Adapt and Overcome: How to Tactically Evolve for Success with Steve Schabacker: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:02John Lee Dumas:Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down how to adapt and overcome and how to tactically evolve for success. To drop these vibe bombs, I brought Steve Schabacker into EO Fire Studios. Steve is a serial entrepreneur across multiple industries and now helps others succeed through the Tactical Entrepreneur podcast and coaching at Tactical Entrepreneur Academy. me. And today we talk about how to listen to customers and put thought into doing something different, how to overcome obstacles, and sometimes how you push through, but often you find a new way around and oh, so much more.

0:40John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Steve and our sponsors. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, are you ready to build something special in the next 50 days? Check out my free YouTube series, 50 Days to Something, short and strategic step-by-step videos by me, JLD.

1:19John Lee Dumas:On day 50, you'll have a valuable asset. And the best part is it's completely free. Visit eofire.com slash YouTube and start day one today. Steve, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? So happy to be here and thank you so much for having me on, John. For me, though, I think the one thing that I believe deeply and I practice that most people don't believe is that all areas of my life are all intertwined. For example, I just can't be good at business. I have to have everything else in my life in sync to be the best me possible and to win in every area of my life.

2:07John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, I'm a big believer in bringing people like Steve on the show and sharing, how is he a little polarizing? How's he a little different? How's he a little maybe controversial in certain things? How's he maybe doing things differently? Because living your life inside the box ain't going to get you to where you want to be, Faux Show. And we're talking about things along these lines today with adapt and overcome, how to tactically evolve for success. And Fire Nation, I can assure you it's not by being a sheep and following the herd. So let's talk about evolving, Steve. Why is evolution important in all areas of our lives?

2:45Well, John, I really think that evolution is so important because I believe we're all here to become the best possible selves that we can create. My best possible self is not the same as anyone else's. I'm a unique individual, but by me continuing to evolve and get better each day, I'm able to excel in all areas. One area that I completely dive into the evolution part, and not just for me and my businesses, but actually for industries, I always look to go into industries where people are stuck to the status quo, where they've been kind of doing things the way they always have. And they just do that because that's how everybody else's function.

3:27And that's very, very important to me to be able to disrupt things, if you will, to be able to make change and constantly becoming better and evolving as both a human being and both as a business owner are just of the utmost importance to me.

3:42John Lee Dumas:So maybe give us an example of something that you've recently evolved in, like with your own area of your life. Because, you know, for us, perfect balance is impossible, man. It's like when the business is perfect or as near perfect as you can get, maybe your health is let go, or maybe your finances, or maybe your relationships, like there's always these different balancing acts. So what's one area that you've recently kind of evolved in that you're like, oh yeah, that needed a little focus? Well, there's been just a ton for me, a ton of change going on lately. So I'm 48 years old and one change for me has been to changing how I work out and how I eat.

4:16Now, what worked for me five years ago does not work now. I've beat up my body for a long time doing a lot of things I probably shouldn't, which has finally caught up to me. But being able to evolve and being able to listen to myself and listen to my body and to some days go harder than others, some days go lighter and just change up what I do based on how I feel and based upon what I believe I can do makes all the difference. On the business side, it's another area that evolution is completely important. We're going into a couple different new ventures, and we're really looking at those of what are we going to do now and how can we change that in a year from now and how can we change that in three years to basically have an evolution plan, if you will, so that we know where we're going.

5:03and much like typing the address in a GPS, GPS doesn't do you much good unless you know where you're going. So the evolution is very planned and very methodical. So it's not just, hey, I'm getting better. It's I'm choosing how I get better and I'm choosing what areas of my life I want to attack at each given time.

5:21John Lee Dumas:Focus is one of my favorite acronyms. Follow one course until success. I actually have a sign in my office here that I'm looking at right now that says just that. I mean, it's just very powerful for me. So let's talk about the area that you believe is the most important area to focus on first for us entrepreneurs. Well, for us, I think the area we need to focus on first is probably the area as entrepreneurs we neglect most. We're always in our business. We're always thinking business. We're always wondering what the next step is, what the next thing, how to evolve, how to get to the next place we want to be, whether it's a dollar figure or a location number.

6:00Or for me, it's chasing freedom just to be able to not be tied to specific times, places, things, and be able to kind of live my life as I want to. I always want to work. I love what I do. But being able to have more freedom and chase those sorts of things. But the first focus for me has to be at home. It has to be my wife. It has to be, it was more so my kids. I'm empty nesting now. We just actually hit empty nesting. I've just was married for 25 years and all our kids now are out on their own. So that's been a, that's been a transition and an evolution of my marriage in a great way, but, but really needing to get things solid on the home front, no matter what that looks like for somebody, everybody's different.

6:43Some people are married, some aren't, some aren't even in a relationship, but then it's focusing on yourself, but making sure the foundational things of you as a human being and those relationships that are most important to you of family are solid before trying to build something really huge as far as business goes.

7:00John Lee Dumas:So Fire Nation, I hope in your life you're looking at the areas that matter most and you're focusing on those and you're kind of tackling that one priority level at a time. And I want to move into core values, Steve. How do they fit into this equation that we're talking about here? For me, and this has been a recent, speaking of evolutions. This has been a recent change of view. One of my mentors and coaches, Thomas Keenan, is real big on core values. And we really went into a thing and dove in real deeply on them. And it basically established them for myself, established them for my family with the help of my wife, but then also established them for each of our different businesses.

7:40And they're different. They all have different little core values. They're all not the same industries. So security and investigations, to IT security and support. So all the businesses are a little different, but we put core values into play the same way in all of them. So it's real important for us to establish, as leaders, to establish those core values, you know, lay out what they are. And so, for example, so Sheepdog Firearms, our brick and mortar firearm stores, our core values are passion. We are driven to excellence in everything we do, real. We are who we say we are and we do what we say we will do.

8:18We're thoughtful. Our compassion is our greatest asset and we're welcoming. Everyone is invited to be part of our family. So those things we use to drive not only the in-store experience for our customers, we use those to drive our hiring. We use those to drive our firing. And basically it's a lens we look at all things we do through. So whether or not we're doing them right or wrong, these are what we use to judge. So there are no gray areas. Either they fit into these things or they don't. And we take that to the extent that even when we're coaching some of our employees, managers, when we're showing them some things that they could do a little better or showing them our direction, it all focuses back on these core values so that when we do that, we make our expectations completely clear.

9:02We all maintain a laser focus on how we want to do things. And we empower people to make decisions that they may not know the right answer, but they can apply this litmus test to the situation and they can immediately make the right decision, probably 98 % of the time that would align with the same decision I or one of my partners would have made.

9:22John Lee Dumas:So Fire Nation, while you're listening to Steve here, I hope you're thinking about what are my core values? How do they fit into my equation? How am I tactically evolving for success? We're going to be talking about adapting and overcoming. We're much, much more Fire Nation when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, ideas are exciting, but systems will allow you to create freedom. That is where High Level comes in. High Level allows you to build and run your entire business from one platform. Website builder and hosting, funnel and landing pages, email marketing, automation and workflows, calendar booking, payments and subscriptions, even course and membership hosting.

10:02John Lee Dumas:everything works together seamlessly plus award-winning 24 7 support so you are never stuck and when you go through my link at high level fire.com you unlock my full bonus stack a 30-day free trial of high level with full access a private 50-minute coaching call with me weekly live office hours with me a digital copy of my book the common path to uncommon success my 50 days to something execution roadmap and more stop piecing tools together start building momentum Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Fire Nation, are you ready to create something special in just 50 days?

10:42John Lee Dumas:If you just thought yes, then check out my free YouTube series, 50 Days to Something. Every video is short, clear, and built to move you forward one intentional step at a time. Clarity, offer, validation systems, momentum. By day 50, you are not working on something. you have built something, something to be proud of. And this is completely free on my YouTube channel right now. If you're done letting weeks just drift on by, visit eofire.com slash YouTube. That's eofire.com slash YouTube and press play on day one. 50 days will pass in the blink of an eye. The only question is whether you'll still be thinking or finally building something special.

11:26So Steve, you love the phrase adapt and overcome.

11:31John Lee Dumas:Why do you love these words? Those words are just so important to me because as I started out as an entrepreneur and just in business in general, that really resonated with me. I've read it in a couple of different places, a couple of different books, heard it used a lot, different movies and TV shows. But for me, adapt and overcome just taken rings so true because if you want to get past an obstacle, sometimes you can just go crashing through it, but oftentimes you have to figure out how to get around it, and you have to figure out how to do things a little differently than you used to, a little differently than you've taught.

12:06Sometimes it's more efficiently, sometimes it's just better, and sometimes it's just completely think out of the box. That phrase was so important to me. I actually just had an Amazon bestselling book, and that was actually the title of the book, was Adapt and Overcome. And in it, I dive pretty deep into how I teach other businesses and how I do business with the things that I'm involved in to basically differentiate yourself. There are so many entrepreneurs that will go into business and they will just think of, OK, well, this business is doing something successfully. I think I can do it, too.

12:41So I'm going to do it exactly the same way they do. instead of taking a look at the industry as a whole and saying, hey, these people do this well, these people do this poorly, there's a gap here. Like for example, so some of the industries we've went into has been completely, I won't say by accident, but by, we had no intention, like firearms for it, say firearms, for example, you know, I was a hunter as a child and I was been into guns a little bit, but never, ever thought of getting into the industry. Well, we had some customers that actually came up to us from another business, come up to us and said, hey, you know what, this is a frustration.

13:19Do you guys know of any good gun shops around? They said, well, why? What's the issue? And they dove pretty deep into the fact that, well, you know, the same thing you're going to see, at least around here in Chicago, and I would argue to say it's probably the same everywhere else in the United States here, is you walk into a typical gun shop and you're going to see typically three things. You're going to see some dark hues on the walls, often it's paneling, with typically decorated with some dead animals. You're going to see a lot of glass cases that have everything, all the guns in it, so you can't touch anything.

13:49And you're going to see two grumpy guys behind the counter that are going to explain to you how much of a privilege it is that you're even able to shop there. So we saw that going on and we're like, man, nobody is really even focusing on giving people what they want. You know, you look at most other industries and they're really adapting and they're really changing and they're really listening to their customers. Well, we found that the firearms industry, especially at a retail level, just did not seem to really care about what customers wanted. So we said, hey, you know what, can we do this better?

14:20Let's open up a little test here. And there was another unit next to one of our offices available. So we said, hey, you know what, we're just going to open up a gun shop and we're going to try this and we're going to try this concept and we're going to see if it works. Well, what we did was we made it so that people could could walk up and touch every firearm. We made it so that our employees we hired were trained and trained and trained not to be grumpy. We hired people from outside the industry so that had the passion for firearms, but did not have a lot of the bad habits that they probably would have had from other places.

14:50And then we're going to say, well, you know, we'll just, we will just be kind of be open by appointment and kind of see how that goes. Well, a week into it, things just took off. People came and saw how different it was. They told everybody. And this was about five years ago. And the store just completely took off to now we actually have a second location where we actually took that whole concept to 2.0, if you will. We tried to make kind of the Apple store of gun shops. There's no front counter. There's not a single glass case, everything. And while it's tethered, so it's, so it can't be stolen.

15:22It's everything is touchable by the customer. There's no pressure. We don't, we don't have any registers or whatever that are like in a row, on a front counter. Everything's built into a lot of the cabinetry and whatnot. So it really creates an inviting experience. There's no barriers between our employees coming alongside customers wherever they are, whether they're new to the industry or whether they've been shooting guns for 30, 40 years, comes alongside them, meets them where they are and educates them and helps them make a buying decision that's no pressure. It's an inviting environment. So So adapt and overcome to me means making things better, moving things forward, not just for yourself, but also for industries as a whole, like we try to do for the firearms industry.

16:04John Lee Dumas:So listening to you, Steve, talk about this, I love it because it reminds me of a recent conversation I had with Brian Scuderman of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. And he had such a similar experience in the junk business where it was like, you had to have junk removed from your house, from your home, from your property, and it'd be people that'd be showing up. They'd be mishmashing clothes. they'd be rude they'd be late they'd be tramping dirt and mud and you know dog poop into your home without a second thought and he's like this could just be so much better and he created what you know is now the uniform and the protocols and they're going to put on little booties before they walk into your house and not tramping in all the crap from outside and they're going to care about this stuff and you know it's going to be professional and timely and it's called disrupting fire nation you can disrupt industries when you do it the right way and then you can have success And now on that word success, how would you, Steve, define success?

16:57Well, success for me may very well be a little different than what other people think. For me, I can break down what I would equivalent success to in one simple word. And for me, that's freedom. For some people, it's, you know what, I want to get to a billion dollars in sales. I want to make X amount of dollars. I'm not so much focused on that. I love business. And I, of course, love, like anyone else, love making money and love having successful businesses. But for me, it's freedom. So freedom to be able to not be tethered to a particular location or a particular thing. Freedom to talk to my wife and say, hey, you know what, let's jump on a plane and let's go for a weekend here or go for a weekend there.

17:37You know, we spend a lot of time in Mexico. I love it there. Just to be able to do that and be able to kind of live life on my terms. I see so many people, even in the entrepreneurial space, that work very hard and are very good at what they do. But then they get to the point where at now empty nesting. They don't know who their spouse are. They hardly know their kids. They're not living life on their terms. They just basically made themselves a job and a 100-hour-a-week job. And they don't even understand what they're even chasing anymore or why they're even doing what they're doing. and they get to be 60, 65 years old, 70 years old.

18:14And then they look back at their life and say, well, what did I do? What legacy did I leave? How did I live? So for me, really focused on freedom and then really focused on the legacy play of, hey, what will be said of me when I'm gone? What am I going to leave this world? What good can I do? How can I positively impact things and people? and as I move into this kind of this next evolution of myself, speaking of evolution, is started a thing called the Tactical Entrepreneur Academy where I'm teaching a lot of these concepts to other people. So I'm able to leave something behind because, you know, it's the old adage of, hey, you can either give someone a fish or you can teach them the fish.

18:56Well, I certainly love to share all of my past mistakes and all the things that I've learned over the years of doing things poorly because I really didn't have anybody to teach me and be able to pass that on and be able to do it on my terms and have the freedom I desire for myself and for my family.

19:15John Lee Dumas:I love that whole concept right there, Fire Nation, because for me, success is waking up in the morning, looking at my calendar or sometimes lack thereof and everything that's on that is by my choosing, by my choice, by my desire and being able to do those things that I wanna do with the freedom that I wanna do it, that's my version of success. Could I work harder? Could I make more money? Of course, but that's not bringing me closer to my definition of success. And so I want you to think about what is your specific definition of success? It's like, it reminds me of when Lewis Howes one day, like this is years and years ago, asked me to define my perfect day.

19:50John Lee Dumas:And like, I started and stumbled, like going through like what my perfect day looked like. And he's like, if you can't even define your perfect day, how are you ever going to live one? And I was like, whoa, that's powerful. Now you started many, many businesses, Steve. Let's go into a couple of the aha moments that led to those businesses. How did you choose each industry? Well, it goes back to kind of what I was talking about in the adapt and overcome. When we were choosing industries, a lot of them have happened by, I won't say by accident, but kind of by, we just kind of stumbled into them.

20:21We saw problems and we took and figured out, hey, I can do that better. And a lot of times it was industries that we liked or things that were related. I've had a lot of companies in the different security industries. We've definitely had one in security investigations. We have a cybersecurity one now. We had one that did cameras, access control, locksmith, all those sorts of things. So they all seem to center around, a lot of them did around security, but really it's just identifying problems in industries and seeing things that we can do better and really listening to customers and really letting them drive it.

20:58So when we identify an industry, the first thing we do is just dive in and go to, if it's a restaurant we're looking at opening up, we'll go and eat at a lot of different places that are near there geographically and that we were thinking about opening in, and as well as taking and diving into the strengths and weaknesses of other ones that serve similar food or provide a similar experience to try to figure out where are those gaps. And the first question we always say, is there an opportunity there? Is there a gap? Is there something we can fill? And are there things that customers want that they're not being given right now with the options that are available?

21:36And sometimes we'll get ideas and we'll dive into things and we'll realize, you know what, there's not as much of an opportunity here as we would like. There's not as much of a gap that we can exploit. So, and we'll pass. We'll completely just say, you know what, that's a bad idea. Scratch it off the list of potential next projects and let's look for something else. Often the best opportunities we've had, especially like the firearms industry first and now getting into custom, actually custom firearms manufacturing with our new company, Valhalla Research, that we just launched. Really just looking at the market and seeing what's there as far as opportunities and what can we make better.

22:18If we can't make something just so radically better, if we're just going to be making a commodity, we'll pass. I'm sure a lot of other people have had great luck getting into industries that, but for me and for my team, we only look at things where we can make it, we can disrupt things where we can make things better and we can do them well. And we can kind of follow the model that we followed through all our different entries into different industries. So it really focusing on the way we do things and making sure we can continue to do them the way we always have as far as our methods. So we've got things pretty well defined, how we enter, how we market, what kind of opportunities we'll explore, what kind of opportunities we won't.

22:59So really just staying true to ourselves and staying true to the things that we know well and not trying to deviate too far from that. But above all else, it's just really listening to the customer, listening to what people want. I truly believe in any industry, if you listen to what customers want, and if there's some things that they're not getting that are feasible to do, and you can do it, you are going to be very, very successful, and it doesn't matter what industry it is. It's all the same. People want the same things. You look at companies that are changing things, like, for example, like, say, CarMax did at one point making things, doing things a little bit different, but more recently, like Carvana and some of the others that are completely changing the way you buy cars.