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Brian Will is a serial entrepreneur, a two-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author, TEDx speaker, and a leading consultant in business and sales management. Throughout his dynamic career, he has had the privilege of founding or co-founding ten companies across four distinct industries, with valuations soaring over half a billion dollars at their height. His journey has been marked by spearheading turnarounds for diverse companies, from startups to Fortune 500 firms, guiding them to generate billions in sales.

 

In this episode, Jason and Brian discuss:

  • Journey from high school dropout to bestselling author and business consultant
  • Strategies for negotiation, sales, delegation, and optimizing operations
  • Importance of data-driven approaches and effective coaching in business success
  • Opportunities for wealth creation and impact of AI on entrepreneurship
  • Embracing gratitude and overcoming hardships in life and business

Key Takeaways:

  • Mastering negotiation and sales tactics is crucial for achieving better business outcomes and driving success in various ventures.
  • The strategic delegation of tasks, operational optimization, and positioning a company for acquisition can significantly increase wealth through successful exits.
  • A positive mindset, coupled with the right training and coaching, can unlock tremendous wealth-building opportunities in today's data-driven business environment.
  • Businesses need tailored consulting, whether focused on mindset, technical, or tactical challenges, to address specific obstacles and foster growth effectively.
  • Leveraging AI technologies like ChatGPT enables entrepreneurs to automate tasks, while effective coaching can transform leadership mindsets and align actions with desired results.

 

“The more negative the world gets, the less people feel like they have the opportunity to succeed, the better chance there is for you to succeed because you have less competition. If you get your head right, your mind right, you get the right training, the right coaching, the right consulting, you do the right things, you can do anything you want to do, and there's less competition because of the very thing you talked about, which is that negative mindset that's floating around the world.”

 - Brian Will

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Listen to the podcast here:

 


Brian Will- Always Another Step Forward

Hello and welcome everybody to this episode of The Insight Interviews. This is your host, once again, Jason Abell, and I've got a treat for you guys today. When I saw this guest on the recording calendar, I got excited, so, check this out. Our guest today is Brian Will. Here's a few stats, just a few because I could go on and on for half an hour, but here's a few stats on Brian. Brian is a two-time Wall Street Journal, bestselling author, he's a TEDx speaker, he's a leading consultant in business and sales management, he's founded 10 companies, had some real successful exits, and this guy has been on, I don't know, what did you say, Brian? 130 ,140 shows like mine, Fox and Friends, other news outlets. But today I'll welcome you, Brian. Brian Will, welcome to the show.

Jason, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here today. I love your guy’s company, so I was really looking forward to having a conversation with you.

Oh, I appreciate you saying that. We’re gonna dive into business, sales training, consulting, coaching, all those things, but I've got an initial question for you, Brian, that we ask all of our guests, like right from the get, which is really to get us facing in the right direction, which is, today, as you and I engage one another, who or what are you especially grateful for?

Gosh, you know, this question is also something people ask me in a different way. They're like, what are you most proud of that you've done in your life? And I will tell you that it's my children. My children are everything in my world. They're my greatest accomplishment. The only thing that really matters at the end of the day. You know, family has really been like, the last thing you're ever going to have, and my children are everything. So, it's my children.

Oh, man, as a person that's fortunate to be the dad of two amazing children, I can just say that I get that answer, brother. Oh, really good. I got 18 questions for you just about that, but I'm gonna refrain. I'm gonna hold myself back. And I do want to get into dude, you write books, you start companies. How does one go from not doing those things- there was a time in your past where you were a kid, or you were coming up and you weren't doing those things, to now you are- like, take us through a little bit of your history, so people, my audience who doesn't already know you, gets a little bit of a feel of who the heck you are.

You know, I like to call myself the most unconventionally educated, educated person that I know. It starts with an abused child who failed out of high school. I did manage to graduate with a 1.2 GPA. Got kicked out of the house, had to join the military because I had no place to go, got off active duty, tried to hold a job, couldn't because I was just a terrible employee. Started my first business at 21. It did really good until it didn't. And when I was 30, that business collapsed. It failed. I lost everything, my house, my cars, my daughter had to have open heart surgery. I couldn't make health insurance payments, and again, had to start all over with my life. But I like to say it's at those moments when you either learn the greatest lesson of success in life or you don't. And the greatest lesson of success in life is that when everything in your world has fallen apart and you have no idea what to do, you just take another step forward and you just keep moving, and that's what I did. I started another company, and from zero, broke, busted, lost everything, in debt, three years later, sold it in my first venture capital exit, and that's what got me into the venture capital world. I went on to do another venture capital deal. Both of those were in the online insurance marketplace. I went on and did a third deal. It was a private equity deal online marketing company that pushed me into consulting. So, I started doing consulting for Fortune 500 companies and sales and sales management retraining sales organizations. I started writing books. I've written four books now. Two of those are Wall Street Journal bestsellers. My latest book just came out, which is about scaling your company, preparing for an exit and creating generational wealth. Bought in some restaurants. I own a restaurant chain today. I own a real estate company. And then what I really get excited about my life is I do executive consulting, or what I call tactical consulting, to entrepreneurs, and really the 2 million to 30 million revenue range. So that's kind of the snapshot of my life there, if that's what you're looking for.

Your first business at 21- what was that business?

Landscaping. I had no education, Jason. I had no education, no discernible job skills, no idea what I was doing, but I knew it could mow grass and dig holes.

There you go.

So that's what I did.

Yeah, very, very interesting, too. Thank you for that snapshot. There are so many directions that we could go in. You know, one of the things that caught my attention when I was doing my research is, you've got a book, and I know it's an acronym, but you've got a book titled No, and it made me giggle when I when I saw that, Brian, because, you know, I've got one book to my name, and it's called start now, which is very positive, very forward thinking, and then I looked at your title, and it's No, and it just kind of made me laugh. So, tell people a little bit about that book, and what the big idea of that book is.

You know, the book is called The Psychology of Sales and Negotiation. And so, it's kind of two different parts, two different thought processes. The first one, I call it the negotiations process, and I stole this from Richard Branson. It's in one of his books, and one of the things he says is that if you're in a negotiation, if your first offer doesn't insult them, you've offered too much, right? And this is where we get later into sales. It's called anchoring, that you're popping your bottom and your price ranges and whatnot. But any good negotiator, and there's always an exception, so when I say any, I mean, 90% of the time, any good negotiator will say no to the first thing, because they want to find out if that's true or not. Is that really your price? Is that really where you are? So I'm going to say no. So as a salesperson or a negotiator, you need to understand that you're going to get a no right out of the gate and as someone who's negotiating on your own behalf, you should probably always use no as your first offer out of the gate. So that's the negotiation side. And then the sales side, if you're negotiating with somebody, and I always like use car lots as an example, because they are the perfect scenario of sales, right? When you go into a car lot, and we all have, and you ask the car salesman what his price is, is he going to give you the bottom dollar, best price, best deal for you the first time he talks to you? No, he's not. And if you take his first offer, you're not very smart, because you need to understand that he's trying to highball you. Your job is to lowball. It is a perfect sales scenario. So, the book's called No, and we do this in my organizations all the time when, when contractors come in and people want to give us prices, the first thing I say is no. Now we can start the conversation, and we'll go from there, but I always say no right out of the gate. I stole that from Richard, so I give him the credit.

This story that you told reminds me I used to go to a lot of real estate seminars when I was a younger man, and this one fellow that I spent some time with, his name is Jim Napier, and he did a lot of seminars around the country and real estate and he was making the point that you just made about, you know, no matter what the first offer is, even if you're excited about it, the answer is no. And he was a southern guy from the panhandle of Florida, and the way that he would act it out, he would, like, grab his heart, like, oh my. No. You're not gonna insult me like that. Like he was in pain over whatever the first offer was. So that sticks in my brain, and here you wrote a whole book about it. So, yeah, no, that's good that. I like that. I'd love to know the same type of information about your latest book, specifically, like the big idea, you know, and we'll make sure that titles and Amazon links and all that are in the show notes. But your latest book, tell us about that.

So, it really was born out of a conversation with a friend of mine who's technically my co-writer, and he is in the mergers and acquisitions world. We call it blue crawler M and A into private equity. So, he deals with blue collar businesses, right? He's done over 100 deals, over a billion dollars in mergers and acquisitions in the last six years. We were having dinner one night and I do a whole thing on delegation and optimizing your company and building systems and efficiencies, kind of the trainings that I do. And he was telling me, he said, you know, in all these deals, there's so many people that build a company thinking that 20 or 30 years from now, they can sell it and make a ton of money, whether it's in the private equity or through acquisition. He goes and really, between what you do and what I do, we can teach people how to hyper accelerate the growth of their company, put themselves into a position to exit that company into the private equity world, which gives them the real shot at unlimited capital and really blowing it out and making generational, generational type wealth. And I was like, Jeff, we need to write that book. And he's like, what do we do? Well, my second book I wrote was called The Dropout Multimillionaire, and it's really about building your business, and its mostly psychology based, which I know is a lot of what y'all do in your company, as opposed to technical. So, The Dropout Multimillionaire is building a company, you know, and becoming a multi-millionaire. The fourth book is called The Invisible Multimillionaire, and that's basically how to delegate yourself out of a company so that you're not an integral part of it, so that you can then put yourself in a position to be acquired, accelerate your growth and really build something big, because nobody can do everything by themselves, obviously. So, that was the genesis of the fourth book. And it's really trying to teach people the delegation process, the preparation process, the data preparation process, to get your company ready, so that you are capable of being acquired by a big player and capable of really generating 20, 30, 50, $100 million exit.

You know, thank you for going through that and answering those questions. As I listen to your answers, Brian, it just makes me think of, you know, when I look at news headlines these days and social media and state of affairs and politics and all that you can start to feel not so great and down about things. I listen to you, and I'm like, man, this dude's writing books about topics, about people growing their business, developing, moving forward, exiting generational wealth, those types of things. It makes me think of a couple different things, but the first thing I want to ask about is how you know you seem very growth oriented, very positive, very forward thinking in a world where, if you get too caught up and it feels like that's not that's not even happening anywhere right now, like, tell me, tell me about your thought process and your psychology around that.

So, two things that I like to focus with people on. The first is somebody asked me this question another podcast. They said, what is the opportunity for people today to really create generational wealth, and succeed, versus 20 years ago when I started? When I started my first business, I didn't have a cell phone. There was no such thing, right? You think about people that were building companies 20 years or 30 years or 40 years ago, or even back to Henry Ford or any of the pioneers of America, and then you come forward to today, and literally, Jason, I have every bit of information in the world. Every speech ever written, the greatest minds worldwide, on my phone.

In your pocket.

If you can’t build something with all the information in the world, then I don't know what you're doing. So that's the first thing I tell people.

Yeah.

And to your point, the more negative the world gets, the less people feel like they have the opportunity to succeed, the better chance there is for you to succeed, because you have less competition. If you get your head right, your mind right, you get the right training, the right coaching, the right consulting, you do the right things, you can do anything you want to do, and there's less competition, because of the very thing you talked about, which is that negative mindset that's floating around the world.

Yeah, no, that's so good, man. I feel like we could go way down this path, because it sounds like you've done a little bit of research on us as well, and that that is, I mean you're preaching to the choir right now, brother like, yeah, amen to all of that. Well, let's go down that path just a little bit. So, you know organizations right now, they might listen to some of your big ideas around your book and may, you know, want to engage you. What is a typical scenario if somebody you know founder reaches out to you, what are you seeing right now? What's a typical engagement look like? And I'm and I'm not asking you from a, hey Brian, sell your business standpoint, I'm asking you from a what are you seeing out there right now that founders and C suite that their biggest challenge that they're presenting to you these days?

So, I'll take your question and reframe it a little bit, and I get this question as well, is what do you do, why is it different than anybody else, and who should I hire if I'm going to bring somebody in to help my organization, right? And I always use this terminology that coaching or consulting is for a reason, and it's for a season, okay? And when I say it's for a reason, I break it down into three types of coaching slash consulting. There is mindset coaching consulting, which is a lot of what Rewire does. There is technical consulting, right? So, if I want to start a gym, I'm going to find somebody that knows what equipment I should buy, how many bench presses I need to buy, what kind of floors I should put in, how should I set up my payment plans? That's technical consulting.

That's right.

And then there is and then there is tactical consulting. Right? Tactical is what I do when I come in. Give me 24 month’s worth of P L's breaking down month over month, side by side on an Excel spreadsheet. We're going to go in and we're going to break it down, identify your core metrics. We're going to apply pattern recognition. We're going to show you how you got from where you were to where you are today, and based on those patterns, I can now predict what your company is going to do in the next 12 to 24 months. And if your 12-to-24-month prediction isn't what you want, then we need to start going to take in those core metrics, which are the lever drivers for top line GPM and net and start adjusting them and seeing how we can fix those numbers to get where you want to go. Then we call this reverse engineering the future, right? Then we break down your sales organization, which starts with marketing and sales, and we say, if you need more revenue to reach those bigger goals, let's break it all down and turn it into data. I tell people this all the time- if your company is over 5 million in revenue, I'll say, what do you do? And they'll say, well, I'm in the windows business, or I'm in the landscaping business, and I do five $8 million and I'm like, no, you're in the data business, because data is what's going to drive your company to from where you are to where you want to be. So, we need to build a database of knowledge, of information that we can use, manipulate, adapt, change, to drive your company to the next level. If you don't understand the data in your business, then you don't understand how to grow. Now, if it's tactical, technical and mindset, whatever you're having a challenge within your company today is the type of coach that you need to bring in. That's the type of company that needs to come in and help you. And it might be more than one. Could be technical and tactical, but a lot of technical guys aren't good at the tactical stuff. And by the way, many, many companies in that two to 10 million range, especially they don't know how to analyze data, a lot of them don't have good PNLs, a lot of them don't have any idea how to do PNL analysis to figure out what they're doing. They were good at what they did and got where they were, but they're struggling to take it to the next level. So, that's the three types. And then I say for a season, because I focus on two to 30 million revenues. If you're doing 60,70, 80 million revenues, I'm not your guy. I'm not your guy because I've never done that. I built companies to 50 million revenues, and I built sales organizations to 200- 300 million revenue, but if you're doing a billion, I'm not your guy, and I'll freely admit that. I'm a season of two to 30. So, make sure you bring the right person in. Vet them hard, make sure that they have success in doing what you're trying to accomplish, bring that person in, listen to them and your chances of success are significant.

To your point, I see, when organizations approach you, and you just talked about the technical, the tactical and the mindset, where do you see organizations having the greatest need within those three?

Well, the reason I focus on the PNL analysis is because I think that's the foundation of growth, right? You have to understand the data, and then secondarily, we focus on the sales and marketing, because that's what's going to drive that. And I say this all the time, you know, I don't care how good your organization is, if your sales organization isn't working, then you're in trouble, right? I just did a consulting project and I told the founder, I said, If I remove the five sales people, you're out of business. but if I remove five executives, I still have a business generating revenue, I can replace the executives, right? I call it income column versus the expense column, anybody of a sale is an expense, and you need that's why your expense within the organization or what are you doing, right? So, and the reason I focus on this specifically is because these are the two things that I'm really good at. And all the companies I've done, companies we've sold, I am always the ops guy. I'm the guy behind the scenes, running the numbers, rebuilding the sales organizations. That's what I do best. So, and I think those are the two primary drivers. So, if somebody comes to me, the first thing I say is give me 24 months’ worth of PNLs, month over month, side by side, on an Excel spreadsheet, and then I have a whole series of questions on the sales organization. Give me all the people the close ratios, the lead gym, customer acquisition, lead acquisition, close ratios, average revenues, and let me rebuild everything into spreadsheets so we can figure out what's right and what's wrong. Coincidentally, I will tell you that for the most part, and I've never seen an exception to this, the bottom 20% of salespeople are all losing money because too many organizations think more revenue equals more profit, and it does not. And it is because they don't analyze their data properly. So, that's the way I start any engagement. I am a data person.

Yeah, the date data don't lie. I mean, there's no question about that. Isn't that? Why was it Jack Welch at GE that every year the bottom 10% was just whacked, Period, end of story? And just start over again?

And I will do this. I remember one of the first organizations I did it with was a large public company, and they had 75 people on their sales force, and I came in, I did the analysis, and I said, you realize the bottom 20 people are costing you money, and they're like, what? How's that possible? They're generating revenue. Like, because you don't add analyze the data. And this was a $100 million division of a $2 billion company, and nobody in the company knew how to analyze the sales, and so we fired them. We also fired the person running the sales organization. And then we went from a company a division losing a million dollars a month, and a year later I had it making a million dollars. So yeah, that's the vast shift you can see just by fixing the data within the organization.

Yeah, the data does matter. I was talking to a friend of mine just the other day, so you're talking about multi-million-billion-dollar organizations. I was talking to a friend of mine that runs a restaurant. You said you're in the restaurant business as well. And he said, within the last couple of years where some of the labor expenses and food expenses coming out of the pandemic were just out of whack, and he couldn't keep his prices up. He said there was a point in time where I would do better if I paid you to eat our chicken wings, as opposed to sell them to you. It would have cost me less money, and I think it's exactly what you're saying. And you know, all kidding aside, if he didn't know his data, he wouldn't even know that, because hey, I'm selling the wings, and they gave me 10 bucks for it, and hey, I made money. And he's like, no, not at all. And you just don't know that unless you're diving into the data.

So literally, I had a restaurant owner in my hometown call me and say would you come see me? I sat down with the guy, and he said, I can't figure out how to make money in my restaurant. I'm struggling here. And it was a nice restaurant. I said, well, tell me three things. Food costs, liquor costs, labor costs, and then rent over revenue. And he goes, I don't know what those numbers are. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I said, how much does your food costs? And he goes, well, I spend about, you know, 5000 a week, making a number up. I'm like, that's not what I'm asking. What is it as percentage of revenue? He said, I don't know. I'm like, how do you have any idea what you're doing if you don't know what your numbers are? And you'd be shocked at how many restaurant owners don't know their numbers, just in a specific industry. It's really any business that they just don't know their numbers, and that's why they fail.

Yeah, you sound a lot like one of my mentors, who runs a large organization down in North Carolina, and his line is, you've got to be fanatical about the numbers. It's a different way of saying what you're saying, but he's like, literally fanatical and man, you know, we're mindset people, but that has just been a lesson for me to really look at the data the way that that you're describing, because without that, you can be all the mindset you want, but if you're not doing the tactical and the technical stuff even halfway right, well, it doesn't matter. But it's also vice versa, right? Like you need, you need all of it.

So, so funny, Jason, and I was, I was sitting in one of my restaurants, talking to the developer of the complex, and it's not only fanatical about the numbers, it's fanatical about the dollars. And I know we had a problem in somewhere. We had, like, an outlet that needed changed, and something else. The electrician comes in and gives my manager the price. My manager comes over and says, He wants $1,300 and I said, offer him nine and he goes, What do you mean? I said, offer him 900 he's like, but it's 1300. I'm like, offer him 900. okay. He goes away, comes back and he says he'll do one of them for 900 I said, No, go back and tell him 900 for both Or, you know, thank you, you can leave. And he like, has this bewildered look on his face, and he walks away, and five minutes later, comes back and he says he'll do it for 900. I'm like, Yeah, because he's already here, so he's either going to take the $900 or he's going to go home without $900, and the developer looked at me and goes, do you always negotiate like that? I'm like, you have to be fanatical about dollar spent. And I know this is a two-hour job, and $900 is fair, so, yeah, it's fanatical. I love the word fanatical.

So with that, that's a good segue, I always like to when I when I get brains in the room, like yourself, Brian, I always want to know, as you're looking to the future, you've told us a lot about your past and your experience, when you look to the future, what types of things are you excited about from a business standpoint? Like what do you see that you're like, man, that's exciting. Like, what’s out there right now that excites you?

Gosh, there are so many opportunities, and I see a lot of them. I sit on a board of Tech Alpharetta, which is a tech technology incubator here. We've got 54 incubator companies in here, and everybody with all these ideas things they want to do. I think AI is going to change the world. I mean, right now, we're building an AI Brian. We've already got the prototype out where I just have to type what I wanted to say, and Brian will sit here. You could be talking to AI Brian right now, and I'm sitting in another room just typing. I mean, that kind of stuff is amazing. And your ability to expand your reach through AI, or even, you know, I tell people all the time chat GPT is an amazing tool, because as an idea generator, it's second to none. You can literally go in and say, give me an idea on, I don't know, how to structure an offer for my box of markers here that targets this particular type of person in this particular type of market m, in his particular income level with this particular interest, and it literally will go out and write you, and I'm like, you can't do that if you're not good at marketing, and it'll bang it out, and all you have to do is adjust it, and you've got an offer at your fingertips. I mean, it's amazing.

By the way, you can bang it out in 10 seconds.

Yes, and then you don't have to sit there and do all the brain power, and you can collaborate with five people to come up with it. You take what it gives you, and then you adjust it and tweak it and fix it, and you've just done something that might take four hours in 10 seconds.

Yeah. Right.

That type of capability gives you, as an entrepreneur, the ability to do things that nobody's ever been able to do before. It's just going to be a whole new world.

Yeah, yeah. So, AI for sure, and that's been a prevailing answer these days. And not only is it something that you're saying you're excited about, Brian, but you actually sound like you're putting hands on it, and you're using it in your workshop, building it out. Anything else that you see that that is particularly exciting for you moving forward?

Gosh, that's the only one I've been focused on lately, mostly because I am in the middle of building AI type of stuff out.

The AI Brian. Next time we have you on the podcast, we'll have AI Brian. Yeah, no, I like it. I dig it. I dig it. Well, as you and I start to head home toward ending this conversation, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you just want to make sure that we talk about today?

No, actually I would love it if you gave me two minutes on Rewire and what you guys focus on and educate me a little bit more. Honestly.

I appreciate that. I appreciate that. So, as much as you're fanatical on the data and the technical of an organization, we recognize that that is super important, but we also recognize that if the thinking is off with the leadership in an organization, whether that means founder, president C suite or the leader of the sales organization, for instance, then the data doesn't much matter. And so, what we find is organizations will come to us and they want different results than they're already getting, and you pointed out a few ways to rejigger the data and get there. What we find is there are organizations that they want to get from here to there, but they themselves are the biggest inhabitant to getting from here to there. And so, we work with people to figure out, okay, what is it right now that you're thinking about? What's going on in your brain, in your head and your personality? And we're not therapists, but we want people to talk through some things. So, this idea of being lonely at the top, so to speak, a lot of leaders and organizations don't have outlets to figure out, workshop their problems with, to figure out, okay, if I do want to get from here to there, let's talk out what exactly is getting in the way. And a lot of times it is the leader themselves. And so, we provide an opportunity to collaborate with people through Q and A and develop the actual plan that we'll get from here to there. And oftentimes it is revolved around the way that they're thinking. Maybe it's the way that they're thinking about one another, about their clients, about the environment that they're in. And so just to have that outlet and to actually start workshopping through problem solving, as opposed to just these blocks that sometimes happen in people's heads, we just provide that outlet for people. So, what we do is we will come into an organization, listen to what their challenges are, we don't act like we're the tacticians or the technical aspect, we will look at PNLs and all of that, but we're not there to solve that particular challenge, and we'll provide an outlet to go, okay, what is it that you are thinking about these days? What do we think the inhibitors are? What are the challenges? And we workshop and co-collaborate with the organization to say, okay, well, let's develop a plan to get from here to there, because without a plan, kind of like you alluded to, things just aren't happening. So, we truly believe, and we've observed this in real life, is if you can change the way that you think, then you can start to change the actions that you're taking to get the results that you're ultimately looking for. Yeah, so I don't know that's pretty broad answer, but that's, that's how we think.

It's interesting, man, I say this a lot, and I will take your statement change the way you think one step further, and that's, and I'll back this up with the biggest challenge I see, and with entrepreneurs and at least in the range of the companies I work with, is ego.

Oh, big time.

And the ego keeps them from accepting that they need to make the change and then making the actual change that's been given to them by the person they brought in.

Yeah, well said. Absolutely well said. When clients come to us with figuratively, you know, their arms crossed, what can you do for us, it's typically the answer is not much, because you're not in a posture where you're ready, you know? But when people come to us, in fact, right before we started recording an appointment earlier today, man, this guy is head of a big sales organization, and he's so eager and ready to grow and be coachable, and I'm like, dude, it's going to work. And part of the reason that coaching is going to be very effective for you is because you want your ready, willing and able for it to work. Without that mindset, there's not a whole lot that we can do for you, but when you're ready, willing and able, the way that this person presented themselves, oh, we're going to have a coach assigned to him that's a really good fit for him, and already I can see it. They're going to be off to the races together. So, yeah, yeah, amen to what you're saying.

I tell people this all the time, and when I find entrepreneurs that that have this ego issue, that they need to be right, they want to be in charge, they want to make all the decisions, they need to be the big dog, and I always tell them, I'm like, listen. You know Apple, right? We all got these Apple phones. And you know who runs Apple? Steve Jobs. Well, he started it. Sorry. Tim Cook. Tim Cook runs it. You know Tim Cook has a board of directors, like 12 people, and you know, about every quarter the Board of Directors comes in and Tim says, this is what's going on, and this is my thought process. And I'm having issues with Foxcom, I have issues with China, we have a distribution and, well, the board of directors from all these different industries, not specifically phone company guys say, based on our experience and our background and what we've done, what we've seen, these are our suggestions. And then Tim Cook says, you know what? Those are great ideas. They break up. Tim goes and implements all these ideas, and that's how Apple moves forward. He also has a personal coach paid for by the Board, which is a mindset coach, which is what y'all do. Now, Tim's a pretty smart guy running one of the biggest companies on the planet. And I ask people all the time, if Tim Cook, who's running Apple, needs a board of directors and a personal coach, what in the world are you doing thinking you can do it all by yourself?

Yeah, so true. Yes, so true. We need to have you do some marketing for us, brother. That was good. That was very good. I appreciate you turning the tables. Very rarely does a guest do that, and I really appreciate that. It tells me a ton about you, Brian. Even before we hit record, I could tell that there's a lot of alignment with the way that we think, and I get a vibe from you that you're here to just help people and serve, and the way that you've done that with either your books or even the organization, the startup or the incubator organization that you're involved with there in Georgia, like, I can tell you're here to be curious, and you're here to serve, and that's the exact type of conversations that we like to have on our podcast, because I do think that there'll be people that listen to this, and even if they don't reach out to you or go to my website or your website, they've benefited from the things that we've talked about today. So one, I just want to thank you for that, and I appreciate it.

That's huge, very nice.

And in the span of 30-40, minutes that we've been together, thank you for that. Consider us friends. Know that Rewire is here to help you whenever and wherever, if that seems appropriate one day. If people want to reach out to you, which I think they will, how do people do that? How do people find you, Brian?

Easy enough. My website is brianwillmedia.com. So, brianwillmedia.com. I always used to say, www.brianwillmedia.com but my Gen X assistant says, will you stop saying that? Nobody says www anymore. It just shows you how old you are. I’m like all right, just Brianwillmedia.com.

Yeah, the AI will find you if they put in Brian Will.

Yeah, my podcast, my training courses, you know, my blogs, everything's on there. So, and if you want to chat with me, drop me a note on there.

So good. Well, thank you for your time today. Thank you for your expertise. From 21 years old, starting a business that failed to all the amazing companies that you're involved with now, and paying it forward and with incubators and books and all kinds of things, we just appreciate you carving out time for us today, and appreciate you sharing your wisdom and your expertise today. So, Brian Will, thank you so much.

Jason. I appreciate it. Thanks, man, I had fun.

Ah, the insights from Brian Will. There's so many, but I tell you what. Going from his very first answer to being grateful for his children and just all the meaning that it has behind that, to just looking at life for so many opportunities, I mean, this is a guy that, you know again, he said he grew up pretty poor, not a lot of opportunities available to him. Had a business went, went way under, like, way back down to Ground Zero, and now is really on top again and just excited about things, looking for opportunities. And the insight that I had in particular was a guy like that who hasn't had everything handed to him during his entire life, like lots of ups, lots of downs, starting from a down position, and looking at life with so many opportunities, it just made me have the insight of, boy, you really find what you're looking for. And this guy Brian Will is looking for opportunities, looking for the good in organizations and people and what's out there, and so, I do think that you find what you're looking for. So that was the main insight that I had today my friends, but it doesn't much matter what me as the host, what my insights were, but what really matters as you listen to this conversation with Brian Will, are, what insights did you have?

                                                                                                             ---

Thanks for reading. If you got any value at all from this episode, a little nugget all the way up to some big, huge insight, please do us a solid by subscribing, recommending, rating, and reviewing us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or Google. That stuff matters to us, and it allows us to continue interviewing more awesome people.



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