Why Successful Entrepreneurs Lose Energy (And How to Fix It) | Todd Merriott | Investor Fuel Show

Mike Hambright (00:33)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with my good friend, Todd Merriott. We’re gonna be talking about a little bit about

his history as a business owner, a real estate investor. has other businesses now. And we just talked for a long time before this, just talking about what we’re going to talk about. And we have a lot of similarities in that you get to a point in your business where it’s a means to an end, right? But it doesn’t have to be that way. And you just talked about some of the obligation of being able to share your knowledge and your experience with other people that are kind of coming up, and that you can change your business. A lot of our businesses, if you’re a real estate investor, or you’re in home services, or you’re in a lot

of other things, the businesses are really not that different at the end of the day. Like our widgets might be different, but customer support, always doing the right thing, how to plan your time, how to get rid of all the junk you have in your mind, how to manage cash, how to hire people and build a team and stuff like that is a skill that could help you no matter what business you’re in. So if you’re running a business right now that doesn’t bring you energy, well, might be time to change. I don’t know. So Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Merriott (01:28)
Good to

be here, Mike. Thanks. You too.

Mike Hambright (01:32)
Yeah, always good to see you. So ⁓ hey, before

we jump in, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background for those that are listening that they don’t know who are yet.

Todd Merriott (01:40)
Okay, yeah I was an athlete growing up, loved all sports. Baseball, basketball were my favorites. Did a bowl, like golf, I did all kinds of stuff. Went to college on the baseball scholarship. Loved that, ended up blowing a disc in my back so that wasn’t doable anymore. Had to do something else, thought I wanted to be a coach so I got a teaching degree.

Tried that for one year, knew a week in that I did not want to do this anymore. So I had to finish out the year. Had a great time coaching, but I felt constrained in the salary scale. I thought, there’s no way I’m going to make it doing this. So started painting houses just to fill the time and kind of liked how it felt to come home and have accomplished something. I was getting paid pretty good at the time for painting.

and you know was an easy thing to learn and got pretty good at it. One thing led to another. People would ask me what I’m doing. I lied and said I was a painter. know they had me come bid their house so it grew into a business. Then I became a remodeler and from there started getting asked to project manage for some people and ended up with a good friend of mine at the time Mark Delatorre. He runs a pretty big

flipping operation he asked me to be his project manager and you know lots of experience there been involved in over 450 flips and you know here we are almost 20 years later and done a lot in real estate so I’ve just got the entrepreneurial bug I guess and have been involved in some other businesses as well we currently have a painting business and also a security camera installation business

Mike Hambright (03:13)
Yeah, yeah. So let’s talk about.

You know, I want to talk about a number of things here, but just some kind of a lot of lessons learned from you. And I think it’s going to resonate with a lot of people and you and I have a lot of similarities in our beliefs and our values and things like that. So I, I know it’s going to be a good conversation, but just talk about you. You’re at a point in your life now where you have a few different businesses. You’ve been through some ups and downs, some of which we’ll kind of talk about here because it’ll give some context not to rub salt in any wounds here, but we all have some arrows in our back and some scars, right? And so, but just talk about like what you’re thinking.

Todd Merriott (03:38)
It’s alright.

Mike Hambright (03:45)
We were just we were just talking about this about like you have a few businesses and they need to have a purpose in your life Because you could do a lot of things. There’s a lot of things you could do, right? You don’t have to have the security business. You don’t have to have the paint business You don’t need to do the real estate Anymore necessarily so just talk about how you value I think like we’re Like I just my wife and I just became empty nesters I know your kids are moving on and you just start to think about like what is the purpose of the business because the business really

is to help you live the life that you want. And so you get to a point where you’re like, if I’m doing something that doesn’t give me joy, if it doesn’t bring me energy, and I feel like it just distracts, you know, takes away energy from me, then you shouldn’t do that anymore. And I think there’s some people that are forced to keep doing what they’re doing, but maybe sometimes they don’t realize that they have a transferable skill maybe.

Todd Merriott (04:36)
Yeah, that’s true. my daughter just graduated college. She’s got her first big girl job. She’s moving out in June. My son’s got two more years left and he’s done with college. So like same thing, an empty nester. It’s kind of like, I’m looking at the next decade trying to figure out how to best leverage my experience and my time. And I don’t have kids sports. I don’t have those kinds of things yet. I don’t have grandkids yet. So we’ve got this timeframe of like, let’s kind of buckle down and figure out what we want here.

In terms of like, you know, bringing joy, like real estate at times kind of started to feel like it was just, I didn’t even enjoy designing houses anymore, which I used to love. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve got a great partner in Ben Allgaier, who’s younger and still energetic about building the real estate company.

You know, it’s funny, we went to several masterminds and like there was a lot of messaging about focus and while there’s a lot of value in that and there’s times when you really do need to focus in on like a thing, we would get, we kind of caught some flack from some people like, uh, seems like you’re a little scatter or whatever.

And so we were constantly sort of trying to like focus and at the end of the day We both realized like that didn’t make us happy like we like having multiple things to do and so then we just decided to lean into it and like okay, if let’s just get better at doing the multiple things because we do enjoy the variety and having multiple different types of businesses to do this and and rather than fight that urge and

Mike Hambright (05:53)
Mm-hmm.

Todd Merriott (06:11)
you know, hate our lives doing a job that we didn’t love. Like let’s just do what we love to do and be really good at Just be better at it, you know, go win. And so we really did kind of…

Mike Hambright (06:19)
Yeah.

Todd Merriott (06:21)
decide hey let’s work backwards from what you want life to work look like and let’s design the plan to meet that goal and that exercise really helped because it freed us to look at each business as its own pot of revenue and then each one has its own challenges and and they’re not unique problems they’re just it’s just timing one business is that one one specific space in time and it has these growth issues and then another business

Mike Hambright (06:43)
Right.

Todd Merriott (06:50)
two years down the road, has different growth issues, but we can work, we know how to solve each independent issue. We just have to kind of focus separately, but in a given week or month, we’ve done a lot on a lot of things.

Mike Hambright (07:02)
Yeah, it’s interesting because I think ⁓ not that there’s you I’ve certainly told people that they need to stay focused before and I’ve got several businesses I we could probably have hours of conversation on that alone right is like I do think you need to have something that’s foundational that kind of pays the bills and that’s covered and then it gives you it opens up the opportunity for you to explore other things if that’s what you want to do.

Todd Merriott (07:23)
Exactly.

Mike Hambright (07:23)
But I think about, I’ve

made this joke a few times about my wife, Lindsay. She has tons of hobbies. She’s an amazing photographer. She’s like dedicated green thummer. has, we have a greenhouse out at the ranch. She’s got tons. She has bonsais that are like 25, 30 years old. Like she’s like really into all this stuff. My hobby is like more business, you know? It’s like break something or fix something or buy something or whatever. It’s like, it’s kind of the same thing, but there’s something to be said. Like if your goal is just to optimize profitability, maybe getting focused on one.

Todd Merriott (07:42)
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Mike Hambright (07:53)
one

thing and never strain from that is okay. If it’s to add seasoning in your life, that’s like, I need to have some variety to do different things, even in business. As long as, you know, there’s always the people that have like four things going on and like none of them are working and none of them are covering the bills. Like that’s a problem, right? You have to have something foundational because they give, but it opens up the, I guess the opportunity for you to explore a little bit because you,

Todd Merriott (08:12)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (08:21)
of playing with the house’s money at that point maybe.

Todd Merriott (08:23)
Yeah, and like I said, I’m fortunate, you know, not everybody has this. I’m a dreamer. I know it. That’s not like, I’m not bragging about that because it can create its own issues. But I’ve partnered with an implementer. And so like, I have the, he gives me the freedom to think and plan and have ideas and solve problems. And

Mike Hambright (08:33)
you

Todd Merriott (08:46)
I give him the space to go and like implement the stuff and he can turn it around super fast. So, you know, if you’re a dreamer and you’re struggling, you probably do need focus or you need someone who can help implement, you know, and vice versa. If you’re just really good at implementation, but you’re just not, uh, you don’t have a good vision for things and where to go, you might need some help with that. So, um, that’s why I’m able to work on multiple things because I’ve got somebody who can help me do the kind of nitty gritty stuff that has to happen.

Mike Hambright (08:49)
Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I think that that’s, you know, some similarities with my wife. Like I’m the gas and she’s the break. Like she’s she’s always been way better. She’s been, you know, effectively our implementer on a lot of things. And we kind of make jokes about just like if we didn’t have each other where where we would be. She never would have bought a single house because she’s very risk averse. And if it was all me, like I would have had all sorts of cash flow management issues and stuff like that, because she was always our CFO. So let’s talk a little bit about the I guess the

Todd Merriott (09:22)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Mike Hambright (09:44)
If you want to have more variety in your life with businesses, like the importance of picking good partners, because I know, like I know Ben obviously very well and know you guys have a good partnership. He’s a great guy. He’s actually for anybody listening right now. If you want to hear the podcast with Ben, he was on just like last month. But I know you’ve had some bad partnerships too. So you could just share a little bit of experience about like finding the right partnerships and making sure that

Todd Merriott (10:00)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (10:09)
you do everything you can to make sure that you’re structured right so that it doesn’t cause problems because I know you’ve got back to war wounds I know you’ve got some from that.

Todd Merriott (10:17)
Yeah, I think maybe that’s part of being the dreamer. I’m also you know it makes you generally optimistic and so You can assume that people will have your same Approach to life your same integrity the same

concept of what’s right and wrong, that kind of thing, not everybody does, even people really close to you. I we have had a couple times where we just assumed that the partnership was much tighter than it was, know, a lifelong friend decided to take from the business and go start his own thing, and it was crushing. It cost us a ton of operational loss and financial loss. As a result, it really fractured

Mike Hambright (10:37)
Yeah.

Todd Merriott (10:59)
focus having to pick up the pieces it was really devastating at the time you know are we stronger coming out of it yeah but sometimes those things are avoidable you know and I think it was avoidable and there’s a lot of I think lessons that we would be able to show somebody where it’s like look don’t assume the best

You don’t necessarily want be negative and assume the worst, but you do have to plan for people’s mentality or approach to life to change or circumstances to change to where if something happens and somebody’s in a desperate situation, they’re going to do what they have to do.

and it may not be what you would choose. Not everybody chooses to do the right thing every time. So you kind of have to plan for the contingencies in that way and you know I think you don’t always have to take on a partner. Sometimes you can take on a

contractor. You can bring someone on that gets a part of every deal in more of a subcontractor way for a while. Maybe you can sort of test it out and say let’s see how this works for a year before we bring you on as an equity owner. I think there’s some wisdom in that and just giving it some time instead of just bringing somebody on right away.

Mike Hambright (12:04)
Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of, like I think everybody goes into every relationship with the best of intentions typically, but if you’re not really structured when you go into it, and sometimes it’s hard to be structured because you’re like, well, that’s a friend or I know that person or you know somebody really well or you think you know them really well, right?

If things go south and you didn’t have things documented, it’s a problem. know you’ve been through that. And I could tell you, I’ve made a joke a few times that we’ve hired and fired one of my wife’s sisters two different times. And so we just generally like, okay, no family members, but…

Todd Merriott (12:26)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (12:37)
Yeah, I think like every relationship, even in a marriage, right? It usually comes down to lack of clear communication, lack of clear expectations for each person and what they’ll do. Right. And that’s kind of the root of all of it is like.

either side had different expectations for what that other person actually did and then obviously if you don’t have clear communications then and it starts to go south and what happens a lot of times is people don’t they don’t they feel they feel away and they don’t bring it up and it just festers and gets worse right

Todd Merriott (13:09)
Yeah,

in our case, a couple times it was just you’re moving so fast and you’re like, it’ll be fine. We’ll figure that out. And then a year goes by and you haven’t and then something goes terribly wrong and you just aren’t in a position to handle it right. And it was all because you just missed it because you’re moving fast and you’re optimistic you think it’s going be fine. So sometimes you just need to stop and…

and take a minute, get it right, and get it spoken about, get it communicated, get it in writing, and then you can take off from that point.

Mike Hambright (13:43)
Yeah, we were having a conversation right before we hit record talking about kind of energy, the energy you get in your business. And so I believe it’s interesting because I’ve had this thought for a while that there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that kind of tap out. Like they just get to a comfort level where they could do more, but they’re just comfortable.

And I think I hadn’t really thought of it in the context until you brought it up of like your business giving you energy or getting energy. But like, think, you know, you’re obviously you want to share some of your knowledge that teacher and you that’s coming back around that wants to share your knowledge. It’s also the dreamer in you that is interested in other things and kind of applying your knowledge to help other people, because maybe you see them that are stuck. I think that some entrepreneurs, what happens is I kind of been saying they they get too comfortable and they just kind of cap out. But I think it’s an it’s an energy thing. It’s like

Todd Merriott (14:01)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (14:31)
They’re too comfortable where they’re at and like the incremental value from that additional work doesn’t bring them joy or energy. And it could, if it was framed differently, it could if you said like, well, look, what if you’re comfortable at this, making this level of income, for example, and you tie your goals to a lot of times with goal plan. And we talk to people about tying their goals to something bigger than them. If it’s just all about you, like you might get comfortable where you’re at. If it’s like, well, for every additional dollar I make, I can put

50

% of that into something you’re passionate about or you know whatever. Now you’re tying your joy to the joy that it brings you to help somebody else do that thing or you know it could be charitable, it could be doing something for a friend or a family member or what it could be a lot of things it could be whatever you want it to be but talk about that like getting to a point to where you like you keep pushing forward but you’re unwilling to do things right now that are not gonna bring you joy and I think a lot of entrepreneurs reach that point.

Todd Merriott (15:27)
Yeah, mean, especially when you have a season where we were doing all those things and it was not rewarding. We’ve had a challenging 18 months since that partnership that kind of fell apart. We had to pick up the pieces. so we had achieved some goals from a personal net worth standpoint prior to that. And was like literally things were going really well. We thought, OK, now what can we grow into? And then the wheels fell off.

And so we retracted half of that, you know, from a net worth standpoint in 18 months while we were trying to liquidate and like pick up the pieces and catch up. So, you know, we basically were grinding with no reward. It was kind like, all right, we need to think backwards from our end goal here. And that’s what we just, we hit stop. We’re like, we obviously have to show up tomorrow and do our work, but like.

What do you want in five years? What do you want in 10 years? What do you want in one year? Those things matter. And let’s work backwards from that and start to establish some activity on a daily basis that leads to that reward, whatever it is. And it’s different for him than it is for me, him being Ben. And so at my stage life, I’ll be 50 in April.

And I’ve been doing this since 2008, pretty much full time in multiple states and hundreds of homes and hundreds of homeowners and hundreds of real estate agents that I’ve fought with and all those kinds of things. I’ve got this book of business now that good, bad or ugly has value and could potentially be a benefit to other people. so I don’t think that, I do think it’s possible, obviously,

not a billionaire or whatever but like it would still be good to come in as an outsider and take a look at someone’s business and be able to coach them on hey I was going through this same thing 15 years ago here’s what we didn’t do that we wish we would have

and here’s what we did do that we wish we could take back. So it’s like you can probably avoid these problems, here’s how I would have done that differently and you can think about that and offer some advice to people in a way that’s like meaningful because we’ve actually been there, done that. And so, you know, I think that a lot of these principles that we’ve learned, they just apply in so many ways to so many different businesses.

you know most people that have a small business their goal is to get somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred thousand to two million dollars in sales and then they don’t really know what to do then you know I kind of feel like I’m not gonna say that’s an easy thing if you choose the right business and you know how to market it’s pretty repeatable to get to that sales level and so that’s where I feel like now it’s time to start either well both both

adding businesses to our portfolio that do that because we can and helping people who are trying to do that because we’ve experienced it. And I think that would just be really rewarding to grow by adding service-based businesses or whatever it is to your portfolio that can hit that sales revenue and so you’re growing your total income but you’re also

just learning and applying lessons that work so well with other people too that we can maybe help them achieve their goals as well.

Mike Hambright (18:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, that’s great. mean, obviously, you know, I’m big on sharing my knowledge as well. I know you’re big on that as well. Not every, but not every entrepreneur is. And I think every entrepreneur needs coaches and consultants and advisors that are willing to share the lessons learned because they’re there a lot of times they’re painful or and we’re expensive lessons. It’d be a shame to keep that to yourself because it’s inevitable. Other people will learn those hard lessons, but it’s like, what is the value to an entrepreneur?

Todd Merriott (18:52)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (18:59)
or to be able to learn hard lessons from somebody else without having to go through those painful experiences themselves. This doesn’t mean that they won’t have any bad things happen, but when you surround yourself, obviously it’s kind of the crux of what Investor Fuel is all about. If you surround yourself with people that have a lot of experiences, then you can climb a learning curve way faster because you don’t necessarily have to experience all the bad things yourself.

Todd Merriott (19:25)
Yeah, Yeah, it’s, there have been times when I wished we had had, you know, some of what we did, and we did have a lot of people advise us over this last 18 months. And I mean, we put a lot of that work, a lot of that advice to work and it paid off. And so I know that we could do that in so many ways. And there’s so many people that have these small businesses that they’re making a living, but it’s really just a job.

you know and they know that but they don’t really know how to make it transition into a business and that’s not something you do overnight you don’t go from working the job and the next day you’re a business where you’re paying other people and you’re making good money it’s like a transition and so that transition can be painful if you don’t have someone or some kind of roadmap to get there

Mike Hambright (20:13)
Yeah,

yeah. Yeah, it’s hard to have. kind of, you you think of it as like…

I it margin. Do you have enough margin in your life to give you time to think about how to get unstuck when you’re stuck? Because there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that are stuck, a lot that are stuck, like you said, in a job. So they can’t get out of the day to day. It’s like, do you level up to get out of that situation if you never have that margin in your life that gives you time to kind of plan or think more strategically or think bigger or…

Todd Merriott (20:32)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (20:49)
get away to surround yourself with other people that have figured that out or whatever it might be. But if your head’s down all the time and all you do is work and you’re just getting by for the most part, then it’s hard to get unstuck. You have to commit to set aside. It could be a Friday, like, I don’t do any appointments or I don’t do any meetings or whatever on Fridays. And I use that time.

to be more strategic, right, to kind of think. mean, it’s, I find it now, like for example, I travel a couple times a month at least, I’m traveling somewhere, and I’ve just found, like for me, one of the times that I use is like flight time. I used to like watch movies or read or whatever, and now.

Todd Merriott (21:25)
Yeah

Mike Hambright (21:28)
I’m just like, you know what, I’m gonna get my journal and I’m just gonna write, I’m just gonna think about stuff. And that time is so valuable to me. Like it’s amazing how many either new ideas or problems that I’m able to solve when I just cut off all other distractions. then, know, a few years ago, I’ve like, I block off Fridays. I do it when I’m, you know, mowing out at the ranch now or whatever. It’s like, it’s an amazing time because I just turn off everything and just.

focus on the future.

Todd Merriott (21:55)
Yeah,

no it’s key. Your ride flights are the best time for that. I don’t like watching TV on my phone anyway so I love just, I do the same thing. I just sit there and write out like a year long to-do list. It’s you know more generic things that I know like these are things I would never think about on a day-to-day basis so I love doing that.

Mike Hambright (22:01)
Yeah.

Yeah, awesome. Well, I think the key for folks is like make time to think about what it is you want, right? Because I think a lot of times too, when you’re so stuck in the day to day, it’s easy to just say, I know what I don’t want where I’m at now. And so I think I need to work harder.

Todd Merriott (22:21)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (22:32)
to make a little more money or they just want more, right? It’s not a greed thing. You just kind of think, if I could just make a little bit more money, then I can get some breathing room. But if you don’t know where you want to go, that never seems to come. If more, and I’m not saying from a greed standpoint, but more, I just need to work harder and work my way out of the situation. Because I’ve felt that many times, but it’s like, you know what, just the time to be able to reflect and sit back and think about what is it you really want.

because sometimes your approach is not going to get you where you want to go. You really need to kind of ruminate on that and think about how to do it differently. basically, and I’ve been using this word a lot lately for our members and my company of just absolute clarity on what it is you want because sometimes and very often, your approach to trying to get what you want isn’t going to get you where you want to go. So let’s get crystal clear on what it is you really want and look for alternative options to get there.

Todd Merriott (23:26)
Well and lean into your strengths too. think a lot of times people focus on what they are not good at and then they try to fix that. And I’m like, you know what? Find somebody who’s really good at that. Leverage their time. You don’t have to bring somebody on full time necessarily. So like if you have to piece out some stuff that you don’t like doing because you’re just not good at it, don’t focus a lot of time on getting better at that one thing. What are you great at? And go lean into that. It’s probably part of that bigger picture of why, you know, what do you want and why. And if you can really lean

into your strengths and just do better at that you’ll probably make up the difference in what you have to spend to have somebody else do the stuff you really are not good at and you know I think a lot of times people they talk about scaling and you know it’s like well why do you want to scale well because all the other guys that fuel or scaling it’s like well okay but maybe you’re not in position to scale yet maybe

Maybe that’s a down the road thing or you know don’t scale for the purpose of scaling. Scale because there’s a reason that you have to do it and really ask yourself why. Be clear on it.

Mike Hambright (24:22)
Right.

Yep.

Yep, yep. thanks for sharing time with I’m sorry. Todd, thanks for spending time with us today. Ben’s your partner, obviously. I was just thinking of Ben when I said something and then I was like, all So thanks for spending some time with us today. If folks want to connect with you, where do they go?

Todd Merriott (24:32)
We respond to either.

Well, honestly, just send me an email. ⁓ It’s [email protected] I’m not really a big social media guy. I Ben handle that. He’s got a great following on Instagram. You could reach me through him, honestly, if somebody was trying to get ahold of, ⁓ we’re a team, so we work together.

[email protected]. He’s big on Instagram and all that. He’s got a huge following. So we sort of share that. I live vicariously through him on social media.

Mike Hambright (25:06)
Yeah.

Yeah. There you go.

That’s good enough. So cool. Well, thanks again. ⁓ Everybody hope you got some good value from today. think at the end of the day, really think clearly about what it is that you want. Like get absolute clarity on where you want to go. And sometimes the approach you’ve been using needs to be changed. But the goal might still be the same, but just getting kind of clarity on that goal will help you get there. So I appreciate you guys. We’ll see on the next show.