Misfit Entrepreneur November 2023 - 378: How to Figure Out the Game and Win with 8-Figure Entrepreneur Preston Brown

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Dave Lukas Chats with Preston Brown

378: How to Figure Out the Game and Win with 8-Figure Entrepreneur Preston Brown

This week’s Misfit Entrepreneur is Preston Brown. Preston is a multiple 8 figure entrepreneur specializing in disruptive innovation & profitably scaling companies. He started his first company in college and was soon making more than his professors which prompted him to drop out of college and never look back creating 18 successful business with revenues over $180 million.

Preston has cracked to code on how to systemize, grow, and scale a business, as well as a few other entrepreneur secrets that I’m excited for him to share with you.

www.theprestonbrown.co

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Show Notes

Preston says “Stories are easy to judge by the ending, right? So, somebody goes in here, so this guy's worth millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, especially with all the rhetoric in society today. Oh, he's lucky, he's this, he's that, whatever, right? No, but there's always, I think, a wisdom in judging a story by the beginning, if you've heard all of it, and then the ending, right?”

Preston great family, lots of love, beautiful environment, but they were poor living in a little trailer in Texas. His dad was entrepreneurial, always trying things, but had trouble finding success.

There was a time when his mom lost her job and his dad has to all but beg for money. Preston watched his dad try to collect money he was owed and it didn’t go well. It was in that moment that he changed and made money important, even taking that lesson to become very much all business and cutthroat as we grew up.

He was not going to end up that way and didn’t. He was very successful in different businesses all the way back to high school, but he didn’t realize he was missing out on life being but business and money focused.

He tried college, but was making more than all the professors, so dropped out and continued grinding.
His mother had a big impact and would tell him, “Figure out the game, you'll learn how to win.” Preston built formulas for everything and was a master at growing business in figuring out the game. It all changed in 2019. His dad sat down in his favorite chair and didn’t wake up.

Preston says, “And the sins of the father, the sins of the son, his pain became my journey. And here I'm sitting there and all of this money I've made and I'm probably worth tens of millions of dollars at that point and all I really want is my dad. And my mom's bringing through my mind, figure out the game, you learn how to win, figure out the game, you learn how to win. And there was no winning, there was no getting dad back. And I'm looking around as I'm there in her house and beautiful regal woman broke in and all my family there is just ripped to shreds. And I'm like, how do I get more time with these people?”

It was in that moment, he changed. Preston realized he was suffering because he still expected his dad to be there. He focused on scaling and removing himself from the day to day of business to spend time with family and that love is the meaning of life.

I've heard you talk about living on purpose with a purpose. And I think it kind of goes to that. Explain that.

Life is about having compelling emotions, learning new things.
The thoughts we have are generally an indicator of what we need to go solve, what we need to go fix, and who we need to become.
Understanding this helps you to know what is worth focusing on and what matters.
You must understand how the subconscious can drive you through emotions and thoughts and not allow it to put you on the wrong path.
Be very aware of your emotions (subconscious) and what they are telling you.

What's the best way for somebody to start changing their belief system - because it affects emotions, which then obviously affects thoughts, and thoughts affect a person’s actions, which ultimately affect their results?

You have to buy into an ideology. People will do far more for ideology than they will for reality.
Your ideology, your religion, is what you would kill or die for. And the problem most people have is they're buying into a religion, a set of rules that is not made by them or for them or by their God.
You need to buy in and create your own pattern set ideology.
Preston’s example is “I have three that I try to live by. One is problems are gifts. So I'm not going to avoid problems. We don't want any problems. I believe that problems are the way God talks to me. That's where my pivot points are. And the bigger the problem, the more I'm supposed to get out of it. Don’t let Your patterns from the past drill holes in the boat. You can just stop and patch those. So, problems are gift. That's an ideology and it really helps.”

Preston talks about forgiveness saying, “Forgiveness, I think, is always 100% a personal sport. It's not a spectator sport. It's an internal process. You have to let go of that attachment, let go of that expectation, understand that the behavior committed by whatever individual, yourself or other, that did this is no longer going to be tied to you. Anything you can't forgive, it's got an anchor. It's got a chain directly to you. You have to get rid of it.”

What's your philosophy on building a business and talk about some of these formulas to create these systems. What's essential to success?

Problem-solving formula. There's three things: efficiency alignment, simplicity and foresight
You understand the only goal in business is efficiency All results in business come out of efficiency.
So alignment and simplicity are what I call the twin sisters of an energy called optimization.
Everybody's worried about this, and they really shouldn't be when they start. Nobody starts optimized. You start not optimized. Everybody wants to build a big, perfectly organized business. No, build something big and disorganized. Get really loud. Get a lot of customers. Get some attention. When you're a startup, is you need to go and get customers right now.
Alignment simplicity - this is the paradox of business. You have to compromise alignment to create more simplicity, and you have to compromise simplicity to create more alignment. So it's this iron sharpens iron process, and that's the paradox of why we measure and use both.
Foresight -that's what it takes to get into a business, but you have to add optimization later, even though you got rewarded by getting in.
What gets you into business is not what keeps you there. So, you need to focus on the optimization and the foresight. Foresight first, then optimization, then foresight for innovation, then optimization.
Once you know that part of the goal strategy, and you put the problem in and you figure out where it hits, like is it foresight or alignment simplicity, then you go down to the next, which is the four things you measure. Culture, clarity, capacity, cash. These are the four things that make up a business.
It is best to listen to all of this part of the interview as Preston weaves things together with the formulas.

What would you say are some key foundations to building a great company culture?

Culture has a root word of “cult” in it. This is not a bad thing. Think of the devotion to Apple from it’s employees and customer. Have you thought about your culture this way?
Creating a great cultures requires faith from you as an entrepreneur and from your team.
You have balance safety and danger. You need to be dangerous to create safety for your staff, your team, your customer, your lender, your vendor, your trade, but if you're not dangerous, you are not a man, you are not a leader, you are not a person that deserves a business
Quality of narrative. Facts tell stories sell. What is your story? Who are you? Your culture needs to reflect and awesome story.
Mission, vision, values. Your mission, vision, values are key because people need to know who we are, where you’re going, and what you’re going become.
Identity is powerful and you have to have tribal triggers.
Work on each area and continuously improve starting with your weakest first.

What's the financial freedom formula?

As a solopreneur, you have to solve the mindset problem before you move to the true startup phase.
Once you got there, guess what? It's basically a job. You're just the boss. You own your job. You're what I call an operational entrepreneur. Another great word for it is slave labor. It's modern slavery in the entrepreneur world because you are going from crisis to crisis to crisis, managing by crisis.
You have to focus on optimizing and systems at this level in the business, because financial freedom comes when you remove yourself from the business and it continues to produce for you.
Once you have your systems in place, you have to learn scaling and scaling is an art. You go into what I call the operational megapreneur phase. There's generally a small pivot and you start mastering one sales because you just scaled capacity by adding a bunch of team to your group.
Once you have proven to scale, go hire pros to run things.

Best Quote

Figure out the game, you'll learn how to win...

Everybody thinks ownership is about possession. It's not. Ownership is about responsibility Ownership begets responsibility begets possession. Okay, so ownership know what it really is.

Live responsive to your reality not your ideology. If you truly know something, you don't have to defend it. You don't have to fight for it. You can just live it.

The word problem comes from the word emblem. A stop sign, if I see it, it's just an emblem. It's only a problem if you don't stop.

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