2350 - Mastering Business Lessons from Pool Tables to Boardrooms with The Kronos Group's Jerry Brazie

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it's Jerry Brazy. Jerry, you are the founder of the Kronos Group. You also happen to be a podcaster. It's the Kronos Group podcast. Your website is thekronosgroup.org. Jerry, it's great to have you. I appreciate it. Thanks, Josh. Before we get going, talking about the work that you do in consulting and advisory, you always love finding what high-level leaders do for fun and when they're not at work. What kind of stuff are you into lately? I've always been a big sports fan and a sports player. But as I've gotten older, I played basketball three, four days a week most of my life into my 40s.

1:35But I broke my back when I was a kid, so I've always battled that. And so I had to quit playing those physical sports. And so for me, I turned to pool. So I'm a billiards player. I'm a pool player. I've been playing pool for about seven or eight years now. Fairly high level. I love it. Three, four, five days a week if I can. Not nearly enough, actually, when I do. And when I go, the cool thing is it's, you know, I'll go play five, six, seven, eight hours straight, say on a Friday night or a Saturday or Sunday. And I just geek out on it. So for me, where I go to relax is I go play pool. I have just gotten into this.

2:10So we have a local pool hall. And, you know, so the only time I play normally is I go up to visit my dad, he's got a pool table, I don't have a pool table. But, you know, a friend of mine invited me to go play at our local pool hall. And I got into it and started going on a weekly basis got my son. So he and I go. He's a senior in college. So, you know, before he takes off, you know, it's been nice that we get to have that fun together. It is a lot of fun. And, you know, it seems to me like, you know, it's one of those things that if you just kind of play it here and there, you're probably not going to improve very often.

2:45But boy, if you put some consistency into it, I'm pretty impressed with, you know, I'm able to play a lot better than it feels like I was able to play a handful full of months. Now, I want to ask you a question, though. So I thought, well, this sounds like a lot of fun. Maybe I should play with some other people. Was it APA? Yeah, APA. Yeah. So I looked into that, started talking to some folks that are playing league players. And I said, well, I'm going to join y 'all. And then I found out, wait a minute, I don't know, maybe it's just the local league here. But I was, you know, they're basically like, well, you're going to be here for about two and a half hours and you're going to play once, maybe twice if you're lucky.

3:28And I'm like, ah, that's not the way I want to play, man. I want to be on that table nonstop. Any tips for someone like me? Well, it is a game that has to be played like anything else. And I'm a golfer also in golf and pool. A lot of the same physical needs are the same. So the same follow through is the same sort of setups. Golf and pool are really close together. And like both of those sports, you got to play them. And so I learn a lot more playing six, eight hours straight when I can, you know, three, four, five hours straight when I can, than I do in the league. I play in two of those leagues on Tuesday and Wednesday night.

4:00I enjoy it. You play eight ball and nine ball. So you're playing twice, but like you said, it's three, three and a half hours, but there's a, there's a range in there of, of, on a team because you can only have so many good players. And so there's a lot of players that aren't quite so good. So you get to learn from the good players and there's a, there's a team aspect to it a teaching aspect at my level that i get to show people how to do it and you know the different ways because it's a very complicated very technical game that like anything when you watch the good players play it like watching a good golfer they make it look so easy you go well why the hell can't i do that pool is the exact same way the good guys make it look really easy until you try to do it yourself so yeah that's kind of the payoff for the for the leagues uh but to your point you're going to go in there for two three hours and you're going to play twice, but you're going to have a lot of sitting, but there's a team aspect to it also.

4:48And a pressure aspect. You go to the playoffs, those sorts of things that you don't get when you're just messing around with your boys. Yep. Well, thank you so much for that. I, it is such an enjoyable, it has become such an enjoyable game to play. And I'm thinking I'm going to meet up with my dad and I'm going to show him something. I love it. I love it. You're you're so your company, the Kronos group, tell me about the work that you do. So when I started my first company at 28, it had a group approach me from the outside, say, hey, Jerry, you come do the operations and the sales. We'll be the bank.

5:20I had ran this fairly large operation outside of Portland, Oregon, and I took them up on it. A year later, they came in and fired me. I grew the company to$3.5 million in the first year. They didn't have the money. I learned a little bit of something called cash flow, and they didn't have the money at that time. So they came in and fired me. 17 days later, I started my own, and I was off and running. we did 4 million the first year, then we did 8, then we did 12, then we did 14 million. So I was growing quick. Halfway through that growth, year two, somebody stepped in and said, hey, I have this group I'm putting together.

5:51I want you to come be a part of it. And it was a peer-to-peer group. And I didn't know what a peer-to-peer group was. Got the best piece of advice I have ever heard from him. He was a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He was the chairman of this group. And he said, you can't afford to spend the time and you can't afford to spend the money, or the money. And so I joined that group, that group still together all these years later, most of the people in it were in their fifties. I was in my early thirties and they taught me a ton as I grew so fast. I was really good at sales. Obviously I'm doing 12,$14 million within three or four years, but I didn't know how to make money.

6:24And they taught me. So jump forward. I've owned all kinds of businesses over the years. And this one has always been in the back of my head to start my own peer-to-peer group and kind of take that role now that I'm 56 that the chairman had when he came and sold me all those years ago. And it turned out to be so valuable for me. And once a month I would go out and meet with the group. You spend five, six hours and you really get like a board of directors that are interested in your business and are honest with you. And you get all the, you know, the power of the group and, uh, and the wisdom of the crowds and all of those things.

6:57It was so invaluable for me that then I've talked about it forever. So I finally, earlier this year, we started putting it together. Now I'm finally just right now launching my first group for the Kronos group. It'd be a group of eight to 10 business owners that were willing to get together once a month, like I said, for about five, five and a half hours. Everybody gets a half an hour. You talk about your business, you get feedback issues, home life, marriage, whatever it might be that was so invaluable to me. And then one hour per month with me on the side to make sure that we're keeping our strategy straight and we're kind of concentrating on things that we need to work on.

7:33And that was so valuable for me that I thought, it's time for me to probably do that thing I've talked about forever and start one of my own. So that is what is kind of the genesis of the Kronos Group is putting together and try to bring impact to business owners, one to$25 million in revenue, the same way that it did me right there when I was just raging with growth and trying to figure out how to make money. Well, there's a lot to unpack here, because when we think about, you know, this is an audience where you got a lot of founders listening, maybe they've been a part of, do you mind sharing a little bit about the elements of the group that you've put together?

8:13There are also masterminds, certainly you can surround yourself with an advisor group, can you maybe talk about the different types of groups that a founder could find themselves in? And if you wouldn't mind, maybe talk about the pros and cons of each. Yeah, it's a great question, Josh. And one that when I started in this group, it was sold to me as a mastermind group. So I think that term mastermind has changed over the years, so much so that I look at this as this is advice that you might get in a Monday morning meeting. and this is how it worked for me in my meeting, I would go to the meeting on a Monday.

8:46Again, you spend it. There's eight to 10 guys. Everybody gets a half an hour. So it's four to five hours. And then you come back. And I always held my operations meetings on Monday night following my group. And I did that because the impact and the feedback and the information that I got back from the group needed to be put out in the field almost immediately. If I was having an issue, I needed to take that directly from the group and go talk to my folks. And so the power of that peer-to-peer or a peer-to-peer advisory group is what the Kronos group is, gives you on the ground information that you can help in your business right now, as opposed to a mastermind.

9:23Honestly, I have a Kronos group, and so I've got a dog in this fight, but I never got anything specifically as a 30-year entrepreneur that's done hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from a mastermind group, only because going into a group, a speaker comes in, talks about a subject, there's a hundred other one of us. Nobody gets to ask any questions or there's just a couple of questions. You get all rah-rah and you feel good about yourself. You're impressed by the speaker. If he speaks well, you enjoy it. Maybe there's a little something you take from it. You figure out where to plug it in.

9:54I never benefited from that. I never needed the motivation. I'm a poor kid from the streets, right? I never needed motivation. I just went to work. What I needed was on the ground. What do I do about problem X, Y, or Z? And sometimes those are a little bit, let's say from ground level, the 5 ,000 foot view, real estate, how do we expand growth, things of that nature, right? But it's still hands on, helping make decisions, helping make changes in a way that a mastermind group can't really do that. And so from an advisory perspective, that's what I would call the peer to peer is a peer to peer and an advisory.

10:29It's just a built in board of a bunch of other business owners that bring the wisdom of the crowds to you kind of, then I kind of chairman the group and make sure that we're going in the right direction and then kind of hold people accountable to the things that we've talked about during the month. I would not be sitting here had I not been in that group for all of those years. That group made me, I mean, I remember it was$600 at the time for me to join the group. I was in my company. We were doing about$8 million when I joined and I wasn't making enough money to pay myself. And so this, by joining the group, but the chairman was right.

11:05He said, you can't afford not to. And I was like, I'm working 18 hours a day already. He said, you can't afford not to put the time in. And he was right. And so that thing made me millions and millions. You know what it makes you more than anything? It helps you avoid the very costly mistakes. And as you grow, as you know, the bigger you get, the more costly mistake is because the more zeros are involved. And so really that's the biggest value is it helps you maybe minimize the mistakes or understand how to get out of problems that you've already had. So you don't get that out of a mastermind.

11:36And in my head, that's the difference between the two. Again, back when I started, they were called mastermind groups. Now mastermind groups are more, you know, two, 500, a thousand people and everybody gets together for a month or, you know, gets together once a month. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Well, Jerry, you know, in the few minutes we have left here, the Kronos group, talk about the process here and what the Kronos group is, like how people join, you know, I guess You have a discovery call process. Do you mind kind of sharing the typical onboarding path and what that looks like? Yep. Simple and no pressure either.

12:12What I love, I always say that passion, I never followed my passion. I've never made$1 on anything I was passionate about. I work passionately, but I've never made a dollar on anything I'm passionate about. And this is a difference for me because I have helped, I don't know how many business owners over all the years, because I love to give back coming where I come from. And so in that context, I've tried to put it together in such a way that it'll bring value. They click on a link and schedule a call with us. And you're going to talk to me most of the time. And if it works for you, great. If it doesn't, fine.

12:44If it doesn't work for us either, because it's not going to be a one size fits all when you're in one of these groups because the group works together. So there's a camaraderie that forms. You want to help each other. And so you're looking for specific types of people, all businesses, all types, businesses, business, but at the same time, personalities, sizes, things of that nature. So outside of that, it's just a discovery call. Give us, you know, go on there, schedule a call, and we'll just have a conversation with you about your business, about your life, what you're doing, and whether or not this sort of thing is a fit.

13:14But I will say this, Josh, that I, whether it's my group or any other group, I think every entrepreneur should belong to one of these groups based on my experience. Again, I bought, built, and sold over a dozen businesses over 30 years in every kind of category. And throughout the years, the one constant I had is this 25-year affiliation with this group that really was just that sounding board because we all know entrepreneurship can be lonely. and this really helps you sit in a room with other people who have the same problems that you do. And sometimes when you're an entrepreneur, you think that you're the only ones with these problems.

13:49And what it brings home is that there's that group that has the same issues, and they probably have the answer of how they got out of it without you having to figure out how to fight your way out of the box. You know, there are so many challenges, and I think some of those challenges, Jerry, you know, you'd mentioned, you know, being at the helm of a, you know, an eight, you know, a company that's doing$8 million and you're not even able to pay yourself. That might be super embarrassing to admit to anyone, you know, and certainly your customers or your, your team or whatever. Like there's just, there's only so many people you want to know that information, but you're absolutely right.

14:26You get yourself in an advisory group and that's exactly what you're supposed to be talking about. And I agree with you. You're going to find out. Yep. but then they're done that. Let's talk about how to get you out of that. That's right. That's right. And I mean, it made me so much money being able to avoid the pitfalls. Also just one real quick, the biggest mistake I ever made followed the biggest month I had ever had in my life. The group told me not to do it, but I thought I was high on my own supply and I thought I could do it. And it turned out to be a seven year,$6 million debacle for me.

14:57And the group told me not to, but I was doing so well and I was making so much money and things were going so great that I ignored the advice of that crowd and went the other direction back in 2012. So again, it's got both sides. You have to be willing to hear the advice. You have to be willing to negotiate and have the conversation and have real serious adult conversations about your business so that the business does better, which ultimately and your life does better, which is ultimately what this is all about. The other side of that is I've been married for 33 years and I've got three great kids.

15:26And so I've been able to do all of this while keep my life together. And so as needed, there's advice about that and kind of input from some of us older guys that have been there the same way I got it. All the guys that were in the group when I joined were in their 50s and now they're in their 70s and 80s and I'm in my 50s. So we've kind of flipped spots. All the help they give me, now I'm trying to give that same help. Jerry Brazy, your website, thechronosgroup.org. And then as well, put another plug in for your podcast, the Kronos Group podcast, right? And that's, again, all accessible at your website, thekronosgroup.org.

16:03Well, Jerry, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely. Josh, I appreciate you having me on. Thank you.

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