Take Control Of Your Finances With Damion Lupo

Founder and CEO of Total Control Financial – Damion Lupo

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TotalControlFinancial.com – Ready to transform your financial future?

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Jamie Masters:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire.  I'm Jamie Masters, and today on the show, I'm actually super excited because he's in Austin.  It's hilarious that we're actually doing this on Skype, but I have Damion Lupo on the show, and he runs Total Control Financial dot com.  Not only that, though.  This is the thing that peaked my interest the most.  He has his own martial art and three black belts in other styles, and of course he's a genius in alternate investing and all that fun stuff, but I care more about the martial arts, apparently.  So nice to meet you, Damion.  Thanks for coming on the show.

Damion Lupo:	Nice to meet you, too.  Thanks for having me, Jamie.

Jamie Masters:	I'm obsessed with UFC.  My audience knows this, so of course, as soon as I saw that you made your own martial art, we'll talk about this probably later.  Why don't you tell me more about what your company does, especially on alternate investing because most people don't understand what that it.

Damion Lupo:	Yeah, alternative investing is essentially things that are not the mainstream.  And when we talk about mainstream, we're talking about Wall street, we're talking about mutual funds, we're talking about the stuff that parents told their kids, hey, go get a job, invest in a 401K, and find some company that matches it.  And we're talking about being very anti that whole philosophy that the idea that you really don't want to me pumping your money into something that you don't understand with people that you don't know, and then losing control of it.

	So we named the company Total Control Financial because we're all about control; investing in things that you can get your arms around.

Jamie Masters:	Which makes total sense considering.  I love numbers, and yet I feel like they try and make it complicated.  Even my 401K, when I had a corporate job, was a pain in the butt.  I tried to learn it, and couldn't, and I think I'm pretty smart.  So you tell me, what sort of things, because I know it's like real estate, and gold, and all sorts of things that you can actually have access to; right?

Damion Lupo:	Yeah.  Basically, you can invest in just about anything under the sun.  The two primary things that people tend to veer towards are real estate and precious metals because you can touch dirt, you can touch houses, you can touch metals.  And with this investment vehicle, with the qualified retirement plan that we set up for people, we actually, you're allowed to go and buy things that you could hold.  The reason that most people don't know about this is because if Wall street were to promote this or even tell you about it, they would lose all their fee source, and all of a sudden they're broke, so they're never ever going to promote it.  

They're going to say you should just trust us, and trust us to keep your stuff confused so that you just put your head in the sand, or you go it's too complicated, like you mentioned, and that's the entire game plan for them.  That way they can charge the two, three, four percent every year until you're dead.

Jamie Masters:	See, I get so annoyed about this just in general.  It's that whole transparency thing.  I was actually looking at your website, I told you this beforehand, and I loved your values and how they aligned with books.  Can you tell - because these books have been recommended by millionaires over and over and over again, except one of them I don't think I'd heard of.  But can you go through what your values are because I feel like, no offense, people on Wall street probably don't have these values, and I think it's important, plus they're great book recommendations.

Damion Lupo:	Well, it's funny because if you look at the values on our company - these are my personal values, too, which there has to be an alignment.  You can't have company values and have somebody leading the company that's not living those values, that doesn't embody them.  The primary one is self-responsibility.  It's that you own your life, your life is yours.  It's your own damn fault as our friend, Larry Williams, says.  And so when you think about Wall street, there's no being self-responsible.  There's you handing your money over to somebody.  There's advocating responsibility in that whole process.

	So self-responsibility is number one.  It's you being in control.  The second one is relationship.  It's all about the relationships between you and your advisors, your team, your customers.  With Wall street, you think about it, it's all about transactions.  There's no real relationship.  People are moving through the process of being your advisor, your manager.  They're just telling you things month to month, year to year.  So we're very focused on relationships, as am I.

	The third one is transparency, and you mentioned that, and that's that everything is known.  So here you know exactly what you're paying.  It's fixed; fixed up front, fixed annual, and there's no mystery.  With Wall street, good luck on trying to figure out what you're actually being charged.  There's no possible way.   That's the entire strategy.  And then the other three are Tenex, growth, and candor.  And tenex is one of my personal favorites because it's all about big thinking.  It's all about rearranging and rewiring your brain because you're asking an exponential question.  And so we're constantly doing that.  Instead of somebody saying well, I'm going to make eight percent, I go great, what would it look like if you were to make 80 percent, or 10 times your income for your company.

	And when you ask those questions, you start to tap into what's really going on.  You're not looking at the past.  You're looking at the future, and it knocks you around.  And then candor, we say what needs to be said, and a lot of times people don't want to hear what they need to hear, so they're told what they want to hear.  We think that that's a stupid plan in general for life, so it's a very candid conversation, and it can be painful, but it's real, and people trust it.

	And then the other one with growth; there's some simple reality around business and life.  Either you're growing or you're dying.  There is no static.  The universe doesn't flatline where you just go everything's cool, I'm in cruise control.  Try to do that with a business sometime and watch Amazon eat your lunch.  I mean you've got to be growing or you're dying.

Jamie Masters:	I agree 1000%.  And some of the books was Hatless Shrugg, which is amazing.  Tenex by Grant Cordone, who we had on here also.  Thinking Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill.  He interviewed millionaires.  I agree 1000% on all of these pieces, especially one of my company values I told you is transparency.  How did you come up with those because it's one thing to be like oh, I have this core personal belief, it's another to actually pull those out and run your company by it.

Damion Lupo:	It was not an accident.  It's fascinating to me.  I was talking to a friend of mine here in Austin, near you actually.  I was having breakfast with her, and she goes this is so cool.  You've got these core values, and I've been in business for five years, and we've just never done that.  I said yeah, I flew to Atlanta and sat there for a day, literally sat down for a day with my old partner, and we thought about this.  So it was a process of digging deep, starting off with 50 or 60 values that we liked, and then going what are our core half dozen.  What are the ones that matter more than anything else, that we will make every decision by, that we will hire based on'  And then when it came down to it, we came down to those six.  I mean it was painful.  It was exhausting.  That'S why most people don't do it.

	They wish they'd done it, and the truth is, if you don't do that, then you really don't know why you're making your decisions.  There's no filter.  

Jamie Masters:	I agree 1000 - I wrote a whole post, we'll link to it, on how to find your company values because it is a process.  You're not just going to - most of it, like honesty, integrity, that should be a given.  No offense, but that should be a given, and all companies are like that.  So what makes you to the core, but we don't look inside ourselves as much as we should.  Or we don't realize that our personal should really align with our company value.  If we're creating something, it really should align.  So I love that you did that number one.  Let's dive into, especially business owners that are small business owners.  They're looking at their employees and they're going, I don't know if I can give them a 401K anyway.  So I know they need to do this for themselves as an owner, but should we be doing this for employees or is this more or less an alternate investing strategy for the individual and not the company side?

Damion Lupo:	It can really be done - the qualified retirement plan, the QRP, can really be done for an individual that has no employees or somebody with employees.  There's lots of options.  The thing that I would suggest to people that have employees is to empower their people with the information around this so that they don't feel like hey, cool, I got a 401K and I can go throw it at mutual funds.  But really empowering them with this idea, and then letting them run with it.  Maybe they have a side hustle where they've got their own little thing and they're starting to put money in their own plan.

	But the truth is, there's not a one size fits all.  I mean this is; that's crazy.  This is not a bathrobe where it's the same size for everybody.  This is really customized, and what you're doing is you're giving people the information so that they can be self-responsible.  That's what I suggest a business owner does.  Not just say I want this or my team.  I think that you're really, you're pushing things off, and you're punting instead of really going into a relationship with your people, and saying here, I care about you enough to empower you so that you can make choices and be in control of your financial future.

Jamie Masters:	I love the word that you said beforehand, advocate.  My mentor used to say that all the time.  We're just sort of like okay, it's over here.  But there's lot of people that feel like that in general about finances because they might not know, or they don't, you know, they feel stupid already because of Wall street stuff so going into it is a little scary.  So what can we do to empower employees, or even empower ourselves, actually pay attention to this and realize that we could probably get and understand the way it works?

Damion Lupo:	The fastest way to do this is to hire a multi-millionaire coach or mentor that is going to say okay, your next step today is to look at your numbers with me, and you have to place to go.  You can't hide.  You've hired the person to be there with you being real and it forces you to move through that.  I actually had this conversation this morning, and one of my clients that I've been working with for a couple of years was working on an investment and she did not want to talk about going to the bank and getting a mortgage for this rental property.  And I said, why?  What's going on?  She goes, well, I just, it feels yucky.  And I said, I get it and there's only one way to get this done, to go through it, and she went, I got it.  But they only way she was going to do that was to have that feedback, and she called me because she needed somebody to tell you that.

	It's our own psychology.  It's what gets in the way.  So the power of having someone there that you respect enough to listen and take action when they say go, that changes everything.  And so that's the thing that I think people need to make sure that they have in their life.

Jamie Masters:	Well, because it's out of our comfort zone, and who wants to sit in our little shell and be like, okay, I'm ready because we do have to take that deep breath.  Okay, I can do this.  And there are small things that we can definitely do that, wherein business, where it feels a little bit more comfortable, it might be a little easier.  In finance, a lot of people aren't like that.  So when we're talking about mindset and that, how emotional finances are, because I'd love to talk about how what you said at the very, very beginning.  You're like, okay, I told them that I worked with six and seven figure entrepreneurs, and he's like net or gross.  I'm like, that is a perfect question.

	Now on here, I make sure everybody has a net worth of over a million, but most business owners don't even know.  They literally don't go through and try and figure out what their net is in general.  And a lot of it is just because they're scared because the numbers aren't as good.  So what can we do mindset wise to sort of wash that away and not have all of our junk come in, especially when it comes to business and numbers?

Damion Lupo:	Well, the first thing that I'll say is that I have a little different opinion because back in the day, back in the day, but when I first started my real estate stuff in my early 20s, I was all about net worth.  And really what I was doing is I was driving the - the focus was on the top line, which is the ego line on a profit and loss.  Hey, look at all this money I brought in.  Any my net worth was 5 million dollars.  I had 20 million dollars in assets, and I thought I was doing pretty good.  Problem is you can't eat net worth, so net worth is really worthless.  You have to look at your cash flow.  I mean that's what really matters; it's the bottom line.

	And most people - the funny part is most business owners aren't even looking a statement of cash flow.  They're looking at their P and L and their balance sheet going hey, cool.  Either it's up or down, and I have a drink either way, and all is good.

Jamie Masters:	And you're like wait, how come I don't have any money in my bank account.

Damion Lupo:	That's the problem.

Jamie Masters:	I've had clients come to me.  I'm like ahh, okay.

Damion Lupo:	Yeah, so I mean this is the big problem that we need to really address and stop worrying so much about the net worth because you can go bankrupt having a beautiful net worth, and you can starve to death having a beautiful net worth.  You've got to be real about what's really going on, and that comes down to the cash and the cash flow.  So that's what we need to be looking at.  That's what business owners should be focusing on.  Forget about the top line.  It's really about the bottom line and the real cash that's coming in that you can spend.

Jamie Masters:	I'm so glad you say this.  But what? tough, and that's what I was sort of saying at the beginning, is that because we don't know, we have to pre-qualify up here.  Then, they don't necessarily want you to look at their numbers because their ego line is like yeah, but I make this much money.  And you're like hmm, oh, you don't really have a very good business at all, right, when you look at the real facts.  So what do you think people should be looking at KPI wise?  Just because you've had 30 businesses, right, you've been there, done that quite a few times.  You're in this business now, but still, cash flow wise, what do people need to know?  What should they be paying attention to?  What numbers should we be getting?  So that way we're not advocating, we're really, really paying attention to what we need to.

Damion Lupo:	Well, one of the most powerful things to do immediately is to narrow the things that you're tracking down to a small number and grow.  I've seen people that come in and they're overwhelmed and they go here's the stuff I'm tracking.  I go why are you tracking 78 different things?  If I said how are you doing, you won't even be able to tell me because you're all over the place.  If I said what are your three things and we were focusing on those three and those are the three primary drivers and we knew that they resulted in certain cash flow, certain conversions, if we knew those, then it's really simple.  

	The other thing is you really need to have somebody kind of auditing you because we tend to look at things and we interpret them in our minds to make ourselves feel better and to sue their ego.  And if you're looking at your financials with somebody that is neutral, and this could be a CFO type of person, or it could just be an outside, it could be your coach, your mentor.  If you have somebody looking and challenging and making you validate, making you justify why you have certain expenses, then all of a sudden you're going to say well, I mean I'm doing this right now.  Some of our expenses, like out phone systems, I go why are we spending $1000.00 a month on this one thing?  What's it doing to drive ROI?  And if you can't justify it with some type of ROI, you're probably spending from the glands.

	You're probably feeling real good about something you're spending money, it looks really pretty and it's nice and it is breaking you financially.  So you've got to really be able to justify stuff.

Jamie Masters:	Okay.  Let's dive deeper into this because I think it's so important.  So what are the typical three things, or a pool of things that we can be choosing from for KPIs that actually do make a difference'

Damion Lupo:	Well, you've got to understand, whatever is driving people through the door, the new people.  I mean this is simple stuff and the truth is most people aren't even this.  You've got to focus on what's driving people in.  What's the conversion from when they come in to when they buy, and how long are they staying until they vaporize?  Because if you've got this rotating door with people coming in and then they're leaving, you've got a big problem.  I mean most business owners, if you asked yourself what would by business look like if everybody that came in was still here?  Your business would be totally fundamentally different.

Jamie Masters:	You don't have to keep finding new people, who knew, yeah.

Damion Lupo:	You just keep rotating.  I mean Jay Abraham is brilliant at the whole referral system, and if you thought about taking care of your people that are in, they would take care of bringing other people in. But people are so focused on just going and finding new people, and then expense in doing that is crazy compared to nurturing and having world class service.  Most businesses have crap service, and they're focused on marketing all the time, and basically killing themselves, and they're not focusing on what's really is going to shift their business, and that is just taking care of people in a different way because it'll make them stand out so fast.

Jamie Masters:	We talk about the hamster wheel of like jobs.  You're like, there's a hamster wheel in business, and it's this.  Okay.  So when we're talking about KPIs on the finance side, what should we ask?  So do we do like a whole - I literally just did this thing on metrics, right.  There are so many it's ridiculous.  I have a whole PDF of what you could choose.  And what's hard is trying to figure out, especially based on your specific type of business, what really matters.  Does cost of goods matter as much to a product business versus a service business; usually.  So when you're going through and trying to figure out what goes where, what do you think financially are the most things to pay attention to?

	So profit and loss is one thing, but they're all broken down.  So how do we really pay attention to cash flow in general with a KPI?  Or how do we do some of those things?  Because what I would love to do is have somebody look at those three KPIs financially and go, we're doing okay, right, we're good.

Damion Lupo:	Well, the way that I break my stuff down, I mean it's kind of something that a guy from Marcus Lamonis on a profit, and it was people processing product.  And so I'm looking at what am I spending money on?  I want to focus on my people.  What are the costs for my people, and then the process.  The process, there's this admin that just eats you, and it's never ending.  And then there's the process of bringing people in or converting them.  That's really the marketing.  So if you narrow things down and you get high level, what are we spending on marketing?  It is two percent or is it 20 percent or is it 50 percent?  I want that to be massive.  I do not want to have a big operation.  I've seen people that have these glamorous offices and all these people, and I go what do these people do?  They're in this space.  And I go, well, how's that driving ROI?  How is that driving bottom line?  I'm not really sure, but they're great.

	I'm like okay.  Well, you know what?  You're going bankrupt.  You just don't know it yet.  So narrowing things down, and the biggest mistake I think a lot of people make, especially when they're struggling, is they turn off that marketing engine.  They turn off this expense there, and they maintain the admin, they maintain all this overhead.  The overhead is what's going to kill you and people don't want to cut it because they get attached to it emotionally.  I love my phone system.  I love my office.  Dude, you know what?  Get in the back of your car.  Work out of the back of the car.  You've got a cell phone.  You're in business. Let's go.

	So we've got to be willing to make some tough decisions or we're just going to bleed ourselves, and that's what most people end up doing instead of focusing on the revenue drivers.

Jamie Masters:	Yeah, and a lot of it's ego based also

Damion Lupo:	Totally.

Jamie Masters:	Well, if I lose this office, it's going to make me look like this.  And you're like well, out of business is going to suck, too, so I don't know what to tell you.  I love your candor just in general.  Most people don't have that, unfortunately.  And so like you said, it's way easier to get the real raw truth and have it sting a little bit than going bankrupt and or having a business that you have to close, and all those people that you have to fire.  I even had somebody come and go my goal is 150 employees.  I was like that should not be a goal.  As few employees as we possibly can to do the exact same work that you want to be delivering.  Anyway, I get on a tangent for this also.

	It's stuff that we're not taught, especially for people - if you go to business school, it's one thing, or a good business school, it's one thing, but most of the time people are in business and they're just doing on their own trying to figure this out, and they don't look for this stuff because they're scared.  And so thank you for letting me and you go on tangents so we can explain to everybody.  Okay.  So how - so specifically, those are sort of the things that you're looking at.  How often are you looking at them?  Are you looking at them every week, every month?  Who in the company knows all this stuff?  Do they have different KPIs for different people?  Like you tell me more about what you think for that.

Damion Lupo:	Yeah.  Everybody is being measured.  Everyone is measuring things, and then we're looking at things.  So I look at my stuff and my team's stuff every week, and we do a deep dive every month.  Some businesses, if you're in car wash business or the food business or something, you should be looking at your stuff every day.  And it's actually hard to justify why you wouldn't look at your numbers on a daily basis.  If you don't know what's going on, how do you know what to adjust?  And you've got to have your baselines, and you've got to have your trends.

	One of the things that people miss in general in business is they don't understand the trends because they're not looking at anything except for the snap shot today or this month.  How do you know if this month was good unless you're comparing it to last month, and you're comparing to a year ago and seeing if it's seasonal.  You've got to be able to compare so you know which direction you're heading because you have no idea.  It might look like a big number, but what if it's shrinking and you just don't realize it, and all of a sudden it's gone.  So the trends are what matters.

	It's like having a doctor without an x-ray.  You just see a bunch of numbers.  You need to see the graphical representation because that's how we can understand which direction we're heading.

Jamie Masters:	So what do you suggest?  And I know we should hire somebody to help us with this because it's way easier.  Just have someone walk you through it than to try and like pull all this stuff out yourself.  But what should we be looking for as far as trends go, and so that way we can, as business owners, make the decisions ahead of the curve as best we possibly can based on trends and numbers.

Damion Lupo:	Well, you want to know if you have creep, if you've got expense creep and you can see that based on what's my expenses overall compared, like the ratio of my expenses to my revenue.  You want to see your different revenue sources.  Really, it's as simple as having a spreadsheet with a graph that shows which direction that line is going, and looking at these ratios, comparing things.  Your revenue might be going up, but if your marketing is going up twice as fast as your revenue, you've got to start asking yourself, is my marketing all jacked up.  And your expenses, it might look like oh, my expenses are only going up by eight percent, but what if your overall revenue is going up by three percent, so all of a sudden you're going to overtake yourself.

	And so you've got to - you want to see the numbers, not just the numbers, but the percentage changes, and you don't need somebody.  You literally can do this with a spreadsheet even if you don't know how to use a spreadsheet or spell spreadsheet.  You can still do it.

Jamie Masters:	Come on people; you should be fine.

Damion Lupo:	Google will do half the stuff for, I mean just do it.

Jamie Masters:	That's the thing that I think is so interesting, and you tell me because you sound very much like a systems process kind of guy, which I really appreciate.  A lot of people need that spreadsheet.  Like they look at a blank spreadsheet and they're like I don't even know where to start, especially people that aren't numbers people.  So are there templates that you can get if you did want to do this stuff, or is there any software that you think is good for this, or just hire somebody and do their system?

Damion Lupo:	I make it simple.  People can e-mail me, damion@totalcontrolfinancial.com, and I will send them the thing I use to manage these things.

Jamie Masters:	Can you actually put it up on the - because what I'm trying to do is get actual examples from real people that are really using stuff because I don't think people understand how simple some of this stuff is.  We just assume you're a big corporation and you have all these things that are way overcomplicated.  If you have a spreadsheet, I would love that.  That would be amazing.

Damion Lupo:	They are overly complicated, Jamie.  This is what happens with people with MBAs.  They complicate the S-H-I-T out of all of this stuff, and so you go whoa, that's way too - it's not.  They don't even know what's going on in their own companies because they've overly complicated it, so you would never know, and you don't need all that stuff.  What you need to understand is your core stuff that's really driving the cash.

Jamie Masters:	See, see, I knew I liked you.  My mentor was a third-degree black belt, and was always like, no bullshit kind of guy.  And he would wipe the floor with the MBA buys because he's done this for so long.  He's like that's not reality.  That's why I do this show.  I'm like, wait a minute.  What are you actually using?  Huh, who knew, okay, yeah, it's simple.  Okay.  So I love these pieces.

Damion Lupo:	That actually brings up a really good point about the simplicity and the narrow focus.  There's a guy that passed away named Chad Holmes, and one of the things he used to say, and he's a martial artist black belt like me, and he said, look, when you're focusing on business, when you're focusing on measuring whatever you're doing, you're not focusing on 1000 things.  Just like in martial arts, you don't focus on learning 1000 moves.  You focus on 12.  You can do those things 10,000 times each and they become really, really clear, and really, really focused, and they're part of your DNA. They're instinctual.  That's what happens in business.  You focus on a small number of things that you do really well.  You don't do 1000 things, you do 6 things, and you kick butt.

Jamie Masters:	I'm obsessed with this.  Even when you watch fighters, they're only really, really, really, really good at a certain number of things.  They're not trying to consult every single thing because most of the time it doesn't work.  Rhonda Rosey only had one move.  Well, that didn't work for her.  You might need more than one.

Damion Lupo:	Maybe more than one, but not 500.

Jamie Masters:	Exactly.  So when we're looking at what this is and trying to shake it up for people in general, because again, unfortunately I feel like we're battling our brain as entrepreneurs because we're a little all over the place.  Accountability is not necessarily something that we're used to unless we put it in place as a system.  So what can you do to set yourself up for success in this for those six or ten things that are really, really good to do it 10,000 times?

Damion Lupo:	I think you have to ask yourself where your highest leverage points are.  I mean I'm a squirrel brain like everybody else anymore.  I'm looking at all these different things, and my biggest challenge is I'll add things on that are taking away from time to put into the one or two or three things.  There's core and the secondary.  We don't need ancillary and tertiary.  We don't need all this other stuff.  We need our core stuff and to focus on it, and it's pretty obvious.  When I look at where my revenue sources are going to come from over the next 12 months, it's really funny how after the second one, they're all really small numbers.  And if I'm really honest, they will always be small numbers.  The other ones are ten times bigger, at least, than these smaller ones.  

	So narrowing in on the focus.  It's like being a real estate flipper and an apartment developer and a parking lot manager, and like doing all these things.  Where is the money?  Where are you really going to have the deepest impact?  We know what that is, but then we get really curious.  As entrepreneurs, we're always out there looking for the next thing or something to add on.  And that can be really dangerous unless it really compliments the primary.  So we've got to narrow things down.

	There's an idea around blank slating, and really what that means is take everything off the table and say okay, I'm going to start fresh.  What do I bring to the table?  And then ask yourself, okay, if that's the case, and there are these two things, these other eight things that are currently on the table, why am I not getting rid of them, let's start purging, and that changes everything.

Jamie Masters:	I wrote that question.  I love that in general.  And I love hearing from you, who's run 30 businesses before.  Because usually, people will be like well, I'm an entrepreneur and I want to do 17 things and I can do it.  Look at these serial entrepreneurs.  And when you go through the data of all the people that I've interviewed, you're like they did one at a time and got really good unless they had the resources to do a little bit more, but most people don't have that.  And like you said, it's sort of the 80/20 rule.  If you have ten different things, two of your top are probably giving you the most bang for your buck.    So if you want to drive yourself nuts, and this is why I think most entrepreneurs are driving themselves nuts is because we're literally trying to spread ourselves so thin, we see no progress in any area because we don't have focus.  Do what do you do personally to actually focus on the one thing, especially with the typical squirrel brain that most entrepreneurs have?

Damion Lupo:	You just said it in the question.  It's the one thing.  I study Gary Keller's work with the one thing, and I got a coach that I've hired through Gary's organization.  He's one of my coaches, and so we're always asking that question.  What is the one thing?  What is the one focus?  What is the one business?  It's not what are the two or three.  It's literally the one thing.  Your brain can't focus on two things at once.  It's literally impossible.  We think we're multitasking; we're not.  We're just rapid fire changing.  And so if you're sitting there thinking okay, I've got these three businesses, I'll bounce from this one to this one to this one throughout the day, it's crazy because your brain is literally getting worn out just bouncing around.

	And so it's narrowing down to that one focus.  When you really can find that one thing and pick it, and if you're literally stuck, this is where you go get somebody's help, and they're going to say it's so obvious, and you're going to go, wow, you're amazing.  But it is obvious to other people because we're in our own crap, it's all emotional for us.  So if somebody else can say, yeah, it's that, it takes them three seconds. I mean that's how long it takes.  And then you shift, and you focus on that one thing, and then you have breakthroughs.

	Billionaires can have 50 different companies because they have world class people running each one of them.  That's not who we are right now.  I mean most of us are not sitting on 200 million dollars in cash going I could hire a world class CEO that just came out of Amazon or something.  We're literally doing it ourselves, running our operations.  We need to make sure that we're focused on one thing, and really really crush it.  

Jamie Masters:	You're preaching to the choir over here but everybody needs to hear this so many times.  Like I say it, as a business coach, all I have to do is go just do that.  Like I have the best job in the world.  Oh, no, you just do that.  They're like you're a genius.  I'm like totally genius, right.  I read the book, The One Thing.  And we can show people by going if you have three things and you split your time, that's 33 percent for each.  How fast do you think you're going to get over that darn finish line, in anything.  So how do you, besides having your coach because I'm sure that's very very helpful, but on a day to day basis, how do you do one thing?  Are we just trying to - because one thing, while we say it's one thing, it has marketing, and it had this, and it has that, and it has management, all sorts of other things that come along with it.  So how do you structure your week so that way you really feel like you can make progress on those main points, one point, that you're really trying to go after?

Damion Lupo:	Well the one thing, the week I know exactly what the outcomes are going to be and I'm accountable to my entire team, so they know that max there's three things for the week.  Those are the primary things, and those things I want to focus on in the very beginning.  I don't want to wait until Friday to get them done.  And then on a daily basis, I use Grant Caro's Tenex planner to drive my days.  It starts off with the five or six goals I have in my life.  Those goals determine the big outcomes I want for the day.  What am I doing that's serving those goals?  And then those goals for the day are literally populating my chunks of time, my hour blocks, throughout the day.

	So by the time I start my day, after this process, I know exactly where I'm going to be, what I'm going to be doing minute by minute throughout the day.  It's very very conscious.  There is no guess work.  And it's really fascinating because people will call and I'll ignore their calls.  People will say I need some time or something.  Unless it's super critical, they don't get to mess with my calendar.  And people, they get used to it.    And I don't feel bad because I know why I'm focused.  I know why I'm saying no, and if you don't know why you're saying no, you're going to say yes, and you're going to interrupt yourself.  You're going to destroy your dreams because you're all over the place serving other masters and not your own future.

Jamie Masters:	That's what you get from martial arts.  You're going to destroy your dreams.  I love it.  People need that level - you know, people really need that level of pain, right, to realize what is on - because we let things go, and it's not a big deal.  But when you actually do these simple things, it adds up over the long haul.  So how long does it take you, because I know you said you did three for your team also?  What sort of system do you do to figure out what those three things are?  And how do you tell your team, system wise, to be able to do something like that?

Damion Lupo:	Well, it becomes rely clear if I say my big three for the week are my laundry, I'm going to check the bookkeeping, and I'm going to go have a phone call with somebody.  Nobody would take it seriously.  And I'm the CEO, so it better be some pretty damn big things that I'm focusing on.  Some key relationships or some major, major rocks that we're moving.  And so you start thinking about that.  If I'm reporting to my team, and I always act as if I've got my board of directors sitting behind me with the work that I'm doing, and it really helps.

	I've put this out there that if you guys want to see what I'm doing, we'll attach a video camera to me and it'll be like the Truman Show, and you can watch me all day because that's how comfortable I am knowing what I'm doing and what I'm focusing on.  If you look at your stuff and you wouldn't be proud to have that on a billboard, here's what I'm working on, then you know there's something off and you need to reevaluate.  And always asking for feedback from people, is this big enough?  Is this a big enough focused for the week?  Is it too narrow?  If it's not big enough, then you need to push it up so that you can start focusing on the big things, especially if you're driving your business as the owner, and then figuring out okay, all these other things that I was going to spend some time on, that's for somebody else to do.

Jamie Masters:	Because we can get really comfortable and or like we're riding along, not pushing the envelope constantly.  So asking that question seems great.  So do you make your top three and then your people each make their top three, and do you know what there is?  I know you said you do a deep dive monthly and you do weekly also.

Damion Lupo:	Yeah, we use something called Smart Sheet, so everybody's weekly stuff is on there, and we can see, we look out a month.  So there's four weeks in front of us and we can see what our big thing is going to be, so that way we aren't sitting there thinking okay, I've got seven really big things.  We can actually populate over the next month.  If you start going out with these things, you go out months, it gets really hard to even keep your mind around it.  But if we know this month, okay, the next four weeks, here are the things that are each week, it narrows the focus down so we can keep really really laser on whatever really matters and we don't have to bounce around.

	Seven things in a day is just too damn much.  But when you have a couple of things for the week and you're putting those in your day, you know the different resources you to deploy and the conversations you need to have to get those things knocked out.

Jamie Masters:	That's exactly what I said.  So my book talks about active actions and having three per week and making sure they actually align with your goal.  Who knew?  Like simple, simple things, but making it a habit is way easier to say than it is to do.  How long did it actually take you, or was it just the coach really like pounding it into you to try and make sure that you made it habitual?

Damion Lupo:	The reality is, if you have any type of accountability that's visual - when you have something out there, there are these inner drivers, like I don't want to be embarrassed, I don't want to go against my word, I want the consistency.  Chaldini talks about this in his book, Influence, and how the consistency, once we agree to something, once we put it out there, we don't want to go back on it because we've got this inter turmoil going, so we'd rather just deal with it even if it's a little bit painful to do, to go forward.  And so keeping things out in front of me where people can see them, they're visual, I'm not going to let people down.  I mean I'm in charge.  I'm the leader and my job is to make sure that other people are doing what they're supposed to do.

	If I'm not going to do what I say I'm going to do, then my organization's going to be chaos, be like trying to herd cats or something.  It's not going to work.

Jamie Masters:	With my mastermind group, we all have to post exactly what they are, so everybody sees everyone else's.  And then if they don't do them two weeks in a row, I make them sing in front of everyone.  Now, no one has ever in two years had to sing because the embarrassment of not doing it and letting everybody know is plenty, way better than like charity, a crappy charity that you don't like.  I think the public embarrassment is really one of the best things that you can use.  Simple things like that.

Damion Lupo:	You know when we're talking about the public accountability, we were talking about people knowing, our mentoring groups or whatever it is we're using, that such a big key is to make sure that we are really, really tight about what the outcome is, and it's not just fluffy.  I've seen this so often, and it's easy to try to get away with it, where my goal is to improve this thing.  One of my old friends who I'm not really friends with anymore, but used to say all the time, I'm making progress.  And I'd go yeah, that's interesting, and it's fluffy, and we can coombyaugh about that, but what did you get done.  

	And that's the hard thing because when we're screwing around or we're not really doing the stuff that is painful, then this is where the problem lies.  You've got to have something that you can be held accountable to, and if it's too vague, there's nothing to be accountable to.

Jamie Masters:	It literally takes us a month to two months to get people to understanding what an active action is.  I'm like it has to have a metric or it has to have a thing that you can actually check of, or improving this.  You're like, that's awesome.  What the heck does that mean?  But we do this to ourselves; right.  We're like I am doing this.  And this is when we can fall into a false sense of reality of going oh wait, my numbers are going down.  I was just chatting with my accountant about this, the bookkeeper the other day, and I can you know warning them and warning them and warning them and they were just like oh, I'm too busy, I'm too busy.

	And yet, when something's going down, you really shouldn't be too busy for the main thing that your whole business is run on, you would think.  But like I said, it sounds so simple for us to say, but when somebody, like you said, is in the weeds, it is way harder.  I'm honest about my business, too.  I can mess it up quite often even though its way easier for me to go into another company and see the issues.  So besides hiring a coach, or is that the only thing that you say?  Because I don't think people should have a coach forever either.  I'm saying that from being a coach; right.  But what do you think that they can do to really set themselves up and not just see the forest through the trees without necessarily hiring a coach?

Damion Lupo:	Well, here's a couple things that, ideas, and this actually came up with me recently thinking about my coaches.  So one of the coaches I have, I've had for a year, and he's awesome.  There's also something about fatigue.  It's coaching fatigue where you see the same person, the same message, and you need something different, you need a different person.  So I think there's always value in having somebody that's giving you feedback, and often times that's just holding space.  So you can look in the mirror through them and you can see your stuff because we are our own inter gurus if we pay attention to the voice that's trying to tell us what we need to hear.  But often times, we go no, somebody else has to tell me.  It's like how you and I go into a business and we go it's this, and somebody goes, wow.  Like no, you already knew that.  You were staring at it but you weren't seeing.

	So just shifting the coaches around.  And really, the other part of it is the we're spending with certain people.  If we're around people and those people are talking about their hardcore metrics, we're actually going to want to talk about the similar things because it's a tribal survival mechanism.  If we're around people that are just talking about the past, or they're just fluffy about the future, and they're not hardcore about reality, then we're going to become just like those people.  So it's really important to start assessing and being honest about the influencers that are actually making us us.

Jamie Masters:	Evolution of humanity, right?  We're like oh, okay, it gets better and better.  And it's funny that you say this, too.  I feel like my mission in life is to help business owners trust their own inter guidance because, no offense, you can pay me forever, but I don't want your money.  You should figure some of this stuff out on your own.  And while most of the time I'm literally telling them what they already know; they just need somebody to confirm it.  I get it; I do, too.  I can't really say that I'm totally all the time in it, but this is also why I meditate all the time because I can't tap in and ask myself what I want.  We also have a tendency to hire coaches that aren't so great.  No offense to any coach that's out there in general, and they tell them stuff, even if it doesn't align with what the person thinks they are, and then they're mad later.

	I just found spent all this money.  I did what they said.  It didn't necessarily work, and that sucks, too.  And I want to make sure everybody's caution from that also because while coaches can be good, we can't always trust 110 percent of everything that they tell us is correct; right.

Damion Lupo:	Well, there's a question that if a coach is asking you this one question on a regular basis, you've got a huge problem.  You've got a coach that wants to maintain that coaching income forever, and the question is, "what do you think?"  And that may sound like oh, wait, I'm asking the coach to guide me, to tell me the answers.  No, the coach should be helping you see that you've got the ability, and they should be helping build up your confidence so you don't need them.  It's like the way that I look at relationships in terms of like a significant other.  I don't want somebody in my life that's always going to be reliant on me.  I want to empower them so that they want to be with me, not that they need to be with me, and this is what a coach should be creating.  A relationship where you're empowered to go out on your own.  Not that you're reliant on them for the rest of your life.  That's just a sad coach that you've hired, so fire that person if they're not empowering you and building your confidence muscle.

Jamie Masters:	Seriously.  When I was in Bali, one of my clients keep messaging me, and we do live transparent coaching sessions on my podcast.  And I go, figure it out yourself.  If I wasn't there, what would you do?  I'll trust you.  Go ahead.  And she's like, I just don't want to do it wrong, and I was like, it's not wrong, it whatever it is.  We're going to learn from it; you're fine.  Figure it out yourself.

Damion Lupo:	That's it

Jamie Masters:	But it is one of those things.  I'm not going to be here forever.  I hope I'm not going to be here forever for you.  The little baby bird should go fly away; right.  That being said, you do want to make sure that they know how to fly before you let them out of the nest because that -

Damion Lupo:	They'll learn.  On the way down, gravity takes hold and they start flapping real fast, and people figure it out.  I mean that's the thing, too.  As a coach, you've got to be willing to let somebody develop their wings.  I mean that's really important.  And a lot of coaches, they don't want to quite go there.  They won't do what you did.  What you did is very powerful, it's very professional.

Jamie Masters:	Well, thank you, number one.  But number two, how do you know when that relationship is "over?"  Even if you love them where you're like I think I need a different perspective.  Is it after a certain period of time?  Because you've been in this for a long time, had a ton of coaches.  So tell me what you think on your gut level is typical.

Damion Lupo:	Well, typically there's a period of time where you need to ramp up and go deep.  I think that anybody that comes into a coaching relationship, or with a mentor and says okay, I want to see how this works for a few months, good luck on getting anywhere in a few months.  I mean you can have a session where there's some great questions, but you really need to go deep with somebody.  I think after a year you start getting into the ' it starts to become a circular equation often times.  I've got one that I've been working with and love the relationship, but it's gone on for just over two years, and we're getting close to the point where I feel comfortable in the client's ability to run on their own, and so we're going to have that conversation.

	It's going to be weird because I think that there's this hesitancy that we're breaking up with somebody, and we don't want to do that because it doesn't feel good.  I mean nobody likes to break up unless you're a sadist masicast.  I mean like, why would you want to do that?  The reality is you're setting people free to grow, and they can only grow in a contained box so far.  It's the limits of the box, and you don't want to do that to anybody; yourself or somebody else.

Jamie Masters:	I also think it's part of the coach's job to be able to know when that it, and to be like, and you're not going to sign up again because I don't think you should.  And be honest about that, too.  Not being said that they couldn't help you a little bit farther but it seems that there's a ROI difference of what it is versus what you've already learned.  I usually become friends with old clients, too, so that makes me feel better as a coach, that they're not going away forever.

Damion Lupo:	I think, my guess is and sense, is that you're going to have massive growth surges in the beginning and then you start to have these incremental things.  When you start seeing just incremental, then you have to ask yourself okay, where would this person be best placed so that they would have those surges again so we're not just making them minor things.  You want to start thinking how do we go back into that Tenex growth, not the ten percent growth, and if you're in ten percent growth, it's time for a change.

Jamie Masters:	I agree 1000 percent.  I love this.  We could talk forever apparently.  I'm checking the time going oh wow, that went by really quick.  I love it when that happens, especially for people that are local also, so we can have hopefully hang out, have long discussions over this stuff and get way too involved over it.  That being said, I'm going to ask the same last question I always do.  What's one action listeners can take this week to move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Damion Lupo:	Easy.  Go take a look at your goals and then add a zero to every one of them.  Whatever that looks like, and figure out how that stretches you because it'll knock you around in a seismic way when you say okay my goal is 1.6 million, okay, make it 16 million.  How are you going to do that in the next 12 months'  It's a Peter Field question about how are you going to do in six months what you thought was your five-year plan.  Tenex what your current goals are, what you wrote down yesterday, Tenex it and say how am I going to do that by a year from today.  And it will force you to start tapping into different networks and different technologies and different mind sets that will knock your business into overdrive and launch you.

Jamie Masters:	You're awesome, Damion.  So tell us where we can find more about you, your current company right now, all that fun stuff.

Damion Lupo:	Come visit us at Total Control Financial dot com.  Resources there.  You can get a free copy of the book on the QRP.  And you can reach out to me or the team and we'd love to spend some time with you.  So visit Total Control Financial.  You'll see us there and I'm looking forward to hearing from everybody

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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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