PP 130: Pushing Past Fears with R Shawn McBride

Quick Show Notes: R Shawn McBride

R Shawn McBride and I have a fascinating discussion about his journey through the career world, how to push past fears and society’s beliefs of who we should be, and the importance of being authentic in our relationships and marketing.

.@RShawnLive and @thekimsutton share a fascinating discussion about entrepreneurial fears, comparisonitis and authenticity. https://thekimsutton.com/pp130 #positiveproductivity #podcast #entrepreneurClick To Tweet

Episode Transcription: R Shawn McBride

Kim Sutton: Welcome back to another episode of positive productivity. This is your host Kim Sutton and today I am thrilled to have R Shawn McBride who is the Chief Innovation Officer of McBride for business with us welcome Shawn.

R Shawn McBride: Well, thank you for having me. I’m really looking forward to this.

Kim Sutton: Oh, me too. And listeners I just have to — before we get into this chat — I just have to let you know how important having marketing any anywhere across any social media platforms, even if it’s evergreen marketing, how valuable that can be, because Shawn and I were just discussing before our conversation here before the recorded section, that it was probably evergreen content on Twitter that actually connected us.

Kim Sutton: So if you if you have any questions, and sorry, Shawn, I’m not trying to give a promo here, but if you have any questions about how to give evergreen content set up, just give me a shout out.

And before we even jump in, sorry, Shawn, again, I don’t normally go off onto a tangent like this, I’m sure that this episode is going to be full of great content, so I want to make sure that you know that you can get the show notes and the transcripts at thekimsutton.com/pp130.

Kim Sutton: But, Shawn, now that I’ve taken that big long detour before getting to you, I would love for you to share your story with the listeners and thank you again for being here.

R Shawn McBride: Yeah, thank you for having me. Um, yeah, I’ve had I’ve kind of had an interesting journey together. Come by my place in business, I started life as a… I started as an accountant, I studied accounting first, and didn’t do that for very long. And I took a survey course in business law and I said, “Yes, that’s my direction. I want to be a business lawyer.

R Shawn McBride: And then I did what everybody told me to do in law school: got good grades, go work for the big law firm. That’s where the opportunities are. And I played the big law firm game for about 10 years, three different large law firms, until I took a look around and I found that most of the people around me weren’t happy and decided I want to do something different.

R Shawn McBride: So I started my own law firm, which which has (?) been a great experience, but initially, I was working a lot of hours so I had to reinvent myself and figure out how to do more in less time and that’s when I kind of opened up a speaking arm and I started doing a lot of business speaking, and really helping people find themselves find what they want to do and really make plans at work everything.

R Shawn McBride: I do seminars around how helping people build or execute plans to make their business and their lives do what they want to do.

R Shawn McBride: So I’ve had a very interesting journey through the career world, and it’s led me to this point of helping people really execute their plans, making their private businesses stand over time, and helping business owners do what they want to do with their lives. It’s been very… it’s been very fun.

Kim Sutton: I… I’m just thinking about your business brain and the education that you received up till now. And I’m just thinking, wow, I mean, I thought it was hard enough to go through one program in school and mine was even in the artistic side. So the fact that you’ve gone through and become a CPA and an attorney, wow.

R Shawn McBride: You know, and the interesting thing is to you talk about the artistic side and for so long, you know, I thought trained as a CPA then trained as an attorney or as a your logical, logical, logical, but you know, as I became a business owner, it allowed me to unlock the creative and artistic side of my mind, which, you know, more and more,

R Shawn McBride: I believe all of us have it. Some some of us just aren’t using those parts of our brains enough where we haven’t let them flourish and develop and that that part of me is come later in life. And it’s been it’s been it’s been a great thing. It’s so fun and interesting to have all that working together.

Kim Sutton: Are you still practicing law?

R Shawn McBride: I do. I still work with clients, negotiate mergers, partnership agreements, corporate transactions, I still do all that kind of stuff, form companies. And then I also implement the legal structures to make their companies last so I still see a fair amount of legal work come across my desk but I also go out and help people start from the beginning.

R Shawn McBride: Not only okay so you want you want to build a company but why do you want to build a company What do you want your life to look like? How do you want to interconnect all your pieces that’s that’s become an interesting part is taking a step before even you formed the company. What do you want your life to look like? What are your missions and goals and business?

Kim Sutton: I love that and there’s so many people who don’t realize that I have to jump back though to When you were in big law firms, what would you say was the number one reason that a lot of your coworkers even got into law in the first place?

R Shawn McBride: You know, there was there was varied reasons. Some people got in because they really wanted to serve a public interest. They wanted to better society. And those people did that some people went in there because they heard it was a great, stable career, which changed a lot, you know.

R Shawn McBride: The world has been changing, and the legal profession is not nearly as stable as what the sitcoms are, what the historical people would have you think, you know, there’s a lot of transition going on in this industry. And it’s causing innovation that’s causing change, but a lot of people went in for those kind of reasons.

R Shawn McBride: A lot of people thought, Oh, yeah, I can go and be a lawyer. You get this education, you make good money on the other end, and sometimes you do, and sometimes you don’t, it’s not a guaranteed thing. And the interesting part, too, is being a lawyer. You look over some time and you look at people who didn’t dearly do as much education as me but did things that they were passionate about, they’re making great incomes too. And and I’m a strong proponent of people following their passion. And not necessarily just doing something because it’s because it’s profitable or because it seems the easy way to make money, really do what you love and the money will follow.

Kim Sutton: I love how you said, making an impact and, and how you talk about the passion. And I know Hollywood has really glamorized the story a bit, but the first thing that comes to mind is Erin Brockovich. And when you’re talking about, you know, people who don’t have as much education, I mean, yeah, yeah. There’s, there’s an example. And I believe, if I’m not mistaken, and I know I’m bringing movies into our podcast, but I mean, she wasn’t educated in law.

R Shawn McBride: Right, exactly, you know, and that’s then you do occasionally see those cases, you’ll see you know, that person defending themselves in a criminal trial or that person following a mission that figures out how to get Done and so much of the legal system, fortunately, or unfortunately, a structure, and that’s a lot of what, you know, good lawyer, hopefully is adding creative thought and innovation and really helping you make your case and present your case.

R Shawn McBride: But part two of what is there is just this complex, convoluted structure of how do you do things, which is very difficult for somebody on the outside and the lawyers get trained in and think about second nature. But, but good smart people can work through that as well. It just takes a little bit longer to go through it the first time because you’re not familiar with this unusually structured system.

Kim Sutton: So after somebody figures out what their passion is, and they decided that they want to start a business that goes around it, what would you say would be the first legal step that they should really consider?

(Transcription still being cleaned up. Thanks for checking it out!)

R Shawn McBride: Oh, you know, once you have that vision, you know what you want to do, then you then you’re kind of working on your plan. And that’s, then that first legal steps are going to vary depending on nature of the business. If it’s a personal service company and you’re doing all the work yourself. You know, a lot of some lawyers will tell you go out and form a limited liability company or corporation no matter what. And that may not be necessary for that kind of company, you may or may just get a good insurance policy. If you have partners, you’re certainly one on one, get a partnership agreement among the partners to understand how you’re going to divide the profits and how you’re going to develop things. If you have a piece of technology. You may want agreements to protect your know how or what you’re going to be discussing with your potential partners and investors and have confidentiality agreements before you even form a company. So which step comes first? depends a little bit on sort of where are you and where are you headed with the business. It’s a little different for everybody, depending on the nature of their business,

I love the fact that you just brought up getting and becoming an ELO p or an LLC, or getting insurance because that was not something that I had thought of when Starting when initially starting the business, okay, never know what type of clients as service providers and I know that some of the listeners aren’t, you know, service providers, they might be an e commerce or or what have you, but no, we don’t know.

There’s obviously you don’t know who your customers are, you know, and then some people are lawsuit happy, you know, and e commerce, you know, if you’re moving a product through the stream of commerce, you potentially have liability there. And now maybe you can push that liability up to the person that sold the product to you through a lawsuit but you know, you’re you’re in the chain of lawsuits that can be exposed if somebody gets hurt by that product. So there’s exposure out there, you know, and people may not like your advice as a as a, you know, as a consultant or as a person who’s given a service business. So, you want to be doing you gotta look for the possibility being sued, because when you’re a business owner, if you don’t set up that company, and you don’t have the insurance, your personal assets are on the line, and that’s not the last thing you want to do. I mean, it’s bad luck. If you have a company, it doesn’t Well, like you hope, you certainly don’t want to lose your personal assets in the process of having a business disruption.

Oh, absolutely. And I and I didn’t realize that actually, until after I had converted into LLP. And it was, I’m an Infusionsoft certified partner. And I understand can spam laws? I mean, that’s part of what I do I need to understand about, you know, opt ins and all of that. And a client didn’t like how I told her I wouldn’t put in context that were bought. But I mean, that’s, it’s my wallet on the line as much as hearse. Exactly. So she ended up letting me go and then suing me because I, because I wouldn’t do it. Yeah, it didn’t go through. It didn’t work in her favor. But I’m not gonna jeopardize my myself and my family over over contracts that were bought. I mean, that’s it. If you’re for listeners, if you put somebody into you Email marketing system that’s that could be up to a $25,000 fine, especially if you are in Canada. I mean, it’s really it’s much more steep up there. So just be really careful. Sean, so you, you opened your law firm, and then you started a speaking business? I would look. And then and then a strategy firm. And it just keeps on going on. So yeah. Love to hear more about that journey.

Yeah, there are sort of interconnected I mean, as I, as I spoke as a lawyer, and was invited to speak to groups, my message more interesting the other night because I got a q&a during one of my presentations. And one of the one of the people I was speaking to is one of the great things about speaking is you get to get to work with motivated people in your audience. And I had somebody in my audience asked me during QA, like, you know, how did you end up doing all this visionary work and doing all this planning work when I started out speaking of very, very technical legal topics, you know, how do you protect yourself from liability as a business owner? How do you bring in investors safely, how do you do these kinds of things? Very, very technical legal stuff. But you know, I kind of started working backwards. That’s protecting yourself from legal liability, but you also need to have a plan. What are you doing with your business? How are you growing your business? That’s a prior step. And if you’re going to do the protection, well, you need to have a good plan in place that started moving me more towards talking about people about their plans, and really, what are you trying to do and what’s going on in your business? And then as I got to that step, I started realizing there was one more step before that it was critical that i did i at that point in my career was not addressing with my clients, which was what is your vision? What is your dream? What do you want to do with your business? So as I started speaking, more I started moving more and more through this process from not just how do you protect this company you want to why do you want this company How do you want your life to look, how do you want to interconnect these pieces? And so that was my journey as a speaker and that I mean to do different stages and to get in front of bigger audiences and do some national and regional conferences and events like that, and corporate training. And so that, in turn led to people contacting me not just for legal work. Can you put together my LLC agreement, a draft my partnership agreement, but people started asking, you know, can you help me build my strategy? Can you make me help me put the right people together on my team so that my company lasts if something happens to me? How do I make this partnership agreement really work? So it morphed over time, it was really a mixture of who I was and what my expertise was and what I was good at and what I liked doing and clients and audiences telling me what they needed or what they would, what what they were struggling with.

I would love to know how it makes you feel when you hear that you’ve helped somebody.

It feels amazing, you know, and more and more that’s happening, you know, as I’ve unleashed This and I’ve started being more myself and following my passion and doing the things that I’m good at and sharing my knowledge and my message, you know, people come up to me and they’re like, you know, your speech caused me to feel like I can be more bold, I can try new things in life, I can do a new direction. I feel like I’m empowered to open my new business. I’ve had people that are senior to me say that they look to me as a mentor, because I’m guiding them on how to really follow a life and a vision they love and, you know, it’s just feels so good to be touching people in the world and opening up the possibilities. I think a lot of us get struck, caught into structures, you know, corporate structures, things that people have told us are true the way things have always been done. People keep thinking this way. Rather than thinking outside the box of what can I do, what should I do? How do I want my life to look like so I get the Bring that message to people and not everybody it connects with. But a lot of people I speak to they make that flash moment. They’re like, yeah, I can do something different my life, I can think differently, I can do something bigger. And that just alters the course of their world.

If you could go back before you were being trained as a CPA, and tell yourself to change or not to change, would you change anything about how you lived your life?

You know, I, part of me says no, because everything’s led to this moment and this being in this place and having this message and be able to convey this message to people. Part of he says, I wish you know, 20 years ago, I had known that I could be more deliberate and then I didn’t have to follow established structures to my career in my life. If I could have known 20 years ago that, you know, I create my value at it. I make an offering that people can utilize and can benefit from. And I get paid for that I don’t have to go sit into some box that somebody else said you’d be my account. You’d be my corporate lawyer at a big law firm. And this is what big law firm corporate lawyers do. I wish I had known 20 years ago that that I found if I need to find a way to add value to the world, and to help others and I would get paid for that. It would have altered the direction of my career I would have started doing more of this type of stuff sooner.

Were you swayed a lot then by the U RS instead of knowing that I am

That’s right. You know, there are a lot of the You are so you know, you’re good at this. You You’re good at math, you should be an accountant. You’re very logical. You should be a lawyer. You’re very organized. You’ll be great. A big law firm, you have great grades, you should be a big law firm lawyer. That was definitely the things that were coming at me. And the funny thing is people tell it to you, so You think it must be who you are right somebody on the outside solid and told you that you’re this you’re like wow I must be an accountant because people tell me I’m a good accountant then they tell me I’m good at this and I’m good I mean I pass the CPA exam on the first try which is not that common and I’m naturally I can do it I’m I’m talented in that area, but it’s not my passion or my or my thing that I really add the most value to the world and but yes, I listened to the you are this you should be this you should do this. Do it like this way because this is how everybody else does it. This is a good path forward rather than saying you know, find your own path Be yourself and let let the world catch up to you and let the people that are really your true customers find you.

I am going to ask the next next question. out of pure curiosity and listeners who have listened for a while know that I would love to start speaking my only thing fears that I would actually trip onto the stage. No, I don’t have a fear of speaking I have a fear of tripping. Well, what would be the first recommendation that you would have for somebody who’s looking to get into speaking?

I get this question a lot. And it’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to. The first step is just to start, start small. Get familiar with the speaking understand how, how speaking works. I think there’s so much people like, like you said, I’m scared of tripping on the stage. You know, that’s not the only one, you know, I’m afraid I’m going to say the wrong thing. I’m afraid I’m going to get locked up in front of the audience and forget my next segment of my presentation. I’m afraid that PowerPoints going to freeze up, you know, we’re all speakers we’re all communicators. You know, people don’t think much about going into a one on one coffee, but you’re probably doing that on a regular basis. You know, you’re sitting down with people that have networking lunch or you’re going to have coffee with somebody And you’re speaking you’re communicating who you are, it’s just it becomes a different format when you get control of the room, and you get to set the agenda for, you know, whatever the duration is 20 minutes or an hour or two hours, it’s a different dynamic. But you’re still communicating, you’re still speaking and you’re speaking already in your life. Now, you just need to get familiar with this new format. So I’d say start small. You know, go talk to local civic organizations, go speak to a local networking lunch, and learn that there’s no real mystery to speaking. It is just like other communications. Now, there are certain skills you can pick up along the way and certain enhancements you can do to be a more effective speaker, but you can start layering those in once you start. Once you break that ice of knowing that it’s not something magical. It’s not something impossible. It’s just another form of communication.

Now I know you’re about to start or you are working Got a new project which I’m gonna ask you to share in just a moment. But before you share that, I have to ask Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

You know, I think I’m an extrovert. But I was for so long in my life I treated myself as an introvert. I didn’t know that I have that I’m very comfortable in front of an audience. I’m very comfortable revealing myself now and I do during my presentations, you know, I’ll talk about I often talk about my failures in business, the things that have gone wrong, but it took a long time. And that was part of that familiarity. You know, knowing what happens with the dynamic and an audience and a lot of ways it’s actually better to address the issues before they come up. So I will talk about the fact that I’ve had struggles I’ve had plans go poorly in business I’ve learned from not being the best possible advisors to my clients early in my career, you know, I didn’t have a holistic view of business and I, there’s many clients that they greatly go work for, but I didn’t give them the right overall advice because I didn’t see the big picture. I talk about this stuff openly now. And that allows me to break the ice with people and people understand that I’m human, and I’m one of them and that we’re all fragile. We all make mistakes. And so that’s part of part of the journey, you know, is being able to just realize that we all are different. We all do things differently. And we’ve all made mistakes. And we make that human connection. That’s one of the great things about the speaking. So

you actually just segwayed really well, because I had another question. You’ve been featured in the Huffington Post, you’ve been a TEDx speaker. You’ve been in Wall Street Journal and on CBS Radio. As far as human connection goes, What would you say were some of the most important steps that you took in human connection to have opportunities like this,

you know, most of these connections at some point tied back to a human at some point, you know, Huffington Post, You know, writing the article for them, you know, all long chain of event tied back to their personal business contact ahead. And Dallas encouraged me to go to a business development program which led to me meeting the certain people, which led to me submitting that article to Huffington Post and ultimately getting it published. Step Step, step, TEDx. You know, I have a team that works with me at the office to help with the clients and to keep things moving forward. And one of my team members came to me and said, You should talk about women in business, and I hadn’t even occurred to me that that should be a topic, but I do a lot with business partnerships, and I work a lot with women and she said, this is a perfect combination. So she put together a proposal for me to speak to the TEDx women which ultimately led to that everything that’s kind of broke through in some way, shape or form leads back to some human connection. Somebody I knew I met, we made a connection. There was a bond there was a reason why we were talking or doing business together and then some synergy came out of it. So you know, we live in a digital But even with a digital age, it’s often about that human connection or that person that you know, in common in the real world that gets you through the noise of all the online digital communication going on. So I highly value my personal connections and talking to other people and building those relationships.

Shawn, my good friend Chris Werth who is hosted the no quit living podcast has told me time and time again that there is no six points of separation. There’s only one Do you agree or disagree?

It may or may not be more than one. But it’s getting it’s getting it’s getting low. The numbers are very small. You know. I think that i think that’s changed you know, one point it may have been six now I would maybe say three or four because we’re not that far apart from others. It’s surprising You know, there’s a

there’s a well regarded speaker out there

who I’ve heard have, you know, kind of admired for some time, a guy named Simon Sinek, he did a great TED Talk. Let’s start with why. And, you know, it’s always just been in the back of my head that I like his work. And the other day, I’m talking to somebody, and he, that person happens to be friends with Simon Sinek. So I’m, I’m one step away from him now. And I don’t know who else is out there that I’m one or two steps away. But more and more, especially as my network is expanded, it’s usually one or two steps. I’m not that far away from most people if I need to meet them. So

that’s always really fascinating to me. When I’m looking on LinkedIn, when I look up somebody that I’m not connected to yet. Usually it really is only their second. I don’t even know if LinkedIn shows third anymore. Actually, they do. But most the time it is second. I think I’ve just gotten so used to seeing the twos that I forgotten that threes or fours could be out there.

Yeah. And it’s just, you know, as your network builds, particularly, you know, and then make these people get closer and closer, so they We’re not that far apart, we’re all interconnected in this world, you know, and we’re all now we’re all communicating with each other and encountering each other. Over time, you know, I have a friend of mine. And it was very interesting. We ran, we met at a party years and years ago, we’ve been good friends ever since. And we got talking one time after we met at that party. And there were like five or six other events where we were probably within an hour or two of meeting each other. You know, within the year prior to the day we’d met. Because we just started comparing notes. I was at this place on this aisle, I was at that same place around the same time I was at this place or that same place around the same time and just amazing. how, you know, we might be nearing people and then now the other experience I’ve had a lot lately as my business has expanded is, one person will say you need to meet this person because they’ll be strategic for your business, you’ll have a lot of synergies and I might call that person and schedule a call with them, and a couple weeks later, somebody else is suggesting that I’ve reached out to the same person.

So,

you know, it’s one of those deals where we’re not that far apart. And it’s amazing to see these over connections over time and how close we are to each other.

Oh, that’s so funny. Because that’s going back to Chris Werth. We actually worked in the same small building in Greenwich, Connecticut at the same time. My office was the only one on my floor. His was the only one on his floor. And our offices were the only two offices in this building, but we never met them. And that was 13 years ago. Wow. The last year. Yeah. And now we’re collaborating on stuff listeners. I don’t know if by the time this episode is released, if announce anything, but there’s there’s awesomeness coming. But yeah, it’s just so coincidental. Just like you were saying, how things just work out like that.

Yes.

I would love for you to talk and share with listeners about your 50 state tour.

Yes, let’s That’s my exciting project right now it’s going to take a couple of years to complete. But, you know, again, as these synergies come together, these connections come together, I enjoy traveling, and I enjoy National Business throughout the entire United States and seeing what we can do better. And kind of all this has coalesced into what I, what I’m calling the 50 state tour a business and I’m going to go to all 50 states in the United States. And we interview at least four businesses in every state, we have four different categories of interviews we’re going to do, we’re going to really collect information and data about what’s working in business, what people are doing right and what we can do better in the future, and how we can help each other as businesses. So it’s going to be a very educational tour should be interesting because it’ll create good promotion for those companies that that volunteer to be interviewed, and will also collect a great body of knowledge which we can communicate to business owners about what’s happening and how we can all do things a little bit better.

What are the four areas that you’re focusing on?

We’re going to do partnerships, an area that I’m very passionate about, I like to make business partnerships work. And I like to be realistic about how partnerships work together. We’re gonna do continuity planning, these are businesses that have put plans in place. So that if something happens to the owner, or the key management team, that business continues, it will still exist for the employees that wealth and value will still be there for the families. We’re going to do women in business following up off my TEDx talk, which is kind of become a mini theme in my businesses. You know, helping women business owners do the things they do great. So that’s one of our categories. And then the final category is going to be empowerment through entrepreneurship. You know, I believe entrepreneurship empowers people to really be who they are, allows them to build teams of people that are being themselves and we’re looking for very entrepreneurial companies that have created unique cultures or systems or allowed people to really be who they are and express themselves and empowered lives through the entrepreneurial process.

Oh, that’s fabulous. And how I know you said

I apologize, I forget the exact expression that you use, but how will you be using the interviews that you prepare? Will you be releasing them to the public?

Yes, we will. So we’re gonna we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re behind you on the podcasting world, but we’re getting into the podcasting world. So we’re going to do podcasts, these interviews will be recorded, they will be released in podcast form. We’re also going to do blogs. And eventually this will become partial portions of a book, I believe that’s going to be part of the end product. This is we’re going to get common lessons and we’re going to learn what’s going on. There’s gonna be articles and books and materials on that it’ll probably be another keynote speech tying back into my love of speaking and spreading messages to audiences. I imagine as we learn from what’s going on and we see these key themes. We’ll be bringing that message to people of what’s happening and what people are doing well in business and what we can all probably benefit from.

I can see it A fabulous looking book in my head already, I can only imagine how inspiring it will be in our value. Yeah. How can people who are interested in your 50 state tour find out more,

you go to WWW dot McBride for business and for spelled out fo r.com slash 50 states, you’ll see the landing page for that. And also, if you just go to McBride for business calm to the homepage, one of the sliders will take you to the 50 state tour. And there we have a profile sheet back of the United States talks about what we’re doing for the tour and there’s a couple of buttons there, you can follow the tour if you just want to get updates on what’s happening and get some of the podcasts and other materials as they are released. You can follow the tour there but you can also sign up to be to apply to be interviewed. So if you’re interested in being interviewed, you can click the Application button. It’s a very short form. Submit your company and your idea And, you know, we’re going to look at these on a rotating basis, the travel is going to be tied to some other travel that have existing. So we’ll be doing the states kind of in a random order, we know go back to a state more than once. So if your states are even visited, we may come back again, we may do a second company in a category if there’s somebody compelling. So it’s gonna be an ongoing application process. So if somebody’s interested in jumping in, you know, feel free to submit an application and you know, we’d love to consider it.

That sounds so fabulous. And again, listeners, you can find all the links and any resources that we’ve talked about at KIM SUTTON comm forward slash p p. 130. I know you just spoke, I gave a couple links, but where are the best places for listeners to find you online?

McBride for business comm is my business strategy firm. Our Sean McBride live letter r sh A w n McBride lives that that profiles me as a public speaker and that really shows what we’ve been giving to the audiences and the different messages that we’ve been spreading. And then McBride attorneys calm is me as a as the law firm and the attorney work and then McBride book profiles. My book business blunders, which is a book of lessons we’ve learned over the years when business owners have made unfortunate mistakes before they hired us as a law firm. We tried to chronicle those things and write them down to help other people from avoiding those mistakes.

Oh, I love that. I love that you’re sharing it because

I wouldn’t call them failures. I love how you call it blunders. I mean, we learned from them and it’s nothing to be ashamed of or to hide. And hopefully by sharing, just like you were talking about, we can help others.

Yeah, exactly. That’s, that’s the whole point of all of my business is to get people to the next level and the more we can learn from each other and avoid mistakes and do things better, the better off we’ll be

Shawn, I want to thank you so much for being here today. Do you have any last words of advice that you would like to share with listeners?

I think number one is think about where you want to be 10 years from now and really make that a very clear picture in your mind. You know, I work with a lot of CEOs and business owners, it’s pretty surprising when I asked them about what they want their life to look like in 10 years, a lot of them haven’t worked through that exercise. But it’s amazing when you have a clear picture of where you’re going, and what you want to be. You can make very easy decisions about whether things fit in your life, whether they don’t fit in your life, whether an opportunity is a good opportunity or not a good opportunity. So I’d say really do the work is this is your life. You have a lot of power, you have a lot of control that you may not realize, think about what you want to be doing with your time. Where do you want to live? What do you want your family relationships to look like? What do you want to develop? Where do you want to be in 10 years and start steering that direction.