Become The Most Valuable Version Of Yourself NAIFA Apex Keynote

 Hey guys, I wanted to give a little bit of context on this next clip that you're about to see. I had the opportunity and honor to speak at  Hey guys, I wanted to give a little bit of context on this next clip that you're about to see. I had the opportunity and honor to speak at  Hey guys, I wanted to give a little bit of context on this next clip that you're about to see. I had the opportunity and honor to speak at NAIFAs annual event. I got to keynote at this event. And NAIFAs is the number one association for financial advisors and life insurance agents. And they just do so much for industry on the state level and the national level. And so it was a huge honor. And I got to speak in front of a bunch of legends in the crowd that I looked up to and have spoken on the stage before. And so, again, it was really, really cool. And I got to talk about value leveraging, which is this topic and concept that become more and more passionate around, around create value and amplify that value. Whether you're in business, whether you're going to school, whether you're working for somebody, if you can figure out ways to provide value and amplify that value, money will follow, influence will follow, you'll start getting closer to unlocking intentional living. And so I got to share that. It's filled with a bunch of tactics. I got to share some vulnerabilities that I've just, I really felt strongly about. And I got to challenge our industry to step up. And so if this is interesting, make sure to share it to share it around. I would love love hearing from people that reach out. I love hearing you in the comments. And I'm just so incredibly grateful for this community. And for all the people that have helped me get to a place where I can speak at NAIFAs annual apex event. So from the bottom of my heart, this is true honor. And I hope you enjoy. Two lines. All I had to remember were two lines. And I totally blanked. What made matters worse is I remember taking out my note card very nervously and reading out every single word. I have no idea what this whole play was all about. I do remember feeling like a total and utter failure walking off that stage. So I want to introduce to you 13-year-old Caleb. I know many of you are like, that was like last week, right? We made without the beard. 13-year-old Caleb had two massive insecurities. Insecurity number one was I was the oldest of six kids and yet I was super, super small. My younger sister was taller than me. And she made it a point to let everyone know that she was younger than me, that yet she looks so much older. And insecurity number two was I could barely read. And being 13 years old and having reading insecurities, it was like the perfect storm. This photo was taken two hours before my most embarrassing moment on stage when I totally blanked. I went to my mom the next day, literally in tears because as a 13-year-old, I was self-aware enough to know that I don't know if I'm going to mount anything. And my mom said something to me that I'm ultimately going to dedicate this whole talk to. She said Caleb, the things that you can't control don't worry about. But the things that you can control, you have a moral obligation to go all in. I don't know about you guys, but when we're in an industry right now where sometimes it feels a little bit like some things are out of our control. You look at politics, taxes, when you look at what's on the news. But I'm telling you in 2022, there is no greater time. There's no greater time to be in this profession in industry. And it's interesting because as I take a step back, like I am insanely honored to be in a room filled with people that have gone before us. I had the pleasure of connecting with Tom yesterday. Tom Hegda, anyone has been impacted by that man? And I remember four and a half years ago sitting in a room watching him speak and thinking to myself, I hope to someday have as much clarity and conviction as that guy does for our industry and what we do in our profession. So here's the challenge. This is going to be like, I promise you I'm going to give my all to be as valuable as possible in this next hour. But I want to remind us that we are an industry that we can take control over. And this is one of the most exciting things. And at the end of the day, if the mindset isn't right, like I'm telling you, I'm still like, I'm still high off a Cody's talk about going to the next level. But if our mindset's not right, none of what I'm going to say matters. Because at the end of the day, sometimes we don't need another tactic. Sometimes we just need to understand why we're doing what we're doing. So my next job after this motivational talk from my mother was at the chicken farm. Okay, let's just say, I appreciate the chicken sandwich. I got paid a dollar for every chicken that we processed. And that's when I started learning so much about money. I read two books, actually I listened to the two books. And one was Rich's Man of Babylon. And the other was good to grade. And that was like the perfect storm because on one hand, I was like, man, I want to get into business. I want to dedicate my life to this whole business game. And the other thing was like, okay, Rich's Man of Babylon, principles on how anyone can be wealthy. A 10% of what you make is yours to keep. And then I looked around at our country and was like, why is everyone broke? At 16 year old Caleb said, I don't know what this whole financial thing is, but I'm going to do something about it. And then what I did was I got a job at a bank, another long story, but a gentleman believed in me, believed in this this kid who was actually so nervous when I sat down with him. My mom helped me write out questions on what to ask. We were in Wisconsin, it was like below zero. I was so nervous, I left my car on. That 17 year old kid got one break. One of my mentors took out his phone, made one call, got me a job at a community first bank. And then through that, I dedicated everything, like I was like, this is my shot. I want to do everything I can to be as valuable as possible. So I worked in our teller line, I wrote radio ads, I worked in our loan department. I became an HR nightmare because I would just show up and do things for free. They're like, Caleb, you can only work for 20 hours. Okay, I'll get paid for 20 hours and work for free because it just made total sense to me that the bank was going to be the greatest place for me to get to the next level. And so at age 19, I came up with this mission statement because seven habits, five effective people was one of the most influential books I've read and encouraged you to think with the end in mind. So I came up with this mission statement to help people see and reach their highest potential. I was like, man, if I could dedicate my life to doing this one thing, that'd be incredible. And by the way, money is not the main reason, but it's one of the many reasons why people aren't able to live to a god-gum, their god-gum potential. And so at 19 years old, yes, that was me at 19. I took over the Banks Investment Department, 350 clients. Now, it was interesting because my dream was to be in the financial space, but on one hand, I felt like I arrived. I'm like, man, this is incredible. I'm 19 years old. I have my dream job. On the other hand, I'm experiencing what like half the room in this room is experiencing. It's 10 minutes of horror. You're like, I have grandchildren older than you. What in the world are you like, how in the world are you going to help me with my money? But is it not true that I had my own 10 minutes of horror when I started seeing what people are going through? I remember one time at 19 years old, someone came into my office all excited because they dedicated their life at a job, but they totally hated. They're excited to retire at 19-year-old Caleb after looking at their few assets for like five minutes, realized that they were going to have a fraction of what they thought they were going to have. And I just thought, my mission statement was on the wall. I was just thinking, am I going to be okay just sitting back in a corner office letting people come to me and just being an average typical financial planner? I was like, I'm not going to settle for this. And so I started really diving deep into like, how is money, how does money work? And I'm going to share with you three epiphanies that I had in this journey that were like, oh my goodness, if people understood this, we would start changing the way that we think about money, which would ultimately change our behavior. So the first thing is clarity. This is like the first epiphany. Majority people don't even have clarity in what they want. It's like Alice in Wonderland where Alice gets in the fork in the road and the cat says, where do you want to go? And Alice says, I don't know. Then the cat says, well, if you don't know where you want to go and you wrote, it will get you there. Welcome to America. Majority people have no clue where they want to go. And at the end of the day, if you don't know where you want to go, why are you even talking to anyone to help you be more efficient with your money? So it's interesting how we define wealth is vital. Because if we don't define the actual goal, how do we know where we're going? And so it's interesting because when you think of wealth, whether you want to admit it or not, a lot of us think about a financial metric. I'm going to use an extreme example, but Warren Buffett is known as being one of the wealthiest, quote-unquote, men in America. Warren Buffett's 91 years old and worth over $100 billion. Who would trade places with Warren Buffett at 91 years old? I need this to sink in. Because if we're not willing to trade places with $100 billion, what are we indirectly telling you about what we value our time at? I'm telling you on a macro level, we get it. We don't want to die. On a micro level, we devalue our life every single day. And so what's interesting to me is we at Better Wellth make our financial metric, the intentional living metric. You're not wealthy if you're not living intentionally. What's interesting is intentional living looks different for each person. Cody, I have a funny feeling that a jet isn't an intentional life for you. For some of us in this room, you don't need a jet to live intentionally. What's important is not to mirror my intentional life or Cody's intentional life, it's to get ultra-crystall clear what does intentional living look like for you. What are you spending your time on? Who are you spending it with? What are the talents that you're using with your one life? That, whatever that metric is, can we not agree that that should be the metric that we reverse engineer a financial plan and cash flow around? And so this is something I can't really take credit for, but it just kind of popped into my head. ROR, a lot of times stands for rate return. And it's interesting because a lot of people will determine what they do for the rest of their life and where they put their money for the rest of their life based on this metric. You really doesn't matter at the end of the day. It's interesting. I took a step back and said, what if ROR stood for return on result? What if we reverse engineered the results that people wanted and we made that more important than any one metric? Just a thought. So number one, it's intentional living and getting clear on what we actually want. The second thing is cash flow. The most important financial metric in my humble opinion is cash flow. Not net worth, not other metrics like rate return, it's cash flow because you could be a billionaire on paper, but cash is what pays your groceries. Okay? We need cash flow is the most important thing. And so I used to say cash flow is king and now I say cash flow is king and queen because I don't want to divide the room. Okay? And so at the end of the day, we're very, very simple. We're like, if you have enough cash flow to live intentionally, that's the goal. Again, not perfect, but at the end of the day, if you have enough cash flow to live an intentional life, you're good. That was a piphany number two is let's plan for cash flow, not other financial metrics that may or may not matter. And number three, the piphany at 20 years old, that was like life insurance. Life insurance. It was interesting because when I first got into the space, I learned all about why permanent life insurance is so bad and by term, and invest the difference and all that stuff. And then I started learning and studying what banks were doing, corporations were doing. I started studying people that I admired and they were thinking about life insurance a little differently. They were like, when life insurance is set up properly, you can not only protect your life, but you can also have benefits in the future. And we came up with this concept of the and asset. I can't take credit for that. We were just smart enough to buy the domain. Okay? So at the end of the day, it's like, oh, I can, when set up and use properly put my dollar in a place that can literally protect my family and myself and it can grow, my, my dollars can grow the rest of my life. And I can have control and use over those dollars. And Tom, we can have amazing retirement benefits in the future. And it potentially can help me at 20 years old save more money because I don't have to say see you for the next 45 years. And the most important thing is I believe the asset when set up and use properly can help you live more intentionally. And so when I started learning this, I was like, man, how many people out there are articulating a life insurance product? This is not an investment. But I was like, man, when set up and use properly, it's an enhancer of you. You are your greatest asset. And I believe you are better if you have life insurance at the foundation of your life. And so that was like the epiphany. And then I thought of like the example of the cell phone. How many, how many people do not have a smartphone? Raise your hand. I knew there's one. There's always one. Okay. Okay. So we're going to pretend that that one young gentleman in the back doesn't exist. The smartphone is one of the greatest inventions. I know there's a lot of negative things that come with it, but think about it. Our phone is a flashlight. It was my alarm clock. It was my white noise machine. I can email. I can text. I can actually do phone calls, which is kind of a foreign thing nowadays. I can do so many things. This is not an investment. And yet I'm able to make a lot more money and do a lot more things and get closer to intentional life because of the cell phone. This is a tool the same thing as when life insurance can be a tool to secure people in the United States and in North America. Just an example that we use that was like, oh, and I got that. It's not the it. It's the end. Okay. So we're going to be talking about a value leveraging, which is a topic I'm very passionate about. And actually in 2017, before I left the bank, I made a voice memo to myself. We're not going to play it now. But I essentially said, I essentially talked about this talk before living it out. I was learning all these things. I was learning about intentional living. I was learning about cash flow. I was learning about life insurance. And I was looking to the world. And I was like, they're not articulating it very well. There's opportunity. And so I made a voice memo to myself that just out of gratitude saying, I'm learning all this stuff. And the person that's going to win is going to provide value to the marketplace and amplify that value. And again, that's what ultimately I'm going to share through my story and some tactics on how to help us all in this room create value leveraging for our life. And so what ended up happening was at the rightful age of 21, I was like, you know what? Got one life. I don't want to regret it. I watched this inspirational TED talk of people regretting their life. And so I'm like, I'm not going to do that. Looked out my mission statement, which said, tell people see and research highest potential. And I was like, you know what? We're going to start this company. It's going to be called Better Wellth. And we're going to do this thing called the internet. And I believe people are going to want, if they understand what I know about life insurance, they'll be a line outside the door. And so I got three crazy people to believe in this vision. Greg, Dan, and Julie. Julie was actually an intern. She got six college credits for someone that was still in college when they launched the company. And we set out on this way to try to like find this better way. Now I want you all to know when I started Better Wellth, I was living with my parents. I was living with my parents. We were in the very prestigious office in the basement of a Papa John's building in a Hawaiian tanning studio. Okay? $250 a month. $250 a month was our lease. Until Dan was bragging to our landlord that we were crushing it and they bumped it up a hundred bucks. I was like, Dan, you're never crushing it to the landlord. You're always struggling. Okay? And so this is where we began. And there are three things that I stumbled upon. I essentially started a podcast. I self-published a book and I started speaking. And those three things were value leveraging that took our business to the next level. I didn't, I wasn't smart enough to say this is how the five step plan and how we're going to do it. I just intuitively knew if people could hear this message, there would be a line outside the door. Our team doesn't look like a typical team in the financial service space. We have now, it's, now we have over 15 people on the team. We're all remote. We have team members in all four time zones in the United States and we have clients all over the country and we do everything virtually. And we have a lot of youth. Our senior person in our internal team is 41 years old. And so we have a lot of fun and we try to provide as much value as possible. The greatest accomplishment I've made up until this point is convincing my beautiful wife April to marry me. And so that happened. We're 14 months. Not writing any marriage books quite yet. Everyone told me communications important. I was like, what do you mean? And I now know what you guys mean, communication, right? So we living in Colorado and actually now moving to Tennessee. So we are excited to live in Nashville. Okay, so value leveraging. Value leveraging is a fun, two things that need to be happened in value leveraging. Number one is you need to create value. Number two, you need to amplify that value. Okay. Number one, provide value. Number two, maximize that value. If you do this one, two punch, you will be successful and you'll serve more people. You make more money. You'll have more time. So in this talk, I'm going to do my very best to what we're going to define. What is value? I'm a big framework person. For those of you that know I love whiteboard. So we're going to provide what value is. We're going to talk about the two biggest problems in our industry today that's keeping us from creating value. Then we're going to talk about the three questions that if you can answer these three questions in this room, you will literally elevate your ability to provide more value in this space. And finally, we're going to talk about a simple sales framework because I have some beef with all the sales tactics out there that can, if we can do, we can just sell more and sell it more ethically. Then we're going to talk about leverage. We're going to look at what is leverage. We're going to look at the six areas of leverage and then I'm going to give you nine. Nine leverage ideas that you can use and implement two day in your business. All right, fair? Okay, before we jump in, I always promise myself I would never not talk about things that I think need to be said. This is a picture taken right before I left the bank and this is a picture of 21-year-old Caleb with the golden microphone, $47 on Amazon. And this is a picture of someone who is afraid. This is a picture of someone who is terrified leaving the bank because I had it all. I had a corner office. I had the prestige at being my age graduating college. And yet, I was afraid of failing. I was afraid of putting myself out there. I was afraid of some of the people that I love the most, thinking down on me for doing something that they didn't think I should do. The reason I have the word identity is I believe identity is the most important thing fundamentally in our life. And a lot of us are making decisions based on what other people think we should do or our perception of what they think we should do. And a lot of us are encaged in a box that the box that we've put ourselves in. And so again, I knew all the tactics. I knew all the raw raw, but I had to look myself in the mirror and say my identity is not built around success or failure. And when I had that moment, I was free to say, okay, even if I fail and lose it all, write a self-published book and go broke financially, my identity is not going to be tied up in that. And that was the thing that ultimately needed to happen before better wealth was born. I just felt like I need to share that because I think a lot of times we don't talk about the actual root issue of why we're not getting the success or why we're not leaning into what we truly need to lean into. So value. What is value? A lot of people say money follows value. I really do believe that. It's interesting. What is money? Money is just currency that is printed, that's getting less and less valuable each year. But ultimately, we believe if you provide value, money will flow. That's what I read in all the books. And so I was like, I want to be as valuable as possible. So the definition of value is the material or monetary worth of something. So we want to be valuable. I'm told you I'm a framework person. So at the end of the day, what is value? Value is made up of really, really there's really two things. You have your input, which is you, your time, your talents, your relationships, your resources. And it can only provide two things. You can only provide two things in life. A service or a product. Some of us are serving in employment and we're not all paid the same. The people that are paid the same or paid more are the ones that are providing a perception of greater value than those that are not. There's nothing wrong with a janitor and a heart surgeon, but a heart surgeon gets paid more because of the perception of value that they're providing. And I would say that perception is something that we wouldn't disagree with. They're providing more value, i.e. that's why they're getting paid more. Not all companies are created equal. There's certain companies that are providing a service that people are paying more for. Why? Because they value that service more than other services. Same with products. I mean, I'm not going to use that example. Not all products are created equal. Let's put it that way. And so at the end of the day, we will pay more for a product that we perceive as being more valuable. And so it's interesting. This is it. All value is, it's in a service or a product, and we can diagnose this and say, if we're providing a service, does the market consider us valuable? Because I have news for us, a lot of us are focused on the wrong things and we're not actually focused on, do people that I want to serve actually find what I do valuable? And so at the end of the day, it's in the output, not the input. I'm talking to my generation first. We think we'll go to school and get a degree and then go and get a master's degree. And we're so smart because we have all this knowledge. No one gives a crap. No one gives a crap how smart you are. They will pay and follow you for what you provide to the marketplace. And that's a thing that we need sometimes to get because some of us have alphabet soup behind our name. And that's amazing. But at the end of the day, what are you doing to serve your clients with all the knowledge that you have? We will get paid for the output, the output and the result that we give our clients, not how smart we are. All right, two problems, two problems in our industry. Problem number one. Most of us think we have a marketing problem. Most of us think we have a leads problem. And in my humble opinion, we don't have a leads problem. We actually have an offer and sales process problem. I'm speaking to myself first. A lot of times we'll say, man, if I just had more leads, I would be better. But at the end of the day, those leads usually are because the offer that we have is not amazing. So you might want to get ready to write this down because I'm going to go through three questions that we're going to go through kind of quickly. But these three questions, quite frankly, could be the most important slide that we go through. Okay? So step number one is, if you think back in your business, and majority of us are in service-based businesses, we provide services and people will pay us for the service that we give them. Number one, who is our ideal client? Who, if we could only serve one type of person, who would that be? Step number two, and this is really, really important. What problem do they have? Not what are our solutions, how we can serve them. I don't care about that. What problem do they have? What's keeping them up at night? What's making them fight with their spouse? What's giving them anxiety? What's stressing them out? What are the problems? By the way, no one's thinking in bed about should I get a spia? Okay? Sorry Tom, no one's thinking about that. No one's thinking about, oh I want uninterrupted compounding the rest of my life. I just, man, I'm not getting uninterrupted compounding. No one's thinking about, man, I just need long-term care insurance. But a lot of the stresses that they're facing could be solved by one of the three products that I just mentioned. So then the third question, this is where we all love, right? Is how do you crazy over-deliver solving their problem? Not again, not. It's not what we think there, but it's like how do we communicate to them? Like you, you're laying in bed thinking about this and this is how we can solve your problems. Because at the end of the day, majority of people don't care what, they just care that it can be solved. I'm telling you this, this right here, I've spent a lot of money being in my head against the wall and I've realized that these three questions, it has made our business incredibly clear because anything that we do, we walk through these three questions. Who are we serving? What problems are they actually feeling and how do we solve that problem? If we can message that, that service will be perceived as value. The biggest problem that people face in this space is they are talking about solutions that are not resonating because they're not speaking to the pain that I have. This is not a picture of my car, by the way. The Lambo effect, and this is like an extreme example, but if I had a Lamborghini, I could sell it for 100 bucks easily because there's a perception of value. I would say a lot of us should be focused on how do I make my company and products and services that I provide to the marketplace, i.e. services. How do I create the Lambo effect that make people say, I'm out of my mind if I'm not working with you. Two other resources. For any of you that want these slides or I have a bunch of free gifts, you can come over by the booth and whatnot. Elon Musk has an amazing video. I cut up two minutes and 50 seconds of it and he literally talks about what is business. He essentially says business or profit is when the output is greater than the input. That difference is profit. He then says majority of CEOs and presidents should stop focusing on presentations and all the cute stuff and they should make their product or service better. He says that over. The person that's interviewing him is trying to get a different answer and he's like, just make your product better. Just make your product better. When I watched that, I got so convicted because I'm like, that's what I need to do. I just need to make our product better. That's a video that I wanted to include in our free gift. The other book, how many people have read this book by Alex Hermosi? Amazing book. He literally breaks down how to create an irresistible offer. I love that. How to make offers so good that they make you feel stupid saying no. It's an amazing book. I would highly recommend every single person get it and Alex articulates the power of the offer and talks about when you start your business, you need to start with the offer. All right, second problem when it comes to value creation. The second problem is our industry is too busy focusing on selling and convincing. When I started in our space, I was given more sales books than I was actually about our products and services. We justify it by saying, well, if you can't sell, you're not going to be able to feed your family and you're going to get out of the business. There's justification there for sure. I'm telling you what, I literally felt like a sleazy salesperson. I was told, get a list of 100 people. How many, you know where I'm going with this? Get a list of 100 people, invite them out to Starbucks and then cold pitch them, fact finder, whatnot, and sell them stuff. Ask for three referrals before you add any value. I was like, man, I'm sorry if I'm offending some people in the room, but I'm like, that just does not sit well. Just not resonate. There may be a reason why only 8% of people last in our space because I'm like, that doesn't resonate at all. So, again, I'm saying if you have to memorize a sales tactic or memorize a nine step, you know, like how to convince someone and convince someone that they need to work with you, I would highly encourage you to take a step back and I'm going to give you two steps that I think are much simpler and if we actually know what we're talking about, we don't necessarily need nine steps because people are way more simple than that. And so, my challenge is let's focus less time on sales tactics and more time on asking the question, are we providing actual value to the people that we're serving? Okay, so my favorite definition quite frankly is efficiency because I think it'll realize to everything that we do about money and business. Efficiency definition is the ability to avoid wasting materials. The ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time in producing a desired result. So, my definition is how to help someone get to their desired result with removing as much friction as possible. That's efficient. If I can help you do that, I'm helping you be more efficient and we as Americans value efficiency. Okay, so step number one in Caleb's simple sales tactics is number one, get ultra-crystall clear and what someone wants. So, resonate with epiphany number one with money. Get really, really clear what people actually want. And if we can articulate what you truly want, I make that what's called the RLR statement, return on result statement, and that becomes a metric that you care about. So, at the end of the day, if I can help you get there, amazing. And then the second thing is just eliminate any friction that's getting in your way. Step number one is do the people that come and work with us, do they feel like we actually understand what they truly want to accomplish? And then step number two are re-illiminating any of the friction in their life to help them get there. So, an example of this is we're in Phoenix right now and our new home is going to be in Nashville, Tennessee. And I could get really, really crystal clear in where I wanted to go. At the end of the day, if I didn't know where I wanted to go, I wouldn't be here. So, I'm here. And I could walk to Phoenix. And I would literally look like Mark Acre, okay, after his run just soaked head to toe, right? No one I guarantee you is walking 20 days to get to this destination. I could drive, I bet you majority of us didn't drive, especially two days to be here, but maybe some of us did, or I could fly and get here in four hours-ish. It doesn't include delays, okay? What's interesting is a lot of people that we meet know where they want to go, or maybe by working with us they get clear in what they truly want because we give them permission to dream again, but a lot of them are equivalent of walking to their destination financially. And if we can just help people get to what they want in a better, more efficient way, they will do business with us if we speak in their language, not ours. Is this resonating with efficiency and sales? So, number one, get really, really crystal clear in what people want. Number two, just help them get there, remove any friction. Here's a question that I would encourage you all to take picture of. Well, this slide too. These are just some of the, these are some of the things as a company. We were like, okay, these are some of the friction points that we're experiencing. These are some of the friction points that our clients are experiencing. They're lacking clarity. They're overpaying on taxes. They have underperforming investments. They have bad debt. They're overspending. They have insurance gaps. These are some of the friction points that people are experiencing getting to where they want to go. But this is the picture, this is the picture that really convicted me as I was going through this presentation. Is working with you the very best solution to getting to where they want to go? Because if the answer is no, potentially we want to take a step back and say how can I provide a greater offer service product to my clients? Instead of saying how can I convince someone to do this? I'm telling you something powerful happens when we know we have the best option for the people that we're serving. So value summary. Your output of your service or your product, people will pay us for the output. Money follows value. Be obsessed with your service and help people get crystal clear on what their desired result is. Because if you make the desired result the thing that people are chasing, everything gets better. That's value. Are we good on value? All right, leverage. The definition of leverage is used to the maximum advantage to think of like an amplifier. This is not Arizona by the way. This is Colorado. One of my friends got a flat tire and what was amazing to me is we got this jack that literally felt like it was from Dollar General. And we started cranking up this whole car and I'm not a big dude. I did it with one hand. It cranked up the whole car. That's one of many examples of leverage. If you Google leverage everything that we use essentially in life that we use multiple times, we use leverage. This is the slide that I most stressed about because I don't know if I can pronounce this name right, but I think it's like Archimedes is credited for literally saying if you gave me a lever long enough, I can move the world. Leverages, incredible. We value leverage. We just don't always articulate it. We don't always live the leverage life in our business. So again, I'm a framework person. You have your input, your time, your talents, your relationships, your creating an output which is either a service or a product, and leverage, all leverages is amplifying that service or product. So if your service is not good, leverage is just going to enhance a not good product. If you're investing in a bad investment, leverage is just going to pull gasoline on a bad situation. If what you're doing is incredible, leverage is going to amplify that incredibleness. I'm a big, big fan of the SkyName of all. I would recommend you read everything by this person. His tweets, he also has a book, but he talks about to get rich. You need leverage. Leverage comes in leverage, leverage comes in language, leverage comes in capital, leverage comes in code and media. I'm going to be using examples of what Naval so beautifully articulated as leverage. He essentially said, if you want to get rich, you need to understand how leverage works. Okay, so disclaimer number one, I'm speaking to my TikTok community. Leverage without value is a total and under disaster. We live in a culture where sometimes it's sexy to look at going viral, borrowing money, blowing up, and at the end of the day, if there's an underlying value in what you're doing, it's not a shortcut that will get you places and sustain your growth. So the reason we need to start with value is if we're not committing to being valuable, leverage might be a short win, but it's not going to be a long, sustainable win. I'm speaking majority to my generation, because I would say majority of people in this room, you're way more valuable than what you're getting paid for because of a lack of leverage. A lot of my generation is trying to shortcut, get leverage, but they don't have value. And then step number two, how many people can relate with this shiny object syndrome? So promise me, promise me this. Try to only commit to one thing that I'm going to go through nine examples. I'm going to go through six areas of leverage and then I'm going to go through nine examples. This is a total of 15 things I'm going to go through. Try to commit to one, maybe two. If you try to commit more than two, you will not do any of it. How many of us can relate to going to a conference getting all fired up and then committing to nothing? Or we commit to something but we don't actually do it. So shiny object syndrome is real. Don't fall into it. So six areas of leverage. Leverage number one is labor. It comes in people. At the end of the day, if you can pay someone X and they can provide Y in the output and Y is greater than your input, there's leverage there. Now, it's not just in what we pay. We also have to factor in emotions and other things, but at the end of the day, there's leverage in bringing on people. If they create a better you, you win. Number two, capital. Other people's money. At the end of the day, majority of us in this room, majority of you can explain leverage way better than me. You can take a real estate property. You can use leverage and you can have a greater net worth. You can have more cash flow. You can reduce your risk. Leverage is truly incredible if it's done properly because you're using other people's money. It's amazing. Lever number three is media, is language. If I was speaking a language that you didn't understand, I would have less influence over this room. The fact that you can understand the words out of my mouth is inherent leverage in itself. The fact that we in 2022 can communicate via written audio video is incredible leverage. And if you think of like the back end, the tower of Babel, the end of the day, they were doing all their things and then they stopped communicating and everything fell apart. That's an example of being able to communicate is a form of leverage. Being able to amplify that communication is another form of leverage. So a platform, a stage. Think of anything that's allowing, like this is a literal platform. I'm speaking once and more than one person is hearing me right now. That's a form of leverage. But there's also, anytime you put a written audio or video on a platform and it's going to one to many, that's a form of leverage. It's a platform. Number five is code. And think of code. The most basic form of code is like a website. The website works for you whether you're up or not. The most advanced form of code is like AI. There's a reason why majority of the the wealthiest, most rich corporations do some type of AI. They're literally creating machines that are creating other machines. That's the ultimate form of leverage. And then number six, I believe this is something I just, this might be the most wooly thing I come up with. I believe influence the form of leverage. If you have more influence or more charisma, you will be able to have more leverage versus if you don't. And I believe charisma can actually be learned. I believe it's a function of two things, EQ and IQ. And I have to give Vanessa Van Edwards credit for this because she so beautifully articulated this. But at the end of the day, we want to be around people that we like. But I don't want to trust my money with someone that I just like. And they like, yeah, you're likeable, but you're not very smart. But I don't necessarily want to just be led by someone that's super, super smart. But at the end of the day, I don't like being around. If you can learn to be, have EQ, but then also have IQ and have that balance, I'm telling you, you will have more leverage in how you communicate how you lead across the board. So I believe good leverage will help you make more money, give you more influence and credibility, gives you more time, and reduces your risk. I really do believe that. I believe bad leverage can do the exact opposite. But good leverage amplifies all these things. Okay, you guys ready for the nine levers that we can implement in our business today without having to be an author? Isn't that true? Like in our space, it's like, hey, if you want to be smart, write a book, right? Half of us in this room are still working on our first chapter, right? So at the end of the day, I'm going to give you nine levers that don't, you don't have to be an author because as much as I love books, they take a long time to develop. And so here are nine levers that we can implement in our business that can take our valuable service to the next level. Lever number one is the podcast lever. Okay, in 2018, I looked like I'm 14 years old and I was like, you know what, I'm going to start a podcast. I'm going to be the Joe Rogan of the financial space. Okay, it's a really, really good thing. By the way, I couldn't read analytics because by the way, do you see that little spike? That was when my mom downloaded the episode, okay? And then she even stopped listening, okay? I had nobody listening to me at the first year, nobody. Like all those little spikes were me re-downloading the podcast, okay? But that same time that no one was listening, I met some of the greatest people and some of the now to this day, some of my greatest friends that literally enhanced my credibility and my confidence. So here's the challenge. The podcast effect is an example of yes, we're, we're, do people listen to my podcast now? Yes. But I consider the podcast lever more effective because of the relationships. Less about the listeners. I got in to say, hey, I want people to listen to me and I realized that 500 episodes later, it's, it's an amazing platform to build relationships with people that I wanted to get to know and add them value. The podcast lever is one of the most brilliant things that we can do and I'm using the podcast as an example, but where can you add other people value? Where can you give to other people? And as a result, create relationships because those relationships will translate in powerful ways. Now people listen, I had average 400 to 500 downloads a day, which is awesome. It's not Joe Rogan, but people listen, but that happened multiple years of being consistent. We also as a company actually produce five podcasts. My, my beautiful wife in the back, she is into health and I was like, why don't you do a health podcast? And to the state, she's interviewed some of the most amazing people in women's health. She's gotten more free stuff from her podcast than I've got just because she has a platform. There's some teenagers that came to me that wanted advice and I said, the best thing that you can do, you're 19 years old, the best thing you can do is create a teen financial podcast and they've been able to interview some of the legends and financial space because who's going to say no to a 19-year-old podcast? We have someone who produces a real estate podcast for us, most connected person 18 months later in real estate because they just interview all the people that have books and have influence in real estate. The podcast effect is absolutely incredible. We know this guy. He has a whiskey podcast and he doesn't say anything about financial services and yet he's able to build relationships, have better connections and he's told me that he personally gets business because he comes on the podcast, like people come on the podcast. If compliance is an issue about talking about money, just create a podcast around something that you're passionate about and use that as a way to bring in people. I'm telling you, if we understand the why and the system behind this, every one of us can create a platform around something that we're passionate about and become the one of the most connected people in that space. The podcast effect is no joke. Leather number two is delegation. How many people have read this book? Who not how? A Dan Sullivan. Amazing book. His whole concept is instead of focusing on what? I don't know how to do that. Focus on who do you know that can make that happen? I think one of the things that I've learned from Cody is he is surrounding himself with people on his team that are our who's that are helping him get to where they want to go. I think he would be at the first to admit that they would not have a fraction of what I have his success if they didn't have the who's. What's interesting is this is Trevor, 2018, a couple months after we started the podcast, I was like, you know what? We need to get to the next level. I hate doing applications and I'm really bad at it. I was like, who do I know that can literally help us get to the next level? I was terrified because we committed to Trevor and if we didn't make any money, we'd be out of money in six months. But it's something amazing happens when you bring someone on your team that helps elevate what you're trying to do. And now we had more money in six months from now and it totally changed my mind to say, I'm going to surround myself with people that can be my who's the things I'm not really good at. This is a tactic as it relates to delegation. I would encourage everyone to do this. Just get super self-aware on the things that you love and what you're good at, the things that you are good at but you don't like, things that you like, but you shouldn't do, and things that you don't like and you're not good at. A lot of us just aren't self-aware about these things. But if you start writing that out, you'll start seeing some themes. You'll start seeing some job descriptions. You'll start seeing future collaborations. This was my list, by the way. There's a lot of things I'm not good at and I don't like, right? And at the end of the day, I started seeing like, when you look at our team, majority of people are doing things that they love and that they're good at, it's allowing them to get closer to where they want to go. And at the end of the day, we are all better. Our output is far greater because we have a team. Level number three is probably my most favorite lever that I'm going to talk about today. Video email. I've sent over 4,300 video emails to date. What is a video email? A video email is literally you open up your email and you're getting a video and you get to click on it and it's me talking to you. It's really convenient for someone that doesn't like to read and type. This one tool, this one tactic has literally changed our business. I require everyone on our team when we're interacting with people to use video as much as possible. This email, I can't share their name. One of the most influential CEOs in our space, met them at an event, sent them one video. He said, Caleb, I think this is the best email I've ever received. He gets hundreds of emails a day. He's one of the most prominent CEOs in our space and I was in a one minute video able to stand out because I just went back and was like, you know what? And this video, I was like, hey, it was amazing meeting you. I'm a big gratitude person. Thank you for what you're doing. These are some of the things that we talked about. I hope our paths cross. Take care. And it just stood out because he saw one minute video. You want to know the biggest problem with video emails though? You won't do them. I'm telling you, it will work. Majority of us will get video emails. We might even buy software. There's some free stuff out there, but we won't do it. Just to tell you how easy this is, I'm going to give you an example of Crash Course on a video email. Anyone that wants to get opt into our free gift, you'll get this video. Hey, everyone, it's Caleb here. I just wanted to personally say it was amazing speaking with you at NAPA. I'm just so grateful for this industry profession. And I just wanted to give you an example of a video email. I hope you can apply this quick video and as you serve your clients and as you meet people at networking events, I hope you can apply this one tool to make you more personable and help you stand out. God bless. You guys will get that video email if you want. I'm telling you, if you do that, it will change the way that you communicate and will make you stand out. I've sent over 4,000 of them. It works. The website lever. I call this the meeting before the meeting. A lot of us, we are killer when we get to the meeting. There's this thing that happened a couple of years ago that made it hard to meet with people. This concept of the meeting before the meeting is something that wasn't new when COVID came around. This is a picture of me still at the bank. I actually got six college credits for an internship that I made up for myself and convinced the professor. One of the videos was term life insurance. I gave this to every loan officer and I said, hey, when you guys sell a mortgage, have people watch this 11 minute video and it was a pitch on term insurance. It was amazing. It was like, why would I meet with them? They could just watch it if they want to meet with me. They can meet with me. When we started, I've done little funnels. It's amazing when people watch a video and they're like, hey, I want what you have. They're ready to go. It's interesting because we have a business advisor that literally helps people go virtual and we help people build software, coaching, all that. At the end of the day, it's like, okay, a lot of people, their websites are not good and they're not setting up with this concept of the meeting before the meeting. It's just one of those things that I'm passionate about. I'm also going to include this if anyone wants to opt into our pre-gift. Here's the five things that you need in a good website. Number one, you need to clear offer on your website right away. Number two, it needs to have an obvious call to action. A lot of websites that I see in our space, all over the place, no clue what you're actually trying to say. Number three, provide value. Provide a free lead magnet. Provide something, whether it's a video or one page or something that's like, makes you want, makes me want to come closer to you. Number four, make it easy to navigate, simple, clean. And number five, don't just get a stock image. Let's get a relatable images. This is just a quick virtual audit. Another thing that, and this is something that I'm sincere about, if anyone wants me or someone on our team to audit your website, we will gladly do that because at the end of the day, we have a lot of good intentions, but a lot of times people are going to a site that's not translating to what we actually want. The meeting before the meeting is so important, you do this once from member code. A website is a lower version of code. You do that once. That website will work for you the rest of your life. Build a website that represents you well. Number five, YouTube. And by the way, I'm a baby YouTuber, but I think I'm probably a better, more relatable example than Cody. Cody, I want to see your numbers after because I'm sure it's unreal. One person on our team is like, Caleb, you're doing a podcast. Why don't you just publish that podcast on YouTube? Why don't we just start making the video also, like we can strip the audio? What if we also make that video on YouTube? And so, you know, 7,000 subscribers later, we have a little bit of traction. What's interesting to me is this last year, this last year, we've gotten over 20,000 watch hours. That's over 2,575 eight hour days of people watching our videos. When I make a video, I make it once. The fact that more than one person can watch that video blows my mind every time I say that. The fact that I do one video and more than one person watches it. I mean, I have to say this. This is one of the big reasons why we have the success that we have. I'm working longer than most of you, but I'm not that you're working, but I'm duplicating the message more and more. The last month, just to share this example, the last month, we have over 212 eight hour days by a very small YouTube channel. I bet you what I do in a year, Cody, doesn't know in a month. The reason he makes a lot more money than I do currently is he just has a lot more leverage in a business that's valuable. This blows me away, and I'm telling you YouTube is an incredible platform because every time you make a video, it's literally you're making a digital real estate every single day that can be searched, it's incredible. I do know that compliance, for some of us, we just simply can't do this, and I understand that. I just think it's something that you should look into because it's only going to grow in its influence and ability. The YouTube lever is truly incredible. Virtual Studio, the virtual studio lever is great. How many of us like to use whiteboards? Raise your hand if you like whiteboards. I was told when I got into this space that if you can't explain it on a whiteboard, you don't understand it, and I actually agree with that. Being able to simplify it on a whiteboard is truly incredible. I have a thesis that most of us don't like the virtual environment because we're not able to actually express and write and create. Whiteboard, for me, was one of those sticking points where I love to draw, and I actually preferred meeting in person with people because I had a whiteboard, every room that I have in our house, we have a whiteboard. I'm going to show you how you can create a whiteboard effect digitally. This is our first, we had the Woncom board because I was broke when I first started the business. I bought one of these off of Amazon and we plugged it into the computer and I tried to write because it was so important to me. But anyone that has a tablet, whether it's an iPad, whether it's an Android tablet or a surface or what not, any writable device, you can make into a whiteboard. Here's a secret. A lot of people go on to zoom with their whiteboard and then they're drawing and you're getting a picture of their nostril. We don't want to do that. The secret here is to make the tablet a second device and you mute it, and then when you want to share that device, you just share it. You're drawing, they're seeing you, you're speaking directly to them. Boom, you have a whiteboard that's actually better because instead of you're putting your back to the wall and they're seeing your back, they're seeing exactly what you're drawing. It's amazing. I learned how to do this. It could literally change the game in the virtual environment. I actually also have a video showing you exactly how to do this. I just think a lot of us, and if anyone wants to get our free gift, this is included. It's an eight minute video of me walking through how to set this up and I actually walked exactly how to do it because it's so powerful and it gave me massive confidence in a virtual environment. The other thing is, I believe it's 2022. We all need to be able to meet virtually. I know not all of us want to, but there's a difference in home studios and I don't believe like I have a really nice home studio. I don't believe that that's necessary. I think really there's three things that you need in a good home studio. You need good internet, you need good audio. Please, please invest in a $99 microphone. I've been on so many meetings where the audio is so bad and it's so easy to fix, Yeti microphone from Amazon. You don't have to get a sure microphone. It's like $600. You can get a $99 microphone. It will enhance the audio. Just get a mini, Yeti mini. And then a good lighting, you don't even need a light but just make sure that lighting is to in front of you. Okay, these three things will be a game changer. This is a good checklist as it relates to virtual meeting. OPA, this is something, again, this is, if you ask me what is probably taking our business to the next level, probably this one level. It's other people's audiences. IE, it's understanding how to win stages. Pete Vargas is a good friend of mine and at 21 years old he said Caleb, you have a message that needs to be heard and I was like I'm 21, I know nothing about money. He's like you need to get out and speak. Your message matters and it was that moment where I was like I am a speaker. I believe that I can speak. I believe I have a message that needs to be heard. That was a change for me. And I started saying hey, I'm a speaker and people started letting me speak. It was amazing. It was like you know it's amazing how many stages we don't win because we don't ask. And so I've had the opportunity to speak to lots of people. It's interesting a stage is not just a physical stage but you could also have digital stages and we've been on probably over 150 podcasts. What's crazy is I'll just use this one example. There was an HFAC podcast that reached out to me and I was the only financial person that's been on the HFAC podcast. It's one of our best podcasts to date. Think of like 200 people, it's a small podcast. 200 people listened but they've never heard half the financial things I was saying. We got hit up from so many people because they heard me on a HFAC podcast. Their stage is everywhere. Their stage is literally everywhere. And this is if you ask if you look at the actual revenue that we've gained as a company it's because we've had a message and we've leveraged it via stage because that's where a lot of people have attention and there's that credibility that gets transferred over. So I have the opportunity to do a learning lab tomorrow and I'm going to break down the three things that have allowed us to scale stages. So number one how to have a message. What needs to be in a message for people to actually listen to you? Because I don't know about you but I've heard people win stages and then talk is not that impressive. How do we create a message that resonates? Number two, how do we actually win the stage? How do we get in front of the audience? I love this. I get goosebumps every time I think about this because it's so fun to be like okay where are people? Where can we get in front of them? And then number three, how can we convert from stage? Because I don't know about you but sometimes I've heard amazing speakers and you're like they leave, they get a standing ovation and then they're gone. Obviously there's an art and a science to say how do you speak and then how do you make people want to work with you after? In the learning labs I'm going to give you the three, like I'm going to break down the framework of each one of these so that you can be equipped to win stages and serve a lot of people. Okay number eight we got two more. Number eight is a repurposed lever. Big fan of Gary Ve. Document don't create. I've been watched him very early on and got very inspired. Dennis you who I also I think is going to be here later. Incredible marketing guru talks about hey Caleb you got to have high authority in everything that you do and repurposing allows you to do that. From the very first talk that I've ever given the one thing that I've done that I'm really really grateful I've done is I've recorded everything that I've ever done. Now I don't necessarily want to show my first couple talks because they weren't very good but I documented the whole step along along the way and I'm telling you some of us are brilliant. We think of the greatest ideas we communicated the greatest ideas and nobody knows because we're not documenting it. So this is this is like a concept that we can we can translate across the board like if you have video and you and you I do a YouTube video I can now I can strip it for podcast I can make little clips on TikTok and Twitter and Instagram and whatnot like one one time like I'm getting filmed today some of these clips might end up later in the future on on LinkedIn. It's a fact of me doing one thing but we're repurposing it. This is just two examples again I'm not I've I've a couple thousand people on on Instagram which is definitely not a huge deal in the influencer space. I had one video that I was on stage talking about wealth over 1.4 million people watch it on Instagram over 18,000 people have shared that one clip over 31,000 people have shared it and over 18,000 have saved it. One little clip repurposed it didn't take me any work we just took that 25 second clip and put it on Instagram and number nine is a gratitude as willis this might be as willis this might be if you make it a weekly habit right Jim if you make it a weekly habit of just telling someone that you're thankful for them you will be amazed how many people come out of the woodwork wanting to help you don't do this don't do this to get something literally be intentional about saying I am super super grateful for you and I'm telling you if you make that a theme you'll be amazed you'll be amazed how much leverage that will create because people will just be your advocate and ambassadors in life so here are the three questions the three three leverage questions are this by using leverage how can your outcome and output be enhanced number two what is the cost I don't pay a a Hollywood production studio to you know make my make my videos because it wouldn't be cost effective I invest in a two thousand dollar camera instead so we have to be smart as we're relating to leverage and number three everything that we do have is inherent risk what risk am I taking on for having leverage these are the three questions these are three questions on leverage so I'm going to take two more minutes our industry and profession is the example value leveraging is it not what we're able to do is create so much value for our our our clients like other than sharing the gospel literally our industry has the greatest value leverage of all time we literally can sign one piece of paper that can have generational differences in our clients life that is incredible to me and so we are literally in an industry that embodies value leveraging so well and we can use the principle to value leveraging to amplify that to the next level so here all the things that if you guys are interested in learning more like I know that some of you guys are taking pictures like if you want all the slide decks if you want the value leveraging checklist and all this stuff that's why we have a booth here is if anyone's interested you can give us your business card or take a picture of one of our QR codes and at the end of the day like we want this to be as valuable as possible I want to leave you with one one final thought March March of 2019 my life changed for good because one of my best friends one of the people that I started better wealth with Greg who's like a second father to me died he died he died a slow death of cancer and what was interesting about Greg is he he embodies intentional living extremely well and he said Caleb be intentional with every moment treasure every moment that you have with people treasure every moment and I'm telling you I'm I'm grateful to have walked through this with Greg because it it's given me a conviction for our industry but it's also remind me of why we do what we do going back to clarity it reminds me of why we get up and do what we get to do every single day and so this concept of one life is very interesting I've realized that a lot of us procrastinate I'm doing what we know we need to do and think of this as each block represents a year of our life and these are a hundred boxes so we're not all going to live to a hundred in this room a lot of us have already filled up a lot of boxes I know I look on that and say I potentially have lived one third of my life and went fast let's stop procrastinating on the things that we truly need to lean in and do and a lot of us know what we need to do going back to identity a lot of us know what we need to do and when are we going to actually lean in and say I am going to live an intentional life and I'm not going to let the neighbors that I really don't care about determine why I do what I do and how I speak the number one leverage thing that I think we can do in our in our personal life is being the main speaker at our funeral I believe if you can make an intentional video while you're alive speaking like you're at your funeral saying hey guys these are the things that are most important these are the people that I most love these this is what I want you to know about who Caleb is and here's what I want to inspire every single person in his audience to do I believe if you do that one thing you will live more intentional today and you'll have a super intentional video that will probably go viral after you die It's one of my personal missions to get at least a thousand people to intentionally make a video being the main speaker at their funeral because I believe this one thing if I think about all the things that I could promote this one thing if we do could change the way that we live our life today but ultimately we'd create videos of ripple effects and our future grandchildren's grandchildren potentially could have a video if we could preserve it seeing of what we stood for Guys I want to thank you all for for for for this I'm incredibly grateful for for NafaI I'm incredibly grateful for the many people have come before us making it possible for us all to be in this room and in such an amazing industry god bless you thank you I Want to thank you for watching till the end if you enjoy our content Please like share subscribe it helps other people find our channel and we really really appreciate it I also want to let you know that we have this thing called the better wealth efficiency quiz and Our goal is to give you a wealth efficiency score in less than three minutes And really highlight and get you to start thinking about the potential inefficiencies that you have in your life So if you haven't taken the quiz go check out it'll be the link below check that link out take the quiz and then let us know your scores annual event. I got to keynote at this event. And NAIFAs is the number one association for financial advisors and life insurance agents. And they just do so much for industry on the state level and the national level. And so it was a huge honor. And I got to speak in front of a bunch of legends in the crowd that I looked up to and have spoken on the stage before. And so, again, it was really, really cool. And I got to talk about value leveraging, which is this topic and concept that become more and more passionate around, around create value and amplify that value. Whether you're in business, whether you're going to school, whether you're working for somebody, if you can figure out ways to provide value and amplify that value, money will follow, influence will follow, you'll start getting closer to unlocking intentional living. And so I got to share that. It's filled with a bunch of tactics. I got to share some vulnerabilities that I've just, I really felt strongly about. And I got to challenge our industry to step up. And so if this is interesting, make sure to share it to share it around. I would love love hearing from people that reach out. I love hearing you in the comments. And I'm just so incredibly grateful for this community. And for all the people that have helped me get to a place where I can speak at NAIFAs annual apex event. So from the bottom of my heart, this is true honor. And I hope you enjoy. Two lines. All I had to remember were two lines. And I totally blanked. What made matters worse is I remember taking out my note card very nervously and reading out every single word. I have no idea what this whole play was all about. I do remember feeling like a total and utter failure walking off that stage. So I want to introduce to you 13-year-old Caleb. I know many of you are like, that was like last week, right? We made without the beard. 13-year-old Caleb had two massive insecurities. Insecurity number one was I was the oldest of six kids and yet I was super, super small. My younger sister was taller than me. And she made it a point to let everyone know that she was younger than me, that yet she looks so much older. And insecurity number two was I could barely read. And being 13 years old and having reading insecurities, it was like the perfect storm. This photo was taken two hours before my most embarrassing moment on stage when I totally blanked. I went to my mom the next day, literally in tears because as a 13-year-old, I was self-aware enough to know that I don't know if I'm going to mount anything. And my mom said something to me that I'm ultimately going to dedicate this whole talk to. She said Caleb, the things that you can't control don't worry about. But the things that you can control, you have a moral obligation to go all in. I don't know about you guys, but when we're in an industry right now where sometimes it feels a little bit like some things are out of our control. You look at politics, taxes, when you look at what's on the news. But I'm telling you in 2022, there is no greater time. There's no greater time to be in this profession in industry. And it's interesting because as I take a step back, like I am insanely honored to be in a room filled with people that have gone before us. I had the pleasure of connecting with Tom yesterday. Tom Hegda, anyone has been impacted by that man? And I remember four and a half years ago sitting in a room watching him speak and thinking to myself, I hope to someday have as much clarity and conviction as that guy does for our industry and what we do in our profession. So here's the challenge. This is going to be like, I promise you I'm going to give my all to be as valuable as possible in this next hour. But I want to remind us that we are an industry that we can take control over. And this is one of the most exciting things. And at the end of the day, if the mindset isn't right, like I'm telling you, I'm still like, I'm still high off a Cody's talk about going to the next level. But if our mindset's not right, none of what I'm going to say matters. Because at the end of the day, sometimes we don't need another tactic. Sometimes we just need to understand why we're doing what we're doing. So my next job after this motivational talk from my mother was at the chicken farm. Okay, let's just say, I appreciate the chicken sandwich. I got paid a dollar for every chicken that we processed. And that's when I started learning so much about money. I read two books, actually I listened to the two books. And one was Rich's Man of Babylon. And the other was good to grade. And that was like the perfect storm because on one hand, I was like, man, I want to get into business. I want to dedicate my life to this whole business game. And the other thing was like, okay, Rich's Man of Babylon, principles on how anyone can be wealthy. A 10% of what you make is yours to keep. And then I looked around at our country and was like, why is everyone broke? At 16 year old Caleb said, I don't know what this whole financial thing is, but I'm going to do something about it. And then what I did was I got a job at a bank, another long story, but a gentleman believed in me, believed in this this kid who was actually so nervous when I sat down with him. My mom helped me write out questions on what to ask. We were in Wisconsin, it was like below zero. I was so nervous, I left my car on. That 17 year old kid got one break. One of my mentors took out his phone, made one call, got me a job at a community first bank. And then through that, I dedicated everything, like I was like, this is my shot. I want to do everything I can to be as valuable as possible. So I worked in our teller line, I wrote radio ads, I worked in our loan department. I became an HR nightmare because I would just show up and do things for free. They're like, Caleb, you can only work for 20 hours. Okay, I'll get paid for 20 hours and work for free because it just made total sense to me that the bank was going to be the greatest place for me to get to the next level. And so at age 19, I came up with this mission statement because seven habits, five effective people was one of the most influential books I've read and encouraged you to think with the end in mind. So I came up with this mission statement to help people see and reach their highest potential. I was like, man, if I could dedicate my life to doing this one thing, that'd be incredible. And by the way, money is not the main reason, but it's one of the many reasons why people aren't able to live to a god-gum, their god-gum potential. And so at 19 years old, yes, that was me at 19. I took over the Banks Investment Department, 350 clients. Now, it was interesting because my dream was to be in the financial space, but on one hand, I felt like I arrived. I'm like, man, this is incredible. I'm 19 years old. I have my dream job. On the other hand, I'm experiencing what like half the room in this room is experiencing. It's 10 minutes of horror. You're like, I have grandchildren older than you. What in the world are you like, how in the world are you going to help me with my money? But is it not true that I had my own 10 minutes of horror when I started seeing what people are going through? I remember one time at 19 years old, someone came into my office all excited because they dedicated their life at a job, but they totally hated. They're excited to retire at 19-year-old Caleb after looking at their few assets for like five minutes, realized that they were going to have a fraction of what they thought they were going to have. And I just thought, my mission statement was on the wall. I was just thinking, am I going to be okay just sitting back in a corner office letting people come to me and just being an average typical financial planner? I was like, I'm not going to settle for this. And so I started really diving deep into like, how is money, how does money work? And I'm going to share with you three epiphanies that I had in this journey that were like, oh my goodness, if people understood this, we would start changing the way that we think about money, which would ultimately change our behavior. So the first thing is clarity. This is like the first epiphany. Majority people don't even have clarity in what they want. It's like Alice in Wonderland where Alice gets in the fork in the road and the cat says, where do you want to go? And Alice says, I don't know. Then the cat says, well, if you don't know where you want to go and you wrote, it will get you there. Welcome to America. Majority people have no clue where they want to go. And at the end of the day, if you don't know where you want to go, why are you even talking to anyone to help you be more efficient with your money? So it's interesting how we define wealth is vital. Because if we don't define the actual goal, how do we know where we're going? And so it's interesting because when you think of wealth, whether you want to admit it or not, a lot of us think about a financial metric. I'm going to use an extreme example, but Warren Buffett is known as being one of the wealthiest, quote-unquote, men in America. Warren Buffett's 91 years old and worth over $100 billion. Who would trade places with Warren Buffett at 91 years old? I need this to sink in. Because if we're not willing to trade places with $100 billion, what are we indirectly telling you about what we value our time at? I'm telling you on a macro level, we get it. We don't want to die. On a micro level, we devalue our life every single day. And so what's interesting to me is we at Better Wellth make our financial metric, the intentional living metric. You're not wealthy if you're not living intentionally. What's interesting is intentional living looks different for each person. Cody, I have a funny feeling that a jet isn't an intentional life for you. For some of us in this room, you don't need a jet to live intentionally. What's important is not to mirror my intentional life or Cody's intentional life, it's to get ultra-crystall clear what does intentional living look like for you. What are you spending your time on? Who are you spending it with? What are the talents that you're using with your one life? That, whatever that metric is, can we not agree that that should be the metric that we reverse engineer a financial plan and cash flow around? And so this is something I can't really take credit for, but it just kind of popped into my head. ROR, a lot of times stands for rate return. And it's interesting because a lot of people will determine what they do for the rest of their life and where they put their money for the rest of their life based on this metric. You really doesn't matter at the end of the day. It's interesting. I took a step back and said, what if ROR stood for return on result? What if we reverse engineered the results that people wanted and we made that more important than any one metric? Just a thought. So number one, it's intentional living and getting clear on what we actually want. The second thing is cash flow. The most important financial metric in my humble opinion is cash flow. Not net worth, not other metrics like rate return, it's cash flow because you could be a billionaire on paper, but cash is what pays your groceries. Okay? We need cash flow is the most important thing. And so I used to say cash flow is king and now I say cash flow is king and queen because I don't want to divide the room. Okay? And so at the end of the day, we're very, very simple. We're like, if you have enough cash flow to live intentionally, that's the goal. Again, not perfect, but at the end of the day, if you have enough cash flow to live an intentional life, you're good. That was a piphany number two is let's plan for cash flow, not other financial metrics that may or may not matter. And number three, the piphany at 20 years old, that was like life insurance. Life insurance. It was interesting because when I first got into the space, I learned all about why permanent life insurance is so bad and by term, and invest the difference and all that stuff. And then I started learning and studying what banks were doing, corporations were doing. I started studying people that I admired and they were thinking about life insurance a little differently. They were like, when life insurance is set up properly, you can not only protect your life, but you can also have benefits in the future. And we came up with this concept of the and asset. I can't take credit for that. We were just smart enough to buy the domain. Okay? So at the end of the day, it's like, oh, I can, when set up and use properly put my dollar in a place that can literally protect my family and myself and it can grow, my, my dollars can grow the rest of my life. And I can have control and use over those dollars. And Tom, we can have amazing retirement benefits in the future. And it potentially can help me at 20 years old save more money because I don't have to say see you for the next 45 years. And the most important thing is I believe the asset when set up and use properly can help you live more intentionally. And so when I started learning this, I was like, man, how many people out there are articulating a life insurance product? This is not an investment. But I was like, man, when set up and use properly, it's an enhancer of you. You are your greatest asset. And I believe you are better if you have life insurance at the foundation of your life. And so that was like the epiphany. And then I thought of like the example of the cell phone. How many, how many people do not have a smartphone? Raise your hand. I knew there's one. There's always one. Okay. Okay. So we're going to pretend that that one young gentleman in the back doesn't exist. The smartphone is one of the greatest inventions. I know there's a lot of negative things that come with it, but think about it. Our phone is a flashlight. It was my alarm clock. It was my white noise machine. I can email. I can text. I can actually do phone calls, which is kind of a foreign thing nowadays. I can do so many things. This is not an investment. And yet I'm able to make a lot more money and do a lot more things and get closer to intentional life because of the cell phone. This is a tool the same thing as when life insurance can be a tool to secure people in the United States and in North America. Just an example that we use that was like, oh, and I got that. It's not the it. It's the end. Okay. So we're going to be talking about a value leveraging, which is a topic I'm very passionate about. And actually in 2017, before I left the bank, I made a voice memo to myself. We're not going to play it now. But I essentially said, I essentially talked about this talk before living it out. I was learning all these things. I was learning about intentional living. I was learning about cash flow. I was learning about life insurance. And I was looking to the world. And I was like, they're not articulating it very well. There's opportunity. And so I made a voice memo to myself that just out of gratitude saying, I'm learning all this stuff. And the person that's going to win is going to provide value to the marketplace and amplify that value. And again, that's what ultimately I'm going to share through my story and some tactics on how to help us all in this room create value leveraging for our life. And so what ended up happening was at the rightful age of 21, I was like, you know what? Got one life. I don't want to regret it. I watched this inspirational TED talk of people regretting their life. And so I'm like, I'm not going to do that. Looked out my mission statement, which said, tell people see and research highest potential. And I was like, you know what? We're going to start this company. It's going to be called Better Wellth. And we're going to do this thing called the internet. And I believe people are going to want, if they understand what I know about life insurance, they'll be a line outside the door. And so I got three crazy people to believe in this vision. Greg, Dan, and Julie. Julie was actually an intern. She got six college credits for someone that was still in college when they launched the company. And we set out on this way to try to like find this better way. Now I want you all to know when I started Better Wellth, I was living with my parents. I was living with my parents. We were in the very prestigious office in the basement of a Papa John's building in a Hawaiian tanning studio. Okay? $250 a month. $250 a month was our lease. Until Dan was bragging to our landlord that we were crushing it and they bumped it up a hundred bucks. I was like, Dan, you're never crushing it to the landlord. You're always struggling. Okay? And so this is where we began. And there are three things that I stumbled upon. I essentially started a podcast. I self-published a book and I started speaking. And those three things were value leveraging that took our business to the next level. I didn't, I wasn't smart enough to say this is how the five step plan and how we're going to do it. I just intuitively knew if people could hear this message, there would be a line outside the door. Our team doesn't look like a typical team in the financial service space. We have now, it's, now we have over 15 people on the team. We're all remote. We have team members in all four time zones in the United States and we have clients all over the country and we do everything virtually. And we have a lot of youth. Our senior person in our internal team is 41 years old. And so we have a lot of fun and we try to provide as much value as possible. The greatest accomplishment I've made up until this point is convincing my beautiful wife April to marry me. And so that happened. We're 14 months. Not writing any marriage books quite yet. Everyone told me communications important. I was like, what do you mean? And I now know what you guys mean, communication, right? So we living in Colorado and actually now moving to Tennessee. So we are excited to live in Nashville. Okay, so value leveraging. Value leveraging is a fun, two things that need to be happened in value leveraging. Number one is you need to create value. Number two, you need to amplify that value. Okay. Number one, provide value. Number two, maximize that value. If you do this one, two punch, you will be successful and you'll serve more people. You make more money. You'll have more time. So in this talk, I'm going to do my very best to what we're going to define. What is value? I'm a big framework person. For those of you that know I love whiteboard. So we're going to provide what value is. We're going to talk about the two biggest problems in our industry today that's keeping us from creating value. Then we're going to talk about the three questions that if you can answer these three questions in this room, you will literally elevate your ability to provide more value in this space. And finally, we're going to talk about a simple sales framework because I have some beef with all the sales tactics out there that can, if we can do, we can just sell more and sell it more ethically. Then we're going to talk about leverage. We're going to look at what is leverage. We're going to look at the six areas of leverage and then I'm going to give you nine. Nine leverage ideas that you can use and implement two day in your business. All right, fair? Okay, before we jump in, I always promise myself I would never not talk about things that I think need to be said. This is a picture taken right before I left the bank and this is a picture of 21-year-old Caleb with the golden microphone, $47 on Amazon. And this is a picture of someone who is afraid. This is a picture of someone who is terrified leaving the bank because I had it all. I had a corner office. I had the prestige at being my age graduating college. And yet, I was afraid of failing. I was afraid of putting myself out there. I was afraid of some of the people that I love the most, thinking down on me for doing something that they didn't think I should do. The reason I have the word identity is I believe identity is the most important thing fundamentally in our life. And a lot of us are making decisions based on what other people think we should do or our perception of what they think we should do. And a lot of us are encaged in a box that the box that we've put ourselves in. And so again, I knew all the tactics. I knew all the raw raw, but I had to look myself in the mirror and say my identity is not built around success or failure. And when I had that moment, I was free to say, okay, even if I fail and lose it all, write a self-published book and go broke financially, my identity is not going to be tied up in that. And that was the thing that ultimately needed to happen before better wealth was born. I just felt like I need to share that because I think a lot of times we don't talk about the actual root issue of why we're not getting the success or why we're not leaning into what we truly need to lean into. So value. What is value? A lot of people say money follows value. I really do believe that. It's interesting. What is money? Money is just currency that is printed, that's getting less and less valuable each year. But ultimately, we believe if you provide value, money will flow. That's what I read in all the books. And so I was like, I want to be as valuable as possible. So the definition of value is the material or monetary worth of something. So we want to be valuable. I'm told you I'm a framework person. So at the end of the day, what is value? Value is made up of really, really there's really two things. You have your input, which is you, your time, your talents, your relationships, your resources. And it can only provide two things. You can only provide two things in life. A service or a product. Some of us are serving in employment and we're not all paid the same. The people that are paid the same or paid more are the ones that are providing a perception of greater value than those that are not. There's nothing wrong with a janitor and a heart surgeon, but a heart surgeon gets paid more because of the perception of value that they're providing. And I would say that perception is something that we wouldn't disagree with. They're providing more value, i.e. that's why they're getting paid more. Not all companies are created equal. There's certain companies that are providing a service that people are paying more for. Why? Because they value that service more than other services. Same with products. I mean, I'm not going to use that example. Not all products are created equal. Let's put it that way. And so at the end of the day, we will pay more for a product that we perceive as being more valuable. And so it's interesting. This is it. All value is, it's in a service or a product, and we can diagnose this and say, if we're providing a service, does the market consider us valuable? Because I have news for us, a lot of us are focused on the wrong things and we're not actually focused on, do people that I want to serve actually find what I do valuable? And so at the end of the day, it's in the output, not the input. I'm talking to my generation first. We think we'll go to school and get a degree and then go and get a master's degree. And we're so smart because we have all this knowledge. No one gives a crap. No one gives a crap how smart you are. They will pay and follow you for what you provide to the marketplace. And that's a thing that we need sometimes to get because some of us have alphabet soup behind our name. And that's amazing. But at the end of the day, what are you doing to serve your clients with all the knowledge that you have? We will get paid for the output, the output and the result that we give our clients, not how smart we are. All right, two problems, two problems in our industry. Problem number one. Most of us think we have a marketing problem. Most of us think we have a leads problem. And in my humble opinion, we don't have a leads problem. We actually have an offer and sales process problem. I'm speaking to myself first. A lot of times we'll say, man, if I just had more leads, I would be better. But at the end of the day, those leads usually are because the offer that we have is not amazing. So you might want to get ready to write this down because I'm going to go through three questions that we're going to go through kind of quickly. But these three questions, quite frankly, could be the most important slide that we go through. Okay? So step number one is, if you think back in your business, and majority of us are in service-based businesses, we provide services and people will pay us for the service that we give them. Number one, who is our ideal client? Who, if we could only serve one type of person, who would that be? Step number two, and this is really, really important. What problem do they have? Not what are our solutions, how we can serve them. I don't care about that. What problem do they have? What's keeping them up at night? What's making them fight with their spouse? What's giving them anxiety? What's stressing them out? What are the problems? By the way, no one's thinking in bed about should I get a spia? Okay? Sorry Tom, no one's thinking about that. No one's thinking about, oh I want uninterrupted compounding the rest of my life. I just, man, I'm not getting uninterrupted compounding. No one's thinking about, man, I just need long-term care insurance. But a lot of the stresses that they're facing could be solved by one of the three products that I just mentioned. So then the third question, this is where we all love, right? Is how do you crazy over-deliver solving their problem? Not again, not. It's not what we think there, but it's like how do we communicate to them? Like you, you're laying in bed thinking about this and this is how we can solve your problems. Because at the end of the day, majority of people don't care what, they just care that it can be solved. I'm telling you this, this right here, I've spent a lot of money being in my head against the wall and I've realized that these three questions, it has made our business incredibly clear because anything that we do, we walk through these three questions. Who are we serving? What problems are they actually feeling and how do we solve that problem? If we can message that, that service will be perceived as value. The biggest problem that people face in this space is they are talking about solutions that are not resonating because they're not speaking to the pain that I have. This is not a picture of my car, by the way. The Lambo effect, and this is like an extreme example, but if I had a Lamborghini, I could sell it for 100 bucks easily because there's a perception of value. I would say a lot of us should be focused on how do I make my company and products and services that I provide to the marketplace, i.e. services. How do I create the Lambo effect that make people say, I'm out of my mind if I'm not working with you. Two other resources. For any of you that want these slides or I have a bunch of free gifts, you can come over by the booth and whatnot. Elon Musk has an amazing video. I cut up two minutes and 50 seconds of it and he literally talks about what is business. He essentially says business or profit is when the output is greater than the input. That difference is profit. He then says majority of CEOs and presidents should stop focusing on presentations and all the cute stuff and they should make their product or service better. He says that over. The person that's interviewing him is trying to get a different answer and he's like, just make your product better. Just make your product better. When I watched that, I got so convicted because I'm like, that's what I need to do. I just need to make our product better. That's a video that I wanted to include in our free gift. The other book, how many people have read this book by Alex Hermosi? Amazing book. He literally breaks down how to create an irresistible offer. I love that. How to make offers so good that they make you feel stupid saying no. It's an amazing book. I would highly recommend every single person get it and Alex articulates the power of the offer and talks about when you start your business, you need to start with the offer. All right, second problem when it comes to value creation. The second problem is our industry is too busy focusing on selling and convincing. When I started in our space, I was given more sales books than I was actually about our products and services. We justify it by saying, well, if you can't sell, you're not going to be able to feed your family and you're going to get out of the business. There's justification there for sure. I'm telling you what, I literally felt like a sleazy salesperson. I was told, get a list of 100 people. How many, you know where I'm going with this? Get a list of 100 people, invite them out to Starbucks and then cold pitch them, fact finder, whatnot, and sell them stuff. Ask for three referrals before you add any value. I was like, man, I'm sorry if I'm offending some people in the room, but I'm like, that just does not sit well. Just not resonate. There may be a reason why only 8% of people last in our space because I'm like, that doesn't resonate at all. So, again, I'm saying if you have to memorize a sales tactic or memorize a nine step, you know, like how to convince someone and convince someone that they need to work with you, I would highly encourage you to take a step back and I'm going to give you two steps that I think are much simpler and if we actually know what we're talking about, we don't necessarily need nine steps because people are way more simple than that. And so, my challenge is let's focus less time on sales tactics and more time on asking the question, are we providing actual value to the people that we're serving? Okay, so my favorite definition quite frankly is efficiency because I think it'll realize to everything that we do about money and business. Efficiency definition is the ability to avoid wasting materials. The ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time in producing a desired result. So, my definition is how to help someone get to their desired result with removing as much friction as possible. That's efficient. If I can help you do that, I'm helping you be more efficient and we as Americans value efficiency. Okay, so step number one in Caleb's simple sales tactics is number one, get ultra-crystall clear and what someone wants. So, resonate with epiphany number one with money. Get really, really clear what people actually want. And if we can articulate what you truly want, I make that what's called the RLR statement, return on result statement, and that becomes a metric that you care about. So, at the end of the day, if I can help you get there, amazing. And then the second thing is just eliminate any friction that's getting in your way. Step number one is do the people that come and work with us, do they feel like we actually understand what they truly want to accomplish? And then step number two are re-illiminating any of the friction in their life to help them get there. So, an example of this is we're in Phoenix right now and our new home is going to be in Nashville, Tennessee. And I could get really, really crystal clear in where I wanted to go. At the end of the day, if I didn't know where I wanted to go, I wouldn't be here. So, I'm here. And I could walk to Phoenix. And I would literally look like Mark Acre, okay, after his run just soaked head to toe, right? No one I guarantee you is walking 20 days to get to this destination. I could drive, I bet you majority of us didn't drive, especially two days to be here, but maybe some of us did, or I could fly and get here in four hours-ish. It doesn't include delays, okay? What's interesting is a lot of people that we meet know where they want to go, or maybe by working with us they get clear in what they truly want because we give them permission to dream again, but a lot of them are equivalent of walking to their destination financially. And if we can just help people get to what they want in a better, more efficient way, they will do business with us if we speak in their language, not ours. Is this resonating with efficiency and sales? So, number one, get really, really crystal clear in what people want. Number two, just help them get there, remove any friction. Here's a question that I would encourage you all to take picture of. Well, this slide too. These are just some of the, these are some of the things as a company. We were like, okay, these are some of the friction points that we're experiencing. These are some of the friction points that our clients are experiencing. They're lacking clarity. They're overpaying on taxes. They have underperforming investments. They have bad debt. They're overspending. They have insurance gaps. These are some of the friction points that people are experiencing getting to where they want to go. But this is the picture, this is the picture that really convicted me as I was going through this presentation. Is working with you the very best solution to getting to where they want to go? Because if the answer is no, potentially we want to take a step back and say how can I provide a greater offer service product to my clients? Instead of saying how can I convince someone to do this? I'm telling you something powerful happens when we know we have the best option for the people that we're serving. So value summary. Your output of your service or your product, people will pay us for the output. Money follows value. Be obsessed with your service and help people get crystal clear on what their desired result is. Because if you make the desired result the thing that people are chasing, everything gets better. That's value. Are we good on value? All right, leverage. The definition of leverage is used to the maximum advantage to think of like an amplifier. This is not Arizona by the way. This is Colorado. One of my friends got a flat tire and what was amazing to me is we got this jack that literally felt like it was from Dollar General. And we started cranking up this whole car and I'm not a big dude. I did it with one hand. It cranked up the whole car. That's one of many examples of leverage. If you Google leverage everything that we use essentially in life that we use multiple times, we use leverage. This is the slide that I most stressed about because I don't know if I can pronounce this name right, but I think it's like Archimedes is credited for literally saying if you gave me a lever long enough, I can move the world. Leverages, incredible. We value leverage. We just don't always articulate it. We don't always live the leverage life in our business. So again, I'm a framework person. You have your input, your time, your talents, your relationships, your creating an output which is either a service or a product, and leverage, all leverages is amplifying that service or product. So if your service is not good, leverage is just going to enhance a not good product. If you're investing in a bad investment, leverage is just going to pull gasoline on a bad situation. If what you're doing is incredible, leverage is going to amplify that incredibleness. I'm a big, big fan of the SkyName of all. I would recommend you read everything by this person. His tweets, he also has a book, but he talks about to get rich. You need leverage. Leverage comes in leverage, leverage comes in language, leverage comes in capital, leverage comes in code and media. I'm going to be using examples of what Naval so beautifully articulated as leverage. He essentially said, if you want to get rich, you need to understand how leverage works. Okay, so disclaimer number one, I'm speaking to my TikTok community. Leverage without value is a total and under disaster. We live in a culture where sometimes it's sexy to look at going viral, borrowing money, blowing up, and at the end of the day, if there's an underlying value in what you're doing, it's not a shortcut that will get you places and sustain your growth. So the reason we need to start with value is if we're not committing to being valuable, leverage might be a short win, but it's not going to be a long, sustainable win. I'm speaking majority to my generation, because I would say majority of people in this room, you're way more valuable than what you're getting paid for because of a lack of leverage. A lot of my generation is trying to shortcut, get leverage, but they don't have value. And then step number two, how many people can relate with this shiny object syndrome? So promise me, promise me this. Try to only commit to one thing that I'm going to go through nine examples. I'm going to go through six areas of leverage and then I'm going to go through nine examples. This is a total of 15 things I'm going to go through. Try to commit to one, maybe two. If you try to commit more than two, you will not do any of it. How many of us can relate to going to a conference getting all fired up and then committing to nothing? Or we commit to something but we don't actually do it. So shiny object syndrome is real. Don't fall into it. So six areas of leverage. Leverage number one is labor. It comes in people. At the end of the day, if you can pay someone X and they can provide Y in the output and Y is greater than your input, there's leverage there. Now, it's not just in what we pay. We also have to factor in emotions and other things, but at the end of the day, there's leverage in bringing on people. If they create a better you, you win. Number two, capital. Other people's money. At the end of the day, majority of us in this room, majority of you can explain leverage way better than me. You can take a real estate property. You can use leverage and you can have a greater net worth. You can have more cash flow. You can reduce your risk. Leverage is truly incredible if it's done properly because you're using other people's money. It's amazing. Lever number three is media, is language. If I was speaking a language that you didn't understand, I would have less influence over this room. The fact that you can understand the words out of my mouth is inherent leverage in itself. The fact that we in 2022 can communicate via written audio video is incredible leverage. And if you think of like the back end, the tower of Babel, the end of the day, they were doing all their things and then they stopped communicating and everything fell apart. That's an example of being able to communicate is a form of leverage. Being able to amplify that communication is another form of leverage. So a platform, a stage. Think of anything that's allowing, like this is a literal platform. I'm speaking once and more than one person is hearing me right now. That's a form of leverage. But there's also, anytime you put a written audio or video on a platform and it's going to one to many, that's a form of leverage. It's a platform. Number five is code. And think of code. The most basic form of code is like a website. The website works for you whether you're up or not. The most advanced form of code is like AI. There's a reason why majority of the the wealthiest, most rich corporations do some type of AI. They're literally creating machines that are creating other machines. That's the ultimate form of leverage. And then number six, I believe this is something I just, this might be the most wooly thing I come up with. I believe influence the form of leverage. If you have more influence or more charisma, you will be able to have more leverage versus if you don't. And I believe charisma can actually be learned. I believe it's a function of two things, EQ and IQ. And I have to give Vanessa Van Edwards credit for this because she so beautifully articulated this. But at the end of the day, we want to be around people that we like. But I don't want to trust my money with someone that I just like. And they like, yeah, you're likeable, but you're not very smart. But I don't necessarily want to just be led by someone that's super, super smart. But at the end of the day, I don't like being around. If you can learn to be, have EQ, but then also have IQ and have that balance, I'm telling you, you will have more leverage in how you communicate how you lead across the board. So I believe good leverage will help you make more money, give you more influence and credibility, gives you more time, and reduces your risk. I really do believe that. I believe bad leverage can do the exact opposite. But good leverage amplifies all these things. Okay, you guys ready for the nine levers that we can implement in our business today without having to be an author? Isn't that true? Like in our space, it's like, hey, if you want to be smart, write a book, right? Half of us in this room are still working on our first chapter, right? So at the end of the day, I'm going to give you nine levers that don't, you don't have to be an author because as much as I love books, they take a long time to develop. And so here are nine levers that we can implement in our business that can take our valuable service to the next level. Lever number one is the podcast lever. Okay, in 2018, I looked like I'm 14 years old and I was like, you know what, I'm going to start a podcast. I'm going to be the Joe Rogan of the financial space. Okay, it's a really, really good thing. By the way, I couldn't read analytics because by the way, do you see that little spike? That was when my mom downloaded the episode, okay? And then she even stopped listening, okay? I had nobody listening to me at the first year, nobody. Like all those little spikes were me re-downloading the podcast, okay? But that same time that no one was listening, I met some of the greatest people and some of the now to this day, some of my greatest friends that literally enhanced my credibility and my confidence. So here's the challenge. The podcast effect is an example of yes, we're, we're, do people listen to my podcast now? Yes. But I consider the podcast lever more effective because of the relationships. Less about the listeners. I got in to say, hey, I want people to listen to me and I realized that 500 episodes later, it's, it's an amazing platform to build relationships with people that I wanted to get to know and add them value. The podcast lever is one of the most brilliant things that we can do and I'm using the podcast as an example, but where can you add other people value? Where can you give to other people? And as a result, create relationships because those relationships will translate in powerful ways. Now people listen, I had average 400 to 500 downloads a day, which is awesome. It's not Joe Rogan, but people listen, but that happened multiple years of being consistent. We also as a company actually produce five podcasts. My, my beautiful wife in the back, she is into health and I was like, why don't you do a health podcast? And to the state, she's interviewed some of the most amazing people in women's health. She's gotten more free stuff from her podcast than I've got just because she has a platform. There's some teenagers that came to me that wanted advice and I said, the best thing that you can do, you're 19 years old, the best thing you can do is create a teen financial podcast and they've been able to interview some of the legends and financial space because who's going to say no to a 19-year-old podcast? We have someone who produces a real estate podcast for us, most connected person 18 months later in real estate because they just interview all the people that have books and have influence in real estate. The podcast effect is absolutely incredible. We know this guy. He has a whiskey podcast and he doesn't say anything about financial services and yet he's able to build relationships, have better connections and he's told me that he personally gets business because he comes on the podcast, like people come on the podcast. If compliance is an issue about talking about money, just create a podcast around something that you're passionate about and use that as a way to bring in people. I'm telling you, if we understand the why and the system behind this, every one of us can create a platform around something that we're passionate about and become the one of the most connected people in that space. The podcast effect is no joke. Leather number two is delegation. How many people have read this book? Who not how? A Dan Sullivan. Amazing book. His whole concept is instead of focusing on what? I don't know how to do that. Focus on who do you know that can make that happen? I think one of the things that I've learned from Cody is he is surrounding himself with people on his team that are our who's that are helping him get to where they want to go. I think he would be at the first to admit that they would not have a fraction of what I have his success if they didn't have the who's. What's interesting is this is Trevor, 2018, a couple months after we started the podcast, I was like, you know what? We need to get to the next level. I hate doing applications and I'm really bad at it. I was like, who do I know that can literally help us get to the next level? I was terrified because we committed to Trevor and if we didn't make any money, we'd be out of money in six months. But it's something amazing happens when you bring someone on your team that helps elevate what you're trying to do. And now we had more money in six months from now and it totally changed my mind to say, I'm going to surround myself with people that can be my who's the things I'm not really good at. This is a tactic as it relates to delegation. I would encourage everyone to do this. Just get super self-aware on the things that you love and what you're good at, the things that you are good at but you don't like, things that you like, but you shouldn't do, and things that you don't like and you're not good at. A lot of us just aren't self-aware about these things. But if you start writing that out, you'll start seeing some themes. You'll start seeing some job descriptions. You'll start seeing future collaborations. This was my list, by the way. There's a lot of things I'm not good at and I don't like, right? And at the end of the day, I started seeing like, when you look at our team, majority of people are doing things that they love and that they're good at, it's allowing them to get closer to where they want to go. And at the end of the day, we are all better. Our output is far greater because we have a team. Level number three is probably my most favorite lever that I'm going to talk about today. Video email. I've sent over 4,300 video emails to date. What is a video email? A video email is literally you open up your email and you're getting a video and you get to click on it and it's me talking to you. It's really convenient for someone that doesn't like to read and type. This one tool, this one tactic has literally changed our business. I require everyone on our team when we're interacting with people to use video as much as possible. This email, I can't share their name. One of the most influential CEOs in our space, met them at an event, sent them one video. He said, Caleb, I think this is the best email I've ever received. He gets hundreds of emails a day. He's one of the most prominent CEOs in our space and I was in a one minute video able to stand out because I just went back and was like, you know what? And this video, I was like, hey, it was amazing meeting you. I'm a big gratitude person. Thank you for what you're doing. These are some of the things that we talked about. I hope our paths cross. Take care. And it just stood out because he saw one minute video. You want to know the biggest problem with video emails though? You won't do them. I'm telling you, it will work. Majority of us will get video emails. We might even buy software. There's some free stuff out there, but we won't do it. Just to tell you how easy this is, I'm going to give you an example of Crash Course on a video email. Anyone that wants to get opt into our free gift, you'll get this video. Hey, everyone, it's Caleb here. I just wanted to personally say it was amazing speaking with you at NAPA. I'm just so grateful for this industry profession. And I just wanted to give you an example of a video email. I hope you can apply this quick video and as you serve your clients and as you meet people at networking events, I hope you can apply this one tool to make you more personable and help you stand out. God bless. You guys will get that video email if you want. I'm telling you, if you do that, it will change the way that you communicate and will make you stand out. I've sent over 4,000 of them. It works. The website lever. I call this the meeting before the meeting. A lot of us, we are killer when we get to the meeting. There's this thing that happened a couple of years ago that made it hard to meet with people. This concept of the meeting before the meeting is something that wasn't new when COVID came around. This is a picture of me still at the bank. I actually got six college credits for an internship that I made up for myself and convinced the professor. One of the videos was term life insurance. I gave this to every loan officer and I said, hey, when you guys sell a mortgage, have people watch this 11 minute video and it was a pitch on term insurance. It was amazing. It was like, why would I meet with them? They could just watch it if they want to meet with me. They can meet with me. When we started, I've done little funnels. It's amazing when people watch a video and they're like, hey, I want what you have. They're ready to go. It's interesting because we have a business advisor that literally helps people go virtual and we help people build software, coaching, all that. At the end of the day, it's like, okay, a lot of people, their websites are not good and they're not setting up with this concept of the meeting before the meeting. It's just one of those things that I'm passionate about. I'm also going to include this if anyone wants to opt into our pre-gift. Here's the five things that you need in a good website. Number one, you need to clear offer on your website right away. Number two, it needs to have an obvious call to action. A lot of websites that I see in our space, all over the place, no clue what you're actually trying to say. Number three, provide value. Provide a free lead magnet. Provide something, whether it's a video or one page or something that's like, makes you want, makes me want to come closer to you. Number four, make it easy to navigate, simple, clean. And number five, don't just get a stock image. Let's get a relatable images. This is just a quick virtual audit. Another thing that, and this is something that I'm sincere about, if anyone wants me or someone on our team to audit your website, we will gladly do that because at the end of the day, we have a lot of good intentions, but a lot of times people are going to a site that's not translating to what we actually want. The meeting before the meeting is so important, you do this once from member code. A website is a lower version of code. You do that once. That website will work for you the rest of your life. Build a website that represents you well. Number five, YouTube. And by the way, I'm a baby YouTuber, but I think I'm probably a better, more relatable example than Cody. Cody, I want to see your numbers after because I'm sure it's unreal. One person on our team is like, Caleb, you're doing a podcast. Why don't you just publish that podcast on YouTube? Why don't we just start making the video also, like we can strip the audio? What if we also make that video on YouTube? And so, you know, 7,000 subscribers later, we have a little bit of traction. What's interesting to me is this last year, this last year, we've gotten over 20,000 watch hours. That's over 2,575 eight hour days of people watching our videos. When I make a video, I make it once. The fact that more than one person can watch that video blows my mind every time I say that. The fact that I do one video and more than one person watches it. I mean, I have to say this. This is one of the big reasons why we have the success that we have. I'm working longer than most of you, but I'm not that you're working, but I'm duplicating the message more and more. The last month, just to share this example, the last month, we have over 212 eight hour days by a very small YouTube channel. I bet you what I do in a year, Cody, doesn't know in a month. The reason he makes a lot more money than I do currently is he just has a lot more leverage in a business that's valuable. This blows me away, and I'm telling you YouTube is an incredible platform because every time you make a video, it's literally you're making a digital real estate every single day that can be searched, it's incredible. I do know that compliance, for some of us, we just simply can't do this, and I understand that. I just think it's something that you should look into because it's only going to grow in its influence and ability. The YouTube lever is truly incredible. Virtual Studio, the virtual studio lever is great. How many of us like to use whiteboards? Raise your hand if you like whiteboards. I was told when I got into this space that if you can't explain it on a whiteboard, you don't understand it, and I actually agree with that. Being able to simplify it on a whiteboard is truly incredible. I have a thesis that most of us don't like the virtual environment because we're not able to actually express and write and create. Whiteboard, for me, was one of those sticking points where I love to draw, and I actually preferred meeting in person with people because I had a whiteboard, every room that I have in our house, we have a whiteboard. I'm going to show you how you can create a whiteboard effect digitally. This is our first, we had the Woncom board because I was broke when I first started the business. I bought one of these off of Amazon and we plugged it into the computer and I tried to write because it was so important to me. But anyone that has a tablet, whether it's an iPad, whether it's an Android tablet or a surface or what not, any writable device, you can make into a whiteboard. Here's a secret. A lot of people go on to zoom with their whiteboard and then they're drawing and you're getting a picture of their nostril. We don't want to do that. The secret here is to make the tablet a second device and you mute it, and then when you want to share that device, you just share it. You're drawing, they're seeing you, you're speaking directly to them. Boom, you have a whiteboard that's actually better because instead of you're putting your back to the wall and they're seeing your back, they're seeing exactly what you're drawing. It's amazing. I learned how to do this. It could literally change the game in the virtual environment. I actually also have a video showing you exactly how to do this. I just think a lot of us, and if anyone wants to get our free gift, this is included. It's an eight minute video of me walking through how to set this up and I actually walked exactly how to do it because it's so powerful and it gave me massive confidence in a virtual environment. The other thing is, I believe it's 2022. We all need to be able to meet virtually. I know not all of us want to, but there's a difference in home studios and I don't believe like I have a really nice home studio. I don't believe that that's necessary. I think really there's three things that you need in a good home studio. You need good internet, you need good audio. Please, please invest in a $99 microphone. I've been on so many meetings where the audio is so bad and it's so easy to fix, Yeti microphone from Amazon. You don't have to get a sure microphone. It's like $600. You can get a $99 microphone. It will enhance the audio. Just get a mini, Yeti mini. And then a good lighting, you don't even need a light but just make sure that lighting is to in front of you. Okay, these three things will be a game changer. This is a good checklist as it relates to virtual meeting. OPA, this is something, again, this is, if you ask me what is probably taking our business to the next level, probably this one level. It's other people's audiences. IE, it's understanding how to win stages. Pete Vargas is a good friend of mine and at 21 years old he said Caleb, you have a message that needs to be heard and I was like I'm 21, I know nothing about money. He's like you need to get out and speak. Your message matters and it was that moment where I was like I am a speaker. I believe that I can speak. I believe I have a message that needs to be heard. That was a change for me. And I started saying hey, I'm a speaker and people started letting me speak. It was amazing. It was like you know it's amazing how many stages we don't win because we don't ask. And so I've had the opportunity to speak to lots of people. It's interesting a stage is not just a physical stage but you could also have digital stages and we've been on probably over 150 podcasts. What's crazy is I'll just use this one example. There was an HFAC podcast that reached out to me and I was the only financial person that's been on the HFAC podcast. It's one of our best podcasts to date. Think of like 200 people, it's a small podcast. 200 people listened but they've never heard half the financial things I was saying. We got hit up from so many people because they heard me on a HFAC podcast. Their stage is everywhere. Their stage is literally everywhere. And this is if you ask if you look at the actual revenue that we've gained as a company it's because we've had a message and we've leveraged it via stage because that's where a lot of people have attention and there's that credibility that gets transferred over. So I have the opportunity to do a learning lab tomorrow and I'm going to break down the three things that have allowed us to scale stages. So number one how to have a message. What needs to be in a message for people to actually listen to you? Because I don't know about you but I've heard people win stages and then talk is not that impressive. How do we create a message that resonates? Number two, how do we actually win the stage? How do we get in front of the audience? I love this. I get goosebumps every time I think about this because it's so fun to be like okay where are people? Where can we get in front of them? And then number three, how can we convert from stage? Because I don't know about you but sometimes I've heard amazing speakers and you're like they leave, they get a standing ovation and then they're gone. Obviously there's an art and a science to say how do you speak and then how do you make people want to work with you after? In the learning labs I'm going to give you the three, like I'm going to break down the framework of each one of these so that you can be equipped to win stages and serve a lot of people. Okay number eight we got two more. Number eight is a repurposed lever. Big fan of Gary Ve. Document don't create. I've been watched him very early on and got very inspired. Dennis you who I also I think is going to be here later. Incredible marketing guru talks about hey Caleb you got to have high authority in everything that you do and repurposing allows you to do that. From the very first talk that I've ever given the one thing that I've done that I'm really really grateful I've done is I've recorded everything that I've ever done. Now I don't necessarily want to show my first couple talks because they weren't very good but I documented the whole step along along the way and I'm telling you some of us are brilliant. We think of the greatest ideas we communicated the greatest ideas and nobody knows because we're not documenting it. So this is this is like a concept that we can we can translate across the board like if you have video and you and you I do a YouTube video I can now I can strip it for podcast I can make little clips on TikTok and Twitter and Instagram and whatnot like one one time like I'm getting filmed today some of these clips might end up later in the future on on LinkedIn. It's a fact of me doing one thing but we're repurposing it. This is just two examples again I'm not I've I've a couple thousand people on on Instagram which is definitely not a huge deal in the influencer space. I had one video that I was on stage talking about wealth over 1.4 million people watch it on Instagram over 18,000 people have shared that one clip over 31,000 people have shared it and over 18,000 have saved it. One little clip repurposed it didn't take me any work we just took that 25 second clip and put it on Instagram and number nine is a gratitude as willis this might be as willis this might be if you make it a weekly habit right Jim if you make it a weekly habit of just telling someone that you're thankful for them you will be amazed how many people come out of the woodwork wanting to help you don't do this don't do this to get something literally be intentional about saying I am super super grateful for you and I'm telling you if you make that a theme you'll be amazed you'll be amazed how much leverage that will create because people will just be your advocate and ambassadors in life so here are the three questions the three three leverage questions are this by using leverage how can your outcome and output be enhanced number two what is the cost I don't pay a a Hollywood production studio to you know make my make my videos because it wouldn't be cost effective I invest in a two thousand dollar camera instead so we have to be smart as we're relating to leverage and number three everything that we do have is inherent risk what risk am I taking on for having leverage these are the three questions these are three questions on leverage so I'm going to take two more minutes our industry and profession is the example value leveraging is it not what we're able to do is create so much value for our our our clients like other than sharing the gospel literally our industry has the greatest value leverage of all time we literally can sign one piece of paper that can have generational differences in our clients life that is incredible to me and so we are literally in an industry that embodies value leveraging so well and we can use the principle to value leveraging to amplify that to the next level so here all the things that if you guys are interested in learning more like I know that some of you guys are taking pictures like if you want all the slide decks if you want the value leveraging checklist and all this stuff that's why we have a booth here is if anyone's interested you can give us your business card or take a picture of one of our QR codes and at the end of the day like we want this to be as valuable as possible I want to leave you with one one final thought March March of 2019 my life changed for good because one of my best friends one of the people that I started better wealth with Greg who's like a second father to me died he died he died a slow death of cancer and what was interesting about Greg is he he embodies intentional living extremely well and he said Caleb be intentional with every moment treasure every moment that you have with people treasure every moment and I'm telling you I'm I'm grateful to have walked through this with Greg because it it's given me a conviction for our industry but it's also remind me of why we do what we do going back to clarity it reminds me of why we get up and do what we get to do every single day and so this concept of one life is very interesting I've realized that a lot of us procrastinate I'm doing what we know we need to do and think of this as each block represents a year of our life and these are a hundred boxes so we're not all going to live to a hundred in this room a lot of us have already filled up a lot of boxes I know I look on that and say I potentially have lived one third of my life and went fast let's stop procrastinating on the things that we truly need to lean in and do and a lot of us know what we need to do going back to identity a lot of us know what we need to do and when are we going to actually lean in and say I am going to live an intentional life and I'm not going to let the neighbors that I really don't care about determine why I do what I do and how I speak the number one leverage thing that I think we can do in our in our personal life is being the main speaker at our funeral I believe if you can make an intentional video while you're alive speaking like you're at your funeral saying hey guys these are the things that are most important these are the people that I most love these this is what I want you to know about who Caleb is and here's what I want to inspire every single person in his audience to do I believe if you do that one thing you will live more intentional today and you'll have a super intentional video that will probably go viral after you die It's one of my personal missions to get at least a thousand people to intentionally make a video being the main speaker at their funeral because I believe this one thing if I think about all the things that I could promote this one thing if we do could change the way that we live our life today but ultimately we'd create videos of ripple effects and our future grandchildren's grandchildren potentially could have a video if we could preserve it seeing of what we stood for Guys I want to thank you all for for for for this I'm incredibly grateful for for Nafai I'm incredibly grateful for the many people have come before us making it possible for us all to be in this room and in such an amazing industry god bless you thank you I Want to thank you for watching till the end if you enjoy our content Please like share subscribe it helps other people find our channel and we really really appreciate it I also want to let you know that we have this thing called the better wealth efficiency quiz and Our goal is to give you a wealth efficiency score in less than three minutes And really highlight and get you to start thinking about the potential inefficiencies that you have in your life So if you haven't taken the quiz go check out it'll be the link below check that link out take the quiz and then let us know your scores annual event. I got to keynote at this event. And NAIFAs is the number one association for financial advisors and life insurance agents. And they just do so much for industry on the state level and the national level. And so it was a huge honor. And I got to speak in front of a bunch of legends in the crowd that I looked up to and have spoken on the stage before. And so, again, it was really, really cool. And I got to talk about value leveraging, which is this topic and concept that become more and more passionate around, around create value and amplify that value. Whether you're in business, whether you're going to school, whether you're working for somebody, if you can figure out ways to provide value and amplify that value, money will follow, influence will follow, you'll start getting closer to unlocking intentional living. And so I got to share that. It's filled with a bunch of tactics. I got to share some vulnerabilities that I've just, I really felt strongly about. And I got to challenge our industry to step up. And so if this is interesting, make sure to share it to share it around. I would love love hearing from people that reach out. I love hearing you in the comments. And I'm just so incredibly grateful for this community. And for all the people that have helped me get to a place where I can speak at NAIFAs annual apex event. So from the bottom of my heart, this is true honor. And I hope you enjoy. Two lines. All I had to remember were two lines. And I totally blanked. What made matters worse is I remember taking out my note card very nervously and reading out every single word. I have no idea what this whole play was all about. I do remember feeling like a total and utter failure walking off that stage. So I want to introduce to you 13-year-old Caleb. I know many of you are like, that was like last week, right? We made without the beard. 13-year-old Caleb had two massive insecurities. Insecurity number one was I was the oldest of six kids and yet I was super, super small. My younger sister was taller than me. And she made it a point to let everyone know that she was younger than me, that yet she looks so much older. And insecurity number two was I could barely read. And being 13 years old and having reading insecurities, it was like the perfect storm. This photo was taken two hours before my most embarrassing moment on stage when I totally blanked. I went to my mom the next day, literally in tears because as a 13-year-old, I was self-aware enough to know that I don't know if I'm going to mount anything. And my mom said something to me that I'm ultimately going to dedicate this whole talk to. She said Caleb, the things that you can't control don't worry about. But the things that you can control, you have a moral obligation to go all in. I don't know about you guys, but when we're in an industry right now where sometimes it feels a little bit like some things are out of our control. You look at politics, taxes, when you look at what's on the news. But I'm telling you in 2022, there is no greater time. There's no greater time to be in this profession in industry. And it's interesting because as I take a step back, like I am insanely honored to be in a room filled with people that have gone before us. I had the pleasure of connecting with Tom yesterday. Tom Hegda, anyone has been impacted by that man? And I remember four and a half years ago sitting in a room watching him speak and thinking to myself, I hope to someday have as much clarity and conviction as that guy does for our industry and what we do in our profession. So here's the challenge. This is going to be like, I promise you I'm going to give my all to be as valuable as possible in this next hour. But I want to remind us that we are an industry that we can take control over. And this is one of the most exciting things. And at the end of the day, if the mindset isn't right, like I'm telling you, I'm still like, I'm still high off a Cody's talk about going to the next level. But if our mindset's not right, none of what I'm going to say matters. Because at the end of the day, sometimes we don't need another tactic. Sometimes we just need to understand why we're doing what we're doing. So my next job after this motivational talk from my mother was at the chicken farm. Okay, let's just say, I appreciate the chicken sandwich. I got paid a dollar for every chicken that we processed. And that's when I started learning so much about money. I read two books, actually I listened to the two books. And one was Rich's Man of Babylon. And the other was good to grade. And that was like the perfect storm because on one hand, I was like, man, I want to get into business. I want to dedicate my life to this whole business game. And the other thing was like, okay, Rich's Man of Babylon, principles on how anyone can be wealthy. A 10% of what you make is yours to keep. And then I looked around at our country and was like, why is everyone broke? At 16 year old Caleb said, I don't know what this whole financial thing is, but I'm going to do something about it. And then what I did was I got a job at a bank, another long story, but a gentleman believed in me, believed in this this kid who was actually so nervous when I sat down with him. My mom helped me write out questions on what to ask. We were in Wisconsin, it was like below zero. I was so nervous, I left my car on. That 17 year old kid got one break. One of my mentors took out his phone, made one call, got me a job at a community first bank. And then through that, I dedicated everything, like I was like, this is my shot. I want to do everything I can to be as valuable as possible. So I worked in our teller line, I wrote radio ads, I worked in our loan department. I became an HR nightmare because I would just show up and do things for free. They're like, Caleb, you can only work for 20 hours. Okay, I'll get paid for 20 hours and work for free because it just made total sense to me that the bank was going to be the greatest place for me to get to the next level. And so at age 19, I came up with this mission statement because seven habits, five effective people was one of the most influential books I've read and encouraged you to think with the end in mind. So I came up with this mission statement to help people see and reach their highest potential. I was like, man, if I could dedicate my life to doing this one thing, that'd be incredible. And by the way, money is not the main reason, but it's one of the many reasons why people aren't able to live to a god-gum, their god-gum potential. And so at 19 years old, yes, that was me at 19. I took over the Banks Investment Department, 350 clients. Now, it was interesting because my dream was to be in the financial space, but on one hand, I felt like I arrived. I'm like, man, this is incredible. I'm 19 years old. I have my dream job. On the other hand, I'm experiencing what like half the room in this room is experiencing. It's 10 minutes of horror. You're like, I have grandchildren older than you. What in the world are you like, how in the world are you going to help me with my money? But is it not true that I had my own 10 minutes of horror when I started seeing what people are going through? I remember one time at 19 years old, someone came into my office all excited because they dedicated their life at a job, but they totally hated. They're excited to retire at 19-year-old Caleb after looking at their few assets for like five minutes, realized that they were going to have a fraction of what they thought they were going to have. And I just thought, my mission statement was on the wall. I was just thinking, am I going to be okay just sitting back in a corner office letting people come to me and just being an average typical financial planner? I was like, I'm not going to settle for this. And so I started really diving deep into like, how is money, how does money work? And I'm going to share with you three epiphanies that I had in this journey that were like, oh my goodness, if people understood this, we would start changing the way that we think about money, which would ultimately change our behavior. So the first thing is clarity. This is like the first epiphany. Majority people don't even have clarity in what they want. It's like Alice in Wonderland where Alice gets in the fork in the road and the cat says, where do you want to go? And Alice says, I don't know. Then the cat says, well, if you don't know where you want to go and you wrote, it will get you there. Welcome to America. Majority people have no clue where they want to go. And at the end of the day, if you don't know where you want to go, why are you even talking to anyone to help you be more efficient with your money? So it's interesting how we define wealth is vital. Because if we don't define the actual goal, how do we know where we're going? And so it's interesting because when you think of wealth, whether you want to admit it or not, a lot of us think about a financial metric. I'm going to use an extreme example, but Warren Buffett is known as being one of the wealthiest, quote-unquote, men in America. Warren Buffett's 91 years old and worth over $100 billion. Who would trade places with Warren Buffett at 91 years old? I need this to sink in. Because if we're not willing to trade places with $100 billion, what are we indirectly telling you about what we value our time at? I'm telling you on a macro level, we get it. We don't want to die. On a micro level, we devalue our life every single day. And so what's interesting to me is we at Better Wellth make our financial metric, the intentional living metric. You're not wealthy if you're not living intentionally. What's interesting is intentional living looks different for each person. Cody, I have a funny feeling that a jet isn't an intentional life for you. For some of us in this room, you don't need a jet to live intentionally. What's important is not to mirror my intentional life or Cody's intentional life, it's to get ultra-crystall clear what does intentional living look like for you. What are you spending your time on? Who are you spending it with? What are the talents that you're using with your one life? That, whatever that metric is, can we not agree that that should be the metric that we reverse engineer a financial plan and cash flow around? And so this is something I can't really take credit for, but it just kind of popped into my head. ROR, a lot of times stands for rate return. And it's interesting because a lot of people will determine what they do for the rest of their life and where they put their money for the rest of their life based on this metric. You really doesn't matter at the end of the day. It's interesting. I took a step back and said, what if ROR stood for return on result? What if we reverse engineered the results that people wanted and we made that more important than any one metric? Just a thought. So number one, it's intentional living and getting clear on what we actually want. The second thing is cash flow. The most important financial metric in my humble opinion is cash flow. Not net worth, not other metrics like rate return, it's cash flow because you could be a billionaire on paper, but cash is what pays your groceries. Okay? We need cash flow is the most important thing. And so I used to say cash flow is king and now I say cash flow is king and queen because I don't want to divide the room. Okay? And so at the end of the day, we're very, very simple. We're like, if you have enough cash flow to live intentionally, that's the goal. Again, not perfect, but at the end of the day, if you have enough cash flow to live an intentional life, you're good. That was a piphany number two is let's plan for cash flow, not other financial metrics that may or may not matter. And number three, the piphany at 20 years old, that was like life insurance. Life insurance. It was interesting because when I first got into the space, I learned all about why permanent life insurance is so bad and by term, and invest the difference and all that stuff. And then I started learning and studying what banks were doing, corporations were doing. I started studying people that I admired and they were thinking about life insurance a little differently. They were like, when life insurance is set up properly, you can not only protect your life, but you can also have benefits in the future. And we came up with this concept of the and asset. I can't take credit for that. We were just smart enough to buy the domain. Okay? So at the end of the day, it's like, oh, I can, when set up and use properly put my dollar in a place that can literally protect my family and myself and it can grow, my, my dollars can grow the rest of my life. And I can have control and use over those dollars. And Tom, we can have amazing retirement benefits in the future. And it potentially can help me at 20 years old save more money because I don't have to say see you for the next 45 years. And the most important thing is I believe the asset when set up and use properly can help you live more intentionally. And so when I started learning this, I was like, man, how many people out there are articulating a life insurance product? This is not an investment. But I was like, man, when set up and use properly, it's an enhancer of you. You are your greatest asset. And I believe you are better if you have life insurance at the foundation of your life. And so that was like the epiphany. And then I thought of like the example of the cell phone. How many, how many people do not have a smartphone? Raise your hand. I knew there's one. There's always one. Okay. Okay. So we're going to pretend that that one young gentleman in the back doesn't exist. The smartphone is one of the greatest inventions. I know there's a lot of negative things that come with it, but think about it. Our phone is a flashlight. It was my alarm clock. It was my white noise machine. I can email. I can text. I can actually do phone calls, which is kind of a foreign thing nowadays. I can do so many things. This is not an investment. And yet I'm able to make a lot more money and do a lot more things and get closer to intentional life because of the cell phone. This is a tool the same thing as when life insurance can be a tool to secure people in the United States and in North America. Just an example that we use that was like, oh, and I got that. It's not the it. It's the end. Okay. So we're going to be talking about a value leveraging, which is a topic I'm very passionate about. And actually in 2017, before I left the bank, I made a voice memo to myself. We're not going to play it now. But I essentially said, I essentially talked about this talk before living it out. I was learning all these things. I was learning about intentional living. I was learning about cash flow. I was learning about life insurance. And I was looking to the world. And I was like, they're not articulating it very well. There's opportunity. And so I made a voice memo to myself that just out of gratitude saying, I'm learning all this stuff. And the person that's going to win is going to provide value to the marketplace and amplify that value. And again, that's what ultimately I'm going to share through my story and some tactics on how to help us all in this room create value leveraging for our life. And so what ended up happening was at the rightful age of 21, I was like, you know what? Got one life. I don't want to regret it. I watched this inspirational TED talk of people regretting their life. And so I'm like, I'm not going to do that. Looked out my mission statement, which said, tell people see and research highest potential. And I was like, you know what? We're going to start this company. It's going to be called Better Wellth. And we're going to do this thing called the internet. And I believe people are going to want, if they understand what I know about life insurance, they'll be a line outside the door. And so I got three crazy people to believe in this vision. Greg, Dan, and Julie. Julie was actually an intern. She got six college credits for someone that was still in college when they launched the company. And we set out on this way to try to like find this better way. Now I want you all to know when I started Better Wellth, I was living with my parents. I was living with my parents. We were in the very prestigious office in the basement of a Papa John's building in a Hawaiian tanning studio. Okay? $250 a month. $250 a month was our lease. Until Dan was bragging to our landlord that we were crushing it and they bumped it up a hundred bucks. I was like, Dan, you're never crushing it to the landlord. You're always struggling. Okay? And so this is where we began. And there are three things that I stumbled upon. I essentially started a podcast. I self-published a book and I started speaking. And those three things were value leveraging that took our business to the next level. I didn't, I wasn't smart enough to say this is how the five step plan and how we're going to do it. I just intuitively knew if people could hear this message, there would be a line outside the door. Our team doesn't look like a typical team in the financial service space. We have now, it's, now we have over 15 people on the team. We're all remote. We have team members in all four time zones in the United States and we have clients all over the country and we do everything virtually. And we have a lot of youth. Our senior person in our internal team is 41 years old. And so we have a lot of fun and we try to provide as much value as possible. The greatest accomplishment I've made up until this point is convincing my beautiful wife April to marry me. And so that happened. We're 14 months. Not writing any marriage books quite yet. Everyone told me communications important. I was like, what do you mean? And I now know what you guys mean, communication, right? So we living in Colorado and actually now moving to Tennessee. So we are excited to live in Nashville. Okay, so value leveraging. Value leveraging is a fun, two things that need to be happened in value leveraging. Number one is you need to create value. Number two, you need to amplify that value. Okay. Number one, provide value. Number two, maximize that value. If you do this one, two punch, you will be successful and you'll serve more people. You make more money. You'll have more time. So in this talk, I'm going to do my very best to what we're going to define. What is value? I'm a big framework person. For those of you that know I love whiteboard. So we're going to provide what value is. We're going to talk about the two biggest problems in our industry today that's keeping us from creating value. Then we're going to talk about the three questions that if you can answer these three questions in this room, you will literally elevate your ability to provide more value in this space. And finally, we're going to talk about a simple sales framework because I have some beef with all the sales tactics out there that can, if we can do, we can just sell more and sell it more ethically. Then we're going to talk about leverage. We're going to look at what is leverage. We're going to look at the six areas of leverage and then I'm going to give you nine. Nine leverage ideas that you can use and implement two day in your business. All right, fair? Okay, before we jump in, I always promise myself I would never not talk about things that I think need to be said. This is a picture taken right before I left the bank and this is a picture of 21-year-old Caleb with the golden microphone, $47 on Amazon. And this is a picture of someone who is afraid. This is a picture of someone who is terrified leaving the bank because I had it all. I had a corner office. I had the prestige at being my age graduating college. And yet, I was afraid of failing. I was afraid of putting myself out there. I was afraid of some of the people that I love the most, thinking down on me for doing something that they didn't think I should do. The reason I have the word identity is I believe identity is the most important thing fundamentally in our life. And a lot of us are making decisions based on what other people think we should do or our perception of what they think we should do. And a lot of us are encaged in a box that the box that we've put ourselves in. And so again, I knew all the tactics. I knew all the raw raw, but I had to look myself in the mirror and say my identity is not built around success or failure. And when I had that moment, I was free to say, okay, even if I fail and lose it all, write a self-published book and go broke financially, my identity is not going to be tied up in that. And that was the thing that ultimately needed to happen before better wealth was born. I just felt like I need to share that because I think a lot of times we don't talk about the actual root issue of why we're not getting the success or why we're not leaning into what we truly need to lean into. So value. What is value? A lot of people say money follows value. I really do believe that. It's interesting. What is money? Money is just currency that is printed, that's getting less and less valuable each year. But ultimately, we believe if you provide value, money will flow. That's what I read in all the books. And so I was like, I want to be as valuable as possible. So the definition of value is the material or monetary worth of something. So we want to be valuable. I'm told you I'm a framework person. So at the end of the day, what is value? Value is made up of really, really there's really two things. You have your input, which is you, your time, your talents, your relationships, your resources. And it can only provide two things. You can only provide two things in life. A service or a product. Some of us are serving in employment and we're not all paid the same. The people that are paid the same or paid more are the ones that are providing a perception of greater value than those that are not. There's nothing wrong with a janitor and a heart surgeon, but a heart surgeon gets paid more because of the perception of value that they're providing. And I would say that perception is something that we wouldn't disagree with. They're providing more value, i.e. that's why they're getting paid more. Not all companies are created equal. There's certain companies that are providing a service that people are paying more for. Why? Because they value that service more than other services. Same with products. I mean, I'm not going to use that example. Not all products are created equal. Let's put it that way. And so at the end of the day, we will pay more for a product that we perceive as being more valuable. And so it's interesting. This is it. All value is, it's in a service or a product, and we can diagnose this and say, if we're providing a service, does the market consider us valuable? Because I have news for us, a lot of us are focused on the wrong things and we're not actually focused on, do people that I want to serve actually find what I do valuable? And so at the end of the day, it's in the output, not the input. I'm talking to my generation first. We think we'll go to school and get a degree and then go and get a master's degree. And we're so smart because we have all this knowledge. No one gives a crap. No one gives a crap how smart you are. They will pay and follow you for what you provide to the marketplace. And that's a thing that we need sometimes to get because some of us have alphabet soup behind our name. And that's amazing. But at the end of the day, what are you doing to serve your clients with all the knowledge that you have? We will get paid for the output, the output and the result that we give our clients, not how smart we are. All right, two problems, two problems in our industry. Problem number one. Most of us think we have a marketing problem. Most of us think we have a leads problem. And in my humble opinion, we don't have a leads problem. We actually have an offer and sales process problem. I'm speaking to myself first. A lot of times we'll say, man, if I just had more leads, I would be better. But at the end of the day, those leads usually are because the offer that we have is not amazing. So you might want to get ready to write this down because I'm going to go through three questions that we're going to go through kind of quickly. But these three questions, quite frankly, could be the most important slide that we go through. Okay? So step number one is, if you think back in your business, and majority of us are in service-based businesses, we provide services and people will pay us for the service that we give them. Number one, who is our ideal client? Who, if we could only serve one type of person, who would that be? Step number two, and this is really, really important. What problem do they have? Not what are our solutions, how we can serve them. I don't care about that. What problem do they have? What's keeping them up at night? What's making them fight with their spouse? What's giving them anxiety? What's stressing them out? What are the problems? By the way, no one's thinking in bed about should I get a spia? Okay? Sorry Tom, no one's thinking about that. No one's thinking about, oh I want uninterrupted compounding the rest of my life. I just, man, I'm not getting uninterrupted compounding. No one's thinking about, man, I just need long-term care insurance. But a lot of the stresses that they're facing could be solved by one of the three products that I just mentioned. So then the third question, this is where we all love, right? Is how do you crazy over-deliver solving their problem? Not again, not. It's not what we think there, but it's like how do we communicate to them? Like you, you're laying in bed thinking about this and this is how we can solve your problems. Because at the end of the day, majority of people don't care what, they just care that it can be solved. I'm telling you this, this right here, I've spent a lot of money being in my head against the wall and I've realized that these three questions, it has made our business incredibly clear because anything that we do, we walk through these three questions. Who are we serving? What problems are they actually feeling and how do we solve that problem? If we can message that, that service will be perceived as value. The biggest problem that people face in this space is they are talking about solutions that are not resonating because they're not speaking to the pain that I have. This is not a picture of my car, by the way. The Lambo effect, and this is like an extreme example, but if I had a Lamborghini, I could sell it for 100 bucks easily because there's a perception of value. I would say a lot of us should be focused on how do I make my company and products and services that I provide to the marketplace, i.e. services. How do I create the Lambo effect that make people say, I'm out of my mind if I'm not working with you. Two other resources. For any of you that want these slides or I have a bunch of free gifts, you can come over by the booth and whatnot. Elon Musk has an amazing video. I cut up two minutes and 50 seconds of it and he literally talks about what is business. He essentially says business or profit is when the output is greater than the input. That difference is profit. He then says majority of CEOs and presidents should stop focusing on presentations and all the cute stuff and they should make their product or service better. He says that over. The person that's interviewing him is trying to get a different answer and he's like, just make your product better. Just make your product better. When I watched that, I got so convicted because I'm like, that's what I need to do. I just need to make our product better. That's a video that I wanted to include in our free gift. The other book, how many people have read this book by Alex Hermosi? Amazing book. He literally breaks down how to create an irresistible offer. I love that. How to make offers so good that they make you feel stupid saying no. It's an amazing book. I would highly recommend every single person get it and Alex articulates the power of the offer and talks about when you start your business, you need to start with the offer. All right, second problem when it comes to value creation. The second problem is our industry is too busy focusing on selling and convincing. When I started in our space, I was given more sales books than I was actually about our products and services. We justify it by saying, well, if you can't sell, you're not going to be able to feed your family and you're going to get out of the business. There's justification there for sure. I'm telling you what, I literally felt like a sleazy salesperson. I was told, get a list of 100 people. How many, you know where I'm going with this? Get a list of 100 people, invite them out to Starbucks and then cold pitch them, fact finder, whatnot, and sell them stuff. Ask for three referrals before you add any value. I was like, man, I'm sorry if I'm offending some people in the room, but I'm like, that just does not sit well. Just not resonate. There may be a reason why only 8% of people last in our space because I'm like, that doesn't resonate at all. So, again, I'm saying if you have to memorize a sales tactic or memorize a nine step, you know, like how to convince someone and convince someone that they need to work with you, I would highly encourage you to take a step back and I'm going to give you two steps that I think are much simpler and if we actually know what we're talking about, we don't necessarily need nine steps because people are way more simple than that. And so, my challenge is let's focus less time on sales tactics and more time on asking the question, are we providing actual value to the people that we're serving? Okay, so my favorite definition quite frankly is efficiency because I think it'll realize to everything that we do about money and business. Efficiency definition is the ability to avoid wasting materials. The ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time in producing a desired result. So, my definition is how to help someone get to their desired result with removing as much friction as possible. That's efficient. If I can help you do that, I'm helping you be more efficient and we as Americans value efficiency. Okay, so step number one in Caleb's simple sales tactics is number one, get ultra-crystall clear and what someone wants. So, resonate with epiphany number one with money. Get really, really clear what people actually want. And if we can articulate what you truly want, I make that what's called the RLR statement, return on result statement, and that becomes a metric that you care about. So, at the end of the day, if I can help you get there, amazing. And then the second thing is just eliminate any friction that's getting in your way. Step number one is do the people that come and work with us, do they feel like we actually understand what they truly want to accomplish? And then step number two are re-illiminating any of the friction in their life to help them get there. So, an example of this is we're in Phoenix right now and our new home is going to be in Nashville, Tennessee. And I could get really, really crystal clear in where I wanted to go. At the end of the day, if I didn't know where I wanted to go, I wouldn't be here. So, I'm here. And I could walk to Phoenix. And I would literally look like Mark Acre, okay, after his run just soaked head to toe, right? No one I guarantee you is walking 20 days to get to this destination. I could drive, I bet you majority of us didn't drive, especially two days to be here, but maybe some of us did, or I could fly and get here in four hours-ish. It doesn't include delays, okay? What's interesting is a lot of people that we meet know where they want to go, or maybe by working with us they get clear in what they truly want because we give them permission to dream again, but a lot of them are equivalent of walking to their destination financially. And if we can just help people get to what they want in a better, more efficient way, they will do business with us if we speak in their language, not ours. Is this resonating with efficiency and sales? So, number one, get really, really crystal clear in what people want. Number two, just help them get there, remove any friction. Here's a question that I would encourage you all to take picture of. Well, this slide too. These are just some of the, these are some of the things as a company. We were like, okay, these are some of the friction points that we're experiencing. These are some of the friction points that our clients are experiencing. They're lacking clarity. They're overpaying on taxes. They have underperforming investments. They have bad debt. They're overspending. They have insurance gaps. These are some of the friction points that people are experiencing getting to where they want to go. But this is the picture, this is the picture that really convicted me as I was going through this presentation. Is working with you the very best solution to getting to where they want to go? Because if the answer is no, potentially we want to take a step back and say how can I provide a greater offer service product to my clients? Instead of saying how can I convince someone to do this? I'm telling you something powerful happens when we know we have the best option for the people that we're serving. So value summary. Your output of your service or your product, people will pay us for the output. Money follows value. Be obsessed with your service and help people get crystal clear on what their desired result is. Because if you make the desired result the thing that people are chasing, everything gets better. That's value. Are we good on value? All right, leverage. The definition of leverage is used to the maximum advantage to think of like an amplifier. This is not Arizona by the way. This is Colorado. One of my friends got a flat tire and what was amazing to me is we got this jack that literally felt like it was from Dollar General. And we started cranking up this whole car and I'm not a big dude. I did it with one hand. It cranked up the whole car. That's one of many examples of leverage. If you Google leverage everything that we use essentially in life that we use multiple times, we use leverage. This is the slide that I most stressed about because I don't know if I can pronounce this name right, but I think it's like Archimedes is credited for literally saying if you gave me a lever long enough, I can move the world. Leverages, incredible. We value leverage. We just don't always articulate it. We don't always live the leverage life in our business. So again, I'm a framework person. You have your input, your time, your talents, your relationships, your creating an output which is either a service or a product, and leverage, all leverages is amplifying that service or product. So if your service is not good, leverage is just going to enhance a not good product. If you're investing in a bad investment, leverage is just going to pull gasoline on a bad situation. If what you're doing is incredible, leverage is going to amplify that incredibleness. I'm a big, big fan of the SkyName of all. I would recommend you read everything by this person. His tweets, he also has a book, but he talks about to get rich. You need leverage. Leverage comes in leverage, leverage comes in language, leverage comes in capital, leverage comes in code and media. I'm going to be using examples of what Naval so beautifully articulated as leverage. He essentially said, if you want to get rich, you need to understand how leverage works. Okay, so disclaimer number one, I'm speaking to my TikTok community. Leverage without value is a total and under disaster. We live in a culture where sometimes it's sexy to look at going viral, borrowing money, blowing up, and at the end of the day, if there's an underlying value in what you're doing, it's not a shortcut that will get you places and sustain your growth. So the reason we need to start with value is if we're not committing to being valuable, leverage might be a short win, but it's not going to be a long, sustainable win. I'm speaking majority to my generation, because I would say majority of people in this room, you're way more valuable than what you're getting paid for because of a lack of leverage. A lot of my generation is trying to shortcut, get leverage, but they don't have value. And then step number two, how many people can relate with this shiny object syndrome? So promise me, promise me this. Try to only commit to one thing that I'm going to go through nine examples. I'm going to go through six areas of leverage and then I'm going to go through nine examples. This is a total of 15 things I'm going to go through. Try to commit to one, maybe two. If you try to commit more than two, you will not do any of it. How many of us can relate to going to a conference getting all fired up and then committing to nothing? Or we commit to something but we don't actually do it. So shiny object syndrome is real. Don't fall into it. So six areas of leverage. Leverage number one is labor. It comes in people. At the end of the day, if you can pay someone X and they can provide Y in the output and Y is greater than your input, there's leverage there. Now, it's not just in what we pay. We also have to factor in emotions and other things, but at the end of the day, there's leverage in bringing on people. If they create a better you, you win. Number two, capital. Other people's money. At the end of the day, majority of us in this room, majority of you can explain leverage way better than me. You can take a real estate property. You can use leverage and you can have a greater net worth. You can have more cash flow. You can reduce your risk. Leverage is truly incredible if it's done properly because you're using other people's money. It's amazing. Lever number three is media, is language. If I was speaking a language that you didn't understand, I would have less influence over this room. The fact that you can understand the words out of my mouth is inherent leverage in itself. The fact that we in 2022 can communicate via written audio video is incredible leverage. And if you think of like the back end, the tower of Babel, the end of the day, they were doing all their things and then they stopped communicating and everything fell apart. That's an example of being able to communicate is a form of leverage. Being able to amplify that communication is another form of leverage. So a platform, a stage. Think of anything that's allowing, like this is a literal platform. I'm speaking once and more than one person is hearing me right now. That's a form of leverage. But there's also, anytime you put a written audio or video on a platform and it's going to one to many, that's a form of leverage. It's a platform. Number five is code. And think of code. The most basic form of code is like a website. The website works for you whether you're up or not. The most advanced form of code is like AI. There's a reason why majority of the the wealthiest, most rich corporations do some type of AI. They're literally creating machines that are creating other machines. That's the ultimate form of leverage. And then number six, I believe this is something I just, this might be the most wooly thing I come up with. I believe influence the form of leverage. If you have more influence or more charisma, you will be able to have more leverage versus if you don't. And I believe charisma can actually be learned. I believe it's a function of two things, EQ and IQ. And I have to give Vanessa Van Edwards credit for this because she so beautifully articulated this. But at the end of the day, we want to be around people that we like. But I don't want to trust my money with someone that I just like. And they like, yeah, you're likeable, but you're not very smart. But I don't necessarily want to just be led by someone that's super, super smart. But at the end of the day, I don't like being around. If you can learn to be, have EQ, but then also have IQ and have that balance, I'm telling you, you will have more leverage in how you communicate how you lead across the board. So I believe good leverage will help you make more money, give you more influence and credibility, gives you more time, and reduces your risk. I really do believe that. I believe bad leverage can do the exact opposite. But good leverage amplifies all these things. Okay, you guys ready for the nine levers that we can implement in our business today without having to be an author? Isn't that true? Like in our space, it's like, hey, if you want to be smart, write a book, right? Half of us in this room are still working on our first chapter, right? So at the end of the day, I'm going to give you nine levers that don't, you don't have to be an author because as much as I love books, they take a long time to develop. And so here are nine levers that we can implement in our business that can take our valuable service to the next level. Lever number one is the podcast lever. Okay, in 2018, I looked like I'm 14 years old and I was like, you know what, I'm going to start a podcast. I'm going to be the Joe Rogan of the financial space. Okay, it's a really, really good thing. By the way, I couldn't read analytics because by the way, do you see that little spike? That was when my mom downloaded the episode, okay? And then she even stopped listening, okay? I had nobody listening to me at the first year, nobody. Like all those little spikes were me re-downloading the podcast, okay? But that same time that no one was listening, I met some of the greatest people and some of the now to this day, some of my greatest friends that literally enhanced my credibility and my confidence. So here's the challenge. The podcast effect is an example of yes, we're, we're, do people listen to my podcast now? Yes. But I consider the podcast lever more effective because of the relationships. Less about the listeners. I got in to say, hey, I want people to listen to me and I realized that 500 episodes later, it's, it's an amazing platform to build relationships with people that I wanted to get to know and add them value. The podcast lever is one of the most brilliant things that we can do and I'm using the podcast as an example, but where can you add other people value? Where can you give to other people? And as a result, create relationships because those relationships will translate in powerful ways. Now people listen, I had average 400 to 500 downloads a day, which is awesome. It's not Joe Rogan, but people listen, but that happened multiple years of being consistent. We also as a company actually produce five podcasts. My, my beautiful wife in the back, she is into health and I was like, why don't you do a health podcast? And to the state, she's interviewed some of the most amazing people in women's health. She's gotten more free stuff from her podcast than I've got just because she has a platform. There's some teenagers that came to me that wanted advice and I said, the best thing that you can do, you're 19 years old, the best thing you can do is create a teen financial podcast and they've been able to interview some of the legends and financial space because who's going to say no to a 19-year-old podcast? We have someone who produces a real estate podcast for us, most connected person 18 months later in real estate because they just interview all the people that have books and have influence in real estate. The podcast effect is absolutely incredible. We know this guy. He has a whiskey podcast and he doesn't say anything about financial services and yet he's able to build relationships, have better connections and he's told me that he personally gets business because he comes on the podcast, like people come on the podcast. If compliance is an issue about talking about money, just create a podcast around something that you're passionate about and use that as a way to bring in people. I'm telling you, if we understand the why and the system behind this, every one of us can create a platform around something that we're passionate about and become the one of the most connected people in that space. The podcast effect is no joke. Leather number two is delegation. How many people have read this book? Who not how? A Dan Sullivan. Amazing book. His whole concept is instead of focusing on what? I don't know how to do that. Focus on who do you know that can make that happen? I think one of the things that I've learned from Cody is he is surrounding himself with people on his team that are our who's that are helping him get to where they want to go. I think he would be at the first to admit that they would not have a fraction of what I have his success if they didn't have the who's. What's interesting is this is Trevor, 2018, a couple months after we started the podcast, I was like, you know what? We need to get to the next level. I hate doing applications and I'm really bad at it. I was like, who do I know that can literally help us get to the next level? I was terrified because we committed to Trevor and if we didn't make any money, we'd be out of money in six months. But it's something amazing happens when you bring someone on your team that helps elevate what you're trying to do. And now we had more money in six months from now and it totally changed my mind to say, I'm going to surround myself with people that can be my who's the things I'm not really good at. This is a tactic as it relates to delegation. I would encourage everyone to do this. Just get super self-aware on the things that you love and what you're good at, the things that you are good at but you don't like, things that you like, but you shouldn't do, and things that you don't like and you're not good at. A lot of us just aren't self-aware about these things. But if you start writing that out, you'll start seeing some themes. You'll start seeing some job descriptions. You'll start seeing future collaborations. This was my list, by the way. There's a lot of things I'm not good at and I don't like, right? And at the end of the day, I started seeing like, when you look at our team, majority of people are doing things that they love and that they're good at, it's allowing them to get closer to where they want to go. And at the end of the day, we are all better. Our output is far greater because we have a team. Level number three is probably my most favorite lever that I'm going to talk about today. Video email. I've sent over 4,300 video emails to date. What is a video email? A video email is literally you open up your email and you're getting a video and you get to click on it and it's me talking to you. It's really convenient for someone that doesn't like to read and type. This one tool, this one tactic has literally changed our business. I require everyone on our team when we're interacting with people to use video as much as possible. This email, I can't share their name. One of the most influential CEOs in our space, met them at an event, sent them one video. He said, Caleb, I think this is the best email I've ever received. He gets hundreds of emails a day. He's one of the most prominent CEOs in our space and I was in a one minute video able to stand out because I just went back and was like, you know what? And this video, I was like, hey, it was amazing meeting you. I'm a big gratitude person. Thank you for what you're doing. These are some of the things that we talked about. I hope our paths cross. Take care. And it just stood out because he saw one minute video. You want to know the biggest problem with video emails though? You won't do them. I'm telling you, it will work. Majority of us will get video emails. We might even buy software. There's some free stuff out there, but we won't do it. Just to tell you how easy this is, I'm going to give you an example of Crash Course on a video email. Anyone that wants to get opt into our free gift, you'll get this video. Hey, everyone, it's Caleb here. I just wanted to personally say it was amazing speaking with you at NAPA. I'm just so grateful for this industry profession. And I just wanted to give you an example of a video email. I hope you can apply this quick video and as you serve your clients and as you meet people at networking events, I hope you can apply this one tool to make you more personable and help you stand out. God bless. You guys will get that video email if you want. I'm telling you, if you do that, it will change the way that you communicate and will make you stand out. I've sent over 4,000 of them. It works. The website lever. I call this the meeting before the meeting. A lot of us, we are killer when we get to the meeting. There's this thing that happened a couple of years ago that made it hard to meet with people. This concept of the meeting before the meeting is something that wasn't new when COVID came around. This is a picture of me still at the bank. I actually got six college credits for an internship that I made up for myself and convinced the professor. One of the videos was term life insurance. I gave this to every loan officer and I said, hey, when you guys sell a mortgage, have people watch this 11 minute video and it was a pitch on term insurance. It was amazing. It was like, why would I meet with them? They could just watch it if they want to meet with me. They can meet with me. When we started, I've done little funnels. It's amazing when people watch a video and they're like, hey, I want what you have. They're ready to go. It's interesting because we have a business advisor that literally helps people go virtual and we help people build software, coaching, all that. At the end of the day, it's like, okay, a lot of people, their websites are not good and they're not setting up with this concept of the meeting before the meeting. It's just one of those things that I'm passionate about. I'm also going to include this if anyone wants to opt into our pre-gift. Here's the five things that you need in a good website. Number one, you need to clear offer on your website right away. Number two, it needs to have an obvious call to action. A lot of websites that I see in our space, all over the place, no clue what you're actually trying to say. Number three, provide value. Provide a free lead magnet. Provide something, whether it's a video or one page or something that's like, makes you want, makes me want to come closer to you. Number four, make it easy to navigate, simple, clean. And number five, don't just get a stock image. Let's get a relatable images. This is just a quick virtual audit. Another thing that, and this is something that I'm sincere about, if anyone wants me or someone on our team to audit your website, we will gladly do that because at the end of the day, we have a lot of good intentions, but a lot of times people are going to a site that's not translating to what we actually want. The meeting before the meeting is so important, you do this once from member code. A website is a lower version of code. You do that once. That website will work for you the rest of your life. Build a website that represents you well. Number five, YouTube. And by the way, I'm a baby YouTuber, but I think I'm probably a better, more relatable example than Cody. Cody, I want to see your numbers after because I'm sure it's unreal. One person on our team is like, Caleb, you're doing a podcast. Why don't you just publish that podcast on YouTube? Why don't we just start making the video also, like we can strip the audio? What if we also make that video on YouTube? And so, you know, 7,000 subscribers later, we have a little bit of traction. What's interesting to me is this last year, this last year, we've gotten over 20,000 watch hours. That's over 2,575 eight hour days of people watching our videos. When I make a video, I make it once. The fact that more than one person can watch that video blows my mind every time I say that. The fact that I do one video and more than one person watches it. I mean, I have to say this. This is one of the big reasons why we have the success that we have. I'm working longer than most of you, but I'm not that you're working, but I'm duplicating the message more and more. The last month, just to share this example, the last month, we have over 212 eight hour days by a very small YouTube channel. I bet you what I do in a year, Cody, doesn't know in a month. The reason he makes a lot more money than I do currently is he just has a lot more leverage in a business that's valuable. This blows me away, and I'm telling you YouTube is an incredible platform because every time you make a video, it's literally you're making a digital real estate every single day that can be searched, it's incredible. I do know that compliance, for some of us, we just simply can't do this, and I understand that. I just think it's something that you should look into because it's only going to grow in its influence and ability. The YouTube lever is truly incredible. Virtual Studio, the virtual studio lever is great. How many of us like to use whiteboards? Raise your hand if you like whiteboards. I was told when I got into this space that if you can't explain it on a whiteboard, you don't understand it, and I actually agree with that. Being able to simplify it on a whiteboard is truly incredible. I have a thesis that most of us don't like the virtual environment because we're not able to actually express and write and create. Whiteboard, for me, was one of those sticking points where I love to draw, and I actually preferred meeting in person with people because I had a whiteboard, every room that I have in our house, we have a whiteboard. I'm going to show you how you can create a whiteboard effect digitally. This is our first, we had the Woncom board because I was broke when I first started the business. I bought one of these off of Amazon and we plugged it into the computer and I tried to write because it was so important to me. But anyone that has a tablet, whether it's an iPad, whether it's an Android tablet or a surface or what not, any writable device, you can make into a whiteboard. Here's a secret. A lot of people go on to zoom with their whiteboard and then they're drawing and you're getting a picture of their nostril. We don't want to do that. The secret here is to make the tablet a second device and you mute it, and then when you want to share that device, you just share it. You're drawing, they're seeing you, you're speaking directly to them. Boom, you have a whiteboard that's actually better because instead of you're putting your back to the wall and they're seeing your back, they're seeing exactly what you're drawing. It's amazing. I learned how to do this. It could literally change the game in the virtual environment. I actually also have a video showing you exactly how to do this. I just think a lot of us, and if anyone wants to get our free gift, this is included. It's an eight minute video of me walking through how to set this up and I actually walked exactly how to do it because it's so powerful and it gave me massive confidence in a virtual environment. The other thing is, I believe it's 2022. We all need to be able to meet virtually. I know not all of us want to, but there's a difference in home studios and I don't believe like I have a really nice home studio. I don't believe that that's necessary. I think really there's three things that you need in a good home studio. You need good internet, you need good audio. Please, please invest in a $99 microphone. I've been on so many meetings where the audio is so bad and it's so easy to fix, Yeti microphone from Amazon. You don't have to get a sure microphone. It's like $600. You can get a $99 microphone. It will enhance the audio. Just get a mini, Yeti mini. And then a good lighting, you don't even need a light but just make sure that lighting is to in front of you. Okay, these three things will be a game changer. This is a good checklist as it relates to virtual meeting. OPA, this is something, again, this is, if you ask me what is probably taking our business to the next level, probably this one level. It's other people's audiences. IE, it's understanding how to win stages. Pete Vargas is a good friend of mine and at 21 years old he said Caleb, you have a message that needs to be heard and I was like I'm 21, I know nothing about money. He's like you need to get out and speak. Your message matters and it was that moment where I was like I am a speaker. I believe that I can speak. I believe I have a message that needs to be heard. That was a change for me. And I started saying hey, I'm a speaker and people started letting me speak. It was amazing. It was like you know it's amazing how many stages we don't win because we don't ask. And so I've had the opportunity to speak to lots of people. It's interesting a stage is not just a physical stage but you could also have digital stages and we've been on probably over 150 podcasts. What's crazy is I'll just use this one example. There was an HFAC podcast that reached out to me and I was the only financial person that's been on the HFAC podcast. It's one of our best podcasts to date. Think of like 200 people, it's a small podcast. 200 people listened but they've never heard half the financial things I was saying. We got hit up from so many people because they heard me on a HFAC podcast. Their stage is everywhere. Their stage is literally everywhere. And this is if you ask if you look at the actual revenue that we've gained as a company it's because we've had a message and we've leveraged it via stage because that's where a lot of people have attention and there's that credibility that gets transferred over. So I have the opportunity to do a learning lab tomorrow and I'm going to break down the three things that have allowed us to scale stages. So number one how to have a message. What needs to be in a message for people to actually listen to you? Because I don't know about you but I've heard people win stages and then talk is not that impressive. How do we create a message that resonates? Number two, how do we actually win the stage? How do we get in front of the audience? I love this. I get goosebumps every time I think about this because it's so fun to be like okay where are people? Where can we get in front of them? And then number three, how can we convert from stage? Because I don't know about you but sometimes I've heard amazing speakers and you're like they leave, they get a standing ovation and then they're gone. Obviously there's an art and a science to say how do you speak and then how do you make people want to work with you after? In the learning labs I'm going to give you the three, like I'm going to break down the framework of each one of these so that you can be equipped to win stages and serve a lot of people. Okay number eight we got two more. Number eight is a repurposed lever. Big fan of Gary Ve. Document don't create. I've been watched him very early on and got very inspired. Dennis you who I also I think is going to be here later. Incredible marketing guru talks about hey Caleb you got to have high authority in everything that you do and repurposing allows you to do that. From the very first talk that I've ever given the one thing that I've done that I'm really really grateful I've done is I've recorded everything that I've ever done. Now I don't necessarily want to show my first couple talks because they weren't very good but I documented the whole step along along the way and I'm telling you some of us are brilliant. We think of the greatest ideas we communicated the greatest ideas and nobody knows because we're not documenting it. So this is this is like a concept that we can we can translate across the board like if you have video and you and you I do a YouTube video I can now I can strip it for podcast I can make little clips on TikTok and Twitter and Instagram and whatnot like one one time like I'm getting filmed today some of these clips might end up later in the future on on LinkedIn. It's a fact of me doing one thing but we're repurposing it. This is just two examples again I'm not I've I've a couple thousand people on on Instagram which is definitely not a huge deal in the influencer space. I had one video that I was on stage talking about wealth over 1.4 million people watch it on Instagram over 18,000 people have shared that one clip over 31,000 people have shared it and over 18,000 have saved it. One little clip repurposed it didn't take me any work we just took that 25 second clip and put it on Instagram and number nine is a gratitude as willis this might be as willis this might be if you make it a weekly habit right Jim if you make it a weekly habit of just telling someone that you're thankful for them you will be amazed how many people come out of the woodwork wanting to help you don't do this don't do this to get something literally be intentional about saying I am super super grateful for you and I'm telling you if you make that a theme you'll be amazed you'll be amazed how much leverage that will create because people will just be your advocate and ambassadors in life so here are the three questions the three three leverage questions are this by using leverage how can your outcome and output be enhanced number two what is the cost I don't pay a a Hollywood production studio to you know make my make my videos because it wouldn't be cost effective I invest in a two thousand dollar camera instead so we have to be smart as we're relating to leverage and number three everything that we do have is inherent risk what risk am I taking on for having leverage these are the three questions these are three questions on leverage so I'm going to take two more minutes our industry and profession is the example value leveraging is it not what we're able to do is create so much value for our our our clients like other than sharing the gospel literally our industry has the greatest value leverage of all time we literally can sign one piece of paper that can have generational differences in our clients life that is incredible to me and so we are literally in an industry that embodies value leveraging so well and we can use the principle to value leveraging to amplify that to the next level so here all the things that if you guys are interested in learning more like I know that some of you guys are taking pictures like if you want all the slide decks if you want the value leveraging checklist and all this stuff that's why we have a booth here is if anyone's interested you can give us your business card or take a picture of one of our QR codes and at the end of the day like we want this to be as valuable as possible I want to leave you with one one final thought March March of 2019 my life changed for good because one of my best friends one of the people that I started better wealth with Greg who's like a second father to me died he died he died a slow death of cancer and what was interesting about Greg is he he embodies intentional living extremely well and he said Caleb be intentional with every moment treasure every moment that you have with people treasure every moment and I'm telling you I'm I'm grateful to have walked through this with Greg because it it's given me a conviction for our industry but it's also remind me of why we do what we do going back to clarity it reminds me of why we get up and do what we get to do every single day and so this concept of one life is very interesting I've realized that a lot of us procrastinate I'm doing what we know we need to do and think of this as each block represents a year of our life and these are a hundred boxes so we're not all going to live to a hundred in this room a lot of us have already filled up a lot of boxes I know I look on that and say I potentially have lived one third of my life and went fast let's stop procrastinating on the things that we truly need to lean in and do and a lot of us know what we need to do going back to identity a lot of us know what we need to do and when are we going to actually lean in and say I am going to live an intentional life and I'm not going to let the neighbors that I really don't care about determine why I do what I do and how I speak the number one leverage thing that I think we can do in our in our personal life is being the main speaker at our funeral I believe if you can make an intentional video while you're alive speaking like you're at your funeral saying hey guys these are the things that are most important these are the people that I most love these this is what I want you to know about who Caleb is and here's what I want to inspire every single person in his audience to do I believe if you do that one thing you will live more intentional today and you'll have a super intentional video that will probably go viral after you die It's one of my personal missions to get at least a thousand people to intentionally make a video being the main speaker at their funeral because I believe this one thing if I think about all the things that I could promote this one thing if we do could change the way that we live our life today but ultimately we'd create videos of ripple effects and our future grandchildren's grandchildren potentially could have a video if we could preserve it seeing of what we stood for Guys I want to thank you all for for for for this I'm incredibly grateful for for Naifa I'm incredibly grateful for the many people have come before us making it possible for us all to be in this room and in such an amazing industry god bless you thank you I Want to thank you for watching till the end if you enjoy our content Please like share subscribe it helps other people find our channel and we really really appreciate it I also want to let you know that we have this thing called the better wealth efficiency quiz and Our goal is to give you a wealth efficiency score in less than three minutes And really highlight and get you to start thinking about the potential inefficiencies that you have in your life So if you haven't taken the quiz go check out it'll be the link below check that link out take the quiz and then let us know your score