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What's your vision?

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Well, I mean, the last year has been transition.

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I'm kind of done working and running companies now.

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So now I'm helping out a lot.

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I've got a few companies down here in the islands that I'm helping learn how to

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market and grow. They have a really huge marketing need down here.

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So it's kind of fun teaching people about QR.

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I mean, there's businesses that aren't even on Google down here.

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So it's fun.

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I throw networking events and meet business owners and help them grow and

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teach them. And this island has like 30,000 people,

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but 2.5 million tourists.

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And that market is just so underutilized.

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These tourists could be spending so much more money down here if we just told

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them where and how. They're on cruise ships, they're flying in,

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they're ready to spend. It's an interesting island and culture,

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but it's fun. The people that I work with,

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you know, one of them's a nonprofit like foster home.

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So I'm helping teach them how to market and how to get more donations and throw

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some events for them so they can raise funds for the,

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they're the only foster home on the island. So.

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Oh wow. And that's super important if they're the only one.

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Yeah. The other one, I guess closed down like probably almost a year ago. Yeah.

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Okay. So you didn't know anything about their need until you actually got out

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there. Is that correct?

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No, I'd never visited the island. So I picked it,

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I guess I picked it cause it was one of the territories.

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So I wanted to come play soccer. I wanted somewhere that was a little more,

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I guess less regulated, less like Colorado.

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And so I did a little research, you know, I was thinking Guam maybe, or, you know,

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American Samoa, but then I, I wanted to be closer to my family.

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My dad's health is fading.

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So I want to be somewhere that's not a 14 hour flight to San Francisco and then

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another flight. And so, oh,

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and another thing was the frontier go wild pass flies here.

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So that means free flights for a year so I can get back and forth easily.

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You know, if I was living in Guam around trip flights,

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probably like 1500 to 2000 each time. So that would add up pretty quickly.

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So, you know, go ahead.

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No, no, no. I keep going.

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Yeah. So I was like St. Thomas, you know,

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if I can fly there pretty easily and very cheaply and you know,

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if something happens, I can get back to my family pretty quick.

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I go back probably once every month or two and like to surprise my mom,

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surprise her on Easter, surprise her on Mother's Day,

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surprise my whole family at Christmas. That was pretty funny.

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We were on a big Zoom video chat with like 10 of my family,

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like wishing me happy birthday and Merry Christmas.

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And then I just walked right in the door with our favorite meal.

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What? Oh, that's awesome.

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You see my mom and my sister's faces are like, Hey, what? Why is he holding,

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why is he holding my nephew? Why is he holding my son?

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That is awesome. And that's super important is to be able to make it back.

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I commend you on wanting to stay close and doing the surprising thing.

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My family, I came out here in 2006 on my own,

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and then I had been out here for 12 years by myself, Austin,

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like by myself, no one, just me and my two older kids. Then I had a third one.

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And then my family starts coming in, in groups.

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I'm like, wait a minute. I enjoyed this distance to

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travel to you, but now I say in hindsight,

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I love them being here and I love the fact that, you know,

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I still have some family back in Denver.

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So I definitely can relate to what it feels like to be close

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and make it there sooner than later.

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Where did your vision come from?

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Yeah, so I guess it's kind of always been, I love traveling.

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I've been to like 60 some countries, love seeing culture.

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I mean, you said you saw my show.

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My show came from just traveling and like meeting people.

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And, you know, you're in Hong Kong and you're like, oh, no, yeah,

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you just invest in the stock market.

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And they're like, what's a stock market?

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And you're like, oh, maybe not Hong Kong because they have a pretty big stock market.

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But like Vietnam or somewhere.

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And they're like, what's a stock market?

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I'm like, oh, you could just put like five dollars a month.

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And then they're like, I don't get it.

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And then you go somewhere else and you're like, oh, dude, this is like

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this reminds me of like a Buddha teaching.

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Like Dalai Lama says this.

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They're like, who's Dalai Lama?

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And you're like, what is going on?

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And like, you realize how big this world is, right?

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You know, sometimes in America, we think we're the biggest, the greatest.

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And, you know, people don't need passports because we honestly,

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we do have just about everything.

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We don't have ancient, like Rome, art, like buildings and stuff.

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But we have beaches, we got mountains, we got, you know,

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if you really want to go to the ice, you can go to Alaska.

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We have just about everything.

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But when you travel, you learn there's just like

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so many people and so much stuff.

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And so that's kind of where the show came was like, all right,

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what if I had a show that everyone in the world could watch?

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We have little tiny tips that just like, you know, because if I go into how to do

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real estate, I could sit here and talk for five hours on how I had, you know,

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to have a 10 million dollar real estate portfolio before I was 33.

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But only like one percent of the world's going to understand that.

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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Simple little tip like, hey, here's one little trick on how to buy a house,

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like creative financing or something like that, you know.

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And so that's kind of where that started.

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But traveling was huge.

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And I I definitely am going to get to Europe at some point.

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But when I researched, I wanted to be a territory.

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So I still had it's kind of like a halfway point, jumping off point.

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And then, you know, when I looked at the Virgin Islands, I was like, oh, yeah,

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you're the Caribbean is actually actually kind of like a mini Europe.

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I mean, three fourths of the the Netherlands, the Netherlands

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empire is down here.

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You know, we have German, German based countries and French based countries,

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English, Spanish, all that stuff.

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So it turned out to be a really cool place.

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I'm super happy.

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I love it here. This island's super small.

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It's great. We have a lot of fun.

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It's easy to work.

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I mean, this is my office.

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I just chill and stare.

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That's right.

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I love how down on earth you are.

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You're like, hey, this is me.

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I was looking at your five things on your website and you said F excuses.

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I said, yes, you know, like at the end of the day, every option

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to say why you didn't do something is an excuse.

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Definitely.

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Yeah.

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And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to do it.

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Definitely. Yeah. And I mean, we all choose our own stuff.

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But yeah, fuck your excuses or no fucking excuses.

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Whatever. I learned that from Ryan Stuhlman.

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He's a big fan of that. But in the end, you know, I mean, like last night,

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I'm so I'm 35 and I'm soccer training with 19 and 23 year old and fucking

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the coach wanted to put us in a group to go do sprint together for an hour.

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I'm sprinting against these kids that are half my age.

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I've seen that. I've seen that.

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Very tempted to just be like, oh, I'm hurt. My hammy hurts.

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I hurt my hammy last week. I want to chill for a bit.

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But I did it.

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They have parachutes on Austin. I was like, what?

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Yeah, we did. We did some parachute runs.

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Yeah, they put the parachute run on me and I'm like, I'm already handicapped.

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Get me out of here.

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15 years older than these fucking kids.

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Yeah, I was like, that is so dope.

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So at the end of the day, they got it.

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They see that you still have that drive and that thrive to actually, you know,

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stay the same, you know, even though we get older, doesn't mean that we have to

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change that much. We just have to work out condition a little bit more and heal.

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Try to heal a little bit faster to stay to stay with them.

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Yeah, that's the goal. That's the goal.

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That's crazy.

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So considering that you've started up to 35 or more businesses,

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how do leaders lean into funding their vision?

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I mean, you have a lot.

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You have real estate.

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You have businesses.

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You travel. You do soccer.

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You know, now that you have this vision and you're sort of I won't say,

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I don't want to put words in your mouth, but come into that end of just creating

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that that a millionaire is made kind of lifestyle, you know, and sitting on an

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island, how do you I mean, answer that question for me?

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How do leaders lean into funding that?

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Where do I think the people just they think it's more difficult than it is.

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And maybe they buy it off more than they chew.

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But I mean, specifically one of my friends right now and he can maybe hear this,

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he's trying to start an ice tea company.

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And I'm like, OK, so let's go rent a fucking little seven hundred dollar a month

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commercial kitchen and go make the ice tea and let's go sell it done.

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Yes. And for me, you know, that's like a

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you know, deposit plus that plus ingredients, maybe two thousand dollar

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investment. Maybe if you're going crazy, three thousand dollar investment

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for the first month. Like, all right.

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So that means we got to make this many bottles and we got to have, you know,

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this many. All right.

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We got to sell like a thousand five hundred bottles of ice tea and we'll pay

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off the first month.

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You know, most of my businesses I start like it's all start shitty then get good.

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What do they say?

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Sometimes done is better than good is another of my favorite things.

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Like, just do it. Get it done.

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It's going to suck. I mean, right now I'm I'm I'm I have a lot of

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I have a market.

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Yeah, like we're selling sea moss and I'm handwriting on a dry erase board.

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Is that's all I can find.

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I don't have any POS of materials or any like flyers.

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It's literally just like sea moss, $15.

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And, you know, one of my friends, like, looked like looked at it.

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He's like, oh, that looks that looks terrible.

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I'm like, yeah, well, as you start shitty, I could have sat around for a month,

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put in two thousand dollars, made this big, beautiful booth

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and then missed out on all that opportunity.

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And I'm like, I mean, it doesn't need to be fucking amazing to start.

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You got to start just start generating revenue and go from there. You know,

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what's another good example?

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And I think that makes a lot of sense, Austin.

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We we have too much thought process into it.

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But I think the world has has structured us that way.

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Make a plan. What is your five year future?

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You know, what does it look like in five years?

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A lot of people don't live in the present and they hear it now.

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And so that thought process of go big or go home

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is is so detrimental when you have an idea

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and don't have everything to put it together.

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So I totally get that.

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Yeah. And I mean, I mean, if you want to start an Airbnb business,

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I could start one tomorrow for probably two thousand dollars.

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I could find a furnished one bedroom apartment.

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You would make more money off a two bedroom.

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So let's say fifteen hundred a month for a two bedroom.

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Plus the deposit will be three thousand.

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And if it's already furnished, you don't have to pay for that.

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Three thousand dollars and you're in.

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It's free to list it and you know, you don't really have to pay for anything else.

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If you're really smart, you could even add in on if you're signing a lease

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with the person and do an arbitrage, which would be the easiest way to do it.

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You could do it with no money down and just start a Airbnb management company.

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You take 15 percent of all revenue, give them 85 percent,

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just convince one person to do it.

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Then you I mean, you could make five hundred to fifteen hundred

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a month in profit and you put no money down.

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But if you want all the profit in your arbitrage,

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I mean, three thousand four thousand dollars, you have the whole place.

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You start renting it out and you can be profitable within like two, three months.

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I mean, everything, everything is just negotiation and simple.

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But doing something is going to make you ten times more money

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than talking about it for the next year.

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Thank you for being here today.

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I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.

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I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes

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continue to move forward.

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This is going to get more and more fun.

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We'll have more and more engagement as well.

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We invite people to participate in the show.

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And thank you for giving us your time and attention.

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Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a vision for yourself.