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DN 242 - Sharon Lechter(Transcript of the podcast has been edited for clarity and brevity.)[00:00:00] Casanova Brooks: What's up family. Thank you for tuning into the Dream Nation Podcast. My name is Casanova. I'll be your host and I'm excited to be bringing to you, entrepreneurs, thought leaders and trailblazers from around the world. Stay locked in with us because we're about to go on a journey that will change your life.What's up DreamBuilder we are back again and today's episode, as you always know, I say that I'm excited to bring it to you, but this one I'm truly excited because we have a pioneer and we have a pioneer of someone who does not only talk the talk, but definitely walk the walk and taught thousands upon tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands through all of the books that you've wrote.And millions of people, I would say financial literacy, and so without further ado, please help me in welcoming my friend, Ms. Sharon Lechter to the show. Sharon, you want to go ahead and say what's up to Dream Nation?[00:01:01] Sharon Lechter: Thank you so much. I love Dream Nation. What's up Dream Nation, and thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be with you today.[00:01:03] Casanova Brooks: Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be a lot of fun. Now. I always love to start off these episodes and I compare us as entrepreneurs to superheroes, and the reason being is because we're constantly flying around the world, and I know throughout your career, you have been, and you're putting on your cape and you're trying to solve some of the world's biggest problems.And so from the outside, looking in, a lot of people, they see you as a superhero, as the wonder woman or the superwoman. But a lot of the times, what we can't describe is on the backside when there's no cameras on who is that Lois Lane, let's say, so take us back and tell us when it comes to Sharon Lechter, who is that Lois Lane?[00:01:45] Sharon Lechter: Thank you so much, and I, we can go dial back many years. I grew up in a very lower-middle-class home, neither one of my parents, even at high school degrees, and my dad ended up running the engineering school for the Navy. So, totally self-taught brilliant, man. But we live in a little tiny house between my mom's beauty shop, my dad's used car lot, I was embarrassed with where we lived. I wanted to be a professional. I wanted to have, my friends had parents who were CEOs or military officers, but we also own a lot of rental properties that I had to go scrub out bathrooms between tenants and orange groves. So, I grew up in an environment understanding the value of assets and expected that everybody else did too.And so I followed my dream. I got my degree in accounting. I started my career with Coopers & Lybrand where the very first women in public accounting many years ago, and I was very successful, but I thought at the ripe old age of 25, I was like, gosh, I'm working really crazy hours. I'm not in control of my own life. This is, and this is my future forever, and I had a client invite me to join him and buy in a company out of bankruptcy, and I still remember going back to my condo in Atlanta, Georgia, because I was having a great time, young, single, and yet not in control of my life. So, I did the old, yellow legal pad, because this was before PCs or cell phones, pros and cons, and it didn't help me a bit.I could argue both sides, but my hand took off and wrote across the top of the page. Why not? Why not do something different? Why not take that path less traveled? And that's still my philosophy today, and that's, I think ties in with true entrepreneurs. Why not solve a problem or serve a need? Why not do something, someone else hasn't done? And that's really still my mantra today. So, I left public accounting. It actually was a really bad business decision at the time, but had I not made that choice, I wouldn't have met a young man named Michael Lechter and we've just celebrated 41 years of marriage.And so continuing on, I started the children's talking book, industry books and had the sound strips down the side. I met the inventor of that and helped him build that. Understood the essence and learned so much about the power of association, cause we had the technology, the kids back then. I know dinosaur days, they didn't have screens, they didn't have no electronics, and so here I am with this thing, I said, how can we get parents to trust us while we aligned with little companies like Disney, Warner Brothers, Sesame Street, Marvel comics, and allowed us to explode that company around the world, and we sold that four years later, and then as my husband moved down to Arizona, and our oldest son went off to college and came home at Christmas time in credit card debt.And that was December of 1992, and that's when I dedicated the rest of my life to financial literacy, financial education, fast forward, a few years, working with the school systems, hence the white hair. My husband called me one day and this guy had come into his office in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt with an idea for a board game, drawn-out with crayons on a piece of which a black paper, his name was Robert Kiyosaki. So, Mike brought us together for the first beta test of the cashflow game, and I'm the only one that got out of the rat race, and I volunteered to help Robert commercialize it because it agreed with my philosophy of investing your time and buying, building, creating assets, as opposed to chasing money, time for money instead of exchanging time for money, lets than invest your time to build the asset that will generate the money.During that process, he told me he wanted to charge $200 for the game. I said, its kinda pricey. We're talking in 1996, and I said maybe we should write a brochure that explains the philosophy that people will then be convinced to spend the $200, and that's when he asked me to become his partner, and we were equal partners in the company for 10 years, and we wrote 15 books together. But that little brochure that kind of started it all was named Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Most people don't know that, that it was written to sell the game, and we thought we were writing one and done one book and said, people wanted more so said we'll do a trilogy. Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Cashflow Quadrant, Rich Dad’s Guide To Investing.But then over the 10 years that we worked together, we had 15 books and in 2007, the height of our success, we were no longer aligned with what we wanted. So, I made the decision to leave. People thought I was crazy, but sometimes, and I want your audience to hear this sometimes you have to close one door for other doors of opportunity to open and had I not made that decision to leave Rich Dad, I wouldn't have gotten the call from President Bush. I had the honor of serving on the first president's advisory council for financial literacy for both President Bush and President Obama, and in March of oh eight, I got the phone call from the Napoleon Hill Foundation, which has been an incredible relationship.They asked me to help reinvigorate Napoleon Hill's teachings during the financial collapse in 2008, and so I wrote Three Feet From Gold, Think And Grow Rich For Women, Outwitting The Devil, and Success and Something Greater with the foundation, and it's just been an incredible working relationship, and then I had incredible honor earlier this year to release the book, Exit Rich in cooperation with the Inc magazine to help people understand most people start a business new and say, do you want to start a business to work until the day you die? Or do you want to start a business to build financial freedom for yourself to get your time back?Everybody says B, but the vast majority of them do A cause they don't understand how to build the structure and the basic fundamentals of building a company, and so in Exit Rich, I go through that and help them, how to build the successful business into one that sustainable, scalable, and saleable, and that kind of brings you to here. I'd try to do my Cliff Notes version for ya.[00:07:44] Casanova Brooks: Yeah, no, you did a phenomenal job and there's so much to unpack there. I, hopefully I can do a lot of justice cause I know that there's a lot of people that's watching or listening at this, that they're ... They have a lot of questions. So, I'm going to try to go back in my mind, and first off, I guess I want to know, as a young girl, you said that your parents didn't have high school diplomas, but then you go off and you then start working as a CPA. For you, why did you not follow the path of entrepreneurship early on? Because your dad, you said he had rental properties and everything else. Why did you decide to take a different path? What did you not like about it in the beginning?[00:08:26] Sharon Lechter: We've heard the phrase, the grass is green on the other side, and that's my friends, their parents were CEOs, and I was the first generation to go to college and I wanted to become a sophisticated professional. I thought that was the path to take a higher level of financial success, and once I got into it, and it was a true gift to go into public accounting because all of my clients, I saw how companies did things correctly, and I also saw how companies did not do things correctly. So, even though it was not an entrepreneurial path itself, it allowed me a window into many hundreds of different entrepreneurs to see how they were doing things. So, it really helped me prepare for the next chapter of my life.[00:09:10] Casanova Brooks: Got it. No, that makes sense, and then you decide that you don't want to do this anymore at 25, and I can only imagine that your parents were probably up in arms because up until this point, you've been a golden child, right? It's your daughter. She's the only person to go to college. She now has a great job. Why, I guess what was the reaction when you told them, Hey, this isn't what I want to do anymore?[00:09:32] Sharon Lechter: I have an older sister, so she's the one that was following the pathway. She was in a corporate job, stayed in the same town. I was the wild child and I'm the one that left Florida and went to Atlanta, and then I went to New Hampshire, met my husband. So, they were not always sure what was happening in my world, and I tell them, but, my parents, every night growing up, my dad would ask me, Sharon, have you added value to someone's life today? And he's been gone 16 years, but I still ask myself that every single night and they were always supportive of whatever I chose to do. They were a little surprised when I left public accounting, but they were never judgmental. They were always there to support me and basically their message to me growing up as you can do or be anything you want to, if you just put enough effort and energy into it.[00:10:29] Casanova Brooks: Got it. I love that. I love that. Have you added value to someone else's life today? That's something that I'm going to start to implement into not only my life, but also to teach my son that and definitely to teach my daughter that as she gets older as well. Let me ask this as you, I think where a lot of people struggle, especially millennials is we understand the power of collaboration, but sometimes when you're talking about getting into partnerships with people, buying companies, as you said in the beginning, there was someone that said, Hey, this company is bankrupt.We can buy them out. How were you able to be comfortable with doing a partnership early on? Did you just not know any better? Or did you have certain rules and parameters that if we're going to partner, we're going to do this? What did that look like for you?[00:11:19] Sharon Lechter: I do a lot of counseling with people that are going into work together, and a lot of times their friends or their family, and that's that's a recipe, blood and money is a very difficult thing to mix, and so it's really important. I sit down and do a little counseling ahead of time when I go, plan the divorce before you plan the marriage, because when you're together and you're looking at what you're doing, you're all very excited about it. You respect each other and it's a good time for you to say so let's, maybe in five years, one of us isn't going to be as excited as the other. So, let's talk now about how we're going to separate while we are still excited about the future while we still love and respect each other, because when you have high emotion, you have low intelligence and what happens?I see so many times people go into business with somebody they're all excited about it, and then things one of them becomes disinterested and it causes a seizure in the family or in the friendship, and so it's always better to think about that upfront so that you can preserve the relationship and maintain that even after a business relationship is over.[00:12:23] Casanova Brooks: I love that plan, the plan divorce before you plan the marriage, but for somebody who's listening and especially for you, someone who's been profound when it comes to personal development in the law of attraction. What if someone says, isn't that really looking at you're attracting the plan B or the negative, because in the back of my mind, then I know that like, when I don't like something, I don't have to stick it out. It's hey, we already got this plan B over here, I can get to going.[00:12:54] Sharon Lechter: The plan B is a plan of respect. It's not negativity, it's not attracting negative results. It is saying we are so excited about working together, but let's be realistic. Our lives may not stay on the same path. One of us may have six kids and we want to do something different, or one of us may end up wanting, needing to move out of town, and so what if based on those things and our mutual respect for each other, how are we going to deal with that in a professional and adult way that will help us preserve the relationship, and so it's really not attracting the negative. It's actually creating an opportunity for maintaining the relationship, no matter what happens with the business, cause typically businesses can be hugely successful and then there are problems, and so people's expectations are all almost always different. So, it's better to clearly outline the relationship, the agreements and what those expectations are.So, for instance, you may go into business with somebody and they end up getting married and that spouse is somebody that you don't want to ever be in business with. If you put that in the agreement ahead of time. So, if one of us. Ha becomes incapacitated or heaven forbid one of us dies. That's not attracting the negative. That's just being prudent and planning out the business and preserving that business because that spouse may not know anything about the business and all of a sudden they're going to step in owning 50%. No, you want to put that in the agreement ahead of time and say, how this is going to work. How are you going to compensate that spouse for the value of the company, but maintain the ability to drive it forward.[00:14:36] Casanova Brooks: Hey, Dream Builder. If you are anything like me, you know the importance of setting goals and achieving those goals, and anytime you find something interferes with that, ultimately interferes with your happiness and if that's you, or if you're in a rut right now, I want to encourage you to check out betterhelp…
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