Justin Brock | Scaling Success: US Marine, Entrepreneur, & Advocate for Veteran Transitions - Mick Unplugged [EP 26]

Episode Transcription

• Justin Brock | Scaling Success: US Marine, Entrepreneur, & Advocate for Veteran Transitions - Mick Unplugged [EP 26]

  Intro: Are you ready to change your habits, sculpt your destiny, and light up your path to greatness? Welcome to the epicenter of transformation. This is Mick Unplugged. We'll help you identify your because so you can create a routine that's not just productive, but powerful. You'll embrace the art of evolution, adapt strategies to stay ahead of the game, and take a step toward the extraordinary. So let's unleash your potential. Now here's Mick.

  Mick Hunt: Ladies and gentlemen, today we have a truly remarkable guest. His success as an 8-year US Marine Corps veteran transitioned him into entrepreneurship a decade ago, and he recently sold his business for an astonishing $70,000,000. He continues to run the business as a minority owner and is passionate about helping veterans and others transition using his expertise in direct-to-consumer marketing and operational efficiency. Please welcome and give a great honor to my man, Justin Brock. Justin, how are you doing, bud?

  Justin Brock: Thank you. Not sure I'm deserving of such an endearing intro, but, you know, we're working hard, and we're very appreciative that you allow us to be on the podcast.

  Mick Hunt: No. You definitely earned it, and I would expect and want nothing more than for you to be here, talk about your background, your success, and inspire others because that's what we do on the Mick Unplugged podcast. Right? We look deeper than your why and talk about the because and the things that everyone overcomes. And, Justin, I'm gonna let you go and say your thing because I believe this and I know that you're the embodiment of this. There's no blueprint to success. Right? Like, anyone that tells you that there's a blueprint and you do these 2 or 3 things and you're gonna be successful, they're lying to you.

  Justin Brock: Yeah.

  Mick Hunt: What success really needs is a motivator, and that motivator has to be you. So, Justin, I'd love for you to talk about your journey a little bit.

  Justin Brock: Yeah, man. So, you know, starting out, I didn't even know that selling a company was an option. Getting out of the Marine Corps, it was all just about how am I gonna replace the income that I have so I can provide for my family. That immediate goal was actually pretty low. I was just saying, okay, I need to make $60,000 so I can feed my family and buy my kids clothes when they need them and that kind of thing. And, thankfully, I knew someone in the life and health space, and I had seen them do pretty well in it. Right? So I was like, okay, I'm gonna try that. The job that I had in the Marine Corps didn't have a direct translation or anything, and I just wasn't the guy that was, like, thinking, okay, I'm gonna go Marine Corps to a police officer or firefighter. So grateful people make those choices, but that wasn't what I wanted to do. I tackled the life and health space. And for the first time ever, I realized the harder I worked and the more I prospected, the more money I made. It became almost like a reward addiction where you'd go out, sell, and make money. I got pretty good at individual sales. I was going door to door, direct mail leads, old-school way. I was able to get in the house, and I was almost 26, so I had a lot of energy for it. I started winning some incentive trips, and then I'd get around other people that were top producers. But then, while I was there, I'd make friends with guys that were not just top producers but top agency owners. And then it dawned on me. These guys have other people working for them, and they're doing the marketing and the operation, and then have these guys doing the production. And I said, okay, I gotta build towards that. You know, and then I would learn a marketing niche from them. But all the while, this kinda success ladder, I feel like, is really just attacking the opportunity that's 6 feet in front of you. It was never like there was this grand plan. There still isn't. Right now, I'm trying to continue to grow that company, grow the personal brand. But really, the vision is just help more people, and money becomes kind of a score-keeping metric at some point. It's not necessarily like, okay, some people write comments on these things, like, talking to people like, oh, if he's really successful, not just me, but like all kinds of people, if he's really had that much money, he'd be on a beach somewhere. They don't get it that the people that find that success, it doesn't matter how much money they make, they're gonna wanna continue to do it. And that's why you see billionaires like Mark Cuban and Richard Branson, and all these guys that still have these passions, and they still spend their time trying to solve problems and do things because that's just the way it is. But I think we're all just trying to solve that next problem and then you see what's possible at that level. And then you solve that problem, and you get to that next level. You're just kinda clawing. And then there are times when I didn't have friends that exited, and I saw how they were able to value that business. And I'm like, wow, okay, I didn't realize what I was building could be so valuable. It did give me another target, but I was 5 or 6 years in really before that even kinda came into focus as a possibility. So I think people need, and that's important. When people say, what's your why and what's your because? I love that. Not just looking for your why but your because. I think sometimes people are so focused on that. What's your why? And so they create a why, but the why almost for me was just why not? Like, why not grow to the next level? What am I gonna do? The process is fun. I remember going on vacations as a kid, and we would go with the church to Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and they put us all on a bus, you know, traveling together. And as a kid, I thought this is fun. My dad would say, well, the journey is half the fun. As you're building businesses, that's true. You found a lot of passion in watching your business grow and the people within your business succeed. I think that's really important because, you know, I would say the number one gratifying thing that I've seen in growing a business is watching other people succeed because of something you created. And when you do that and you really feel that way too, it becomes easy to hire and recruit and build a team because people feel that compassion that you have for it. And I just hope and pray that I can maintain that continuously because I don't want to lose sight of not only what got me where I'm at but, selfishly, what was the most beneficial thing for me. And that was watching people win along the way.

  Mick Hunt: I love that. Right? Because you're essentially saying that's your because. And for me, and you said it so eloquently, I never say that your why is not important, but it's your because that's your accountability. Your why should always evolve. Right? When I was a kid, my why was my mom, but my because was because I made her a promise. My kids then became my why, but the because was because I needed to create a legacy. And so that because was my accountability for success, and you're saying the exact same thing. And I tell people this, the recipe for scaling a business is this: success that breeds success that breeds success. That's the simple formula for scale. If you can show other people how to be successful within your business, within your team, and then they show other people how to do it, that's how you scale. Like, all the other stuff, I'm not saying it's irrelevant, but it's a minute factor in scaling.

  Justin Brock: There's no hurdle that comes up. No technological hurdle. No breaking point within the scalability of my business, no team building, no middle management. None of that's gonna stand in my way. It's not because they aren't things that I have to overcome, but if you know the whole while that that's not gonna stand in my way because I have to continue this path, then when those things pop up, you find a way. And the good news is, man, there's tons of mentors and leaders out there that are helping with all of those things. Sometimes they're not even in your industry. They're in another industry, but there's similarities. And if you can figure out ways to tap into things that other people have done, whether paid or just by becoming a friend of theirs or some sort of business partner, no matter what it is, when you can attach yourself in some way to someone who's overcome something you have, it just makes it that much easier. But even without that, there's some hurdles that I got through with just brute force. If you run through the wall hard enough, eventually, you can get through it. But sometimes it's like a cheat code to just get the tip from someone else.

  Mick Hunt: There you go. So, Justin, you gotta talk about the $70,000,000, brother. I've exited businesses. $70,000,000 is a big number.

  Justin Brock: Yeah. Even when I started thinking about selling, I wasn't really thinking about that number. The first friend that I had that sold actually was a pretty big one. He sold for around $50,000,000. What I learned from that one is it was a volume business. We had to help a lot of people. There's no way you could help a handful of people. Each one of our customers is worth a smaller amount of money. If I called it a $1,500 to $2,000 lifetime value of a customer, to get to that number, you're gonna have to have a large operation. We took a few different approaches. If I was doing it all over again and the goal was just to get to $70,000,000, I think I could shave off a little bit of energy that I spent on things that were more expensive and time-consuming. I guess that's all of us. Hindsight's 2020. Getting there really was the number one thing for us, creating a controlled distribution center where we had employee agents and an employee service team where we could really control the outcome. We actually have several thousand agents that are contracted with us around the country that we make overrides on. We're the FMO or the middleman, and we make a small sliver of revenue, but we have very little control over how much each one of them produces. We can try to get them to produce more, but they don't work for us. We kinda work for them. Our agents internally, the employee side, with a much smaller group of agents internally, we were able to do all the marketing, all the accountability. They're having to show up. We do 8 AM to 5 PM. At 8:15 AM every day, Monday through Friday, we're doing training. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is different types of sales training. Monday, we're doing just the company-wide meeting, getting everyone on the same page. Friday, we're doing an accountability for what we just did for that week. We keep that team in the right mindset, in the right headspace. We're able to identify quickly what they need. Do we not have enough leads? Do we not have the marketing right? Are the leads bad? We never wanna settle with "the leads are bad," but at the top, sometimes we're thinking, okay, can we make the leads better? But then also, is this individual salesperson making enough calls? Why are they working in this or not? You can really start to get to the point where you could fine-tune and find everyone's inefficiencies. And then you develop that mid-level sales management and those people that are doing reporting where we really got to the point where you were able to get out of the business and work on it. This begs the concept that our growth rate and the number of tentacles we had into the market and our media brand dictated a very high multiple of our EBITDA. So $70,000,000, it's not like we made $70,000,000 last year. You know that, but just for the audience, we had a high multiple. It's in the 10x kinda multiple of EBITDA. But when you're looking at that level, a lot goes into that. They're getting me. I have an employee contract with them. They're buying that continued growth. They show the pattern that we have collectively, and they're getting the media attention, all the marketing, all the we built our own software tool in that. They're getting software. So there's a lot that goes into that number. It's not that it's unattainable at all, though. Like I said before, we did it in 10 years not even really aiming for that. If I was gonna go and try to build the same operation under the same market conditions, if the market conditions are the same, but I know what I know now and I had that 10 years, it'd probably be $150,000,000 to $200,000,000. It's just because I'd know where not to spend money and where to spend the most time. End of the day, it's enough. I wanted to make sure we locked in some of that success for the family, to make sure that no matter what the market conditions are. You know, Mick, you have a background in the insurance space on the P&C side, and we see this with P&C right now. It's a tumultuous market. You have coastal issues with roofing. It is calling rates in places like Florida to go sky high. And California, I think it was like State Farm pulled out. Like, all of California or something. There's always things that can happen. That's why when we came to acquisition, it was like, we could just keep building. And I had friends that were like, I'm gonna build a legacy company. I'm like, I still wanna build a legacy company. I still have retained equity in our business. I'm still very involved and still wanna continue to build that business. But I didn't wanna get so fixated on it. I still have that little bit of fear, and I think that's important. I went to a business class. It was actually a Grant Cardone thing. It was a 10x360, and they made us do the John Maxwell belief lid assessment, and I filled it out. And then at the end, they told us what Grant's results were, and my belief lid was higher than his. He's a pretty confident guy. I was thinking, man. There's definitely market conditions that can change things. So I wanted to make sure, okay, let's get to this level. Are you narcissistic in thinking that you can always replicate the same results? I'm absolutely sure that I can grow more businesses and be successful. But I definitely felt blessed that the timing of the time that I was building in that industry was also ideal. That's why I said earlier, could I replicate it faster? Under the same market conditions, yes. But we're never guaranteed those market conditions. We happened to be in the right industry at the right time. COVID really positively impacted our industry. So it amplified our success. That month we were down in COVID, we had to close the office. I went home. I used it as a stepping stone to create a bunch of online curriculum that we were able to leverage. I tell people, if you could have just taken that 30 days, 30, 60 days, depending on where you were, and really leveraged that time, that was the time to set yourself up. We did, and it was one of those launching points. There's always these different trampolines where you'll have a honey hole of leads that'll come up. One thing I know is when one of those honey holes emerges, I'm gonna spend money faster. I'm gonna spend more in, I'm gonna have more intention in leveraging it because it's not necessarily gonna be there forever. There's all kinds of lessons in business, but it's fun to grow. If you're having fun with it and you're enjoying it, timing the market perfectly, man, if you get $20,000,000, $30,000,000, $40,000,000, $100,000,000, there are differences, but there's not all that many differences. If you got $5,000,000 liquid somewhere, you could make $250,000 to $500,000 in interest off of it for the rest of your life. So what are we even talking about? It's all like fake money at some level. I'm glad we got the $70,000,000 valuation, but I fully intend to do my very best to make the remaining 49 percent worth $100,000,000 to $200,000,000 in the next 5 years.

  Mick Hunt: I love it, man. I love it. I wanna unpack something that you said earlier, and it's a mantra that I have. You gotta be able to work as a CEO. You gotta be able to work on the business and less in the business. I personally feel where most green or newer entrepreneurs or maybe you're years in, but you're not growing at the rate that you wanna grow, it's because you're not wearing your CEO hat the majority of the time. We know you're gonna wear multiple hats. I totally get that. But, you know, one of my mentors is Damon John, and he says all the time, you have to know your business in order to grow your business. I feel like a lot of younger CEOs or CEOs that have been stale, they don't know their business enough, meaning they don't know their numbers. They don't know their true KPIs. They can't tell you their sales cycle time. They can't tell you their per employee ROI. They can't tell you the output of certain things. They can't tell you the cost of goods. It doesn't matter the industry. I love that you said you've gotta focus on working on the business as a leader because you're never gonna grow or get to the margins or numbers that you truly can when you spend half of your time trying to be the head of marketing. I know it's 2024. A lot of entrepreneurs think, oh, I've gotta do all these social platforms and this and that, but then you spend so much time doing one post that the rest of your business has gone to crap. I'd love for you to elaborate a little bit on that, on techniques to work on your business because I feel like that's the biggest failure that most CEOs have.

  Justin Brock: Yeah. I started off selling, and honestly, through the end of 2019, I was still the top individual salesperson within my business. Even though I had multiple salespeople, I was working, I hate to quantify it, I'd say it's somewhere in the 70 to 80 hours a week. It was all kind of a means to an end concept that I would tell my wife all the time, I'm working until 7 or 8 at night because I'm trying to get ahead. Then eventually, I started telling myself, okay, I have to do something or I'm just lying to her and I'm just gonna keep working to the bone. Because you can dig yourself into a big hole where you have to work that much. To dig yourself out, you kinda gotta get a little deeper. January 2020, I told myself, it was me and I had one other agent who was technically inclined. I said, me and you, January 2020, we're not selling anymore. Our busy season is in the last quarter. January is a good time for us to try to fix it out. We said, we're not gonna sell insurance anymore. We're going to completely work on it. It was a cold turkey thing. Fast forward, it's amazing to think the times that we would have people tell us that we were doing so much, and we were more sophisticated than other businesses. Now thinking back, in 2020, I feel like our business was like a dinosaur. But we were able to really start compounding that. I started hiring some of the first people I hired in content creation. That's where our brokerage side, where our recruiting started coming in. I hired a videographer who was videographer, social media, all that. I hired a graphic designer, who is now my chief operating officer. He started off as a graphic designer, but he just had a high attention to detail rate. I ended up hiring several more in the creative space over time. I would hire and place around. I would take internal agents and administrative employees and shuffle them based on what they showcased as a skill. Early on, when you're building a business from the ground up, you can't go out and hire and recruit six-figure c-suite executives. You'll bankrupt your business doing that. So you have to find and cultivate talent within. I used a lot of entry-level marketing positions, entry-level admin, and entry-level agent positions to find the people that I thought were worth more than they realized. Our company is still running on these people. Our department heads now, our CMO started off as an internal agent. Our COO started off as a graphic designer. My director of contracting, my director of commissions right now, they started off both working the phone with the front desk. There are good people out there that nobody's ever taken a chance on. There's smart and intelligent people. I see a lot of people say people don't wanna work these days, and I think that they do. They just wanna find somebody who sees them for who they are and helps them tap into something they haven't been able to tap into elsewhere. They'll appreciate it and feel like what they're doing is part of something bigger than themselves. We tapped into that, and now we're getting to the point where I come into the business and I try to keep temperature checks on things, and I get reports and stuff. But I try my best not to influence anything anymore because I want them to influence it.

  Mick Hunt: Mhmm.

  Justin Brock: I still have tough moments where I feel like they're off course on something, and I'm trying to hone it back. But my goal is to get completely out of it. Next week, I'm taking my family on a week-long vacation, and my goal is to turn the phone off the entire time and get on the laptop 15 minutes a day for kinda like a synchronization day, a point in the day. I have a friend that did this who also sold his business. It's super important for people, whatever level you're at, get around other people at that level in some way. It doesn't mean you have to go around physically, but you need to be talking to them. People that have sold their business, you gotta get around other people that sold their business because it's not like all our problems go away. Sometimes we're having a little bit of psychological effect, like, okay, how is this liquidation event gonna kill my motivation? Or it can be a little weird. To be around other people that are going through it or have been through it is impactful. If you haven't sold your business, if you're just in that building phase, find other people that are doing something similar and have them as allies. There are people out there, and you can teach them something, and they can teach you something. That's been powerful for me. One thing he did is he took his family to Hawaii for a week, and during that trip, he, for the first time in 5 or 6 years, was disconnected for 5 or 6 days straight, but he would do a 15-minute daily on his laptop sync-up meeting where he would just check-in with the COO and make sure there's nothing that needed his immediate attention. If the answer was no, he'd turn it back off. If it was yes, he would try to put that fire out and then turn it back off. I'm gonna do it next week.

  Mick Hunt: There you go.

  Justin Brock: It's a stress test. Where do they still need me? And how can I make them in the future not need me in that area? That's what really working on your business becomes. At first, it's just literally getting out of the income-producing activity. It's funny. I spend all my time taking somebody that's new to insurance and focusing on income-producing activities. Eventually, you gotta focus on getting other people to focus on income-producing activities so you can be that mid-level. And then eventually, you even have to develop the mid-level so you can be at the top. I hate you know, some people might say it's a pyramid. Well, everything's a pyramid, man. You gotta build yourself up. If you don't think you're in a pyramid, you're probably at the bottom of something.

  Mick Hunt: At the bottom. Right. Totally agree. So, Justin, I know that you're passionate about helping veterans, especially with the transition period. What are some specific programs or initiatives that you're involved with, and how do they support veterans?

  Justin Brock: Yeah. So, first of all, people in our industry who are veterans tend to have a leg up. We're dealing with an elderly population a lot. They don't respect college education the way they used to. Especially in the middle-class population, but they respect veterans. When you're a veteran, instant respect. They do really well in our industry. As soon as I got through with this M&A event, I started writing a book called Purpose After Service. I'm eight chapters in. It'll be out soon. The whole thing is conceptually to just get that book out there to people so they can find the idea that you think when you're a service member, when you're a Marine, soldier, grunt, you think, what else is gonna have as high of a calling as what I felt doing this? What else matters? So it isn't that insurance matters that much, but you can impact lives within any vertical. So if you're in real estate or insurance, whether it's Medicare, P&C, health insurance, you could sell ice or cups and still impact people because you can build a business where people within it benefit on multiple levels. The book is really about that. What I'm gonna do is self-publish it. I have four books on Amazon right now. They're all in the Medicare niche. Three for agents, one for consumers. But this one will be on my author profile, Purpose After Service. The whole goal of that book is to put it out there and any royalty proceeds that we get from Amazon and the other self-published portions, we're donating to Tunnels to Towers. I like that charity a lot. The goal is not to make money but to give it away. If somebody calls up our office, we'll send them PDFs of the book for free. We just want to get it in the hands of veterans, but also family members of veterans, because sometimes family members of veterans identify that they're struggling the most with debts. There's the old known statistic that 22 veterans a day are attempting or committing suicide. That sucks. But a lot of it is because they're not finding that purpose, that next step. They're automatically, you know, and this is a stereotype, I guess, but they're automatically, more often, a certain type of person mentally. They were chasing some sort of purpose or higher calling. Whether they found it in the military or not, they're certainly often struggling to find it outside the military. So that's the concept of the book. It's not to say, do this. It's to say, do anything and understand that in that process, if you apply these principles that you've probably picked up in your service, you can affect change and find purpose. You don't have to run into burning buildings. You don't have to get shot at. Not all heroes wear capes. Not all honor comes with carrying an M16 around the desert. So that's really what it is. I know that a lot of veterans are also suffering from the effects of things like PTSD, but I know a lot of veterans, being in the Marine Corps for 8 years, I have a lot of friends that had PTSD. I can tell you, in most cases, it's not any kind of psychological disorder they have. It's that they're failing to get into a routine of purpose after service. That's the whole message for me. If I could help 10 of them get to a point where they're happy, because I know when I can get them in the right mode, they'll help a lot of people. If I can help 10 veterans do that, they might help 100, 1000, 2000, 10000 people or more. That's the goal, and that's how we wanna help, to push that arena. Over time, once I'm finished with that, I wanna get into a way to plug them into more opportunities. If anybody's listening to this and they're like, hey, I wanna help veterans. I wanna hire veterans. I have a goal of creating a staffing or job placement or high-level recruiting agency that places veterans with good opportunities in a not-for-profit way. I'm not there yet, but if you're interested, reach out to me so we can have you in the Rolodex. As soon as that book goes and we start promoting, that's one of my next initiatives.

  Mick Hunt: Well, I can promise you this. When the book drops, we will be back on the podcast and we'll talk about it. We'll even do a couple of live streams as well. At Mick Unplugged, one of the missions we have is to support all of our past, current, and future servicemen and women. So, Justin, whatever we can do to support you, we are definitely gonna do as well.

  Justin Brock: Thank you so much, man. I appreciate that. It means a lot because there's a lot of them out there that need a ton of help, and they deserve it. There's a lot of people that are trying to help them too, so I'm absolutely aware of that. But I think we all have different voices that speak to different people. Mine might speak to someone. Yours might speak to someone that the other people that are out there helping don't reach. It takes a village, so to speak.

  Mick Hunt: Absolutely. Well, Justin, I'm gonna get you out of here on this. Where can people follow you, find you, and all of that from my guy, the $70,000,000 man? That's what I'm calling you now.

  Justin Brock: Two spots really. You can go to justinbrock.com. It's a little bit of a splash page for our niche in what we do, but I try to get really active on Instagram and YouTube. On Instagram, it's @thejustinbrock, and on YouTube, it's youtube.com/justinbrock. We put a lot of free content on both of those platforms.

  Mick Hunt: I can promise you, you will learn something the moment you get to either of those pages. When I visit, I write down some notes as well. And, Justin, I appreciate just the alignment that you and I have. Anytime you wanna come back on the podcast, let's do it. Anytime you need anything from me, let's do it. Ladies and gentlemen, make sure you are following Justin Brock, the $70,000,000 man.

  Justin Brock: Hey, guys. Listen. This has been a great podcast. I've been listening to Mick, and he puts out great content, gets great people on, has great messaging. So if you're listening to this, please subscribe to the podcast. This is gonna be a good one. There's gonna be consistent value, and it's worthy of that. It's worthy of a review on any podcast platform you're listening on.

  Mick Hunt: I appreciate you, Justin. Appreciate you. Thank you, man. And for all the listeners, remember, your because is your superpower. Go unleash it.

  Intro: Thanks for listening to Mick Unplugged. We hope this episode helps you take the next step toward the extraordinary and launches a revolution in your life. Don't forget to rate and review the podcast, and be sure to check us out on YouTube at Mick Unplugged. Remember, stay empowered, stay inspired, and stay unplugged.