Stoke Your Entrepreneurial Finesse with Patrick Bet-David

What's working on purpose anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on purpose. Now Here is your host, Doctor Elise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose Program. Thanks for tuning in again this week. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez, joining you live from Dallas, Texas, which is home based for me. If you've been tuning in for a while, then you know this program is a thought leadership series that enlightens it inspires us with insights from distinguished business leaders and subject matter experts. Our conversations are designed to make you think, inspire to ever, retire for cultivating your best, and take an informed approach towards leadership and business. Our guest today is Patrick Bett David, a prolific content creator, producer, author and CEO. Of both PHP Agency and Value Attainment Media. He's the author of the soon to be released book called Your Next Five Moves, Think Clear, Solve, Faster, Scale bigger, and achieve your vision as an entrepreneur. We'll be talking about his book and a few of the key concepts that caught my attention that I think will fundamentally alter your course for the better. If only you'll lean in and listen generously. You do it today from Dallas, Texas. Patrick, welcome to Working on Purpose. It's good to be honest, so great to share you with my listeners. I can't wait. It's my turn to share you. You're ready, Yes, let's go. Okay, Well, there is so much that goes into this being of Patrick Bett David, and of course you know I'm one of your four million fans. So I want to open the conversation if we can, Patrick, by just presence some of the things that I really appreciated about you, and those include an immigrant who makes America great, a trailbazing entrepreneur, business leader, a chief educator of business, someone who has a well earned the right to call himself and make his father proud that you have the name that David. Those are just a few of the things that I want to talk about the game. Yes, let's go. Okay, Well, let's start with your heritage and just how it is you came to the United States. It's such an amazing story. I wish I had more time for you to tell all the details. But talk to us about what it was like to leave your country of Tahan, Iran and just literally in the nick of time coming here, getting settled, going to the army, your early career as in financial services. So so I was obviously born and raised in Iran. I lived there ten years. And one of the things about us in Iran is we would we would dream about one day coming to America, to the point where every time somebody got their green card, or somebody was going to Austria to come to us, or somebody was going to Spain, France or Germany to come to us, we would put a big party for them, and everybody would go there, and you are happy for them, was secretly envious because you can't wait to come over here. And so while I was living there, I was going to school. Six weeks after Whomny died, my parents just got sick of it. They were worried because they thought they were not going to let me leave the country and I'd be forced to serve the military. They said we have to leave, so we eventually escaped. We went to Germany. I lived at a refugee camp in Germany for nearly eighteen nineteen months, and then we came over here to the States November twenty eight, nineteen ninety. When I went to the airport, I was looking for Rocky. I couldn't find Sylvester Stallone. He was. I thought all the Hollywood celebrities would be lined up when we arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport, but that was not the case. Eventually ended up in Glendale, California. Lived there for a few years, and right after high school, I joined the Army Hunter first Airborne Division air Assault. I got out of the military. My plans were to be a bodybuilder, almost like a Middle Eastern Arnold Win mister Olympia, going to Hollywood. Mary Kennedy eventually become a governor. But I met a woman in Venice Beach who her and I started dating, and she was working on Morgan Stanley Dean Widder at the time, and she would always pick me up in a different car, and I said, what do you do for a living? She says, I work at Morgan Stanley. I said, how do you work over there? She says, well, I want to UCLA. I said, I want to work at Morgan Stanley. She said they don't hire people without a four year degree. I said, I'm not going to college. So eventually, long story short, I took my resume at the time, which was quite impressive. It had Burger King on it, Bob's Big Boy Hoggen does the US Army and Bally Total Fitness without a four year degree or an associate's degree. And at that time we used to fax resumes. I ended up faxing my resume to one hundred different offices and branches with it was Morgan, Meryl, Schwab, Goldman, Smith, Barney, everybody. And my cover letter had my best joke at the time, and at the bottom of the joke it said, if you're laughing, this is exactly how my clients are going to film when they do business with me. They're gonna love me. If you want somebody like me on your team, give me a call. And once I faxed the resume and the cover letter, I got thirty callbacks. Fifteen of them said, very creative, but you're not qualified. The other fifteen gave me interview offers, went to the interview, and then eventually three of them gave me a job offer at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. I took Morgan Glendale a day before nine to eleven, which was a Monday, was my first day, got my serious seven sixty six, twenty six life and help all the licenses, and then eventually I left them, went to Transamerica, and then October and I started my own insurance agency and grew that from sixty six agents to now over fifteen thousand agents nationwide, and somewhere along the line by Attainment got started. Well, yeah, okay, so I want to talk about this is just so great, Patrick. Anybody listening to this, it's got to be leaning in going, oh my gosh, how do I get more of that? Well, your book and this conversation is going to give them more of that. But I don't want to skip over the fact that you are an entrepreneur or you came to the United States as you did. You just shared that and you started this company when you were twenty nine years old. Patrick, that's crazy it's amazing and that you convinced those sixty six agents to join you then and what you're doing today. So for the rest of you didn't catch that. So it started. Then, has sixty six agents start? Now you have thirteen thousand agents with one hundred and twenty offices in forty nine states, in Puerto Rico. In your vision is to be the largest field marketing organization with a global force of five hundred thousand agents by twenty thirty nine. So paint the picture for us. Why does this vision so compel you? So the number you took from the website, thirteen hundred and twenty offices, that was a few months back. We're at fifteen thousands. Now, fifteen thousand with one hundred and thirty plus, which means I need to get on my website. Person two, Yeah, I keep up. Patrick. You know, you know, the thing for me was very simple. I just have no desire to do anything that's small. And here's why, here's why. Let me explain it, so this makes sense to everybody. When we came to the States, I was a guy who you know, when I turned eighteen, I went to the army. All I wanted to do was party. That's all I did. I was just a party guy. I always wanted to go out have a good time, you know, five days a week you'd find me at a nightclub or at a bar. And then eventually my dad ended up having a heart attack. I went to UCLA Medical Center to check on this guy, and my dad and I are best friends at this point. And when I was at the hospital, I was kicked out because I made a mess. I was upset because they were not taking care of him, and I didn't like the food they brought him. Finally, the lady calls the security. They come upstairs to kick me on. They say, listen, who are you to tell us what to do? This is a government hospital. You know you're not paying for this. Taxpayers are paying for this. And I got kicked out, so I go downstairs. I'm sitting in my two thousand and two fourth Focus. I'm six four six five, I barely fit in this Ford Focus. But I'm sitting in my Ford Focus and I'm crying like a little baby, and I'm asking myself how much longer is this going to be continuing? And then that same year, I went to a Christmas party with my dad and a lot of our relatives were kind of looking down at my family. Well you know what, you know, Patrick and the bid David family, and my dad was kind of working at a ninety nine cent store. And I've never liked people to feel bad or feel sorry for the family. I've never I've never been a fan of that. I don't want to anybody think we're victims or anything. So when the family started kind of making fun of my dad and our family at the Christmas party, I said, listen, I'm sorry, you don't talk about our family this way and that, Oh, we're just joking. We're kidding. I said, yeah, you don't joke with me being around, nor do you joke about my dad who did so much for you guys. Patrick, it's just a joke. It's Christmas. I said, no, we're leaving. My DA's like, we're not leaving. I said, Dad, we're leaving. We're not here to be a laughing stock for anybody. So we left. We got in the car for thirty minutes. On the way back, I told my dad, I said, the world is going to know our last name now. At this point, I'm twenty six years old. The only people that know who I am is the local community of financial advisors because I have a reputation in LA at the time. But nothing more, nothing less. I said, watch what's going to happen? Set the family down. I said, We're going to go out there and do something where everybody is going to know your last name, Pops. They're gonna know what bid David last name is and how many sacrifices you made. Long story short, long story short. That happens once I get into the financial industry and we start PHP. I just told myself, if we're gonna do something, we're not going to do something small. If I wanted to do something small at to stay where I was at, We're only doing it to do something that's never been number for And that number was five hundred thousand licensed stagents by twenty twenty nine, and for somebody to like me who came to America with the dream of one day. You know, America is all about the dream, right you leave you around, you come to America hoping to live that American dream. And to live that American dream, it starts through entrepreneurship or entrepreneurship, and I chose to go the entrepreneur route first and then I became the entrepreneur, and then when I got up on stage, I said We're gonna have a hal Familion licensed st agents in front of sixty six people. They thought I was nuts, but enough of them believed in us, and we've made some progress from there to where we are today. Progress to be celebrated, and you know I revere it, which is why one of the many reasons I wanted to have you on the show and share you Patrick. Okay, So the next thing I want to talk about is you're a media celebrity and a chief educator, and I have to situate this for our listeners, and that you know, you didn't go through the formal education system, and I think that's probably part of the reason you've become so successful as you are today. But you started in twenty thirteen making two minute videos about what worked for you in business. You put them on YouTube. You've got sixty subscribers, as I understand it, that first year. Then you change the name from your own to Value Tame It, and three years later you grew into one hundred thousand subscribers. Now I looked yesterday, it looks like you have two point three million subscribers on YouTube. So you are a content creator maniac Patrick, Where does all that come from? All the energy this has to create all that content? So originally, you know, you know, for me, I'm all about seeing if I actually have a product. Meaning when we first started creating content, I told myself and I told Mario, I said, if there is not an audience for the topics I'm talking about, we're not going to do it, because you know, I'm just not going to be doing that. I just want to make sure there's an audience sport. So once I got specific about what the word we're going to create content for, which was entrepreneurs things change. Because we were originally wide, which means we were talking about so many different topics. Then I said, we're gonna go to narrow and all we're going to talk about is entrepreneurship. Then we created momentum, and then we are, well we are today. Obviously, my main motivation with creating content was I was hoping that there was a channel out there that I would want to have at the age of twenty six, twenty seven, twenty eight and say I'm running a business that's doing a million dollars or five million dollars per year, and I want to figure out a way how to get that business to ten one hundred million dollars per year. I wanted the channel that did that, and that's exactly how the Ataman got created and once I realized that there was an audience for it. And by the way, it takes a lot of effort to create content. To have a business that you're running with employees, with investors, with attorneys, with carriers, with partners, with a wife, with three kids, with family friends, trying to stay in shape, reading, exercising, all of that stuff takes a lot of effort. But you know, the audience energizes you. And the more I learned, the more excited I get to want to share more content with the audience, and obviously it's turned into what it is today. Yeah, And I think one of the ways that we can also prove, if you will, that there's some real residence for people, is that you manage in your first big conference in May of last year, twenty nineteen, to attract six hundred entrepreneurs from forty three different countries one hundred and forty industries. And it looks like you had to postpone this one or canceled this one this year, But that's your that was your first big conference and you got those numbers. Yeah, it was actually very interesting to know. You know, there's a different between having content and you put an events again and you're charging yeah, thousand, five thousand, ten thousand orders for tickets, and people showed up from all over the world, and you know, businesses running a million a year, two all the way up to a half a billion a year. End. Very very excited to see what happened there. And obviously we were looking for this year's because this year's we were anticipating four thousand, but the pandemic threw us a curveball, so we have to make some adjustments with it. I appreciate that very much in respect your choice there. Okay, so the last thing I want a presence for our listeners that I really appreciate about Ji Patrick. There's many things I could go on and say, but for this, for the sake of time, I really appreciate the father, friend, and mentor you are to so many. I hear people over and over again remark about your incredible ability to remember their details, their issues when they come to you with something. People maybe you have met one time, and you take all of these mentees on. You've got this huge focus on helping other people. So the first thing I want to understand you just presence for us what your world is like. How do you get the energy to be of such service to so many other people? And how do you summon that ferocity to do it? Yeah? I mean it must matter to you. You know. For instance, I can't go up. Some people can play video games for hours and they just really enjoy doing I can't do it for ours. I used to play festers Quest and Zelda and Mario, you know, Final Fantasy decades ago, but I have no desire for it today. My desire today is what I'm doing. When I got two points, when I got clear for myself, the biggest thing for me was clary. Clarity gives you so much confidence that words can't even describe. I got clear out of point where I said, okay, pot the first twenty years of your life is to learn about human nature, experiences and try to not make any massive mistakes. And your first twenty years, you know, not a felony, don't go to jail, don't try to do anything that's going to totally ruin your career. Make some mistakes, but not the big ones that's going to cost you a lot. So the second phase of my life I was to find an industry and find a skill and a trade that I can get very good at and get behind it. So I found the financial industry. I've always liked numbers and I love people, so I said, I'm gonna go do this for twenty years. I know a lot of people will say things like, I'll try it out for six months, I'll try it out for two years or five years, Let's see how it does. I said, I'm going twenty years. And the reason why I said I'm going twenty years is because too often I see people will go from industry to industry to industry to industry, and every single time they're about to experience momentum, they leave it because they hit a wall and it's frustrating, and they hit a plateau and they say, you know what, I don't think this industry is for me. So then they go to another industry. Then they go to another industry, and they go to another industry, and what they're not able to maximize is that momentum, the compounding effic effect, the massive momentum that builds up and all of a sudden makes an average person look like a rock star they don't experience. So for me, you know, the energy came from having a vision that excites me every morning when I wake up. And once that vision excites me, and I got clear on what I could do, and I got confident about my abilities, then I found the right people. Then the rest was to ask myself how big do we want to build this? Do we want to be a regional market? Do we want to be a statewide you know, people know us in the state of California? Do we want to be national? How big do we want to build this poppy here? And you know, that's kind of the next question you ask, and you say, what is the level where you're comfortable with? What are you confident with? Where are we going to be content with? And then at that point, when you start winning and making money, that's when you really realize how big you think, because it's easy to say I think very big when you're making fifty thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars and you start making a quarter million dollars a half a million dollars, Then to make a million dollars your income. You've got nice cars parked in a garage and a fifteen thousand score foot home. You've been all over the world, visited forty countries. You've had dinner with the most strangest people and personalities that you've admired. Now, why do you want to work even harder? That's when you kind of hit a wall. So this is why my basic business success model comes down to model comes down to four different things. Number one is outwork, but most people think it's just work. It can work and still not be the best. Number two is out improve, but you can outwork and out improve and you still won't be the best. Number three is out strategize. But you can outwork and out improve and outstrategize your peers, and you still could not be the best. Because the last one is very hard, and the last one is outlast. Most people can't last. When you compete with somebody in a game, in any business, you're playing, in sports and the war and military, it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's in a capitalistic nation like the one we're living in at least we're currently living in. Is you outwork, you out improve, you outstrategize, and if you show that you're willing to tolerate pain more than your competitors, Eventually one day you're gonna look around. You're gonna say, wait a minute, we're officially the biggest out there in the marketplace. How did this happen because of those four criterias? Okay, listen to you all day long, but on that now, let's grab our first break. I'm Elease Cortez. Were in the air with Patrick Bett David, who is a prolific content creator, producer, author and CEO of both PHP Agency and Value Attainment Media. He's the author of the soon to be released book called Your Next Five Moves, Think Clear, solve faster, skill bigger, and achieve your vision as an entrepreneur. He joined today from Dallas, Texas. We've been talking a bit about his approach and some of the things that really distinguish him as a businessman as a human being. After the rake, we're going to talk about a few of the key technical tools that I took from this book that I think will really help you. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Doctor Release Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Leise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise Alis at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on purpose if you're just joining us. My guest is Patrick That David a prolific content creator, producer, author and CEO of both PHP Agency and Value Tainment Media. He has cultivated an extremely engaged organic fan basic over four million followers across five media platforms, and as an unapologetic and thought provoking approach to education, conversations and business. I'm your host, doctor Lee's Cortez. So for this segment, Patrick, I just want to focus on a few of what I considered to be the technical tools that you give in your book. And I first want to say, I think you have given us a gift. Oh my gosh, how you crafted this incredibly tight book. It's full of inspiration all kinds. I think it represents a lifetime of your lessons as a human being and as a businessman. So, first, you got plenty of other things to do. Why did you write this book? And what do you hope it does for its readers? So the reason why I wrote this book is because you know, I was sitting down watching this guy play chess, and Magnus Carlson, who young phenom, comes up and he becomes the best grand master in the market place. Everybody's following this guy. How's it beating everybody? He became this incredible story and one of the quotes they talked about knowing he knows his next fifteen moves. A grand master knows his next fifteen moves. And I sat there and I said, you know, it's interesting. Every time I do any kind of business planning, I'll sit there and I'll grab a paper and pen. I'd like to be around on a board and have a marker to write on, but I also have a paper and pen on the side, and I'll list out issues, challenges, enemies, problems, allies, everything and the big goal that we have in mind of what we want to do, and then from there we work on our next steps on what we need to do. Sometimes the challenge about making the next steps that we need to put in place is the sequence. Meaning people generally have the right idea of what they want to do and what they want to achieve, but the sequencing of their next moves is why they don't achieve it. For example, a lot of times people are tempted to do move nineteen on move three. When you make move nineteen on move three, you've done it so far ahead that you could take a massive hit and end up taking steps back because of not being patient enough on when you make your move number nineteen. When you're playing the game of chess, there's certain moves you make. There's certain moves you don't make right up front because one, you know you're not ready for it. Number two, you don't want to disclose it to the appointed too early because if you do, he knows exactly what you're getting ready to do. And the last one is just because you still haven't developed yourself to be strong enough to make that next final move that you want to make. So I wrote this book because we were sitting around and talking to our peers and they were asking, Pat, how do you come up with your next moves? Every time you say you're going to be doing something, you come out with a strategy. Start an insurance agency, you do this, and you start a YouTube channel, and you went from nobody knowing what you were doing and one of the toughest platforms to create subscribers on. It's not Instagram or you know some of Facebook. It's very hard to do it on YouTube because YouTube is demands a lot of solids. It's very challenging on YouTube, and we were able to create that kind of a content. Well, I said, it's because of these next five move strategies that I use. So typically it's fifteen moves, but the book The Way was written. It was broken down into five moves, with each of them having three different chapters to write about. So it's a total fifteen chapters in the five moves. And so somebody could read this book and they could say, you know what, I don't know if I want to be an entrepreneur, I want to be an entrepreneur. I don't know if I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to be a solopreneur. I don't know if I want to be solopreneur. I want to be a number six in a company, and I don't want to have all the pressures. I don't even want to be a president. I just want to be a person in the company that brings value and hopefully i'll get some equity, and when the company has an exit, I get my six hundred thousand dollar check or two million dollars check or ten million dollar check or look, I don't want to be the founder, but I want to work in shadow under somebody and learn so much from him or her and eventually ask that person that, hey, I want to now be the CEO of the company or the president of company, and give me two percent the company. And so if the company sells, you get a fifty million dollar check or a twenty million dollar check, or a hundred million dollar check, or even for a gain of like Steve Ballmer your work fifty nine billion dollars and he was never an entrepreneur. He was an entrepreneur for you know, Bill Gates. So the key is knowing who you want to be, and then knowing the kind of a life you want to live, and then, based on who you want to be in the life you want to live, map out exactly your next five, ten, fifteen moves on how to get there. That was so crisp. There's so much more I could ask about that. I do want to try to get a couple of those specific tools that you offer in your booking before we go to our next segment, which is more about on the conceptual level. So I do want to if you would please, Patrick, that personal identity audit that you talk about, I think is so critical, and I think either you developed it from what was you got from somebody else, But help us understand why it works so well in getting to understand who we are and where we want to be, who we want to be in life. You know, it's crazy, is most of us spend our entire lives studying other people. You study George Washington, you study you know, Alexander the Grade. We end up studying all these philosophers. We study everybody except for one person. We don't study ourselves. And if we don't study ourselves, how are we supposed to move ourselves. If you don't study yourself, no wonder so many people are insecure because everybody is studying everybody else, thinking they have to be like everybody else to be good enough. And you constantly compare you're bad too, they're good, and you fall apart and you play defense, you don't play offense. You kind of hide. You don't want to be around people because what if they find out your weaknesses versus if you sit there and do it the other way around, and you take a time out and you study yourself and you take these questions, which I went through, and it brought out the worst sides of me, the weaknesses I have, my flaws, my insecurities. And I finally sat there and I said, listen, it's all good. This is you. I'm fine with this. It's fine. Why you know this happened in your life that led to this. So I did these questions years ago and eventually got me to get so clear of who I wanted to be, and I was so confident and comfortable amount of skin and eventually that helped me get to the next level. And by the way, this is coming from a guy that had given up on everything in life, and I thought military was just a route for me because it offered me good benefits. That was literally my decision. I said, I'm going to go in the army because they give you a good salary. They give you a good salary was twelve hundred dollars a month, they give you place to live, they give you benefits. They're going to give me a GI bill and later on my kids are going to get the benefits, and I'm going to meet my wife in the military. That's how small I was thinking. And then I asked the tougher questions. I get out and I said, wait a minute, maybe I can do something bigger with my life. So the personal identity question, it was built for people to be able to ask the tough questions of themselves, and by them going through those questions, it empowers them and encourages them to want to take the next necessar sery steps gorgeous and then along that line to be I would say, the next extension of that is you discovered four ways that people are generally driven, and that gets to motivation, and that you talk about the importance of each of us understanding what drives us so that one we can steward that for ourselves. And two, if you're trying to manage somebody, recognize what drives them. Will you say a little bit about those four drivers? Yeah, so the four drivers. You know, I lead an organization with fifteen thousand people, and one of the things I learned the hard way is the fact that you can't motivate everybody the same way. Not everybody is driven by the same thing. I remember I was working on Morgan Stanley Dean wooter and I was twenty one years old, and I got up in front of a client group of clients and I said, you know, can you imagine if one day you have a Ferrari and you have a house on Pebble Beach and you're living in this ten thousand scoreful house on the water, and you're traveling all over the world. And I'm saying all this stuff, except my audience, the average age was six five years old. They could care less about a ferrari, They could care less about a bigger house, they could care less about a waterfront property. They want security, freedom, peace of mind. And I was speaking to the wrong audience. And then I went to a different audience, and in front of the other audience, they were in their early twentieth college graduates just finished everything, and here I am speaking to them and saying, can you imagine if one day you have a retirement plan with an annuity that pays you a stream of income for the rest of your life, and you're able to spend the time with your grandkids and sitting there and you listen to the conversations and they're looking at me bored out of their minds, because what twenty three year old is thinking about retirement? None of them are. So I learned about how to move myself based on what drives me at the different stage I'm at. So let me kind of give you an idea about some of these things that drive people. There's twenty different things and they're broken down into four different areas. First one is people that are driven by advanced For example, there are those that all they want to do is what's the next promotion I need to get? Okay, I went from being an employee to assistant manager to a manager. Now I'm a director, Now I'm a VP of operations, now I'm a CEO, and I'm a president. What do I need to do because I want my next promotion. There are those that like to complete tasks. There are those that like to meet deadlines, and there are those that like to reach a goal as a team. That's advancement. Individuality are those who want lifestyle, cars, homes, jewelry, clothes. They're driven by lifestyle, recognition and security. I want to be secured. It's I. I want to be recognized. I want to live a big life. It's a lot of I right, and again nothing wrong with that. Next one is madness. These are people that are driven by opposition. They want an enemy. I know this sounds weird to some people if you're not driven by but if you're one like this, you know exactly what I'm talking about. They want an opposition, they want competition, they want control. They have to be in control of what they're doing. They want to experience is power and fame. And by the way, if somebody's listening to the same, what a narcissistic type of an individual desist? Well if you think of them that way, Just so you know, many big companies and great teams are built by these people. If you don't know how to lead them, these are the kind of people that you want on your team. Only if you know how to lead them, so opposition, competition, control, power, and fame, proving others wrong. They need to avoid embarrassment, mastery, and desire to be the best, meaning they want to break records. And the last one is those who are driven by purpose, making history, helping others change, impact, enlightenment, and self actualization. So when you listen to this, you may say, well, the twenty seven year old version of me was about individuality. Well, the thirty four year old version of me it was madness. The forty four year old version of me was about advancement, and quite frankly, today I'm about purpose. It evolves. You're not going to be the same phase for the rest of your life. It changes as life changes. But it's important for you to know one which one of these dry you today and two what drives your people. And if you can figure those two things out, the rest is history. Beautiful Patrick, very Chris, and a perfect way to take us into our last break. I'm your host, Elise Cortez. We don't there with Patrick Bette David, who was a prolific content creator, producer, author and CEO of both PHP Agency and Value Tainment Media. He's the author of the soon to be released book called Your Next Five Moves, Think Clear, solve faster, scale bigger, and achieve your vision as an entrepreneur. You joined today from Dallas, Texas. After the break, we're going to hear more about some of the concepts in this book that I think are quite riveting. Stay with us, we'll be right back. Doctor Release Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise ali se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on purpose. If you're just tuning in, my guest is Patrick Bett. David A. Prolific content creator, producer, author, and CEO of both PHP Agency and Value Tainment Media. He has cultivated an extremely engage or genig fan base of over four million followers across five media platforms. There's an unapologetic and thought provoking approach to education, conversations, and business. I'm your host, Alice Cortez. Before we get into some of the conceptual bit that you put in your book that I thought was so compelling, patrol, let me just give our listeners one more thing from the technical piece that I thought was so amazing, and that's the concept of solving for X decision making. Will you share that? Yes? So, everything I look at is looking at the problem from software X. Meaning in high school, when you were doing math that was X plus y equals nine, you'd figure out what why is? If why is six? We already know what X is XS three? Right, everything in life I like to look at it from the lens of solving for X. So the more and more questions I ask, I finally realize what the real problem is that we're facing. You know, a lot of times we're just like, oh my gosh, I lost the customer. What do I do? Well? Ask the right question. But what kind of questions do I ask? Why did you lose the customer? You know, we lost the customer. Why, Well, because the competing products cost less? Why does it cost less because it has fewer features? Why does it have future features? Because most customers don't need all the features in one product? Aha, I got it. So, you know, you really got to look at everything from a software standpoint, Especially when you're building a business, You're going to meet a lot of new challenges that you've never been there before. And if you don't try to get to the bottom of it, a lot of time we just kind of fix things based on surface level. We just put a band aid on it. And you can't put a band aid. While you may need a stitching, you can't put a band aid on every single problem. Unfortunately, most of our lives, we solve most of our problems with temporary solutions. Look at where America's at today. Look at all the last few days of challenges we've been facing. Why are we having these challenges? Everything is a band aid. We keep fixing problems with band aids. What happens? Problems keep reappearing. Sometimes to make the tough decisions and realize what we need to do to lead. It's not necessarily the most popular thing we need to be doing, but sometimes those are the things that leader must do so the same problem doesn't reappear. If we're sitting in a boardroom and we have a challenge, we're facing whatever it could be, a lawsuit, a find a software that went wrong, a rogue employee, somebody that defamation of character, whatever it could be. When you're building a business, you could face many different forms of crisis. But when you're sitting there and going through it, one of the questions I ask all our guys is what do we need to do to make sure this problem never reappears again? What do we need to do not to delay this three months is to make sure it never reappears again. And once we think from that standpoint, sometimes we have to spend a little bit more time about processing that issue. But every time we've done that, it saved us hundreds of future headaches. Which is why you know, just this month right now, while I'm talking to on the phone, the month of May just close for us. Last May, in a month of two nineteen, we saw five thousand, six hundred and sixty one insurance policies in a month. That's without a pandemic. That's what out protesting. That's without rights. That's what out office is shutting down. And I sell insurance nuities and retirement products, which means we looked at you face to face. Well, this year, in a month of May, with all of that last month, we sold ten thousand, six hundred and seventy policies in a month. It's the first one we cracked ten thousand policies. Why because when the pandemic first happened, I was in LA for a board meeting and all my board members canceled it, and delahoyah. We were all meeting together. They all said, well, I have to go back to Connecticut. I have to go back to New York. Everybody was worried because that's the day an NBA shutdown, NHL shutdown, if you remember this, everybody was panicking. This was like March eleventh date that we're talking about. And I said, wait a minute, if this is happening, what do we gotta do? And I was in LA with my wife and three kids in my nanny. I said, let's go to Universal Studios. We're staying at Beverly Hills Hilton. I said, Bay, we got to go back to day. We were in LA for less than twenty three hours. We flew back to Dallas. I came straight to the office, spent fourteen hours in the office a lock that said, don't bother me. I went and researched every pandemic, how to market reacted six months later, how the immediate overreaction and theory is, and how the media makes it bigger or if it's real, if it's not real. Fourteen hours I looked at every time. I said, Okay, you have to assume this is bad. So let's assume this is bad and do everything necessary to be prepared for this. But also on the other side, we have to make some fast pivots, so every presentation was shifted to zoom. Everything that we did, we made audibles to shift a way of selling insurance. I contacted all my carriers to see if they can do certain things to accommodate without having to meet the client to sign off the policy, delivery your seat. Long story short. Those immediate audits that audibles that we made and pivots that we made helped us prepare us for the month of May that we just had. Obviously, June's going to be the biggest ever, but May ended up being the biggest month we've ever had. So all of those things comes together when you saw for X. So that just showcases for me, Patrick, just the beauty of that magnificent brain that you've called it. It's just it is. And this idea of five moves in advanced really fifteen, that's a great way to showcase that. And I wanted to make sure that we gave that to our listeners so that they started to at least approximate or at least step into the space of dancing with you on that level. And I do think of you Patrick as a modern day philosopher. You are probably the most informed businessman that I've met, and so I wanted to have you share a couple of the things that I got from your book that I thought we're so compelling on a conceptual level, And one is that you talk about religion and business and you say, look, all religions have believers and rituals, and what business cans to see without people believing in it? What business doesn't have value symbols, sayings, creatos, et cetera to make up its culture. And then you go on to say that Google, Apple, Southwest Airlines, and Walmart are all religions. I think this is such a powerful point. Will you say more about your thinking about these two items and how they're related. Absolutely, I mean, Sam Walton, is it could have been a pastor. You could have been a preacher, yeah, and a prophet. It could have been somebody that's going out there. I mean, what is really the difference? The only difference is here you're talking about profits and business and jobs, and you know, in religions you're talking about a higher power and a calling. But at the end of the day, you know, you have to follow certain proverbs, you have to follow certain rituals. You have to create a culture. You have to have a vision of what we're going. There's got to be an end in line why somebody is willing to work very hard to one day see Walmart become the largest employee in America with two point three million employees. You know, a Bezos is somebody that's built Amazon as a culture. I know that company may be the most hated company for a lot of people, but it's a company's worth a trillion dollars and he's a sixteen percent owner of the company, him and his wife. I know the whole detail with the personal life, but let's just say sixteen percent. That's one hundred and sixty billion to him and his wife. There's another eight hundred and forty billion dollars of wealth that has been made for other people. It's an interesting story about this guy, the fact that at first, when he started Amazon, he went and raised a million dollars from twenty of his relatives, a relatives and friends. The average person gave him fifty thousand dollars. Let me say this again. He raised a million dollars. He got fifty thousand dollars from twenty different people, and he gave up twenty percent of Amazon. Let me say that again. Twenty percent of Amazon for one million dollars. Those people that bought the twenty percent of Amazon for one million dollars, that twenty percent is worth two hundred billion dollars today, two hundred billion dollars. You go look at a Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway's pretty much a religion. He's the profit. Everybody follows Profit Buffett, and he makes predictions, some right, some wrong, some of them become right and some of them don't become right. You know, there was a guy years ago in nineteen seventy something when he first started Berkshire Hathaway. This man gave Buffett ten thousand dollars. You can actually go search this guy's story. He gave him ten thousand dollars and never did anything with the ten thousand dollars killed today. Nothing. He just left it with Buffett. That ten thousand dollars today's worth seven hundred and thirty eight million dollars. He never took the money out, not a penny of it. He lived off of everything else that he had. So in the world of business and a culture that you're creating, whether you're working and playing for Notre Dame Football Notre Dame, or you're playing for Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots, or Phil Jackson from the Bulls of the Lakers, or Gregg Popovitch, or I can go on seeing a lot of different stories. Everything will come down to a culture led by visionary a profit that creates a certain let of a certain set of culture or a certain set of standards and criterias and rituals that people follow, and then he eventually finds a true believer. And once you find true believers who fully buy into what you want to do, the rest is history. Because everybody else says, if Bobby is a true believer to Johnny, why am I not believing Johnny? Then Bobby helps convert other people into believing Johnny. And this example could be, if you know a Balmer believes in Bill Gates, why don't I believe in Bill Gates? If Paul Allen believes in Bill Gates, why don't I believe in Bill Gates? If Steve Wasney, I believe Steve Jobs, why don't I believe in Steve Jobs? So, you know, very a lot of similarities when you see these companies that do it well. And it's by the way, it's one of the reasons also when they get a black guy, because some people say, well, I don't like what they're doing here. I understand it. I didn't say you're gonna like it. I just tell you it's very effective and if you really broke it down, it's what makes a great organization based on those certain principles that we just talked about. So what I like about that Patrick, or what I wanted, why I wanted to share that is because when people start to open their minds to thinking on that much higher level, they can see things much differently than they do from this very low level, singular tree perspective. That's why I wanted you to share that. Thank you so much. We're coming close to the end of the show, so I want to give you a choice, Patrick, if you will either for this last question talk about either your chapter four on how mobsters sell negotiated in Lunce, which I think is very PBSK the way that you talk about that, or if you want to talk about the story about Ela. Which one do you want to finish with? You know, we can talk about we can talk about the mops side, we can talk about that, Okay, on the sell, negotiate and influence. You know, I've had the chance for you know. One day I get a call from my booker and he tells me, I got this mobster I want you to interview. I'm like, I'm an entrepreneur channel, why would interview this mine? So I'm telling you want to interview this guy? So I said no, I'm good, he says, Pat. A year and a half we go back and forth. He says, here's why you need to interview him. Finally I decided to interview him. So I'm sitting at Jordan belfource House. This is the Amando Wolfo wall Street, and I'm talking to him and I'm doing an interview. On the way back at Newport Beach, I interviewed this mobster, Michael Francis. When I sit down at this place and I'm interviewing him, we're not We have no idea what's going to happen. I had no idea two years later that was going to get ten million views on YouTube and translated in Russian all these other languages. It's gone a round one hundred million views this interview that I did. Long story or after that interview, all the mobsters around the world started calling me. So Oscar Goodman, who was Tony Splatra's attorney and also three time mayor of Las Vegas for twelve years and his wife's now the mayor of Las Vegas, he calls me. We do his interview. That one gets nearly a million views. We do Frank Calata, who was in the movie Casino, which Frank is a pretty serious gangster from Chicago. We do his interview. He gets a few million views, and I interviewed all these other guys, and eventually Sammy de Bocravano that we do the interview. He's only done two interviews. One is with Diane Sawyer and the other one is with me. We interview him. Then you got Phillionetti and then raph Natali all these other names. Anyways, here's one of the things I learned about interviewing these folks. And obviously as a kid, I grew up with my dad watching all the mob movies, The Godfathers, the Bronx Tale, the Casino Is, the Goodfellas, all of them when you go into When I was a kid coming to Germany, my dad protected me from all evil things because in you he was so paranoid of what could happen to his kids. So I was never allowed to play outside. He was always there. He was so paranoid. So when I went to Germany, I thought everybody was good, meaning every person was good, like they all wanted to good for me. When I got to this refugee camp, I'm from Iran. There were people there from Pakistan, Afghanistan, you know, Yugoslavia at the time, check Poland everywhere. And I'm a ten year old kid who grew up pretty sheltered, you know, church, all this other stuff. Next thing, you know, these kids really start bullying me. And I got stabbed one night by this Afghanic kid who kind of played the role of being my friend, and then he betrayed me, and then all of a sudden a fight he stabbed me. I'm like, wait a minute, what the hell just happened? That day, I learned not everybody wants the best in you, and that's okay. So today, when my son Dylan, whom everybody likes him, today, I'm very careful to say, Dylan, everybody likes you. I'll always say Dylan, almost everybody. And he'll ask me, Dad, why do you say almost? I said, because not everybody likes you. What do you mean not everybody like because not everybody likes your daddy, And that's okay. You can't get everybody like you. So I'm very careful to get him to think that in life, everybody's supposed to like him. What does this have to do with business everything? If you ever decide to want to do something big, you have to know that you're going to pistol a lot of people off, and you can't be naive to think everybody wants you to win big. When we were small and we only had sixty six agents, a lot of my competitors would call me and they would say things like this, Patrick, We're rooting for you, we love you, we wish you nothing but the best. We think you're gonna do great, buddy. I'm like, oh, wow, these are such nice people. But in the back of my hand, my head, I already knew that's not the case. And then eventually when we got bigger, next thing, you know, who do you think you are? What makes you think you can do this? And what makes you think you can do that? I said, listen, I told you a long time ago, I'm going to compete. Now that we're actually doing the numbers. Now you're not with Matt, I said, you were supporting me. So if you're going to compete in the game of business, Chapter five is move number five is specifically for you because move number five is all about power plays. And if you don't learn and master these power plays, you will find yourself very quickly being bullied around in the marketplace, and you'll be disappointed in the business and you'll say I don't like it, but it's not the fact that you don't like it. You need to learn the power place, because once you learn the power place, you'll actually enjoy it because it's a game you can actually play and have a lot of fun with. And at the same time, if you do it with the right people, you can also make a lot of money with. So yes, there's an element of that that for those who run businesses, that section of the book move number five is something though they're not just going to read once, They're going to read multiple times. There's it's just chewy and here we are out of time. Patrick, it's saying just thirty seconds or less, what would you like to leave our listeners with all I want to leave my listeners with this. Take some time to fit exactly who you want to be. Forget about everybody else, forget about me, forget about anybody in your family, what they've done, how big they've done it. Don't compare yourself. Who do you want to be? Get clear on it, what kind of a life you want to live? And then based on that, go put your pieces at the puzzle together and go make it happen. Beautiful, Patrick, thank you so much for being my guest and sharing who you are with listeners across the globe to meet their lives better. Thank you, appreciate you very much. You know how much I respect you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for that. Listeners who want to learn more about Patrick Bett David PHP Agency Value Tainment Media, his books, or his thought leadership, you can start by visiting Patrick Bett David dot com. Last week, if you missed the live show, you always catch a b recorded podcast. We were on air with Ray White talking about the importance and monitoring cultivating mental health in the workplace to reduce stress and increase productivity and innovation, and do so effectively through the Voyages app he created. Next, we'll be on air with Christian Chrome, a futurist from the Netherlands and author of Humanification, Go Digital, Stay Human. We'll be talking about the opportunity we as humans have when we collaborate with techno, allow you tolictit our higher human competencies in the workplace and usher in a bright future that nonetheless needs our intentional stewardship. See you there. Remember that work is at least a third or alive, so let's work on purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose, featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortez, each week on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, leadership inspires impassioned performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose. The Dinner