Thanks for having me, Derek. Man, I’m excited man. Let’s do this.

Awesome man. There’s so much to the story. I’ll keep it kind of bite sized and really give folks really where I came from and kind of how I wound up, you said, ten years in prison. Folks are probably like, “Wow. How did that happen?”

I grew up in a very dysfunctional home and environment, you know, a lot of drugs, gang involvement, these kinds of things. That’s all I was exposed to. It wound up at the age of eighteen I woke up in a jail cell with no recollection of why I was there or what had happened.

I had blacked out from taking a multitude of Xanaxes the night before and woke up in this jail cell. As I look back at the experience of waking up in the jail cell and then ultimately spending the next ten years, from the age of eighteen to the age of twenty-eight, in a Florida prison, it was probably one of the best things that have ever happened to me, because without that experience I never would have been able to be exposed to things outside of the very small drug infested criminal world that I knew.

That was all that I had saw. I never would have been able to be exposed to anything, man.

I find myself in this cell. I think one of the big breakthroughs came as I kind of began to realize where I was in life. I began to just look at this selfish drug addicted hoodlum that I’d become, and it just really disgusted me, man. I really looked and said, “Wow. This isn’t what I want for life. This is not what I want to be doing.”

It broke me, and it caused me to take a lot of internal introspection.

Throughout the process of the sentencing process where they said, “Ten years is the best that we’re going to give you, bud. You better take it and run. You better be happy with it.” Being eighteen and having the realization that I’m going to spend the next ten years in prison was … It’s kind of like being handed a boulder and asked to walk up Mount Everest with it.

It was really like extremely overwhelming, because it was more than half of my life up to that time. Internally I struggled a lot with the feelings of, “Wow. What am I going to do when I come out? I’m going to be twenty-eight. Everybody my age is going to be far ahead of me. The world will have passed me by. What am I going to do?”

The most impactful turning point came … I found myself in a cell. I was working out. I was having this kind of internal communication with myself, with God, reflecting on what was ahead of me, the uphill battle ahead of me, the time.

I kind of made this internal commitment and realization that I put myself there. The choices that I made were why I was where I was. I realized that. I gave them ten years of my life.

I also made a determination at that point that although I’d given them ten years of my life, my freedom I mean, I wasn’t going to give them ten years of my life.

That decision shaped how I used those ten years of prison.

While all the other guys were focused on being better criminals, and gang activity, and drugs, even inside a prison, I was focused on sharpening my mind for business, spiritually.

I learned how to speak five foreign languages. I just immersed myself in all things investing, real estate, marketing. I wanted to learn the qualities of an entrepreneur.

I think for me there’s two sides. As I lived in the environment, and a lot of the cliches and things we see in society about what prison is and stuff are mostly true … For the most part most of the guys on the inside, all they really cared about, man, is being better criminals.

After this kind of breaking, and realization of who I was, and taking the personal responsibility to change it, it also kind of created in me kind of this indignation against what I saw around me.

I kept thinking, “Really, how can you guys continue down this path? Do you not see where it’s going? Why do you not want to take the time to change this, man, and create some success in your life, no matter what that looks like, even if it means never just coming back to prison again and working at McDonald’s. How can you succumb to this?”

The one side was this indignation and this deep commitment to never be that, as well as the other side, man, that really drove me was I wanted to be free. I never wanted to be in that place again getting told what to do, getting told what to eat, when I could eat, how I could eat, when I could go to the bathroom, all of these things.

The determination, “I want to be free,” overwhelmed everything about me and drove me forward.

For the most part. Here’s a caveat to the story that I didn’t really share. My wife, Robin, who’s now my wife, my business partner, the mother of my children, she and I actually met while I was in prison.

She had a radio show. It’s a very intricate part of the story, but I just want to kind of share that as it plays into me being released, but we met while I was in prison. We stayed together and I actually left prison. She was there and my parents were there as well, so I did walk out to a completely clean slate.

To kind of put it in context and to kind of make the folks listening laugh at this, because I want everybody to understand the world that I emerged to, as opposed to the world that I had left. The world that I left was a world where Google didn’t exist, Facebook didn’t exist, Twitter didn’t exist, smart phones didn’t exist. I’d never even seen a flat screen TV.

Yeah. So I walk out and it was from 1999 to 2009. I walked out to a world in 2009 and the very first time I grabbed a cell phone it was really weird. I’m looking at it. I’m holding it. It’s really awkward to me.

I remember being out, as we got home, and I think we went to Walmart or something, and one of the things I noticed that kind of … It almost tried to overcome me a little bit was every little kid that I saw was just … They looked like a squirrel with a nut on a cell phone.

They were just going crazy with it, and I had no idea how to navigate these things. I felt so far behind, man. I felt like, “Wow. How am I ever going to catch up, man? How am I even going to be able to compete? How am I even going to realize what’s going on out here?” Yeah. I did start … I walked out to a world … The world did not wait for me to come home. I got out there and …

For the folks that are listening, because we all struggle and I want people to realize we all struggle from a mindset perspective. We all struggle with failures, or comparing ourselves, or feeling like we’re not going to be able to make it, or the odds are too heavily stacked against us and what not. I did.

I felt that a lot, man, but I drew consistently from what I shared earlier. What drove me in prison was I wanted to be free. As I came home my wife had a job. She had started a business, but the economy tanked, so she wound up having to work with one of her clients.

I came home, and I was kind of eager to get out there and get out into the job market. I thought folks would open their doors and hire me knowing that I could read, write, and speak five languages. I was pretty intelligent. I had educated myself while I was in there. I had a lot of entrepreneurial traits.

But nobody would hire me. At the same time my wife, who we actually had gotten married five weeks after I came home, she lost her job because of her being married to an ex-con.

Here we are. We find ourselves with bills and neither of us have a job. We’re dead broke, and we both just had this entrepreneurial spirit, these deep entrepreneurial traits. We dug deep, and we did what we think any savvy entrepreneur in our situation would do, and we sold trash on Craigslist.

This is real bad. We literally would go out on trash night, socks on our hands. Yes, it does get a little bit cold in Florida. It doesn’t snow, but it gets cold, and it was in the wintertime. We would find like printers and flat screen monitors and put them on Craigslist.

Looking back at it, as my wife and I have told this story … Looking back at it we enjoyed it, because the one thing that both her and I wanted in life was freedom, and we had it. That’s one of the important entrepreneurial traits. We were writing our own script. We were making our own money. We had no bosses. Nobody could tell us what to do. We used that to kind of fund our first business.

What we did is … At that time, this is mid-2009 or so, and this is right around the time when Facebook and Twitter was starting to become really, really popular, and people were starting to get involved in it. My wife and I had realized … She used to have an actual brick and mortar business here in Melbourne, Florida, which tanked with the economy.

As we got into the new business ventures we both realized there’s no way we could ever be just tied to a local economy, so we moved into an all things online and just immersed ourselves in marketing. I went back to school, wound up getting a degree in E-commerce and online marketing.

We served clients doing all of the done-for-you marketing services. We built websites. We built landing pages. We did funnel optimization. We ran media campaigns. I want to say about two to three years into that we were doing well, multiple six figures, financially free. We had had our first son. He was probably two to three years old.

We hit a brick wall. What happened is my wife’s family lives in North Michigan, which is almost the same as Canada, very, very close, really, really north Michigan, super cold there. We’re up there, we’re visiting for Christmas. Her dad lives on this big hill, and there was no internet there.

Every day we would have to drive the SUV with four hundred pounds of sandbags in the trunk, so we wouldn’t crash. I’m sure you can relate to this in the winter. Right? We would have to scoot down the hill, half the time we’d get stuck, go to her dad. Her dad has this little church, which was the only place we could use the internet, and do client work.

Every day we’d have to go there to do client work, answer emails.

Right there at the end of 2012 we’d made the very hard decision to completely shift our business model, fire all of our clients, and move into the space that we were really passionate about and a thing that we’d loved all along. That was consulting, coaching, strategic development.

Exactly. The interesting part is … For us we’re young, we didn’t really know all this stuff. You kind of get down the journey. All entrepreneurs kind of go through this. We go down the journey, and there’s just a lot of stuff we just genuinely didn’t know. That experience kind of taught us. Experience is one of the important qualities of successful entrepreneurs.

We thought, “Hey. Let’s just build this business. We’re having fun. We’re hanging out. We’re making good money.” Then we find ourselves in this place that we just weren’t happy with.

I think for the listeners is, and when I coach clients with entrepreneurial traits, one of the things we always start with is the big why. What do you want your life to look like? Let’s design a business and some systems that will accommodate and help you create that, because it’s such a bad thing to find yourself in that spot that we were and just be burnt out, and overwhelmed, and just not happy with it, man.

It was actually really scary, man, because the money side, the money was really, really good. We just literally looked at ourselves and just kind of took that big gulp, and swallowed hard, and said, “You know what? It’s getting ready to be the beginning of a new year. Let’s just build a new website.”

We had the skills and the entrepreneurial traits. We said, “We’re going to put up a brand new website. We’re going to re-brand.” The cool thing is a lot of the clients that we had were in a lot of the spaces. Robin and I have had the chance to work with most of the big names in the coaching, consulting, information space, so it kind of lent itself to referrals and things along those lines.

We fired all the done-for-you clients coming into 2013. Then we headed down just simply doing consulting, coaching, like strategic design, so actually working with clients to develop, as opposed to doing all of the things for them, which was just a time sucker for us. 2013 through even now that’s the main thing that we do.

Last year, being online marketing junkies, my wife and I … Everything marketing just drives us. I think that’s one of the qualities of successful entrepreneurs.

We’re so enthralled in it, definitely one of our stronger entrepreneurial traits. We love everything about it. We study it constantly. We decided last year to dip our hands into a very foreign kind of a thing for us and move from the coaching, consulting, information into actual physical product type businesses.

We did it as kind of … We’re very competitive, both my wife and I (more entrepreneurial traits!), so we said, “Let’s challenge ourselves. Let’s see if we can apply our skills to something that we’ve never done before.” The first thing that we did completely flopped. We spent thousands of dollars, put this site together, threw up all these different products.

There was t-shirts and designs. We even built a Facebook community of about twenty-five thousand people, but nobody bought our stuff.

We looked at each other … Again, here’s one of those opportunities where doubts and that inner liar tries to rise up and convince you, “Oh. That was a bad idea. You guys can’t do it. It’s dumb.” We wanted to kind of throw the towel in, but we didn’t. We kept pressing through. Perseverance is one of those entrepreneurial traits that is awesome.

Towards the end of 2015 we kind of hit oil. We had created an E-commerce brand that went from about nine hundred dollars a month to over eighty thousand dollars a month within less than sixty days.

From there, coming into ’16, we took that and we duplicated it. We’ve got probably three or four stores that are up, that are running, that are doing very, very well.

We’ll definitely do over the seven figure mark this year in E-commerce and among other things that we’re doing.

The cool thing is as we look back, is it’s a lot of fun and everything is really, really leveraged. Not only are we making the money that we want to be making in our business, but it also affords us the freedom, which for my wife and I with our entrepreneurial traits is really, really important.

I have a five year old son and a almost two year old daughter, and we get to spend as much time with them as we want to. We get to be those parents that are there, that are involved, that can take them to the park. That was always kind of one of the big drivers for us, and one of the qualities of an entrepreneur.

Yeah. We have. Initially my wife and I kind of … Everything we do in business, and this is something really good for the folks to take away. We always start really, really small.

If we get an idea, we always start with a very small kind of minute version of that idea before we invest tons of stuff into it. Right? We want to kind of start small, prove the concept, and get it out there. For us that’s part of how to be a successful entrepreneur.

With the physical product thing we were literally initially doing all the order fulfillment and getting things out there until it started getting big, and then it became very, very easy to bring on some help, train them, and have folks go at it.

At this point we are very, very hands off. It pretty is a very well oiled machine that runs for itself. My involvement is pretty much just from the marketing side which plays into my entrepreneurial traits, so whether I’m writing emails, which is a thing I love to do anyway, so if it’s writing emails, or tweaking, or creating new Facebook ads, that’s pretty much all my involvement.

That portion of it is pretty much as much of it as I want it to be. If I want to spend more time, I can. If I want to go on vacation, which is cool …

We actually had a realization. We just went back to Michigan this past Christmas, and we visited some of the places that we were at last time that were very different. We found, “Wow. This time being here three years later is way different than the last time.”

We didn’t have to be on the internet if we didn’t want to be. If we wanted to, cool, but the business ran, everything functioned, money was being made, profits were still continuing to flow whether her and I were shooting down the bottom of that mountain, getting stuck in the snow, or not.

It definitely is. A lot of times we find clients … A lot of clients with entrepreneurial traits that we work with will come to us in a very similar spot that Robin and I were in, that Michigan winter of being slaves to the business. They come to us in that spot, and that’s always where we like to start.

For everybody listening, you know, I like that you brought up the whole Ferraris, and the yachts, and this whole internet marketer stuff, is people sometimes get really discouraged when they see these things online.

They feel like, “Wow. If I’m not generating 1.2 million dollars a month, then I’m a loser, and things are not working, and I just need to quit. I don’t have the entrepreneurial traits, it must not have been for me.”

I saw this quote the other day, and I really like it. It kind of speaks well to just the world that social media’s created. It goes, “Never compare your blooper reel to somebody else’s highlight reel.” Right? It’s funny. Right?

It’s funny, because that’s Facebook. That’s what we see. We’re on there. We only see the highlights. Who puts on there, “Struggling today. I couldn’t pay my power.” You don’t even know. You see the guy with the Ferrari, but lord knows how much debt he got in to get the Ferrari.

You don’t see those things. We only see the highlights, and then we compare our blooper reel to their highlight reel, and it discourages people.

I would say only twenty to thirty percent of the things we put our hand into or get involved in turn into successful things, but the thing is that you have to keep pressing forward.

You have to keep trying, and executing, and implementing, and getting things going, and not be discouraged or dissuaded when you see the Ferraris and the Lamborghinis on Facebook. This is probably one of the most important entrepreneurial traits.

I think one of the number one things for me, and I think that’s helped both my wife and I, is when I walked out of prison I didn’t know what I was going to be doing in life.

We knew that above all, more than money, more than nice houses and fancy cars, or any of those things, or successful businesses even, we wanted freedom. For everybody listening I would say before you get into trying to start a business, or go down and follow the latest shiny business model, or what not, ask yourself what do you want?

Why are you doing the thing that you’re doing? Why do you want to start this business? That thing is going to be the thing that guides you.

Again, there’s a really cool quote around this, and I’m sure you’ve heard this. “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Know where you’re going, because it allows you to filter out good opportunities from bad opportunities.

Throughout the six, almost seven, years of us being in the entrepreneurial world there have been so many opportunities that presented themselves to us, so many things that we could have done, or went after, or chased after that we could very, very quickly say yes or no to them, because we could quickly analyze them through the filter of is this going to get us closer or further to the freedom we want?

I would say for everybody listening with entrepreneurial traits , develop that filter. You have to know. For you it might be a million different things. For us it was freedom. You really need to know what that is and why and let that be the thing that guides and governs you.

Definitely. First let me touch on the degree thing. The degree has served me about zero in the business world. It was more a personal goal. I was actually the first one in my entire family to get a college degree. That was the only motivation for me to just kind of do it, like a personal goal.

It hasn’t done me very well in business, but the skills. Right? The skills that are most important I think for anybody to have success is sales and marketing.

I’ll break that down a little but further. The beautiful thing for folks to realize is that we live in a world now, with social media, with Facebook, with the internet, that you can literally start a million dollar business, the money side is not the important, but from your kitchen table in your pajamas.

The thing that makes it most powerful is Facebook. For us Facebook is probably our number one source of leads in anything that we do, whether it’s info products, physical products, any of those kind of things. For the folks listening I think the number one skill to really hone and understand is how to utilize Facebook marketing and Facebook ads.

A hundred percent Facebook. I’ll tie this in where this really hones in and where the skill would really be for people is focus on one thing. For us it’s Facebook.

I would say if somebody were coaching with me I’d say, “Start with Facebook before you look at any of the others.” It’s the biggest. It’s the easiest to master. It’s going to provide you the fastest return.

What I find a lot of folks do is they start with one, and then, “Oh. Periscope’s hot. Let’s blab. Let’s Tweet. Let’s Pinterest.” They get themselves so scattered, which is one of the more negative entrepreneurial traits, in all of these different platforms that, yes, they can be successful. Yes, they work.

I do have involvement with Pinterest ads. I do do Twitter ads. I do some of these things, but my number one focus was mastering one of those, first getting results, getting returns in one of those.

For us it was Facebook first before I ever decided to even think about going after Instagram, or Pinterest, or any of these things. The thing for people that are listening is it’s very easy, especially with social media.

You see people talking about the latest … Periscopes the hottest thing. It can blab. Facebook live is the hottest thing. You need to be on there twenty-four seven. People need to be watching every moment of your life. If you’re not doing it, you’re not going to be successful.

Don’t believe the hype. Don’t get caught up following after these things. Focus on one, become good at it, get results. Then if you want to add another into the mix, you can go there.

The skill to develop is kind of like social media thick skin I would say. Don’t let the pressures of all the shiny objects get you where you’re so deluded and trying to do all these things that you can’t have success in even one of them.

It’s that ADHD. We’ve all got that ADHD, those of us with entrepreneurial traits.

That’s really funny, man. I wish I had like a formula for you on this one. When it comes to marketing and even the business side of things a lot of times my wife and I will get ideas for things in our main business or new products by just simply paying attention to life around us.

We might see a challenge. We might even, like in some of our E-commerce businesses, some of our friends will say something about a product they’re so excited about like, “Wow. This is so awesome.” It kind of gets the entrepreneurial traits wheels turning like, “Wow. If people are liking this, if people are so excited about this, let’s see if this can work.”

I think for us one of the things that we kind of gravitate towards is we look for products or services where there’s kind of a fanatical fan base already, where people are like fanatical around it, they’re in love with it. They’ll almost die for it to have it.

If you look, think about Apple. Why would somebody spend six days sleeping in a tent in front of Best Buy to get a phone that’s highly overpriced? Now, I am an Apple lover, but sit in line, sleeping in a tent, eating hot dogs to get a phone that’s way overpriced that they can get in three days from then without waiting and doing it. That’s simply because Apple has created this fan base.

For us, kind of the smaller guys, look for the opportunities to tap into where there’s an existing audience, or an existing fan base, or a group of people that are just fanatical around an idea or a topic.

Oh, nice.

Done. It’s done.

It is, man. This is where it really ties for my wife and I. I guess there is maybe a process to kind of what we’ll do. We’ll start with that. We’ll see this fanatical audience.

We just helped a client the other day start getting into the E-commerce space. We kind of honed the idea to kind of merge an audience. What they’re doing is it’s like gun related products to Christian people. How much more of a fanatical audience can you get? Right? Uber fanatical people. Right?

We start with the idea, and then we’re like, “Yeah. That really is …” The next thing we do is we go and say, “Can we target these people with our products and services?” Where do we go? To big old Facebook. We look and see, “Is there targeting options to put our products and services?”

The thing for everybody with entrepreneurial traits to really get excited about … I think this is something that really gets me excited is back in the day it used to be Google pay for clicks. You’d pay for ads, and people would search, and then your ads would show up.

Now, with Facebook ads there’s a huge difference. This is why Facebook is so much more valuable than pay per click. It is because people in a search mode that go to Google, they’re already looking for those products or those services. They’re in shopper mode. They’re probably comparatively shopping. It’s probably going to take them a few days or even weeks to make a decision. They’re going to compare them.

People on Facebook … When you can know that you have a Christian gun owner and put a product in front of them that’s like a gun holster with a bible scripture on it in front of them, it’s almost like dangling a carrot in front of them.

Then when you add some marketing genius behind it the impulsion of them to go ahead and buy … They weren’t looking. They were just scrolling through their news feed, and then bam, this product is there that they’re like, “Oh. I can’t live without it.” That is the genius behind why Facebook and Facebook marketing is so powerful for entrepreneurs and businesses today.

Absolutely. As a matter of fact two of my most successful stores online are in some of the most competitive markets that there ever could be.

One of them is the sports market. How much competition is there in the sports market? I know other guys that are in the golf market, which how much competition? They’re making great success at it, so absolutely.

That’s just kind of one of those things that’s just kind of noise in your ear, “Oh. There’s no niches. Everything’s so saturated.” That’s BS.

One of the best places, man, my wife and I have a Facebook group. It’s called Marketing Megaminds.

Anybody listening can just go to marketingmegaminds.com, and there’s a ton of free resources, a lot of things about some of what we’re talking about, Facebook ads, growing your business online, some of these kind of things that are available to anyone.

And inside the group really hot, active conversation. Entrepreneurs and people with entrepreneurial traits from all levels of the spectrum, just getting started, super successful, just geeking out about all the stuff that we’re talking about, marketing, Facebook marketing, all this cool stuff. It’s marketingmegaminds.com.

As a matter of fact that specific store, it’s on a separate site. It’s actually beastmodepreneur.com. There’s phone cases. There’s pillows. There’s t-shirts. There’s even stuff for little baby entrepreneurs as well.

Uh-oh.

Awesome. Thanks for having me.