Speaker 1: You are listening to Carrie Leutz's Financial Survival Network, where
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Speaker 2: And welcome you are listening to and watching the Financial
Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie Letz. Hey got a
really incredible guest for you today. His story college dropout
home depot, overpaid employee at eight dollars an hour, now
has got on to run companies making millions and millions
of dollars a year. Never went back to college, didn't
see the value of it.
Speaker 3: Cody. Welcome. Great to have you on the show, so
thank you. Hey.
Speaker 2: Home Depot, very humble beginnings there. They're paying you eight
bucks an hour. Probably they were paying you too much
at that point, but quickly you've realized you were worth
a lot more than eight dollars an hour.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I think Hope Depot was a great
place to start out at because it's like a bunch
of teams working together at a single location, right to
build a business and actually took that and you know,
through the rest of my positions took that model. So
anywhere I went, I wanted to learn what every team did,
and you know that's what served me well. Plus eight
dollars an hour at the time, it you know, it
paid the bills and it did feel like a lot.
That is, you know nowadays not so much.
Speaker 2: That's about you make that before you even wake up
in the morning, just brushing your teeth, you're making probably
well more than that at so unusual story, but actually
it's not that unusual. Many of you out there started
very humble beginnings and built it up and it built
incredible things. If you could go back to your to
your eight dollars an hour Cody at home depot, what
would you tell them?
Speaker 3: I'd give him the same advice I get if anyone
I hire, which is be curious, be competitive, and don't
be an a hole. So I going to take you
a lot of polices in life. So be curious means
keep on learning, right, yep.
Speaker 2: Competitive means not so much or compete against others, but
that you are ambitious and you have right and don't
be an a whole means get along with people, find
out what they want, how you can help them get
what they want, and at the same time help yourself
get what you want.
Speaker 3: Yeah, especially on that last one. Is like everyone, no
matter how much of a higher performer you are, everyone
goes through a period of tough times, right where the
results aren't coming in. And if it requires you to
be a mean person to get results, as soon as
you stop get results, So now you're just a mean person. Right,
Very few people in my experience actually enjoy working with
a mean person. All right, So you know, be nice,
but don't be weak, be straw one hundred percent. I mean,
it's part of being competitive, right, is you got to
be ambitious. You got to want more from yourself and
from your team. Otherwise why are you there, right, You're
just showing up and going through the motions?
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, So, and you've encountered a lot of other people.
How many people have taken your advice to heart and
really succeeded as a result, Cody.
Speaker 3: Uh, you know who knows how many? Exactly? I know?
Right now, I've got a team of about eighty people,
So you know, of the eighty, I've got my a players,
probably five to seven A players, and you always have
the people you need to show up. So I think
if I had to quantify my impact, I can think
of at least seven individuals who have gone on to
go from being a junior marketer starting out at fifty
a year to making more than six figures in some
form of the marketing leadership position.
Speaker 2: All right, So these skills are transferable, and maybe that'll
be your legacy. I mean, obviously family whatever. You want
to leave a legacy for your family, But you want
to try to leave things better than you got them.
Speaker 3: Right, that is the end goal. I am a results
person and I do believe like reputation precedes you, and
that's the one I hope to leave behind, all right.
Speaker 2: So, hey, you know, when you're looking at it, there's
a lot of paths to success, right, but every path
begins with you.
Speaker 3: So yeah, and you the amount of success you have.
Speaker 2: I assume you have an attitude no matter whether things
go right or wrong, it's all about you, what you've done,
what you missed, what you could have done right, Taking responsibility,
owning your failures. Your successes are real easy to own, Hey,
anyone could do that, but to actually own a failure.
That takes some fortitude, doesn't it one hundred percent?
Speaker 3: I think that ultimately, you know, everything is on you
because no matter where you're working, what business you're starting, like,
what the world around you looks like, you really only
have control yourself. And when you leave that company or
that business doesn't work out, you can take that as
you know your identity. You can say, oh, well, I'm
the guy that worked it here or I'm the guy
that you know started or lost this business. But the
truth is a you know, we get an open book
and you can write whatever story in it next you
want to, and the main character, like you said, is you.
So the more you focus on you and what's next,
right the story you want to be written in that book,
generally you get to the happy ending you want at
the end of it. It may not be the journey
you want, but you might hit the outcome. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, the most important thing though, is taking action right,
getting your knowledge and learning what you need to learn
the skills that everything else, and then it's actually to
do something you can't just the lie in bed, visualizing
and hoping that the law of attraction is just going
to bring.
Speaker 3: It all to you. No, not at all, And that's
we talk about the company often of like being books
smart is twenty per percent of the equation, right, because
no matter how intelligent you are, if you don't do
anything with that knowledge, then it's only going to live
in one place and it won't have any impact. What
you really need is a game plan, right, What you
really need is to be able to take that YouTube
video you watched and apply it into your real life.
And chances aren't a twenty minute video. Maybe you find
one thing, but you apply that one thing and it
has exponential impact on what happens next. So you know,
at the end of the day, you learn more from
dookuhen than by reading. In my experience, doesn't mean you
can't solve yourself some harsh pains by learning and reading.
But the only way to the only way to get
to where you want to go is to take the
first step in every step after that.
Speaker 2: And you know the old saying, if you don't know
where you're going, any road will take you there.
Speaker 3: That's the truth. That's the truth. And you know, more
often than not you end up in a place you
actually did and want to go in the.
Speaker 2: First Yes, yeah, because you no longer the master of
your own fate if you will. Hey, so tell us
about what you're doing now company everything involved?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so right now, I'm a cheap marketing officer at
a company called Stocks to Trade, and we're a financial
education company, so spend a lot of our days. We
have a platform, right that has NASDAK level stock information
that we help people leverage. You know, most people get
stock with a either like E Trade or Bloomberg Terminal, right,
and the price difference between those two is pretty meaningful, right,
I think Bloomberg Terminal is like twenty five pr. So
the everyday person actually doesn't have a lot of access
to resources or information that helps them make smart financial decisions.
So we stream the same data to our platform and
it's you know, it gets some level two data that
gives them a lot of information. And that's the see
of it all. It's like giving every day people access
to you know, Wall Street great information that you would
have to pay a lot of money for. And then
me personally, I've got a podcast business Marketing from the Edge,
and that's where I take everything I've learned about marketing
and building businesses and I candense it down into information
for others. I've gotten pretty good at building businesses. It is.
You know, when people ask me what's one thing I'm
good at that, that is the answer. Like, I know
how to build a business. I can go from you know,
six hundred thousand to three million, I can go from
I can go from zero to sixty million, and I
go I can go anywhere in between. All way been
a part of a company that did just shy at
half a billion dollars. So building businesses, I think that's
what I do best. And marketing from the edge is
the culmination of everything I've learned doing it pretty cool
and it's transferable to any company. Huh.
Speaker 2: When a new client comes to you, the how do
you figure out whether they've got a real viable business
or they shouldn't move on?
Speaker 3: To me, the first thing is always the offer. If
they show up and they say, I don't know what
we should sell or you know, what I'm selling isn't working,
you know, to me, that's the fundamentals of a brooken business.
If you don't have clarity on what value you can
provide to the end user, it makes like why bother
selling it at all? You're not actually helping anyone so
to me, that's the difference between like building a business
versus reinventing a business, is it is your offer solid.
Speaker 2: So you know, interestingly, when you look at a business,
so you could either start it or you could buy it.
Speaker 3: And in my.
Speaker 2: Opinion, generally it's always easier to buy a business even
if it's not profitable. In fact it's marginally profitable or
break even, you could buy it for next to nothing
and then you just have to improve on the systems
that are already there.
Speaker 3: What's been your experience, Yeah, I in fact back in
I want to say, twenty twenty two, I don't know,
a couple of years ago, I bought a business. It
was doing like seven grand a month or something, right,
it was nothing, and it was directly in the financial
education space. So I bought it. Was it seven grand?
Did an owner carry on it right? So out of
pocket pretty much nothing and scaled it all the way
up to I think we peaked at like fifty three
k a month and handed it back to the guy.
And it was more of just like a mental mental exercise, right,
being able to take something build it like from year zero,
buy a business, go through that motion, go through the
you know it is somewhat of a painful process buying
a business. That is like the one downside, right is
they have a certain evaluation. You have the different and
sometimes it's a little bit of a roadbound to get
to something that's equitable for both people. But I tend
to agree with you. Buying a business beares well than
building a business. Right. You don't have to learn all
the lessons the business has already has already done for you.
Especially if you have a skill set, you can go
in there, use your skill set and get a result.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so all right, So when you're starting a
new endeavor, what's the most important thing that you need
to do.
Speaker 3: I think if you're starting a new career, I think
learn right, go and talk to everyone there. If you're
starting a new business, but whether it's building or starting
a business, the most important thing you can do is
talk to the customers. Right, even if you don't have
like whether you haven't sold anything to anyone yet, if
you have someone else in your space or you have
someone else in your you know that you can access
from the company you're looking to buy at the end
of the day, knowing what your customer is thinking and
what they're feeling and being able to implement that into
the next level of what you want to start. That's that,
to me, is going to serve you far better than
any sort of of demographic research or like you know, quizzing,
quizzing whatever. If you've got a great team and you
know your customer, you can go a long ways.
Speaker 2: That's all about the team, all right, Hey, Cody, I
want to find a bit more about you.
Speaker 3: Want to connect with you on the web. How do
you go about doing that? Yeah, Marketing edgepodpod dot com.
That's the best place, and I have any letter on there.
It's free. You just got to apply. And like I said,
it's where I share all the insights I've learned building
businesses from zero all the way as high as four
hundred and eighty million in a year. And you know,
I'm just sharing that value now because like you said,
it's it's about leaving something behind great. Just repeat that
the website again, Marketing edgepodpod dot com.
Speaker 2: Marketing ed Marketing edgepod dot com. The link is in
the show. That's this interview on Financial Survival Network dot Hey.
When you go there, please sign up for your free newsletter.
Get a lot of really valuable info like you're getting here,
and if you've got a question for Cody or myself, shoot.
Speaker 3: Me an email.
Speaker 2: Klatcarrie LUTs dot com. Cody, been a pleasure, Thanks so much.
Speaker 1: Thank you, thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network,
your solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go
to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more
than ever,