How Wes Rowlands Built a $620M Wealth Management Business

In this episode of Success Leaves Clues Podcast, host Pedro welcomes Wes Rowlands, a wealth strategist, entrepreneur, and passionate financial coach who left the world of Wall Street to help everyday families build lasting wealth. Inspired by personal experiences growing up in a financially struggling household, Wes transformed adversity into a mission to change family trees through financial education and disciplined wealth creation.

Wes shares his journey from serving institutional clients to managing over $620 million in assets for business owners and retirees. He discusses the importance of aligning your goals with the right strategy, avoiding burnout through resilience, maintaining unwavering commitment to your mission, and building a business that delivers real value. This conversation is packed with practical insights on wealth, entrepreneurship, coaching, personal growth, and creating a legacy that lasts for generations.


Connect with

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesrowlands/
Website: https://www.atikanwealth.com/

Transcript

Wes Rowlands 0:00

When the reality is, if you actually take time, like we have a whole series of where we do with clients, right? We we look at their vision, their values, and their victories along the way that they need to define their own version of success. I can tell you you can accomplish basically everything that you'd want to accomplish from a material standpoint and an environment standpoint and an actual experience standpoint for way less than a billion dollars, right? Like for a fraction of a billion. So people say they want to become billionaires. It's not that I don't believe them. It's like only a small percentage of those people actually mean it. They might want the status that comes along with it, but the money doesn't mean anything after a certain period of time. Right. After a certain period of time, you just cannot spend that amount of money. So if you're trying to do the Elon protocol because you think that the goal is actually having one billion dollars, you're probably going to burn out because you didn't define the goal up front appropriately.

Davis Nguyen 0:51

Welcome to Success Leaves Clues, the podcast where we interview business owners on how they built their businesses and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is David Swain, and I'm a business coach and a founder of Purple Circle, where we help business owners achieve their first six-figure, seven-figure, and eight-figure year, all without sacrificing their quality of life. Before becoming a business coach and before founding Purple Circle, I started and scaled several seven and eight-figure coaching businesses and have been a consultant at several businesses doing over $100 million each, including some that are publicly listed and doing over a billion dollars. In every episode of the podcast, you're gonna learn lessons that took our guests years to learn, and you'll be able to learn that in minutes. No matter if you're a new business owner or an established business owner, every episode is gonna give you the clues in order to elevate your business.

Pedro 1:35

Welcome to Success Leaves Clues Podcast. I'm Pedro, and today I'm joined by Wes Rowlands, who walked away from the glamour of Wall Street serving large institutional clients to pursue a childhood dream rooted in something far more personal, helping everyday families build real wealth. Raised by a single mom who taught him firsthand how essential money is to a family stability, Wes knew that working for big banks would never fully satisfy the teacher and coach inside him. Fast forward 12 years and Wes and his partners now manage roughly $620 million plus dollars, focusing on 401k plans, profit sharing plans, and investment strategies for medium-sized business owners and executives. His story proves that sometimes you have to sacrifice the good for the great, and that the most meaningful work happens when your professional expertise aligns with your deepest personal convictions. Welcome to the show, Wes. Thank you, brother. Looking forward to it, man. It's rock and roll. Yeah, great to have you. I'm excited to have you, right? And uh from the first day we met. And Wes, I'm kind of a comic book nerd myself, you know, love the first edition. So back to the origin story. Let's rewind a bit because every coach has that moment where they look at their life and say, Yeah, I guess this is what I'm doing now, right? So when was that for you? When I originally decided to coach, is that the question? I would say even sometimes it's when they're kids, sometimes it's an aha moment, sometimes it's some something natural that people keep asking for advice, and someone eventually realized the coach, hey, I guess this is something I'm doing now? You know what?

Wes Rowlands 3:19

Yeah, so I think the catalyst for me, not I think I know the catalyst for me was when I was 11 years old and my mother and I were getting evicted from our apartment and you know, lights turned off, water turned off, et cetera, and just realized that the family needed help financially. And I know that money doesn't create happiness, but I definitely know that not having money is the recipe for unhappiness. So I set out on a mission from literally that time period onward where I just decided I've got to solve our family's money problems. And then eventually that just evolved into, oh, well, I can help other people solve their money problems. Then I got to Wall Street and I was helping institutions solve their money problems. And then there was just, you know, an inner calling. I know that sounds cheesy, but an inner calling to say, well, you got into this to solve your family's money problems. Why don't you help other families, not institutions, solve their money problems? And then the writing was on the wall for me and said, I'm gonna do it. And then that was roughly 15 years ago. And here I am, and it was a leap of faith, and I had a lot of help along the way, a lot of mentors, a lot of good luck and fortune. And we now manage 600 over 600 million dollars. The companies are doing phenomenal, and we want to keep on spreading the gospel of wealth.

Pedro 4:28

Okay. Now you mentioned a leap of faith, right? So I want to understand one thing because you moved from that institutional place to helping families. It sounds like this is very important, a key pivot in your story. And I want to understand if that was Carrie, you know, uh to a point, and if you felt like an identity shift, because sometimes I talk with coaches and they're like working corporate for 10, 20, 30 years, and they move to coaching or doing something different, and they're caught up in a birthday party and someone asks them what they do, and they're used to say, Hey, I work at X, Y, and Z, right? And I do this, but eventually they pivot. You move to helping families. How would that transition look like? Can you can you walk us through about that?

Wes Rowlands 5:06

So I would definitely not be the exception to the rule. I was absolutely scared to do it, but I will say that my fear of not fulfilling something that I felt like I was called to do was greater than the fear of failing at trying to do it, if that makes sense. It makes sense. So my fear of not doing it was greater, and the fear of regret essentially was greater than my fear of failing. I'd rather take the loss of a failure than the acceptance of regret of not even trying.

Pedro 5:38

Okay. Now I have a question for you too, and it's about identity too. I worked at uh a bank here in Brazil, actually, more than one, future markets and all of that. Then I moved to consulting. And was in touch with a lot of people in the wealth management too, right? And there are few that actually perceive themselves, have this identity that you do have to feel like a coach and present yourself in a way that you are a coach, right? Deep down you are a coach. Do you feel like that's very unique to you? Do you do in comparison to your other people that actually do wealth management?

Wes Rowlands 6:10

Yeah, no doubt. It's a great topic, actually, because I I don't like being called a financial advisor. I look at myself as an enthusiastic teacher and coach. We teach a lot of information up front to our prospects who eventually apportion them become clients. At that point, is where I become a coach. It's so important in the world of finance to realize the real value is in the execution of the fundamentals. So, what oftentimes happens is if we change the analogy, right? In this space and a lot of other spaces, there could be a temptation of the advisor to start to feed into the fears and hesitations of the clients to the degree that they start to change the plan to sort of retrospectively fit what the client says they want. And this might sound appropriate, but it's not. It's, hey, that might be what you want, but what you need is this. So, as an example, let's say you're a fitness coach and somebody's 300 pounds overweight, and they come into your gym and they say, Hey, let me tell you, I'm not comfortable with using all that equipment over there. I'd rather do this over here. And it's so easy to say, okay, great. Well, give me your money and we'll have you do that over there because that's what you're telling me you're comfortable with. But in my head, if I'm a good coach, I'm like, well, that's not gonna work. Now, this sounds obvious when I use a visceral example like weight loss, but it's not so obvious in the world of professional services and wealth management and taxes, et cetera, because it requires a certain pushing back, if that makes sense. Of, hey, you might be telling me you you feel more comfortable doing this, but I'm telling you that comfortable plan is not going to be effective. And what makes it even more tricky is I already know this, but you don't know this. But the plan is not going to be effective about three years from now. So there's just enough duration of distance to where it becomes a sticky conversation. Does that make sense? So I'd rather step up as a coach and say, you know what? No, I understand you're not comfortable with these investments, but let me teach you why you need to have a certain level of comfort because this is what needs to happen. If we do anything else, it's not gonna work. And all these other people who are trying to tell you that it will, that's because they're trying to sell you on what your version of a comfortable plan would be. But we're not gonna do that. So either we're not gonna work together or you're gonna do the plan that I know is going to work for you. And what we find is our clients appreciate that because they want to be in good hands, somebody who has strong hands, who's like, I need somebody to lead this area of my life. I don't need a yes man in this area because the stakes are so high that if this leader gets it wrong, that I'm gonna be paying the price in the future. So that's a big responsibility for me, one that I'm very honored for myself and our team to take on. And I take it very seriously.

Pedro 9:02

Interesting. I have a follow-up question because I'm thinking as a potential client, right? And I I talk with a lot of people still in that market, and I perceive sometimes that they they're willing to join something, done it for them instead of done it with them, because sometimes they don't know about how that looks like. They you're they're not the experts. And what it looks like from what you're telling me, there's an education piece, right? You're trying to teach them during the course, but what if I just said, dude, I don't I don't care about this, you know, just do the thing. Because I've seen some people joining, like hiring financial planners, and they don't care about it. Just don't want to throw the money there and forget. You know what I mean? Yeah. Those people are not for us. So it's not a good thing.

Wes Rowlands 9:46

I think that's another important thing for coaches to realize, like, and business owners to realize the whole world is not going to be your client. So the the championship is one in the draft, as they say. It should be a two-way interview. Hey, are you a good client for us? And are we a good coach for you? And both parties should be mature enough, especially the coach, right? The business owner, should really be mature enough to say, hey, like that's okay. You want it done that way. There's another vendor down the street that will that's happy to have you and your demands as a client. But respectfully, we're not that vendor.

Pedro 10:20

Okay. Now I'm curious about another thing. Was it like that in the early days when you launched your business? Or did you had to went through some, you know, trial and error to determine, okay, this is the type of people I help? And my follow-up question to that is who do you serve today?

Wes Rowlands 10:37

Yeah, so I think trial and error never stops in building your practice ever. We are literally in a state of trial and error every single day. And to your question, a synthesis of who are we serving? Because as we gain more skill sets and more distinctions, we are simultaneously refining who we want to work with and serve. So right now, we serve two main clients. Our business serves two main clients. So mass affluent retirees, we call them MARS, M-A-R-S, and then Hisbos, high-income small business owners. So these are business owners who are already making a decent amount of money, you know, above $750,000 a year in personal income minimum and increasing from there. And they want help building their personal wealth via real estate, public companies, and their private business. So we we help them build their personal balance sheets through those long-term assets. Okay.

Pedro 11:28

Now I want to shift gears for a second, but still in the same topic. How would they pretend I'm one of them, right? The Mars or the Hezbolt, however you want to call me, how would I be able to find you in the first place, marketing-wise, right? You can give me the two avenues if they're different.

Wes Rowlands 11:43

Yeah, so the majority of our clients come in through one of two channels, either word of mouth, so we get a a lot of referrals, and then we do educational seminars. So if you were to receive an and it's invite only, so if you were to receive an invitation to one of those seminars, it's a six-hour seminar, and there's no sales pitch, and then there's follow-up two meetings. And if it makes sense for us to work together on again on both sides, then that's how we acquire clients. Interesting.

Pedro 12:09

Okay. Same exercise. Okay. Let's pretend I was referred to work with you, either one of those lanes you mentioned, right? And uh or went to one of your educational seminars. That resonated with me. Seems like we're gonna work together. Let's speed up a little bit on the sales process. Okay. I want you to, if you can, please, walk me through how does it look like to work with you guys and what are the potential outcomes I can expect out of it.

Wes Rowlands 12:34

So one thing that you said, I that might be an important distinction, we do not speed through our sales process ever. I think it's important for a lot of coaches and business owners to hear that because sometimes there are steps that are skipped because your brain thinks, like, oh, I don't have to do this, this person's already sold. No, no, no. Again, it's a two-way interview. We need to go through a period of osmosis where we're trying to get to see if it's a good fit for us and vice versa. Similarly, when we when we cut the sales process because we feel like, you know, it's a good fit, but then we un we we uncover three weeks down the road, oh, there's an issue. Shoot, that's because we didn't do this piece in our sales process. So we're real sticklers on sticking to our systems. Now, from there, um, so we do a seminar, then we do two meetings, and then we have a call to action. Hey, do you want to become a client? You're a good fit for us. Are we a good fit for you? Okay. Then we go through an on onboarding process where it's a very choreographed, scripted, in a good way, templatized structure for the benefit of the client where they are now on a journey. Okay, we're gonna do, depending on what client it is, we're gonna do between five to eight meetings, and we're covering these exact things in these meetings. There will be a beginning, a middle, and an end to each and every one of these meetings. At the end of that journey, you will have our final deliverable, and then you will go into the next phase, which is like you're now a perpetual client.

Pedro 13:56

Okay. Now I'm curious about one thing that I think our could help our audience. I know you do have a team, right, helping you in the back end and all of that. And I'm not sure if that was always the case, but your work seems also pretty hands-on. You're very concerned about delivering value, it sounds like. So, how do you think about capacity? So you don't stretch yourself too thin. And the reason I asked this for the coaching part is because I see a lot of coaches out there advocating against burnout, right? And they're burning out themselves because they're wearing all the hats. So, how does that look like for you?

Wes Rowlands 14:28

The first thing I would say to that honestly is I think the world well, I'll speak for America. I think America needs to have a rally cry on the anti-burnout conversation. So I think sometimes if we repeat something enough times where it starts to become more real than it actually is. So I would like to have a battle cry for resilience. And it's like if you want to build something great and you are committed to providing surplus value for other humans, you are going to have to red line at certain points. But if you define that as burnout, then you're probably leaving too many reps in reserve to actually create that surplus value. Does that make sense? So, as an example, when you're building a business and yeah, you're right, like you have to serve your existing clients. But then if you don't have the staff to then go out and do another project, well, what does that mean? You're gonna have to work after hours to build the next part of the infrastructure for the business. But if you define that, or not you, but if somebody defines that as burning out, well, then I would say, like, you probably need to work on your resilience because at that point in your business, you don't have enough money, most likely, enough revenue to hire somebody to do that. Well, that leaves us at a fork in the road. We either hire somebody, which we've already defined that we can't afford, or we go and build it ourselves, but there's not enough time during the workday to do that because we're servicing clients. Okay, what does that mean? That means you moonlight, you work after the work hours to then build that infrastructure. And then that will get you to the next level of the business. And then hopefully at some point you keep on stair-stepping your way up towards you have enough revenue to then offload that task to your new hire and then rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. You always have to decide am I gonna spend time or money on to on this problem? That's it. There's no there's no other solution, in my opinion.

Pedro 16:13

I like that. No, I like that, man. Uh there's a cost, right? And uh most people are not willing to pay for it uh at the end of the day, you know. And that's okay. Some are yeah, it's okay. You just gotta accept it, or uh choose another way of doing things or even get a job again. You know, you never know, but you cannot accept the fact that or complain you just you didn't put in enough work or effort or whatever, or maybe the project was doomed from the start, you never know, right? But it's an interesting perspective because I kind of follow that a little bit based on my dad who was creeping toilets here in Brazil, you know. So, and he turned out to be a vice president of a bank here too. So that's that type of stuff puts things into perspective. So my skin is a little bit thick when some ever talks someone talks about burnout. I'm like, we'll see about that.

Wes Rowlands 17:02

Right now, yeah, I mean taking it as assumed of like, oh yeah, that that's that's fair, that's valid. This is also where I think we have to be careful on how much therapy culture we bring into business culture. You know, so it's like if I validate those feelings, okay, burnout, yeah, like okay, that's okay. Now you feel validated, but it doesn't change a damn thing for the surplus value you're supposed to be creating for the people who are paying you money. And I know this sounds harsh, so I only want this to land on the ears of people who take this in the right way. Your feelings do not matter to paying customers. They don't. The paying customers, what do they care about? They care about the results for them. And it is your job and obligation, irrespective of your feelings, to give them those results. And if you don't, they can and should go somewhere else.

Pedro 17:55

Interesting. Okay. You know, that kind of heads home in a way, especially when we were talking about burnout, right? Um to me, burnout personally, it's whenever I don't see light at the end of the tunnel. So if I have a project that I I know the outcome is, it's happening, right? Because I I set up the plan, I'm doing this the thing. Burnout to me is like I'm doing it, but there's no future, you know? So that really bums me out. And the other thing you mentioned, I think it's very interesting. It's like we had our retreat a while ago, right? And I have two boys, three and seven. And I was thinking, am I stressing about going to like a week or two weeks away? Not really, because I'm building something. Coming back to the the light at the end of the tunnel, I'm building something, not just for me, right? I'm building a legacy for my boys too, because it's all about creating a future for them. So I think I I see a I'm not sure if you agree with that, but I see a lot of people trying to find a find out a balance, but not willing to sacrifice a bit to get to that place. You know what I mean?

Wes Rowlands 18:54

I think it's so important to define exactly what you want and keep on refining that. So in the wealth management space, I give clients a framework to work through, which is this do you want middle class, upper class, or ultra class? So important to define that. And you probably intuitively know what that means for you. It's not to the decimal, but it's at least directionally correct. Now, there's no right or wrong answer. However, there is congruent or not congruent, aligned or not aligned with that desire. So if somebody says, Well, I want ultra class, but I want to be a W-2 employee that goes into work nine to five and has holidays and weekends off. I can tell you right now, there is a misalignment between the goal and the protocol that you're doing to get to that goal. And that's okay. What's not okay is pretending that that's gonna work. So what we have is a very like real conversation with clients of like, okay, well, something's gotta give. You either have to change the goal or you have to change the plan. What do you want to do? And I think that oftentimes is freeing for people. Because to your point, if you are trying to obtain ultra-class levels of wealth and you're doing it through a wrong mechanism, you will eventually get burned out because you're going down roads that literally just don't produce that result. Now, often what I notice though is when somebody, it's actually the opposite, which is kind of interesting to me. A lot of people will follow the plan that they heard online or something like this. And again, fitness is a perfect example of this. How many times do we see the person who is 75 pounds overweight? And really, they'd be actually happy with just looking like let's let's call it of average athleticism. So let's call it 20% body fat, and they don't really want a six-pack. But then they start following, you know, Jay Cutler, Mr. Olympia, former Mr. Olympia bodybuilders protocol. And it's like, yeah, it's overkill, dude. Right? If you're trying to carb cycle, right, like Mr. Olympia does, you are very likely going to fail by like day number four because carb cycling requires absolute precision. So you're following in a weird way, you actually want to not look like Mr. Olympia. You actually want to look just decent, but you're following Mr. Olympia's protocol, which is exponentially harder and way overshooting the mark relative to what you could have. So you burnt out, you didn't accomplish either. You didn't fulfill the plan, the super hard plan, and you didn't accomplish looking decent because you followed the wrong protocol.

Pedro 21:27

It's so interesting. It's the environment you're you you set yourself up to, right? It's like I was watching a well ago, I was watching a guy who's like a billionaire and he was like talking about it and was in a circle with other billionaires and he was feeling poor because he was like the least successful billionaire. So it's all about the environment you insert yourself to, right? If you're following someone who's that a first of all, un unachievable goal because the guy is an athlete and also a freak, right? He's a Mr. Olympia, and you're like feeling bad because you're not at that stage and you're trying to replicate that. It's just not gonna happen. It's so interesting the way you frame the the the mechanism, right? It needs to be tied up with a goal or else we're talking about fiction here.

Wes Rowlands 22:07

Yeah, and it's no different in business. I mean, how many people read or listen to or hear about an Elon Musk story of him sleeping over at his office for like 30 days straight and like, oh, I should do that. It's like, well, do you want that? Do you even want? Are you sure you want to be a billionaire? Because what comes on the other side of that is the reciprocal work that it takes to get that. When the reality is, if you actually take time, like we have a whole series of where we do with clients, right? We we look at their vision, their values, and their victories along the way that they need to define their own version of success. I can tell you you can accomplish basically everything that you'd want to accomplish from a material standpoint and an environment standpoint and an actual experience standpoint for way less than a billion dollars, right? Like for a fraction of a billion. So people say they want to become billionaires. It's not that I don't believe them, it's like only a small percentage of those people actually mean it, right? They might want the status that comes along with it, but the money doesn't mean anything after a certain period of time, right? After a certain period of time, you just cannot spend that amount of money. So if you're trying to do the Elon protocol because you think that the goal is actually having one billion dollars, you're probably going to burn out because you didn't define the goal up front appropriately. Interesting.

Pedro 23:24

Okay. Now I want to ask you another, another from another topic, which is pricing, okay? Because I think you can deliver a lot in this one, especially when we were talking about your sales process, and you mentioned maybe they're not meant to work with us, you know. So there's that. And uh, there are a lot of coaches out there that are as you already established that in your origin story, they're struggling to pay their bills, right? And uh sometimes there it comes up with that scarcity mindset, you know, of I just I should close this client, even if I'm not sure if I can help him, because bills are knocking on the door and all of that. And coaching sure is a self-worth path. Sometimes you're trading dollars for time and all that. So, how do you think about it today, you know, by rejecting potential clients? They're actually not in your lane that you you don't want to work with. And were there any lessons along the way that shaped how you landed where you were?

Wes Rowlands 24:14

I've pretty much always been a stickler for only serving people that I feel like I can actually create surplus value for and not putting myself in a position where I need to get a client because I just think that's not good for them, and I don't think that's good for me as well. So the way that I did that at least is I would just do other work to make money. That way I could keep my core craft of building this business pure. Is it does that make sense? Like I'm not um results don't go out of style. The best marketing you could do is to get results. The problem is getting people to give you a chance to give them results takes a long time in the beginning. So, but I never want to sacrifice that. So if you're asking me, hey, should you take an alternative path where you take on a client who you know is not gonna get the results because it requires work on both sides, but just because they're willing to write a check, I never have and never will do that because I know on the tail end of that is going to be a lack of results. And that's not okay with me for them and for our business. So the way that I would do this is I would moonlight in other things, right? I would do side projects, I would, you know, do whatever, whatever anybody would pay me for. Plus, I kept my expenses crazy low for many years, like many years. Dude, literally, I this is an actual story. To keep my expenses low, I would go to Sprouts, a grocery store, and I would buy chicken when it was on sale one time per month. I would buy chicken in 180 pound increments. I'd cook it all in one day and I'd freeze it. I would eat that from my protein. Then I would buy 50 pound bags of rice from this grocery store called Smart and Final. And at that same grocery store, I would buy 25 pounds of dried beans. I would also buy oatmeal there and canned tuna fish. That is all I ate for probably four to five years of my life. And when I say that's all I ate, I mean 99% of the time, that's all I ate. Because that cost me, I forget what the calculation was. It was like, I don't know, like $2 a day for my calories. And then I rented a room and I had four or five other roommates, all of which did not really speak English that well. I rented the smallest room in that house and I slept on the floor for many years. So anybody who says, oh, I can't cut my expenses, I just don't believe them. It's just really, it's what is your level of desire of reducing your expenses? So that helped not put stress on me from a financial standpoint. So that way I could be fully present to serve any client that I brought on. So I didn't have necessarily the scarcity mindset because I didn't have all this financial pressure forcing me to give them to acquire any client that I could, irrespective of whether or not I felt like I could produce a result for them.

Pedro 26:50

Okay. So let me ask you this when you were hitting a low eventually and you're in though in between those four to five years, what kept you going? What was the main drive to the sticking up to the plan?

Wes Rowlands 27:01

100% the mission. My goal is to change my family tree and help others do the same. I repeat that mantra many times throughout the day. I still do. So if you bring a level 10 why to a situation, any obstacle is easy, right? By contrast. It's like, okay, if I do this thing, will it help me change my family tree and or help others do the same? If the answer is yes, I just do it. I just act like an animal, like a pit bull, right? If a pit bull decides I'm going to attack that thing, there's no analysis between the decision and the doing of the thing. There's no time to analyze it. Once the decision is yes, you just go, period. And if you don't, then the mission is probably not big enough for you. It's almost like instinct, right? 100%. The work is in deciding what is important enough to die on the hill for. It's not in the strategizing, it's not in like all the the the perfection. No, people spend a whole bunch of time doing that. I would argue it's because they haven't spent enough time on really developing the mission. If you were so convinced of the mission, the strategy, the planning, all that stuff becomes easy. You could fail 150 times on a strategy and a plan, but the mission never becomes a negotiation, ever. Okay.

Pedro 28:12

Sorry, I'm deep thinking right now. I got into a rabbit hole thinking about my my choices. Okay. Now I'm curious where you're taking all this was future, right? Looking ahead, shifting gears for a second. Where do you see the business going? Are you thinking about scaling, hiring, or is there a next step you're excited about?

Wes Rowlands 28:26

100% we're scaling. We're we're at 620 million as of this morning under management. The goal is to get to the next goal is to get to a billion. But we want to keep on serving, keep on getting bigger. I want to be the biggest. As Connor McGregor said, it's like our plan is to not just attend. Or no, what is it? We're not here to take part, we're here to take over. I I think it should be every coach's and entrepreneur's goal, honestly, every human's goal, to beat everyone else around them. Not in like a weird, negative, malicious way, but because I think one of the phenomenal things about humans is we can get inspired by other people. So if I see you trying to be the best relative to not just your past version of yourself, to other people. And if you're trying to beat me, that's going to inspire me to then reciprocate. A good cooperative competition, as we see in capitalism, is what creates the most surplus value. It just does. And I'm committed to that forever and always.

Pedro 29:21

I will not retire. Retirement is just not an option. It's funny. Uh, you remember me of a story, I think it was Alex Armozzi, right? He started his uh coach, not coach, gym business, and he was sleeping on the floor and you know, working a lot and all that. And his first clients were like passing by, hey, looking that he was sleeping there, and oh, hey, good luck, you know, nice work, good job, blah blah blah. And then he started succeeding, right? And then he stopped sleeping there, and eventually he noticed people started treating him differently. Hey, big shot, big guy. You and the reason, well, he brought this up is because if you get to a point that you passed other people, right? You you left them behind. Sometimes it they realize they're looking at themselves now, right? Sort of a mirror, and they're looking at themselves and thinking, I'm gonna, you know, talk shit about this guy because I haven't got to his point, you know. So it's very interesting the way psychology works. Uh the competition side, I understand, but sometimes people they they avoid successful people, and not sure if you agree with that, just because it puts them into an uncomfortable zone, you know?

Wes Rowlands 30:26

Yeah, I mean, I would put that all in the distraction category, right? Like if people are gonna comment on your success or lack of success or whatever, if you spend any time on that that's not in the service of making you better, then I would argue that is time wasted that you should be spending on increasing your skill set to deliver value to your humans that you're trying to serve. Period. Okay.

Pedro 30:49

Now, a little bit of sci-fi here, just to close it out. I'm curious about your answer. Let's pretend we have a time machine in front of us, okay, Wes, and you can step in and go back six years ago when you started a business you're currently running. If you had one piece of business advice you didn't know back then, but you could share with your past self today, what would that be? Keep going.

Wes Rowlands 31:10

Optimize for duration, always. There is such advantage over your competition and for your own psychology of saying I'm only gonna do the things that I'd be willing to do for the next decade, period. That does two things. Number one, it's a good filter for not getting distracted by gold, shiny objects. Because if it means, hey, I gotta be doing this thing for the next 10 years, I've got to enjoy doing it. There's nothing that I'm gonna do for 10 years that I'm not gonna like. That's that would just be brutal. Why would I ever do that? Then number two, most people quit within the first year. So eventually in business, you just get to a point of competition where you're compete, like 85% of your competition, they're all rookies because they are just transients. They came over from different industries. Cause, oh, I heard this space, you can make money. And then sure enough, what happens? They spend six months and they barely got their licenses, and then they try for the next six months. They're like, Oh, this is hard. Yeah, it's hard like any other industry is. So then 85% of your competition is just wiped away because you're just competing with first year rookies. And then the next 15%, guess how many people make it to like the sixth year? Very few. Very, very few. So it's just phenomenal. And then the people who, funny enough, the weird thing that happens is once you've been involved in the game for a decade or more, then the rest of your competition, like those people who are left, you actually build a camaraderie with them. Because yes, they're technically your competition, but there's a respect, right? It's like, oh, we're we like we're all we're all battle tested here. Let's share ideas because the reality is the competition is not with you and your supposed competitors. The competition is between you and trying to get the results for the people that are paying you to get them. That's the competition. How do we fight for the result? How do we win the result for the client? Period. You focus on that, man, you can build a phenomenal coaching product.

Pedro 32:57

Love that, man. And if someone listening wants to connect with you or follow your work, Wes, and we're gonna have all the links in the description, but what would you say is like the best way to find you and connect with you? Instagram, West.rolins. You know, there were a few things you shared today that really stuck with me. Let's start with the origin story, the 11-year-old evicted kid, right? Uh and that created the drive I'm looking at right now. So there's that importance, the importance of money at the end of the day, right? Not just if you're gonna have money, you're gonna be happy, not necessarily, but if you don't, you're sure gonna find yourself into a pickle, right? So there's that. Also very unique. I gotta tell you, man. I talk with a lot of I've talked with a lot of wealth management, financial planners, and all that. You're you're such into a, like you said, a teacher and a coach, not necessarily just someone who's pushing a process about the outcome X, Y, and Z percentage, but it's like educating people to understand first if their goals are aligned with what they're doing, the mechanism you mentioned. So important reminder too. So when you stopped me at the sales process, right? I was like, let's speed up this sales process. There's a line man, you're like, uh, hold on a minute, right? Because that's very important. And uh kudos to you for holding me a little bit and explaining the sales process because it requires not just the lineman, right? It requires to be a good fit because it's not just them interviewing you, it's the other way around, too. You gotta make sure you're gonna deliver value, right? So there's that. And last but not least, I would say is when you're in your you know tough moments, everyone goes through them. You ask yourself, will it help me change my family tree and others to do the same? You know, and can I deliver value to them? Very important to go back to the true intention of why we're doing things, right? And I eventually at 40 right now, uh, realize a lot of people have surface level answers to big questions, right? Why are you doing this? Following up someone else's agenda, like, oh, they got a new car, they're looking at the keep up with the Johns's right up, a new house, but deep down, they don't even know why they're doing the thing. So, this is just my long-winded way of saying, Wes. I appreciate what you do, and I appreciate you being here and sharing so openly today. Okay, it was great having you.

Wes Rowlands 35:10

Thank you very much, man. That was outstanding. And honestly, that last summary meant a lot to me because it indicates me that you were very present with the conversation. So just the fact that you were able to do that so quickly that is an honor and a pleasure, man. Thank you. Appreciate you.

Davis Nguyen 35:23

That's it for this episode. This episode, as well as this podcast, was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help business owners elevate their business to six, seven, and eight figure years, all without burning out. If you're looking to grow your business as well as get the time freedom that you are looking for, visit us at join purplecircle.com and see what we can do to help you end your business.