How to Build and Exit for Multiple 8 Figures with No College Degree with Hunter Ballew: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:01Light that spark 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 build an exit for multiple eight figures with no college degree. To drop these vibe bombs, I brought Hunter onto EO Fire Studios. Hunter is the founder of Roofing.com and fueled in cornerstone construction. He is a partner of RepCard and has multiple eight-figure companies with acquisitions and has helped thousands through annual conferences and retreats. In today's foundation, we talk about how you should surround yourself with mentors who will hold you accountable.

0:35How if you want to make a huge impact, you have to build a team. To build us all a team, you must have a common mission and do so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Hunter and our sponsors. Are 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. Franocity has helped hundreds of people leave unfulfilling jobs, invest in recession resilient businesses and create legacy income for their families through franchising.

1:19Get started today with Franocity's franchise funding guide packed with real world strategies to launch your business without draining your savings. visit franocity.com. That's F-R-A-N-O-C-I-T-Y.com. Hunter, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What is up, Fire Nation? Super excited to be here with you today. For me, man, actually, this is something that most people don't hear often. I talk about this a lot on podcasts, when I speak at the retreats that we host, you know, people talk about work life balance a lot.

2:01And they're always trying to find this balance. How do you get it perfectly balanced? You're at home enough with your family, you're at work enough, so you get stuff done. And for me, I don't necessarily think that you have to be dead center. I think that you can spend way more time at work. And I wish I could draw it out in a illustration, but I can't do that because were audio only. But I think that you can have a lot more of your time allotted at work as long as, for one, you understand your why. And I know that's overplayed a lot, your why, your why, your why. But if you truly know your purpose, why you're here, if you care about impact over income, and then secondly, if you're married, if your spouse understands why you do what you do, they're going to be willing to let you be gone more than normal people will say normal people would let you be going from the home because they understand that you're out there trying to make a big impact in the world.

2:53I love that, Hunter. And Fire Nation, you're going to love this episode because we're talking about how to build and exit for multiple eight figures with no college degree necessary. So Hunter, let's get to the core here because passion is important. But to make a financial windfall, which I know a lot of our listeners want, there has to be both scale and leverage opportunities within that passion. So how can we pick an industry that we're both passionate about, but that is also scalable? Yeah, man. So it's funny. I found my way into the roofing industry, not because I was passionate about it at all.

3:33You know, I'm a guy from a little small town in South Carolina. I guess you'd say I'm more of a blue collar guy than a white collar guy. I didn't go to college, never cared to go to college. Didn't want to be a doctor or lawyer or anything like that. Nothing against it. Just wasn't the route I wanted to take. I went to the Marine Corps, then went to the fire department and found myself after the fire department when I wanted to start my own business, working with some roofers, helping them with their marketing agency. And through that, I found myself starting an actual roofing company just as a case study because I figured, hey, man, if I could take this thing to a million dollars, then I could show all these clients that I'm trying to get that this dumb old dude from South Carolina grew a company to seven figures and knew nothing about the industry and it helped me get more clients.

4:17And as I continued to learn more about the roofing space, I said, hey, man, this is actually an industry that needs innovation. It's a place where you can come in and if you're willing to work hard and innovate and not be stuck in the old ways, then you can really make some waves and change the lives of a lot of people that you bring onto your team as well. So for me, it wasn't even necessarily that I was that passionate about it. It was just a vehicle where I could help a lot of people, my team members, the community, and then obviously create wealth along the way too. So for me, that's kind of how the story went.

4:49That is how the story went, Fire Nation. So I think it's important for you to realize that, listen, it's important to have passion because you want to wake up every day and you want to out hustle your competition. You are not going to be able to do that if you're not enjoying and love, enthusiastic of what you're doing. but guess what? If your passion happens to be in something that just can't scale, you're not going to get to those eight figures, which by the way, it's not for everybody. But if you're listening to this episode, because you're looking to build an exit for multiple eight figures, there's got to be scale included there as well.

5:21And as you can hear with what Hunter was breaking down here, he kind of fell into this, but what he fell into was very scalable. Now let's ask the question about mentors. We know that we should surround ourselves with mentors, but tell us why. Tell us why we should and how to find them. So for me, I've been super blessed to have great mentors locally and across the U.S. that aren't necessarily right here, my next door neighbor. And the old strategy of having to call somebody up and I'm going to buy them lunch so that they'll take me out and teach me all their secrets doesn't necessarily work anymore.

6:03You have to be willing to put some skin in the game. And I've done lots of crazy things. We host our own event and I've been willing to pay a hundred grand to bring a speaker just so I could build that relationship. And some of those speakers are Ed Milet and built a great relationship with John Maxwell and people like that. But continuing to level up the people that you surround yourself with and the people you allow to pour into you, It's so, so important as an entrepreneur and people listening to this. I know that your listeners are amazing people. They're hustlers. They're out there getting it.

6:34And oftentimes we find ourselves pouring back into other people. It's us always pouring into other people. But as some people, at some point we have to be filled up. And so do you have those people around you that are willing to pour into you? That's the question. And if you don't, where can you find those? There's plenty of masterminds out there across the U.S., across the world. We know of them. War Room, Multiple Club, Power Room, Lewis Howells have one, Perry Belcher, all these different people. We have Revolt. And so are you surrounding yourself with the right people? And it's not always just one or two mentors.

7:07It's a community of people, a collaboration of people that are there that you can build relationships with and hold you accountable. I think that's the most important part, how you ended Hunter, holding you accountable. Because it's so easy to say you're going to do something. It's so easy to have the intention of doing that thing. But what's hard is the follow through. And when people that you know, like, and trust, when people that you respect are holding you accountable, are saying, Hunter, really, dude? Like, you're better than that. That's going to cut you to your core. You're never going to want to hear those words.

7:40You're never going to want to admit that you did not do what you said you were going to do to somebody that you respect. And so that accountability is so huge, Fire Nation. So let's talk about building teams, Hunter. how can we build a team that will help us succeed you've done it tell us how yeah i think that when you place your team's success above your success you will always win you're going to come out with what you want because you're taking care of them and to do that you have to set them up for success you have to give them the tools you have to give them the training you have to give them the technology they need to succeed.

8:20And so for me, as we built Cornerstone, as we built Roofing.com, RepCard, all these organizations we've been blessed to be a part of at FIAS, at best, we've always focused on setting the team up for success. We don't want them to be limited. And I don't just mean the sales team. Obviously, the sales team, they can go out there and they can make unlimited money because they have commission structures that allow them to do so. If they sell more, they make more. But I mean, even down to the secretary, I want them to be able to make more. If they go out and they hustle and, you know, they they help sell a roof or for our events business, if they help sell a sponsor, if they do that, we want to incentivize them and help them win, too.

8:56So set your team up to succeed. And, you know, not just with compensation structures, but those tools and the training and the technology. I mentioned to you. Do you give them the right training? You know, if you're in the door to door space, do you give them good training on how to knock doors? Maybe they're remote sales reps and you hook them up with remoterep.com and you send them over there for training. But are you giving them everything they need, all the tools they need to succeed? Because if not, you're doing them a disservice. You're doing a disservice to yourself inevitably because they're not going to succeed and your business is going to suffer.

9:29But morally, we should have that inside us and we want to give them everything they need to succeed. And at that point, our team is going to bond and we're going to have an amazing culture and continue to scale and serve the people we're trying to serve. Such critical information, Fire Nation, and it's a great way to look at how you can build the right team to help you succeed. And we're going to be talking about this type of stuff and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Starting your own business can feel intimidating. Where do you start? How do you grow? When will you start generating revenue?

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12:25High Level, join the revolution. Hunter, we're back. And let's be frank, there needs to be a rally cry that the whole community, that your whole team can get behind if you really want to max out your potential as an entrepreneur, as a business owner. How can we create this common mission? I love that you asked that common mission. We got to talk about this a little bit before creating a common mission for your team. What is that? You know, for our companies, we talk about a mission statement at our retreats and our events. We talk about having a life mission statement. What about for your team?

13:02What is something that they can rally behind that they can believe in and everyone can come together so that when it's late on a Thursday night, maybe you're at the office at 7 p.m. Maybe it's a Saturday and nobody wants to work, but they're willing to come in because they know that it's going to benefit more than them. It's going to benefit more than the team. And so just an example, just to give an example, at one of our companies, Cornerstone, that we sold to a publicly traded company out of San Diego, we started a nonprofit called Cornerstone Kids, and we would donate a percent of revenue off of every single dollar that came in.

13:33So just for instance, if we sold$10 million for the year and we gave 1%, that'd be$100 ,000. That was$100 ,000 we could give back to the community. For us, our common mission was serving youth, underprivileged kids specifically, and teaching them life skills that we felt like they don't get at school. How to change a tire, how to change the oil, how to balance a bank account, teaching them about fitness, teaching them the importance of leadership and the importance of addiction and staying away from drugs and alcohol and those things. And we've seen broken homes where we would have different speakers come into our events and lead those kids.

14:09And so maybe the money isn't enough for your team to want to work those extra hours. But the fact that they know that people are going to benefit from it, those kids that we all care about as a team together, we care about that. They're willing to work those extra hours. So that was one example of a common mission for my team. And it was so cool to see one real life example, two real life examples. One was, you know, a family had their house burned down. Immediately, we're able to donate money, donate clothes and foods and shelter to them so that they have a place to recoup after losing their house.

14:43Another one was when COVID hit, we had all of the schools here in South Carolina shut down, right? They're not letting prom go on. And so we ended up doing a dozen proms in July of that year for people to bring all of the kids together. They were able to have one last hoorah and have their senior prom. And that was so fun. But not only was it fun for the people, the kids, it was fun for my team, man. Like it was really fun for my team to come together and celebrate and say, hey, you know what? It cost us, it cost us about 40 grand to throw those 12 props. But it was so meaningful to my team to come together and see what they had done, because really that's what they had done.

15:21They worked hard. They worked on the Saturdays. They worked the late nights to make that money to be able to fund those props and bring that joy to those kiddos. Fire Nation, imagine being able to bring that kind of joy, that kind of cohesive togetherness to your team, to the company that you're doing. I mean, to me, that's just really exciting. It actually just gives me some ideas right now of like, what could I be doing? Like in my local community, like down here in Puerto Rico, because there's so much opportunity here that you can be giving back. You can be having fun. You can be building camaraderie.

15:51But let's get down to Brass Tax Hunter, because the title of this episode is how to build an exit for multiple eight figures with no college degree. Talk to us about that. What does building to exits look like? Walk us through this process. Yeah. So I didn't start with the exit mind. I think that we're starting to see a shift in today's society with entrepreneurs. And hopefully, you know, this podcast will change the thoughts of a lot of listeners on how they're building their business. A lot of us, we get into business, we start building because we want to have this dream life. We want to have financial freedom, whatever that means.

16:27I can't stand when people say, oh, I want financial freedom. What does that actually mean? We've heard that so many times, but what does it mean to you? If you're one of those people who figured that out, what about time freedom? We want time freedom. So we have this idea of what we want. We want to be able to travel, get married, have the car, the house we like, go on the vacations, whatever. But we don't really have the end in mind. We don't really think about the exit. And what's unfortunate is a lot of people just go through life and they build this company and And maybe it's successful, right?

16:55They have it for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And they get to the end of the road and they realize, you know what? My kids don't want to take it over. None of my employees are capable of taking it over. So what am I going to do? Does this company die when I die? Does my legacy expire once I'm gone? Because I haven't put any focus into how to keep it going. And so that's when I started thinking about, do I want to exit at some point? And from the time I really started digging into what does it look like to exit a company and then hiring mentors, hiring coaches, joining masterminds that just focused on building a company to exit.

17:32Within 12 months, we sold our company for more than we ever thought we could. We understood how to how to tweak a couple of things within the company, raise the multiple, raise the value of the company and be able to exit that company. And now that's kind of our model is, hey, let's start companies, let's invest in companies, and let's help tweak those to get a higher multiple and then be able to sell those. And what that does, man, is it makes an impact on every one inside of your team. For us, we were able to bless so many of our team members, giving them shares because we sold to a public company.

18:04So we got shares along with cash. Wow. We were able to bless team members that were with us for the ride and helped us build the company. And we can't wait to continue doing that with companies along the way. So I challenge anyone that has a company, like, what is your exit strategy? You're going to exit one way or another, whether it's exiting your business or exiting your life. You're going to exit your life. We're all going to do that. So are you just going to let your company die along the way? Are you going to build it to sell? Are you going to build it to give to your kids? Like, put some thought into that.

18:33There's so many takeaways from this episode, Fire Nation, so many value bombs. But Hunter, what is the one takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything that we talked about here today? Oh, man, don't do that to me. I'm really passionate about everything we talked about. But if I have to go back to one, you know, I think that if you're going to make a big impact, if you want to have a legacy you're proud of, once you're going from this earth, I talk about legacy. I talk about leadership all the time. We've got a book drop real soon called Make It Count that talks about legacy.

19:08And I think that if you're going to make the impact that you want to make, you have to build a team. You can't do it by yourself. You look at all the great entrepreneurs and they have teams. Nobody does it by themselves to build that team at its core. You need that common mission. So I go back to the common mission and figuring out what that is. So if you're an entrepreneur listening to this that has twelve, one hundred, fifteen hundred employees and you don't have a common mission, figure out what it is, what is something that your entire team could rally around. And it doesn't just have to be your cause or your purpose.

19:40Get your leadership team together. Start writing on a board. For me, I took my team to Salt Lake City. We did a retreat. We said, hey, what are some things we're passionate about? It was veterans. It was the water crisis. It was so many kids being without a father. It was underprivileged kids. We had all these things and we kept whittling it down and we got to underprivileged kids. We got to youth. We all cared about youth. And so that's how we came up with our common mission. So figure out as a team, what's something you guys can rally behind that isn't just about money or the company success, it's about something in the community.

20:16Such powerful words, Fire Nation. Hunter, what is the call to action you have for our listeners? How can we connect with you? And then we'll say goodbye. Yeah, man. I'd love to connect with anyone listening to this episode, you can find me at hunterbaloo.com. Just type in my name, hunterbaloo.com. You find everything you need there. You know, we have all kinds of free resources, stuff we've come up with, exercises throughout the year, years that help with leadership, legacy, all the things that I mentioned, right? We've got the book, Make Account. You can get a free copy of that coming out here in a few months.

20:47We have a free challenge, Fearless 44, that we've done with hundreds, thousands of people across the world that's changed many, many lives. We're actually in the middle of one right now with a ton of people. It was so cool to see the impact it makes. And then, of course, you can check me out on social, Instagram, Facebook, wherever. Love to connect with you. Fire Nation, you are the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with HB and JLD today. So keep up that heat. Head over to eofire.com. Type Hunter in the search bar. The show notes page will pop up with links to everything that he just mentioned and that we talked about during this entire episode.

21:20Hunter, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Hunter and Fire Nation. If you've ever, ever thought about creating a podcast of your own, the podcast journal is for you. It is a gorgeous full leather journal that will guide you step by step in the creation and launch of your podcast in 50 days. Visit thepodcastjournal.com and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies?

22:02Build 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. Franocity has helped hundreds of people leave unfulfilling jobs, invest in recession-resilient businesses, and create legacy income for their families through franchising. Get started today with Franocity's Franchise Funding Guide, packed with real-world strategies to launch your business without draining your savings. Visit Franocity.com. That's F-R-A-N-O-C-I-T-Y dot com.