I’m Changing & You Should Consider It Too – FDDTC #30

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Podcast Transcription:

(this was AI generated and may have typos)

 What’s up guys? Devin, Zander here, your host, and today I’m actually going to have a personal talk with you. We’re gonna level, I wanna talk to you guys about my goals, dreams, and what’s going on in my life and what I’m now instilling into my life to ensure that I reach. All of Michael goals.

Hey, this is Devin just mentioned that this is the From Delivery Driver to CEO podcast. These are lessons, tales, and stories of how I went from a high school dropout and Jimmy John’s delivery driver to the CEO e o of an eight figure software education company. Woo. Let’s get into the episode. All right, ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I think we’re moving offices soon.

There’s a nice warehouse up the road. That’ll give us about twice as much space. It’s beautiful in there. We’re just waiting to hear back on that, so that’ll be amazing. Now, the biggest thing, though, obviously that’s not like a big deal. What I wanted to talk to you about was changes I’m making in my life to help me achieve my goals in my dreams.

So some of you may know my old business partner is Alex Becker, a super successful dude, just sold his company for $110 million. And I’m proud of him. I’ve known him for a long time and it’s crazy to see him do that. It’s crazy to see that happen. And to give you context, Alex and I go back, before either of us were internet marketers, we met on a website called R S D, real Social Dynamics.

It was a website about meeting, about picking up women. And him and I just met on those forums. We became friends and. We actually got into online marketing together. We had a blog. It was called College flirt.net. It was how to Meet Women. He owned the website and I wrote for it. And then him and I had many partnerships over the past 13, 14 years.

Now the reason why this is important is because, like I said, he just sold the company for 110 million. Now, here at SCUP, we make. Millions of dollars, don’t get me wrong, but I have nowhere near a nine figure net worth, a hundred million plus. Obviously I live very comfortably, very well and I’m blessed.

I don’t want it to seem like I’m complaining or anything. I’m obviously, I live a blessed life and I hope I can help you do the same, but a nine figure net worth is an entirely different level from where I am at in my life. And. I do think that although maybe I don’t want that much money, I would like to be very close.

I would like to live comfortably. I would like to have never worried about anything again. I would like for my wife to never have to worry about anything. I would like for my children to never have to worry about anything. I would like for their children to never have to worry about anything. And the way to do that is to build generational wealth now with the way that inflation is and the way the economy’s headed.

And even the way, like the real estate market is really. It’s if you’re making a hundred thousand, $200,000 a year, that used to be pretty good. And now that’s like the lower end of middle class, right? If you’re making that much in a city like I live in here in St. Petersburg, Florida, it can be hard to survive.

So as times change, we need to make more money. And I guess where I’m going is, if you only have a few million dollars It can be hard to even make that last until retirement. Unless you want to go live in the middle of the USA where everything is dirt cheap, there’s no one around, but I, I have, I’m not gonna lie, I have lavish goals. I have lavish dreams. I want to have a nice multi-million dollar yacht that my wife and I, we have a home in Greece right now and it’s on the water. And I envision, me pulling my. Yacht up to our house on the water and just traveling all around the pe, panis, traveling all around Europe.

And to do that I would need millions and millions of dollars that I could just waste the fuel costs on something like that are absolutely insane. Now lemme me get to my point cuz I’m just rambling about my goals and dreams. So my business partner or my old business partner, Alex, sorry, let me see.

Where’s my phone? I wanna read, he posted a tweet. The other day, and I actually said it as the background of my phone. That’s how much it impacted me. I’m reading the tweet now. People will act like giving up drinking or bad food, keeping a hard routine, cutting back on friends and family and cheap dopamine like games is suffering.

I. Listen here. True suffering is waking up in your mid thirties to forties and realizing that your life, income, and yourself have not grown in the past 10 years. You will look around and you will realize you are roughly the same quality and level of person just in a weaker body that has been beaten by years of stagnation.

True pain is how you will look back and realize all you have experienced is the same repetitive experiences over and over while you stagnated in the same position. Remaining in your comfort zone, abusing cheap pleasures. Tweet was longer than that, but that’s the part that really resonated with me.

And, I’m sure this resonated with a lot of people. It’s a good message. But I do feel that it probably impacted me a lot more than it did everyone else who read it. And the reason being is because I’ve known Alex, Alex has been my business partner for many years, and now I’ve been making about the same amount of money for probably four years now, and him and I were business partners four years ago.

Keep that in mind. So he was making a similar income to me four years ago. We split ways in 2019 so he could focus on the business that he just exited. He focused on that for a few years and now he’s sold it for over $100 million and he’s other done other projects. So the message really hits me because he’s saying, you will see others surpassing you while you remain the same.

And he, that’s literally what happened. That is our story. Four years ago we were business partners. Now I’m at the same place. I’m making a few million dollars a year, and he’s made over a hundred million dollars. Like I said, I obviously don’t have room to complain. I do very well and I live a nice life, but I’ve decided that I don’t want to settle for this, and the changes I’m making in my life, I would encourage you to make as well, if you want to live an extraordinary life, achieve extraordinary things, and not just be comfortable, not just have money.

But to build generational wealth, like literal fuck you type money to where if I want to go buy a plane, I can, if I want to go buy a yacht, I can. And I realized I need to make changes in my life. So I just wanted to share a few of those things with you and maybe inspire you or help you realize that maybe you should make similar changes in your life.

And look, just because I’m doing these things, if you think it sounds stupid, you don’t have to fucking do it. Okay? But I will tell you, winners will win and losers will lose. And the actions you take will, that’ll do everything for us, okay? That is what the separation is the actions we take on a day-to-day basis.

So the first thing is I’ve stopped accepting anything less than excellence from my team members and my employees. For years I’ve been like the boss that you can be friends with. We’re homies. I’ll never be too mean to you. But I’m entirely done with that. I’m okay.

I’m not an asshole. I don’t want people to think I’m an asshole, but what I will do is I will expect great performance from you. If you’re not performing well, I’m gonna call you out on it, and I’m not gonna be nice about it because it is your responsibility as a team member to do the bare minimum. Okay?

To me. There are levels of work, right? There is a line. This line is the bare minimum, like showing up, doing your job. That’s the bare minimum. You don’t get a pat on the back for showing up and doing what I pay you to do. It is literally why you are here. You’re not here doing it for free. I am paying you.

That is the bare minimum. Okay? So when people do their job and they do it well, I’m not gonna clap. I’m not gonna give you a pat on the back. Doing your job well is why you’re here. If you cannot do it well, I will fire you.

And I want you to understand that I’m not doing that because I only care about myself or because I want to be rich. I care about my employees to an obscene amount more than I should. I put their happiness way ahead of mine most of the time. And something I realized was, I’ve talked about this before in the podcast, a couple years ago I was about a hundred pounds heavier.

And it’s not, I was fat. I was severely overweight. And it’s not anybody’s job to tell me that. Nobody owes it to me to say yo, Devin, you’re fat. You should stop eating so much. People don’t owe me that. But I will tell you that I do believe that a good friend or a good family member or a good relationship, a significant other.

They owe it to you to fucking tell you that you’re not living up to the person that you could be because they care about you and they should wanna see you successful. They should wanna see you fit, they should wanna see you happy and healthy. So yeah, I do believe that if you are overweight someone, if they care about you, should tell you.

And I also realized it’s the same thing with my employees. Because if I want them to be successful in life, in their career path, whether or not it’s with me, they could go work elsewhere. I realize. I need to hold them accountable. I can’t I can’t baby these people anymore because if I care about them, I need to help them grow.

I need them to be the best version of themselves they can be, and I need to help them. That just showing up, just doing the bare minimum, that’s not it. Because if I let them get by with that if our business ever closes or something and they take their work elsewhere, Most other business owners would not accept subpar levels of work, and I need to demand that because I care about them and I want them to succeed.

And something that you don’t know is a lot of our employees actually get revenue sharing. So when SCUP does well, they get paid more. So by me demanding excellence from them, I’m keeping them accountable to getting themselves paid. But here’s another important thing is if there’s one weak link, it’s taking money out of everybody’s pocket.

It’s taking money out of our customer’s pocket because they’re not getting as good of service. It’s taking money out of their fellow employee’s pocket because when revenue’s down, their revenue share is down. It’s taking money out of the employee themselves pocket because. Revenue’s down, they’re getting less revenue share.

And yes, it does take money out of my pocket as a business owner as well, you must demand excellence. You cannot settle for anything less. And what I’ve also realized is since I’ve started implementing this, people actually are happier. They respect me more and they’re making more money. It is a huge win.

I was terrified that my employees would not like me. First of all, that’s a whole nother issue. You shouldn’t care whether or not your employees like you or not. We’re here to get a job done. We’re not here to all be BFFs and homies. But I actually get more respect. Everyone’s happier now and we’re producing better results.

Yeah, that, that really worked out. But that’s step number one. Step number T, sorry. Step number two. The second big change in my life, and this is probably the biggest one, is I’ve left my friend groups because I felt that they were not productive to the goals that I have, the goals that I want to achieve.

And I think this is something that a lot of listeners, a lot of you guys might be dealing with as well. But I realize that I have these huge goals. I have goals I want to be, I want to achieve a lot in life. I realize that I have one life to live and you know what? 60 years from now, I’m probably going to be dead.

I will not be here anymore. Devin Zander will no longer exist, and there’s no do-overs. There’s no second chances. I have goals, I have dreams for myself, my wife, my family that I want to accomplish. And I realized that there were friends and ti and a lot of time that I spent with these friends that was not productive towards those goals.

It’s not bringing me any closer. All I was doing was giving myself momentary distraction from the actual mission. And no people might think yo, but Devin, what about enjoying life? Dude, listen if I can crush it for the next three to 4, 5, 6 years, I can build an immense amount of wealth. And I can enjoy the rest of my life with my wife, with my kids, and not have to worry about anything.

And I want you to understand this because you can do the same too. We’re giving you the frameworks that we’ve used to build multimillion dollar businesses. All you have to do, like literally we walked through fire, we did the hard parts, we figured it out. You just follow the frameworks. And I want you to realize that if you listen to what I’m saying today, and you take these steps, You follow our frameworks in three to four to five years, your life can be entirely different.

The home you live in, the people you surround yourself with, the activities you do, the places you go, the things you own, the freedom you have, it could all be so different if you could just give up this need for immediate pleasure. Distractions, TV, porn, whatever it is, whatever you distract yourself with, if you could just give it up for a few years and you could instead just put time into building your business every day, you could be someone you don’t even recognize in a few years, your life could be different. And I want that for you and I want that for myself. And that is why I’m making these changes. So a lot of my friends, I I have group chats on my phone. You guys might have some too with all your friends that you talk with and hang out with. I left all those. I still have friends.

I don’t want you to think I’m like living in a cave somewhere. But my friends are my co-owners at scup, my manager’s here at scup. And then just a few key friends who share the same mindset and goals as me. If you have friends that are holding you back or weighing you down, you need to fucking ditch them.

They will keep you from success because they are too scared to go achieve it on their own. It’s crabs in a bucket. Look it up if you don’t know what that is. Essentially, whenever, if you put a bunch of crabs in a bucket and one tries to escape, the other crabs will pull it fucking back down into the bucket.

And when you surround yourself with shitty people who lie about themselves, who mislead others who are not genuine, and who have zero ambition, that will come and fall onto you as well. We are who we surround ourselves with. So that was the second big change is I’ve changed my friend group. I’m not, I’m just, I can’t anymore.

I have big goals and I’m not gonna let people hold me back from that. Third thing is just restructuring how I spend my time. I spend I get high. I smoke weed at night. I distract myself from work. I play video games. I watch YouTube videos. I get up from work a lot and walk around town here.

And I tell myself like, yo, it’s because I’m bored. I need to go. I need to do something. And it’s dude, oftentimes when you’re bored, it’s because you’re avoiding something. And the best thing to do is just do that work. And that’s the change I’ve decided to make. Man. And it, all of this might sound like miserable, but it’s not.

It’s exciting because I’m making so much progress. Just today I got so much more done than I’ve done in the past three weeks before I decided to change my life. And it’s exciting. And I want you to realize, I just can’t reiterate this enough, your life could be so vastly different. One even one year from now, dude, I lost a hundred pounds in almost a year.

Just you can do all this. You can change your wealth, you can change your situation, you can change your relationships, you can change your fitness, you can do it all, and you can do it quicker than you ever could have imagined. If you commit, if you stop lying to yourself, if you stop spending your time with shitty people and shitty tasks that hold you down and do nothing but distract you.

But you don’t have to do any of this if you don’t want. And listen, you can be successful without these changes as well. My only question is how fast do you want it, and how much of it do you want? Because if you want it quickly and you want a lot of it, that being success, money, freedom, whatever it is you want the best thing to do, go all in.

Leave it. Leave everything else behind. You don’t have to do it forever, but you’re gonna have to do it for a little while. And once you’ve done that, the results will come faster, harder, stronger, bigger than you ever could have imagined. So those are just changes I’m making in my life that I wanted to share.

Guys, this is Devin Zander, the from Delivery Driver to C E O Podcast. I know I sound like emotional or whatever, you know my voice got deep. It’s not cuz I’m sad, it’s because I’m serious. It’s because I know the importance of this and I know how it can affect you and I want you. I just want you to see it too, because I want you to achieve everything you want in life.

So this is the From Delivery Driver to CEO Podcast. I’m Devin Sander. Make sure to like, comment, subscribe. Leave a freaking review. I’ll see you guys in the next episode. Peace.