me this business, I knew after the first or second year, I knew for a fact I did not want to do Amazon for the rest of my life. I knew that I wasn't fulfilled in my Amazon journey.
I think that's what led me to what I'm doing now where I'm very fulfilled. I think the money was good, I did a lot of traveling, going to Thailand, going to China, being a digital nomad, and all those things. It opened so many doors and helped me build so many relationships. I think it was really just practicing for what I'm doing now of running this larger company. I don't know where this company is gonna go.
I wanna build this into a billion-dollar company. That's the bigger plan with this current business. When and how I'll get there, I'm working on it every day. All this was possible because of joining MDS and learning about how people do things. Still to this day, some of my very best friends are in the group and it just opened so many doors.
To answer your question, I think each opportunity in life is the vehicle for the next thing, for the next opportunity, for the next whatever it might be. You don't know where it's gonna end up. You can be as intentional as you want and you should be intentional with everything that you do, but you don't know where that will take you. Seven years ago, I didn't know that I would be where I am today and all the relationships that I built. No one knows. If you did, then you'd have a crystal ball.
It's so cool to hear you say that because I've been thinking about something similar. We've got an executive coach and she says things like this to me and I hear it from other members. I think it's tough for a lot of people who aren't going through it to understand that it's not so black and white when you talk about planning and what you're doing now.
The example that my coach always gives is a flight plan and a pilot. I think the flight plan, they go according to plan 8% of the time or something like that. The pilot is really there to correct and get things back on track. They're planning, but they know it's not gonna play out that way, but they've got someone there to navigate the pilot, the captain, so to say.
That just really stuck with me because it brought clarity to the idea of planning, but also being ready for what pops up, versus thinking I have to plan and ignoring what pops up and then just understanding my role and what I should be focused on. It's cool to just keep hearing that over and over and over.
I think that brings up another point whoever's listening to this, throughout this journey, one of the big turning points in my life was getting a business coach and coaching it. Whether it be life business, whatever it is, paying for that sort of stuff I think is the single most important thing you can do to continue to grow. Now I'm all about joining masterminds, paying for coaches, and paying for people's time.
I think that one of the secret sauces to success is opening your mind. Business is just a brain exercise. It's not about luck. It's not about skill. It's about sharpening your brain to be able to do the thing.
I like that man. That's such a great way to explain it. I definitely think getting coaching is such a good idea. I love it when people point things out like a coach, someone that's qualified to tell me hey Nick, you're screwing that up, or the way you're thinking about that isn't good anymore. That got you started, but that won't get you where you're trying to go.
I personally love it when someone tells me I'm being an idiot or I'm wrong or that was not the right thing to do because now I can better myself. I can learn from that. Only a coach can do that because there are so many. It's kind of easy to lie to ourselves and make us believe that we're doing the right thing. Sometimes we aren't if we're not asking the right questions of ourselves, too. I think a coach just makes that happen.
Yep, totally agree.
Well, man, Paul, thanks for coming on and just sharing your story about where you're at now, and some of the things that helped you get here. I think the audience has a lot of great things they can walk away with and implement depending on whatever their goals are. If you're looking to buy some property, hit up Discount Lots.
There we go. I appreciate you having me on here and like I mentioned before, MDS is incredible and I don't think I would be where I am today without the relationships that I've forged in this group.
It's a great community, a great group of people. Definitely, something special to be a part of that I'm very appreciative of as well, man. Thanks for coming on and we'll get you on again sometime soon.
Thank you so much, Nick.
Alright.
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