John SmallMtn (00:00:00)

Welcome to another episode of Founder’s Growth. My name is John Hill, AKA Small Mountain. I’m the founder of Adapted Growth. Today on the show, we have Frederick Douglas Bussey. He’s the founder of Icon Status and the author of two books. The first one is called Breaking Orbit, and the second one is The Lie That Keeps You Broke. Most of his work is helping family-focused entrepreneurs make more money with less time so that they have more time to spend with their family. Welcome to the show, Frederick. I would love to just dive in immediately into The Lie That Keeps You Broke. What is that lie? Why do people get stuck?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:00:38)

Man, first of all, thank you for having me, John. It’s an honor to be here with you and having this conversation. With The Lie That Keeps You Broke, there are actually multiple lies, right? The lie is not always the same for everyone, but in the course that I teach around Breaking Orbit, I talk about what we call anti-beliefs. These are beliefs that are actually inside of us, right? A belief is like a solid object. We hold these beliefs, but they’re also invisible, and they’re how we see the world. You’re not always aware of what you believe in terms of it being an actual belief; it’s just how the world appears to you.

These perspectives that we have are oftentimes built around actual lies. Because these beliefs are solid, we have to uninstall them, as anti-beliefs are actually working against what we want to accomplish. You can notice that we’ll say, “I want to be able to make seven figures a month,” “I want to be able to get married,” or “I want to be able to have this outcome in my life.” Yet there are things that we believe about ourselves, about the world, or about God that actually work against us being able to accomplish those things. Because they’re invisible, we’re not always aware of what they are.

The purpose of The Lie That Keeps You Broke is to help people illuminate what those lies are and then help them go work through them. It’s a 30-day devotional, if you will, but every day you take one section of the book, work through a lie, and understand how it shows up in your life and how it can be dismantled. There are actual steps and questions that you ask yourself. It’s really a workbook in a sense, taking 15 to 20 minutes a day to go through it, unpack those things, and understand what is hiding in plain sight in front of you that may be acting as an obstacle keeping you from getting where you want to go.

John SmallMtn (00:02:43)

My goodness. I love the idea of making it a workbook, because this is my big railing against workshops that just skim the surface of everything. If you’re doing deep work, you need a space to actually work through it. For a long time, everything that I thought was true had to be true, and that kept me stuck for a while. Thankfully, I found really great coaching, but part of that coaching was journaling and having a space to haul out my ideas. They had labels like “head trash”—just garbage beliefs that you have sold yourself on. It took a long time before I could look at that stuff honestly, as opposed to being defensive or digging in that I was doing it the right way.

When you see people who are running businesses, who are entrepreneurs, and who are feeling that press that there’s just not enough time, what’s the most common lie that they’re hung up on?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:03:55)

Oh man. Well, there are several, but I think that they’re all basically rooted in the idea that “I am not enough.” Most business owners that I come up against have this fundamental belief that if they just build the business big enough, then it will make them enough. They think, “I can shut down the voices and the people that doubted me, as well as the doubt that’s inside of me. People will see me, I’ll be upfront, and then I’ll matter more because I’ve built something significant. I’ll have enough money and enough purpose.” There are different tributaries that we can go down, but ultimately, there is a sense of identity that is rooted in building something that qualifies them to be worthy of love, attention, or whatever the case may be. That’s a deep psychological path to go down, but if you want to simplify it, that’s what it really boils down to: “I’m trying to build something so that people can see me.”

John SmallMtn (00:04:57)

Interesting. A lot of these people are very goal-driven and goal-oriented. If you’ve sold yourself on this identity that you have to be here or else you’re not a real entrepreneur or really successful, is the way out of that just journaling and reflection? Do you think that is enough, or do you think there are other specific things that people need to do for that change to really come into play for them?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:05:29)

Well, I definitely think that reflection is involved. Tony Robbins is famous for saying that the power of your questions determines the power of your life. When we work with our clients, we help them see that the way you structure the question helps you get to the desired outcome. Sometimes we’ve actually been structuring the question wrong. Notice, for instance, that when things aren’t working in your business, the first question that comes up is, “What’s wrong? What’s going on? What do I need to fix?” But the real question people are asking themselves is, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I make this work?” This happens just because they’re efforting so hard—they’re working and grinding.

Oftentimes, it’s not even that they’re working so hard, but that they’re thinking about it so hard. The illusion we have when we’re thinking hard is that thinking is working and being productive. There are many different paths to being able to understand that. As you mentioned before we got on here, you had a coach. Having someone as a thinking partner can illuminate those shadows and blind spots hiding in your work and your thinking. There are things that we do by practice, habit, and ritual that oftentimes create even more blind spots because we wear the grooves deeper into the path we’re taking, making it more difficult to pivot to a slightly different path. It helps when you have somebody who can illuminate your thinking so you can ask yourself different questions, or phrase them in a more powerful way, to help you get an even better outcome.

John SmallMtn (00:07:16)

I tell everybody—and not everybody believes me around this topic—that there’s a special connection whenever you’re coaching someone. I learned this as a martial arts instructor: some people just can’t hear it from you. You need someone who isn’t going to deflect or say, “Well, you don’t get it. This is different. I’m different.” That connection has got to be there, or else they’re not getting any value and won’t be able to hear anything we’re talking about. Then I just get frustrated in those moments. I don’t really have a lot of patience for people who aren’t really ready to be coached, but are looking for help, which is something I’m trying to be better about.

In your business, when you’re dealing with these people, do you run into a lot of that same friction—people wanting help, but when the help is not sexy or brand new, but rather reflection, discipline, and being open and honest with yourself, do they get defensive and try to make it about something else?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:08:31)

Absolutely. One of the things about entrepreneurs that makes them so unique is that they are extremely stubborn. By the time they come to me, they’ve gotten a fair level of success. The challenge that people experience is when you’ve gotten to a certain point and you can’t get beyond it. Let’s say a typical person comes to me making $3 million, $4 million, or $5 million a year. In that space, you’re already far and above 95% to 100% of the people in your world. You’re already more successful in many ways than anyone else, and yet you know that there’s another level that you want to get to.

However, the belief that it’s possible by doing something different is not quite there yet, because you have to understand yourself differently. There’s a shift that you get to make. If you’re not ready to make that shift, an ego death kind of happens there. We believed this thing about ourselves; we had to believe in ourselves so hard to get to this level, and now you’re asking me to unbelieve in who I’ve been all the way up to this point and become someone new. There’s a level of stubbornness, so they start to see your insight through skepticism: “Does it really make sense? How do you really know?”

It takes surrender. One of the ways we try to help people understand it is that it’s just a recipe—it’s not personal. You don’t have to be Betty Crocker or Martha Stewart to make a cake using their recipe to get their outcome. Once you start to understand it in that sense and shift it outside of yourself to not internalize the change so much, the transformation gets internalized. A lot of times, people have to be able to see it from outside of themselves to actually access the power.

The great thing about it, though, is that if you just do the work—if you just follow the recipe—you get the outcomes. It doesn’t take anything to click a button to load the internet, which is one of the reasons why it works the way that it does. It’s not quite that easy, but it is that simple. Once people can make the shift and simply surrender to the process, they start seeing those outcomes. One of the great things about this work is watching the lights flip on for people and seeing those outcomes. We don’t allow them to get mired down in self-pity and beat themselves up because they didn’t get it sooner. You’re going to get it when you’re ready. Our job is to help you understand what’s possible and allow you to get ready yourself.

John SmallMtn (00:11:03)

100%. Going back to my coach, it’s sometimes hard to see the changes we need to make. My coach told me for two years, “Hey man, you’ve got to journal. You’ve got to journal.” I was like, “No way, not me,” choosing to stay stuck because it was easier than trying to understand why this thing was going to help right now. Thankfully, he had a lot more patience than I did, because I don’t push nearly as hard on people as he was pushing on me. Now I’m thankful that he kept on me about all these things that take a while.

The hard part about journaling, meditation, or any kind of reflective process is that in the beginning, the only real value we realize is that we’re better at sitting down and writing or thinking. That kind of feels like, “How is this going to help me in the things that I think I need help in?”

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:12:19)

It’s a counterintuitive truth, right? It’s the thought that, “If I go directly at the problem, I’m going to solve it,” when you don’t realize that the problem is actually a symptom of something deeper, and you have to go at the root of it. It doesn’t always mean that you’re going to attack the root directly. Sometimes you need to sprinkle the poison around the perimeter to be able to get it to penetrate the earth, seep in, and kill the root of the problem. But it requires being willing to do that, and that willingness oftentimes only comes when people hit rock bottom.

There’s a very small percentage of people who are consistently focused on leveling up all the time, so much so that it becomes their practice and process. That takes time, but it’s a lesson learned. When you look at some of the people we admire most in the business world—the Elon Musks and Steve Jobs—there have been hard-fought battles. People often look at their demeanor at the end and say, “Well, I’m going to be like that now.” It’s like, Steve Jobs is 100,000 times wealthier than you because he did the work 100,000 times earlier to get that result. When he was at the two or three million dollar mark, in order to get to the hundred billion dollar mark, he had to shift his thinking.

We forget that Steve had to be ousted from his company. There were things he had to go through—certain levels of failures and experiences that taught him the lessons so that when he came back to Apple, he was able to turn it into a juggernaut. Sometimes people stub their toe, stumble, trip, and fall, and with certain failures, they don’t always get up. Our goal is to help people understand that failure is part of the process, but there’s more that’s possible beyond that if you’re willing to submit to the process.

John SmallMtn (00:14:24)

One of the things we were talking about before hitting record was the right framing of failure. This was a big struggle of mine for a long time because my personality really likes to be right, which can lead to endless waiting until I feel like I know enough or have it figured out to where it’s going to run perfectly. I’ve had to do a lot of work on myself to get out from underneath that weight because it keeps me paralyzed.

One of the things that you said that I really appreciated was that sharing that failure is helpful not just to other people, but also to you. The way that I think about it now is that I want to proclaim it as a failure as quickly as possible. The quicker I can see that the experiment failed, the faster I can start thinking about what I need to change so that next time it goes better.

How do you work on this with people? As you said, these people have gotten to a place of success that most other people haven’t, so it becomes very easy to focus on the wins, if we appreciate them at all. A lot of entrepreneurs are constantly moving their own goals and then being frustrated that they’re not at those goals. How do you get people to be more open to the concept that failure is part of this path and we don’t need to run from it?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:15:47)

Yeah, I love this conversation because most people are fixated on not being a failure versus being a success. What happens then is you’re basically skidding down the road with your foot on the brakes the whole time, rather than accelerating with your foot on the gas.

There are a couple of ways that we think about it. There’s a process we use called target practice. If you think about a bullseye, everything that you hit that’s not the bullseye is technically a failure. If your goal is to hit the bullseye—perfection—then everything that does not accomplish that is technically a failure because your goal was to hit the bullseye. However, if you shift that—what we do is we don’t talk about goals; we talk about mission.

When a company has a mission that is clear and everybody is aligned with it, it dictates everything that you do in a much better way than goals, because goals are arbitrary while missions are mandatory. I tell my clients, think about Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible when he gets that little message that says, “This is your mission, should you choose to accept it.” His goal is not to jump out of airplanes, do a motorcycle jump across the Himalayas as high as he possibly can, get shot, or dodge and skim down skyscrapers. All those things are not the goal; those things are just a part of the mission. The mission is something that you will do absolutely everything required to accomplish without question.

Many people fixate on goals because the goal becomes an arbitrary measurement of success. What does it mean? We give our clients a very simple mission. Our mission in Icon Status is to be the best business advisory firm in the world. What does that mean? That colors everything that we do. Now I can ask the question, “If we were the best business advisory firm in the world, what would we do in this instance? How would we do sales? How would we treat our people? How would we onboard clients? How would we advise them to get this optimal outcome?”

When you’re focused on that in terms of a mission, you’re willing to do absolutely everything necessary, but it zeroes your focus down to the bullseye. It doesn’t eliminate peripheral vision, but it helps hone it down so you’re clear about what it is.

Going back to the target practice analogy, my goal now is not to focus on hitting the bullseye. My focus is: how can I get better at pulling back the bow? How can I be more accurate in my assessment of the wind speed? How can I be more disciplined in my process of pulling back the bow to make the arrow fly straighter? When I focus on the process, I get better at that, and it raises my level. I hold myself to a higher standard, but the standard is not hitting the bullseye; the standard is being a better archer.

That’s the difference between the top 0.001% of business owners in the world and everyone else: they’re focused on being better business owners, while everyone else is focused on making more money and being more tactical in their approach. Tactics can only get you as far as tactics get you. If you’re focused on being the best business owner you can be, you’re going to see quantum leaps in your results and the outcome you have through your enterprise.

John SmallMtn (00:18:55)

Yeah, I love that. A long time ago, I was playing poker and trying to make that my full-time thing—I thought that was going to be my lane of greatness, if you will. I was working with a poker coach, and we were having this very frustrating conversation. He said a line similar to what you said: “You will improve based upon the quality of the questions you ask yourself.”

I was like, “What does that mean?”

He said, “That means that sometimes you’re going to ask me how to win this hand, and my question to you is going to be: why are you even participating in that hand?”

This made me hot, Frederick; I was pretty pissed. I was paying this guy what felt like a lot at the time—around $45 an hour—and I said, “No, I am paying you so you can help me win more hands.”

He said, “No, you are paying me to help you become a better poker player. This is what I help people with. Is this the help that you’re interested in getting?”

I had to sit with it for about a day and a half because I was thinking, “What are we even talking about here?” We were talking about the same thing, but we weren’t. We were talking about intention and the mission, to put it in your words, as opposed to just the tactics of it.

I talk about that interaction with everybody that I work with. Going back to something else you said, there’s a big difference between playing to win versus playing not to lose. Man, I love that, because it very much comes down to what you are optimizing for. If you’re just optimizing to make more money, you’re going to go down one path. If you’re trying to optimize for being the best business owner or parent you can be, those are going to be different paths, and all are valid. It’s about what you really want to work on. I love that.

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:21:14)

Absolutely. One of the reasons that’s so important is because we’re not always clear on why we want the things that we want. The intention is always there, but if it’s not clear—you know, there’s nothing wrong with making a lot of money. You say you want to be a billionaire? Great. What are you going to do with the money? Because if it only represents an identity, then it’s going to be something amorphous—it’s smoke, and we all know that if you’re chasing smoke, you can’t catch it. But if there is something beyond this that represents something more meaningful for you, now it colors your efforts, and you have the right perspective on what you’re doing.

Also, as Gary Keller says, the challenge of being successful is being able to master the monotony of success. It’s boring and repetitious. There are a lot of things that you have to do that you don’t want to do. Entrepreneurs are drawn to new things; we love to create and build things, which is often new. But if you have to build the same table every day, and that is what’s required for you to get to where you want to go, do you have the discipline, framework, and structure to execute that at the level you need to? How do you get to that level, and how do you maintain enough consistency to reach it? Because it doesn’t happen overnight.

To take your analogy: if you’re focused on your ego telling you, “I want to win this hand, I want to win every hand,” a great poker player knows, “I only play the hands that I can win.” Knowing when to get in and when to get out—my father’s favorite song was the old Kenny Rogers song: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run. You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table. There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the deal is done.”

John SmallMtn (00:23:15)

Yeah, great song. One of the other things we were talking about, and I think it’s tied to this, is you said that most people don’t know how to make a good decision. That’s an interesting statement to make. In the work that I do with a lot of people, we’re trying to overcome some of their habitual decisions—the things that come easy to them—and make new decisions. Where do people get stuck with good decisions versus bad decisions, and how does that impact their business if they can’t make a good decision?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:24:05)

There are a couple of different reasons for that. One is because the way that we see decisions often is rooted in how we were taught about who we are. There’s a lot of identity based in that. One of the things that we’re taught is that bad people make bad decisions. So if you’re afraid of making the wrong decision, that’s another case of playing not to lose versus playing to win.

John SmallMtn (00:24:18)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:24:32)

The other thing is that decision-making seems obvious, right? But there are so many other factors that go into it. If we don’t have the structure for great decision-making, then we will default to the lowest level of our training, conditioning, and understanding. Which means that you can only make as good a decision as you understand how to make a decision, to be more clear.

People often think that money is the primary deciding factor in making a decision. They use how much it costs as the default. But there are certain people who say money is no object, not because they have all the money in the world, but because their outcome is not determined by how much money they have. Great entrepreneurs and great leaders don’t say, “How much do we have?” and then make a decision based on what they have. They say, “What do we want? And how do we create enough cash flow, opportunity, and options to be able to accomplish that thing?”

Another thing that business owners often do is think that the solution to getting better employees is to pay everybody more money, and then they base that around that framework. But money is only about 12% of the decision that anybody makes. I’ll give you a perfect example.

I don’t know if you own the home that you’re living in, but when you were buying your house, was money the only thing that made you decide to live there? No, of course not. I know this because you’re married, and we know that our wives have any number of factors that go into it: How big is the kitchen? What color is the kitchen? How many bedrooms does it have? What’s the location? Is it close to a school? Is it close to other shopping or retail, or do they want to be out in the country?

When you get down to it, there are probably hundreds of little micro-decisions and bigger decisions that you make before you decide you’re going to sign on the dotted line. Then you’re willing to go through that process of filling out all that paperwork—you’ve got to get insurance, mortgage insurance, appraisals, all the other paperwork—and come up with the money for the down payment. Money and the price of the house is just one of those aspects.

Most people let the money decide for them where they’re going to live or what they’re going to do, and they think that was the thing they chose. In reality, they used that as a framework and then backed into all the other things: “I can’t afford a house that has a kitchen that I love. I can’t afford a house that has more bedrooms,” et cetera. But if you could back out of it and say, “If I could afford anything that I wanted, where would I live? What would it look like? What am I willing to do? Am I willing to wait until I have the money? Do I have a pathway to create that money if I did some things differently?” All those things are factors involved in that.

When we’re walking people through a decision-making process, it’s about understanding how to sculpt away the things that don’t matter, get clear on what does matter, and then create the pathway towards that from abundance. I know when we use the word abundance, a lot of people think it sounds high-flying, flighty, or really fluffy, but you really have to believe that because there are only two options: abundance or scarcity. Either it’s limited and you’re limited in your options, or you’re opening up the universe of possibilities. Where would you rather live? Because you get to choose—even that is a decision.

What’s the framework that you’re using for making the decision in your life? Do I believe that I have the power to choose? Am I coming from a place of powerlessness or power? I get to choose that. Now you start to see all these different models for thinking that allow you to navigate the world in a different way. It shows up in your business and in your life. I just think it’s a more powerful way to live, and I really encourage people to examine how they are making decisions.

John SmallMtn (00:28:55)

100%. I used to have this line that I would tell people: “I’m not a pessimist; I’m a realist.” But really, I was a pessimist. I would find reasons to not push myself or buy in fully.

Then I saw this meme—and I think about it all the time—that said, “Pessimists are typically right that it’s not going to work, but they also don’t ever do anything cool.” It was one of those weird things where I saw that and thought, “Let’s just go try. Let’s not be so sold on ‘this will work’ or ‘this won’t work.'” Our personalities, talk tracks, and upbringing affect what we can even conceive of as valid. Reading that line made me realize that I have probably shot down as many ideas as I could just because it was super easy to be like, “That isn’t going to work.”

In my work with founders, the first sell is the sell of yourself—that you are enough to go do this and that it’s worth trying. The world isn’t going to shatter. After that, we need to start laying in some realistic expectations, a plot, a plan, and a path. But I really think about that line all the time because it’s super easy for me to be negative and find a flaw or a reason not to try. All of this comes from just trying and seeing what happens when I try, without having to sell myself on either the positive or the negative, but thinking, “What would trying this look like?”

Please, go ahead.

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:30:47)

Yeah. If I would add to that, I think that we often think of the world as binary—it’s either this or that, right? Even the idea of optimists and pessimists, or realists and optimists—I think of it in terms of minimalists, maximalists, and optimists. Minimalists think about the minimal outcomes. They see the glass as half empty—”This is all there is in the glass.” A maximalist might say, “I’m going to fill the glass to the top.” But an optimist says, “I know I can go get more water anywhere.”

If you’re only focused on what you have or don’t have instead of focusing on what is possible to have, that is where you create into abundance and go out creating greater outcomes. You’re not saying, “These are all the people that I can serve in my little town, or these are all the people on my Facebook feed or Instagram.” That’s playing by other people’s rules instead of learning to play a different game altogether.

John SmallMtn (00:32:05)

100%. Well said. I love that.

Changing gears just a little bit: on your path, Frederick, of working with people and helping them do this deep work, what season of growth has been the hardest for you personally? You might have hit a ceiling, or needed to reflect, change, and do things differently. What was that season like for you where you struggled the most?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:32:49)

There are several significant seasons that come to mind. To be transparent with you, there’s no such thing as a season where you don’t struggle some. If you’re not struggling at all, then you’re probably not stretching or pushing yourself hard enough, right?

John SmallMtn (00:33:00)

100% agree. Especially these days—now it’s like, “What hard thing can I choose to go do just for the challenge of doing it?”

In the growth of your business, where have you had the most struggle and had to figure the most out?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:33:18)

I will go back to the beginning, when I told you a little bit about my journey becoming an entrepreneur. There was a period of time when I was leaving the music industry and shifting, but I didn’t know that I was shifting. I had already been an entrepreneur for about seven years and was running a business remotely. In the space of a week, I lost my business.

I had started working as a junior celebrity publicist. I lost my job and my business, and then I got in a car accident. Three days later, the car got repossessed. I was living in the basement of my aunt’s house, lying on the bed with no money, no business, no car, and no idea what I was going to do. I was 34 years old, trying to figure things out as a single man. I wanted to get married, but I didn’t know if that was going to be possible—who was going to marry a guy like this? I had nothing.

I remember my mom calling me and asking, “What are you going to do?” I had no idea. Where would I start with a plan? I remembered that I had started a window cleaning business, so I said, “I’ll start doing that.” But I had no car. I tried to get in a taxi with a bucket of water, and the taxi driver looked at me and said, “There’s no way. You’re not getting in with that.” I couldn’t get on the bus, so I just felt doomed. In hindsight, I could have just filled up the bucket when I got to the place, but it didn’t dawn on me. I was just stuck.

What happened, though, was that a friend of mine let me borrow his car and said, “I’ll sell it to you.” I had no money, of course, so he said, “Get $250 and join this multi-level marketing business that I’m in.” He wanted me to join his downline, so I was like, “Fine, whatever.” I didn’t care about the MLM, but along with that came a subscription to Success Magazine, which Darren Hardy used to publish. At the back of Success Magazine were these CDs. This was before YouTube was really popular—it had only been around a couple of years—so all the motivational and inspirational things that we see on social media didn’t exist back then.

I got these CDs and popped them into my car. I got a job working at a home for young boys—at-risk youth—that was an hour away. I had to drive an hour back and forth every day. I popped in those CDs and listened to Les Brown, Tony Robbins, and Dale Carnegie sharing these mind-blowing, life-altering truths. I remember my brain being on fire. It started opening things up for me. It was the shift I needed to see that it was possible to accomplish great things and that greatness was actually inside me. Beyond all of the narrow pathways I had seen, all the things I thought were closed off to me, I realized there was a pivot I could make.

It was unbelievable. It’s amazing that you can be broke, have no money, and be living in your aunt’s basement, but have so much hope, optimism, drive, and motivation again. That was a moment when I began to live outside of myself and start to learn. I got introduced to this world of coaching, leadership, training, and courses that helped me see things in a different way. I started to understand that there are entrepreneurs building incredible businesses in a way I didn’t understand before, even though I had been an entrepreneur for seven or eight years.

Now we’re all exposed to that and have that understanding, but at that time, it wasn’t obvious to me. That was one of the ways I was able to navigate that whole experience, and it’s been helpful for me since. Now I’m able to pull on that. Every time I’m up against another challenge, it just reminds me that I’ve been at the bottom before, that I got up, and that by the grace of God, I was able to navigate through that. I have the capacity to do that over and over again, because every level you get to is the highest you’ve ever been, but if you keep going, it’s the lowest you can ever be, because you can always start from there to get to the next level.

John SmallMtn (00:38:44)

100%. I love that, man. How long were you grinding the tapes and doing the window cleaning until you made a move out of that?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:38:59)

Several years. Around that time, I actually ended up getting married. I was cleaning windows, still had the job, still driving an hour away, and doing all the things. Gradually, I broke out of that and started a marketing agency. At the time, I think I was also managing an artist. I moved from the creative side to the business side. Then that kind of went away, and I transitioned into being a partner at a PR firm. That was a tremendous experience—being able to see that a different level of success is possible. We got an office in downtown Atlanta on the 14th floor of the Hurt Building. It was a very cool experience. We actually had our own content studio before people really knew what studios were or had a place to put all that content. It was a nice transition over the next three to four years, but it was not easy.

John SmallMtn (00:39:58)

Oh, yeah. What I have to tell everybody is that this kind of work takes a while. In the beginning, you’re just going down a hallway, and you might see a window or a door, but if you’re just focused on moving forward, you don’t even look in that direction. There’s a period where you blow past the window of opportunity, and you can’t even see it until you’re working with someone who can hopefully help you see it. Then there’s that mode of, “That’s what I should have said,” or “That’s what I should have done.”

It takes a while of reinforcing these ideas and taking it easy on yourself, because it’s super easy to beat the crap out of yourself mentally. That just shuts down any opportunity to really work on yourself to where you can move with intention, keep moving forward, see a window, judge if it’s a window that you want to dive through, and act in relation to everything else going on. It’s not a workshop, and it’s not a book—it takes time.

That’s always the number one thing I run into when I’m dealing with a founder or someone who wants me to come in and work with their sales team: “How long until it works?” If you’re asking that question, we need to slow things down significantly and talk about what your real expectations are here.

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:41:35)

Right. When you’re in desperation mode—when you get to the point where things have not worked the way that you want them to for long enough—you’re fed up and desperate for something to work. But at that point, we’re desperate enough to ask for help, but we want the help to happen right away. What we really need is the capacity to understand that, as Marshall Goldsmith said, “What got you here won’t get you there.” Einstein said that a problem cannot be solved by the same mind that created it. Everything that we did to get us to here is the same thing that creates the problem that keeps us from getting to the next level. If you want to be able to move beyond that, you have to become a different version of yourself.

I talk about the five levels of leadership roughly, and how they relate to revenue streams.

The first level of leadership is just learning to lead yourself. You have to be able to get yourself to do the things required to get the outcomes that you say you want. Typically, that’s zero to six figures—three, four, or $500,000.

The second level of leadership is learning to lead your clients or your customers. You have to be able to create a solution that they will follow, buy into, and literally give you money for. You can brute-force that first level, but the second level requires a little bit more finesse and a certain skill.

The third level of leadership is learning to lead your team. You’ve got to be able to get results through others—we call it RTO. You’ve got to be able to inspire people and learn how to lead them so they can get the results that you were getting yourself, but at an even higher level than you could do by yourself.

The fourth level of leadership is learning to lead your market. How can you position yourself in a way that’s clearly unique, so that people see you as the only option for what you’re doing and for getting the outcome that they want? That level can get you up to $100 million or nine figures, definitely, if you’re a market leader in your space.

Fifth-level leadership is learning to lead the world. How can you be singular in what you’re doing in that identity? These are billion-dollar-plus companies. There’s a rarity in terms of what they do, but they all have a unique positioning and an edge in the world that allows people to look to them and say, “We want your guidance not just in this market or business, but there’s an expectation and responsibility that you’re going to have a global, environmental, or political impact.” You have to be ready for those levels of leadership. You’ve got to have values that you adhere to, and understand how your influence affects those around you and how to deploy that in the proper way.

When people don’t understand these levels of leadership, every time they get to the bottom of the next level where they need to make that shift, that’s where they feel the friction and tension. The tension that they’re putting on you and me is, “I need you to make this thing happen for me,” and they think it’s a dollar amount. The reality is that it’s a shift you get to make about who you are. Where is your leadership level? Where are you able to impact people? How are you able to affect things through this vehicle you built called a business?

The business is only going to respond to you—you are the driver and the pilot. If you don’t have the capacity to do that, you’re still going to struggle, and it’s always going to be a war. It doesn’t matter who you hire to consult or how much you pay them if you’re not ready to make that shift and help your people make that shift in your business. Most businesses—99% of businesses—do not have the structure to be more successful than they already are.

John SmallMtn (00:45:55)

Hmm, what do you mean by that?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:45:58)

Well, I liken it to—I just talked about a business being a vehicle, right? So, if you want to go across the street, you would walk. If you want to go down the street, you might take a bicycle. If you want to go across town, you might take a car or a bus. If you want to go across the state, you would take a car. If you want to go across the country, you would take a plane. If you want to go to another planet—the moon—you’ve got to take a rocket. The vehicle that you use is determined by where you want to go.

You can’t get to that destination if you don’t have a vehicle that’s going to get you there. A lot of times people are focused—they think they’re focused on their destination, but they don’t realize, “I want to go overseas, but I’ve got a bicycle as a vehicle right now.” You’ve got to build something that has more substance, has the engine and the capacity to be able to take you where you want to go.

John SmallMtn (00:46:49)

Okay, I like that. We talked a little bit about your early music career. I really like when I get to talk to musicians, because musicians are grinding, right? They’re wearing a lot of hats. Most people don’t start with a team. I just really appreciate when people have walked different paths. When you think about your time in music versus the work that you do now, what do you pull from that time of being a musician that continues to help you in your work now? What’s the most helpful thing from that time?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:47:31)

I think there are a couple of things. One thing is I realized that there is a genius that we have—I call it giftedness, right? There’s a gift that we have that shows up effortlessly when we’re moving in that space, but most of us don’t always recognize it.

The way that my genius showed up was in two ways. One, I was a songwriter-producer, but mostly vocal production. I would get in there with the artists in the studio and help them perform the song at a level to get the best vocal performance out of them. Literally, that’s coaching. I have to get into their head and help them become a version of themselves that will get this best possible performance.

A lot of times I’m writing the song, so I have to create a vehicle and give a message that they’re going to be able to convey. One of the things that is often overlooked—because we have a magnitude of probably 100,000 artists out now since the barrier of entry is so low—is that people don’t have to perfect that art of being an artist as much as they used to. You had to really work on your craft.

One of the things that goes overlooked is how certain artists have a certain brand. There’s a certain style of message or song that they’re going to convey. They represent an idea. When you become iconic like Beyoncé, The Rolling Stones, or somebody like that, you’re no longer just the music itself. It’s not just about being a great artist. You embody an idea that people can envelop themselves around. You bring them into your world. There’s a perspective and a way you convey love, living, ownership, self, whatever the case may be.

What I was able to understand was that, as a writer, you have the capacity to give the artist that thing that they didn’t offer to the world. Many great artists can write those songs themselves, but I was able to be in service in that way. One of the things that I’m able to bring into the business world is to convey this message: you need to be able to say things in a certain way. It’s not just copywriting, but it involves copywriting. It’s not just messaging, but it involves messaging. It’s not just sales, but it involves sales. It’s always about how you position this idea in somebody’s head so that they take ownership of it. It’s inception, literally, but it’s through music, a song lyric, a concept, or a title.

Bringing those two things together—the idea of the message, being able to be a translator for that message, and then coaching the artist through it—is the same way that I coach my clients and advise them on how to get the outcomes that they want. It’s not me doing the work for them. It is helping them to raise to the level where they can bring out the best of themselves and get the outcomes that they’re looking for. It’s a partnership, but it’s being able to see that best, that greatness, in other people.

Oftentimes artists, just like entrepreneurs, have doubts and insecurities. They’re not sure that they can actually get to this next level. There is a level that can be unlocked, but it requires understanding and opening up. There’s a level of vulnerability and transparency. When I’m looking at entrepreneurs, we would love to do it through brute force, where the numbers would justify everything. You work in sales, right? People think, “If we just sell our way out of this problem…” And it’s true, enough profitable sales will cure 99% of your problems. But the 1% of those problems is that you still have to run the business, right? So you can sell people into the business, but if you don’t have the structure, then you’re still in trouble.

I think I answered your question—those are the two skills that I really take from music.

John SmallMtn (00:51:37)

100%. I love that, right? I appreciate the artist path as much as I appreciate the entrepreneur path. Go read any biography on any big artist, and you’re going to find a lot of overlap with the stuff you’re going to read about in any entrepreneur’s biography. There’s a lot of doubt, a lot of loneliness, and a lot of, “Am I enough?” Being able to stay on track with that stuff is difficult.

Switching gears a little bit, Frederick, we’re going to get into the rapid-fire side of this because we’re coming up on time and I want to make sure we spend the time well.

First question: When you start thinking about what a founder needs to know on their first days, whether that comes from mindset, limiting beliefs, or sitting and reflecting, what does a brand-new founder need to be thinking about when it comes to their mindset and how they think about their performance and decisions?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:52:51)

The number one thing that I would say you need to think about is that you have a gift. There is something that you are uniquely qualified to do. A lot of people, when they are starting a business, think about what they can build that will be successful, instead of thinking, “What am I uniquely qualified to be successful at effortlessly that I can build around to create a business?”

I talk about this a little bit in The Lie That Keeps You Broke. It’s the lie of lack. A lot of entrepreneurs are building from a place of lack. They’re building based on what they don’t have, versus, “What do I have that is unique, that the world would beat a path to me to help them solve?”

This is not a rapid-fire answer, but when I was at one of my lower points as well, my wife and I had three small children, and we had an eviction notice on our house. I needed to be able to pay the rent, and I didn’t have the money, but I had my marketing business trying to get off the ground. I actually ended up borrowing the money from my dad to hire this coach because I had to figure out the answer long-term.

In that process, using the community that he had, he would talk about using your gift. We never really defined what that was. He gave me an assignment one time and said, “Why don’t you write down what your solution is for your clients?” I banged around on that thing for about a week, and I could not figure it out. John, I was so frustrated. I finally messaged him back and said, “Man, I don’t think I have a solution.”

What he said blew my mind and changed the trajectory of my life. He said, “God doesn’t make people without solutions.” It’s like a bomb went off in my head. What I started to unravel, which led me to writing my first book, Breaking Orbit, was: What is the gift? What does it mean to have a gift?

The way that I define it is your unique capacity to impact the world in a singular and powerful way. There’s a thing that you can do, John. There’s a way that you see the world and a way that you convey truth to people that nobody else can. That’s valuable in and of itself, because the most valuable number in the world is one. If you are the number one neurosurgeon or the number one XYZ in the world, it’s not just because you have the skill set—which is true—but also because you have a unique capacity, a unique set of talents, skills, and perspectives all wrapped around your gift that allows you to do that.

So for entrepreneurs who are starting out, I would say start there. Find the thing that’s the most valuable about you, because it’s already going to be hard, right? It’s already going to challenge you. Don’t make it harder than it has to be by trying to do things that other people are doing in the way that they’re doing it. When we talk about a recipe, yes, the recipe is for the structure. Bank accounts have been set up the same way forever; you don’t have to reinvent the wheel in that regard. But in terms of how you get to the money and how you create that value, the most valuable thing is to be able to build something unique that people can only get from you. They have to come to your company to get that result in that particular way. It makes you valuable from the beginning. That’s a much better business to build than the one most people are starting out with.

John SmallMtn (00:56:49)

I 100% agree with that. The whole idea of, “What is a business that will be successful?” versus, “What am I supposed to be doing?”—those are very different conversations and moments of reflection.

Next: What is a lesson that you can see now in the form of a tweet or a social media post where you’re like, “Yep, I get it,” but you had to go through the adversity and challenge—learning the lesson the hard way—before you could really appreciate it?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (00:57:27)

Yeah, here’s one. I think you’ll appreciate this because it most directly relates to sales, but it also corresponds to the way you structure your business: Sell people what they want, not what you want.

As business owners, entrepreneurs can be creatives, right? We fall in love with the thing that we’re building, and we love it so much. We want to talk about all the things that we did: “I polished the wood like this, and I got these brand-new, state-of-the-art chips that are smaller than anything, and they fly higher…” People don’t care about any of that stuff. People buy what they buy for their reasons, not for yours.

The clearer you get on what their reasons are, and the more willing you are to sell them for their reasons, the more successful you’re going to be and the much less friction you’re going to have. It’s hard because our ego gets in the way. We want people to laud us for the thing that we built: “You’re amazing! Look what you did!” That will all happen if you just give them what they want and get better at giving them what they want. The idea is not that what you know they need is not important, but you can’t give them what they need until you give them what they want.

John SmallMtn (00:58:56)

100%, yes. Man, I had to learn that lesson so many times. Honestly, I think it’s a Carnegie line: “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” A good friend of mine was always hitting me with that line before I even read any Carnegie. I was kind of like, “Ah, Carnegie, that’s an old-school book. I don’t need to read this.” But my friend was always talking about that line specifically, because I was going around saying, “I’m smart, you should buy from me! I know what I’m talking about, you should buy from me!” Well, people don’t buy for those reasons; they buy for their reasons. If I don’t slow down enough to try to uncover what those reasons are, I’m going to miss the mark.

I love that. It’s very easy to get caught up in our own intelligence and creative drive. “Look how shiny this is!” But the old sales adage is: No one is excited about buying a quarter-inch drill bit; they’re excited to hang photos of their family on their wall. Don’t make it about the drill bit, make it about the outcome.

I still struggle with that sometimes, getting very in the weeds with, “We’re going to do this, this, and this.” It’s like, “Okay, is this going to help me move the needle? Yep. Okay, wait a minute, I need to back up and make sure that this is focused on what you’re looking for, not what I’m going to be giving you.”

Last question, Frederick: You’ve been in the space for a long time and you’ve run multiple businesses. If you were going to start over today, what is the piece of advice you would give yourself to make sure that you have a somewhat more linear path to where you are?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (01:00:40)

I would definitely get better at sales. I would start to understand the sales process better. The coach that I hired was a sales coach, and it still took me several years to get good at it. I had to work through the monotony of making those calls and getting through rejection. But with the things that I’ve learned about sales now, I wouldn’t call it effortless, but it’s completely different than it was when I first started.

I wasn’t even doing sales at the level that I really needed to. I didn’t understand the process of creating a lead, nurturing a prospect, going into that whole conversation, qualifying them, et cetera. All those components were foreign to me. I thought, “If I just put up my marketing, people will come. They’ll understand they need marketing—everybody needs marketing.” But people don’t necessarily think that they do.

Nowadays, people understand that marketing is persuasion and influence, like Cialdini’s work. It’s: “How do I tell people a story that enrolls them into this process of becoming a client?” Donald Miller has Building a StoryBrand and that whole aspect. There’s a story there, but a story is not just a linear “once upon a time.” A story is an idea. How do I get better at inception—allowing people to visualize themselves standing at the finish line, waving the checkered flag, and holding the trophy because they worked with us and employed something that we used? How do I create that image for them? How do I get better at doing that?

If I had done that, it probably would have shaved years off. There’s a lot of hard-earned and hard-learned advice and insight, but that’s where I would start.

John SmallMtn (01:02:45)

If I’m being honest, I got to work with a sales coach for probably four or five years before I went out and started this thing. It was hugely helpful, and I would never have been able to get to the place where I could run my own business without it.

There was a guy on the show who said a beautiful line around the idea that—even though he had a similar path where he worked as a sales trainer, led a team, and then launched his own sales training brand—he said, “I still had to go through the process of figuring out how to sell myself.” I think no matter what it is you’re selling, there’s that season of the listening tour: What do people really care about? What are they interested in buying?

If you’re selling something that is strategic, custom, or tied to your greatness, you have to package it differently than selling just about anything else. I struggled with that. Every person I know who has done a fair amount of sales training, but then goes out on their own, has to go through that gauntlet again of learning how to do it for their own stakes and disconnecting from the outcome. It’s not character assassination if someone doesn’t need our help; if anything, we should be happy that they’re in a place where they’re not in dire need of our services. Instead of getting mad or thinking that they’re the problem, we have to be big enough and abundant enough to go find someone else to talk to. Sometimes, if we don’t have that disconnection, it feels like character assassination.

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (01:04:27)

Right. One of the things that really helped me make a tremendous shift was the way that I characterize what sales is. This is what a lot of people struggle with. The reason why it’s difficult for people to be successful at sales for their business or anyone else’s is because they see it as personal—it’s almost a validation. A lot of old-school sales tactics are about hand-to-hand combat: you’re going to pin the customer to the mat and make them say uncle. It’s not that at all.

Even with the perspective your guest was sharing, selling yourself doesn’t mean convincing someone that you’re worthy of being bought from. Selling yourself means you are creating an environment where you’re helping this person. The definition of sales that we use is a series of questions designed to lead a person to the point of a decision. We were talking about decision-making earlier, right? Lead a person to the point of a decision. You are supporting them in achieving their desired goal, even if their decision means going with somebody else.

If you do your job well enough, it should be obvious why your product or service is the choice for them for two reasons: one, because you’ve helped them get clear on why they’re making this decision at all; and two, because you’re the person who helped them do it. Why would they want to start over with somebody else?

If you do it the right way, the difference is starkly contrasted—it’s obvious. Other people are trying to do the exact same thing caveman-style, trying to beat you over the head and drag you home. Whereas when you are walking alongside them and saying, “Hey, these are the things you say you want to make, right?” Think about a great real estate agent. There are people who can just show you the home and say, “Well, you decide, do you like this house or not?” Or somebody says, “Hey, you said you want to be close to this school. I put a map out and showed you the exact proximity. This is what traffic looks like at this time of day. You say you work down here—what have you thought about this?” All the different factors that come into helping them make a decision make them feel comfortable.

It’s a partnership, and if you approach it in that way, it creates a vastly different experience. It allows us to move past rejection, because whether somebody bought or not, I did my job. My only job is to help you reach a point of a decision. If you can’t make a decision, I didn’t do my job well enough. And if you make a decision that involves not being with me, it should be obvious to both of us that this isn’t a good fit, right?

John SmallMtn (01:07:15)

100%. Well said, dude. Very, very cool. Frederick, if people want to come hang out with you, keep up with you, see your stuff, or take a look at your content, where’s the best place for them to connect with you?

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (01:07:27)

Yeah, man, I’m everywhere:

• Facebook: Frederick Douglas Bussey
• X (Twitter): @FrederickBussey
• Instagram: @Frederick.Bussey
• LinkedIn: Frederick Douglas Bussey
• YouTube: Icon Status

We’ve got a lot of content—always writing and putting out videos, masterclasses, and things of that nature. Come check us out! And always the books: Breaking Orbit and the new book, The Lie That Keeps You Broke: 30 Days to Crush Imposter Syndrome and Go From Purpose to Profit.

John SmallMtn (01:08:06)

I love it. Frederick, thank you so much for coming on. There are a lot of deep topics in here, and I’m hoping that people have the room and space to downshift a little bit so they can hear it and action some of these things that we’re talking about. I really appreciate you coming on, man. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

Fredrick Douglas Bussey (01:08:22)

John, it’s been a blast. Thank you for having me. You too.

John SmallMtn (01:08:24)

You’re welcome. Have a great day.