What's your vision?
Well, I mean, the last year has been transition.
I'm kind of done working and running companies now.
So now I'm helping out a lot.
I've got a few companies down here in the islands that I'm helping learn how to
market and grow. They have a really huge marketing need down here.
So it's kind of fun teaching people about QR.
I mean, there's businesses that aren't even on Google down here.
So it's fun.
I throw networking events and meet business owners and help them grow and
teach them. And this island has like 30,000 people,
but 2.5 million tourists.
And that market is just so underutilized.
These tourists could be spending so much more money down here if we just told
them where and how. They're on cruise ships, they're flying in,
they're ready to spend. It's an interesting island and culture,
but it's fun. The people that I work with,
you know, one of them's a nonprofit like foster home.
So I'm helping teach them how to market and how to get more donations and throw
some events for them so they can raise funds for the,
they're the only foster home on the island. So.
Oh wow. And that's super important if they're the only one.
Yeah. The other one, I guess closed down like probably almost a year ago. Yeah.
Okay. So you didn't know anything about their need until you actually got out
there. Is that correct?
No, I'd never visited the island. So I picked it,
I guess I picked it cause it was one of the territories.
So I wanted to come play soccer. I wanted somewhere that was a little more,
I guess less regulated, less like Colorado.
And so I did a little research, you know, I was thinking Guam maybe, or, you know,
American Samoa, but then I, I wanted to be closer to my family.
My dad's health is fading.
So I want to be somewhere that's not a 14 hour flight to San Francisco and then
another flight. And so, oh,
and another thing was the frontier go wild pass flies here.
So that means free flights for a year so I can get back and forth easily.
You know, if I was living in Guam around trip flights,
probably like 1500 to 2000 each time. So that would add up pretty quickly.
So, you know, go ahead.
No, no, no. I keep going.
Yeah. So I was like St. Thomas, you know,
if I can fly there pretty easily and very cheaply and you know,
if something happens, I can get back to my family pretty quick.
I go back probably once every month or two and like to surprise my mom,
surprise her on Easter, surprise her on Mother's Day,
surprise my whole family at Christmas. That was pretty funny.
We were on a big Zoom video chat with like 10 of my family,
like wishing me happy birthday and Merry Christmas.
And then I just walked right in the door with our favorite meal.
What? Oh, that's awesome.
You see my mom and my sister's faces are like, Hey, what? Why is he holding,
why is he holding my nephew? Why is he holding my son?
That is awesome. And that's super important is to be able to make it back.
I commend you on wanting to stay close and doing the surprising thing.
My family, I came out here in 2006 on my own,
and then I had been out here for 12 years by myself, Austin,
like by myself, no one, just me and my two older kids. Then I had a third one.
And then my family starts coming in, in groups.
I'm like, wait a minute. I enjoyed this distance to
travel to you, but now I say in hindsight,
I love them being here and I love the fact that, you know,
I still have some family back in Denver.
So I definitely can relate to what it feels like to be close
and make it there sooner than later.
Where did your vision come from?
Yeah, so I guess it's kind of always been, I love traveling.
I've been to like 60 some countries, love seeing culture.
I mean, you said you saw my show.
My show came from just traveling and like meeting people.
And, you know, you're in Hong Kong and you're like, oh, no, yeah,
you just invest in the stock market.
And they're like, what's a stock market?
And you're like, oh, maybe not Hong Kong because they have a pretty big stock market.
But like Vietnam or somewhere.
And they're like, what's a stock market?
I'm like, oh, you could just put like five dollars a month.
And then they're like, I don't get it.
And then you go somewhere else and you're like, oh, dude, this is like
this reminds me of like a Buddha teaching.
Like Dalai Lama says this.
They're like, who's Dalai Lama?
And you're like, what is going on?
And like, you realize how big this world is, right?
You know, sometimes in America, we think we're the biggest, the greatest.
And, you know, people don't need passports because we honestly,
we do have just about everything.
We don't have ancient, like Rome, art, like buildings and stuff.
But we have beaches, we got mountains, we got, you know,
if you really want to go to the ice, you can go to Alaska.
We have just about everything.
But when you travel, you learn there's just like
so many people and so much stuff.
And so that's kind of where the show came was like, all right,
what if I had a show that everyone in the world could watch?
We have little tiny tips that just like, you know, because if I go into how to do
real estate, I could sit here and talk for five hours on how I had, you know,
to have a 10 million dollar real estate portfolio before I was 33.
But only like one percent of the world's going to understand that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Simple little tip like, hey, here's one little trick on how to buy a house,
like creative financing or something like that, you know.
And so that's kind of where that started.
But traveling was huge.
And I I definitely am going to get to Europe at some point.
But when I researched, I wanted to be a territory.
So I still had it's kind of like a halfway point, jumping off point.
And then, you know, when I looked at the Virgin Islands, I was like, oh, yeah,
you're the Caribbean is actually actually kind of like a mini Europe.
I mean, three fourths of the the Netherlands, the Netherlands
empire is down here.
You know, we have German, German based countries and French based countries,
English, Spanish, all that stuff.
So it turned out to be a really cool place.
I'm super happy.
I love it here. This island's super small.
It's great. We have a lot of fun.
It's easy to work.
I mean, this is my office.
I just chill and stare.
That's right.
I love how down on earth you are.
You're like, hey, this is me.
I was looking at your five things on your website and you said F excuses.
I said, yes, you know, like at the end of the day, every option
to say why you didn't do something is an excuse.
Definitely.
Yeah.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to do it.
Definitely. Yeah. And I mean, we all choose our own stuff.
But yeah, fuck your excuses or no fucking excuses.
Whatever. I learned that from Ryan Stuhlman.
He's a big fan of that. But in the end, you know, I mean, like last night,
I'm so I'm 35 and I'm soccer training with 19 and 23 year old and fucking
the coach wanted to put us in a group to go do sprint together for an hour.
I'm sprinting against these kids that are half my age.
I've seen that. I've seen that.
Very tempted to just be like, oh, I'm hurt. My hammy hurts.
I hurt my hammy last week. I want to chill for a bit.
But I did it.
They have parachutes on Austin. I was like, what?
Yeah, we did. We did some parachute runs.
Yeah, they put the parachute run on me and I'm like, I'm already handicapped.
Get me out of here.
15 years older than these fucking kids.
Yeah, I was like, that is so dope.
So at the end of the day, they got it.
They see that you still have that drive and that thrive to actually, you know,
stay the same, you know, even though we get older, doesn't mean that we have to
change that much. We just have to work out condition a little bit more and heal.
Try to heal a little bit faster to stay to stay with them.
Yeah, that's the goal. That's the goal.
That's crazy.
So considering that you've started up to 35 or more businesses,
how do leaders lean into funding their vision?
I mean, you have a lot.
You have real estate.
You have businesses.
You travel. You do soccer.
You know, now that you have this vision and you're sort of I won't say,
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but come into that end of just creating
that that a millionaire is made kind of lifestyle, you know, and sitting on an
island, how do you I mean, answer that question for me?
How do leaders lean into funding that?
Where do I think the people just they think it's more difficult than it is.
And maybe they buy it off more than they chew.
But I mean, specifically one of my friends right now and he can maybe hear this,
he's trying to start an ice tea company.
And I'm like, OK, so let's go rent a fucking little seven hundred dollar a month
commercial kitchen and go make the ice tea and let's go sell it done.
Yes. And for me, you know, that's like a
you know, deposit plus that plus ingredients, maybe two thousand dollar
investment. Maybe if you're going crazy, three thousand dollar investment
for the first month. Like, all right.
So that means we got to make this many bottles and we got to have, you know,
this many. All right.
We got to sell like a thousand five hundred bottles of ice tea and we'll pay
off the first month.
You know, most of my businesses I start like it's all start shitty then get good.
What do they say?
Sometimes done is better than good is another of my favorite things.
Like, just do it. Get it done.
It's going to suck. I mean, right now I'm I'm I'm I have a lot of
I have a market.
Yeah, like we're selling sea moss and I'm handwriting on a dry erase board.
Is that's all I can find.
I don't have any POS of materials or any like flyers.
It's literally just like sea moss, $15.
And, you know, one of my friends, like, looked like looked at it.
He's like, oh, that looks that looks terrible.
I'm like, yeah, well, as you start shitty, I could have sat around for a month,
put in two thousand dollars, made this big, beautiful booth
and then missed out on all that opportunity.
And I'm like, I mean, it doesn't need to be fucking amazing to start.
You got to start just start generating revenue and go from there. You know,
what's another good example?
And I think that makes a lot of sense, Austin.
We we have too much thought process into it.
But I think the world has has structured us that way.
Make a plan. What is your five year future?
You know, what does it look like in five years?
A lot of people don't live in the present and they hear it now.
And so that thought process of go big or go home
is is so detrimental when you have an idea
and don't have everything to put it together.
So I totally get that.
Yeah. And I mean, I mean, if you want to start an Airbnb business,
I could start one tomorrow for probably two thousand dollars.
I could find a furnished one bedroom apartment.
You would make more money off a two bedroom.
So let's say fifteen hundred a month for a two bedroom.
Plus the deposit will be three thousand.
And if it's already furnished, you don't have to pay for that.
Three thousand dollars and you're in.
It's free to list it and you know, you don't really have to pay for anything else.
If you're really smart, you could even add in on if you're signing a lease
with the person and do an arbitrage, which would be the easiest way to do it.
You could do it with no money down and just start a Airbnb management company.
You take 15 percent of all revenue, give them 85 percent,
just convince one person to do it.
Then you I mean, you could make five hundred to fifteen hundred
a month in profit and you put no money down.
But if you want all the profit in your arbitrage,
I mean, three thousand four thousand dollars, you have the whole place.
You start renting it out and you can be profitable within like two, three months.
I mean, everything, everything is just negotiation and simple.
But doing something is going to make you ten times more money
than talking about it for the next year.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes
continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a vision for yourself.