Self Made Millionaire Interview: Ronco Johnson – Owner of L.R. Johnson & Associates, Inc.

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Ronco Johnson – Owner of L.R. Johnson & Associates, Inc.

Ronco talks about “Lights Out” moments, which are moments where everything changes in an instant. He was a professional athlete and became injured and so many things changed. Now he runs a full service financial and consulting firm and helps others make better decisions with their finances. Plus he started a foundation to help economically disadvantaged youths and adults learn about finances.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber

Check out Lrj-associates.com.

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Or check out the huge list of interviews with other self made millionaires

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire Podcast. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have Ronco Johnson on the show. Ronco is the President of L.R. Johnson & Associates and they're a full service insurance and financial consulting firm. He's also a member of the Million Dollar Round Table which is the top 2 percent of insurance groups and firms and not only that, he's the top of the table which I had never heard of before. He's in a 0.5 percent of the world of insurance people and I think that's huge. The other thing is he also runs the Ronco Johnson Foundation, which is dedicated to providing financial literacy to economically disadvantaged adults and youth and I am so excited to have him on the show today. Thanks so much for coming on today, Ronco.

RONCO JOHNSON: Jaime, thank you so much for having me.

JAIME TARDY: Top of the table is amazing. First, before we even get into the background, what does that mean and how did you even get there?

RONCO JOHNSON: Well the Million Dollar Round Table is known in our industry as the MDRT. It recognizes the top insurance professionals and financial service providers over 76 countries. It's a unique situation. I'm really proud of the opportunity to be a member for multiple years now but achieving the top of the table is a little bit different. It recognizes less than the top 1 percent of insurance professionals in the world and once a year we get together and we're able to share some ideas, concepts, strategies of the most successful people in this industry. That allows us to come back home, share those ideas with our clients, our fans, friends and family and help them have a better and more secure life, as it pertains to their financial plans.

JAIME TARDY: That's amazing.

RONCO JOHNSON: It's an honor to be a part of that.

JAIME TARDY: I bet. I definitely want to get into what you actually had to do to become one of the top 2 percent or 1 percent but let's first start off with what type of background do you really have and how did you become a business owner.

RONCO JOHNSON: Well, Jaime, I started out believe it or not in the radio and television career.

JAIME TARDY: I can tell.

RONCO JOHNSON: I'm a former athlete that had all the ambition in the world to become a professional athlete and among the opportunities of being a collegiate athlete I had that opportunity to go to the next level and I ruptured my patella and we call that a **** moment. That knee injury took me, of course, to the emergency room and I was 12 hours from amputation and it ended my career. It took me about four years to learn to walk again.

When you have that type of adversity to overcome, you start thinking that hey you have to have more than an Option A and an Option B in life. You better have an Option E, F and G. So I had my degree already in radio and television broadcast. I have another in mass communications and I did radio in Atlanta, Georgia professionally for about seven years and I realized that all my friends were a select group of today hall of fame athletes and individuals that had some fantastic careers in professional sports, who were making real sports money.

Of course, in radio and television you get to meet entertainers that are making real entertainment money and I was instant radio money. I figured out really quickly that they were spending their money in ways that probably were not the most responsible and if I could just help my friends, maybe I'll just try this thing called financial services and if it didn't work out I'll go back to radio. But here we are 13, 14 years later, I'm still in the financial service world but I ventured back into of course, radio, television, coaching and all that for entertainers, athletes, affluent business professionals and it gives me something to talk about more than just reading lines.

JAIME TARDY: So what made you so excited to help people with finances at the beginning? Was it just because you saw your friends that weren't making the best choices or what was it?

RONCO JOHNSON: Well, that's a good question, Jaime. My family, coming from a, you know, my family is not a super affluent family. Just some hardworking folks. However, I've had the opportunity to see multiple members of my family go into professional sports ' upward of 20 or so in my family throughout the entire family. What's the most amazing is most of them are broke and when you think about that, lightening only hits supposedly once, maybe twice in the same place but maybe you should figure it out.

If there were one thing that I would want to change is how we handle our finances or how people handle their finances and this urban myth about hey I'm a professional this or I'm a professional that or I may have a couple million dollars here or there, I must know how to handle money and that's not always the truth. This is a life skill. Understanding money and finances is a life skill that I think many Americans today we need. It's not something that is taught in school, you know?

JAIME TARDY: I agree.

RONCO JOHNSON: We're just looking at it economically, if we understood what was really going on, we could probably make some of these decisions a little bit quicker.

JAIME TARDY: Yeah, I agree and I think that's huge. I don't know if you read my bio but I was $70,000 in debt and I was like oh wow, how did I do that? So it was, it was financial education. Go ahead.

RONCO JOHNSON: I was right there with you.

JAIME TARDY: Okay, so yeah, tell me about your experience with money and sort of some of the things that you learned and that you now teach people.

RONCO JOHNSON: Well, I mean, like you were just about to say, I'm sorry I cut you off, you come out of college and you have this wonderful education and you think hey I got the education but everybody in my life promised me the moon, the stars and all the money once I got the degree only it doesn't work out that way. You still have to go out and make yourself more recognizable, brand yourself. Hopefully you get an opportunity with a company or a firm that fits what you're looking for.

That relationship with money obviously, as we mature, if you don't have someone in your life to give you or provide you the guidance, it can be a little difficult. When you come from nothing and then all of a sudden you have a little something, the first thing you really want to go out and buy is shoes. Well, with the proper guidance, most of my clients have taught me over the course of the years is how to put it away. Even though I'm recommending the services, I have to say I have learned from my clients a more responsible way of providing for your family long term. We are just trying to do the same thing for the community.

JAIME TARDY: That's great. So what do you find are some of the most common issues that people have with money?

RONCO JOHNSON: Well, the most common issue I found with money is people are scared to death, Jaime. You know you look at television and you've got all these and here I am I'm on your show but you have these gurus on television and they are given this advice and that advice and the truth is that in the real word of giving financial advice, it's an individual type of conversation. Not one shoe fits all people. So we don't have a cookie cutter type plan for anyone and I think where I come in most of the time is more of a counsel of some sort or a psychiatrist than anything else.

It's just the people's idea about how to handle the money or what, when I interview women, it's security. If you're a man, it is I got to get this thing done and sometimes we have to either soften that idea or we have to just kind of massage the idea to say well listen, what's most important to you? It's amazing, absolutely amazing some of the things that are most important. When you really think about it, the first thing that comes out if you're married and you have children, and my child is the most important, I want to leave this and how to do it.

One of the wonderful things about the insurance industry is, you know, unfortunately, some of my clients married the wrong people. Maybe they lose a business partner; how to shelter away from some of the taxes. We talk about accumulating money a lot but we don't talk about how to protect ourselves from some of the unnecessary taxes that we are paying and those taxes usually come when it's too late in estate taxes, inheritance taxes. It's like which one?

When we arm our clientele with that knowledge, it's amazing that you'll see a person come in scared to death walk out with some home and some confidence that hey, you know, I understand why I put money away in my retirement plan at work now. I understand how that 59 - works with my IRA or my Roth IRA. I understand why I use cash value insurance sometimes and term insurance in other scenarios. That part, for me, is a blessing and you're preparing people for what we call lights out moments because there's two things - everyone one I talk to and I hate to say Jaime but everyone that I speak with will do one thing. They will pass away.

JAIME TARDY: No, wait, what?!

RONCO JOHNSON: Sometimes you really have to think about it. You have to really think about it. We, as people, that's probably the one think that we wouldn't want to think about as much but if we can get comfortable with the guarantees in life, then we can start preparing for the what ifs. What if I'm successful? What if I want to take that retirement early? What if I live longer than expected? You have things open up when you got the guarantee.

JAIME TARDY: And you've mentioned lights out moments so what exactly is a lights out moment?

RONCO JOHNSON: Lights out moments, I have a program and starting to talk about wills and trusts. Who do you leave that kind of money to if you have a special needs child? You're the only one right. That's a lights out moment. Many Americans right now who have unfortunately received a yellow slip and been asked to move and go on their way or been forced into early retirement weren't thinking about it. If you asked the employee, they probably thought they had 10 years left to work but yesterday was their last day. That's a lights out moment.

Entertainers die or entertainers or athletes that blow their wealth - lights out moment. Opportunity is all over the place for the average American to learn from where other people might have made mistakes and, you know, in my little circle, I've been fortunate enough to build up the top 5 percent of what we call American wealth but I've changed and made my focus to 95 percent of the population who really needs more advice, that made sense. That 95 percent really may not always be able to afford a financial planner or a consultant so we go through our foundation which is the Ronco Johnson Foundation for financial literacy. There we teach and give that back to the community.

JAIME TARDY: So how do you do that? What exactly does the foundation do? I know it says leave a legacy and that sounds amazing but I don't know what you guys actually do.

RONCO JOHNSON: Well leaving a legacy, basically what we do is we go into corporations. We go into school systems and we host 8 to 12 week classes for children, young adults and adults. They start from everywhere from learning how to use checking accounts to understanding credit cards, to buying homes, to the more advanced planning as they start to think about ideas about owning a business or franchising or branding. It's from soup to nuts and we've been really happy about it and we are going into our third year. It's just an opportunity to give back and I think when we all have a moderate level of success, it's important that we give back.

The idea behind it is if we can teach these young adults how to handle mom and dad's money and mom and dad can also learn how to handle theirs little bit more appropriately. Well, we put this big nest egg together and it's our goal to send a certain amount of kids to college on just a wonderful opportunity for four years of college based on them going through the program.

JAIME TARDY: Nice, so you do that too. That's great.

RONCO JOHNSON: Yes. That's us doing our part.

JAIME TARDY: Yeah, and I agree that personal finance specifically is quite lacking and I love hearing that there are people that are actually really trying to help, especially people that can't afford it because it's those people that don't feel like they can get that advice and that information that don't get it and so being able to that is amazing. Thank you by the way.

RONCO JOHNSON: Thank you. I mean it's those obstacles that you were talking about. It's just that one of those obstacles would be the information. Where do you get it from and when do you start' I would tell someone hey start now and when we say you got to take more risk that doesn't mean risk all your money, it just means you might need to start being more aggressive with how you're approaching things. Get rid of credit cards. If you have a car bill, pay the car off. It's amazing what happens if you can get yourself to live on a $30,000 to $40,000 budget. You feel like a millionaire even though you might not make $100,000 a year.

I'm marketing myself as more of a financial wellness coach. It's interesting when you talk about financial wellness, that just like physical fitness, you can't lose weight if you don't sit down and chart out what your goals are. When you write it down, you know you got to eat right. You know you've got to do a number of sit ups and pushups and you know that you need to do a little bit of cardio every day and two pounds a week, that's a great deal. Well, if you make that a situation where you look at finances the same way, well you need to take all your financials out, your checking account, your business account, look at how much you're spending in food.

Look at how much you're spending in gas, reevaluate some things, hopefully you sit down with an advisor of some sort that you trust, that will go through it, a lot of them don't, and say look you find that you're spending $800 to $1,000 a month in food and you're literally just eating and it's going away. When you do that and reposition those dollars towards things that cause stress in your life. Stress in your life are the things such as the credit cards, the unwanted phone calls. Some people have jobs where they are 9 to 5 and they're only going to make a certain amount of money. Well, if you got rid of those extra bills, even if it's 50 to 60 dollars extra that you really don't need, well what happens is you start to shed weight. That's a financial weight off your shoulders and it's amazing what happens when people don't have that. They make better decisions.

JAIME TARDY: Yes, I agree 1,000 percent. I remember the day I paid off my car and was like this is the best thing ever! I'm going to be rich now! But that's the sort of the pathway. You start small and you start with the grocery budget and you start making your way up and therefore you can do more things. It's just having conscious choices with your money and I think that's sort of the thing that is lacking. It's the unconscious choices that we just sort of go ahead and spend money on things. But really making a point to know beforehand and to make a choice on what your biggest priority is, is huge for people and a lot of the times we won't do it ourselves so having someone to help or having someone to teach you how to do it is really important too.

RONCO JOHNSON: Well, I tell you, if that's the case, Jaime, you probably are great. A lot of people, it's okay to admit it, to all your listeners, there's a lot of people, maybe someone listening right now, your lights might be out because you paid that car off, it's like you can breathe again. The lights come on. Can you imagine if everybody, think about it, what do you think the attitudes would be across America if you got on an elevator and everybody on that elevator were completely stress free? Debt free? Have you ever been on an elevator where you just get on that thing and no one talks to each other? Can you imagine when you got on everybody starts to speak to each other? It's a wonderful idea. Now I don't know if that's going to work out all the time.

JAIME TARDY: The next time you are in an elevator you better start talking to people, right, everybody listening!

RONCO JOHNSON: All the time. When I walk around I go why is everybody so quiet? Hi, how are you doing? It's amazing.

JAIME TARDY: Beautiful. So what I'd love to do is sort of switch focus just a little bit and talk about your business because you were in radio and then you ended up helping your friends and stuff. How did you get to be a business owner and did you always want to be a business owner?

RONCO JOHNSON: Well, it was a gradual progression towards becoming a business owner. I mean I started out with one of the more reputable insurance and financial service companies in New York Life Insurance Company after I left radio. After doing that for a number of years to being amongst one of the top agents and having an opportunity to travel the world and visit. At some point you start to feel like, you know, it's kind of like you realize if you have a following or more people are trusting you than necessarily the company that you represent and if you continue to do the right things, the things that make people better and your decisions are not because of what company you work for but is because it is putting your clients in a better situation L.R. Johnson & Associates was created.

What I wanted to have here and what we do have here, L.R. Johnson & Associates is an insurance and financial service consulting firm located in Marietta, Georgia. We have about 120 different carriers that we work with but what makes us so different is our consultative approach to being an advocate for our clients in our associates and showing them different ways that may not even have anything to do with insurance. Some of those benefits in becoming a business owner are one of those. When you work for someone for so long, just healthcare benefits is one of those things. You talk about well how many people would work for their company if they could start something that they really wanted to do on their own.

Start a business that they really wanted to do and they could offer themselves the same benefit package if they stay where they currently were, 90 percent of the people in that room say no. So that means there's a lot of people not happy with the jobs they've chosen as a career. You'd be surprised how many times they're working a job just to keep benefits - health, life, disability, long-term care and then when we talk about hey here's a tax advantage to this and here's a deduction here, you can have your whole family on a health insurance program that really works because you control it, it's an eye-opening experience for some people.

JAIME TARDY: See, I get that question a lot actually because both me and my husband are self-employed and we have to have private health insurance and so I get a lot of people asking well how did you do it and I pay a lot of money for not a lot of coverage and so I explain, I'm also in Maine so it's a little bit different in every state, of course, but you know where you are. So it's possible to get sort of a similar package for not having to pay, sell your small child so that way you can pay for it every month.

RONCO JOHNSON: Well we call it the business planning toolkit and in this business planning toolkit, I mean there is more things to address than just the health insurance. You and your husband are what we call key employees to your businesses, executive bonuses. No one wants to pay anything and that's just a reality. No one wants to pay out but everybody wants the income. When we talk about the income, well, what are you doing with your income? If your business has now gone from $100,000 a year to $2.5 million a year, what would you do with the extra couple million that you just had?

Well, rather than buying, just not the same habit, for the young adult buying shoes and spending on credit cards rather than buying a new car or boat, maybe you sit down and have someone do an executive bonus or a carve out program that your business can allow you or you and your business can have the conversation to defer some of your income into tax deferred vehicles and have the ability for money to grow in another pocket as if you were one of the top Fortune 1000 companies in America.

When you start looking at it like that, you go beyond thinking about saving for college. You go beyond thinking about saving for your car or home because the dollars are much, much more great. The way you look at it, if I own my business, number one go get incorporated. Sit down with someone who knows or go online to your commissioner's office and get incorporated, if you are a sole proprietor. Save yourself on the self-employment tax. Once you get incorporated, now you start to look at it and say I am a company now. I'm just like the stores that I go and frequent every day.

When you start to look at it that way, well what are the expenses to this business? Number one, if I were going to work for this company, I've got to have great benefits. If I am going to buy health insurance and I'm going to pay that large of a premium, I'd probably rather do it in a way that I could deduct some of those premiums because I am the employee. You understand that?

JAIME TARDY: Yes.

RONCO JOHNSON: Maybe I need to put in a buy sell agreement. If me and my business partner are together, I want to make sure that hey what happens to our business if I pass away tomorrow, if I have a lights out moment? Or better yet, if I become disabled and I am not able to work anymore and I'm not fortunate enough to die, you know, I have to sit here and live this life and not be able to do anything about it. What happens to this thing that I'm dreaming about? Well, those are very, very important business succession planning conversation topics that we have on a daily.

You may find that your daughter doesn't want to be in the family business. She wants to be an architect or a pilot. Well, you better start planning for that or identifying individuals that want to take over the family business. Those are the bigger issues that I would say that most people need to look at rather than how much it costs because I'm going to be honest with you, without some of these programs, strategies and solutions that we provide as financial professionals, it's costing you more not participating.

Recently I had a lights out moment where I was working late and next thing you know you're in the hospital. Yes my wills and my trust and my college funds, all those things are secured, but you know what, Jaime? You know what I thought about the most? I thought about my 8-year-old daughter that I couldn't take with me. I thought about all the stuff that was on my desk that someone else needed me to get done that day or all the people that depend on me for my businesses, for my coaching, you know, at the end of the day, I wake up the next morning and I'm very blessed to be here doing this interview today.

I woke up the next day and I realized that I got to take care of the things that matter most and that's my family, spending the time and the thing that gave me the best, took some of the stress off my heart, and it was a heart issue, was the fact that I knew that I was prepared if I passed away. It's just I wasn't prepared to be in that situation that early. Those are lights out moments and to actually say hey my heart stopped beating, that I passed away and I came back and here I am two weeks later doing this interview.

JAIME TARDY: Oh my gosh! That's nuts. Wow.

RONCO JOHNSON: I think that's important for your people listening to understand that yes, I am a 38-year-old entrepreneur. Started business from scratch. We're a nice seven-figure company and we are expanding into different states and globally and I speak all over the country but you don't know. We all come with two days - a start date and an end date. What you do between it, you got to make sure that everything is taken care of. You don't have the opportunity or you do have the opportunity, but you shouldn't take it to sit down and say well I'll get it tomorrow because that's not guaranteed.

JAIME TARDY: That's amazing points and thank goodness you're still here. So I think what you're saying is that we don't know when our end date is so the only thing we can do is sort of prepare as much as we possibly can right now which makes me go okay let me go check and make sure my will is updated and let me go make sure because those are things that you can't change once you're gone.

RONCO JOHNSON: We talk about these lights out moments. May I give you a couple examples?

JAIME TARDY: Please.

RONCO JOHNSON: Of celebrities? You know when Anna Nicole Smith passed away, everybody knows everything about that case. You know why?

JAIME TARDY: No, I don't.

RONCO JOHNSON: Because there was not trust. There was no trust created in that situation which meant that everything became public and when you're talking about eventual millionaires or millionaires are listening to this program. Understand, our estate tax can take up to 55 percent of what you totally have over a certain threshold and you know that changes from time to time and it comes back. Then if you use the Michael Jackson story, which is all over the media right now, you don't know too much about his financial situation.

That's because there was a trust involved and inside of that trust those kids are taken care of with a certain amount of money and there are certain royalties that will continue to keep coming. Well, unfortunately he passed away but the plan was there. That leads into those succession plans. Who is qualified to run my business? What family member would probably prefer to have some cash rather than the business? What would my customers be like if it weren't me?

Then you get into thinking about your alumni status at your university or your church. How are you giving back? Have you been part of a charitable dividend campaign where you can show people how to give and donate money to their favorite organizations a little easier than just lump sums of cash? You know, outside the box thinking and leveraging the amount that they pass on to a charity. These are ideas that it makes it great to start give it away. It makes it great to have a wonderful life, a wonderful business and enjoy it, just enjoy it. We're so blessed to be, we don't realize how blessed we are sometimes.

JAIME TARDY: Sometimes it takes those lights out moments for us to realize how thankful we are for what we already have.

RONCO JOHNSON: You are absolutely right. So I would just say hey you get the planning toolkit. First go out and get you a ruler. Get your buy sell agreements in place if you have a business plan and if you don't know what I'm talking about, please sit down with an advisor who knows what their talking about. The next then get your toolbox out. For those doctors and those lawyers and those dentists that need a building, sit down and talk to someone about premium financing.

There are insurance companies that will back your loan just based on the revenue that is coming into your business. Next thing you know, you're your own practice. I would say the next step get a power drill to put in that toolkit. These are called executive bonus programs that we deal with. These executive programs known as a 162 bonus, it allows the employer to bonus a certain amount of money to its employee into deferred vehicles and the next thing you know, you've got a significant amount of retirement savings in deferred income set aside that you can guarantee will be there. No what ifs, it's guaranteed to be there.

The next two things I would tell you to put in your toolkit is a hammer, which is your key person insurance, a ladder which is your deferred comp and we've already talked about the blue print. Your business continuation planning and take care of your employees with the nuts and bolts. They are the nuts and bolts of your whole entire process, with adequate healthcare and supplemental type of stuff and last but not least, to complete your toolkit, charitable giving. Give back.

Find and organization or start one that you believe in and that you will find that you are giving the blessings to other people, how much recognition you get back in return and for me, that's my key to success and that's where my growth has come from is helping other people get to where they want to get to.

JAIME TARDY: That's exactly what I was going to ask because we know of a lot of insurance agents and financial planning companies and all that sort of thing. There's tons of them everywhere. So how did you separate yourself or how did you either brand yourself or whatever it was to really become one of the top 2 percent in the world?

RONCO JOHNSON: I think that the hard work of doing that, first being recognized. Get involved in your civic opportunities locally but then again, you still have to put in the hard work. Million Dollar Round Table is based on the revenues that an agent brings in so you have to save a lot of people first of all. You have to be pretty decent at what you're doing. Once you get recognized, let people know. Hey, look for a top of the table advisory in your area. I know in Georgia there are 65,000 licensed professionals that actually carry a license to sell insurance and financial services.

JAIME TARDY: That's a lot of competition.

RONCO JOHNSON: But the Million Dollar Round Table only recognizes the top 35,000 in the world. There's only 11 top of the table advisors in the State of Georgia and out of that 11, 3 of us are African American or Black. So we know those numbers, we are in a very, very, very small elite group of individuals and I would tell your listeners, hey, you know what? You deserve the best. It's your life. You're living it to the fullest. Go get the best. Sometimes it doesn't cost more. It's probably costing you more without.

JAIME TARDY: So what gives you that drive to really try and get so far or is it just you're really good at business and your marketing and sales tactics are amazing or what really is it?

RONCO JOHNSON: I think there are a lot of the habits that you get from, I have to say my upbringing and the background in sports. There is a difference when you get to a certain level of sports and discipline that you find in athletics or maybe even in military service people, getting up in the morning, read the newspaper, read the current events. I mean I am sitting here reading Fortune and the Kiplinger's magazines just trying to keep my brain filled with positive influences and new ideas about what their businesses look like, new trends and being flexible with my ideas.

My passion is people. At one time I thought I wanted to be successful and I realized that was pretty selfish but being significant, helping other people be where they want to be today is more my passion. I don't see myself as a salesperson of insurance. I see myself as a business owner who happens to offer insurance and financial services. But I've been able to turn that into other opportunities. Currently I am working on a music project with a jazz artist by the name of Joey Somerville who has a top currently the album The Get Down Club is in the Top 25 jazz albums in the country.

We put these same business coaching principles that work in any form, for me, I think the turning point was hiring a business coach to help me understand what my profits were, what my loss was, what my brand was and if I didn't have one, what is the culture of my business and once we started to figure that out, bringing on people and personalities that compliment where I wanted that vision to be. We've been blessed to do that.

JAIME TARDY: Well that's what I was going to ask you too. What resources did you turn to? It sounds like a business coach but have there also been books that you've read or any resources that have really helped you out?

RONCO JOHNSON: Oh man, books, if you don't read, you got to read. I mean I pick up everything from one of my favorites is Michael Gerber's E-Myth Revisited. The entrepreneurial myth, you know. I take lessons from that all the time. There are so many awesome relationships that I have been fortunate enough to meet from everyone from the President to the list goes on and on. You sit down and you have these interviews and it's amazing. People are willing to share when they know that they're helping you.

It's kind of like when you go to grandmother and you say hey mom what was your experience? Well, they may not have that life experience that you're going through as an entrepreneur but when you can turn to someone who has a formidable business and say, "You know, tell me how did you get there?" Well, it was more than just a lot of hard work. Yes I put in the hard work but there's a lot of no's. I had to take a lot of no before I got to a yes and I have to keep going and even though some people may not believe in what you're building, you kind of shake those off and you take what they're saying as constructive criticism and try not to be that.

Try not to be whatever the negative is, correct it and promote the better side of what you want to become. For me, that's been the influence - people, books, the circle of associates that I have created for myself. When you do good work, the marketing comes automatically because they speak about us. Once they start to speak about us, I've already been vetted before I get a chance to sit down and talk to you.

JAIME TARDY: That's great. It sounds like you are sort of a lifelong learner and I see that as a trend from all the interviews that I've done. Most of the people are true lifelong learners and ready to change, if they need to. That's excellent. So, as the last question, what's one action that listeners can take this week to move them forward towards their goal of a million?

RONCO JOHNSON: An action that you could take this week - be more aggressive. Not more risky, just be more aggressive. Write your goals down. Plan your work, work your plan. Don't stop, don't quit. Never give up and sit down with someone that you trust. A trusted advisor, not call our offices let someone talk to you. L.R. Johnson & Associates we can do that. But sit down, take control of your life, take control of your finances and I promise you in a very short period of time, you will start to begin to win.

Once you start winning, never look back. Continue to win and God is going to bless you more than you ever thought so, you know, that's just my life lesson for the day. It may sound very tongue in cheek but try it, you might like it.

JAIME TARDY: Beautiful.

RONCO JOHNSON: You could have the lights go out and you will be ready.

JAIME TARDY: Great. Well where can we find you online?

RONCO JOHNSON: Okay. Our website is www.lrj-associates.com. I will tell people we got some wonderful articles, newsletters, financial calculators. That way you can learn from your home. Online seminars so you don't have to read it all if you're not a great reader or you can go to our website and click on that from the privacy of your own home or you can catch us on Twitter or on Skype which is Ronco Johnson on Skype. Easy to find us. Our office number is (770) 321-1337.

JAIME TARDY: Great. Well thank you so much and I'll definitely link everything up in the show notes so everyone can take a look if they want to. Thank you so much for coming on today, Ronco. I really appreciate it.

RONCO JOHNSON: Jaime, thank you so much for having us and I really appreciate it and when the lights go out, are you ready?

Just to note, you can download the Top 10 tips from these millionaire interviews on the blog.

Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on eventualmillionaire.com.

Tags: Lights Out, millionaire interview, Motivation, Personal Finance, Personal Wealth, Ronco Johnson, Wealth Building

Categories: All, Business, Finances, Millionaire Interviews, Personal Finance/Wealth

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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