Welcome to the Unshackled Owner Podcast. Your host is Aaron Young, a business owner, an entrepreneur of the last 34 years. Why do 80% of businesses fail? It’s because they don’t know what they’re doing. This Unshackled Owner podcast is designed to give you little ideas, little tweaks, little motivation, and an anchor, a place to come and get some inspiration and get some education. What we want you to do is start to learn the success, not just principles, the success steps, the processes, the formulas.
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Revelation At The Beach House With Aaron Young
Howdy and welcome to The Unshackled Owner podcast. I’m Aaron Young. I’m your host. I’m so glad you decided to come over here and join me today at The Unshackled Owner. If you’ve just found the podcast, since this is episode number one, I thought I would take a minute and just tell you a little bit about me and a little bit about why I’m doing this podcast. I think you’re going to be really glad you found this place. You’re going to be really pleased that you found this information. Let me tell you why.
First of all, I’m a business owner, an entrepreneur of the last 34 years. For three decades and a half, I’ve been starting and buying and selling companies. Some of them have been great successes, others have been fireballs into the dirt. Like all entrepreneurs, I’ve had my ups and downs. But generally speaking, I’ve been able to fail forward. This was really brought into sharp relief, really brought into clear focus in the 16.
My wife, Michelle, and I where spending some down time at our home on the Oregon coast. We live in two different places. We have a farm up in Washington state. We have this wonderful house on the beach in Lincoln City, Oregon. We’ve enjoyed this place. We call it the great escape. We’ve been going there for many, many years. We built the house a long time ago.
Last summer or the summer of 2015, I was there at the beach house with Michelle and we were just really life enjoying our time and said, “Let’s just stay for as long as we want to stay.” Like is common these days, I was sharing little funny pictures and selfies and stuff on Facebook. I’ll tell you, the first two weeks, people were celebrating with us and, “That’s so cool. What a beautiful place. Enjoy your time at the beach.” That was the first two weeks.
Revelation At The Beach House: How in the world are you still there? How can you guys still be at the beach?
The second two weeks, people were getting curious. “You’re still there? I’m a little surprised you’re still there.” That was week three and four. This growing curiosity amongst our Facebook friends, our real life friends that were in the Portland area and other places. By week five and six, people were not just curious. They were sort of demanding answers. “How in the world are you still there? How can you guys still be at the beach?” It was fun for me.
I remember on one particular day, I’d gotten a series of interesting little comments to things on Facebook. I thought, “For all of my career I’ve been building businesses where I could leave them and go away from them and they would still operate.” That doesn’t mean retire and that doesn’t mean a four hour work week or whatever.
What it means is, over time, I thought that’s what everybody did and it’s why you started a business, was so that you could work hard, build it up and then once it was at a place of a certain level of organization, that there were processes in place, that you had great people in place, then you could leave. You could be gone for a day or a week or a year. It didn’t really matter. The business would work.
In that moment, I remember having a funny thought. I thought, “What is obvious to me is obviously not obvious to a bunch of other people out there in my Facebook family.” I put a post on Facebook and I said, “Hey guys. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I really appreciate all your comments. Would you like me to teach you a class on how to build a business that you can leave and go to your beach house for six weeks and it doesn’t hurt anything?”
I was overwhelmed with responses from people. As a matter of fact, over a thousand people, in one way, shape or form, reached out to me and said, “I want to know more about this.” Because of that, I ended up developing a class based on what I’ve done over my career. That’s a cool class. It’s called The Unshackled Owner Intensive. That’s not what I’m hear to talk about.
Revelation At The Beach House: How do you get unshackled from your business?
What I’m here to talk about is that as I go out and I speak about other topics … I’ve been public speaking for many years, most all of my career. As I go out and talk about things and I meet with business owners and when they say, “What are you working on?” I say, “The Unshackled Owner,” I get this look of both, this pinched look and then this feeling of, “Oh my gosh, that’s me. You’re talking to me.” They want to know, how do you get unshackled from your business?
As I’ve been out speaking on this topic, as I started doing the class … The first class started in April of 2016. I’m recording this early November 2016. For just a few months I’ve been doing this and we’ve had hundreds of people who’ve joined us in one of the several ways. It just keeps growing. I thought, “I’m going to start a podcast.” I have another podcast called The Lookout that has been going for a long time.
I thought, “I’m going to start a podcast on this topic and I’m going to start to share the ideas of how to become unshackled.” The little nitty gritty things, the little tiny tweaks that you need to know as a business owner to begin building a life and a business that works harder for you than you have to work for it.
Revelation At The Beach House: Your business should be working harder for you than you have to work for it.
Because see, when you get your business organized in such a way that it gives you leverage, it’s working harder for you than you have to work for it, you can lift a much heavier weight with the right lever. When you learn how to build that lever, when you learn how to follow the recipe that gives you this tool every single time, it doesn’t matter what industry, when you get that, it becomes like, I don’t know, like an ATM.
It starts to create businesses that just creates cash. As long as you stay in the position of the idea person, of the steward, of the leader, you will be blown away, blown away, by what you can build.
I know there’s a demand for this because so many people have been coming to me. I want to get out there in front of a bigger audience and start to teach these principles. If you’ll join me on this short podcast, my plan is to keep them to, when it’s just my own personal musings, we’ll keep them short. We’ll keep them 10 to 15 minutes. If I have a guest, we’ll keep it to about 30 minutes.
Let me tell you, when I bring on a guest, you’re going to love that guest. If you’re really building a business, I’m going to be introducing you to a lot of my friends. You will be surprised. You don’t know me but you’ll be excited by having access to the success formulas of some of my dear friends who have built brands that you know and that you love and that you’ve probably bought. National and international brands that are household names.
As I bring these people on and as we start to teach you these secrets that I’ve learned and that I’ve got friends who specialize in one thing to another that really can teach the value, you’re going to see your business speed up. That unknown path from where you are to where you want to be is going to start to become illuminated.
Revelation At The Beach House: The curve from where you are to where you want to be will get steeper and is everything will go faster.
The path will not only become clearer, it will become shorter. That curve of going from where you are to where you want to be is going to get steeper and everything is going to go faster. When you follow these true principles and then also follow the exact formula, you cannot help but have greater success.
Back to the story, the origin story. I’m at the beach house and I put out the Facebook thing. I get all these responses back from people. Something really interesting happened. I said, “Okay, I’m going to teach a class.” All these people said, “I want in. I want in.” Then I said, “Okay. Here’s what the class is going to cost.”
I’ll tell you what, people just fell off. The main thing they said they wanted to learn, they backed off. Now, hundreds of people jumped in. We’ve got several different ways you could do it. Hundreds of people jumped in. Whether it was inexpensive or slightly more expensive, let’s call it buying the seat in the auditorium to get the concert. Depending on how you want to engage, you could choose different ways.
Here’s the fun thing. The people that jumped in and decided to do it were all people that already had successful businesses. They were people that if you met them and if you hung out with them and you looked at their house or their car or the watch on their wrist or the vacation they go on or whatever, you’d go, “These guys are already successful.”
That was this wonderful revelation to me. People who are successful are constantly wanting to learn better ways to do things. The people that are already successful, they don’t have time to waste but they have time to invest and they have money to invest in themselves.
The people that were clamoring for education but then fell off were mostly the ones who were struggling to get a real foothold in their own life success. I thought, “I know this is true. I know that successful people tend to get more successful and dreamers continue to dream. People who are okay and they’re comfortable, they continue to drift.”
Revelation At The Beach House: Quit dreaming and start doing.
What I want to do with this new podcast, what I want to do … I hope I haven’t offended you by anything I’ve said. I’ll just tell you what. The reality is, most people that listen and they don’t like what I’m saying, they’re never going to listen again. That’s okay. They’re not ready to have the reality check that says, “Quit dreaming and start doing.”
You don’t have to know everything to do. You don’t have to have a perfect vision of every single step you’re going to take. What you do have to do is find the motivation, find the inspiration and find the mentorship that goes along with getting you off your butt and getting moving. 95% of success is just freaking taking action. That’s what I want this podcast to help people do.
If you feel shackled, whether you’ve got a big business, a medium sized business, a little tiny business, if you’re a solopreneur, if you’re working in a vacuum by yourself, I want this podcast to be an anchor for you. A place that you can come and get a little bit of inspiration, a little bit of motivation, a little bit of clarity.
If you’re a little bit bigger and you’ve got a team, I don’t care if it’s a virtual team, if they’re employees, if they’re contractors, if you’ve got five or six or ten people on payroll, whatever. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to start to show you the things that I’ve learned over 34 years and having hundreds and hundreds of employees over that time, how to get the best results out of your team, how to get the best results out of your meetings, how to figure out a way to measure things that really matter and not things that are just a waste of time.
What we want you to do is start to learn the success, not just principles, the success steps, the processes, the formulas. It’s simple steps that, when followed in sequence, will get you what you want. If you love the idea of getting what you want, if you love the idea of building a business that will give you the results that you always wanted, if you feel like you’ve been a hamster on a wheel and you run faster and faster but you don’t seem to make progress, then join the club of the majority of people out there.
Revelation At The Beach House: We will give you little ideas, little tweaks, little motivation, and an anchor.
Try to ask yourself, why do 80% of businesses fail? It’s because they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re doing something valuable, they’re doing something worthy, but they don’t know how to run a business. This Unshackled Owner podcast is designed specifically to give you little ideas, little tweaks, little motivation, and an anchor, a place to come home to a couple times a week to come and get some inspiration and get some education.
If you love that idea, I want you to go ahead and subscribe to this so we can push new episodes out to you. Some of these are going to be me talking to you about these principles and these steps. Others are going to be the interviews that we’ll do. No matter what, it’s going to valuable.
If you know what you need, if you’re feeling like, “What would really help me, Aaron, is if you could teach me a little bit more about this thing about sales, this thing about marketing, this thing about human resources, this thing about banking, this thing about raising money. I need to learn more about how to manage my people because I don’t know, I’m having an awkward time being an employer.”
Maybe you don’t feel worthy to be an employer. You know you need people but you feel awkward being the owner or the boss. Maybe you feel very comfortable being the owner or the boss but people keep quitting because you suck at being the owner or the boss.
I meet a lot of people who don’t know how to manage their team and don’t know how to get results from their team. What they end up feeling is just frustrated and tricked and they wasted money and all this stuff. Usually, it’s your fault. But I can show you how to avoid that problem. If you’re saying, “I need to know how to get my message out bigger to the world,” I’ll help with that.
I need to know the things that you want to hear about. As you listen to the podcast, as you decide you can trust me as a voice of someone who’s been down the road already, then I want you to write to me. You can write to support@AaronScottYoung.com. Send me an email and say, “This is what I want to learn about.” We will help.
Or, you can put comments down below and I’ll go back and read comments. If you ask me something specific and it’s legit and it’s actionable, I will make sure that I add that into my list of things that I’m going to cover. The podcast is for you. The Unshackled Owner is not just an idea. It can be a movement.
I see so many thousands, I personally have tens of thousands of clients that my companies serve right now. I see the desire and the need and the want for help and for some guidance. Because those little tiny tweaks will give you exponential growth in your business. That’s what Unshackled Owner podcast is all about. That’s what we’re going to be working on here. That’s what I’m excited to be teaching you.
Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening in on the very first episode. Revelation at the beach house, when it became clear to me, when it was obvious to me that it was not obvious to them what they needed to do to have that kind of business that could work without them. I tell you, that’s was the catalyst. That was the genesis moment that’s brought us together today.
Invite your friends to this if you have other business owner friends. Tell them about the podcast. Go ahead and make comments. Go over to the Facebook page at The Unshackled Owner and join us there. Let’s go ahead and get your business giving you the huge results, the huge benefits, that you always knew that that business could provide for you, for your family and for everything that matters in your life. Come back and let’s play together here at the Unshackled Owner.
