From Bankruptcy to Billions: The Business Comeback Stories Every Business Owner Needs to Hear - Part 1

0:01 Welcome to The Coaching Equation brought to you by Empire Partners and hosted by Ryan Lang and Brooke Bishop. Our mission is to help you build a profitable and impactful coaching business by cutting through the noise and all the expert advice to deliver tried and true actionable insights that you can deploy in your business today. Each week, we bring on expert guests, unveil cutting-edge tactics and strategies, and share the secrets and stories that we've gathered from working with the most successful coaching companies on earth. Welcome back to the Coaching Equation Podcast.

0:41 I'm your host, Ryan Lang, CEO and co-founder of Empire Partners, alongside my co-founder and co-host, Brooke Bishop. And you've heard us say many times on this show that business is a sport for gladiators. Well, listen, I'm going to be totally honest with you and tell you... 2025 has been a very challenging year for Brooke and I internally and with our team at Empire. And we get a chance in this episode to share a little bit about those challenges. We get a chance to talk about how we reframe challenges so that we can win. And one of the things that makes this episode really unique and special is that we dive in on some of the most incredible stories of entrepreneurs who have risen from what seems like, you know...

1:23 impending doom they rose from the ashes from impending doom to not just win but win so big that they go down in history and become truly the thing of legend so let's buckle up and dive in this is the coaching equation podcast welcome back to the coaching equation podcast i'm your host ryan lang ceo and co-founder of empire partners alongside my co-founder and co-host brooke bishop my man how you doing buenos dias buenos dias to you sir yeah this is gonna be a fun episode this is gonna be this is gonna be out of out of the norm of our normal our normal uh ensemble it is this is gonna be fun man we're gonna we're gonna serve up some entrepreneurial huevos rancheros today uh I don't know.

2:15 It's the Buenos Dias thing. Oh, huevos rancheros sounds so good. Or some chilaquiles. Oh, chilaquiles. Come on, man. So good. All right. So, you know, one of the things I just want to start by just being, you know, by just kind of having a moment of vulnerability here, you know, this year, 2025, so far as we're recording this episode has been probably one of the most amazing years that we've had in our business and probably the single most challenging we've had in our business. That's understatement. Yeah. Probably a lot of other ways we could use to describe it. But I, you know, I mean, there have like legitimately this year, there have been a lot of sleepless nights.

3:01 There have been a lot of, oh, holy shit. What are we going to do about blank? Yeah. Um, there have been a lot of very, very difficult and challenging decisions to have to make where it's, I think my exact words to you semi recently were, well, we got a shit sandwich in each hand. Which one's going to taste better here. But I thought it would be nice for us to just come together and talk about it a little bit. And also share some stories that might inspire a little bit.

3:43 Because this is something... I know I hear this from our clients and other people, not just in this industry, in the coaching industry, but God knows in business and entrepreneurship in general. Yeah, I kind of felt like this would be nice for us to talk and share about this because the challenges don't ever go away. It's just reminding ourselves that we have everything we need to deal with. Yeah, and it's also that, I mean, Tony used to talk about this. It's like, if you no longer have challenges in your business, that means you're out of business. Right? Right. So it's like the goal is that you just have better challenges that arise. And the reality is the more you grow your business and the more that you have, uh, the further along you are, you have more at stake too.

4:28 So the stakes get higher as the challenges arise. Um, it's just a matter of, okay, great. Are we built for these challenges? Are we made for them? Are we, can we do a better job of anticipating them? I can honestly say, okay. There's so much shit that happened this year that I thought we hedged for. And it was like, nope, didn't anticipate that happening. Okay, cool. How do we get out of the mud? Okay. And yeah, we're just, we're getting, I can honestly say, I feel like we're getting better at getting out of the mud. That's it. Yeah, I think that's a thing. No, it really is. Because like, realistically, when you think about this, forward momentum in business is everything.

5:14 You know, it's absolutely everything. And our ability, the better and better we get at... Number one, making the tough decisions that get us out of those difficult places, recognizing maybe ahead of time, you know, some of the things that that you couldn't see otherwise or when you're in the middle of it, recognizing, you know, you know, something that that needs to be addressed or dealt with. I definitely think that's a skill. You cultivate that for sure. I think what's interesting, though, is that most people, honestly, a lot of people in the business world don't cultivate it because, you know, after one or two times of getting kicked in the nuts, they're like, fuck this.

6:00 I'm out. Well, dude, I mean, at one, and I know we haven't even gotten, haven't cracked this thing even open yet, but for something that's been instrumental for you and I has been our language. I'm not, not referring to the, the four lettered words that we like to let loose. That's instrumental for me. That's our coping mechanism. But no, do we like one thing that's been really huge for us this year has been how we've like this, the stories and the meaning that we've given the challenges that we've come up against. Yeah. Like we can either look at those things as failures and throw in the towel, or we can look at one thing that's been huge for you and I is it's like, we're either learning or we're growing.

6:41 Yes. Right. And like you and I have been very good at turning quickly to go, okay, what story and language are we given this shit? And if we're, dude, you've caught me many times where I'm like, F them. I want, if a bus comes rolling by and they mysteriously trip, I'm okay. Yeah. It's been some of those moments where the real challenges that we've run across, like you've called me on my languaging. I know that there's been moments where I've helped reframe you on your languaging. And that's huge. Honestly, I don't know if it's a sexy thing to talk about the value of what empire is, but...

7:22 It's not something you could sell our membership on of like, hey, be in our world so that we can call you on your language. Like when you go funky or wonky, the biggest value you get is we're going to call you out on your language. But it's, dude, it's freaking huge because when we go sideways, having people around you that can help you redirect that story. Cause the story determines what we're focusing on and what we're focusing on determines what our identity and our belief is. And our identity and our belief is triggering our behaviors. So like, it's so invaluable for us to be able to hold that standard of like, let's not go, let's not get swept into the getting hit by a bus story. Let's figure out what we really want to be focusing on here.

8:03 Anyways. Yeah. 100%. No, that's a real thing. Listen, I'm thinking just as we're talking, the wheels are turning here. Wheels on the bus go around. Sorry. The next landing page for whatever it is that we're selling. Headline. For coaches and thought leaders that want to get bitch slapped around their language. Come on over here. This is for you. Yeah. In all seriousness, I mean, you know, if you're listening to this right now, my guess is that at some point or another, you have uttered the phrase, oh, my God, I don't know what I'm going to do next month.

8:48 Oh my God, my Facebook ads were working and crushing it. And now they're not. And I have no leads. And maybe I have a salesperson or salespeople that are on my team and their calendars are not full. I don't know how I'm going to pay my staff next month. Oh my God, if something doesn't change in the next 60 days, I'm literally thinking I may have to go back to my J-O-B. I don't know how much more I can take this. I had somebody say to me recently, I've been doing this for a year. I don't know how much more I can continue doing.

9:30 We just had somebody this last week. I've been running a funnel for six years that has produced leads like Clockwork. And I just throw my little money into meta meta and give, I give that away to Facebook and Instagram and poof, I get the number of leads I need and I enroll them and it's been predictable and it's always worked for the last six years. And now it doesn't work at all. Tell it didn't. What do I do? Yep. So listen, you've no doubt had a moment like this or moments or... And if you haven't, just hang tight for a second because you will. And maybe you're in one of these moments right now. And whether you're in it right now or whether this is going to prepare you for the next time that you're in a moment like this.

10:14 One of the things that inspired me to want to record this episode is I just got to thinking... No matter how big the challenge, one of the things I said to somebody recently that I believe wholeheartedly in, I would say one of my tricks, I don't know about you, but maybe before we launch into these stories, we can share this a little bit. One of my tricks around, and I should say, really, this is a strategy because it's actually thought out. So I'll maybe use a better speaking of language, a better word for it. One of my strategies around keeping my head screwed on straight when I have a challenge is I go seeking out as many examples and reference points of people who have overcome something way fucking worse than what I'm dealing with right now.

11:03 I seek it out and I eat it alive every day because... We're going to find evidence for whatever we want. If we decide that we're completely fucked and this isn't going to work, we're not going to succeed, we've got to go back to the job, our lives are going to end 30 days from now when we can't pay our bills, whatever, then we'll go find reference points for that. But if I go the other way and just go, shit, I don't know how I'm getting out of this. I don't know how I'm going to figure this out. But... I'm going to go find myself a bazillion other references for people just like me who had way bigger challenges that found a way to overcome them.

11:47 And that's what I'm going to pay attention to. And that's kind of what inspired me to do this. Do you have anything that you use when you're kind of in that state where you're facing the big challenge and you got to reframe stuff for yourself? I do. Um, yeah. And I've got a couple, a couple of things, um, you know, just kind of to stack into that, you know, it's that concept of what's wrong and what's right is always available to us. Yeah. Right. And, and we're meaning making machines. And so oftentimes we try to find our brain is going to scramble to make meaning of whatever our circumstances are. And if we're unconscious with it, or if we're not, um, you know, if we don't have a default strategy that we've cultivated, our brain is going to usually fall into one camp, which is blame.

12:30 Whether we're blaming other people, whether we're blaming circumstances, or whether we're blaming the story of whatever has happened is actually that, like we might have, most of us are blaming the story of what transpired as to why we are not where we want to be or why we won't do what we should do. So yeah, so for me, I'm, The one thing, and I'm so grateful that Mark, actually my uncle taught me this when I was little is he, I was probably, I want to say I was 12 years old, but it was that concept of one, two, three, too many. And he's like, so if you're stressing or if you're caught in that space of, ah, the aggravation more times than not, it's because there's more than three things that it's affecting.

13:11 So finances, health, ability to do something, whatever it is. So what he always had me do back then, this was before we had the technology like lucid chart to do this now. But it was, I used to keep a pad of paper with me. So where Mark got it from is my grandfather. He used to keep a pad of paper in his pocket. And anytime he felt stressed, he would just immediately start writing his notes down. And so Mark passed that one on to me, which was, hey, as soon as you have more than three things, start organizing your thoughts on paper and get it out of your head and then chunk them together. Yes. And then find other people, to your point, find other stories, victory stories of people who overcame something way more, way more hardcore than what you're currently sitting in.

13:54 Yes, yes, yes, yes. I love that. I love, I think, and the whole process of taking the time to organize thoughts is so, so, so important. I do something somewhat similar as well, especially in a challenging time, is just to sit down and do a little bit of self-coaching. Like, okay, what's actually real right now? What's the truth? Yes. Not the story that I'm writing about it, but what's the actual truth? What do I actually have to deal with? And then once I get it laid out, then, yeah, it's so much easier to navigate. So today, what I want to do is to actually share a couple of stories that I dug up.

14:38 And some of these, like, to be transparent, a few of them I was aware of. A few of them I was like, oh, holy shit, never heard this one before. Yeah. Um, and, uh, I want to share these stories because they're examples of, I can promise you, no matter what you're dealing with right now, it pales in comparison to what, you know, uh, some of these other people were dealing with in these stories. And I think you're going to really, uh, find them to be, uh, inspiring. So we'll share them a little bit. We'll talk about them a little bit. It's going to be a different kind of an episode. Hopefully you're down for this. Um, but, uh, I don't know if the listeners are down, but I'm down. Okay. I mean, I'm down. And who cares about anybody else but the two of us anyway? If you don't like it, just hit pause and move on your merry way.

15:18 Yeah, that's right. Go listen to somebody else's podcast. No, don't really do that. Stay right here. Okay, stay here. There is no other podcasts. We're the only one. That's exactly right. What are you talking about? All right. So the first one that I want to share is actually, it's an Apple story. So think about your Steve Jobs, and you just returned to the company that you co-founded. only to discover that it's pretty much a walking corpse. So 1997, Jobs walks back into Apple.

16:01 And they had, at that point... When he walked back in, Apple had lost over a billion dollars, a billion dollars in a year. They had laid off 3,800 employees. And at this particular moment, they had 90 days of operational cash left. Their stocks at a 12 year low. Now think about this for a minute. Most people have no idea that this ever happened because we just think about Apple and this demonstrosity. Trillion dollar business now. Yeah. One of the biggest businesses in the world.

16:43 Think about Apple having 90 days of cash left. Yeah. So Jobs goes to Macworld and he's able to get some investment from Microsoft, actually. His competitor. Uh-huh. He's a competitor. Borrowing money from his number one competitor. Yeah. He gets $150 million. And the whole audience, of course, is pissed. They're booing. Bill Gates is on like a satellite appearance. And they're booing Bill Gates.

17:24 The person lending him the money. Boo. Don't give us money so we can keep running our company. Yeah. Think about that for a minute. Seriously, go to your biggest rival for money. But here's the thing. The interesting piece of this is that in the moment, how many people... This is so unique. I mean, we celebrate Steve Jobs for his brilliance and his dogged determination to create magical things in the world and at Apple and all of the things. But this is really special, I think. And it bears spotlighting. The willingness to do something as uncomfortable as literally going to your biggest rival...

18:13 and asking for an investment. Who the fuck would do that? I don't know if I would have it in me to do that. That's some cojones, man. Well, I mean, then I was also, it's funny, cause that one, the one that jumped to me was, imagine going on stage in front of the employees that made the layoff cut. You had just fired 3,800, 3,000. Dude, that's like five times the size of my graduating class in high school. You have to go in front of all of those people and speak knowing that their friends just got whacked. Yeah. And then them booing you when you're their employer and you're the one you kept them. They're the ones that got to stay on the Titanic. Yep.

18:54 And booing the guy that's giving them money to keep the company. That's a bad, bad day. Right. So, but here's the thing. What was interesting is that he not only had the gumption to go and make the decision to find a ridiculously unexpected ally in Bill Gates and Microsoft, but... This breathing room that they got as a result of this $150 million, they used it to cut Apple's inventory. So they had just... If you know anything about Apple, there was a time... There was this Newton message pad thing that they were doing.

19:36 There was like a clone program. He chopped 70% of the bullshit, hyper-focused on the things that he believed were really going to move the needle. And... And now we know Apple for what it is because he was willing to do that in that moment. I mean, that literally was the massive turning point. And it's been insane. Their growth since 1997 is bananas. I mean, something like we've barely seen in any other company in the history of business. So I think one of the things that...

20:18 you know, that one of the things that also comes out of this for me is his ability to focus on what really mattered. It's like, hey, okay, circumstances are the circumstances. How have we over bloated ourselves? How are we maybe stretching in ways that we shouldn't be right now? And how do I now right the ship by hyper-focusing on something that I believe at my core is going to make things successful? And actually, it was right around that time that they started shipping those colored iMacs. That was the turning point. They were so dope when they came out. And I remember Gateway was like the behemoth at that point, right?

21:00 Oh, my gosh. Yes. And it was one of those pieces. I remember because I was in high school. For anyone who's going to want to do the math on this bad boy. But that was, I remember our high school got somebody, one of the parents sponsored redoing the computer lab. And we got all those different colored iMacs. And I was like, these things are rad. And yeah, that turned things around for them 100%. It's funny because now I was a PC guy for such a long time. And then shortly thereafter that I'm like, you know what? Mac is so much cooler. And I've never looked back. So now everything in my world is Apple. Same here. Yeah, same here. Yeah, that one's pretty sick.

21:45 So again, think about this. Walks in the door, back into his company, laid off 3,800 employees, lost a billion dollars in one year. That's another thing too. Think about a billion in one year. I remember I should find the video of it. I remember when Tony Robbins was explaining to us how much money a billion dollars is because most people just think like, oh, it's more than a million. And he was explaining, like, if you took the dollar bills and you put them end to end, like million dollars wouldn't even get like halfway around the globe. I'm totally butchering this. I'll find the video of it, but he talked about a billion and like in relationship, it could go around.

22:25 Like, I think it was something like 30 times or something. It was this crazy astronomical thing of how much more a billion dollars is compared to a million. And like it's bananas to lose a bill. Like, how do you even go? I'm in debt. A billion, a billion, a billion, Like who are you going to go to, to go, Hey, can you give me a loan to get out of debt on this bad boy? Bill Gates, Bill Gates, apparently. Hey, Bill Gates. Yeah. Yeah. There's like two people on earth that could actually help me out of the hole. One of them's my competitor. All right. Yeah. Tail between your legs. You know, you know, what's interesting about this, too?

23:07 I think this also those spotlights so often one of the biggest reasons why I think we don't make it out of challenges is because of the fact that we we we decide we we're not willing to ask for help because we make a decision for someone else. What the fuck do you think? Like, what was Jobs thinking before he went to Bill Gates? Like, did he ever think what Bill was going to tell him to go fuck off? You want $150 million? Go screw yourself. You're my competitor. Why would I do that? Yes. But this is another great example. It's interesting that he would lend that money as well.

23:48 And obviously, he took an equity. I think it was what, like 7% or 10%? 7%. Yeah, 7%. Yeah. Yeah. So for him, that's a crazy move to go, you know what? I'm going to bet on you guys rebounding on this thing. I'll give up some cash and position myself and keep my competitor in the game. Like, I wonder what those thought process, like, that's a whole nother side of the equation of sitting there going, I can put these guys out of business if I say no. Yep. If I say yes, I'm literally giving my rival more energy, which is going to force us to get better and stronger too. Like, that's a crazy side of the coin as well. 100% it is. And, you know, he's... You know, after the deal was done, Jobs goes to him and says, Bill, thank you.

24:33 The world's a better place. I guess the quote landed on Time Magazine. And you know what? He was right. The world was a better place, is a better place, because Steve Jobs had the gumption to go ask for... something like that from you know their arch rival and bill gates had the the the vision and the foresight to know that he was about to do something really amazing by saying yes pretty freaking incredible wild pretty freaking incredible All right. So let's dive in on another one here.

25:14 So this one, I'm just going to pre-frame this. All right. This is a Tesla story. So regardless of what you think about Elon Musk and all of that stuff... hear me out and at least listen to the story. Okay. This is not in any way. We're already going to have some Bill Gates stuff on the previous story. So we're gonna have to like trigger warning for each of these stories. Yeah. Well, I, I, I want to say, I want to preface this by saying this is in no way, shape or form a, uh, uh, you know, a commentary on, on Elon Musk, uh, or what we do or do not think about Elon Musk. Um, but yeah, So December 24, 2008, 6 PM, Tesla's financing round closes.

26:02 It's the last hour of the last day possible to get financing or his payroll payroll is going to get bounced two days later. And at this point, Musk decides that he's going to take the remaining money that he personally has from PayPal and give it to Tesla. So literally, the company is going to run out of money. I mean, here's another thing. Think about this for a minute. You got a company that you've dumped a whole bunch of money into. You've got a whole bunch of employees. You got two days. Okay. to figure some shit out before your company has no money and you can't make payroll.

26:47 So he, he decides to, to, to go take personal funds to, to, you know, to pull them and put into this at this point, he had already given $40 million of his, of his own money to Tesla, 40 million. And but but now they're in this spot where and this is another thing. When you think about investing in something, think about that for a minute. I hear this all the time. You don't understand. I put I put three grand a month into Facebook ads for six months and it didn't work. I've, you know, I've been out of my job for a year.

27:30 My 401k is gone. This is craziness. The choice that he had was, I can retire now and live off of what I earn on this $40 million, never have to work again, or I can put it into this failing business where right now, there's a really good chance this is just going to get melted and I'm back to ground zero. Like you won the lottery with your, your closing out of PayPal. I'm going to either bet on myself or I can go retire. Like how many people I can go retire and buy an Island and never have to do shit ever again. Or let's, let's bet it on red.

28:10 Yeah. Let's bet it on red. And at a time, think about the timeframe of this. What was the year on that one? This is 2008. Oh, 2008. Yeah. We've got the global financial crisis. All of this is happening during the global financial crisis. And especially in the automobile industry, you got behemoths. I remember the government was bailing all those guys out. Yep. Yep. GM files bankruptcy. GM filing bankruptcy. I think Forbes was the only one that didn't file BK, if I remember correctly. I think you're right. Barely, like by their teeth, made it through. And then you're a new car company coming into the fold. That is.

28:50 And with a new concept, and you're going to bet the farm, that's wild. Yep. So he decides to put some of his own money in there, and he's able to get on a conference call and get a restructured plan and get some additional funding and found a way to prevent bankruptcy, literally to the point, think what you want about this guy. You'd think about sleepless nights, and you know stories say that the dude was totally in tears over the entire thing when he finally was able to get over the hump but literally everybody else is collapsing he finds a way they dodge bankruptcy and now Tesla is fucking everywhere it's really interesting because I've never put myself in Elon's shoes because it's not been something that I've tried to do But it makes you think like if you went through that experience, you'd probably be pretty ruthless and cut through it in your business.

29:53 If you got to that point where you put $40 million of your own money into something and you knew what it took to get things back to the other side. And like thinking of the standards you'd hold people around you, thinking of how you'd negotiate, like... That's, that's pretty wild to just, you know, I don't know if we do that often enough of the people that we throw stones at, of just kind of going, why, maybe, why do they behave that way? Or maybe why do they act like that? Or why do they make those decisions? Like, shit, I've never been in a position where I invested $40 million to take something that was a sinking ship and try and turn it around. Yeah, just interesting, interesting. An interesting world that we're in, but it's also, you know, we're already seeing a pattern, right?

30:34 People who in the most hardest of markets who went all in and when they figured out how to crack the code in those hardest markets, like how much did they catapult the other side of that bad boy when things spun around? Yeah. Well, during the storm in those tough times, pretty big. This is so true. And our ability to do it in those times. Yes. I like those people. We've kind of talked about this. And now the analogy I love about things like this is it's like, you know, when if you're familiar with baseball at all, you're you're in the on deck circle and you're swinging around, you know, two or three bats or you've got like your. you know, weighted donut on your bat and it's like super heavy.

31:15 And then you get in the batter's box and feels like you're swinging a twig. It's the same thing, man. You go through this super tough stuff. And here's what's really nuts about this. All right, I'm going to lay some numbers on you. This is crazy. So this happened in 2008. So if you think about this, it's Christmas 2008. Yeah. They literally have... They can't make payroll. Money is gone. Gonzo. Now, today... And I want to think timeline here for just a second because I get so pissed off when people get so impatient in business. Yeah. Oh, I've been doing this for six months.

31:55 I've been doing this for a year. It's been a couple of years. I've tried everything. Yeah. Okay. But so from near bankruptcy and no money, Christmas 2008. Okay. Today, July 29th, 2025, Tesla's market cap is over a trillion dollars. They are the 10th most valuable company in the world. 13 years. Are you willing to bust your ass for 13 years?

32:38 That's... Actually, I guess it's more than 13 years. Brooke can't do math. 17. 17 years. Not a math wizard. But that's crazy to... The amount of, and I think there's a lot of moments too. I think he has others there. If I remember correctly, there's been a couple of times where he just bet the whole farm and he went all in to make it work. And I think there's a, there's magic in there of having that psychology. I mean, Tony used to talk about this all the time. He's like, if I lost everything, how long do you think it would take for me to get it back? It's like, I don't have what I have because I had some huge cash bucket sitting there that allowed me to get to where I want to go. Because I got to where I got to because I got to where I got to.

33:22 Sounds like a song. I got to where I got to. Squirrel. His relationships and his mindset and his determination of knowing that he could do it again. That's, I think, the key piece of like knowing that we can do it. So I think kind of going back to the original, you know, court ethos of this conversation, if we can find other people who had the psychology that they could do it again. Like, can we glean a little bit of their story? Can we make their story our story? I think that's the magic, right? Like we can relive it and we can put ourselves in their shoes, whatever, whatever we think about them from their values or their morals or whatever that piece is. But the story is the story and we can make it our own.

34:04 That's huge. A hundred percent. And that's the thing. There's a quick little clip. And I'll link it up. And I'll link up one of them. I mean, it appears in like a bazillion different clips. But I'll link up one of them in the show notes. And you maybe have heard it, seen it. But Elon's getting interviewed on TV regarding SpaceX. And it's like the next rocket blows up. And I can't remember who it is that's interviewing him, but he goes, well, the next rocket blows up and you're like, did you turn to yourself and think, man, like, I got to pack this in?

34:48 He just stares him blankly in the face and is like, no, why not? Because I don't give up. I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead. His exact words are I'd have to be dead or incapacitated. Sorry, but one of the things right now that I want to share, if you're listening to this right now, this is, I'm going to say something that's maybe hard to hear or maybe going to be unpopular. I don't know. But I want to be real about something. What you face deciding to be a business owner of any kind, I don't care what kind, what you face deciding to be a business owner of any kind is competition that thinks like that.

35:35 And if you're not willing to, they will eat you alive. There will always be people that will be more talented than you or less talented than you or have ideas that you don't have or have come from money that you don't have or whatever. But you got to control the things that you can control, especially in times of difficulty or crisis. And cultivating a mindset like that that is ironclad I mean, it's like there's no wavering. We don't compromise. We'll figure it out. We'll find a way. We don't go backwards. it's right in alignment with, you know, you and I have said this bazillions of times, but it's, you know, business is a sport for gladiators.

36:17 Yep. And it's like, we're not, we're not saying that like metaphorically, like straight up. If you look at the numbers, it's like less than, I think the last time I saw it was less than 82% of businesses that start are in business 12 months after they begin. Yep. After 10 years, less than 1% of 10%. are in business. So I don't even know whatever the math gets to be on that. So that's after 10 years. So for anybody who's listening, who's been in this game and they've, you've still have a business and you've been in the game for five years or 10 years, like you literally are an anomaly in and of yourself at this moment. And, uh, Dean Graciosi, I saw something he posted the other day.

37:00 Dean posted something. He said, it's not about, uh, being the best in your business. yeah it's like we all have this belief in our head that we have this thriving booming business where there's no problems and we have all these people who are you know doing the palm fronds and giving us grapes and we've got this incredible beautiful maybe that's just my own picture but makes me think of coming to america better stop right now watch that one again too but yeah we're gonna get in trouble uh you know, the reality is we have more and more problems. Hopefully we just have better quality problems. We have better strategies for tackling those problems when they come up.

37:42 And hopefully we've built a strong enough, you know, uh, what's the, uh, protective armor around ourselves to know like we're going to get hit. We are going to bleed. We are going to have other people in the arena with us that are going to get taken out. It's going to happen. But are we in for it to have the victory and those moments? And it's not that we're always living in victory, but there's those fleeting moments where we get out of there and we go, holy shit, I survived. And guess what? We wake up tomorrow. We're back in the arena again. And then we get to go, do we survive or do we throw in, do we throw the towel in or do we drop our sword and we get whacked? Yep. The other thing that I love about that, dude, is that it's evidence.

38:23 It's, you know, earlier in the episode, I was talking about references, right? And going out and finding those references. Well, I'll tell you what's really cool about this is that every single time you decide not to pack it in, every single time you decide to get up off the mat one more time, every single time you decide to go make a really hard decision instead of just crumbling, um, Every time that's a reference to yourself. You're literally stacking credibility with yourself to say that becomes, you know me, I'm obsessed with identity. That's how you cultivate that identity by doing the hard things and making the hard decisions over and over and over again. And then at some point you just wake up and you're like, no, this is just what we do.

39:06 It's what we do. So, uh, I, uh, I'm going to wave the flag here and say that we've got more stories to tell. And we're not done with this. And we want to get a whole lot more mileage out of it. The only way that we could actually do it the way we wanted to, though, is to chop this up into two episodes. And so there's going to be a continuation. And we're going to leave you hanging because we got, we got more stories, uh, of, uh, really tough stuff that was overcome. And a couple of my absolute favorites, a few of which I had never heard before in their bananas are just wild.

39:47 Uh, but I want to save that for the next episode, man. And I think that you and I have more to jam out on this stuff as well. And I think that this is a topic, hopefully that is intriguing for you. If you're listening to this, because it doesn't ever go away, we're always going to have to have this and our ability to navigate these things is, uh, is paramount to us, not just staying in the game, but actually thriving and getting everything that we want. So you cool with that? If I just pull the plug on this one, totally cool with that. And, uh, yeah, Even talking these conversations through, I'm so fired up to, I'm like, put me in coach. Put me in coach. Let's go. It's like Rudy, man. Yeah. He has so many good movie references today. We're going to have to know what I'm doing this week. But yeah, I'm totally down for episode two.

40:30 Excellent. All right. All right. Part two coming up. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Coaching Equation Podcast. Until next time, take care. Take care, everybody. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Coaching Equation. Please hit subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you got value out of this episode, we would be so grateful if you would share it out with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite platform. To learn more about Empire Partners or to inquire about working with Ryan and Brooke, please visit www.empirepartners.io forward slash go.

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