Chad Hufford's Formula to Wealth, Purpose, and Life Mastery

Never Been Promoted Podcast with Thomas Helfrich

In this episode, Chad Hufford uncovers  the intricate world of entrepreneurship and the critical importance of strategic wealth management. He brings a unique perspective from the cold terrains of Anchorage, Alaska, where he has not only mastered the art of financial planning but also learned to navigate the challenges of maintaining a balanced life amidst the harsh climate. His firm, Veritas Wealth Management, is renowned for its tailored approach in helping clients achieve financial security without compromising their life's purpose.


About Chad Hufford:

As the driving force behind Veritas Wealth Management, Chad Hufford has carved out a niche in the financial industry. Despite his initial reluctance to embrace the Alaskan cold, he has become a pivotal figure in retirement and legacy planning, ensuring that his clients not only sustain their wealth but also find meaningful ways to enjoy it post-retirement. His approach is not just about growing wealth but about enriching lives.

In this episode, Thomas and Chad discuss:

• Entrepreneurial Challenges: Insights into the hurdles of starting and sustaining a business, especially during economic downturns.
• Wealth Management Principles: Chad shares his approach to financial planning, emphasizing the importance of not just managing money but also ensuring a purposeful life post-retirement.
• Strategic Planning: The importance of long-term financial strategies that align with personal and professional goals.

Key Takeaways:

• Resilience in Entrepreneurship

The journey of an entrepreneur is fraught with challenges. Chad and Thomas discuss how resilience and strategic financial planning are crucial for sustained success.

• Holistic Wealth Management

Chad's philosophy goes beyond financial advice, integrating life planning to ensure his clients are prepared for the future, not just financially but with a fulfilling life purpose.

• Adaptability in Business

They explore how adapting business strategies to life's unpredictable nature is vital for both personal and professional growth.

"Success in entrepreneurship and wealth management is not just about accumulating assets but about creating a life of purpose and security." — Chad Hufford


CONNECT WITH CHAD HUFFORD:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-hufford-066208100/

Website: https://www.veritasalaska.com/

CONNECT WITH THOMAS:

X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/thelfrich | https://twitter.com/nevbeenpromoted 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hovienko | https://www.facebook.com/neverbeenpromoted 

Website: https://www.neverbeenpromoted.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neverbeenpromoted/

YouTube: h

Transcript

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Welcome to the Never Been Promoted podcast with Thomas Helfrich. Get ready for a thrilling adventure as we uncover entrepreneurial journeys and life changing business insights every week. And now, your host, Thomas.

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Welcome to the Never Been Promoted podcast. Hi, I'm Thomas Helfrich, your host. I appreciate listening in. You know, we're on a mission, a mission to help as many entrepreneurs in the world just get, get started, get unstuck, get better at entrepreneurship. And I believe doing this through some micro mentoring, through the, through the learnings of other entrepreneurs is a really great way to grab information and to move 1% forward, forward every day. So as you're listening to this today, look for key moments and aha. Moments or reflective moments and make you think about your own journey. Or if you're trying to get started, of how you can do that better. You know, this is your first time here. Thank you. And I hope it's the first of many. And if you've been here before, I really appreciate you coming back. It means a lot to me personally, and it tells me that maybe we're doing the right thing. So, you know, without further delay, let's meet our guest, Chad Hufford. Chad, you are the founder of Veritas. I keep saying it wrong with Veritas Wealth Management. If I butchered that, we're going to reshoot it. But I think I got that right.

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You got it. You nailed it.

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Thank you. So this is big for me because I've never talked to anyone ever from Alaska. And he is in Anchorage, Alaska, I believe so. Chad, why don't you take the floor, say hi and give your backstory a bit.

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Thomas, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited to have a fun conversation, but also to educate, hopefully encourage some of your audience. I am from Anchorage, Alaska, born and raised up here. Probably would not have chosen the state. I can't ski. I can't snowboard. I don't snow machine. I don't particularly like the cold and snow. But it's a beautiful place and it's what we call home. And I run Veritas Wealth Management. We're a kind of a boutique financial planning firm. Do mostly retirement planning and legacy planning. And I would say, in a nutshell, what we do is make sure people don't run out of money or purpose.

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And retirement, well, that's big money or purpose. We'll dive into both of those because the money part, I think lots of people do that. I've never heard of claim the purpose part. So I like that. Differentiators in business.

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Well, I got started in 2007. Impeccable timing. I was licensed weeks after the peak of the market as we slid into the biggest recession since the Great Depression. I had a baby on the way. I had a background in chemistry, trying to start a financial planning firm. It was an absolute nightmare and a mess. And I thought my job was make sure people didn't run out of money in retirement and to keep them on the path, to keep them persistent. And I was so focused on the money, what I realized, there was a lot of people that were very clear about what they were retiring from, but not what they were retiring to. And the types of people that are listening to this show, the types of people that I work with, they have more drive, more ambition. They're the worst types of people to retire, sell a business and have nothing to do. And they're sitting there doing crossword puzzles and playing bingo all day. Like, it's just. It's not a good fit for them. So people have to have purposeful pursuit. They have to have something to chase after. And if we don't give them something meaningful to chase after, too often, they end up chasing the wrong things.

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Yeah. And I see this in my parents and other parents that are getting seventies, and they're. And they're retired and they haven't kept their health and they didn't have hobbies, and I'll tell you, so just personally. Right, right. So I stopped drinking August of 2023, not because I went to a meeting, just gives a choice. I was like, you know what? And the choice was around. I think the last ten years of my life are going to be a lot better. And what I meant was, if I could do that now and kind of take care of my health a little bit better and start chipping away at some things, what you describe, I'll have more purpose to go play golf, go fishing, to play with grandkids, have more energy, have less health issues, and live a little longer and enjoy it a lot more. It's just a theory, but all the science and data support it, so it's a good theory. I think it'll actually, from your perspective, it'll save me money because I should have less medical bills.

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Well, and that's the thing, too, is way too often we see people trading health and relationships to build wealth over their thirties, forties, fifties, and then they get to be 60, 70 years old, and then they end up spending their wealth to try to buy back relationships and health. And it just doesn't work. So I think it's so important to build those things together and not sacrificing too much in one area to build another area, because I think health and. And wealth are very much tied together. It's really hard to have a great relationship with your physical health and have a dumpster fire of a financial situation because that stress will eventually eat away at your physical health and vice versa.

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I have a chapter in my book that's called Health is your wealth. And I don't know who the quote is, but it's on an attribute. I cannot find the person to attribute the quote, but the quote is, the man with his health has a thousand to dream. The man without has only but one. And it is so true. If you've ever, like, injured an ankle, even, you're like, oh, man, I really want this to heal. And, like, you're not thinking about anything else but that ankle. Or if you get a scare of an EKG, you're like, I really hope I don't have heart disease. Or, like, that's a real thing that you want to avoid, is that loss of all your dreams to keep your health well.

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And just to that, you and I are old enough to remember this thing called Kodak. Remember when we actually made phone calls on a phone and we had to take pictures separately on a camera, and you pull out your film, you'd rewind it, you'd send it in, and, like, months later, you get the pictures back and half of them were garbage, and you threw them away. Anyways, George Eastman founded Kodak, and at one point, Kodak was one of the most profitable, one of the largest companies in the world. He was one of the richest people in the United States. A lot of people don't realize this, but George Eastman committed suicide in his seventies because he had a debilitating back condition. So the guy had more money than he knew what to do with, but he couldn't buy back health and ended up taking his own life. And I know this is not a fun conversation, maybe right now, but I think it's a good thing for people to realize that. Yeah. There's no amount of wealth worth trading away your help for.

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Yeah. And listen, and, you know, I have fun conversations. We're going to. I think that idea is important because you're talking about wealth management. So from an entrepreneurial standpoint, as I've built this, I haven't been saving. I've been putting money into my company with the idea that I have a payoff. So I have a potential really big risk gap from a wealth management piece. I've got to do everything else I can around it to kind of balance the life, because if I'm making that bet, this is the entrepreneurial path. You may not realize it when you're younger, but you're missing your 401 ks and you're missing all the other things because you're investing back in yourself. That's an okay thing and that's a really good thing because you're going to be fulfilled. But I think understanding that on this path, you have to take care of yourself, your friendships, your relationships with those you love. I've struggled with all those things. And like I said when I had this book written, it's a vulnerability that I've written about starting a business. All the neglect you do, your mind's not with your kids when you're hanging out. You're on your phone, too. All the things that take over your life are part of this thing that, what I would call how you actually get to the point, retiring wealth. And so we can dive into that. But I think it's very relevant. But I wanted to back up off camera, you'd say that, you know, you're, you got a good backstory. You said you're born in Alaska. You never escaped. I don't know if there's like an, you know, is it, is it state required that you stay there or do you have just, you just chose to stay in Alaska?

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Well, my dog sled team, they got sick and it's just a long walk on the way out here. So, you know. No, we do travel a lot. The winters here in Anchorage, they're not super harsh, but they are very long. So there's places in New York, especially like buffalo, places in Minnesota and even like Chicago where you get those cold winds coming off. Like, there's, there's a lot of places the United States have harsher weather, but it just lasts a long time here. So we get out a lot. We like Hawaii. We like Arizona. We're actually going to Arizona here in a couple weeks.

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Completely different than Hawaii or, and then alaska. Like, it's dry here. It's cold, it's warm. It's cool in the evenings, but you guys are in shorts anyway. You don't care.

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My, my kids are, man, my, my 13 year old kid wears shorts year round. And I mean, it'd be like, when it gets really cold, it might be, you know, 00:10 below, it doesn't last very long. But I'm like, buddy, do you understand what's going on here? Do you understand temperature? But anyway, no, we, we love alaska. There are challenges. Absolutely. We planned on moving maybe 15 years ago, and it never happened. We're still here, and we do like to travel, but I think alaska will always be home.

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Yeah, that's great. So tell me about your story a little bit. So you said you're from six kids. I know it's off air a little bit, but tell me about your little backstory and lead it up to where. Why you pick chemistry, biology, the sciences, and why you're like, yeah, no, and I'm going to do this. What was the. So give me a little backstory to that and then get me there.

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So I was homeschooled in the eighties, and if you know anybody, Thomas is homeschooled in the eighties. You know, only the coolest kids were allowed to be homeschooled. There's a reason we had a stigma and stereotypes. Stereotypes typically exist because of evidence. If you've ever had to interrupt your spelling test because your sibling was grinding wheat berries to make bread, then you understand what homeschooling in the eighties was like. It was that bad. So grew up. There was five of us kids in Anchorage, Alaska, grew up on the side of a mountain, bears, lynx, moose coming through our yard again, hitting all the stereotypes. We didn't have an igloo, but you can't get them all. I was really interested in medicine, though, and physiology and biochemistry. So I got my degree in biochemistry on a medicine track, and I was building up my resume. I had, I was getting really nice letters of recommendation from medical school professors to send to other medical schools. And I just, everything was clicking. And then I met the woman who is now my wife and the mother of my six children, and she did not have the same background that I did. And I realized what she was looking for was stability. She wanted a husband. She wanted to raise a family. She wanted kids. She did not want a hotshot surgeon. And I had to think really long and hard about what my life goals were. What I really wanted, Thomas, was I wanted to own a business. I did not want a business that owned me. And I had some really good friends. Friends. They're still with me to this day, who were surgeons at the time of established surgeons who really warned me. They're like, chad, I know how you're wired. You're going to struggle with balance. You're going to struggle with being an excellent father and husband and an excellent surgeon. You talked about this idea of the trade offs. You have to make when starting a business. But in medicine, sometimes it's hard to ever regain those trade offs. And yeah, you pay your dues at the beginning, but, I mean, I know people 2030 years into the business that still work crazy hours, have very little autonomy. They make great money, but their family suffers because of it. And that's ultimately why I chose to make a switch and go into the financial field. And it gave me more flexibility and autonomy over my time. It's not that we didn't have to work hard, not we didn't have to sacrifice, but I have a business that I own instead of having a job that owns me.

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Yeah, listen, anybody thinking about starting a marketing agency, it's going to own you for a while, at least, unless you get some good processes. That's my autobiograph out. A surgeon, 100%. I mean, I look at some, like, the lifestyles of lawyers and doctors, and everything's for hours. Trade effectively, right? And if you know they're there a lot, and that becomes a really wealthy business. But you will trade, you know, every. Everything you do has a pound of flesh attached to it. You'll pay it. You'll pay it through not getting your workout, you'll get it paying through less vacations, through less time to see your kids concerts, or less money, because. Or less relationships or whatever it'll be. You know, you can't believe that kind of social media image you see sometimes of ultra success, because they have given up something to get there. And just know that you're going, if you go into it knowing that entrepreneurs, and if you're there, you already know it. But just pick your poison on what you're going to give up and why. And for example, I gave up the drinkings. I feel like, you know what? That's what I can give up that I get a bunch of time back with and no one loses in that equation ever actually win all around, if. So, if you can find little things like that, hey, if I go to bed, if I give up a little more netflix, I get a little more sleep. Allows me to get up a little early to get a little more stuff done or write a book. That's what I did. And so you give up maybe things that you should. That you should trade off for the better, that are wasted time versus really good investments in people or yourself. I. I mean, what do you think?

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No, you're absolutely right. I was down at an event with Ed Milet at his house was about a year and a half ago in Palm Desert. And one of the things he said really struck me. He said, you have to know your non negotiables. What are the elements, the areas, your life that you were absolutely not willing to give up or sacrifice. Because when you run a business, all of those things will be tested. You will be tempted to compromise every area of your life when you're trying to run a business, grow a business. So going into it, knowing, here's what I'm willing to compromise, here's what I'm willing to give up, here's I'm willing to sacrifice. But these are my non negotiables over here and I will not compromise on these super vital, because this is a marathon and it isn't about doing the perfect thing. It's about sustainability. It's persistence. I believe you did run a marathon at one point.

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I have ran a marathon. I am not a marathon runner.

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And I have, I would love to.

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Run another, but everything hurts waist down now. So I'm like, yeah, I think I'll not do that anymore.

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I don't even like driving 26 miles. Like, that's boring. Like, I could not imagine running it. But being an entrepreneur, it is a marathon journey and it's about endurance and being able to stay consistent rather than about what you do any one day. So I think having that balance of your, of what you can sacrifice and what your non negotiables are extremely important.

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You know, and I haven't done that. So I think in my head I have them, but I think writing them down and, you know, think of atomic habits, verbalizing them and saying, hey, I'm going to be doing this this morning. And I give you a really, you know, I have not done that with, I just literally had this conversation not even 2 hours ago with my wife. I mean, no question. I said I can't, I said, I'm really struggling. And we're trying to work on like, vulnerability and talking and communicating, right? So if you guys get cringed out, well, you need to work on it, probably. Because the truth is, I said I'm really struggling. I said I have the instantly relevant, the marketing and I'm trying to, I feel like I cannot let the gas pedal up. I feel like, you know, I'm in that phase where we're doing really well and I want to have more life balance, but I feel like because I'm founder led sales, if I give up four meetings a day to go work out, I'm giving up. Maybe, you know, what is that? 16 opportunities a week times four? That's a lot, right? I can't do the math that fast, but I think it's like 64 maybe. I don't know. It's a lot. And the point being is, so I can't fit that in because I also have this other thing called never been promoted now that does eight 1 hour podcast a week, plus all the post and pre production I got to go jump in on. And so I go, I don't know how I can let the pedal up because I can't let this momentum die because it gets us where we need to go. But then I was like, you know what? I wrote a chapter on this, and I went today after I dropped a kid off at school, like, you know, this is a perfect time. This is before my day gets going. I got energy, I'm pumped. I'm gonna get in the gym, I'm gonna make it where I drop them off, and I'm just gonna protect the hell out of my morning, and so be it. And I've decided this morning I'm just gonna do it as much as I can. And the reason is because that became a non negotiable to me for a long time. It wasn't for a couple of years. And I think entrepreneurs, not to get off this monologue, you have to create these. And I want to tie it back to some things. You do that also, besides the non negotiables, tell me, in your world of planning for financial management, what the non negotiables are as you're going through maybe that entrepreneurial journey. So leave out some of the health and the wealth things that we're doing. Health is your wealth things. But from the finance standpoint, how do you prepare for a retirement? You're struggling just to keep your company going. So what do you do for that?

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That is a very tough balancing aspect. And it was very hard for me from this idea of cognitive dissonance as well, because I was talking to people when I started this about maxing out their 401K, funding, their Roth iras, and I wasn't doing that myself because I was putting everything back into the business. And as an entrepreneur, building wealth and financial independence looks a little bit different because. Because when you work for a company and you leave that company, they don't buy you out, you just leave. And you might get a severance check or something like that. But when you build up a company that has market value, when you walk away, there should be a payday. But we also, I think, have to build elements of wealth outside that. Because when you own a business and if you have and you have wealth outside, it gives you so much more flexibility about the timing and how you walk away where you don't necessarily need to divest yourself of that business. You don't need to sell it. You don't need to have somebody else take it over in order for you to have that financial independence. You have wealth and income streams outside of the business that can support that. So whether you're grooming somebody to come in and take that over, maybe it's a family member, it's a slower trade off, or you're just not willing to give it up completely. You maybe want to be outside the day to day, but you don't want to completely sell it and release it. You have wealth, you have other income producing elements outside of that business. It's much easier to do that. So knowing what that balance is and creating that is super important, I think, Thomas, to do that, you have to reverse engineer it. You have to look 10, 15, 20 years down the road, say, what do I want my life to look like? What do I need to do today to get myself in alignment with that 100%?

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So, you know, autobiography a little bit here. But the reason I started instantly relevant was to make money because I saw a gap in the market of marketing and things like that. Right. And how you use AI and how you do with social media. And I understood the algorithm, so I built something I knew I could build revenue on. I also knew that was going to be a job because they're going to build from, from my gusto, from my perspective. And so there's work to be done to automate some things there and get out of that day to day, but Never Been Promoted, really, for me was about, let's fast forward ten years. I'm 48, I'm going to be 58. My kids are going to be now all hopefully in college or some version of that. Do I want to be doing exactly what I'm doing right now? I was like, hell, no. It's exhausting. How do I build something that I can hand out or sell and, or if we've Never Been Promoted, how can I build? At least it's around me initially, but how can I collaborate and bring more people in for this mission where I just own the channel and the platform and I'm bringing in the right people to kind of enable the vision and the mission. So my idea is to exit out of the guy with the tie later or just have different my ideas, like bring a female host in that does Latin America, and she has a pink tie. And the point is to come in with different characters that are on the same brand. And then that way, I can exit as I get wrinkly and old and no one wants to see me online anymore. Right. And that is. You're right. There's a 15 year of, like, I'm not sure how that's gonna happen, but I'm hit. My ship is. It is sinning that way. There's a beacon of light I'm chasing on that one because I don't know. I just know I don't want to go that way. I don't stay on the shore.

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Well, and that's what's hard, I think, for a lot of entrepreneurs, is sometimes you're just trying to get through the day. You're just trying to make payroll on Tuesday. To think about 10, 15, 20 years in the future, that's very, very difficult. And we don't need to get it perfect. I mean, this is. This is iterations, and you can evolve the path as you go. The objective might move, it might change, and then you just recalibrate. We do the exact same thing with financial planning. What do you want your life to look like? If you retired tomorrow? What would you be doing different? You know? But these specific goals and the income targets that we have, they change and evolve through time. Your business plan does as well, but you want to make sure you're proactively acting on a strategy so you're not reacting to this crazy world around us. And I think having that long term vision is really critical for that.

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You said a key thing. If you're constantly in the how do I make payroll Tuesday? Mode, you're never going to get out of it.

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Yes.

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Ever. Until you think of a way to get out of it or get a second line of income coming in. But even then, you got to think outside of that business. Now, there'll be times that, like, you know, during this time of year, whatever, it's. It's a stretch. But when you get the free moments, you got to put the horsepower into it 100%. Did you? What do you think? You know, I think you come from, like, the Dave Ramsey world. So was that like, how you got trained up? I want to kind of pivot the conversation a little. How you kind of got started, found the resources, and developed yourself to become your own vision of yourself.

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No. Dave Ramsey came along during that journey. I wish I would have connected with them sooner. I was actually really turned off by celebrities in the financial world because a lot of them weren't giving great advice. It maybe sounded good or they were selling some other product, but I kind of came to Dave Ramsey kicking and screaming a little bit until I really sat and listened to him. And I thought, this is what I've seen working my entire life, and they're basic principles, but a lot of times we have a tendency to overcomplicate things, and I think sometimes we use complexity to distance ourselves from the responsibility of acting. And what Dave Ramsey did is he just. He creates some very simple, straightforward processes around difficult things. And I was like, I love this. This is perfect. This is what works. So it's been a great partnership. I think it's about ten years that our organization has been partnering with his. I was just down there in Nashville with him a couple months ago, and, yeah, like I said, I wish we would have crossed paths sooner, but I'm glad we did when we did.

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Yeah, well, and your lesson there was a little bit, and if I'm wrong on it, but you had a preconceived notion. So one of the ideas of cut the tie is cut the tie. What you know, and be an open cup. Like what? You know, the excuses you make, the roadblocks you create for yourself, the things that hold you back. And that was something that was holding you back was a preconceived notion of what it should be. Right. Because you had astigmatism of celebrity, but when you got into it, you're like, huh? All right. And some people don't ever make that transition, and they get stuck in whatever they get stuck in because they can't. But that's a big one that you had that you got through it. And there's. People repeat that in smaller stereotypes all over time. So I think the fact that you were open cup with it, open minded, you know, all right, he's here for a reason. This guy's gonna. Can't be completely full of it. And then you kind of, you know, fell into the. To the, you know, or were guided into it. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a careful way to approach it. But you came in with some open. Is that fair? Like, you came in with an open cup to some degree, yeah, it opened up for you. Did someone turn the cup open for you?

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Somebody did.

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There was.

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There was a mutual colleague who kind of kept pressing on that. But I think some of that goes back to that biochemistry, the open mindedness of, okay, we're going to try this. We experiment with this and just see what happens. But what I loved about Dave Ramsey is the repeatability of his processes. You can duplicate that. And there's a lot of people out there who got wealthy, but they're, they're one off stories. Or you have a lot of people out there that are broke giving advice on how to be wealthy because they're just kind of fake until you make it. You have that side too. But when we founded Veritas, when I founded Veritas, it was very much looking at tried and true repeatable process. We wanted things that almost anybody could do to build long term sustainable wealth. And Dave Ramsey has been doing that on his side, too. It doesn't matter if you're a plumber, a welder, a doctor, an entrepreneur. These principles simply work. They work across the board and they've worked for a very long time because ultimately these principles are coming out of proverbs. They're 4000 years old in the Bible and, and they've, they work for King Solomon, they work for Dave Ramsey. They'll work for you too.

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Yeah. So you're not saying throw it all in crypto and spray and pray it. Let's see if we can do. Get some meme meme tokens. That's not a good.

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Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it. Wouldn't recommend.

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I did, I did. I will tell you, I am a fan of bitcoin. I think the math. And once people get their head out of how it works, 20 years. So I said to myself, you know what? We're going to take, you know, 510 percent of what we make here in the company and just dollar cost, average buy and forget. Buy and forget bitcoin. Just, just bitcoin. Because it's the standard and it will be for some time. And I was like, ah, no, no. And I look at today and it's like $70,000 bitcoin. I'm like, God damn it. Dollar cost, average people, I'm saying, go bitcoin, go big. Don't listen to the guy, Chad. He doesn't know what he's talking about. I'm just kidding. But actually, let me ask you. So you get these emerging ideas and no one knew, let's say, that Amazon was gonna be what it was gonna be. And so people are like, I don't wanna spend that on a stock. And $10,000 or $1,000 of stock on Amazon, it came out, it's worth a lot. Now it's like a million or it's some crazy number. How do you know when to kind of put a little risk out there on something that. How do you guys think about it? I'm not saying to give any recommendations as much as just how do you think about when this seems to be a trend. What's your ideas on that, if you're allowed to give that advice?

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But just, yeah, I'll just say diversification is extremely important because it's very easy to have too much betting on too little. And when I talk about diversification, here's the simplest way to describe it, is diversification is not having enough money in any one thing, any one idea to make a killing. That also means you don't have enough money, any one thing to get killed by it. It's building wealth slow and steady. It's not trying to get rich quick. So that, I think, is a key mindset to have. But around that, let's go back to the nineties and when Amazon and some of these other companies were coming out, you've got Internet commerce starting to change. The way people bought and sold, that was a trend. I think we can both agree that that trend became the norm. Fair enough. So people talk about these companies, maybe it could be AI, maybe it could be crypto, like, oh, these are pioneers. It's a new direction. Even if you get the new trend in the new direction, right, you have to remember that the pioneers also take a lot of the arrows. So a lot of times it's the companies that come behind that learn from the mistakes of those initial pioneers, because most of those companies that started in the e commerce business in the nineties don't exist anymore. So how do you separate the Amazon from the pets.com and the AOL and fraud? You can't, I mean, when was the last time you checked your MySpace? But MySpace, Facebook, you know, MySpace and Facebook were right there.

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So Facebook was the second that improved on what mattered. On MySpace, it's the second one to market. Can do it a little more efficient, for sure. But that's the idea is like, take a slow back. That's, I want to put money in something, but what's the right one? Who's the right funding? Who's the right bank behind it? Like that's how you're thinking about it is don't, don't go quick rich. Just let's figure the one that seems to have the right mechanics and it.

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Goes back to repeatable. Like what we're not so worried about what is going to work next as much as using what's always worked. And it just goes back to reverse engineering long term goals. Investments are a tool. That's all it is. A lot of people select their investing tools and then try to figure out what they're trying to build with it. We need to figure out what we're trying to build and then go select the right tools. And it's no different than building your business. A lot of times we adopt tools and tactics because they're cool, and then we try to figure out how to fit those into our business plan, rather than looking at our business plan and saying, what are the tools and tactics that fit what I'm trying to create.

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I think you hit something really important there. You're using some processes, repeatability to execute. So you can, you know, once you do that, you can adjust a strategy a lot easier. When you're building your business as an entrepreneur in any way, the more times you can repeat any process, good or bad, it allows you to correct it. And so extrapolating, like, don't just, you know, you know how many times you do that, right? You. You preach one thing and you go home and you completely don't do the same thing you just told someone else to do. And I'm losing an example, but I know I do it all the time where I'm like, don't do this, don't do that. I come home and do exact same. It's like, so follow a process in your business. And then when you go to your wealth management, you're saying, don't just guess at it. Like, follow a process or find somebody who knows one.

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Yeah. You would not want to live in a house that was built without a blueprint, and you wouldn't want to operate a business or have a financial future. It was built without a blueprint as well. And what a blueprint does when you're building a house is it attaches your long term goal with your current actions. And that's what blueprint should. That's what, that's what a financial plan does. That's what a business plan does. It attaches your current actions with a future goal and a desired outcome, I think is vitally important. And I just want to touch on something you just said. I'm going to give you a buzz. We're going to make this famous. Thomas, intellectual obesity. When you take in information, but don't execute on it, just like, if we're sitting here eating a bunch of calories, not doing anything with it, we get obese, we're taking in energy and not expending it. And I think too often, entrepreneurs, people in general, but entrepreneurs, we study and we plan. All those things are important, but at some point, we need action, we need to execute. And if we're not careful, we just paralysis by analysis, whatever you call it, we take in, but we don't do what we know. And that's intellectual obesity. It's not executing on what we know, because this world doesn't pay you for what you know, it pays you for what you do with what you know.

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Yeah, I think that's the title of the show. Intellectual obesity. How to get fatter. No. Did you guys hear this? If you're out there, he just called me fat. He saw the calories I was eating before on camera, and he's like, this guy's a lord ass. I'm just kidding. Just on the show, actually. I always want to give you an opportunity, like, and don't run away. If you've made it this far, listen. How to get ahold of them and who should get a hold of you?

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Well, anybody that wants to clarify their path going forward from a financial standpoint, that wants to go from merely collecting investments to building strategically based on a desired outcome, and people that are willing to do the hard things today to be where others probably won't be able to be in the future.

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Do they get ahold of you on your website or what's the. What's the best method?

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Veritas Alaska is our website. Easiest way to get a hold of me. And don't let the name fool you. We got people spread all over the United States, but founded here in Alaska and has some cachet to it. So. veritasalaska.com.

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Awesome. And that was actually one of the questions you don't because of, and I'm not familiar with all the regulations. You can work in any state.

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We have people spread all over because as you can imagine, when you're retired and you have a six month long winter, maybe that's not where you want to stay. So we have folks that retire. They snowbird. We have a ton of people in Arizona, but Florida seems to be a popular place recently. All over.

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Yeah. And that's good to know because I believe you should find the best professionals to work with, no matter where they live. So, I mean, like, I have my teams in Philippines and other parts of the world. I could go anywhere for that. I just found the same kind of ideas. When you're working with someone to do something, that is your goal. You find the best people, not just always the people that are down the street from you, because it's not always the. That's a. That's more of a control thing. I feel secure with that versus, you know, become that open cuff. Don't get your intextual obesity to think that you can't work somebody that's remotely from you.

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Well, I'll just tell you, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, here's two things that I was looking for in building a business. I want to be able to make money while I was sleeping. I wanted to get paid even when I wasn't in the office, and I wanted to be able to work from anywhere. And as a surgeon, we haven't figured out how to do that yet, how to get paid while you're sleeping, because if you're sleeping doing surgery, the medical associations tend to not like that. And we haven't figured out how to do surgery on Zoom yet. So I wanted a business where I could get paid while I was sleeping and work from anywhere. And the technology has supported. Supported that and blessed to be able to say that that's what's happened.

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Well, and also, you know, you won't be able to get paid while you're drinking, and you certainly can't do that as a surgeon as well.

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But we're not doing that anymore, right? We're not doing the drinking anymore.

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I just can't say alcohol, just water.

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I mean, okay, you can't even do.

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That while you're in a surgeon. You can't, like, have a glass of water. They don't do that. They sometimes got to bring you a little water bottle, and you got to turn your head. I don't know how they drink, actually. It's a mystery, but we're not going to solve that today. What's one question I should have asked you that I didn't?

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Well, one of the things that we talked about offline was this idea of experiencing failure as an experiment. And just real quick on that, my biochemistry background gave me this mindset towards failure and setbacks in business, where I wasn't so tied to the outcome as much as I was learning to look at the lesson in the experience. So failure is not failure if you're able to learn from the experience. And entrepreneurial journeys are often one failure after another. So, Dave Ramsey says the only difference between success and failure is, are you buried underneath your pile of failures? Are you standing on top of them? And failure is inevitable when you're running a business. It's micro failures. Sometimes it's macro failures. But learning to view those as an experiment and how you can learn from it was a life changing lesson for me?

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Yeah. And you want to get into that a little deeper, like an example where you, like. Like a moment of this is not going to own me.

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Sure. So 2008, 2009 was almost literally jumping out of the bushes at people and saying, thomas, you've never met me. You don't know me. You have a background in biochemistry. I'm doing finance right now. Don't worry about that. How would you like to turn your family's entire life savings to a stranger to help you plan for the future? That conversation didn't go very well. A lot of no's, a lot of rejections every now and then, you know, I hope your cat dies and never call me again. You know, whatever. But I didn't even have a cat, and they were hoping it would die. I'm like, man, that's really harsh. But I had to change that and not personalize that rejection, that experience of failure. And even now, I still try to keep that prospecting muscle strong. We get a lot of referrals. It looks a lot different. But to be able to put myself in front of somebody and say, I've heard your story. This is what I have to offer. I think it could change your life. Then let the chips fall where they may, and learning from those experiences to get better, but most of all, just to build that resilience. So when you hear the no, when the outcome isn't what you hope, it doesn't crush you, and it doesn't reduce your enthusiasm to go out and do it again the next day or the next moment.

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Tell me about the first time you landed a customer you didn't know. Like, I mean, like, was not referred. It was like, cold. Like you sold this person. Like, you. You did it.

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You cracked through.

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What was the. What was the. Do you remember the first one?

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I remember one of the most memorable ones was February 14, Valentine's Day up in North Pole, Alaska. It's a real place that actually exists. North Pole, Alaska. It was 2009. It was three weeks away from the very bottom of that market crash. Nobody was trusting anybody. And I remember sitting down with this couple that have got. That was going through some pretty extreme tragedy in their life. They had lost a family member. Their house had flooded because of a boiler that had rusted out anyways. And I just remember them finally agreeing like, we're going to do this. We're going to move forward. And they displayed some of the most courage I've ever seen. And they wrote a check for $300,000, which is the largest account I had at that point. But they wrote a check for it. They went from cash, which is where everybody wanted to be in 2009, and they put it almost entirely into growth stock, mutual funds, and, and they did a very hard thing at almost a perfect time. But at the moment it looked like the stupidest thing that somebody could do. And I just remember missing my flight to get back to Anchorage, calling my wife and saying, I'm going to miss Valentine's Day with you. But knowing that I was going to be able to change that family's trajectory, and it felt incredible.

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That's a million and a half dollar turnaround.

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And I had to talk it down. I had to talk him down and saying, I'm not a genius. I'm not some savant. You did the right thing at a very difficult time, and now you're being rewarded for it. And I was just talking with this guy just a couple weeks ago about that moment. And we've had a tremendous relationship. We've become really good friends. But I just remember sitting in the airport after missing my flight and just feeling so, so elated that I had the opportunity to be there. And I really, I knew at that moment that was going to change this family's life, that was going to change not just their financial trajectory, but it's going to change so many things about how they experience freedom and flexibility. And that was fuel for me. It still is. I still remind myself of that moment.

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That's great. That's awesome. That's great. And I think you touched on something from, I don't call it luck, but you had enough no's in front of that. And it's the right moment, the right time, and that's how it happens sometimes. You just get the right meaning when all of it's going to shit. And this doesn't have to be in finances, like anything, you get the right meaning in the right time. And if you kept the right process to say, I'm going to keep doing this, I know the value is there. You refine maybe your pitch or your, your value proposition, whatever it is, and it hits. You feel so validated. Is that how you felt at the time? Like, just.

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Absolutely.

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Was that the right emotion?

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Yeah, validated. And it reminded me that if I keep showing up, doing the right thing, doing the right thing at the right place, eventually it'll be the right time and with the right person. But it's just, you know, to use a baseball analogy, you just gotta keep stepping up to the, eventually you get your pitch.

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You do need to practice and batting and you know, time, fitness. But there's some things you need to do. So when you get your shot, you're giving yourself the best shot at that time to hit, hit it single, get on base, whatever it is. Right? And that's a good metaphor and analogy for it. And I think that the idea, though, behind that is it's. It's one of the addictive pieces of entrepreneurship is validation. And when you feel it and you get it, it really, that's like the energy you get from that. And then when it comes back and when they're like, that person refers someone to you and you get. And then you're like, oh, man, it's so much easier than cold calling. And that's where you become, that's, that's how the name instantly relevant got born. It's like, that's when some, a business, a company, or customer refers another customer to you. You are incredibly relevant, very fast to that other person. I love it. And so if you've got the processes in place, you should be able to capitalize on that very quickly, and I love that. So, listen, chase that validation feel and know that if you entrepreneurs out there, if you're getting rejected, you're just frustrated. Keep going, keep, keep learning, keep trying to just make micro adjustments till you get it right, till you find it, and then find out and really examine what. So I play chess. I look at none of the games I win and all the ones I lose, and I look like, what could I have done in that moment? So that, so the next time, that moment or something like, comes up, I can make a better move, better decision, I would tell you to do the same. A cool thing to do, here's a takeaway is record them. If you're allowed to record the conversations, upload them to GPT and ask it. What could I have done better to build? If you think you need to build rapport or listen to the questions, did I miss a question? I should have asked? This is a fantastic use of GPT to look at your interactions, just to get better, to drive a better meeting. I do this with the podcasts. If you look into our first podcast, they're not the same as the current one. I'm doing the same thing right now myself as I upload them and say, hey, what could I have learned? What kind of questions should I have asked? How could I made it easier for the guests to share, do the same thing? So it's a good trick with AI. So I'll leave you with that. Once again, how should people get, ahold, of you and who should get ahold of you? Let's get niched. Who's the ideal person that should get ahold of you, and how should they do that?

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The ideal person is somebody who's been diligently, maybe even relentlessly, saving for their future. But they want to be more intentional about it. They want to go from a good plan to a great plan. Or maybe they want to go from saving to strategically investing, having more purpose and intentionality behind it, and somebody who's willing to make the sacrifices today to have a better future tomorrow.

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And they go to fair. Alaska.com.

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Veritas. Alaska.com.

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Right. And is it like, I mean, ideally, is it like the 40 year old that's about to the prime of their thing? Is it fit? Is it any age group? Or what's the kind of area that really, really, you kind of ring with 50 to 65?

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The people who are either on the cusp of retirement or kind of hit that red zone the last few working years where they're probably making about as much money as they ever have, but they cannot afford to have any inefficiencies lose any more time. They've got to get their, their financial strategy dialed in because retirement's coming up quickly.

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I feel that. And I'm, like, not prepared. It's like, kids, enjoy the house. We're selling it. That's our current plan. We're going to sell this boat anchor. It's going to be great. All right, Chad, you rock, man. Thank you so much for coming on today, man.

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It's been a pleasure. It's been a fun conversation. I've learned a lot. That chat GPT thing was phenomenal. Didn't know chat GPT could do that.

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Oh, it's. Yeah, I should probably do a YouTube channel on this.

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No, that's. That's excellent. But anyways, I. This has been a pleasure, been a fun conversation, and it's an honor to share some of my experience with your audience.

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Thank you for being here. And if you guys are still here with us, thank you as well. I wore dad points randomly. You get some, you know, Chad gets a few. And if you're a dad, you know, or you're a kid who's received them, you know, there's nowhere to spend them. It's just like a thank you. My kids have billions of them. They can't figure out where to spill them. Chad gets a couple hundred today. I'm just gonna. He did a great job. He can invest those in a mutual fund. I mean, he can do whatever he wants with them. Those are his points. If this was your first time, I do hope you come back. If this is a time you've been here before, you rock. And bonus, 50 points for you. Thank you for coming. Until we meet again, this is Thomas Helfrich, your host of here, the Never Been Promoted podcast and YouTube channel. Get out there. Go unleash your entrepreneur. Thanks for listening.

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Thanks for listening to Never Been Promoted with Thomas Helfrich. Make sure to check the show notes for our guest contact information and any relevant links. Connect with Thomas personally at neverbeenpromoted.com.