Separation Saturdays on Elevate Springfield

Summary

In this episode, Robert provides a comprehensive overview of financial strategies aimed at enhancing income and managing expenses from Cardone University's Building Blocks of Money. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on income generation, implementing effective saving strategies, utilizing financial tools wisely, and cultivating a positive mindset towards money. The discussion is structured around twelve key building blocks that guide listeners in improving their financial health and achieving greater wealth.

Takeaways

• Income is king; focus on generating revenue.
• You can't save your way out of a revenue problem.
• The 40% rule forces you to increase your income.
• Money loves attention; track your finances regularly.
• Price is not the problem; income is the issue.
• Worry indicates a lack of planning or knowledge.
• Stay broke by moving excess funds out of reach.
• Debt should be used for production, not consumption.
• Hold regular money meetings to stay informed.
• Shift your mindset to see abundance, not scarcity.

Join The Elevate Insider:

https://bigdogbc.com/elevate

Facebook:  @robertferriell   @elevatespringfield

Youtube: @robertferriell

10X Health:  https://10xhealthnetwork.com/BIGDOG

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Elevate Springfield, where we will dive into strategies and stories that help you rise to your full potential. Each episode, we'll talk about how you can take intentional steps to elevate your life and your business while making a meaningful impact on those around you. Along the way, we're gonna bring in the change makers from our community that are already elevating. We'll bring the actionable strategies, you bring the discipline and follow through, and together, we can elevate Springfield. Alright, let's go, Springfield. Time to 10X your day, 10X your life and all of us. 10X Springfield, hey, you are listening to the Elevate Springfield podcast. Robert Farrell here, certified 10X coach, speaker, and mentor, here to bring you actionable strategies. You bring the discipline and follow through. And together, we're in Elevate Springfield. We are coming to you from the big dog construction studio in beautiful downtown Springfield. You are listening to Separation Saturdays on Elevate Springfield where you can separate yourself from the competition every Saturday morning now. We are every day with Elevate Springfield now, so you can start your morning every morning with a new drop from Elevate Springfield, and we are looking forward to having you. And we are thankful that you chose to listen to us. We're gonna get started after the break. Hey Springfield, when it comes to reliable, high-quality roofing, you don't want to leave things to chance. That's why you should reach out to Acosta Angeli Ruffing, your local roughing expert serving Springfield and surrounding communities, from quick, dependable repairs to full replacement, from residential to commercial, they are your trusted pros. Call them today at 217-993-2748 or visit their website to book your free quote and inspection. Don't wait. A little leak now could lead to major damage later. Trust the local experts, protect your home, and get peace of mind with Acosta Angeli Roofing. All right, and we are back. Hey, another phenomenal week on Elevate Springfield. Quick recap. Started like we always do with your weekly battle plan. Talked a little bit about Claude to help you enhance your productivity and uh time control, y'all. Then on Monday, we had Sarah Van Halle from Growth Corp. Great conversation there. Pretty awesome that we have a company like that that is in the top 10 in the country when it comes to production for those SBA 504 loans. So if you're a small business out there, a medium-sized business, whatever, remember we talked about that. That small business definition is much bigger than you probably think. You're looking at some expansion, maybe getting a building, things like that. Hey, give Sarah and her team a call. They'll be able to take care of you. Then on Tuesday, of course, we had Ellie in for our next gen segment. Wednesday, we had a solo episode with me. We talked a little bit about the businesses that are in the top five for the locals' first Springfield business grant. We're going to be giving away two $2,500 grants on October 1st, 5 30 to 7 30 p.m. over at The View. That's Jane Hayes Sales and Stagings new event space over on the West Side. So hey, if you want to join us that night to celebrate local business, you can head over to localfirstspringfield.com slash events and pick yourself up a ticket. We're going to have live music, food, drinks, a talk from Representative Mike Coffey, and just a whole lot of fun and networking as we celebrate those businesses and give away some money that night, y'all. So it's going to be a good night. Hope to see you there. Then on Thursday, we had Herman Seanor the second. We talked about his business that he has. Good enough to talked a lot about his athletic endeavors earlier in his life, how he was so successful in that track, and how he has brought that into his training company that he has now. And he's looking forward to doing some great stuff in the community with his nonprofit as well. Then on Friday, we welcomed back Dr. Brian Willie from Align Life Chiropractic, friend of the show, regular contributor, whatever you want to call him now. He's in an awful lot. We talked all about toxins. So that's one thing that I've made a concerted effort over the last couple of years to try to reduce my toxic load. So that's a great one. If you didn't listen to that, make sure you check that out because there's some actionable stuff you could do right now to reduce your exposure to toxins and also how to detox some of that stuff. So if you missed any of the episodes this week, hey, go check them out on any of your favorite podcast outlets, or just head over to my socials. You can get the links from there too. But today it is Separation Saturday, so you're here for a training, y'all. Separating yourself from the competition. So let me ask you a question. When's the last time you sat down with your money? And what did you look at? Unfortunately, a lot of people I talk to, you know, they spend far too much time looking at the expense side of things rather than the income side of things. So today, I want to flip that. I want to get us thinking more about the income and less about expenses. I've been working through the money course inside Cardone University, and this is what Grant calls the basic building blocks of money. There are 12 of them, and I'm going to walk through all 12 oh here in about 20 minutes and give you some stuff to do for each one of those. Some of these might bother you because you've been trained to think the other way or taught to think a different way. Well, let's check this out. He's had a lot of success utilizing these building blocks, and I have as well. So I've grouped these 12 blocks into four buckets so we can go through them just a little bit easier, easier to really remember that stuff when we have these four buckets. So bucket one, let's call it the income engine. We're talking all about income on this one. All right. So part of that, one of the blocks in this training is income is king. That's the first one out of the whole thing. And Grant is super blunt about it. Income is king. Not saving, not cutting, not budgeting, income. And his logic here is pretty simple, really. If there isn't enough money coming in, there's nothing to save, nothing to invest, and nothing to retire on. Of course, wealth is the destination for sure, but you can't get to wealth without going through income first. Now, I know if you were raised the way I was, you know, turn the lights off, clip the coupon, watch every dollar. And there's nothing wrong with being responsible, but you cannot save your way out of a revenue problem. If you have a shop and it's doing, say, $8,000 a month and it costs $10,000 to run your life, there is no coupon for that. The answer lives on the top line, that revenue line, y'all. So part two of that, income increments. This is block number two. Keeps this from, you know, I guess getting too far away for people. It's called income increments. You guys know Grant is Mr. 10X, and I love that, right? Giant goals, massive action. We talk a lot about that. But in this lesson, he says something that might surprise you if you think it's only 10X. He says, you're not going from $4,000 a month to millionaire in one jump. It happens in steps. He tells the story of being $25, making around $4,000 a month, some months $2,000, and living with that constant uncertainty. What changed things was shrinking the question, not how do I get rich, how do I get to the million? Instead, how do I get from $4,000 to $4,400? That's only 10%. $400 extra dollars a month. About $100 a week, call it $20 per working day. $20 a day. Now, that's a little easier problem for you to solve, right? Who do I need to call today to find 20 more bucks? What one upsell, what one follow up, what one extra estimate gets me that $20. You know, one thing that's pretty powerful that he says here is there is no staying the same. Same always slides into less. You're either focused on more or you're drifting toward less. So pick your next increment. Not your tenure number. You want that too, but your next one. We're gonna have those 10x goals, those 10x targets. But what's your next increment to get you moving toward that 10x target? Block number three is the one I talked about when I started this. It's called the 95-5 rule. You might recall a couple of weeks ago when we were talking to Ellie on the next gen segment about money, I brought this one up specifically. And quite frankly, that's another reason why I wanted to talk more about money on this one today. We started that conversation, so I said, hey, let's let's dig a little deeper in here. So the 95-5 rule, if you recall, if you heard that episode, spend 95% of your money time on income and 5% on expenses. Think about your profit and loss statement real quick. The income section is, what, pretty short, right? But the expense section can go on for quite a while. And because it's longer, a lot of times people give it a lot more attention, maybe feel productive going through it all, right? So Grant, as an example, owns thousands of apartment units. He says when he reviews those financials, he doesn't live in the pages of taxes and repairs and insurance. He spends his time on the one thing he can directly drive, which is the income. Now that's not to say you ignore expenses. He actually starts there. He says, take a quick look, ask what you can get rid of, cut it, and move on 5% of your time. Then put the other 95 into growing that top line. His claim is most people run this 99 to 1 in the wrong direction. If you want a different result than most people, like we've talked, flip the ratio. If you want what everybody else has, do what everybody else does, but we want to flip that. So from this first bucket, from bucket number one here, where we're talking about income, here's something you can do this week. Write down your average monthly income. Add 10%, break that difference down into a daily number, put that daily number on a sticky note where you'll see it every single morning and start working toward that increment. All right, bucket number two. Let's call this keeping what you make. So you've got income moving. Now what do you do with it? So blocks four, six, and nine out of this training, pulling these together because it's all part of one bigger idea. So block number four is the 40% rule. This is the one that could probably be the most difficult of all of them. Grant's target is to save 40% of your gross income. That's gross before taxes, right? That's huge. Most people don't do that. But he says people in the top wealth bands going all the way back to the depression were saving at that level. Now, I can't verify that stat for you, but that's the one that's in there. But let's do the math he does. If you make $4,000 a month, 40% is $1,600. That leaves $2,400 to live on and pay taxes out of for most families. That's pretty darn difficult, right? And he knows that. And he says so, but that's the whole point. So the real lesson here is when you commit to a savings number that your current income can't support, you only have one way out. You have to raise your income. The 40% rule is not really a budgeting rule, it's kind of a forcing mechanism. It shoves you right back to block one we were talking about with income. And look at what happens when the income grows. 40% of $10,000 a month is $4,000 saved. At that point, as Grant puts it, he's interested. You know, 10% of a small number never builds anything. 40% of a growing number can change your life. If 40 feels impossible today, the workbook that goes along with this training asks a question, what would it take to save 5% more than you do right now? Start there. Increments work on the saving side too. Block six, pay yourself first. Everybody's heard this one. Everybody's shaking their head, yep. But most people don't do it. Grant makes a point here that sometimes people think about who actually gets paid first from your paycheck? It's not even actually you. It's the IRS. They take their cut first. They take theirs before the money ever reaches you. Because quite frankly, they don't trust us enough to give it to them later. So why do we trust ourselves to have something left at the end of the month? A lot of times we won't. Everybody else gets paid, and whatever is left, which a lot of times is nothing, that's what people can save. So his encouragement here is set up that transfer so it happens automatically. The day it lands, you first, and then everyone else. Block number nine, the stay broke rule. That probably sounds pretty strange if you're not in the 10x ecosystem to stay broke, but we're not telling you here to have no money. Grant's telling you here to have no money sitting around. Every time money comes in or every time income comes in, that 40% gets moved immediately into what he calls a sacred account, somewhere you can't easily reach it. He says he didn't even trust himself, so he made it hard to get to. Why? Two reasons. One, idle money finds an emergency. If there's a cushion in an account, something will show up to spend it on. The sale, the upgrade, the thing that felt necessary at the time. And two, comfort makes you soft. We've talked about that before. People get too comfortable and they stop pushing. When the account looks full, you don't make the extra call. When it looks empty, you hustle. So he recommends to keep it looking empty on purpose by his own choice, while the real money stacks up somewhere else waiting for an investment. Now, this isn't to say don't have an emergency cushion. This isn't drain your account. You can still have a sensible safety net and move everything beyond it out of reach. So call to action for bucket number two, something you could do this week. Hey, open that separate account, maybe even at a different bank, no debit card attached to it, and set up an automatic transfer for whatever percentage you can do today and start working toward that 40. Bucket number three, let's call it the tools. Blacks five, seven, and eight. He talks about credit cards, debt, and meetings. And yes, two of those things I said you've probably already been told to never use. So Black Five, he talks about using a credit card to make money. Of course, he says pay it off every single month, but you can also use it as essentially an accounting system. All right. For you business owners out there, all your expenses are right there on that card. Now, he is not saying use these for just creature comforts or anything outside of business. He's saying use this as a tool. If you're carrying a balance each and every month at high teens interest rate, that card is not your employee anymore. Grant likes to say his credit card is his employee. In that situation, you are its employee. So don't be afraid to use those. Then on the same line, use debt to make money. This is block seven talking about debt. Really quite simple for this rule right here. He says debt is for producing income. Debt is never for consumption. He points out that the biggest companies in the world borrow money constantly, even the ones sitting on tons of cash because borrowed money lets them expand that top line. Talks a little bit about his own real estate ventures here. He carries a large amount of debt on his apartment buildings. And he's not the one paying it down. The tenants are. The rent covers the note. So the test is one question. Does this debt make me money or does it buy me a thing? A loan for a piece of equipment that lets your crew take on two more jobs a week? That's production. A loan for the vacation, the wardrobe, the toys, that's consumption. And the answer would be no there. Even vehicles, he kind of puts in a gray zone. A vehicle that gets you income is one thing. A vehicle that just looks good in the driveway is certainly another. And of course, borrowing to grow, of course, still carries risk. The equipment loan only works if the jobs actually show up. So run the numbers honestly. Talk to your accountant, banker, advisor before you really get into that. Block eight, money meetings. Block eight might be the easiest one to start right now, right after you get done listening to this episode. Money meetings. Out of sight, out of mind. If you're not looking at it, it's not growing. Grant says his family sits down every week. All of them. Wife, kids, everybody looking at the money. How'd we do this week? What's in the accounts? What went out? And on what? And he sets one ground rule. Nobody gets hammered. This is not a meeting where you show up and beat up everybody else over a purchase. You put your attention on what you want, which is hopefully more income, 40% saved, and debt used the right way. You're reinforcing commitments, not assigning blame. And remember the ratio that we talked about earlier: 95% of that meeting on income, five on expenses. He has a great way of saying why this matters. Money loves attention. We've talked about that before, right? You ignore it, it's gonna go to somebody else. So this week's move for this third bucket here. Put a 15-minute money meeting on the calendar. Same day, same time, every week. If you're married and get both of you in there. If you got kids, bring them in. If you got a business partner, hey, set up a second meeting. So bucket number four, the mindset. Blocks 10, 11, and 12. This is the stuff between your ears. And really, might be where the whole thing is won or lost. So blocks 10, 11, and 12 out of the training. Block number 10, the money shortage mindset. Grant says if you grew up poor, middle class, you inherited a belief that money is scarce. His dad told him the same thing. Mine told me, money doesn't grow on trees. His exercise for this is simple, and I've tried it. Next time you walk out to your car, stop and look around. Look at the vehicles in the lot, the buildings, the signs, the equipment, the shoes on people's feet. Every single thing you're looking at is money that moved from one person to another. There's a lot of money in Springfield, y'all. There's a lot of money on your street. The shortage isn't out there. It's just a story we were told growing up. He says for decades he spent weekends driving through neighborhoods he couldn't afford, not to be envious, but to retrain his eyes to see abundance and opportunity as normal. And we can do the same thing. Block eleven, the price myth. And this is a big one here. Grant says every time your attention goes to a price tag, you've taken it off what you actually want. Whether it's the $5 coffee, the gas bill, the cost of the book, whatever. He tells a story about standing at an airport bookstore watching a man pick up his book, his 10X rule book, like the cover, and then flip it over and check the price. Grant walks up to him and tells him, in so many words, that the $30 is not his problem. What's inside is worth far more than that. And the real question is whether he wants his business to grow. The man walked out with 10 copies for him and his team. So his conclusion here, price is not your problem. Income is your problem. When you catch yourself obsessing over what something costs, treat it like a warning light. It means you've started thinking small again, and we don't think small. Now, he's not telling you to be reckless with your spending here. Know your numbers, but there's a difference between knowing a price and being ruled by it. If you're agonizing over a $50 training that could land you one more client, your attention's probably in the wrong place. Last block here, block 12, is worry. Grant says worry is just information. It's a signal that you're off track. Think about this picture he uses in the training. You're on a highway, starts pouring rain, and your hands tighten on the wheel. A professional driver in the same rain doesn't really feel that. The difference isn't the weather, it's the skill. So he says most of us can afford to be amateurs in the rain, but we can't afford to be amateurs with our money. Worry means no plan, not enough attention, or not enough know-how. And then he talks about his own sister. Did everything right, worked hard, saved faithfully, and no matter how much she put away, she never stopped worrying. We all know somebody like that. Maybe a parent, grandparent, passed away with plenty in the bank and lived like they had nothing because they never felt safe. Saving alone doesn't cure worry. Competence does. Knowing how the game works does, and knowing that's what these 12 blocks are for. One more thing from this lesson. Sometimes the worry isn't even yours. It's a parent, spouse, friend, someone around you dropping their doubt on top of yours. Make your decisions from your plan, not from somebody else's fear. So hey, in closing, 12 blocks. We talked about them in four different buckets today. Let's run through them real fast. One, income is king. Two, let's grow it in increments. Three, ninety-five percent of your attention on income, five on expenses, four, aim at saving 40% of gross. Five, credit cards can be a record keeping tool as long as they're paid in full every month. Six, pay yourself first. Seven, debt is for production, never consumption. Eight, meet on your money every week. Nine, stay broke by moving money out of reach. 10. There is no shortage. Might be the most important one there. Get that mindset right. 11. Price is not your problem. And 12, worry means you need a plan. If you had to boil all these down to one sentence, it's probably this put your attention on income and then protect what you earn from yourself. So here's the challenge for the next seven days. Three things. First, figure out your next 10% increment and what it works out to per working day. Two, open that hard-to-reach account and automate a transfer, whatever size you can manage now. Third, hold one money meeting. 15 minutes and nobody gets hammered. That's it. Do those three things and you'll be ahead of you were last week and ahead of most people around you, quite frankly. Quick note here, I'm no financial advisor. I'm no accountant. If you're gonna do some of this stuff, talk to your trusted financial advisor before you make any big moves with debt or taxes. Hey, if you have a business out there and you want some help with any of this stuff, you want help putting these building blocks to work inside your business, reach out to us over Big Dog Business Coaching. That's exactly what we do. We'd love to help you out. Hope this helps today. We'll be back after the break. Looking for expert tree care with hometown integrity, look no further than Sangamon Tree Service. They're your trusted local pros, delivering quality workmanship, exceptional customer service, and fair, honest pricing. Every time. Whether it's trimming, removal, or storm cleanup, their team brings professionalism and care to every job, big or small. Call the name your neighbors trust, Sangman Tree Service, or visit them today at Sangamontreeservice.com. Sangamon Tree Service, rooted in quality, built on trust. Well, thank you for joining us today, everybody. Appreciate you making us a part of your day. Hey, don't forget while you're out on social, check ours out. You can check my personal one out at RobertFarrell at everywhere. Check out those Elevate Springfield pages, those big dog business coaching pages as well. Check us out over on YouTube. Give us a subscribe, give us a like or a follow on any of those channels. We would certainly appreciate it. So hey, take what you learned today. You bring the discipline and follow through and together. That's right, y'all. We're gonna elevate Springfield. Be great. Looking for personalized insurance with hometown care, David Hilst, American Family Insurance Agent's here to help you protect what matters most: your family, your home, and your dreams. Whether it's auto, home, life, business, David and his team are proud to serve the Springfield community with trusted advice and reliable coverage. Local service, real relationships, peace of mind. Call today or stop by their office. They can build your dream protection plan together. Call 217 726 6343.