How Justin Goodbread Built, Scaled, and Sold Businesses by Valuing Time Over Money

Time is finite. It's so limited for all of us, but money we can always miss. So cheap. We can make money all day long. It's no big deal. Welcome back to super entrepreneurs podcast. I'm your host, Shahid Durrani. The show where we dive into the minds of high performing entrepreneurs, innovators, and world-class leaders. If you're someone who's always looking to grow, push limits, think bigger, you're in the right place. Today's guest is someone who knows business inside out. Justin Goodbread. He started his first company at the age of 15 and went to becoming a nationally recognized financial expert, author, entrepreneur, he's built and sold multiple businesses, earned top financial certifications, and now helps business owners, which I love, increase their company's value and plan for the future. Welcome to our show, Justin. Hey brother. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Oh, my pleasure. It's great to have you. I'm same here. I know we were chit-chatting before recording. When I meet someone, I want to get to know them as much as possible. I find that connectivity to another human being is very special to me. Thank you so much. I agree a hundred percent. We have the honor and privilege to serve so many people. And those of us behind microphones, we, even though we have a platform, there's thousands, if not millions of others who don't have the microphones that literally is just trying to just stumble our way through life. We have this calling from a higher power, from our God, so to speak. And he's laid a problem in our heart, his vision in our heart. And at this point in my life, Shahid, I'm just, I'm just at the point where I want to drive our business owners to their vision that they believe they have in front of them, that I call it God ordained vision, man. How do we drive them to that? How do we help them prevent the stupid mistakes that so many of us have dealt with in the past? And so I'm looking forward to unpacking this. This is going to be a lot of fun conversation. Good. Yeah. Great. Starting at age 15, you had this entrepreneurial bug in you. Were your parents into business as well? Actually, no. And I didn't have an entrepreneur bug. My dad told me that if I don't have a job by Friday, don't come home. And I was 15 years old. We were homeschooled. I was back whenever there wasn't a lot of, a lot of homeschoolers in the day. And we were a small family, mom and dad. Just, they were raised very humble. This very meager beginnings. And they wanted to raise their family to be entrepreneurs. And he can, my dad through a series of events, train my brother, my sister and I, how to be entrepreneurs. And now seven businesses later, 30 plus years, man, 30 plus years of driving businesses. It has been a journey. This one now that I have the privilege is to, to empathize and to rationalize and actually understand where so many of our brothers and sisters are in the day-to-day grind. Definitely. You don't look like someone that's been doing it for 30 years from where I am. You seem much younger, but that's a tremendous experience obviously is because of the fact that you started so young, right? Yeah. That's a thank you comment. They gray on my face and the weather on my skin and all the scars from the last 30 years would probably differ with you. But it's been a journey. It's been a journey I wouldn't trade. And this entrepreneur journey is one that it's not for the pain of heart, but the journey, and I don't talk about the destination because we're always, we're never going to reach our destination. I don't believe in our life. We're always going to continue to pursue whatever God's put in front of us. But the journey itself is so amazing. It is so, so beautiful and absolute. Had so beautiful. Is there any kind of lesson that you could share with others that you picked up at a young age, starting a venture, going into self-employment per se that influences what you do today? Absolutely. There was one key point in my life to where I was about 20 years of age and my teacher at college had just told me I was dumb as a box of rocks, exact quote. You're dumb as a box of rocks. And I've turned around in the typical 20 year old response. And I said, no, I'm not. In fact, one day I'm going to have a New York times bestseller. That's literally what I told her. And she's dude, you can't spell worth a flip. And she's right. I can't even spell the word flip. I cannot spell. And so I'm like, no, I'll do this. And so I went after that conversation to hit to, to a, to a Zig Ziglar conference back in the old Zig Ziglar, you know, on the stage, he had the water pump and he's saying, you got to prime the pump. You got to serve others, but ultimately where do you want to be? And he challenged that audience to that small audience, three or 400 people at that time. He said, I'd like you to take a sheet of paper out and write down your wildest dreams that you want to accomplish in the next 20 years, wildest dreams. And here I am 20 years old and I had three things that I wrote down. I don't mind sharing them. I said, I want to be married to a smoking hot girl that had a beautiful family by the time I'm 40 years of age, I said, number one, number two is I want to write New York times bestseller. And the number three, I was like, I don't know where this came from, but it's like, I want to become a deck of millionaire by the time I'm 40. I want to have a net worth more than $10 million. Now this is in the nineties. Okay. It shows you my age is nineties. And at that time until today, that's a lot of money. And so I can remember that. And it became a staple, like the mountain I was going to charge up. Didn't know how I was going to achieve this. I was like, I'm going to do this. So I spent the next roughly 16 years of my career buying and selling and starting companies and selling them and growing and different professions from landscaping to consulting to insurance. And then finally it come to the point where it's like, I'm looking and I achieved my, my, I have a beautiful wife and a beautiful family. I'm blessed in that area. I had not written a book. I had not written anything really since college. And we had nowhere near the deck of millionaire status we want to achieve. And so I hired a coach and I believe that a coach can change your life. Yeah, cause it changed my life. And I believe this with all my heart. And this is the principle I'm going to drive you to, because by the time I was 40, I achieved a number one wall street journal bestseller, an international bestselling that sold over a million books. We reached deck a millionaire status and as to have a wife and a beautiful family. So we are able to achieve a lot in a four year period of time, but the coach taught me a valuable principle. And here's the key to that story. The key to the story is that the money is infinite. Time is finite. We can always make more money. And I coached Tommy's son. If you will trade your dollars to speed up your success curve, using wisdom of others, using the mistakes of others, or having that coach apply principles in my monthly life, every month, helping me coach not to make the same mistakes he made, he pushed me to achieve my goals. And then the money that I sacrificed for that four year period of time came back, but more importantly, I now had time. So time is not, time is fine. I is so limited for all of us, but money, we can always miss so cheap. We can make money all day long. It's no big deal. It's a game. That's the principle right there, brother. Yeah. It's the way we look at life. When we look at it as difficult, this guaranteed to be difficult. When we shift the mindset and we look at it that, Hey, it's a learning curve. And I create the experience that I want. I want my life to be difficult. I want it to be easy and flowing. I have those gifts to make that possible. And that's the realization that when you went to that event, just thinking big, like that, writing those things, unleash something much bigger than if you didn't know, if you didn't realize that thought patterns, right? They, it unleashed the desire, not knowing how we were going to accomplish. And I would say that every person listening to us right now has a desire. It's something that's burning in your heart. Now, it may be something monetarily. It may be something with your family. It may be something with your faith. It may be something with your friends. Or we have something that's burning in our hearts. If we literally pause for a moment, that old Hebrew word says silah, pause for a second and just push the noise out and think about this journey that we're on. If we honestly sit back, see that there is a, there's a destiny that we're all trying to achieve. Now we may not be able to see it crystal clear, but we know it's out there. So as we think bigger and our mind sees the bigger opportunities, what we end up actually doing is creating pathways, syntax that allow us to find the destiny. And the journey becomes, as we were talking earlier, it becomes beautiful. It becomes this thing that's, man, I'm going to step in faith to this next particular move, I'm going to step in reason to this next particular move. I don't know what it's going to yield, but it's going to carry me one step closer to this particular desire I have in my life. Me, whenever you had that opportunity to stretch your mind and allow somebody who believes in you, you surround yourself with your family, your friends, your coach, whoever it is that believes in you and they challenge you as like iron sharpening iron, they push you forward. I firmly believe that we can accomplish anything, anything truly center. My best friends. I live it. And it's funny. And it's funny, I'm attracting guests that think and feel this way more often now than I used to. Even though I wanted guests like you on the show, I would be bringing something different, so basically whatever I had in my subconscious is what I was bringing. And my subconscious has shifted so much over the months and now I'm noticing a different, and there's a little minute areas of your life you start seeing that shift when, like you mentioned, that desire is super important to have because we need to grow as human beings. As soon as we were born, my late mentor used to say, we need to start crawling and you start running. We want more life, we want more money. We want like this growth. That's the whole purpose of the expanding universe that we're part of it. And because of the experiences we had in the past and in our environment, we start giving more energy to the limitations, the thoughts that come up that are based on more limitations that we hold ourselves back and that's unfortunate. That's the real passion behind this show is to help people wake up to what you're doing exactly is bringing individuals like you on the stage here and spreading your message to allow someone to, Hey, step away a little bit and say, wait a minute, there's something great inside me. There's some greatness, something super inside me that's boiling and I want to do something. And like you said, it could be a book or it could be something else as a desire. Now, what do I do? And then they start giving energy to the how, but honestly, in my experience and the people that we work with, the how really honestly doesn't matter because it comes to you, it shows up these partnership, these people, and this idea, this plan starts coming and start creating within you start creating it because you're already living with that faith, not fear, but you shift it. There's some reprogramming that needs to be done internally, but you start having more faith and you're leading with faith where action doesn't seem like action anymore because it's effortless. You're just flowing and the flow is 10 times more effective than how you were grinding when you were in fear. You know what I mean? Absolutely. I've had the privilege of talking with uber successful people as the world might define success. And I'm not talking about money. Money is just one element of success. I think the way I frame success for my person and the way that I've stayed grounded in my own life, and it's a challenge that I challenge now, the clients that I coach, these business owners that want to rapidly grow their companies, I believe there are five areas of wealth. I believe our faith, you and I have spent some time talking about our faith that we believe there's a higher calling. We might call him God. We might call him Allah. We might call him Jesus, whoever it is. We believe there's a higher calling, right? And so two thirds of the world believe there's a higher calling. So we're the majority of those of us who believe that way. So faith is vital. And then we have our family. My family, what good is it if I gained the world and lose my family? They're not with me throughout the success journeys that they're not around me at my deathbed. And I can't reminisce a point of them. So I don't wanna lose my family. And then friends, I don't hear a lot of people talk about this. You said friends, we have to have ourselves surrounded with friends who can encourage us along this journey who are not employees, they're not pastors or our bishops or our priests or our rabbis or none of that. They're friends that you can go play golf with or go hunting and fishing with, and you just love them. And then you gotta have your fitness. We gotta stay healthy because what good is money if you can't enjoy the money? Or what good is your fame if you can't enjoy the fame? Or what good is your family if you can't play with your kids? So you have to have your fitness, then you have your finances. To me, that's the least important of everything is finances. The world seems adopted around a different way. And so what we do is we put this mystical thing out here, money wise, and we're gonna pursue it. When the reality is it comes back to, as we think, so we are. It's said a couple of different ways. Henry Ford says, if you think you can or think you can't, Napoleon Hill wrote this book, Think and Grow Rich. Scripture says, as a man thinks, so is he. As a person thinks, so is he. Right? So it all starts with this framework around how do you, what is your syntax? What is your faith in this journey? The how, which is why so many of us want to get caught up in how did you do it? What worked for me is not going to work for you. There's a framework and there's a methodology and I can tell you some secrets if you want to know. For a deck of millionaires, I talk to them literally every day and things like, don't turn the TV off or pick up a book. That's the simple framework. Do that and it's going to lead to success. But in the end of the day, it's a simple principle that I learned on the farm. And that is this, you're going to reap what you sow. Every time you throw a seed out, it's going to turn back something. If it lands on the soil to which it can permeate, it can grow, it will yield you. So if I throw some corn out, I'm not going to get okra. I'm just not, even though I like both of them, I'm going to get corn. It's interesting. If I put one kernel of corn in the ground, I'm going to get back typically two years on that one stock. But whenever I plant it, I'm not going to reap it the next day. I'm going to reap it perhaps a season later. I'm going to sow it in the spring, I'm going to reap it in the summer. I'm going to sow it, I'm going to reap it later than I sown it. And so we as business owners, or we as humans who are trying to drive to that destination, we want in our Western culture today, instant gratification, instant result, we want this mindset. And we forget that, Hey, look, Justin Gilbert sitting here now, mid forties, almost fifties saying, I spent the last 30 years reading a book a week, reading, going to conferences, investing in my mind, not the how, the mind first and keeping my eyes on a vision, on a clear destiny and in this journey, every part of it wasn't always beautiful. Heck no, lawsuits, issues with employees, issues with clients, near bankruptcy several times. It is tough, but the journey, this journey to that destiny, that whatever that destiny is in your future, it is so precious and it is so beautiful and it shapes us to who we are. And ultimately it shapes us, get this so that we can serve others. Yeah. That's what it shapes us for. Yeah. And when you lead with that value, it's so amazing what you're saying and it is so close to heart. And that's why we need more of this type of conversation out there in the business world. I feel that grinding the hustling it's so 2019 and earlier, I think that when we focus internally, my world has completely shifted because of it. But initially I thought it was nonsense. What do you mean internally? But it is so important to get to know self at a very deep level. A lot of people talk about self-awareness, but almost everyone thinks they're self-aware. But that's, it's true to an extent, but I'm talking about deep self-awareness moment to moment. Understanding, being aware of the thoughts, the feelings that, that trigger things and giving it some space. And I found that when we started creating that gap internally, we start unlocking our true potential, not masked over some conditioning that we have experienced in the past or other people, ideology that was transferred to us, but just know for yourself through experience. And the more you do that, the more you want to do for others automatically, because you start feeling that oneness, the oneness to everything. And science is proving, right? That everything is entangled with just what we see as physical. Obviously this seems separate, but at the foundation, the core, it's just love. It's just one. And when we start operating from that energy, when we want to help others, we're not trying to help others to gain. Obviously everybody wants to grow, but the focus starts shifting. You actually want people to succeed because if you help them get what they want, you're going to automatically get what you want anyways. It's not like it's not going to happen. And what you're seeing here is deep. And I'm grateful that you're on this show, sharing this so other people can hear. It's not just one person talking about it. There's other successful in my network. I'm blessed that I'm coming across with, like you said, wealthy on a monetary level, but success might be different for everybody, for me, my success is creating that gap between who I feel I am and my thoughts. That was the biggest success for me is to take that power back where my emotions aren't triggered by other people's circumstances situations, because you mentioned challenges, challenges going to happen, they're going to happen. And some of the challenges that happened to me, for example, when they were happening, I thought the whole world was against me. I thought everything wants me to feel like I'm doing something wrong. I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy. But in all this, he, when I zoom out and when you look back at that and you notice, oh my God, what an incredible lesson, what an incredible stepping stone to my next stage of my life. Every single one of them. I'm not kidding. Like every single challenge that was insanely devastating at the time later became a perfect next step to where I needed to go, you know, it's beautiful about what you just described. And I use that word beautiful because in the challenges, we are shaped and molded to who we are. I believe that we are created. I believe that God created us in his image. I believe that we're fearfully and wonderfully made. I believe that. I believe I'm not an accident. I believe that you're not an accident. Everybody who's listening to me. I believe that we were placed here on the earth for a purpose that only we can pursue that only we can achieve the way I say it to my children. The way I talk in my microphone on my podcast is God has created us for what he's created us for, and he's preparing us for what he's prepared for us. So all this journey and all this chiseling and this sacrifice and this pain and this hurt and this deep emotional devastation that we all face. We're not isolated on island. One of us face this it's ultimately to equip us and to protect equip us and prepare us for what we are prepared for. My dad, I grew up on the ocean in South Georgia here on the East coast, the United States, and we would go out in the boat and my dad used to make the statement. I didn't understand it, but now as I've got a little bit more age, a little bit more gray hair, I understand a little bit more. He would say, son, calm seas never make good sailors. In other words, whenever the sailors were placed into tumultuous areas, tumultuous waters, they learned how to navigate at a different intensity level than ever before. And so the very journey that you've gone, the very journey that I've gone and everybody who's listening to us is literally shaping us into this masterpiece for one reason and one reason only. And it's not for self gain. That's this so Western 20th century, 19th century culture. It's not for self gain. It's so that we might turn around and help and serve those who are struggling, who are going through very similar circumstances, those who are feeling that weakness. And the way I say it in my simple South Georgia country boy style, as I say it this way, look guys, if this country boy born and raised on a dirt road, who barely liked to put tennis shoes on his entire life can be used for what God's allowing me to do in my life over this last 30 years, anybody can do anything because I know me, I'm not special. I'm not the sharpest person. I can't spell man. I can't spell worth a flip. I've got so many weaknesses, but what happens is I get, I got a glimpse. I got a glimpse of what it could be. And in that glimpse, it's like, there's a journey that's hard. There's a journey that's tough. There's a journey that has a way of just like this. The Mason would take a chisel and shape that piece of grain into the beautiful masterpiece that we see all of our world. It chisels us and it refines us. And it brings about this masterpiece that when we, that when we sit to a point at a different level, we say, it's not me. I didn't do this. You don't understand my team, helping my family, helping my friends, help me. God helped me in my faith. Help me. It wasn't me. You don't understand the journey. It just won't. And by the way, if I can make it through it, you got this, you got anyone can. So my kids, when I'm on the microphone, I'm talking to business owners, just dude, I know how hard it is. I know how tough it is. Take a step back. Pause. Reset your vision. What is it that you're designing for? What is it that you're really trying to achieve? Not the service or the product, not the money, not the clientele, not the procedure, what is it you're ultimately trying to do? What was it like in the infancy of your business? What was it like in the infancy of your life? What was that 20 year old dream you had? Like my Zig Ziglar dream, whatever it may be. Let's, let's reconnect with that. Now, look at how you've been molded to this particular point to serve the person you once were. Look at how you've been molded to help that person who's following your footsteps and now lean back and work with him. And as you do, you know, it's going to happen. It happens every single time you're propelled exponentially forward to your next journey. It's amazing how the God set up, set his world up for us. Beautiful system. I love that word as well. I use it a lot. It starts happening automatically because you hear a lot of people use the word beautiful when they're happy or fulfilled or grateful. But it is definitely a beautiful experience for us to have, to be able to create, to help others. And like you mentioned, when you start becoming that aware of yourself and what's going on internally, you automatically want to help others because you see the struggle, you see what's going on and you know that they can do it. Like for you, you have this passion that you want to help them because you see that whatever you're dealing with, whatever's happening is nothing compared to where you can go because you are a human being, so incredible. So I wanted to ask you a question about financially simple that you built and it is to help business owners. But was there anything unexpectedly at the time when you're scaling it that was hard launching it, scaling it, and how you actually pushed through that may help someone? The hardest thing I dealt with in my companies when I was building them and scaling them and then exiting them is removing my identity from the company, the single hardest thing I had to do because so many of us, we have blood, sweat, and tears. We have this vision that we have in our business of where it could be. I believe it's God ordained. I believe he gives us that vision of what we can do in the greatest servitude, humbled, and walking in faith toward that goal. So I believe that with all my heart. This literally, I speak like this nonstop because it's who I am. And I believe in that journey. One of the things that so many of us as business owners that we mistake is it's our business. Is look what I've done. And the reality of the circumstances, the business is nothing more than a wealth creation tool. It's a wealth creation tool to create wealth for the owner, for the employees, for the community, for the charities, for the clients, for the vendors, for everybody involved. That's all it is. Well, now we are to do good work and we are to provide good service and we are to be reputable and all those things that we know we just should do as business owners. But at the end of the day, it's a tool just like a screwdriver or a hammer. It's a tool to accomplish a goal. And in this scaling journey, I'd already scaled several companies. So I didn't face in this particular company, some of the challenges that I had faced in the previous companies, like how do I build systems or how do I create marketing or who do I loan them an avatar, none of those things that so many, maybe in their first business would face, those are academic, those are easy to accomplish now at this phase. I can walk somebody through it and that's what we do. They're our coaching for us. We coach business owners, how to rapidly grow the value of their companies. But in my case, we reached a point and this is not me being braggadocious. It's just a fact reached a point where I was taking four months off a year and making significant rent income, significant income, and the business was growing exponentially because we had built systems that could do that. It wasn't centered around me. And then during COVID, my wife ended up being in the hospital. My wife is in the hospital. We thought she was going to die. We actually had a conversation with our kids. Mom may not come home from this. We can talk with our attorney, make sure all of our legal stuff's in place. And I'm spent, we spent 16 weeks not knowing what was going on. We had to have a surgery that had a very slim chance of success in it. And it was literally outside of our control. And during this conversation, there was two things that happened that I hope no one ever experiences. But when I say hard times, I'm saying hard times. We already dealt with miscarriages. We already dealt with death of friends and family and suicides and all those other things of immediate family management, various things. But this was my bride, man. This is my love of my life. Right. And here I am later from the hospital. She's made a statement to me. She said, Justin, what's another million dollars going to do for us? She made that statement was not the money side. So please don't misunderstand. It's not the money side. It was, are you focusing on the wrong thing? That's what she was asking me. My coach said, Justin, if you had unlimited time and unlimited resources, what would you do tomorrow that you're not doing today? So literally the hardest thing I had to do was sell my baby because it pulled to a point of my career to where my business did not drive me forward to the next chapter. I closed that season out and God used her sickness to bring about something that I would not have walked away from because it was beautiful. It was an unbelievable business, highly valuable business. Now, thank God today. She's great. She's healthy. No problems. It was a miraculous turnaround. But God brought us to that particular journey of very difficulty where we had to face the reality that this business is not who we are. We're simply, this is simply a step in the pathway. So I say that because several times now, as I'm talking to business owners, either when I'm on stage presenting or they come up and line up or they go through our systems or social media, whatever, they'll say, man, I just don't know if I should be in this business. Look at the bigger picture. You see, now where I'm at is I cannot go out and create a eight, nine, 10 figure business. Absolutely. It's a simple process to do. I know the game plan. I could do it. Is it hard? Yes, but, but so is walking. When we first learned how to walk, it was hard. So it's not a matter of knowing it's hard. It's a matter of what's the calling. So for me, the hardest thing I dealt with in that business was saying, you know what, it's nice. It's good, but it's not the season now. We're going to let it go. And we're going to now step out in faith to the next step and do something I've never done before. And that is, I'm going to get on a microphone and I'm going to talk about my faith in such a way that tries to encourage business owners and tries to encourage my brothers and sisters around this great planet and say, Hey, God has a plan for your life. Walk in faith toward it. He is, he, he wants you to succeed bigger than your wildest imaginations. He wants you to achieve things that you haven't even thought about. In fact, one of the, one of the scripture says exceedingly abundantly above anything you can ask or think that's what God wants for your life. So for me to step out of this business world where I'm literally making good income, impacting people, and now be able to get in the microphone and say, Oh my goodness, I'm going to speak openly about my faith. I'm going to speak openly and talk to people who are struggling and try to encourage and who am I, who am I? I'm an old country boy born and raised on a dirt road, live on a dirt road now in East Tennessee. I'm just a country man. But now for some reason, brother walking on that platform, it's beautiful today. Last two years have been grueling for me emotionally, physically, spiritually to lean every way you can judge. It has been struggling, struggling for me because I'm fighting. I was fighting the very calling to which God has ordained for this next season of my life. And so if you find yourself where it's grueling, may I challenge you to say, Hey, am I really fighting the direction that I should be going? Maybe like I had to face, hopefully you don't have God bring you to a point to where your wife or your husband or your child or a significant other is literally on the doorsteps of death. Maybe it doesn't come to that point, but maybe then this story that I'm sharing, trying to be a little bit more authentic and vulnerable for our friends and brothers and sisters out there that you can say, Oh my goodness, maybe just, maybe I'm not on the right path. Just maybe it's now time for me to reset and recreate and go to version 3.0 or 4.0 of your life. Great story. We have this nudge that happens. I can relate to it so much, but then we just think our way out of it and we make reasons why we shouldn't do it. And then we try to go in a route that we think that should be the way, and then something pulls us back continuously, keep pulling us back to go in a certain direction. And you took that leap and you're following a purpose here. There's a deeper purpose where mountains start moving in front of your path, right? Because there's something very powerful when you go in the direction of that intuitive calling that you have taken on. So I want to really show my appreciation for your time today, coming on our show, spreading your goodness and your wisdom. And I wish you all the success, all the growth, all the calmness and helping other people also experience that elevated life. And I appreciate you. Thank you for having me. I hope this message helps whoever's listening. I hope it helps you. If you ever want to connect, Hey, look, check me out on Instagram. I live my life openly. I don't hide anything. You're going to see authentically who I am. I'm a human, just like everybody else. But I honestly believe that if we work together and we lean on each other and we share in our journey, that we can, as you just said, we can move mountains. We can accomplish the most unbelievable things and friends. It is despite where you're at, maybe you're struggling today. It is a beautiful journey. It is. Yeah, I agree.