Becoming Greater
I promise, if you go through life externally speaking, “I’m going to be rich,” without understanding why you want the riches, then there will be a tough journey ahead. You have to understand why the pull is so powerful. Even if you have a good idea of your motivation, this is going to be a hard row to hoe without the right people speaking into your life. Pursuing greatness is a lifestyle that is not going to be easy. What you are reading is not a fluff book or an assortment of conceptual hoo-haws. I have suggestions for your life that will alter your course. My recommendations will truly, genuinely work over and over again to push you past the plateau, ensuring your success.
You’ve probably already read the cover, but just in case you haven’t, I’ve successfully started and exited a dozen companies to date. The idea of growing a business is fascinating to me! My team is currently running a case study company in the automotive industry, because I feel like that industry is broken. I believe that once we are embedded into the industry, my team will be able to look for disrupting opportunities and scale.
In the last decade alone, I am single-handedly responsible for between 200 and 250 million dollars in retail sales in North America and Canada. How did this happen when as a child I was told multiple times that I didn’t even have a chance? Choosing to become greater than the circumstances that could be seen in my life was my only option. I joke with people and tell them that you could have sat in my living room and felt the wind blow. If it blew hard enough outside, you could have seen my hair blowing in the wind inside of our home. It wasn’t quite that bad, but it wasn’t far from it. Being raised in this environment gave me the springboard into my future, but it required work, preparation, planning, and taking risks.
I once heard my stepfather say to my older brother, “We are what you would consider upper-middle class.” Five kids, $60,000 a year in income, up to his eyeballs in debt, living in a household with addiction, abuse, and all the other kinds of nonsense imaginable doesn’t sound like upper-middle class to me. Looking back, my circumstances were unsurmountable for many. You may have been raised in a similar environment, or maybe your childhood consisted of picket fences and rosebushes. Either way, you deserve to learn from my upbringing. This book is to help you regardless of your foundation, regardless of where you started, regardless of what you’ve been through, and regardless of where you stand today. This book is designed and written with one goal in mind: to show you that wealth is extremely possible and easily duplicatable if you’re willing to do the work. Your future is in your hands. Take my knowledge, and grow into your greatness.
You can’t build on the concepts and guesses of men.
You have to start with a solid:
FOUNDATION
If you can’t create a strong mental foundation, the things you attempt to build will crash around you.
Turning A Corner
It was the beginning of 2016, and it had been about six months since I had sold my last company. A 220 seat smokehouse, a restaurant, bar and grill, very high-end, very beautiful, very... just a great little business. This restaurant was the final business in my portfolio. You see, 24 months prior to closing on that property and that business, I had six functioning companies at one time. Unfortunately, I had lost my passion for nearly every one of them. I found myself getting into businesses because I could. I thought they were quality companies because I thought they would make good money. It was in 2015 that, unbeknownst to me, I had lost my entrepreneurial passion.
In the beginning of November 2015, I sold the final company, the Brickhouse Bar & Grill. Within the six month time period after selling my restaurant, I thought, “I have enough passive income, commercial real estate, apartment buildings, a stake in a small trucking company owned by my father-in-law, that I could just retire.” There would be enough income to pay my bills indefinitely with just a little bit of maintenance. The properties would increase in value and I would wait. As additional properties became available I would snatch those up as well. I would continue to build this little nest egg of properties that would eventually create a great foundation. These properties would just continue to build equated wealth in myself, my family, and my companies. However, in respect to all operational distribution, product, and retail companies, I made a conscious decision to exit them all.
At this point I had just a little bit of maintenance and nothing but time on my hands, so I was in the very best shape of my life physically. Nonetheless, I was bored. I was so bored in fact, I toyed with an idea that I knew was a gimmick. There were these people running around offering me an opportunity. The pretend-to-be-in-business song and dance, known as multi-level marketing, that offered quick money. By the way I just worded that, you can probably tell that I don’t necessarily believe in this model. I think it’s really great and serves a role in the marketplace, but it is not for me. I will chat more specifically later in the book specifically on MLMs, or multi-level marketing. For the sake of this story, I can just tell you that two school teachers were crushing a multi-level marketing company in my little community of 5000 people.
This dynamic duo were in a company called Nerium. A face cream was the primary product they sold at the time I decided to join. I made the decision to join this company and sprint. I wanted to see what I could accomplish. Now several months prior, right when I sold the Brickhouse, I bought myself a position in this company but didn’t do anything. I told the two teachers I would pay for the membership if the they would just leave me alone. I thought they would get some commission and stop bothering me. At that point, I had no plans of being an active member of a multilevel marketing company. I paid for the membership in November. By March, I was bored and thought, “What the hell? Let’s just see what happens.”
So for the next 40 days, I sprinted at this MLM. I built an organization of about 380 people. I qualified for commissions right at $20,000. I was featured as the top recruiting agent inside of the company. A little blurb in their version of Success Magazine said, “Number one, Michael and Joy Munsterman!” Because of this, I flew out to an event hosted by Nerium, and they introduced me to all the top performers. I met people who had been in the company for a really long time. They introduced me to the rollers and the wheels of the brand. I had crowds of people gathering around me to hear what caused my success, and it was simple. I was just working my tail off.
I was cordially invited to sit in the front few rows amongst the crowd of all of these people who were jacked. I hadn’t entirely earned my spot there yet, but I was on route to in the next 90 days. I looked behind me at everybody else in attendance, and I saw a sea of people who wanted it so badly but didn’t know how to actually get it. I immediately felt hollow. In the 24 months prior to that moment, I had exited a company that did $48 million in gross sales in its best year. I had just under 400 employees from coast to coast, with manufacturing in Vietnam, in Taiwan, and in mainland China. I was importing products and distributing them through fortune 500 companies like Tractor Supply Company and Ace Hardware. I had been negotiating deals with companies like Lowe’s America and getting product placement in Lowe’s Canada. I had been negotiating with Canadian Tire company and many others. I had went from this incredible business to sitting three rows deep from the stage at a multilevel marketing event with a bunch of hype and hoorah. I was surrounded by people who wanted to taste real business but didn’t know the path. I was empty.
I faked it; no one around me knew. Only one person could see the dead space in my eyes, and that was my wife. So I got back home from the event, and I made a decision. I’m not going to do anything in this company for 30 days, and I want to see what happens. When I left for this convention there were 392 active people in my downline, people who wanted to sprint, wanted to be successful, wanted to have a business, and wanted to drive and hustle. Only a couple of those 392 are still in the company from the last I heard. The teachers who recruited me made some excuses about the company and left. Now they are onto anothe
r MLM company, and they continue to blast the internet with why they love relationship marketing.
The truth is, if those same people would invest in themselves and if they’d experienced what I experienced, they would realize that they’re eating tasteless food. It will never be their legacy. It will never be their story. It will never be their results. It will always just be somebody else’s company, and they will forever, in one capacity or another, still be working for a higher boss, as long as they continue down the path of multilevel marketing. This perfect machine is designed for people who want to be in business for themselves. It is created for the few elite who can actually operate at scale and capacity; those few can go in and make a ton of money. However, they have to look in the mirror every day and know they are faking value through over-hyped products that require an 800% markup. **Side-note: 800% markup is the number that was given to my by the founder of HERBALIFE, a well known nutrition company that seen its heyday in the early to mid 2000’s before going public. That means every product you purchase through MLM has been marked up 800%. Compare that to a space heater you would purchase at your local hardware store that has around a 25-40% markup.
MLM want-repreneurs stare in the mirror and recognize they are taking advantage of people that just want a better life. They look across the table from people and say, “You can do this.” MLMs know entirely well that the eager, yet ignorant people, cannot actually make any money. Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t even want to call them ignorant. They’re good people, they just don’t realize they don’t have the capacity to succeed in an MLM. Knowing what it takes to build to that level, the MLM representative is looking across the table at a lady who’s going to give them a large percentage of her nest egg, knowing that she can’t perform, knowing she’ll never reach what she hopes she can reach. The innocent victim is sitting there hoping she can create additional income for her life.
My wife saw that dead space in my eyes. She saw in my eyes that there was no way that this was long-term for me. She knew that I needed to remind myself that I was designed to hunt. I need to know that I was designed to scale, that I was designed to lead, that I was designed to coach, to teach, and to mentor. She could clearly see that I was dying on the vine.
An Unexpected Video
One Saturday morning I woke up with no reason to get up. Typically, when I’m actively pursuing a venture, I’m a 5:00 A.M. guy. I’ll talk more about that in a future chapter. However, when you don’t have any hustle, anything to grind, anything to scale, anything to pursue, there’s no reason to get out of bed before 7:00 A.M. On that particular morning I realized my wife had stayed up late Friday night on her phone. I wasn’t sure what she was up to and I fell asleep. When I woke up, it was twenty minutes before seven. Out of habit, I looked at my phone, that’s what most of us do, the very first thing we roll out of bed, we look at our phones. Some of us use the bright light of our phone to jumpstart our brain. I’m definitely guilty of that.
I looked at my phone and I had a message from my wife, a Facebook message. I clicked on messenger and I went into the app. I clicked on her name and it was a link to a video. I thought, “Well she’s laying in bed asleep, I want to see what this video is.” It was Wake Up Warrior, the have it all lifestyle. I thought “interesting.” Immediately, I go in the other room to get more information. I click on the link and it’s an hour-long video of a guy by the name of Garrett J. White. He is standing on a bridge in Las Vegas ranting about how more than likely I was a one-dimensional douchebag. He was calling me and every other married businessman that might have stumbled onto this video a pussy. It intrigued me. I thought, “This guy, he’s standing on a bridge and he’s screaming at me telling me that I am broken.’”
It clicked, “Why would my wife send this video to me?” There was tons of profanity in it. My wife is not interested in profanity. She’s not into profanity at all. It’s not her bag, and this guy’s dropping F-bombs, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Then it dawned on me, “She knows that I’m sad. She knows that currently in my life I’m a caged lion who is unable to hunt and unable to perform at my full capacity. My food is being brought to me every day. It’s being dropped at my feet.” Money was rolling in. We had long forgotten the days of want or need, or worrying about, “Will we ever run out of money?” We had gotten to a point where income was just coming. It was literally income-ing. It was everything I thought that I needed and it was happening. Unfortunately, I was dead inside, and she knew it.
At the end of this video, this guy says, “Apply below to secure your spot in Warrior Week.” I could not resist. I had to learn more. It just so happened that I ended up being in Warrior Week 28. I flew out to the beaches of Laguna for the week. I went through what Garrett affectionately refers to as the crucible; five days of being fully submerged in an experience that was designed to break you. Then with you broken, he shows you some insights and some realities. Not insights and realities to the outside world but insights and realities to your world, to your heart, to what you want, who you are, who you’re designed to be, but mostly who it’s okay for you to be. It was a lesson that I needed. He was the mentor that I needed.
Becoming a Warrior
That process, that week, that ticket, that crazy expensive experience changed me. Inside of the seven days traveling to and back from Warrior I spent more than most people make in a year. I did that so that I could run with a group of men that were as powerful or more powerful than myself. I have a place where I could speak openly about successes, wins, failures, and not worry about being judged. This week provided to me an outlet where I can converse without worrying about somebody coming at me or without worrying about somebody having professional jealousy. Having a group to listen without worrying about somebody giving me advice because they were biased and their opinion actually had weight in an area. Warrior gave me a group of true entrepreneurs to have fellowship that was not a relative, not a family member, not a wife, not a kid, not a brother, not a sibling, not just a warm body. These were just men who were in the same sprint searching for the same thing I was; permission to hunt.
When I stepped onto the beaches of Laguna for the first day, we had been given very specific instructions on the gear that we needed to bring. Combat boots, BDUs, t-shirts that were logo’d specifically for the event. Black head to toe. We were brought out, no watches, nothing weird on your wrists. No rings allowed. Our thought was very much we were getting ready to do a workout, but we weren’t dressed like we were gonna work out. Combat boots and BDUs typically not workout attire for civilians. They rushed us out into a line where they made us recite Invictus.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
We had to recite it quickly. There were guys yelling at us. We couldn’t misstep. Then we were blind folded and taken by van to a grinder mat. If you don’t know what a grinder mat is, a grinder mat’s essentially just a great big hard surface. They had put some rubber workout material down that could get wet, and they started football drilling us. “Run in place. Drop to the ground. Do push ups. Jump up. Do a burpee. Jump up. Get on your back. Get on your feet. Do more pushups. Do some sit ups. Do more pushups. Plank. Do bear squats. Go.” On and on this went. Next we heard the fire hose come on, or some kind of a high pressure hose that started to spray us. We are in
what I would consider non-water-wearing attire getting sprayed with water. Boots are getting wet. Faces getting wet. Clothes, pants, underwear, socks, everything getting very, very wet, and we’re just continuously grinding and grinding and grinding on the grinder.
Finally I hear, because we’re still blindfolded, I hear some of the coaches coming and grabbing different people. I could hear them taking people away and bringing them back. Continuously taking them away and bringing them back, taking them away and bringing them back. At this point, I had no idea where they were going. In fact, I thought that they had forgot about me. Suddenly I felt a hand grab my arm. The guy literally said to me, “You didn’t think we forgot you, did you? Follow me.” He guided me not very far, about 25 or 30 paces from where I was standing. I could still hear the guys working out in the background.
Why?
Revelations of an Ice Bath
This voice says to me, “Why are you here?” This answer was simple. I was broken. I knew that I needed a new hustle. I needed a new venture, and I wanted to figure out what industry was next. I simply said, “I’m here for business.” He said, “Very good. Raise your left foot, and step forward for me. Be careful.” I raised my left foot, and I stepped forward. “Go ahead and put your foot down.” I set my foot down, and it went into an ice bath. It went into a freaking ice bath, knee deep and it was freezing. I thought, “Holy shit, this is cold.”
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