How To Start With Nothing And Build Your Own Personal Empire with Jon Boyd

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 how to start with nothing and build your own personal empire. To drop these value bombs, I brought to John Boyd and EO Fire Studios. John slept on a mattress on the floor, made$12 ,000 a year, listened to EO Fire, that's this show, Entrepreneurs on Fire, changed himself, learned business, made$24 million teaching guitar, visited 35 countries, and now lives an ideal life to help others. And today, we're talking about defining your empire, condensing the concept, the mindset shift, finding your right path, and oh, so much more.

0:40And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to John 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. 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.

1:19Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. John, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. So I think that big goals actually lead to small results. So we all know that if you want to achieve anything big, it takes a lot of sustained effort over a long period of time. And guess what? The only thing, the only way to keep doing that, to keep doing anything is if you actually want to keep doing it. If there's something literally driving you from the inside to make you get off the couch and actually do it, right?

2:04So I found that, you know, if I ever made these big goals, I would initially be motivated and I would try to follow the steps to get there. But as they say, I would fall off the wagon. It would honestly just start to suck and I would be just unhappy. So I stopped doing it. And of course, I never got the results. So I eventually discovered that trying to aim toward these big goals was actually not getting me where I wanted. And it made me feel a whole lot worse about myself. So as I said, the only way that you can sustain the effort to achieve any kind of high level of success in any area is to pursue what you actually want to pursue something where you're actually compelled to get out of your chair and go do something and do something else and do something else.

2:45So in essence, it's actually small goals every single day when you get that inspiration to, to, you know, create that blog post or to write that idea down or whatever it is. Do that small goal, right? Then do it again, then do it again, then do it again. And all those small goals ultimately wind up giving you the biggest results possible. Fire Nation, that's why we're talking today about how to start with nothing and build your own personal empire. And I want to start by talking about defining our empire, John. So what exactly does our own personal empire really mean? And why is it so important for entrepreneurs to define it for themselves?

3:25Right. That's a great question. So if we think about history, right throughout much of history, a lot of people were born into situations or circumstances that they really didn't have much control over. Right. But today we have amazing technology. We have knowledge at our fingertips and essentially, you know, we basically have the freedom to do anything we want. And once you become aware that the circumstances of your life in your future or within your control, you realize that you have a choice. You can accept the circumstances that were already defined for you, or you can define your own circumstances.

4:00So if you've ever seen a jigsaw puzzle, we all know that there's a big picture, right, on the box that shows you what the puzzle is supposed to look like, so you know what you're building, right? Well, society gives you a default picture, and it says, hey, here's the picture that you should fit into. But if you don't like that picture, if you don't want to live in that picture, well, guess what? You're free to create your own. And that's the problem. Most people don't know what they want their picture to look like. Therefore, they don't know how to build it. And that's where the concept of your own personal empire comes in.

4:31Your personal empire is the sum of the biggest parts of your life, like your business, your lifestyle, your wealth, all sewn together by your unique personality and vision. And in essence, it gives you a blueprint to create the life that you want. See, I love that, especially that visualization of that jigsaw puzzle, because Fire Nation, we've all seen like what it's supposed to look like. But at the end of the day, we're entrepreneurs, we're mavericks, we're small business owners, like we're changing the world, we're disrupting. Like, do we really want to follow the rules? Like, let's talk about that a little bit more.

5:05And I want to kind of move that into condensing the concept. Because, John, let's be honest. We all have big ideas. But how do we take the big idea of building this empire and actually break it down into actionable steps that somebody listening can actually implement? And that's always the question, right? So I want you to imagine an outline of a triangle, like a pyramid. So just the outline of the pyramid. If we take another triangle, an outline of a triangle, flip it upside down and put it in the middle of the first triangle. Don't worry, you don't have to visualize this. There's not a test afterwards.

5:41But the point is, it gives you four compartments. It divides up the big triangle into four smaller triangles. And this big triangle with the four compartments is what I call the personal empire triangle. Now, this personal empire triangle gives us a clear way to divide up your big picture, so to speak, so that the most important parts of your life are easy to define. So what are in those four compartments? Those four compartments consist of you, your business, your lifestyle, and your wealth. And if we break those down, there are sub-compartments, right? So within the you compartment, you have your vision, your strategy, your brand, your network, your distribution.

6:23In your business, you have cash generation, leverage leads, multiple streams, and multiple teams. Inside your lifestyle, you have time, time freedom, travel, health, relationships, and family. And inside the wealth compartment, we have liquid assets, property or illiquid assets, toys, and protection. So basically, by breaking down this big picture, by breaking down the personal empire triangle with the components, we can then start to put the individual pieces in place to achieve our ideal life. Fire Nation, I really love these visualizations that John's breaking down for us. You can tell he's a very creative individual, but you, biz, lifestyle, wealth, have you really taken the time to break those down, to condense those concepts and maybe have a mindset shift as a result, which is, John, actually what I want to talk about next is the mindset shift.

7:19I mean, for you, what was the biggest mindset shift that took you from just making money to truly building wealth, to truly creating an empire. So now this is the good stuff, right? So there are two parts to this. So first, every noun has a value. If we think back to English class, what is a noun? A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea. So every person, place, thing, or idea has a value, and we can measure that value in dollars. So the simplest way to think about this is just look around your room. What's in your room, right? Everything that you see, your computer, your desk, your clothes, your shoes, we can assign a value to all of those things.

8:01And of course, if you need quick money, well, the easiest way to do it is just to sell the stuff that you have. You're literally surrounded by value. You're surrounded by money. It's just in a different form than dollars. So the first key is that everything is a form of value. Or in other words, every noun is a form of capital. Now, what is capital? Capital is a resource you can use to create more resources. So it's not just money. It can be relationships, time, skills. There are a lot of other forms of capital. But essentially, capital is any person, place, thing, or idea with a value that you can leverage or use to create more value.

8:39That's the first part. OK, the second part is the biggest key. The second part is that great entrepreneurs and wealth builders continuously aim to exchange or change existing forms of capital into higher forms of capital or higher value capital. OK, this applies to any activity, but let's just apply it to making money. We're all entrepreneurs here. Right. So at the lowest levels, you can exchange the stuff in your room for dollars. It's a form of value. You can exchange it in two dollars, which is a different form of value. Right. If we keep climbing the ladder of capital sophistication, if you want to call it that, you can exchange your time to learn skills, which you can then charge for in terms of a service, and you can make money out of that.

9:22Or let's go even higher. You can acquire or create products, and you can exchange those products for dollars. It's a different form of value. But at an even higher level, you can acquire or build an entire business and exchange that for a lot more money. It's a lot higher form of capital. But let's go even higher. At the highest levels, you can create your own currency. Now, legally, I'm not advising you to do that, of course, but think about like a credit card company. Points, that's a form of currency. A public company with shares of stock, that's a form of currency. Or even governments who literally print currency.

9:58They essentially own the exchange. It's like they own the football field where all the teams play, and they get to take a piece of everyone else's activity. right? So the point, the biggest mindset shift is that every noun has a value. Every noun, person, place, thing, or idea is a form of capital. And the goal is to continually exchange or change your existing capital into higher value capital. Fire Nation, talk about a mindset shift. I mean, this is coming from a person who has built wealth, who has created an empire. As you heard me talk about a little bit in the introduction. I mean, John slept on a mattress on the floor.

10:36He made $12 ,000 a year. He listened to EO Fire. He changed himself. He learned business and made$24 million teaching guitar, visited 35 countries, and now lives an ideal life to help others. And this is what it looks like when you are able to have that type of mindset shifts. And so we need to talk about finding your right path, about lessons learned, about step-by-step action, when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Let's talk about that level up mindset. You know, the one you need to take your business from comfortable to next level amazing. In this stage, the basic stuff matters, like how you communicate with customers, which is why today's episode is sponsored by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the modern alternative to run your business communications.

11:17Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3 ,000 reviews. That's why more than 90 ,000 businesses, from solo operators to growing teams, rely on Quo to stay connected, professional, and consistently reachable. One of the many great things about Quo is that it works wherever you are. Plus, your entire team can handle calls and texts from one shared number. And Quo isn't just a phone system. It's a smart system. Quo's AI automatically logs calls, generates summaries, and highlights next steps so nothing gets lost. Calls, texts, voicemails, transcripts, and contact details all live in one clean view.

11:49Make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash fire. That's Q-U-O dot com slash fire. Quo, no missed calls, no missed customers. 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.

12:26That's where CAPE comes in. CAPE is a privacy-first mobile carrier built from the ground up with security as the priority. It works like any premium self-service you're already used to, but without collecting a bunch of personal data they don't need. In fact, CAPE doesn't even ask for your name or address when you sign up. They can't sell what they don't collect. CAPE also protects you from sim swap attacks, offers encrypted texting and voicemail, and even rotates the behind-the-scenes identifiers tied to your phone, making it much harder for anyone to track you over time. It's real network-level privacy, something apps alone just can't do.

12:56If 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, High Level. If you're an entrepreneur, coach, agency, or course creator looking to grow faster and smarter, High Level 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.

13:33You can build funnels, send SMS and email campaigns, schedule appointments, manage pipelines, run memberships, and even launch your own branded mobile app. It's drag-and-drop simple, incredibly customizable, and built for serious growth. My favorite part, you can resell HighLevel under your own brand. That means recurring revenue, loyal clients, and total control. So whether you're tired of duct taping tools together or ready to start offering high value services with ease, HighLevel is your unfair advantage. On top of it all, their support team is second to none and has your back every step of the way.

14:06Seriously, 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. John, we're back, and I want to talk about finding your right path. I mean, let's be honest. There are so many ways to make money today. How can fire nation our listeners choose the right direction that fits their personality and provide a high probability of success?

14:47I already mentioned that You know, I found that if whatever you're going to succeed at a high level at something It's got to be something that you want to do like you really want to do it You're really driven to do it and it's not your choice You want to do it without choosing to do it, right? And we've all heard the phrase that, you know something like if you love what you'll do you'll never work a day in your life. Well, I actually think it's the opposite. I think when you love what you'll do, you work every day of your life, right? The question is, what do you want to work on? And, you know, another way to think about that is if something catches on fire, EO fire, right?

15:21If an object catches on fire, it doesn't require continual ignition to burn. That's what you're looking for. That's what gives you the direction, something that burns on its own, something that burns within you. And think about this, if it requires relighting, if you continually have to relight it, that's not the path. It's not going to catch on, right? But even with the direction, so that gives you your direction, right? But the question is not about whether you can succeed or not. Everybody succeeds every day. You succeed at tying your shoes. You succeed at going to the grocery store. But that's not going to give you the type of success that we're talking about here.

15:56It's about how can you succeed in succession in the right direction? Okay, I'll say it again. How can you succeed in succession in the right direction? In other words, how can you keep going and keep getting better and better and better at the same thing and higher and higher levels of success in the same direction of something that you truly want to be doing? Zig Ziglar said that the elevator to success doesn't work, but the stairs are always open. Anyone who has succeeded at a high level has always taken the stairs. Any athlete, any business person, any real estate agent, or any other area in life, there is no other path to success but the stairs, right?

16:36And in general, it's those who are the highest paid that are the best at what they do. They're just the best. And they got there by taking the stairs. They got there by succeeding in succession in the right direction day after day, week after week, year after year. Okay. So let me illustrate really quick the power of the small goals that I talked about of taking the stairs that will actually get you where you want to go a lot faster than you think. So once upon a time, I've always wanted to start a story with that. Once upon a time, there was a businessman who made a lot more money than everybody else in the industry for 40 years, but nobody knew how he did it.

17:13So after he retired, he actually had a banquet and he got all his competitors in a room and then he told everybody the secret. and nobody could believe how simple it was. He said his goal was to get 1 % better every single day. Now, it sounds extremely simple and even boring on the surface, okay? But think about this. If you start with$1 and you make that dollar worth 1 % more every single day for a year, you end up with$37. Now, the dollar amount's not important, but what is important is you wind up with 37 times more than the value you started with in just one year. Okay. So that means whatever you're doing, if you're playing basketball, if you're being an entrepreneur, or even just learning, if you aim to get 1 % better at that thing every single day, you're going to be 37 times better in one year than where you started.

18:03But let's take it a little further. Instead of going the extra mile, what if you just went the extra inch? What if you just added 0.1%, one-tenth of 1 % so that your daily goal is actually to get 1.1 % better. That means if you started with a dollar, after one year of getting 1.1 % better every single day, you would end up with$54. That's approaching double the amount of the$37 just by adding one-tenth of 1%. Imagine if you did that every year, year after year, right? As we said, the highest paid people are the highest paid because they're the best at what they do. This is how you not only find the direction to go in, but how you succeed at such a high level that other people will literally think you're lucky, they'll think you were born with it, or both.

18:53So much value there, Fire Nation. I mean, for me, the big takeaway there is what will continually burn for you? Your passion that you're willing to wake up every single day and put in the flipping reps for, because that's taken the stairs like my main man, John's talking about here. Because at the end of the day, a lot of people said, John, you're going to get so burned out doing a daily podcast. Okay. That was 13 years ago. That was 4 ,826 episodes ago. And guess what? A lot of people would have gotten burned out, but that's because they're not passionate about this. For me, I love speaking with motivating, interesting, inspiring individuals.

19:28I just love it. I wake up in the morning and I said, I get to talk to six incredibly inspiring people today that have gone out there and done it. And I get to learn from them and share that with the world? That to me is something I want to do every single day, week, month, year. And I've proven that now for 13 years. What's your version of that, Fire Nation? Let's talk about lessons learned. What's one thing, John, you wish you had known before getting into business that honestly would have helped you grow faster and avoid just those common pitfalls that seem to just take everybody down? Well, I can give you a million things, but let's give you one giant big one.

20:04The concept of power bands. Okay. Driving a business is like driving a car on the highway. Most of the time you're just cruising, but occasionally, you know, you have to speed up to pass a car. Sometimes you might have to slow down to avoid a wreck. Sometimes you need to change lanes, right? But you would never put the pedal to the metal, put the accelerator all the way to the floor and just keep it there because you would go way too fast. Your engine would probably overheat. It would definitely be overstressed. And the chances that you would eventually crash pretty much go to 100%, right? But the same is true in reverse.

20:37If you go too slow, if you go too slow on the highway, well, first of all, your car can't, you know, keep the, it doesn't have enough power. It doesn't have enough torque to speed up if you need to, if you need to pass somebody or avoid some kind of, you know, some accident or something like that. And of course, the cars coming from behind are going a lot faster than you, which can be like competitors. They can run you over, right? The chances of a crash go up dramatically. So business works the same way. Everybody wants to scale, scale, scale as fast as possible, right? But that's like driving a car too fast.

21:06Your operations get stressed. Once you scale up, some expenses, people don't know this and they don't realize this at the beginning, but some expenses can't be turned down overnight. You can turn them up. Any credit card company will love it if you turn them up, but you can't turn them down overnight because you have operations. And if something happened to your revenue, right, you might be at a huge risk of chargebacks, merchant accounts going down, refunds, You know, something else disastrous happening that could even take you out of business. But it's also the same if you go too slow, if you grow too slow.

21:35Maybe you wouldn't have a critical mass of customers that would allow you to pay the expenses or the employees that you need to pay. You know, you wouldn't have enough power to speed up your sales if you needed to for some reason. For example, for merchant account health and competitors would just run right over you. Right. So what does this have to do with a power band? Well, in a car, the speed of the engine is measured in RPMs. Now, I'm sure we've all heard of RPMs or revs in a car, right? But what most people haven't heard about is that there's a certain range of RPMs for each gear where your car actually produces the most power or the most speed for the least amount of effort or the least amount of input.

22:13That range is called a power band. It's literally a band of maximum power in the rev range of your car. Below that power band, if your revs aren't high enough, your RPMs aren't high enough, the car acts really sluggish. You can't really move fast, right? Like when you're starting from a stop, it's hard to get going fast. But the opposite problem, if your engine is operating above the power band, it's essentially overworked. It's gasping for air, right? An exponential extra effort really isn't going to make you go much faster, which is also a dangerous place to be in. So the point is, every business is at a particular stage or in a particular gear, right?

22:53And every gear has a power band. in business that's a level of speed or operations that allows the business to produce the most revenue with the least amount of relative strain or threats for that particular gear or that particular stage of business and if you go too fast or you go too slow in that stage you overly strain the system and you open your up to big huge threats so knowing that concept obviously would have not only allowed me to make a lot more money it would allow me to keep a lot more money and basically cruise through with a heck of a lot less headaches. Fire Nation, that's what I call a rewinder.

23:27That's when you hit that rewind button a few times and listen to that again because there was so much value drop there. And I want you, John, to take us home right now with your step-by-step action plan. So if we want to start building our personal empire today, what are the first three steps we should take? All right. So step one is to take a list of all the components of the personal empire triangle that we talked about earlier. And under each category, just basically stream of consciousness, write down what you would ideally love for that part of your life to look like. So for example, your network or your business, right in your business, what would be your dream scenario?

24:03It could be something simple and short, like for your business, I want to hit my first thousand customers. Okay. So no filter stream of consciousness, just write down whatever comes to mind and move on to the next thing. Okay. So step two, get out a doc and create what I call your living vision. The date of this document is always going to be one year from today. Okay. Every single day, it's going to be one year from today, but you're going to write it as if you were looking back a year in the future, looking back to now. Okay. So what happened over the last year? And you're going to start this living vision with, I did it.

24:34And then everything that comes after that few short paragraphs of all the things in the categories of the personal empire that you wrote down, the personal empire triangle categories. So for example, your business, your network, your brand, et cetera. Using those descriptions, you're just going to write a few paragraphs of what is the state? How does everything look like? How is everything at that moment, one year in the future? Okay. So for example, in business, you might say, I got my first thousand customers or for health, you might say, I made it to my goal weight. Now here's the thing. It doesn't really matter much what the specifics are.