From Saving Lives to Building Empires: A Firefighter's Rogue Path to 7 Figures with Sean Percy Travis

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today, we'll be breaking down from saving lives to building empires, a firefighter's rogue path to seven figures. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Sean Percy Travis and the EO Fire Studios. Sean is a retired LA County firefighter paramedic turned seven-figure e-commerce builder. He founded Ecom for Heroes to empower first responders and veterans with purpose-driven structure, leading them from the firehouse to lasting financial freedom.

0:33In today, Fire Nation, we talk about life after the badge, building the kingdom, finding winners fast, hero stories, automation advantage, mission 10 ,000, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Sean and our sponsors. Here's something most of us don't think about until it's a problem. Our phone service. Cape is a privacy first mobile carrier built from the ground up with security as the priority. If you care about protecting your digital life without giving up your smartphone, Cape makes that possible. Visit cape.co forward slash fire and use code fire for 33 % off Cape for six months today.

1:08Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Sean, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. There is no such thing as self-made. Something you said before we started on the episode was we're all standing upon the shoulders of giants. And I truly believe in that from, you know, Napoleon Hill, Albert Einstein, I mean, people that I pulled in spring, Benjamin Franklin.

1:57I mean, we're all pulling and learning and educating ourselves from the shoulders of giants and fire nation. We're talking, you know, from saving lives to building empires today, a firefighter's rogue path to seven figures. And I want to talk about life after the badge because Sean, most first responders, they have zero clue what to do once that uniform form comes off. And I mean, I'm raising my hands. I thought the best day of my life was going to be the day that I was able to walk away from the army after my four years of active duty ended up being one of the worst days for a number of reasons.

2:30We won't get into, but I mean, I know what you're talking about. So why is that transition so difficult? And what's the one decision that changes everything? The feeling of floundering is real. And so we create this sense of freedom when we walk away from something that we are matured out of or evolved out of or whatever you call it, right? There's nothing wrong with the calling of being a firefighter, paramedic in the busiest city in the world. There's nothing wrong with that. It's one of the dream jobs, but I evolved out of it. And so when I moved on, the big celebration moment happened. And then of course, just like every gold medal winner in the Olympics, you get the depression mode.

3:09Why? Because your purpose, mission, but most importantly, your structure vanished. You did not have the same wake up, go work out for this purpose, check out your gear for this purpose, get in line, do your things for this purpose anymore. And establishing that, finding that that was the one key. So whatever it is that calls us to a career service, whatever that is, right? And there's plenty, right? The obvious ones are the big shiny ones where you're riding around on a big fire engine or you know you got lights and sirens or you know you're a military personnel and you get to you know shoot off some epic epic cannons like those are the shiny ones yes but there's also lives of service where it's your teacher you're an educator you're you know something where you're a shift worker and you're showing up but what you do is specifically affecting the days of others life of service whatever it is that calls us into that i think and this is my pet theory on it i think part of the attraction is that we ourselves need structure in order to thrive we don't already have it innate now some people do right the elon musks the zuckerbergs of the world holy cow man those guys just build it out of their brain but for us i think we need to step into structure in order to thrive.

4:30Structure provides room for freedom. And long story short, what ended the floundering period of mine was a mentor and a business coach of mine now said, treat your day as if you're on shift. Now that sounded like a nightmare at first, cause I just walked away from it, but I got what he was going for. Establish, when are you going to sweat? When are you going to eat? When are you going to sit down and work on your mission? When are you going to end it? When are you going to literally schedule out your day as if you're on shift? And although at first it felt like pulling hair out of my head because I wanted out of that, right?

5:15I was looking for freedom. Ironically, I needed structure for it. But soon we come to find out that when I started treating my day like that, holy cow, John. that's when life came back. I didn't, I don't, I don't know why, but I just think our brains operate that ADHD. I have this huge ambition for the world and I want to serve others. It needs that structure. And I mean, everything to what I'm eating, to how much I'm eating, to what I'm doing for work, to how much I'm going to type to, I said, you know, uh, timers, 20 minute timers, and then get up for five minutes and do lunges. And those 20 minute timers, I, that's what I'm sitting down and doing work or that's when I'm on a phone call or whatever.

5:57I scheduled that to a T. So Fire Nation, all those things that Sean just said, I'm going to add even one more word here, which is relevancy. Like that is the, one of the biggest things that I lost when I left the military. I just didn't feel like I was relevant to the world. Like I didn't matter anymore. You know, before I left the military, like I was protecting our country. I was deployed in Iraq for a year. I was a combat veteran. Like I, like I had been in combat, like as an officer in the U.S. army. Like I like was somebody and I meant something that was relevant to this world. And I remember just walking around Walmart one day, like after I left and was like, wow, nobody knows and nobody cares that I'm here right now.

6:36It's like, it's like this, this feeling of invisibility that was so strange that I'd never encountered before. Cause I had spent the first 26 years of my life, you know, always doing something, you know, school, sports, military, fill in the blank. So I want to talk about building the kingdom, Sean, because you've created a proven playbook. And again, that's what people need, structure, systems, a playbook that took you from zero to multiple seven-figure e-com brands. What does that system actually look like in practice? Yes, sir. Okay. Well, if we go on the YouTube ether and the wiki house of, you know, the world, we can pretty much knowledge is free.

7:14That's what I'm getting at. But the implementation of it is what costs and that will cost you everything. so how much are you willing to play and again if we don't have that structure we'll get lost in the ether and we'll flounder so when i established that structure of mine for my business coach essentially treating a day like a shift and then obviously evolved out of that into now you know just being a business owner um first off let's back up right why did i ever want to build out e-commerce brands i was in a job i was in a career calling which pretty much pays you for life right You work for 25, 30 years, and then you get a pension in the fire service, and that's until the day you die.

7:53So it sounds great. It sounds awesome. Why would I ever walk away from that? And like I said, I evolved out of it, and I'm not here to ever talk someone out of that career. It is one of the best jobs in the world, so that is not my goal here. My goal here, though, is to share my circumstance. And we, when I say we, my wife and I, we're both working full-time in the city of Los Angeles, and we wanted to build and create something of our own. So both jobs, you know, mine was living someone else's mission, you know, the fire service. And like you said, the relevancy, right? It's already built in.

8:27You have the badge. You have the honor. It's built in for you. You just got to step in line and do what you're told. Awesome. So you are relevant. You are honored. You are respected. Now you got to build something of your own. Now you get to create something of your own. And so my wife and I wanted to build out a business of our own. Now, we didn't want to trade time for money. that whole one-to-one or time and a half, literally it's in the word time and a half where you're trading one-to-one linear only takes you so far. So how do I leverage time for capital? How do I leverage time for creation of value?

9:04And that's where we leaned on online. No time in history has it ever been easier to build a business and succeed in it. I firmly believe in that. I, it's unreal what's at our fingertips. So we started building out, um, your basic Amazon storefront. You know, we got on YouTube, we searched around, we bought a DIY course, you know, the old do it yourself, watch these video tutorials, go through it. And it was pretty good. You know, I'm not going to lie. It was, uh, you know, the, the company that we used ended up closing down, unfortunately, but I think they bit off more than they can chew. that's another story for another time.

9:38But it got us to where we needed to go. What I mean by that is it took us to the place of the abyss where it got us past the uninformed optimism, where we think we're going to build something and succeed at it, to then the informed pessimism, where we all of a sudden realize this is 10 times as hard and it's going to take 10 times the work, and then into the abyss where we kind of floundered and you go, all right, this is either put up or shut up moment. And that's when we started establishing our own structure. And when we started doing that is when we really started to see sales. So instead of relying on someone else's journey, so to speak, we started creating our own.

10:20And, um, I really liked the book. Uh, and this is a funny book, but all art is stolen. Um, meaning we're putting our own iteration off someone else's teaching of someone else's, someone else's wisdom. Kind of the same thing as we're all standing up on the shoulders with giants. I mean, it's, it's the same vibe. Yes, exactly. And that's what I mean. There's no such thing as self-made, right? We, I might be the, uh, the lone man in the arena, but someone still had to build the arena. So, um, we started building that and then all of a sudden realized like, Holy cow, once this started taking off, if I put more time and effort into this, I can really start leveraging this.

10:56And that's what allowed me to then, uh, surpass my income. And in LA, we get paid very well as fire service professionals, right? The best trained firemen in the world. So we get paid accordingly and it's per cost of living. So if you live in an expensive city, you typically get paid more. So my whole point of saying that is we were comfortable with what I call the golden handcuffs, but I built something to a point where it surpassed that income and now allowed me the option. Now remember my goal wasn't to leave this career. Um, now with every incentive, with every goal that we set for ourselves, um, John, you're familiar with the, the rat maze, uh, experiment.

11:38Okay. So, right. You put a, you put a piece of cheese at the end of the maze, the rackets there like twice as fast. If you put a cat wanting to eat the rat, the cat gets there like five times as fast. If you put both the cat They're like, or sorry, the rackets, they're like 20 times as fast, right? Wow. So it's having the incentive, the carrot at the end of the stick or whatever you want to call it, but also the pain point, what are you leaving? What are you not wanting to return back to? And to set the container and not to get dark, but I lost three friends in the same year. I was battling a back injury, which they wanted to operate on.

12:14And I was home maybe one day a week. So set that up. now put that across about six years of the career and it was getting dark and it was getting dark fast. So that was my cat at the beginning of the maze. And then I built the business, my wife and I, and that was the cheese at the end of the maze. So now I had both and now I had the option. I'd built this thing and we could do it. And that's when I realized that if we go all in on our quote unquote side hustles, they become something. And this is, this is very, very key. If we go in on something of creating value, not trying to create a side income or a whatever, what's the famous term of supplemental income or, you know, make money while you sleep.

12:59Yeah. Passive income. Right. I also, I don't think that exists, but that's another thing. We built out this structure. And when I did leave the fire service, guys started reaching out asking, how'd you do it? And can you teach me? and that's when I not only, you know, had established the structure of how to build out these businesses, but then started teaching it, and that's where we built the Building the Kingdom playbook, and this is for other first responders, other, you know, service professionals. We're starting to work with network marketers as well, but teaching them this structure so that they can thrive and build out a business of value for themselves as well.

13:37Fire Nation, you're probably getting pretty excited with everything you're hearing from Sean, and we have a lot more to get to around this topic. when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Here's something most of us don't think about until it's a problem, our phone service. The big carriers, AT &T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have made headlines over and over for data breaches, tracking, and selling customer data. And the wild part is, even if you use things like VPNs or encrypted apps, that doesn't protect you at the cellular level. Stuff like SIM swaps, call interception, and silent tracking can still happen behind the scenes.

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14:37If you care about protecting your digital life without giving up your smartphone, Cape makes that possible. Visit cape.co forward slash fire and use code fire for 33 % off Cape for six months today. Okay, let's talk about a platform that's completely changing how entrepreneurs are running their business. And they are also our featured partner, HighLevel. If you're an entrepreneur, coach, agency, or course creator looking to grow faster and smarter, HighLevel is the all-in-one platform that replaces your entire tech stack. Seriously, think ClickFunnels, Calendly, MailChimp, Kajabi, and even your CRM all rolled up into one powerful white label solution.

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15:47Seriously, every question that pops up, they will have your answer waiting. And if you visit my special partnership link, you'll get a free trial. So visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial and see why thousands of businesses are switching. That's highlevelfire.com, where marketing, sales, and automation finally come together. High level, join the revolution. Sean, we're back, and I really want to dive into finding winners fast, because I think that's what's stopping a lot of people from even starting in this area. Now, you use firefighter-level discipline to find and to validate winning products.

16:24This is taking out the guesswork, the waste of time, the emotional decision-making. How do you do that? Break it down. So to use the firefighter metaphor, pretty much triage. In a multiple casualty incident, you show up on scene and you're the first person to figure out, I got 20 plus patients and I need to figure out who's immediate, who can treat themselves, who needs to go to the hospital, and who's possibly lost. And we do that by color coding. You got green, yellow, red, black. And the whole point of me just saying that right there is we chunk it down to something super simple. So you take thousands of data points.

16:57When you show up on scene, you see people injured and you chunk them down to literally color codes. Why? Because we need to chunk it down to simple in order to scale, simple scales. So we've essentially done that with finding winning products as we've triaged it. Now, there are literally millions of data points to trying to figure out a market and trying to figure out what do I sell? How do I build it? All that stuff. But it chunks down to this. Can you find a market in a category? So you pick it, right? Auto, pet, supplements. I don't care. It doesn't matter realistically. Just pick the category, something that you can get behind, but you'll trust the data.

17:33Then is it highly sought after? Then you find products within that market. And this is where we're using our AI tools. We do, John, we used to have to categorize this on spreadsheets, create word analysis. It would take months. Now I can literally do it in days, maybe a couple of weeks, but very fast. And you can also say, give me some great headlines. Give me some email copy. Give me some courses. I mean, it's unbelievable. Yeah, it is wild. But you have to come with this very, very important secret sauce. And I say secret because for some reason people miss it. Unique value proposition. How are you going to create value?

18:13So we take what's working. It's already getting sought after. People are saying, yes, we love it. What do they love about it? Keep it, right? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But what are they complaining about too? with everything out there, it could be better. Everything. There's no such thing as the perfect thing. So how do we improve it? And they're telling you, the market is telling you in Reddit forums and TikTok trends and ads and reviews in Google form, like literally across the board, they're telling you already. So we mine all those data points and we figure out, okay, we have a few products here.

18:46We have what people like and we have how we can improve it. And then we do a margin analysis, right? And that's where you start reaching out to suppliers and manufacturers who can make it for the cost that I needed at so that I could sell it at the price that I needed at. And now you've essentially built yourself value. You've built yourself something that you could take to market. Fire Nation, we could dive so much deeper into all these topics, but we have so much more that we want to talk about. And I want to really be moving into the automation advantage. We talked about this pre-interview, Sean, but we're going to go deeper now because listen, I've been with high level now for quite some time.

19:21I am their global ambassador on the feet. They're the feature partner for entrepreneurs on fire. They literally sponsor 365 episodes per year. I know all of their founders, all of their top level work. I mean, this company is amazing. So it's, it's great for me to see that you found your way to them as well. So let's talk about high level. How does go high level plus AI automations run an entire business while someone's still working shifts, raising a family or out fishing because this couldn't even be done literally two years ago, even a year ago is question mark, but it's insane what's happening and available right now.

19:58Talk to us about this. Yeah, so we've built out a dashboard as well in GoHighLevel, which we can absolutely give to any of the Fire Nation community, absolutely.

20:12The platform of GoHighLevel has allowed us to essentially take every single marketing analysis dashboard, how you run your business, how you're going to market your business, how you're going to advertise your business and put it into one thing. Then it's allowed us to customize it based off of the type of business. Then it's allowed us to implement different AI tools that do a lot of the data analysis. So everything that I've talked about so far was building and creating the product of value, but not how do you get in front of people? How do you get people to align with the story or the narrative that you're sharing?

20:46And then how do you essentially convert them into customers by saying, hey, this is the thing that will fix or be the answer to the narrative, the story, whatever it is that we've connected to. So that whole process right there is the, that's the trillion dollar answer, right? That's where companies either make it or break it is they followed in line with creating something of value, guiding it in front of you, making you relate and making you want it. The Go High Level platform has allowed us to essentially automate almost all of it. And whether it's email automations, SMS automations, building out workflows so that we can contact people on their birthday and let them know they get a 10 % coupon for it or whatever it is, right?

21:26It's all these marketing strategies that used to take days, weeks. You used to have to hire full-time employees to implement. You'd have to schedule it out on your own calendar and then manually do it, send it from your own Gmail, or you're working with, let's say Shopify, you know, is one of the big, big e-commerce storefront builders. If you want to add all these tools, you know, you start at 39 a month and then it's an extra 20 bucks a month and then an extra 40 bucks a month. And before long, you're spending, you know, eight, $900 a month just to have all these tools. And we've been able to build out this e-commerce automation for a fraction of that cost, right?

22:04We're talking a couple hundred bucks a month and you are off and running. You can use it all, whether it's implementing in your social media, implementing in your Google and meta ads, implementing into your entire customer base, doing your outreach, doing cold outreach, you know, warm outreach, like the whole thing. It is just unbelievable. And now if you're new to e-commerce, right, some of that might have flown over your head, but essentially what it's allowing us to do is build that product of value, get it in front of people and connect with our customer. We are able to do that from one dashboard.

22:34And I know many of you are going to align with this right here is right now on my computer, I probably have 76 tabs open. Now that's all with research and just, you know, the way my mind works, but my business itself, my e-commerce business has one tab and that is my dashboard. I mean, Fire Nation, this is the power of using the right tool. That's why I partnered with High Level. That's why I love this company. That's why we use this company. It's incredible what you can do with the right company. So we're going to move on to mission 10 ,000. But before we do, Sean, I think you have a call to action.

23:12I think you have something for Fire Nation. We'll circle back to it more at the end, but real quick, since we're on this topic, where do you want Fire Nation to go to learn more and to have the opportunity to really experience what you've been talking about. Yeah, absolutely. So if you want to work with us, which we love, love ambitious people who align with integrity, grit, honor, right? A lot of the core values that come from a life of service. If you want to work with us, go to ecomforheroes.com and it's 1M, ecom with 1M. Why we chose that, I don't know, but I wanted to stand out somehow. And then if you want to get our pre-built snapshot.

23:46It's ecomforheroes.com slash build. And we will guide you through that. Um, and this comes from everything from website automation, literally customized templates there to your funnel template. Like it's wild. That's the other thing is building your website used to cost thousands of dollars. And then if you want to iterate another thousand dollars, and then if you want it right, uh, that's pretty much almost automated now. So it's really insane. I mean, you can take a snapshot of something. You can even just like drop it in this place and say, do that. And there's like, he's like, then it's done.

24:19You're like, whoa, I used to have to pay. I used to have a guy on retainer for 2K a month, by the way, just to like do these little, I mean, it was insane. And now it's, I mean, I love this. So listen, we want to talk about Mission 10 ,000 because you're committed to helping 10 ,000 brothers and sisters in uniform hit financial freedom. Take us home. Talk about this. This is, I guess, the calling. And this is probably the entrepreneurial curse is that we always want to shoot for the moon. And the entrepreneurial blessing is that if we don't quit, we will reach it. And we're wired a little differently.