[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign welcome to the Victory Show.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Hey victors. Welcome to this episode of the Victory Show. If this is the first time you're joining us, I'm Rachel League with bestseller By Design. Our founder, Travis Cody is the best selling author of 16 books and we've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling books as well. Through that journey, we've discovered a fascinating pattern. Most businesses really struggle to break past the seven figure revenue mark. On this show, I sit down with some of the world's most successful CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they used to scale way past that mark so you can do the same. So get ready for some deep insights and actionable takeaways that you can implement in your life and business. Starting now. Today's guest is Paul Mayer, a lifelong entrepreneur whose career spans more than four decades of building, scaling and exiting successful companies across multiple industries. Paul began his entrepreneurial journey in 1982, co founding his first business, Satisfaction Restaurant and Bar. Over the years he went on to start and grow ventures in Infusion Ventures, Optima Futures, rating brokers, as well as leading Elite Pacific, the real estate brokerage and property management company he co founded in Hawaii in 2005. Under his leadership, Elite Pacific grew from a single new agent to more than 300 team members and achieved over $1.7 billion in annual sales, becoming the third highest volume brokerage and the top vacation rental management company in the state. After several successful exits, Paul founded Happy fool, an all in one personal development platform that integrates proven strategies for vision, setting, goal achievement, mindset planning habits and productivity into one set system designed to drive meaningful, lasting change. Throughout his career, he has trained over 1,000 employees and associates, combining entrepreneurial execution with a passion for helping others thrive. Paul, welcome to the show.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Thanks Rachel. UN Travels have had some really impressive guests and I'm honored to be here.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: Well, well, we are excited to dig in today. Now tell us, as you graduated college, seems like right away you decided the traditional career path wasn't quite right for you. So what sparked the decision to forge your own way and become an entrepreneur from day one?
[00:02:30] Speaker A: So actually I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur before I even knew what the word meant. I actually started my first business when I was 12. I was going door to door convincing neighbors that they needed me to paint their street addresses on their curbs. And then in high school, I started a window washing and painting business to make money. Each summer I hired my friends to help do the Work. And that continued through my first few years in college. And then the summer before my senior year in college, I partnered with a friend and started a courier and process serving business for attorneys. When it was time to go back to school, I sold it to my sister for $8 and Steve and ran it and grew it and made enough money to retire on it. So although I did have jobs all throughout high school and college, if I had to pay for all I own college expenses, I always knew I would be in business for myself from the very beginning. And I think the underlying drive was that I wanted to make my own decisions. I wanted to be in control of my own life. I'm a non conformist with a pretty strong anti authority streak. So that really kept me from being well suited for a job or the military. So starting a business was the way to go for me.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: It totally makes sense. And it seems like you continue to forge that path to today. You know, you've scaled businesses in so many different industries. Real estate, hospitals, vitality, investment. What made you choose those industries?
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Well, it started with what I was interested in. So as a college student, it's all about eating and drinking and having fun, right? Hanging out with your friends. So starting a restaurant and bar there would be a hangout for the students. I was a Duke University student and so the idea was to open up a place that would become the hangout for Duke students and that worked. Also passionate about music. And so that led me to open a music retail business. In other cases, it's about buying, finding an opportunity and a need and developing a business around that. But I think in every case, to be successful, you have to truly understand the customer and then you have to understand what it is, how you're going to serve them differently from anybody else. That solves a pain point or gives them pleasure.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: How do you go about discovering that and really getting to the core of how to differentiate yourself?
[00:04:38] Speaker A: Well, I guess you start by understanding the industry or the business. So to give you an example, when I went into the music retail business, that was in 1985, I was looking for a business that could scale better than the restaurant business. The restaurant business was the most fun a person could possibly have at 21 years old. When you are the hangout for, you know, all the college students, where you went to school, all your friends go there. When you come back, when they come back to town, it's just tremendous fun. And my original plan had been to scale that and open up restaurants and bars in college towns throughout America. But after A couple of years. It was just not scalable. It was just operationally complex, hard to attract high quality employees. The turnover was high. It was clear that was not what I was going to scale. So looking for something else. And the compact disc had just come out in 1985. The CD player was $2,000 and compact discs were $20 each. And it was just a handful of Class 1 jazz that I had a real conviction that the CD was going to take over from records and tapes. And at the time, music retailers, small music stores were mainly records and tapes. They had one bin with a couple hundred CDs. And so the strategy was to open up a store that sold only compact discs but had the largest selection. Because once somebody bought a CD player, they only wanted to buy compact discs and therefore they wanted the largest selection. So that's what we did. We opened one of the first all compact disc stores in the country and people were driving from over 100 miles to come shop at our store. So we knew we were onto something. We knew that a business built completely around that passionate music lover who was the early entry into compact disc. If we built the whole business around that, which was primarily with selection, but also the shopping experience, that it would be successful. Wow.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: And to get up to speed on so many different kinds of business models. I mean, it sounds like you were both following your heart and what you really love to do. But also, you know, you had a nose for what might take off in the market. How did you get up to speed quickly on different strategies?
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Well, that's a great question. It's not really advisable for somebody to start a dozen businesses than a dozen different industries. The general advice is to stick to what you know. You pick one industry, you know, you've, you've done it, you've worked there, you've learned it, and then you go out and you do it yourself, your own. And that probably is better advice. But again, I'm kind of a non conformist and I've got a lot of self confidence and I. One of my strengths is that I am able to understand a business and the fundamental cues to success in that business pretty quickly. You know, obviously I've read a lot of business books, books on strategy, operations, culture, the works. And so I'm able to identify a business that looks like some interest to me, doing my research, see if there's a real opportunity based on the market, the competition, the growth and the overall industry dynamics and then enter it if I like it.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: It sounds like you have a very methodical approach to a lot of the things that you do. How does that come into effect when you're working on scaling a business?
[00:07:42] Speaker A: Well, systems are absolutely essential for scaling a business. When you start out with the business, the founder, the entrepreneur is doing everything and just figuring it out as they go along. And then gradually they develop the best ways of doing something. And I've always felt like anything that you're going to do more than once should have a documented system and process. So you, you figure out the best way to do it that you know of at that time, you document it, then you follow that plan and experiment and innovate off of that and test and see what works better. And then you continually refine your processes. No business can scale without systems, without thoughtful, documented systems for how they operate.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: That is such an interesting thought, and I've heard this from other entrepreneurs about the importance of systems, because so often you think about the entrepreneurial journey and there's so many moving pieces. Typically you're trying to get off the ground in a somewhat scrappy, cost effective way, which means that you're putting in a lot of the sweat equity. There's not a ton of time to go around. And so how do you think about the balance between ensuring 100% accuracy in all of these systems and more administrative pieces versus just getting out there, testing something that's maybe not perfect, and then refining it from there.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: Most businesses have really three core themes. There's going to be growth, there's going to be improvement, and there's going to be profits. And it's really hard to do all three at once. Maybe impossible. It's hard to do two of those at once. So you have to get that balance. It's sort of the green light, yellow light, red light concept. So first you get your systems and execution up to a certain level where you are outperform the competition, you're efficient, you're satisfying the need, and then now you can push for growth from that and then that's going to stress out your systems. And so you need to hire more people, train them, develop more systems, and once you get that worked on, it's all flowing smoothly, then you can grow again.
And typically the path is you start out with the improvement side of things and then you move to the growth side and eventually you get to the profit side.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: And tell me about what inspired the different pivots in your career. Was it just that the scale of certain business models topped out or you just had a new passion that you.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: Wanted to go explore that's a really great question. So the with my beauty retail business that was mostly about timing. So we started it at the right time in the compact disc evolution and we exited at the right time.
And I had a pretty good idea of when we needed the exit. And so we were actively looking to sell the business. When we did, I'd gotten it up to 300 employees in 10 stores in six states. Some of those stores were among the highest volume music retail stores in the nation. So we were doing well, we were profitable, growing, everything was great. But I knew that that was the time to exit. So we looked for an exit, sold it to Borders Books and that was a terrific exit for everybody. Invol brokerage business, that's a little bit different story. So I guess it has the same theme though. The industry dynamics changed so with with compact discs. What had happened was that the really rapid growth in sales of compact discs was driven by the replacement cycle. People were replacing the records and tapes with CDs as well as buying new CDs as they came out. So growth was way above the normal trend for the industry during this replacement cycle.
That of course caused all sorts of retailers to expand, open more stores. The supply was growing to meet the demand, but then the demand was going to drop off. And I also had a strong belief that actually dated back to my first business plan in 1985, that eventually compact discs would also be replaced with some digital form of music that would come from what I thought of as a big computer in the sky. You download music to some solid state device from the computer in the sky. That was timing for sure of thinking about how the industry was changing with the brokerage business. I'd scaled that from that one brand new agent to having 250 agents in 12 offices, back office team of 50 and doing $1.7 billion in sales. And everything was going great. But the industry dynamics changed very suddenly and made it a less desirable business to be in. And so that was a matter of facing reality and looking at the changing situation we had.
We had three core businesses. We had the residential brokerage business, we had the vacation rental management business, and we had a long term property management business. And for years the residential brokerage was the big driver of profits and was doing great. It actually fed the other two businesses. But the industry changed. When Compass Real Estate came into the market. They were a venture backed company with billions of dollars. And when they came in and just started writing huge checks to buy agents and offering them insane commission plans to get market share. And so they really destroyed the margins in the business. It just became very, very difficult to make any money. And so looking at our three businesses, the vacational business was doing well and growing and had a big potential. Long term property management was a steady, easy cash flow business and a brokerage looked like it was all of a sudden going to be chasing a lot of headwinds. So we decided to exit the brokerage business and focus all the effort and attention on the vacation rental, using the long term property management to help fund that.
[00:13:12] Speaker B: Wow. I mean it sounds like you were really put in a hard spot where the incumbent coming in was really. Or the, the new player, excuse me, that was coming in was really aggressive in their approach and it felt like there wasn't a lot that you could do and still maintain the business strategy that you were comfortable with. Tell us a little bit about what that was like emotionally when you had been scaling so successfully and then things were sort of pulled out from under you.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: Very, very difficult. Here we'd had what was a great lifestyle business. It was making money. I'd grown it to the point where I could hire a president and then promoted them as CEOs. So I'd stepped back, wasn't involved in the day to day operations. I was traveling, having a great time and then really everything went wrong at once. So and early 2020 we were at the peak of everything. And then Covid hit and Covid completely shut down our businesses. So all, both the vacation rental and the brokerage were completely shut down.
We made the decision, I made the decision that it would be good to seek some financial strength and backing from a national franchise company anywhere. Real estate is a franchisor of Coldwell Banker and Sotheby's, Century 21, Better Homes and Gardens, et cetera. And they had had a new franchise come available called Corcoran. It was the. They bought the firm that Barbara Corcoran had started many years before and they just had them as company owned branches. But they decided to franchise it and they offered that to us and it came with some financial backing. So we took that and unfortunately what happened was that Compass, who you mentioned took advantage of that situation to attack us. So they entered the Hawaii market two years earlier than their stated plan specifically to attack us. We were the number three brokerage in the market. We were the largest luxury brokerage in the market.
And so they came in seeing that opportunity and writing huge checks to recruit our top agents. And then another relatively new brokerage firm, exp, which is a very low cost and very high commission Split company came at the same time, and they also attacked us. And so the result was that we took this great, flourishing business, and at a time when we were shut down on the vacational business, we're starting to lose all of our agents. So we went from a great, profitable business to thus hemorrhaging money. And yeah, that's not a good feeling at all, but it does force you to face the facts. You can't bury your head in the sand. You got to look the facts in the eye and decide what you need to do about it. And so the first thing we had to do was we had to restructure the business model for the brokerage. So we had grown by being a very high service model to the agents. Our mission was to make the agents happy and successful. And we do almost anything to make them happy and successful. So we had a very high cost structure which was supported by very high volume. When the volume dropped, we had to cut out about 90% of those costs, which was not fun. But that enabled us to change our commission payout model for the agents to make it unbeatable. And that was okay because we cut our costs by 90%.
And so we just completely retooled the business to have a completely different business model, Offered some equity to some of the remaining top agents to keep their loyalty no matter what somebody offered them. And then once we dealt with the situation, all that fear and anxiety goes away. Once you just accept that, okay, here's what the situation is. What do we do about it? There's always a solution. Always. And many times, the result of what seems like a crisis makes you actually stronger, better. So in our case, we now make more money from our vacation rental and property management business than we ever made from a combination of them, as well as simplifying by only being in two businesses instead of three.
Wow. I had a similar scenario actually in my restaurant bars. This was in Durham, North Carolina, and at the time, North Carolina had some unusual liquor laws. And one of the rules was that there's no such thing as a restaurant and bar. To be a restaurant, you can get a liquor license, but only if your food sales are greater than your beer, wine, and liquor sales combined. And one year in our bar business was so good, it was standing room only every night, that it overwhelmed our food sales. We were 52% alcohol and 48% food. So they yanked our liquor license. So there we are, a restaurant bar, one year old, and they pulled our liquor license. So we had to get creative. How do we grow the Food business, even more sort of the pizza delivery business to help us with that, you know, all sorts of things.
And in the end, we got our liquor license back a year later and we were stronger than ever because of that. So business is nothing but solving problems. It's just one problem after another. And some of them seem like they're tremendous crises, but in fact there's always a solution and often you'll end up better off because of it.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: Wow. I love that there's a clear theme of creativity underpinning all of your solutions. Where do you get the inspiration from for all of those creative approaches to the problems you're facing?
[00:18:14] Speaker A: So I've always been an idea person, but I will share one habit that is just amazing to help people come up with ideas and that is to do an input free wake up walk. So shortly after you wake up, get outside with no phone, no music, no podcast, sorry, no nothing. It's just you, the birds, nature and your ideas and that letting your mind get to rest will help it bubble up so many ideas. You can either prompt it with, you know, a question you want to answer the night before or the morning before as you're going out for your walk. But most people live their lives completely filled with inputs. They're just constantly on social media and email and text, and the mind cannot rest and get creative if you're filling with inputs. It needs quiet, it needs quiet time. It actually needs a pretty good bit. Most of my ideas don't come up until about 15 minutes into my walk and then they start bubbling up and I'll walk for 30 minutes to an hour and usually come back with anywhere between 10 and 20 ideas that I've recorded on my my Apple watch. And if you don't have a normal watch with a voice recorder, just carry a little digital recorder with you. But that's been a fabulous way to generate ideas.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: I love that advice and I think you make a really excellent point about how we are consuming so much more than we are creating these days because there are so many opportunities to fill the space in our mind with entertainment or so maybe that we don't have to think about all of the things in our brain and it gives us a little moment to shut off. But I love this idea of starting your day with the piece to let your brain take it to wherever it needs to go. And that'll probably help figure out the rest of your day, if not the rest of your week and maybe business strategy for the year.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: Yeah, when you get perspective, that's when you see bigger picture opportunities or challenges. So most people, as you say, they're spending all their time being entertained and distracted, so they never even get to think about the small opportunities in front of them. But the further away you get from that, the higher up you go, you know, you want to get that mile high view and really see the big picture. I had a great experience that taught me a lot about that. I did a week long rafting trip on the Grand Canyon, on the Colorado, through the Grand Canyon and there's no connectivity at all. So there's literally no way to have any input for a week. And that helped me get such perspective to see the big themes, the big picture, both personally and professionally.
And that's also part of the reason for doing that input free walk first thing in the morning.
Most people when they get up in the morning, the first thing they do is they pick up their phone and they start looking at social media feeds and the news and Twitter and all this crazy stuff. And at that point you've already revved up your brain and it's all in the fight or flight mode. So when you first wake up, if you don't look at anything, your mind is still clear and rested and that's when it's going to be creative. And yes, I've had some unbelievably valuable ideas from these walks.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: You know, I've never heard this approach to starting your day with this creativity walk, but I think it's something so interesting and so easy to do if you just set aside the 10, 15, 20 minutes, however long it is to take yourself out there, get a little bit of vitamin D from the sun and come back in and then start your day as opposed to instantly grabbing for the phone. But it's a hard habit to break. So are there any other habits that you find really help you? Because become a better person in work and or personal life.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: I'm all about habits. As, as John Maxwell says, you'll never change your life until you change something you do every day. And so I live my life by a checklist of habits and activities. And that's one of the core principles of my newest business, Happy Full, is that you design your ideal daily protocol. Everything that's going you're going to do as part of your morning routine, your end of work routine, your pre bed routine, and all of your key activities during the day. And then success is as simple as following that checklist. I literally do that every single day. Every week. I print out the new checklist every morning, I follow It I will share, and there's many, but I will share one really important change that people can make that is a daily habit that can change their life and that is a nightly disconnect. So prior to dinner time is the ideal time, but certainly at least three hours before bedtime, you are done, you are disconnected from the matrix, you're not doing any more work. So you exit out of email, you turn your computer off, you put your phone in airplane mode, you put it in a drawer and that's it. And this does a lot of things for you. Obviously if you stop before dinner, it gives you a chance to focus on your loved ones and spend time and actually be present. We all know what happens when there's a phone present. People are no longer thinking about what they're talking about. And the people there, they're looking at their phone, they're distracted.
So it's going to improve your relationships, it's going to improve your mental health dramatically. It's going to help you to sleep better.
And then when you get up in the morning, you keep that phone in that drawer until you've taken your walk and ideally until you've done your entire morning routine. But again, it's a matter of establishing a habit and sticking to it. So another life changing habit would be for people to institute a planning system. So I have a very structured planning system that we teach in Happyful. You start with your vision of your ideal future life and then from that you establish your five year goals. From there, your one year goals and quarterly goals. And then where it gets tactical is weekly planning. So you always need to plan before you start that time period. So over the weekend you make up your weekly plan or the most important things you're going to do the next week. The handful, three, five, seven things that are going to have the biggest impact on your life. And that's in writing. And then as part of your end of work routine, you make up your plan for the next day. Same idea. You identify your handful of most vital priorities. The key things that are going to have the biggest impact in your life. I've got a planner that we give away in Happy Soul that makes it really easy to take care of a lot of habits as well as this planning for you keep you on track. But those two changes, easy habits to implement. Actually the nightly disconnect and planning your weeks and days before they begin can make extraordinary differences in your life.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: Sounds like something I could certainly use. Though I will say I think the habit of stepping away from all the connectivity is so challenging because it feels like there are so many. Both as a way to personally connect with others. There's different things related to your work constantly pinging. And I think it's a really great idea to try something new, step away, see if that makes the hours that you spend the next day even more effective. So it's definitely something that I want.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: To try, and they will be. So this is something that I learned. It took me many, many years to learn this lesson. I, as an entrepreneur, I always had a literally infinite amount of things I needed to do. And so I would work from morning till night, was just a brief break for dinner, right? I just go right back to work again and I could never get everything done. And finally I learned to stop and stop before dinner. And not only was that much better for again, relationships, mental health, sleep. But it also forces you to limit yourself to just the most important things. So when you feel like you have infinite time to get your work done, well, then you have time to do everything, including the trivial and unimportant. But if you have a limited defined time, then you're forced to limit yourself to just the most important things, the most impactful action you can take in that time period. And to give an example, let's say that you had some crazy disease and you could only work for two hours a day or else you'd die. But in those two hours, you had to make enough money to support your family. You had to pay the mortgage, pay all the expenses. You had to bring in just as much money as you bring in right now in two hours a day. Well, you'd. How would you act? You would do only the most important things for those two hours, right? You'd figure out how to structure your life, your business, your time, so that you could make that money in those two hours. And during those two hours, you'd be incredibly focused and productive. You'd only do the most important things. You wouldn't allow any distractions. You wouldn't do anything trivial. So that's just an example. You probably can do more than two hours of work a day, but there's no reason why you need to do more than seven or eight hours of work a day if you stick to the most important things.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: I think that's a really important distinction you've made of the quality of those hours, however many they are during the day that you're spending has to be laser focused and intense. And that enables you to sort of time block what you're doing. Personal time, work time. And I Think that can be really challenging, as we've talked about a number of times in this show. But how many different sources are competing for our attention constantly? And there are different things, even work related popping up, fire drills happening that feel like they need to be addressed immediately. And so when there are so many little things continuing to pop up during the workday, how do you set a boundary or say I need to focus on this really important thing and you either let that other thing go and it doesn't get done, or it has to get done later.
[00:27:32] Speaker A: Understanding how to prioritize this won't surprise you. I have a system for how to prioritize. Everybody's heard of the Eisenhower matrix or should have in which you Everything is categorized in the four box matrix of urgency and importance. And so there are things that are urgent that are not important, those you need to delegate or let somebody else handle so that you can focus on what's urgent and important and then also take time to work on what's important but not urgent. Of course there's the not important, not urgent. Just ignore that stuff, don't even think about it.
But I realize that evolution has trained us to pay most attention to something new. And so any new item is going to automatically appear to be a high priority to you. And you're going to want to cheat in that prioritization system. You're going to want to call it important and urgent because it's new, because that's what your brain wants to do from evolutionary training. So I had to create definitions what is important and everybody should do the same. So important might be a dollar value. If it is more than depending on your business, $1,000 it might be important. Or $50,000 it might be important or it might be if it impacts your strategy, it might be if it impacts your key people. You just figure, you just define what is important and then urgency, that's a little bit easier. Urgency can either be, must be done today or must be done this week. And if it's not one of those two, that is not urgent, that helps you when again having a system helps you to not be distracted, hold off course and lose your focus.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: That is another beautiful insight of you need to set a materiality threshold because the inputs are not going to stop coming and the urgency with which they scream will probably only continue to feel louder as you put them off. But I think it's a wonderful lesson on really thinking hard on how you're spending your time for what's the biggest impact for the things that you care about. And that's probably different for everyone. But I like this idea of going in with a preset definition so that in the moment it doesn't feel like so much of a struggle to decide what to do next.
[00:29:41] Speaker A: Without it, you'll cheat, right?
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:43] Speaker A: You'll do whatever's new every time.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: That was also so interesting. This idea of anything that is new feels urgent. And that's something I hadn't heard before.
[00:29:51] Speaker A: Well, that's the evolutionary programming. Because anything new might be a danger. And our primitive brain's job is just to keep us alive. And so much of what we do as human beings is driven by that evolutionary programming. Same reason we have a negativity bia, you know, because we're always looking out for what's wrong. Because it's dangerous, we might die. And so we have to have. We have to use our conscious mind, our prefrontal cortex to come up with systems to override that primitive mind, that reptilian mind that's always going to be trying to just keep you alive.
[00:30:23] Speaker B: Very interesting. Is there any piece of common business advice that you might disagree with or take a different approach to? And what might you offer instead?
[00:30:33] Speaker A: A couple things come to mind. One of them is we've already touched that to be successful you have to just work non, stop, give it everything you've got. You know, it's going to be an incredible grind for a few years and it may be for a short period of time, but as we discussed, limiting your work hours will actually make you more productive than feeling like you have to work all the time. So that would be one and the other one we touched on as well, which is, you know, stick to one thing only, do what you know, and just go deep instead of wide and so forth. And that certainly not something that applied to my life. I like to be challenged. I like new things. I do get bored after a while. And so for each business, once the business challenges were solved, I was looking for something else to do and it worked for me. I don't know if it would work for everybody.
[00:31:19] Speaker B: What's next for you and Happy Fool? I know you have a big goal of trying to reach a million people. So what does that look like?
[00:31:26] Speaker A: So first in the content and Happy fool came out of the training that I'd done for employees. Actually going back when I was in my early 20s, I'd always been pretty obsessive about organization and time management. And so I trained employees. I don't know, I was probably 23, 24 years old when I started training employees. I'd read all the books, gone to the summer, used all the systems, and I trained people. And then I really took that to the next level in the real estate business. So I mentioned that in that business, our mission was to help agents to be happy and successful. And so I developed a complete training programs for them, which I called Cues to Success. And it had to do with establishing a vision and a planning system, mindset habits, systems and routines and so forth. And whether it was employees or agents, they would take that course, they'd love it. They'd almost invariably say, paul, you should help others outside of the company. This is too good to keep it just within the company. And so after exiting the brokerage business, that gave me the time and the opportunity to bring that to a larger audience. And so the beginning was just building all the content because I wanted to make this a really valuable course. And the focus is on teaching people how to design, create and build their ideal lives. And that's what I've done personally is I have designed, created and built my ideal life and I'm living it and I want to help a million people do that. So developed all the content. We also developed a couple of other products besides our core behappy full course. We also have a daily inspirational email that's free. It comes out to anybody that signs up. It's called Inspire. And people can sign up for
[email protected], which is H E.
And then we also have a really cool thing which is a Chrome extension that will automatically add a rotating daily inspirational quote to your Gmail signature. So if you're a Gmail user, you just go to the Chrome web store. With one click, you'll then get this great inspirational quote that will go out with every email you spend. So you're just spreading inspiration around the world. That's not, it's free, it's not branded, there's no spam, you know, there's nothing, nothing in it. For happy Full. We just wanted to spread inspiration around the world. So we're in the process of getting our courses turned into interactive learning format to make it applicable to companies. Because most larger companies have their own learning platform and so they need compatible software to be able to run our courses on their software. And so that's. We have two growth strategies. One of them is the corporate market. So our course, because it covers both personal and professional development with the vision, the goals, the productivity, the planning, the mindset, and then health and happiness, it's really attractive to corporate learning and development leaders who are able to offer both personal and professional development in one package with just these four underlying themes that help the employee. So that's market number one and then market number two is individuals. And really the target market there is entrepreneurs. So if you're somebody that has to achieve your own success like an entrepreneur, it's perfect for you. And so we will reach that individual market through like minded personal development authors, podcasters, thought leaders who want to share it with their audience. Wow.
[00:34:51] Speaker B: Sounds like something I would really love to use as an entrepreneur. So I will definitely be checking that out. Thank you for sharing about that.
[00:34:58] Speaker A: I'd also like to take a moment, Rachel, if I can, to offer a special thing to your audience, which is a 50% off coupon for our courses at Behappyful. So if you go to behappyful.com that's B E H A P P I f u l.com and type in the coupon victory, you will get 50% off at that time. There's also free courses there that you can go check out and.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: Okay, well, you know where I'm going after this call. I'm gonna check it out. That is fantastic. So a quick question. You've achieved so much success across your career, but what does victory look like to you today?
[00:35:34] Speaker A: That's a really good question. So I've always been a goal oriented, competitive person. It used to be Victory was winning. Victory was becoming the most popular restaurant bar for Duke students. Victory was having the highest market share in each market for a music retail business. It was having the highest volume of any luxury brokerage in the state of Hawaii. But now looking back, I see that's a little bit shallow. I've always enjoyed and felt I got the most reward from helping the team members to be their best and perform their best and grow and thrive. And so to me now, that's really the definition of victory is to be able to put together a business that lets you give your best, lets you help your team members do their best and grow and thrive and of course, still meets your financial goals.
[00:36:24] Speaker B: If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?
[00:36:27] Speaker A: I go into investment banking or private equity. No, seriously. I wish I'd learned the lessons, but I don't think there's a way to do it without going through it. So some of the things that I've shared about the putting limits on your workday are really important. Another huge lesson was to pick the right business. So if you're going to be an entrepreneur. It's incredibly important to pick the right business. I told the story about my restaurant and bar and that really wasn't scalable. So after a few years, it wasn't even fun anymore. It was just a grind. It was just a tremendous amount of work. Some businesses are simple, profitable, easy to scale, allow you to recruit high quality professionals. Other businesses fail all of those. And I didn't realize that my restaurant business failed all of those before I started it. So picking the right business, knowing how to pick the right business would be something I wish I had my future self. Tell me before I got started.
[00:37:20] Speaker B: Paul, this has been a really wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights on how to build a meaningful life.
[00:37:28] Speaker A: Thank you for the opportunity. I really enjoyed it.
