Transcript

Announcer:

Are you an entrepreneur looking for more free time, more money, or just looking for that success blueprint? The Proven Entrepreneur is the podcast for you. Host Don Williams and his guests share real success stories from proven entrepreneurs. Here's your host, Don Williams.

Don:

Hey, Don Williams here with today's episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a real treat for you today. Dialed in. He lives in the Bay Area, but somehow today he's in Florence, Italy. I'm really, really jealous. So he's the founder and president of Stealth Venture Labs. A serial entrepreneur passionate about using business to generate not just profits, but social impact.

In 2009, he founded Roost, an online marketplace for social consumer brands that featured Mashable, Forbes, HuffPost Inc, Today Show, NBC, ABC and soon to be everywhere. He was honored by Forbes as a name you need to know. In 2011, he was about 12. Today, Brent is an angel investor, former venture capitalist. He writes a regular contributor for Entrepreneur in Ink.

He's the founder and president of Stealth Venture Labs, co-founded five e-commerce brands and is chairman of the Board of the Bay Area chapter of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship to Inner City Children. Now, his bio says he loves to travel to Italy. And remember, he's in Italy today, gives back, spends time with family and friends. In 2020 and we'll dig into this a little bit. He received the high honor to be knighted by the Italian royal family, Casa de Savoy. I think I pronounce that correctly are pretty close. For his commitment to philanthropy and giving back. Brent Freeman, welcome to the show.

Brent:

Thanks, Don. Pleasure to be here. Really appreciate that.

Don:

Well, man, I'm glad that you took time out of your evening day to be evening to you as you're in Italy. And so love the power of video conferencing where time is irrelevant. Oh, yeah. So tell me, what are you doing now? What's your main passion? What's happening?

Brent:

Yeah. So I'm currently in Florence, Italy. Florence is where my soul is. At peace. There is a magic and energy vibration in the city. That's different than any other city in the world. This is birthplace of the Renaissance and same creators we were talking about earlier, Michelangelo and Da Vinci. All of these in the same people that influence history for so many years all came from here, even including Dante and Collodi, who wrote them.

And I mean, they so much here in Florence. So my passion is Italy speaking Italian and the Italian culture and being here. And so I invested 2 to 3 months a year in living out here. And we have a business now out here, which we'll talk about a little later. But if you say, what's your passion, it's definitely Italy and what I'm up to in general is I'm, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, so I have been an entrepreneur for 15 plus years and I have been failing my way to moderate successes and that entire rodeo I've had some moderate success is a lot more failures.

And I'm fortunate to have the company I have now called Stealth Venture Labs, and you can think of us like a venture studio that has a digital marketing agency inside of it that helps e-commerce brands grow in scale through growth plateaus and big brands like HelloFresh, Poo~Pourri and whatnot, all the way down to small startups. We have an incubator that helps start and incubate new brands 0 to 1 concepts, and then we have a nonprofit and our own nonprofit teaches children how to start businesses, entrepreneurial mindset, digital marketing, e commerce.

So three divisions Stealth Venture Labs, agency, incubator and nonprofit.

Don:

Love that kind of cradle to grave. Yeah. Wall to wall carpeting, wall to wall entrepreneurship. I love that. So I'm really active in an entrepreneur organization, which is 16,000 people around the world and a chapter or two in Italy as far as.

Brent:

I am in the San Francisco chapter.

Don:

Oh, there we go. Great, great, great, great. Love to hear that. So, yeah, that is certainly one of my passions. Okay. I'm going to dial you all the way back to young Brent once you go all the way back to like 5 to 18. Okay, So the household or households that you were raised in. Okay. Was one of the adults in your life.

Okay. Whoever that might have been different for different people was one of them entrepreneurial? Did one of them set an entrepreneurial example for a young boy? Brent.

Brent:

Short answer, yes.

Don:

Okay. Who was?

Brent:

And I do. So let me give a little background to this. My mom, my birth mom passed away when I was seven and so my mom w w it is the defining event in my life that made me into the man I am today. And she and her energy and spirit has stayed with you my whole life. And I call her my birth mom.

And then my father remarried. Both were Italian women, by the way, and my father remarried an amazing woman who is now my birth mom and so she is great. And so she was the entrepreneur and my father was a cinematographer, a director of photography, very focused on the artist voice of telling stories. And my mom, who was the one that read My Earth mom, she was an entrepreneur for for 20 years.

And I got to see the dichotomy between the hustle grind. Do everything yourself, you know, the long nights and weekends, hours working on vacations and all of that, and the artistry and passion. My dad, where he would work sometimes on set for 6 to 12 weeks and then not work for three months, right? It was a very feast and famine and I really grew up.

I wasn't a lemonade stand entrepreneur. And I believe that entrepreneurs are made as well as born. Some people it clicks and they just they have that the garden cleaning business and they have the lemonade stand and they're slaying and things don't add up. I wasn't that kid. My only dream in life was to come to Italy, meet my Italian relatives and learn to speak the language.

That's my dream. And so when I saw the dichotomy between my parents, I knew I didn't want to be that workaholic, slick, crazy entrepreneur. That's why so many of us see. And I knew I also didn't want to be the face and famine of a freelance life also. And so when the lessons they taught me were centered around follow your passion and the money will come and work hard, but don't work so hard that you burn out because the destination isn't promised.

And it's about the journey. And so Brent, from age 5 to 18, went through a lot, right? My birth mom passed away. I was coming of age, I rebelled. You know, I found myself, I lost myself, and then ventured out on my own and went to college and saw the volatility of what happens in entrepreneurship and through a series of very unfortunate events.

In no fault of my mom, the business she ran, she sold it. But then the company that bought it was fraudulent and I took the whole business and her and the family into bankruptcy my freshman year in college. And so we went from being upper middle class to bankrupt when I was 18. And I didn't want to switch colleges because it was a place that I really wanted to be.

And so my parents, God bless them, they took out student loans, I took out student loans, I worked. They helped where they could, and I graduated through that. Four you. It's down to us. See, not at not a cheap college either. And I graduated that institution knowing that my network would be my net worth. As I got out of there, that's when I started my my first business.

And so the connections between kind of that, those early years of loss and grief and then connection with my my parents and then this amazing woman who came into my life and was a little bit older but showed me what entrepreneurship can be and what it can't be and the ups and downs that, you know, for me I came out saying I'm optimizing, I'm very squarely optimizing for the journey because the journey is the destination.

Don:

Wise, wise beyond your years. At that point, just saying.

Brent:

I was 11. Yeah.

Don:

So tell me about so we're probably still in young Brent. So like what was your first you weren't a lemonade entrepreneur, but what was your first job? What's the first thing you did where you tried to time and effort and somebody paid you first?

Brent:

First job was schlepping gear for my dad on set, as you know, a production brat, as they call it, and you bring it out and see sand and sand bags and help and set up lights and all of that. But the real kind of first non family gig that and maybe I was like 10/11 when I did that.

I was 12 because it was definitely under the table. I worked at a video store for winding tapes, rewinding VCR tapes, Right. Take him out of the thing. The owner wins them, you put them in the back on the shop. That was my very first job. It was a terrible job, but good benefits. I got free movies and so I love movies.

My thing was always about who, you know, I always had I had a guy that worked here and a guy who worked there, and they give you a discount here and you always had always kind of a little network going as a kid. And I didn't work the system like I'm going to sell things to people because my next job after that was working front desk at a local gym.

But it was always about me saying, how do I create a network of people where I bring value to them and vice versa? But it wasn't like, Hey, I'll do this for you, you do it for me. It was just like, Oh, I know a guy that works at the movie theater. He can get us in, I guess free popcorn, you know, there's always that kind of stuff.

And that transcended to college where I couldn't afford spring break trips and I became the head rep for them. And so I would get paid to promote them and get free trips. I just was always.

Don:

Yeah, love, love, love. And kids, if you're not familiar with what a VCR, tape rewind or just just ask your parents, okay? Because barely remembers. But I remember really well.

Brent:

Yeah.

Don:

Yeah. So. Okay. All right. So went to USC, graduated with a degree or degrees in what?

Brent:

I was a communication major with international business campuses and I had a minor in entrepreneurship and Italian literature.

Don:

I always love you guys who went to college and got a degree in entrepreneurship. One of my best friends went to Baylor and got his degree in entrepreneurship. Like, Yeah, I don't know, 40 years ago. So it would have been like cutting edge stuff for higher education to kind of recognize, you know, the yeah.

Brent:

The entrepreneurship program at USC is very strong style, the great center and they had a really good job at incubating amazing entrepreneurs and, and bringing alumni together. You know, Marc Benioff went to USC and Aaron Levy went to USC and there's like, there's so many examples of people who have done really big companies and small like the curriculum when I was there was centered around the traditional business plan, feasibility study, business planning day, right?

Go to your pitch and all that. And I think what was good about that is it taught you kind of a process, right? But then the moment I graduated, I realized a business plan isn't worth a shit as long as your business plans, your business realities, right? And everyone has a plan A punched in the face, as our boy Mike Tyson says.

And so you know that process. What the entrepreneur or miner did for me is it put me in a class, in a peer group around other people to say, kind of like what you focus now? Like I'm not alone. Other people think like me. Okay. Right. And that sparked my entrepreneurial spirit and and actually full circle to Florence.

I studied abroad in Florence and 26 my junior year in college, my junior spring semester. And I took an entrepreneur intro to Entrepreneurship last year for the first time before I went back and declared an entrepreneurship minor. And it was here that really in that class it was like, Oh really? This is why I think differently. This is why I'm stubborn.

This is why I think all my bosses are asked and they should do things differently and have opinions about how they should run their company. When I'm 18 years old, it was like this. Oh, it's because I'm an entrepreneur, right? Or I think entrepreneurially. And so, you know, I joke that, you know, entrepreneur organizations are far more like entrepreneurs.

Anonymous, you know, it's like, Hi, my name is, but I'm an entrepreneur and I got friend, right? Really, just to make light of day. But it's really it's like that because we are afflicted with the blessing and the curse of being creators, no doubt.

Don:

And if you are an entrepreneur and you're listening today and you have not found your tribe, reach out to reach out to me, reach out to EO. There's other groups out there that's just the one we're probably the most fond of, but it doesn't have to be lonely. And for, you know. So I'm 60 and 30 years ago, a client called me and said, Hey, you should join this thing called Why EO?

And I was like, What is that? He told me. And I was like, Oh, I'm not a joiner. I don't really play well with others. So I pass.

Years later, you know, a friend invites me to go to an event, I go to an event and I'm like, I think this is going to really be cool. And it takes me about six months to connect the dots of. Oh my God, it was very inspiring.

Don:

Yeah, yeah, somebody brought this up, you know, way back then. And so funny how that goes. Okay, so tell me how did you start your first business and was your first business Stealth Venture Labs?

Brent:

No. Oh, gosh, no. Oh, no, no. I've been doing stealth now for eight years, 37. So since I was about 29 and my first actual attempted business was a consulting company in college trying to convince restaurants and bars in downtown L.A. The downtown L.A. project hadn't blown up yet. They were still very buried on how to recruit and get us kids to come and drink and eat at their establishment.

And so we walked around all these green places, pitched the owners, put together a proposal. Here's we're going to do here's a plan, all that kind of stuff. We give them a proposal we didn't realize we should give a synopsis of the proposal. We gave them the proposal. They were like, Why did we pay you? You've given us everything you need.

So that business was kind of dead on arrival. And so we called it Lounge Doctors. It was never even a formal company, but that was kind of the first where I like to tweak this. My best friend at the time, who I did that with, he's gone on to start a couple of unicorn companies. He's just a really brilliant kid.

My first real company was the International Commodities Import Export business, Commodities trading. I was 22. I was just graduating with $200,000 plus of student loan debt due to the fact, as I told you about my dear friend who is co-president of the Entrepreneur Club with me at SC, he had worked in that industry the summer prior made 100 grand in sourcing lumber for a construction project in Dubai, cutting out the middleman.

And I was like, That's really interesting. I could use two of those deals. Please pay back the student loans. And so we started talking and he had some connections in the supply chain and in the buyer side, and we decided to form a company together, not knowing what we're doing. I didn't know anything about import export. I bought a Commodities Trading for Dummies, an import export book for Dummies to try to understand what terms like FOB went and X works and all that.

And we started that. And for two years we chased the money really aggressively and the goal was to make as much money as quick as possible. Then we made that money and I remember. So my lifelong dream was going to Italy. When I came to Italy, that fulfilled that dream. The radiance from the inside, out of my body of pride, happiness, fulfillment.

I mean, I feel it now looking out here at this landscape, you know, it's just there's a fulfillment, too, when you really fulfill a dream that is that is rooted in joy. So I knew what that felt like. Fast forward, I set this goal to make a certain amount of money because a $10 million deal, we celebrate it.

The next morning I wake up, I'm a millionaire. On paper quotes, and I feel the most hollow I had ever felt in my life. So from a very early age, I got to compare and contrast that the money chase money brings happiness to a certain point, but then it brings a total captured the handcuffs at times, like you need money to create freedom, of course.

But I was expected that inside out radiance that I felt when I came to Italy for the first time when I closed this big deal and it wasn't there. And that was an aha moment for me. And then the world imploded. The global financial crisis killed that business. It was Dubai with a couple of rings outside of the center.

A million became a hundred thousand. And I walked, I think with like 40 grand, 30 or 40 grand. And we shut the business down and it was one of the best things that ever happened to me because I got the opportunity to take It was my first big failure in business, in failure and growth, because the business didn't work out.

But I learned so much and I said I loved running, being entrepreneurial. I didn't love that business. I didn't want to be the guys that were the most successful there. They weren't. I didn't look up to them. They had all the fancy things, but they were miserable me. And so I got an opportunity in 2009, 2010, around that time to reinvent my entrepreneurial career at a very young age.

I was 24, 25, somewhere there, and I said, I really I was always passionate about philanthropy and giving back. And I had volunteered for the American Cancer Society. My mom had died from cancer. I really liked the model that, like the TOMS Shoes had, was kind of pioneering at the time of embedding social good into the DNA of the business.

And so I said, I want to do that and I want to use for profit business to create social impact. And that's my mission in life. And so I set out on a journey to make that my life's mission, to embed cars into my COGS. And I've been doing that ever since in a lot of different forms. I went on to start a marketplace platform for social entrepreneurs, also failed miserably.

That took four years to kind of slowly bleed out in a lot of different ways. But then again learned a lot from that. And then that's what led me into what we now do at Stealth. And here at Stealth, we founded and co-founded about ten different different brands and companies, including one here in Italy that we started and covered Italian grandmothers doing live stream pasta, making classes over Zoom. So that's kind of the arc. There's obviously a lot more in there and a lot more failure than success.

Don:

Well, I love your attitude on failing my way to success. And every time you talked about a failing thing you said and I learned. And so in my private client practice, you know, one thing I share with clients is, hey, either you win or you learn soon, and laughing is just slow or winning. Learning is winning. It's just a little slower than the pure winning. So I love that.

Brent:

So I have a saying and now we do it on my company. Every Monday. You win some, you learn something and so we do wins and then we do learning and it is over. You win some, you learn some and have done this now long enough to know that as an entrepreneur you're just a firefighter. That is failures that are your stepping stones to success and you're constantly putting out fires all around you every day.

And so, you know, we just tell ourselves we create solutions wherever we go, not if we're traveling. Doesn't matter if it's a business issue. We just we create solutions and quote unquote, failures are just those learning stepping stones.

Don:

I love that and creating solutions. I have a friend here in town. He is venture capitalist and he interviewed 40 billionaires when he started his career. And so that provide this immense amount of wealth and knowledge. Okay. So he has four children and with his four children, he's told them you will all be entrepreneurs, okay? Like from birth, you will all be entrepreneurs.

And when people hear that, they're like, Oh, that's a little heavy handed. He's like, Yeah, yeah, but listen to how I define being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is a problem solver, and that's just the way it goes. Okay, so think back across your career, okay? I'm going to ask you for a candid story I want you to share, thinking back to a hard lesson, something that when it happened was like, oh, oh, my gosh, that hurts.

But maybe now, maybe today in retrospect, you look back and you're like, Man, that needed to happen. But at the time that hurt. Do you have a hard lesson you can share with us?

Brent:

So many. We don't even have enough hours in the day to go through all this. But here's what I can tell you in the last five years of my life, I had gone through a personal renaissance of rediscovering joy, of going through a rebirth, of reconnecting to the things that matter to me and the why. And in that process, what I realized that if you do your initial if you do the timeline right or an equator exercise highs and lows, what I realized is that every single joyful moment in my life, the highest of the highs, stemmed where the seedling was the lowest of the low.

And so I've realized that the hardships are my seedlings of joy. And that realization now, because there's been so many, allows me to surrender to the universe and trust that when I'm going through hard times that there is beauty on the other side, just like the sun is always shining behind the clouds that we see in the sky may feel gray or dark or stormy, but the sun is always there.

And so the story that I'll share with you, I mean, there's a couple, but the business story is when Roost the marketplace for social entrepreneurs that I started after the commodities thing fail, it was my baby. I mean, they say don't attach yourself to your I was it it was me. I was on all the shows and I had 45 people in my cap table from my high school football coach to my brother, to my best friends, you name it.

And it was on a passionate vision to show the world that you can make a difference in a profit. We did the first one very well. The second one not so well. We had really bad margins. We didn't have any recurring revenue. I was really my first real operational business with more than a couple employees. We had 25 and when that business eventually failed because we ran out of capital, we tried to raise a series A of time.

We got our ducks in in order. The market went soft and we ran out of money and in one day all my best friends and people who worked for us that I love and I was really tired of it. I had to lay off 25 people in one day, 9 hours of check writings, handwritten checks, and go cash, as it won't be money tomorrow.

Cash, this won't be my income. And you want to talk about ambiguous loss. When you have a company like that, go under like the way that it did. I was destroyed. I was embarrassed. I was in real grief. I was in shock. I was angry. I was in denial. And I went to all five stages. And what I realized what happened in that failure of that company, I had to go through that entire journey so that at this stage of my career in life, when the stakes are even higher and I'm looking to build a family and grow and I'm not as young and have as much energy as I do when I was 25 and I'm not 60, but, you know, it starts to slowly decline and late thirties, right? And I realized that the joy of me being in the happiness that I am now, I had to go through that because the learnings that came out of it were the fundamental building blocks for everything that we've gone on to do now with Stealth.

We've now catalyzed $1,000,000,000 in M&A exits for our clients in the food industry. We've helped our clients generate $1,000,000,000 in revenue. We've done pretty well ourselves, certainly not in the billions, but I am focused now on how do we create a life, a lifestyle that is centered around joy and investing in the joy and getting return on joy or what I call the ROJ.

Right? And that all came about because the other business fail. I walked away with even more in death and I previously was embarrassed that I lost all my investors money and no financial anything. I didn't want to get a job. And so all I had was the learnings. And then as I went through the recovery of that, I eventually got married and then that marriage failed and I had to go through another heartbreak to lead me into this renaissance that I told you about because I had to get to a point where I stood on my penthouse window in San Francisco and I had all the fancy things I considered jumping because it was so

dark, right?

Because the world tells you you can do all these things and follow the program. And once you get these amount of things that success and recognition, you're happy. And I realized that I followed all of that and I still didn't get the things that wasn't promised the destination right. And so I had to recalibrate back into the things that brought me joy, those little things like going to watch a sunset or fresh fall and snow being in Italy, which I hadn't gone to in years at that time, and the moment I turned my attention on trying to achieve what the world told me I needed to achieve.

And I centered because the destination isn’t promised. And I learned that that marriage failed, the business failed, and there is no destination. So why am I waiting to invest in joy to some later date once I have a quote unquote exit? And what I did is I made a commitment to myself every single day to invest in one thing that brings me joy and that can be small, could be just today I walked to the gardens and I lay back on the grass and I looked up at the clouds like a kid and made shapes in the clouds.

They passed by what the imagination go and that's on what I call my list of joy, Right? And what happens is when you invest in those daily little things that bring you small little bits of joy, it becomes a compounding. Moore's Law, exponential growth. The fact that at first slow, but then quick, and you realize all of a sudden that the things that you're doing in your day to day are actually rooted in the things that make you smile from the inside out.

And that is all stemmed from the failure of that business where I was so devastated and destroyed and so bitter and angry and jaded and frustrated and disappointed and embarrassed all the emotions, it drove me into the lowest of the low so that I could use it as a trampoline and bring me now into orbit that I'm in, which is much more sustainable, happier.

You know, I'm not always happy, happy joy, joy. Life happens, right? But I know how to get back to to center these days.

Don:

I love that. And so my wife is one of those people who people will comment. She's joyful and it is her natural bent to be joyful. And I think that's a gift. It's not necessarily my natural bent. So I benefit from the fact that it is her personal gyroscope is kind of set that way. But, you know, about five years ago, I began this intentional daily practice of gratitude, and they're kind of interlinked.

And I'll just tell you that if a person will practice gratitude intentionally and with intention, not accidentally, but do it every day, you'll be amazed at how much more grateful you become and the more grateful I become, I trespass into joy. Now my wife is in joy.

Brent:

That's. That's it. That's it. On. It becomes a practice. People think that it's so hard or it can't do it. It's a practice. Gratitude is when you're in a state of an elevated emotion of gratitude. You the neuroscience. What happens in your brain is your brain doesn't know the difference between a future and a past event. Talking about time at the beginning of this, it's all happening in the present.

And so when you feel in a state of gratitude, even it's from the past, you're probably feeling it now. So I use gratitude all sort of daily practice, but it's also fantastic as a way to fall asleep if you're having trouble sleeping and you drop into a state of gratitude with a small little. I'm thankful for this bed, thankful for this pillow.

I'm thankful for these sheets and thankful for right and just little things. And you really are feeling grateful, right? You really get it before you get to ten things, you're asleep. And it's because the gratitude shuts the nervous system down, right? Gets you out of this cortisol and puts you in a state of bliss. And joy is the same thing as a gratitude practice.

The joy practice. It's not like sit there and grin, although there's science behind just smiling. What that does. Sure, it's about reconnecting with the things that make you smile from the inside out and usually those are things from our childhood. And then as we get older, we forget about these things. We don't allow ourselves to. We're chasing a program or whatever.

And so when I first did my first list of joy, it was very short five, ten items, and I had trouble remembering I wasn't doing anything. And it was big things like going to Italy and speaking Italian and watching sunsets. It was like, Now my list of joy. I do this every year. It's every year. It's like 170 things.

And I keep adding to it because I'm like, Oh, that brings me joy and I'm happy to resource it specific. Now it's like hearing the sound of Italian being spoken about, speaking Italian to a little Italian lady, fresh fallen snow, big snowflakes watching like, and then all of a sudden you start to tune into the things that bring you joy and then you realize it's all in your brain.

We have this little feature called the reticular activating system, the Aria through it, and it basically just says this, be aware of this. And sometimes, you know, that happens like you get a new car and all of a sudden you see that car everywhere. And what happens is when you start programing your brain into saying, be aware that this matters.

Oh, this, this brings me joy. This means you're going to start noticing it. And the more you notice it, so the happier you are. And it's not that you necessarily turn from a grouch to, Oh my God, blissful. It's just the happiness quotient, the joy quotient, Whatever I got in the inside out, you just feel better.

Don:

I'm just saying, you know, I started this gratitude thing five years ago. I released the book in December, which my fourth book now.

Brent:

I love it.

Don:

You may have a joyful book in your future, I'm just saying you got a lot more.

Brent:

Appreciate that, I'm writing it.

Don:

There you go.

Brent:

Yeah, it's going to take I'm running a couple of businesses full time. You know. So finding the white space has been a challenge to create. And what's interesting is that every day I'm building on it, right? And I'm adding new things and I'm making more because I'm never going to stop growing. And so I'll pick your brain as I really dig into it.

Don:

Sounds like you're quite the expert on writing.

Happy to share some tips I've written for five and six are in process right now. That's the first time I've been working on two at one time. Now, that may be a sign of insanity, but maybe not. It may be a sign of genius. Who knows? We'll see. But that's what I'm doing. Okay, so now we're kind of getting into the fourth turn.

The final turn. I can see the checkered flag out there. Share a nugget, something that's pure gold. And, brother, you've been really generous with your gold so far today, but share a nugget, something of pure gold that an entrepreneur could take from your career that maybe would help them in their other what you already have, which have been extremely valuable.

Brent:

You know, I think it's a continuous mission of what we're just talking about. You know, I think there's a really great tactical answer to this, which is centered on, Hey, listen to the market and adapt to the market. And that is such simple advice that is so difficult to do and follow. But I'm going to move away from the tactical and move into that spiritual with more kind of the the area that we were just talking around, around like.

So there's no dress rehearsal in life. No, this is it. We're in the main show or in the main event. We get certain chapters. We're not promised all of them. My mom died when she was 40 to guarantee you she wasn't planning on that. Right. And so in that journey that we have, what are we doing? What are we chasing and why our society is so good at beating us from a young age on what success looks like and what it means to be successful.

How much money you need to have, the things you need to do. The white picket fence with two and a half kids, the fancy car, the all these different things. When you're an entrepreneur, the TechCrunch that exits the we see that this the that right the glamour all the different stuff that comes along with what it means to be successful that we think that that's the road we should chase.

But I mean you know this as well as I do being a part of you know how many of our fellow viewers are miserable because they don't want to be in our business anymore. And it's not because they're not entrepreneurs, not creators, but they had a misaligned understanding of how they do the what in the why, but the how right became hustle and grind and hustle and grind.

And once I get there one day, then I can enjoy it. The one day is two day and that's the piece of advice that I hope I get to share with the world more and more. And it really ties into the joy. We can only control the now and we can only control the things that we put our attention.

And so I am choosing while I'm running several businesses and solving really serious problems in this kind of post-COVID world, I am choosing to invest into joy every day and invest into creating more and more of that. And it's not always easy, but I'm also choosing to say I am intention in not going the route of venture backed and this and that and chasing like I once did.

Because when I did that, I got some of the things and I got some of those places and then it all fell out from underneath me and I was left with nothing. And I had neglected my mind, my body, my soul, my family, all these different areas for so long. And that was only a five year stretch, right?

Rather than someone doing it for 20. My biggest nugget is that it's not too late to recenter on Joy and to re adjust your day to day, week to week life and operations one joyful act at a time, even if it's as little as I love sitting in the sun, having coffee in the morning. I love playing with my children.

Whatever. Right? It's the daily small compounding of facts. It's compound interest. Put it in there. You know it's compound interest, right? But with joy. And what happens there when you start to do more and more of that, It's slow at first and then speeds up and business starts to change, client starts to change, your relationships start to change, sometimes for the better.

Sometimes things have to fall off. But that is a beautiful process when rooted in things that make you smile. So I would just encourage my fellow entrepreneurs or watching partners or people that are operating and say, it's not too late to readjust your operations, your day to day, to realign with things that make you happy. Now, take that vacation, take that time with your family and a little earlier.

Turn your phone off at night. Right. Be present. Go do something that makes uncomfortable. All right. And get out of the program. It's The Matrix right out of the movie sound.

Don:

That's it. So. So maybe the title one day is today. Just saying one day is today. That's pretty powerful. Brent brother, How can we use there anything we can do for you as the proven entrepreneur tribe?

Brent:

You know, Don, you're doing it now. This was a beautiful conversation. My passion. Yes. I run a multi-million dollar firm and I have multimillion dollar brands and I had a lot of responsibilities and employees and all of that. That is important work in the world. It is my passion beyond Italy is spreading this message so people can live more of a joyful life.

So you're doing it. I think if people want to reach me, they can they can email. We do. I do respond to all of my dreams. Freeman at Stealth Venture Labs dot com supplementary Labs dot com, that's the fastest way. And then you know, if they want to work with us or whatever, that's, that's way to reach us and reach me.

And like I say we respond to all of them but the number one thing is just spreading the good word and such is the life you are.

Don:

I love that. Thank you so much for joining us today. And hey, people, remember, it's good business to do good. So do both. That's today's episode of the Proven Entrepreneur show. Thanks, Brent.

Brent:

Thanks.

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