How Long Could You Last Without Your Next Commission?

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0:21Welcome back to the Sales Gravy Podcast. I'm Jeb Blount Jr. I'm your host today. And with me in this conversation is Morgan Keim. He is back like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Last time we focused on the tactics of the follow-up. But today we're going to be talking a little bit deeper into the seller's identity. And I really like this conversation. It has a lot to do with emotional intelligence. But it comes from a place of experience. And I really love Morgan's experience because he's raised over$400 million in venture capital. He's invested in more than 3 ,000 real estate units. But his biggest insight isn't just like some math that I've done for this intro.

0:55it's dependency and being the number one seller in a small organization and being in that venture capital startup world and having, you know, lots and lots of things to work on in his space and going really, really hard, but knowing that there are some key risks when you put everything on the line as a sales professional. So we're going to talk about how you can transition into a position of power and not from a position of pressure. ABJ, it's great to be here, man. You are one of the most watched episodes because you've heard follow up flywheel. But I thought we'd talk a little bit today about some traps that high performing sellers fall into.

1:28I'm sure some of them are listening to this podcast. You've said high income sellers don't have a money problem. They have a dependence problem. Fleshed it out a little bit for me. What does that mean? What I mean by that is most high performers don't even see this necessarily because they're so busy producing. But from the outside, things look gravy, right? Good income. They've got momentum. They've got status. They're super important usually in their companies. The challenge is that when the machine stops, it's driven by them. It's driven by their time, right? And I lived this, you know, I spent a decade plus in startup sales and built what by every conventional measure looks like success until I kind of realized that it was ultimately a really high paid time for money machine.

2:12And if I separated myself from that equation, I was exposed, right? So I think that particularly like given a sense of who's in your audience, I think there are quite a few different archetypes of people that might resonate here between the founder who's carrying the company and the belief and the momentum is everything to that person or the top producer who's really, really dependent on that next number or maybe even the operator within a company, but is kind of on somebody else's org chart. They're different roles, but they have the same exact risk that income and freedom are not the same thing.

2:47All right, let's just dive into that a little bit, because that's a fun one. It kind of hits a nerve. I think it's one of those areas that LinkedIn influencers, a lot of different, you know, if you get on social media, there is a lot of talk about income versus freedom. And it sort of looks very different in 2026 than it did in 1995. There's a very different versions of this. When you say the risk is that income does not necessarily equal freedom, kind of give high performing sellers like maybe some awareness of what that looks like on a practical on the ground scenario. I'll share what I can from my background and my story.

3:21But there was a while back I started a consulting firm. And I mean, we were just nailing out proposals out in front of conversations. This is before I read any of sales EQ or fanatical prospecting, but we're doing what I can to fill the pipeline and translate it. And I mean, I was making good money, but ultimately I sort of had the aha at that moment that, you know, if I stop, if I even walk away for like two weeks, my fruit's going to die on the vine. And I carried this through to the point that I had this really unique kind of experience with my now wife. She was, it's actually even before she was my fiance, but we got this opportunity to travel the world.

3:59And we're like, this is super cool. There's like, I'm in between some companies. I'm going to go do this thing. You have three months. And I remember being in month two, we just landed in Bali and I was so antsy and agitated. I was sending out proposals and I realized that I was so hardwired to feel the sense of guilt. If I wasn't producing, I was like putting my family at risk, despite the fact that we are on a once in a lifetime trip around the world. Right. And I realized the problem for all of us, for high income producers, it's not necessarily a financial problem. It's like a psychological one.

4:33We've wired our identities to output. But the minute that we step off that hamster wheel, that flywheel, whatever we want to call it, is the minute things start to slow down and we need to do something about that. You know, the work that you've done since that trip to Bali, what are some of the practices you've kind of put yourself through to separate yourself from the outcome or maybe give yourself some more peace when you take those vacations or even just in the sales game, you know, every single day, just giving yourself a little bit more emotional space. So what are some of those things that you've done for yourself?

5:04This is a very tactical question, but the reality is if we solve for a tactical challenge before addressing the root cause problem, we're just going to be dependent, but better at being dependent, right? And I think that the big challenge that I had to face personally is going, what's the amount of money I need to make for me to be able to walk away? What's the amount of passive money I can make for me to not be impacted, to go take 90 days away from my world and not feel like I'm behind the gun. And this was very, very solidified for me when I started to really learn about this concept. I started to look into saying, you know, how do I ultimately build this bridge away from active income?

5:44How do I create some leverage that brings back, you know, a little bit more freedom to me? And there were a lot of different ways to do this. But I think just the recognition of the challenge that we face here as salespeople and just having a brutally simple exercise of saying, how much money do I need to make outside of my active income to just feel like I'll be okay? Like that's step one before we even go into how do we do it? It feels very learned, the unlearning process of taking yourself away from those outcomes. And I struggle with this all the time. I mean, it's just put in front of us and every little channel that we're a part of that if you are not making X number of dollars or you're not producing X number of hours a week, if you're not working, you know, Saturdays and Sundays, you're not getting ahead of the game.

6:30And it sounds like you found some different ways to help create leverage in your life and unlearn some of those behaviors. Can you kind of walk us through the key man risk and what this looks like for professionals who may be listening to this podcast? I mean, look, at the end of the day, a lot of this rests on you. And just to nod to the unlearning process, us like the relentless grind that we have, our ability to constantly be striving. That is not the same thing as freedom, right? If anything, that creates sort of an uncontrollable addiction towards feeling important or feeling productive or feeling high status or ego as much as it might be hard to admit.

7:04And it was for me to get there. But at the end of the day, just having a sense, like a lot of us know our quota cold, but we don't actually know what our freedom number is, right? So if you take that now and you say, hey, I am going to address being the key man in my business. I need some sort of insulation here. I think it's really key to think about carving out just some percentage of active income that is literally untouchable. It's not for savings. It's not even like 401k. This is earmarked for ownership today. This is going to create your bridge, right? And then thinking like, ultimately, how do you just engulf in a little bit of education while sort of building towards imperfect action, but all around the ethos that, you know, how do we create something that's not just driven by me all the time?

7:52And so for me personally, like, I'm going to give a little story of like my first experience here, because I think it'll resonate. My vehicle has been real estate passive investing. We'll write a check and somebody will buy an apartment building and they'll fix it up. And they're generally quarterly distributions that come with it. When I did my first deal, I mean, I remember I was scared. I was playing so small. I didn't know what the heck I was doing. It's actually like a funny deal. Like the first deal I did was across from a graveyard in like an up and coming, but kind of gang ridden part of LA.

8:21Like it was like the exact opposite, like not on my vision board for that year. The location, location, location did not apply to this. Location, location, location was extremely scary at the same time. Like I knew that I had to just start taking action towards this thing. And what was cool about the deal, I mean, I mustered up the courage, ask as many questions as I could to go do this thing. And my first, you know, passive income check comes back three months later, and it's not life changing by any stretch of the imagination. But it made me an entirely different person when I showed up in the sales arena, because at that point I had gone from being like, I need to close this deal.

8:57I'm really feeling the pinch. If I don't hit my numbers into being like, wow, I think I'm starting to see the bridge of how I can sort of make sales by choice and not by necessity, which changed 100%, by the way, of how I responded. I wasn't agitated. I was very patient. I actually listened better. And I think as you start to really frame, A, recognizing that this might be an issue for you, B, figuring out what your passive number or your freedom number might be, C, educating yourself towards some key areas that can help reduce your dependence. Psychologically speaking, it's incredibly powerful to actually increase the thing that we're trying to get create dependence away from.

9:36It's crazy that people can smell it when you just need the deal. This comes from we talk about it from a full pipeline perspective. So selling, you know, in your active income job, if you don't actually have an active pipeline, you're going to be 10 times worse in your sales process. And then if you don't have the ability to have some freedom outside of that, you're in the same boat. So I really love how these two things are melding together. When you talk about your freedom number, I like this concept in terms of its idea, but it kind Kind of feels hard to imagine for an individual. Now, I understand that everyone's a little different.

10:05Your freedom number is different than my freedom number. But how did you go about understanding a freedom number? And what does that mean to you? How did you start to articulate that? You're right that it's different. Everybody has different risk and reward tolerances too. But I took very simplistic math when I started here. And I said, if I can make 10 % on some amount that's invested in something, that creates 10 % towards the goal that I'm ultimately trying to achieve. and just having an idea what that goal even is. It is not your quota. It is not your OTE. This is a different goal entirely.

10:36And I mean, let me ask you the question, Jeff, like how many people listening do you think have that goal like written on their computer dashboard or is this a relatively disconnected thing? I teach goal planning and I teach all kinds of students from all over the world how to prioritize and put their just priorities on their calendar. First and foremost, getting people to put just prospecting or even just their daily activities that are impactful to their income and their active income job is nearly impossible. They don't practice that. So I imagine not a lot of people have the freedom numbers on their laptop at any given point.

11:09They're right. But it's the highest leverage thing you could probably have in front of you. And it's not that you're going to be able to achieve it in a year or even, you know, I'm going on 10 years working on this stuff. Right. But it's incremental action towards a goal that can create freedom a lot sooner for us. And a lot of people just aren't optimizing for that at all. So, you know, I know you keep kind of going like, what are the tactics? How do we get there? Let's bring it to ground level. There are lots of ways, right? There are income products. I focus in real estate. You know, I'm not going to say any ways right or wrong for anybody as much as the psychological understanding that if we stop, our income can often stop in creating ownership outside, I think is critical, especially in this day and age, especially with what's coming down the pike with technologies.

11:53I want to ask you about ownership, the psychological attachment to ownership outside of your world that you typically live in. What has that done for you and how do you articulate that for somebody who has never thought about ownership outside of their active income job? Yeah, I mean, there are different layers of it, right? There's ownership of your time. There's ownership of your space, of your, you know, of assets that creates more things for you, right? There's ownership of liabilities, too. You know, you have all sorts of different things. The practical advice is, you know, increase your assets, all that kind of stuff.

12:26But at the end of the day, I think if you take it down to ground level, we all just want autonomy. We all want freedom. We all want to have ownership of our time. And if we're dependent on active income, we, to some degree, as much autonomy as we have within a company structure are dependent on something else. And that's not ownership. So there are ways in which you can accumulate assets, find ways of creating avenues outside of that, that will basically increase the amount of time you have back or increase the amount of energy you have back because you show up from such a place of abundance. So I'm scared and I want you to help me.

13:01I am 28 and have lived in corporate world, different sales organizations, make pretty decent income for myself and my family, and we support our lifestyle and we have a great way of going about it. And when I talk with folks like you, it seems so, I think, apparent that I should be doing these things. But when it comes down to really like stepping across the line, the eight inches between my brain and really get in the way there. Can you help someone like me? Like, how do you help me with a broader idea of taking time away from, you know, maybe my family time or my rest time or my workout time or any of the other, you know, 16 hours I have in a day to do something that's a little bit different, like investing in, you know, real estate or creating that 10 % return or, you know, going into another project that creates passive income.

13:46I think there's just such a psychological disconnect there stepping into the world feels too daunting. Yeah, it's a really good point. And, you know, practically speaking, if you do cross the bridge of saying, hey, this is an issue, this is something I want to address, this merits some small portion of that time. I mean, we live in the age of not just information, but like curated at your fingertips, whatever you want, right? I think there are a lot of ways between any sort of online education type platforms like YouTube or podcasts like everyone's doing here to looking at different AI like Claude or, you know, GPT of just being a little more practical about addressing this key fundamental shift.

14:26I am looking to diversify my income source. I'm looking to not be the center of my family's dependency on income and just finding key steps. And by the way, we don't have to start big. Let's say you do some education. Let's say you do like private credit or the real estate space and you decide, hey, I think I can get a decent yield here for not a lot of risk or whatever it is. Start small, but just start. Right. And that's kind of the key point. My deal next to the graveyard, like was the last thing I thought I was doing that year. And I started small and it was scary. But at some point I learned enough about that asset class to keep going and going and going and got, you know, competitive and good at some point.

15:05So I think what I'm saying is like you have permission to start ugly here, but just start right. Just get in the ring and move forward on something. to learn. I want to hear your thoughts on this. I'm a person and a lot of people who listen to this are high performers in sales roles. And there's a particular kind of personality type that typically fits into that space. And I am an all or nothing kind of guy. Like if I do something, it is, you know, to the wall as best I can do it. I picked up a guitar like 10 years ago, and I am like gung ho on learning everything about music theory. Like I will spend spurts of my life just invested in something.

15:42And I know that when people started stepping into the space, because this is how I feel, I go, if I can only spend an hour a day on this, or even like 30 minutes, or maybe an hour a week, because my life is so hectic with, you know, we got children, I've got a nine and a 10 year old, if I can only spend an hour a week on it, is it worth it? Like, am I going to get enough out of this? You know, I might just be throwing away money, or I might just be throwing away my time, or shoot, I might just fail at this. So how do you balance someone who like you is probably just super high top performer wants to kill it, but knows that there's limitations on just our physical world around us and the time we have.

16:12How do you balance those things as a person in that position? I went to UCLA MBA like more than 10 years ago. I'm actually about to go to my 10 year reunion. And I remember they had a law class and they were like, are you going to be a lawyer? No, you're here for a business degree. You're not going the law route. You would have gone to JD if you wanted that. But they had you go through that class anyway, so that you could at least ask the right question. So you could at least find the right who, if it came down to that. So if you're like an all or nothing type of person, you don't have to be that here, right?

16:41But I think the education component is knowing enough to be dangerous at least to then connect you to somebody who maybe shares your values, who respects your perspective, who understands your goals, right? And actually really gets it. And if anything, your sales skill set is going to allow you to basically leverage strengths that you already have in identifying that person, right? Challenging, understanding these people. What's their own cost of inaction? Like we can use the same things we're good at to actually be the skillset to find the people that live in this world, right? That's something to just kind of marinate on if you're saying, hey, I don't want to be the self-managed person.

17:17I want to tap into somebody who has this kind of specific knowledge, then leverage what we do have, right? So you've gotten all of this work done over the last 10 years. It sounds like you built a system that allows you to step away from it without it all falling apart. And this conversation has been primarily centered on getting started doing this? What is the psychological impact of it? You're 10 years into it. What does it feel like? How do you feel? Some days I wake up and I feel like, you know, Steven Schwartzman at Black Boxster, like, let's go, right? Other days, I struggle with my own vulnerabilities around still being human, around still being guilty if I didn't work 12 hours that day, right?

17:54Like, I still have a deconditioning process personally, and it very much impacts me. I have to bring myself back constantly. And you mentioned the part about, you know, it's hard to calendar our time, right? But the reality is like, I have my golden hours, my platinum hours. I have my research hours. I have my deal analysis hours. Like, you know, it all goes back into that, right? But I have noticed shifts. You know, I used to think that a lot of how I felt even five years ago, I felt important if I like had my calendar filled with meetings. And now like I block that thing as much as possible and only put the high value.

18:28stuff. It's like a fundamental shift. If that's valuable, you know, to anybody listening, they're saying like, I just want more time with my family. I want to not feel so under the gun. This is a proven avenue to do that. And there are lots of different ways to do that. But the point is just addressing that this is something that needs to be done and taking some initial actions to just even get going in the right direction or having a few conversations that might lead you down a path to create more, you know, durable, lasting wealth outside of your sales career. I want to leave you with a few seconds here to talk about you and where your business is and how you help different individuals invest in different places.

19:03Leading into that, can you leave the listeners who are interested in this with either a conversation that you remember or maybe a quote that you kind of hang on to that just helps articulate that mindset that helped you step in, really build something that was different than what other people were doing and stick with it so that you had more freedom in your life going forward from 10 years ago? For me, a lot of it comes down to just imperfect action. like without that there's nothing we could theorize about this all day long but find your percentage that you want to save for that ownership income and actually commit to it and whether you don't know what to do with it for six months or a year it's okay right but like just start taking incremental action to get there you know i think a lot about this other one that confidence is earned right and you're saying like you're 28 you're trying to figure it out like you don't have to have the answers today but like you got to at least know like the one step in front of you That's where we are today, right?

19:56But there is an issue. Let's work to resolve that issue. And maybe this is a 10 or 20 year road, but it might create freedom 20 years ahead of when you otherwise would have happened. This can be transformational. All right, so Morgan, where can people find you, learn from you and follow you so that if they have questions, they might be able to get some answers. Yeah, look, I'm starting to do a lot more writing on this. If anybody sees value in it, check me out on Substack or YouTube at Ocean Ridge Cap. And look, if anything, just write down your freedom number, start taking steps towards figuring out how to get there.

20:28I promise you this is a worthwhile journey. Morgan, I really appreciate you taking some time today and talking about kind of a tough topic, but one that is really, really insightful and sorts a lot of conversations every single day in my life. And so I hope that y 'all listening to this are able to pull at least a few nuggets from this conversation. If you are listening right now and you have not, go to youtube.com forward slash sales gravy and follow us so you can watch this conversation. You can also ring that bell, get a notification when we put new content up. Give us a five-star rating on Spotify or Apple Music or iHeartMedia, wherever you get your podcasts.

20:59Leave comments. I respond to everything that I can. So y 'all go give us those five-star reviews. You are a marketing department for the podcast to help us help more salespeople sell more. We also have Outbound Conference coming up. So go get tickets at outboundconference.com. Those tickets are almost all sold out. So go get those right now. Morgan, thank you so much for being on the Sales Gravy Podcast, and we'll catch you next time.

21:21Thank you.