The CEO's Playbook: Charge, Expand, and Overcome with Michael E. Parker

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Systems Saved Me. Today, we'll be breaking down the CEO's playbook, Charge, Expand, and Overcome. To drop these value bombs, I brought Michael Parker into EO Fire Studios. Michael is the CEO maker. He's built multimillion-dollar businesses and consulted thousands. Connected to many celebrity coaches, he recently garnered thousands of views and praise on Myron Golden's podcast discussing CEO success systems.

0:36And today, for our nation, we'll talk about the acronym of CEO. We'll talk about how to build a successful business, how to avoid getting stuck and how to grow your business the right way and transformational advice and oh so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Michael and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lands, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented.

1:12The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Michael, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Well, I want to say hello and what's up to everyone on Fire Nation. Such a pleasure to be here. And I think the one thing that I'll mention that sometimes people have a misconception about is that success is actually this hard, long struggle. creating wealth is this journey of climbing this big mountain to get to.

1:58And what I've discovered is that success is actually pretty immediate, pretty instant. The struggle and the journey is becoming the person who believes it can be immediate. And that's the hardest part, is becoming the person who's able to do that thing that will create the success. that is the true journey, not the work itself. In Fire Nation, today's focus is all around the CEO's playbook. We're talking charge, expand, and overcome. Now, I love acronyms. I mean, one of my favorite is focus, follow one course until success. And for those who are listening closely, I may have already teased it, but I noticed that you have CEO as an acronym.

2:42Can you break down what it means and go into some detail for us? Absolutely. Well, you know, I came up with this because, you know, my company, you are a CEO. And sometimes people think I just mean a CEO of a business. But I really teach people how you have to be the CEO of your life as well as your business. And that CEO is giving us an actual game plan and a mindset that we have to have about both leadership and self-leadership as both an entrepreneur and a self-preneur. So when we think about charge, I'm really dealing with the fact that we can't live in delay, that this is the greatest enemy to our success.

3:22We have to operate with taking massive, imperfect action and just being committed to the things that you have to do. Delay is probably one of the strongest things that stop people from really getting things done and becoming what they can become. So it's always now o 'clock. You have to move. And then expand has to do with our ability to grow. You know, be a little, do a little, have a little. If you don't, if you want to have a lot, you got to do a lot. But to do a lot, you have to be a lot. And to be a lot, you have to grow. And everything that grows has to go down before it can go up, whether that's jumping or a bow and arrow being pulled back before you release it or a seed that has to go in the ground to become a tree coming upward.

4:09All these things is expansion. We have to be willing to grow. And then lastly is overcoming. And we have to be willing to overcome things. We have to be willing to not run from the obstacle when it comes up. There's always this tug of war between our expectation, what we believe will really happen, and our desire. And so the desire is great. And sometimes people focus on that, like have the mindset and be willing to grind and have desire, but they don't deal with their expectation. And eventually your desire will succumb to your expectation. So it's by overcoming the thoughts that would keep us down, keep us negative, keep us thinking we can't.

4:45That overcoming process is what will allow you to get the furthest possible with this mindset of truly being the seal of your life and your business. Charge, expand, overcome Fire Nation. Now, Now, Michael, let's break it down because a lot of people's lives do not prepare them for entrepreneurship, plain and simple. Yours did, however. Tell us how. There's a few aspects of it. There's the personal and professional journey. Just really quickly that, you know, I started off in a pretty difficult situation in which my mom was in a very bad domestic violence situation growing up. And so my childhood was filled with a lot of difficult things, saw a lot of violence, went to six different elementary schools, and just had a lot of things that caused me to believe that I wouldn't be able to accomplish as much.

5:36I wouldn't be able to do certain things. There was a lot of fear surrounding my life. And so this taught me a lot, though. This really gave me a great treasure where I began to learn how to deal with fear. I began to learn how to deal with opposition and how to keep your sanity in the midst of madness. Little did I know these were going to be critical entrepreneurial skills. You know, being an entrepreneur for over two decades now and seeing the good, the bad, and the ugly, you learn that it's so important to be able to, you know, stand on some of the foundations of what you've went through. And so some of my greatest pain has created my greatest profits because it has taught me how to stick through things when things get tough.

6:18And then my journey actually ended up taking me to coming, you know, after getting through so much and being able to rise above my situations in my mind, I was able to achieve more. And coming from the things I came through and then ending up in a situation where I was able to go to college and out of college, end up on assignment with Toyota and then be handpicked by Akil Toyota, who's the chairman now of Toyota. and he was there on assignment and everyone knew one day he would be he's in the real Toyota family they knew where he was headed but he saw me as a young man and he said there's something different about that young man and it was some of those life experiences that made me not have I wasn't afraid to say hey I'll give him the tour when he came everyone was kind of nervous so I said no I'll give him the tour I've seen much worse this isn't fearful I can give him a tour of this so I gave the tour and he said it's something different about that young man.

7:16He said, now, here he tells all these executives, I'm just coming up. I'm just young in my career. He said, I want him to be a part of a special project team. And I want him to go to Japan next week. Next thing I knew, I had a letter written in Japanese. I was being sent to Japan. I didn't know what the letter said. I handed it to the taxi driver when I landed in Nikoya, Japan. He nodded at me and I nodded at him. And I just up in Toyota City, Japan. And when I got there, I literally fell to my knees and I just thank God, I began to pray. I couldn't believe where I'd come from and then where I was at that moment.

7:53And my life would be changed forever. I saw the highest level of operational excellence that one could ever see. I was with first generation lean experts like Katz Nishimoto, Yoshifimu Tanaka, Kurt Onoue. These were people in the real family. I didn't learn from someone who learned, who heard from someone who heard, this was the real foundation. And this would transform my thinking as an entrepreneur forever, because I would see that everything begins with value. And the way you trim off all the waste that doesn't add to that value in anything you do in business will always cause you to have a superior opportunity to be successful.

8:34And so all these things in my life, John, I would say really catapulted me to be able to be who I am today. I love the building blocks that make us who we are, Fire Nation. And our listeners, Michael, I mean, we have veteran entrepreneurs, we have side hustlers, we have small business owners, but we do have a lot of new entrepreneurs that listen to entrepreneurs on fire. What steps specifically should new entrepreneurs take if they want to build a successful business? When people ask me that question, John, that's an excellent question. You know, sometimes people want like a lot of tactics, you know, go do this, go do that, use this particular tactic, get a sales funnel, publish a YouTube channel, do this and that.

9:22But there's five things that I think are much more important if you really want to succeed as a new entrepreneur. And the first thing is to realize you need to be determined. You have to have an overwhelming desire to succeed. This is the thing that's going to keep you. This is the thing that's going to make you win, right? And just losing the whole concept in your mind that successful people are successful because they have money instead of saying successful people have money because they're successful. What I mean is it's the mindset they have. Like wealthy people aren't wealthy because they have money.

9:56Wealthy people have money because they're wealthy in the way that they think, their determination to make the right decisions. And this is why someone can lose it all and get it back again if they have a wealth mindset. Someone can be given a bunch of money and a bunch of tactics, a bunch of things to do, a bunch of things that can help them, and they'll lose it. That's why I would see athletes or entertainers that get a lot of money and then lose it all because the person never changed. The determination to make the right decisions was not there. Then I have to say just the ability to be willing to be developed.

10:29So if you want to be a new entrepreneur, you want to be successful, you've got to be good at something. You've got to develop in some way. You've got to develop an expertise. You got to find that thing that is going to be specialized and unique that you can give the world. And if you don't have that, you're not going to have anything to build around, right? And then you got to have discipline. Discipline is really going to keep you going because things are going to get hard at times. And as I told you about my background, John, like the thing that you have to learn how to do is to choose your heart.

11:00Like either it's going to be hard up front because you have the discipline and you stick with it, you do what's required. or it's going to be hard later because you took the easy way out. You didn't put in the work. You didn't really stick with it. And I often tell my team and others that are around me that when I think about some of the things that I went through and I'm up against something as an entrepreneur and that discipline kicks in to keep going and to not see this as hard because I start to think back, this isn't hard. It was hard going to a home for battered women with my mom. That was hard.

11:30It was hard recognizing that I had to go to yet another school and try to meet new people again and not feeling accepted. That was hard. Going back and forth when I was in struggles in business and the economy changed, I had to lay off over 80 % of my workforce and start over again. That was hard. And so when you start to understand what hard really is, you'll change on being willing to give up when you should stay disciplined. The other thing I would say is being decisive. You know, this is a big problem for entrepreneurs. You know, how many people, you know, buy into the thinking that, you know, I need to sleep on it instead of having that first mover advantage, you know, being able to make quick decisions to not always feel it has to be perfect to take action.

12:18You know, people that aren't decisive, they miss opportunities. And this is why, you know, some things that, you know, when you say is the sun shining and you say you You have to go think about that. Some things are just true and you don't need to think about it. It is what it is. What's in front of you is really there and you have to believe in what's possible and take action. The last thing is, is to have directors in your life, people that can help direct you, people who have been there before. You know, there are patterns that we can follow and we see this in every area of life and spiritual things as well as, you know, just natural things in life.

12:55and you have to be willing to allow directors, mentors, coaches, people who have done it before, they will save you time because they've already been where you're trying to go. And the quicker you see that it's better to take that information, take that guidance, take that wisdom, take that constructive feedback so that you can take 10 years and bring it down to 10 days. This is a great, great asset to any new entrepreneur that wants to succeed. So those are five critical areas that I would say is most important. I love all five of those, Fire Nation. And a phrase that I want to repeat because it's so good is choose your heart.

13:34I hope that hits you at the core. And I hope you think about that at a deep level. Now, we're going to take a quick break, Michael. But before we do, we have a couple things for Fire Nation. I want to go deeper with you. I know on August 7th and August 14th, you're having a couple webinars. We're going to go deeper into both of these at the end of the episode. So just take about 30 seconds now and let Fire Nation know where they can go to sign up for these. They can go to chaosorcontrol.com. Chaosorcontrol.com. And this is really going to delve deep into the chaotic life of an entrepreneur moving to the control life of a CEO.

14:17So entrepreneurs solve problems, CEOs put systems in place and that's what causes the difference in the businesses that they build. And this webinar is going to go deep into this in a way that is very, very transformative for any entrepreneur who wants to grow or go to the next level. And Fire Nation, when you have the opportunity to take this type of learning to the next level, which Michael's giving you, take that opportunity, make it happen. And we have more to talk about when we get back from thanking our sponsors. We all know that starting a business is hard, but there are tools out there that help make it easier.

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15:27Starting a business doesn't have to be so hard. Go to clickhubspot.com slash ENT to download the guide right now. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Running a business takes a lot of time and effort. And when you're focused on business growth, it's easy to let self-care slip. But something I prioritize every single day, no matter what, is my health, both physical and mental. In addition to the daily supplements and workouts are spaces of time I give myself to just relax. No devices, no music, just peace and quiet. But I know how difficult it can be to make this happen in between the chaos of daily life.

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17:20Think of it as life insurance on your terms. Protect your family today. Get up to$2 million in term life insurance coverage in 10 minutes with Ethos. Answer just a few health questions and get your free quote at ethoslife.com slash fire. That's ethoslife.com slash fire. Michael, we're back and most entrepreneurs, they get stuck and they struggle to grow. It's just a reality. What's the number one reason for this? I really think the absolute number one reason for people getting stuck is not understanding the process of growth. And some people don't realize that the thing, it wasn't that the thing didn't work.

18:07It's just that it was working on you. And sometimes what you have to go through is going to allow you to sustain the success that you're going to have on the back end if you're willing to go through that. And, you know, I love talking about the power of a seed because the first thing a seed has to do to become a tree is to no longer want to be a seed. It has to be willing to die. It has to be willing to change. And, you know, this is a very, very important thing. And then even when that seed begins to make the decision to become a tree, it has to go through a process. And a tree is one of the most powerful things that grows both down and up.

18:46It has gravitropic growth that goes toward the earth and it has phototropic growth, which goes towards the sun. And see, people oftentimes, one of the biggest reasons they get stuck is that they're not realizing the process that you must go through to grow. And so we have to be willing. See, people want the phototropic growth that you see. Everyone can see the tree and the fruit. They can see the success, the views, the followers. They can see your logo, the accolades, your title. That's what we want to see. And when that doesn't happen, we feel stuck. But we don't understand. Sometimes we're having gravitropic growth where we're learning how to deal with fear, with anxiety.

19:24We're learning how to rise above things within ourself that hold us back. So before you can fly with the birds, John, you got to sometimes be willing to crawl with the worms. And if you're willing to do that, then you will truly find that you can get unstuck because a lot of times you're not stuck. You're just going through a process of growth. And when you realize that, it's very freeing and you'll attack your day differently, realizing I'm just going through a process of getting where I need to go. And that is only if you start to shift your mind to be more in anticipation than you are anxiety, remembering that both faith and doubt is a belief.

20:04Doubt is not the absence of belief. It is a belief that things won't work. Faith is a belief that things will. And we want to be driven by that and have more anticipation in our life than anxiety. And this will keep us from being stuck and being able to always grow and move forward. The reality is there are entrepreneurs who right now are in a dark place. They're looking for transformation. They need it. They have doubts. They have fears. They have anxiety. What specific piece of advice can you share with those individuals? When you get in a dark place, one of the things that you have to first do is you have to let the sun in, right?

20:47And the sun is really getting access to more knowledge and information that can take you higher. I think one of the biggest mistakes is people misunderstand what the purpose of learning really is. And the purpose of learning is to arrive at a level of mastery. And so we want to learn, even intelligence itself is the speed at which you learn. So when you get in a dark place, a lot of times there's some sort of sunlight that you need to let in. And sometimes that sunlight begins with how you see yourself, the level of anxiety you're allowing to come in versus anticipation, as I mentioned earlier.

21:26But then also, it's taking the time to learn from someone that is actually able to help you rise above that darkness. So if you don't have the light within yourself, right, this is why we have to have, you know, I love this, John. You know, I live in an area where, you know, we're close to some mountains. And sometimes, you know, the utilities company in my area, they'll, you know, do tests and stuff for fires and turn power off. And one of the greatest investments I ever got was my generator because people in my neighborhood don't have one. And every time there's a test or something happens or there's a storm, I get a little flicker with my lights.

22:09But then that generator kicks in. I can hear it comes on. And now my house is lit up because I have a generator. Everyone else that doesn't, they stay in darkness. But see, the thing that we can learn from this kind of parable, this allegory, is that there is a generator you have to have. You have to have a self-generator, and you have to learn how to turn on your own generator, because sometimes there's not going to be a person there to pat you on the back, to tell you you're great, to tell you you can keep going, that you can make it. And so you have to be willing to turn that generator on, read the book you need to read, watch the video you need to watch, call the person who can help you, and let that light come on again so that you can see.

22:50You can't walk in darkness. You can't travel until you can see what's in front of you. And so these are some of the things that I would mention, John, very, very important to have these ingredients and attributes to let the light in so you can be freed from the darkness. Michael, you've dropped value bombs, brother. We really, really appreciate that. Let's end with a bang. Take the stage, take the mic, dive a little deeper on the opportunities that Fire Nation has to go deeper with you? I have a complete mastery program where individuals are able to, you know, work with me and I with them. And I have a complete executive team that will literally help any entrepreneur, whether they're just starting out and they want to get to that $10 ,000 a month,$20 ,000 a month, or there's someone who's already at the, you know, six, I should say the seven figures and they're trying to grow further.

23:46These things are principles and one of the things that's so powerful about a principle, see, there's the task level and that's the how to use, but then the strategy level is a higher level of learning because it shows you why you're using the task. But a principle is even higher than that. It's a law and anywhere you use it, it's going to work. So it doesn't matter if you're starting out or you're making, you know, $10 million a year. If you use the principle, then you'll advance, you'll grow. And so I have a whole program that helps people do that. But what I've done is, you know, not everyone is really, I like to make sure that people are really serious and they're ready for the things that we give because we give them a lot.

24:22My current hourly rate for helping people that are not in my programs is$30 ,000 an hour. And so what I am doing is creating a more affordable way to see and vet who is really serious about their future, who really wants to grow. So this is why I have this free webinar to really expose people to the information that is most critical to the success of any business, which is systems. You have to learn how to use systems. This is the difference between you and anyone that's further than you. It's the reason that the person on the corner who has the best food in the neighborhood and everyone knows it is not making as much money as the franchise that's nearby, whose food is not even better, but their systems are.

25:04And so we have to understand the power of these systems and move from chaos to control. And then once we actually understand that, I have an academy that is a real inexpensive investment, but it allows someone to get the basic foundation that they need for me to be able to really help them. And so when I actually have people come to the webinar, I always give them valuable, priceless information. And then I always open an opportunity for some of them to be a part of an academy that will then vet to see, are they really someone who wants to go even further into some of my programs that can really help them grow as an entrepreneur?

25:43And so this is really what we try to do. And we've been very successful at helping many people make substantial amount of wealth. But more importantly, I look at four different P's here, John, is so important. You got to get better at making profits. You got to get better at managing your processes. You have to get strong and better at managing and developing people. But you can't forget this fourth P. You have to get better at managing your peace of mind. Because it's not just about these businesses that we all have and we want to be great. You can't lose yourself. This isn't about just revenues and expenses and profits.

26:24This is still about the life you want to live. and understanding that the purpose of money is to buy back our time. And the purpose of time is to buy back our freedom. And the whole purpose of freedom is to live the life that we want. So it's not about just moments where we celebrate the money we made. It's still having those moments that we cried a cheerful cry, that we laughed with someone that we loved, that we went on the vacation, that made our heart warm. That's what this is about. And when you understand the true purpose of those things, you'll approach your business from a different perspective.