Resilience, Reinvention, and Leading Through Uncertainty with Jim Stavis

0:01John Lee Dumas:Light 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. And today we'll be breaking down resilience, reinvention and leading through uncertainty. To draw these value bombs, I brought Jim Stavis in the EO Fire studios. Jim is an entrepreneur, CEO and author who built Paragon Steel and after surviving a rare triple organ transplant, now shares lessons on resilience, leadership, entrepreneurship and perseverance. So today we talk about the origin story, thriving and uncertainty, lessons from failure, life-changing perspective, adaptability, advantage, and oh so much more.

0:35John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Jim and our sponsors. Fire Nation, is your business stuck? Join Eric Trump and Clay Clark's Life-Changing Business Conference, November 5th and 6th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Learn the specific proven systems Clay Clark has used to create thousands of success stories today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Again, request tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. 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.

1:17John Lee Dumas:Visit highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Jim, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. The ad that Apple Macintosh did many, many years ago, which said, think different, always stood out to me because to me, that was an important feature of business and being a successful entrepreneur, because I think that there is a tendency for people to just kind of go with the trend. And I think it's important that you think outside the box. And for me, in my business dealings, thinking different was kind of a key way to have success and to kind of test the outer boundaries of what was successful and what was not.

2:20John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, we're talking about resilience. We're talking about reinvention. We're talking about leading through uncertainty. And Jim, I want to do that by starting with your entrepreneurial origin story. I mean, take us back. Take us back to the beginning. What first inspired you to become an entrepreneur and build your own business? It started at a very young age, actually, as a teenager, in part because I was diagnosed with a disease when I was a teenager, juvenile type one diabetes at the age of 17. And I was told that I would be fortunate to live to the age of 50. And so that message to me was a message that I had better get started on a career young because a lot of my contemporaries would be living a lot longer than me.

3:11And so I set out on a course to start a business at a very young age, right out of high school. And with a partner, we built a business in the automotive aftermarket, which ultimately led me to be in another business in the steel industry where I met my partner in the previous business. And so I think that it was the diabetes diagnosis that set me on a course really where I felt like I needed to get started sooner. And it was up to me to make that happen.

3:49John Lee Dumas:I want to move into the crux of our conversation. We're talking resilience. We're talking reinvention. We're talking leading through uncertainty. And you actually focus on thriving within uncertainty. I mean, you've written about how many businesses fail because they do what? They wait for certainty. So why do you believe that learning to prepare for uncertainty is such a critical entrepreneurial skill that we simply have to possess? I think that change is a kind of an element that is true in all parts of our life. And you have to be prepared for change and be prepared to pivot as changes occur.

4:35and because of that, it doesn't allow us the luxury of necessarily waiting for when that change occurs. I think you have to prepare for it. It has to be part of your culture so that when it does occur, so that when COVID happens or tariffs happen or AI happens, you're in a position to not only survive but hopefully thrive. and that's kind of been my philosophy from day one is not to just be content with where we are but always be looking to the future for where we're going to be.

5:15John Lee Dumas:Give me a specific example of this with you and your journey in your business. When did you face uncertainty? When did you thrive in uncertainty? Well, again, I think that there's events that occur in your business life. For me, we've had customers go out of business. We've had industries that were successful, and then suddenly the market moved, shifted, and that industry no longer existed. I mean, even I tell this story, it almost seems like a joke, but when we started in business, our largest account was a payphone manufacturing company. and the payphone industry kind of went away overnight when the cell phone was invented.

6:04And now you rarely ever see a payphone. It's almost like a dinosaur in today's world. But at the time, we were sending two truckloads of steel down to Mexico for probably three years while this payphone company thrived, and then overnight they were gone. So that's the kind of thing I'm talking about is you never know what tomorrow may bring, so you have to be prepared to kind of move forward. I've actually done an analysis of our accounts, and almost 80 % of our business that we had when we started in business nearly 40 years ago no longer are in business. And yet we still are. So I think that that's a testament to the fact that as things shift, we've moved in and out of markets.

7:04We've taken on different product lines. We've moved from just distributing to fabricating steel, processing steel. So we've had to adjust. And our business is founded on the customer. Whereas when I started in business, the steel industry was very much founded on steel companies bringing in a bunch of steel and then having it available for customers. but they were the ones that set the rules. The distributor was at the top of the pyramid, whereas today the customer is at the top of the pyramid and it's up to the distribution company to fulfill their desires. So that's a pretty big shift that's occurred almost like the Amazon approach to steal.

8:06John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about lessons from failure Because Jim, if we're being honest, every entrepreneur has setbacks. I mean, hello, that's a reality of the game. So what was your biggest business failure? Take us to that moment. What did it teach you? In my first business, which was the automotive aftermarket, we had a fiberglass shop, which manufactured automotive fenders, flares, spoilers, things that basically made cars look cooler. and one summer day back in 1978, the air was still, the chemicals were rising, and a small fire turned out to be an inferno, and I was in the shop with about 50 workers, and instantly I had to get everyone out of the building for fear that it was going to be a loss of life type situation.

9:13And fortunately, nope, everybody got out and it was quite a spectacle. In fact, it was on the front page of the LA Times the next day. It showed an airplane landing at the LAX with the shop totally engulfed in flames. So anyway, so we managed to survive that. And at the time, I wasn't sure if the business was going to survive. But we managed, in fact, I think if anything, it made us get our act together and we became a far more efficient company than we were at that time. And then the second one I would say is I started the second company, the steel company, with a partner. and the partner was my age and we ran it together for 25 years through thick and thin.

10:06We made a very good partnership as we ran the business and then he suddenly fell ill and passed away in 2014, which was quite a blow for me personally as well for the business. again didn't know if we would survive wasn't sure if I wanted to continue the business without him but I chose to continue and and in many ways the business became stronger and we kind of learned from our mistakes we filled the gaps and fortunately we moved forward so I I think what I've learned through tragic failure is that you can actually become better once you emerge from the setback.

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14:07John Lee Dumas:Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Jim, we're back and I want to talk about a life-changing perspective. I mean, we're talking triple organ transplants. That's quite the experience to say the least. So how did that change the way that you view life? how you view leadership, how you view entrepreneurship. Well, the diabetes diagnosis that I was given again at 17, I was told that I was going to have a life of kidney failure, heart disease, amputations, blindness, a host of really difficult things for a 17-year-old to absorb.

14:57And as it were, as I got into my 40s, I started having some of these health setbacks that were predicted for me back in the early 1970s. So I had a cardiac event when I was 43 years old at the top of a mountain in Los Angeles. I was on a ropes course at a UCLA retreat and my heart stopped when I was at the top of a of a pole climbing a pole so that was quite an event fortunately for me they brought me down and a close friend of mine who knew CPR rescued me and so for the for the balance of my 40s it was just a matter of time before, you know, I would succumb to this disease. And I went and saw a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.

16:02And he said, well, you need a new heart. You need a new kidney and best case a new pancreas. But such a surgery we've never done. And I don't believe it's been done anywhere. And I just looked him in the eye and I said, well, then I'll be the first. And that set me on a course that in 2005, I became a triple organ transplant recipient, getting a new heart, kidney and pancreas, which was pretty remarkable. And obviously, a big part of my story is how did I develop that mindset of being prepared for such a journey. And it really came down to my mindset, my positivity, and embracing hope, which really set the course for me going forward.

17:00So when you talk about perspective, that's a perspective maker. because I was able to overcome the adversity and kind of set my life on a course, which has had an amazing amount of success. And my ability that I've learned is that, you know, nothing is impossible. You know, as long as you have the right mindset, you can overcome anything. as to how it affects me on a leadership level. I think that my business has mirrored a lot of my belief system and my perspective on life, that every day is a gift and that I have a tremendous amount of gratitude for still being here, able to share my story, and that our business life has kind of gone parallel to my life story and that my employees all kind of believe that we're unique and special in our own way and that we can overcome anything that may beset us.

18:16John Lee Dumas:Jim, let's talk about the adaptability advantage. I mean, what separates entrepreneurs who are able to successfully adapt to disruption, which of course is going to happen, from those who just get left behind? Change is inevitable. And I think it's how you adapt to those changes that allows you to succeed where others may fail. And a big part of that is you have to be forward thinking. You don't want to dwell on where you've been looking in the rearview mirror. You want to be focusing on the windshield and see what's coming at you. So I use that analogy a lot. And I think that it's important that companies have that perspective.

19:07It's not easy. And I think that to be successful, you have to be prepared for what may be coming at you.

19:16John Lee Dumas:You have one big lesson to share with us, because if you look back over everything that you've experienced, what would be the one message? What would be the one lesson that you hope our listeners, Fire Nation, take away from your journey, your experience? My big message really is to be resilient. Don't be afraid to take a stand. In fact, you'll be much better off if you don't let adversity get in your way. Taking risks is part of the game, but try and be smart about the risks that you take. Beware of your downside, but always be looking to the future and realize that no one knows the future any better than you do.

19:57John Lee Dumas:So if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, Jim, wants to learn more about you or your company, what would be your call to action for our listeners today? I have a book, which is When Hope is Your Only Option, which tells my transplant journey as well as my life journey. And it's not written just to be a memoir, but it's kind of a how-to book for anybody that's going through their own adversity and kind of sets forth a blueprint for how you get through tough times. That would be my one thing that I would say. And then secondly, if you wanted to get a hold of me, my company is Paragon Steel. So I can be reached through the Paragon Steel website, www.paragonsteel.com.

20:53And my address is jstavis at paragonsteel.com. And then I'm also on Facebook. um you know i have a jimstavis.com website which again details my book and my speaking schedule that sort of thing but um so there's a lot of there's a lot um a lot going on with me and there's um the the first step is um my book and i also have a documentary which is called Source of Hope, which is available through YouTube, which talks about my donor family, which I have a relationship with, and my story of the transplant journey.

21:37John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JS and JLD today, so keep up that heat. And for links to everything that we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Jim in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Jim, thank you for sharing your truth, knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you, brother, and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you so much. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Jim for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, are you an entrepreneur on fire with a high ticket offer, but not enough quality leads?

22:14John Lee Dumas:Well, Nexus install may be your answer. So to learn more, email me at john at eofire.com. And I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. Fire Nation, is your business stuck? Join Eric Trump and Clay Clark's life-changing business conference, November 5th and 6th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Learn the specific proven systems Clay Clark has used to create thousands of success stories today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire. Again, request tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place.

22:51John Lee Dumas: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.