Dr. Travis Parry
Welcome to another episode of the Balanced Growth Show. I'm your host, Dr. Travis Perry. Today I have the privilege of meeting with Joss Willard. His mission is to help good people build profitable lives and achieve extra extraordinary goals. He's an international coach and counselor for over 20 years, and he's the creator of the profit flow system and is the founder of the business liberation collective. Joss believes in the businesses should support your life and your dreams.

not consume them. Well, Jos, I absolutely couldn't agree with that more. I think this is why I wanted to have you on the show and talk to us a little bit about how you got here. What made you jump into this line of work and kind of fill in the details, my friend.

Jos Willard 
Cool, thanks, Travis. Yeah, as I like to say, I try and put this into at least a coconut-sized nutshell. I was always that kid in school that...

even though people didn't really hang out with me necessarily. mean, I had my friends, right? But not everybody hung out with me, people I didn't know, people from towns away would reach out, call me, to the point my parents got me my own phone line, because I got tired of the phone ringing at three o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday. And people would call and say, hey, can I talk to you about something? So and so, who's a friend of so and so, who's a friend of so and so? They said that you're a good person to talk to. And I'd be like, oh, OK, sure. And I learned very quickly.

even as a kid to ask questions, The way that you would make progress as you listen.

ask questions, what is it that you're struggling with, what's going on, and then say, well it sounds like you want A, but B is in the way and you think you want to do C, and they'd be like, yeah. It's like, okay, well have you considered actually doing C? And it's like, oh, you're so right, I totally should, but, and then they go through the circle again, and by the third or fourth time, they're like, you know what, I should totally do C. Cool, thanks, right. So that was what I learned as a kid.

And then I joined the army. I grew up in Alaska. I joined the army to get out of Alaskan winters. They were too cold. I went and learned how to jump out airplanes and blow up tanks, messed up my knees. And they temporarily made me a chaplain's assistant, which was odd. Basically, they assume, everybody assumes a chaplain's assistant's job is to drive the chaplain around, set up the little portable altar, take down the little portable altar and file paperwork. And that is part of the job. But what most people don't know is that chaplain's assistants also get like 18 months of training.

Jos Willard
on counseling. Well, I didn't get any of that training, but I was suddenly I was running the interfaith prayer circle. I was dealing with the Alcoholics Anonymous group. I doing pastoral counseling for people for everything from, know, I'm away from my daughter, thousands of miles away from my daughter her 16th birthday or missing my son's start as the, you know, his first game as the starting quarterback for the football team to, you know, I think my spouse is cheating on me to oops, I accidentally, because I was accidentally cheated on my

spouse to suicidal ideation, everything in between. And all I had to go on was what I had learned as a kid, which was, tell me what's your deal? Ask the questions. So I did a bunch of reading. Internet back then was America Online Dial Up with the modem screeching. So you couldn't just Google stuff or watch a YouTube video. You had to actually learn. So I had to do a bunch of reading and stuff and took some classes eventually.

And from there, eventually became an infantryman again and then became a training NCO, a logistics guy. Learned a lot about how to train large groups of people, small groups of people, make sure that people got the training that they needed. Communication stuff. Got out of the army, medically discharged. Went to university, was a theater kid for a while, met a Canadian girl, moved to Canada, met her dad and he was in financial services, investments and whatnot, and asked me to come take a look at that.

take a look at their training. He knew I had a background at that point that included training. And so he asked me, know, what do think of our training? And my response was basically along the lines of, think I want to keep dating your daughter so I'd rather not tell you what I think of your training. To which point he made me. it's like, no, no, tell me. It's like, well, I'd have to, you know, I'd have to write it down. He's like, please do. I'm like, okay, fine. So I wrote him that kind of a...

thing of this is what I think of the training, is what I think would make it better, this is this is why I think...

Jos Willard 
This is why I think your people are struggling." And he said, okay, this looks good. Can you help us implement this? And at that point, I was there on a student visa. was like, no, I can't. I can't do that. can't work off campus just because of my visa. He's like, no, but you can volunteer. I read that. That's in your thing. You can do volunteer work. I'm like, yes, but why would I volunteer? He's like, well, I thought you said something about wanting to date my daughter. And I was like, fine.

So I started working with his investment people and basically coaching them and helping them on how to communicate with people and how to understand how the levers work in people's heads and how to basically be independent business owners. As you know in the financial services world, they get recruited as, know, be on your own, know, for yourself, not by yourself, all that kind of stuff. But then they basically get left by themselves. And so we changed that. In about six months, we took them from wherever they were, just a small

little office of eight people in the middle of nowhere in Canada and they became like the number two or number three team in their country in that business in all of Canada.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Wow.

Jos Willard 
just because of the way that we changed it. So it's like, wow, I'm kind of good at this stuff. Wound up marrying his daughter, moved out to the coast and was doing some work out there with international trade, US customs and things like that. Wound up getting hurt, having a surgery, being off work for a while and then my father-in-law called up and said, hey.

I heard that you're not with the company you're with anymore. You've got your Canadian permanent residence now. I've left the company that I was with, starting a new division in Western Canada with this new company. I want you to come work with me." Okay, so we moved back to Calgary. We built that division. I was the fourth person hired. The other three were the vice president. The three executives, and then there was me.

Thanks

think it was a year and a half, maybe not quite two years, we had turned them into the single most profitable division in that company in all of Western Canada, hired 300 brokers and agents and I was training all of them and I had become at that point certified as a business owner succession planner. So my primary focus when I wasn't teaching other brokers and agents how to be good at what they do, I had learned how to help business owners succeed out of their company.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Mm.

Jos Willard 
financial services implements to help them do that in a tax advantaged way. And then the challenge was you'd have a bunch of them come to you and say, hey, you know, I think my business is worth $6 million or whatever. Somebody else sold a business like mine for $3 million. I think mine's worth double that. We should be able to sell it in six months. You're gonna help me get all the money out tax free, blah, blah. And you'd be like, no, that's not how it works. You'd take a look at it. You go, I'm sorry. You're not gonna be able to succeed out of this business and get $6 million for it. It's definitely not gonna happen in six months.

you might be able to sell it in the next two years and you might be able to get half a million for it if you agree to stay on as an employee for two years to help with the transition because you don't have a business you have a job and a client list and they're like I've yeah right and and they've spent years and years of 80-hour weeks and sacrificing their families and all the stuff and you know they were told this is how you retire you sell your business and you're gonna be a millionaire and that's not how it worked so to shorten the story a little bit as

Dr. Travis Parry 
That's right.

Jos Willard 
as as I can, it's a little too late now.

Basically what happened was I would try referring them to my business coach friends, but those business coach friends were all very focused on, well let's take this company that makes a million dollars a year and let's make it a 30 million dollar a year company. And by that time these guys were like, that's not really what I want to do. I'm looking to get out of the business. I'm not into growth. I'm not into all that kind of stuff. I just want to retire or leave it to my kids or whatever it is. So they come back to me and go, I guess my option is to just walk away, pay money to shut it down. And so what I would say is, well hold on. What if I give you some advice?

what if we work together for free so that I'm not in violation of any ethics and I'm not gonna, you know, ruin my chance for commissions on the back end or whatever those things are. You know, we'll just meet once a month or so, we'll talk about what it is that you can do to turn this business into something that you can succeed so it's actually a business, so that somebody would want to buy it. And you lose a third of them immediately because they go, I'm not interested in that, I don't want to do that kind of work, I just wanted to tie this up and I was hoping I could get some money for it.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Mm-hmm.

Jos Willard 
So they leave. But the remaining two thirds, by the time we were done, most of them would do the work. I'd give them the resources, I'd give them the help, the support, whatever. And then within six, 12, 18 months, by the end of it, they were ready. The problem was too many of them at the end of it said to me, I don't want to sell this anymore. We've turned this into my dream business. Why would I sell it? It prints money. It doesn't need me every day.

I can go live my life and still use this business to make money. And so then I would wind up with nothing. I could put some key person insurance in place or something like that. Some financial or investment thing or insurance things in place to kind of protect them. But that was it. And so I was doing too good of a job as a free business coach.

to be able to continue in financial services. So basically, I eventually wound up becoming a business coach. I apprenticed with another business coach for a couple of years, turned it into like the number four office in all of North America, number 27 around the world for one of the biggest business coaching franchises in the world. Not because I knew their stuff. I was never certified in their thing. I didn't teach their stuff. He coached their stuff. I coached the stuff I knew about what's going on inside of people's heads, how to, you know.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Bye.

Jos Willard 
The big identity crisis that business owners have about they come in going, I'm the owner of a struggling business. I'm a struggling business owner. And then in 90 days, you fix the struggling part of the business or you set it on the path to start being successful and that causes a problem.

and then they start going, well I'm supposed to be a struggling business owner, I can't have a successful business. So they would start shooting themselves in the foot. This is why most business coaches will only work with you for 90 days because they know that at the end of the 90 days you're going to start self-sabotaging and they don't want to be there for that. So they step out, you sabotage, it crashes and you think, oh man I can't do this by myself, I need to go back to that business coach and go back to the business coach and try to hire them. They'll work for you another 90 days, work with you for another 90 days. But what we would do is instead when we would start to see that sabotaging happening or that people being uncrowned.

or they'd start missing appointments or they'd stop doing their work or they'd say, hey, you know that decision that we made two months ago that was a really good decision? I'm uncomfortable with it. want to change it back to the way things were. Like when that started to happen, we'd stop the business coaching. My business partner would stop doing the system stuff and I would go in and start doing the people stuff. And so it was a combination of the two. But in doing that, we took the average business coaching client in that.

I think their average client lasted four to six months, ours lasted 18. Because every time we figured out how to deal with the identity crisis.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Yeah.

Jos Willard 
fix that as well as fixing the business at the same time so that we could do things like take a business from $8 million a year to $36 million a year and then get fired because the guy couldn't handle having six weeks of vacation and coming back and his business being worth $2 million more than it was when he left. But that's the kind thing that we did. And then at that point, I stepped out on my own. So since 2015, basically, I've been doing business coaching.

under my own brand, Joss Water Coaching and Consulting. And over the course of that time, I took some of the things that I learned from him, some of the things that I learned from other courses that I've taken, certifications that I have, put together the Profit Flow system, which includes the Time Flow system and...

Dr. Travis Parry 
Sure.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Mm-hmm.

Jos Willard 
just basically started focusing on working with business owners who were not necessarily looking to explode their business. They've done the 5X, 10X, whatever.

And now they're at the point where they're like, I think I'm done being a business owner, being the business owner, being the key in my business. And I want to be the guy who does other things and also owns a business. And that business then feeds all of my other financial endeavors. So my investments, my...

charitable giving, all those types of things, and I don't have to come back and worry about is the business going to provide for me? Do I have to remortgage my house to make payroll? Do I have to work 80 hours a week? Instead it can be, you know what, I can step away for 18 months to go serve a mission and dig wells in Africa or build orphanages in Southeast Asia or whatever it is and come back and know that my business is going be in better shape than when I left. So that was a long, speeley story.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Cool. No, appreciate this. Yeah. You and I have the shared, uh, you know, beginning there in financial planning. We've spent some time and we know the ups and downs and the ins and outs. And yeah, I appreciate you actually explaining why you did what you did. Cause it, makes a lot of sense. found myself in a very similar position. I know we talked about this pre or, you know, podcast here, uh, about trying to help.

married couples with their businesses and their time. And this has ended up me becoming a coach, realizing that my strengths are in coaching people to get where they need to be so they can be helped. And now I have partnered with other financial people that I know and trust because I don't want to do it anymore. That's not my specialty, but specialty is in coaching. So I love what you've done here, Joseph. I love that you've been able to build upon the things that you've seen as.

Jos Willard 
Yep.

Dr. Travis Parry 
some of the problems. Um, one thing I noticed here is that you mentioned, you know, there, there's a system thing and then there's a, there's a kind of behavioral thing. And, and as you've modeled through and you help them change and to improve and grow their businesses, you start to see, they're self sabotaging. Um, you know, in my first book, achieving balance, I talk about this at the end in Marion grow rich. I talk about this like right up front. Self sabotage is, a fear of success.

Like, I'm seeing some success in life and then I can't have that. And most business owners I talk to say, I don't fear success. I'm driving towards that. like, yeah, consciously you are. But subconsciously, you're not. Tell me, would you say this is the biggest issue that business owners face or is there something else that the profit flow system really helps with?

Jos Willard 
Yep.

Jos Willard 
Well, I think it's a couple of things. I think a big part of it is I quibble a little bit with the idea of the fear of success. Although I agree with it. For me it's not necessarily fear of success, but it's fear of becoming somebody else.

Because we have this identity of who we think we are. We had talked about this earlier, know, there's still a 20-something year old kid running around in my brain that thinks that's who I am, right? Right up until I try and run a mile again and fall over. So the idea of I'm working towards success, well now my identity is I'm somebody who's working towards success. Well, how about, that means it's not okay to be successful.

this idea of being okay with who you can be or how you can be a successful person. And it sounds woo-woo and it's kind of nuance-y. I think it's a little too simplistic to say it's a fear of success as much as is of saying fear of becoming who what I think a successful person is because what a successful person is isn't me. So I think that's a big part of it.

It's probably 70 % of what I do with my clients. The other 30 % is, well let's get the systems that you need so that your business can be what you need it to be and then we come back and we have to give ourselves permission to let the business not rely on us. So many people, business owners in particular, think of their business as their baby and it was a, oh can't remember who it was, a guy know up in Calgary.

His favorite, one of his favorite sayings is if you treat your business like a baby, it will never learn to walk and leave the house and grow up and run without you. So it's like if you treat your kid like a baby.

Jos Willard 
their entire life. They're gonna be 45 and in diapers and not able to do anything, right? It's the same thing. yes, you need someone who can walk you through the things that you don't know about your business, like how to put a system in place to manage cash flow. That's part of profit flow, right? We're just managing your cash flow so that you can determine in advance where the money's gonna go before it even comes in so that you don't wind up at the end of the month going, well, I was supposed to have some profit here. So you need to have that. You need to have a way to manage your time so that you can pre-determine

Dr. Travis Parry 
Yeah, same thing.

Jos Willard 
where your time is going to go and be able to shift that time around if some other demand comes up. Those types of things. But there are literally hundreds if not thousands or hundreds of thousands of different systems out there or variations on different systems out there. And finding the one that works for you is a, I mean, that can be a full-time lifetime project on its own. So that's why it's nice to have a go-chur.

or somebody who can say here's the system that I think is going work for you based on XYZ, here's how we plug it in, here's how it works for you, but then you also need to be able to go am I okay with being a person who runs a system in my business that allows me to be profitable so that I don't have to be grinding for 80 hours a week to just barely pay the bills.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Yeah. So tell me about the profit flow system and what, what would you say that it really solves? Like maybe break it down. Tell us a little bit about it. how it works. You talked about time management. You talked about, know, really values management as well, but tell us a little bit about how this works and, what are the key components?

Jos Willard
Okay cool, so so profit flow originated

as a system in my head. Like in the past it was different tools that I got from different places and I just kind of threw them together and they sort of started falling into a pattern. I typically go, okay we need a screwdriver here, it's gonna be one of these three screwdrivers. We need a hammer here, it's gonna be one of these three hammers. Occasionally it'll be the fourth hammer, whatever it is, Depending on the individual client. Like most business coaches or life coaches in particular out there, I was of the mindset that can help anybody, right?

I can have anybody with anything, I can customize the thing to anyone. I don't have a system. And then I started looking at what actually no I do because like 90 % of my clients wind up using one of these three solutions here, one of these three solutions here, etc. So I started realizing I needed to kind of put this into a repeatable system, something that can be explained without having to be well, you know, it depends every time.

And at the same time as I was doing that, I had become a certified Profit First professional, which is, if you've read the book by Mike McAloy, it's Profit First, great book. He talks about cash flow management and basically what I described earlier, which is, if you break it down to its basic fundamentals, it is the envelope or jar system.

but for your business, right? So you know that 20 % of your money is gonna go into this bucket, 20 % is gonna go into this bucket, 40 % is gonna go into this bucket, 10 % is gonna go over here, right? You know in advance every dollar that comes in, how it's gonna break out. And you limit your business to, this is how much money you get to pay bills with. If you can't afford it based on the money that's in here, you don't get to take the money from somewhere else. You have to find another way to do it or do without it, right?

Jos Willard 
So that was the basics. I became a certified Profit First Professional. I actually am still a national lead for Profit First in Canada. So I train other Profit First Professionals on how to do this. So that system is a great kind of starting place. gives a great, on the financial side of things for your business, a great dashboard. So people start doing that and they start going, if you're limiting me, Joss, to only spending 40 % of my revenues, as an example.

on operating expenses, I can't afford X, Y, and Z. Great! Let's look at why you can't afford X, and Z. Let's look at what in the business needs to be changed and adjusted so that you can either afford X, or don't need X, Z or can find some other way to do it. So it gives me a kind of a dashboard place to start. But by itself, it isn't going to fundamentally change and fix a business.

It can if that's the business's only problem, but it's place to start. So I kind of started with that and started to realize, okay, well, yeah. And I threw in some additional psychology about why and how it's okay to move money the way that you move money, give yourself permission to actually take profit, think of the word profit, those types of things. So we fit those in. And then I took a look at the fact that most people, particularly business owners, are really bad at figuring out where they need to be spending their time. And I took that same basic concept

from ProfitFirst, which is decide in advance where the stuff is going to go. Give yourself buckets and then within those buckets you can have flexibility. And I looked at that with time. And so I said, well, all of us have the same amount of time. Until our last day, we all have the same amount of time in a day, 24 hours.

In business, you're going to set money aside in a bucket for taxes because if you don't pay your taxes, the IRS or the CRA or whoever your tax agency is is going to come for you they're going to take your business. You're going to wind up losing it. Everything dies if you don't pay the taxes. You don't necessarily want to, but there you got to. So what is the equivalent of that in time? Well, that's going to be things like sleep, things like eating, the time that you have to put into taking care of you so that you exist, so that you can continue to exist. And if you don't do those things, eventually,

Jos Willard 
your body falls apart, all of your relationships fall apart, etc. So I kind of matched up, you know, what are similar buckets. One of them is where do you put your time to make your life worth living, right? Because those are your relationships, right? You're gonna invest time in your, like with you, know, invest time in your spouse because that's gonna be your number one priority, then your family.

religion, those things, where do you want to put your time, what percentage of your 24 hours that you have available are you going to make available for those things. Alright, this is how much time I have so I'm not going to waste time on things that don't move those things forward. That type of thing. So we wind up deciding in advance, this is the time flow part of it, how time flows through your life, where you're going to put it and how you're going to be allocating that.

for your best life. Startlingly, it's always a shocker, the business owners realize that I don't want to be putting as much time into being in my business or running my business as I am. In fact, they're usually putting two, three, four, ten times more time into their business than they can afford to if they want these other things that are important to them. That's always a big wake up call.

and then instead of sitting in this

despair that a lot of business owners and a lot of people wind up with quite frankly. go, I'm not gonna have I don't have time in my life to accomplish all the things that I want to do or all of the demands that are on me or my dreams and my goals and etc. Instead of sitting there in despair and going okay, so how do I shrink my dreams to fit into the time that I have? We have that conversation and okay well if we want to accomplish these dreams if we want to accomplish these goals if we want to build these relationships how much time do we need?

Jos Willard 
And if we can't bridge that gap between how much time we need by taking things from other places.

taking time out of place. we can't bridge that gap, then we start looking at, well how can we make the amount of time that we have available expand or leverage it so that it gets us what we want with a smaller time investment. Or maybe it's a longer term time, maybe it's smaller amounts of time over a longer period. Whatever it is that we need to do to make sure that we still have the money and the time and the energy, those are the three keys, available

and how do we leverage them so that those things can get us the things that we want, the things that we need, or the things that we think we're called to deliver. So that's the process in a nutshell. Then once you have that, it's kind of like working with your family doctor. You go in, we know what it needs to look like, we know where all the bones are supposed to be, where all the muscles are supposed to be, how the systems are supposed to be working. If we see something that's not working,

Quite often we can fix it by saying, let's start doing this exercise or let's install this thing or take this pill or whatever it is. But just like if you go in and your family doctor looks and says, you know what? I see a mass here that things aren't working the way that we want and there's a thing here that looks like it shouldn't be here. They don't throw you up on the counter, pull out their scalpel and start cutting. They say, I'm going to refer you to an expert. We're going to bring in oncologist or we're going to bring in a team of experts. And together, we're going to work on your health program to get you to

where you need to be. And if that's an oncologist or respiratory therapist or whatever it might be, we then work as a team to solve that specific problem and then we're back to the full overall health of the business and the life. So that's kind of how we work.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Yeah, very, very similar systems as the make time method. And I love that you're talking about how do you make the time really work for you? Right? How, how, can we really take the things that are wanting to be done? Cause otherwise people are left in there. They're feeling, like burnt out. They feel, out of balance, whatever you want to say, that, that, keeps them from doing their best work. Right.

Dr. Travis Parry 
So what would you say is the most important principle out of your profit flow system? What's the one thing that if business owners could really do, would change everything about their business? What's the one thing?

Jos Willard 
I think it is giving yourself permission to be proactive instead of reactive.

And that comes in so many ways. The idea that you can say, want to pull profit out of my business this year. My business is going to pay me this year and it's going to do so without taking more than 40 hours a week from me. And it's going to allow me to take six weeks of vacation or two months of vacation, whatever. The very idea that you can say that.

and then figure out how to get your business there by being proactive rather than saying, well, I'd love for there to be profit in my business, but we've got to be realistic. It's a down economy. There's tariffs. There's this. There's that. Whatever it is. And I got to respond to those. I got to be ready to make whatever changes I need to make based on whatever happens. I can't get good people. Whatever the story is that we tell ourselves.

that says I've got to be there to solve these problems and react and keep things going. That story keeps us from being able to, it says that we can't decide in advance this is what we're gonna do. Now can we predetermine outcomes? No, there's always the chance that something can happen, right? There's who knows what might happen to cause that's well outside of your control.

But if we leave the things outside of our control, the things we absolutely can't control, we just accept, we can't control those, know, Heavenly Father's got a plan or randomness is randomness or whatever you want to believe, however you're going to approach that. Understand that, okay fine, let's put a wall there, those are the things that I can't do anything about, I'm not going to worry about them. I can't say that if you make...

Jos Willard 
hate this example but I'm using anyway. I can't say that if you make 500 cold calls a day, you're gonna sell X number of dollars of product in your business. But I can say if you control the number of phone calls you make and you make a determination that I'm gonna do these things, you have a better chance of getting the outcome you want. But if you say, well you know what, I gotta be there and make 500 phone calls. I've gotten a little sideways.

If you feel like you have to respond to everything or react to everything instead of saying this is what I want and now I'm going to engineer how to get there you will

you will prevent yourself from being successful. You will be like 90 % of business owners who feel like on the outside they may look successful, but they're constantly running, they're constantly stressed, they can't take a vacation, they can't do the things that they wanna do with their families without feeling like the business is gonna fall apart. That's what happens when you tell yourself the story that I have to react to everything. But if you give yourself permission to be proactive and say I'm gonna build this thing the way that I want it to be,

that's what will allow you to be successful. If you can't believe that, if you can't be okay with the idea that you're a person who decides what you want and then builds it and then sees what happens along the path and finds the joy in that, if you can't be that person, if you can't give yourself permission to be that person, you're not going to be successful. Not in this field anyway.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Right. Yeah. I, you know, I think, you know, Covey was a great proponent of thinking proactively, right? I mean, we get that one of his, his habits is, you know, be proactive. but what does it really mean to be proud of? love that you mentioned this and really put this as a, you know, as the most important principle in your profit flow system. What are the one, two, three things that people can do right now?

that will help them to take care of that, help them to be more proactive. What would you say the first two or three things would be?

Jos Willard 
Cool, first thing is ask yourself, you really know what you want? Because most of us don't. So if you get the answer, no, I don't really know what I want. Or even if you get the answer, yes, I'm pretty sure I know what I want. Give yourself some time. Step one, to sit down and go, what do I want? Draw it out. And why do I want?

So that's step one. And it's boring, right? It's this, man, you're gonna make me do this work. Yeah, you gotta know where you're going. You gotta know where you want to go. And even if the closest you can get right now is to say, I want it to be a beach with white sand. I wanna see white houses with blue doors on this beach, right? And I want it to be warm. Great, we can find you. There's probably, there's at least half a dozen beaches like that in the world.

So if you can get close, you can describe as much as close as you can.

we can start from there. I'm a person who has a really tough time myself saying I want all of these. I'm not a good detail positive person. I'm a great detail negative person. I can see a negative picture. I can feel emotionally attached to it. All the things. Don't know where that came from. that's how my brain works. So I struggle sometimes to go, this is exactly what positive looks like. This is exactly what success looks like. So I get as close as I can. And that's where I start.

I can start filling in details along the way. I can go talk to somebody like my coach or my wife or someone else and say okay, this is what I've got. How do I fill in the details where I want there, right? So the important thing is you get a general idea of this is what I want it to look like at the end or at least at the end of whatever time period. Put that down for yourself and get specific on the whys. Why do I want these things?

Jos Willard 
Spoiler alert, they'll tie to your values. They should tie to your values. If they don't tie to your values, you probably haven't gone down deep enough yet, generally speaking. So that's step one. Get really clear on, or as clear as you can on what you want and why you want that. Then when you have that, then we can look at what does it take to get there.

And that might be, you know, if we're using the travel analogy, you're trying to get to this beach with the white sand and the white houses and blue door, it's going to be one of several. Well, the first thing we've got to do is start looking for, it's going to be on a coast somewhere, right?

It's going to be on a coast somewhere. It's going to be somewhere that's in certain temperature ranges. So that means certain parts of the earth probably. It's not going to be above the 49th parallel. It's not going to be Antarctica. You're going to have an idea. We can narrow down kind of where this is and start heading in that direction. And then we go, well, if you happen to live in, let's say, Logan, Utah, and you want to live on the beach, you know you got to go.

east, west or south. It's not going be north. It's not going to be there. how do I get there? Walking is going to take a long time. So what kind of vehicle do we need? And in some cases, when we talk about vehicles, can be what's the business model look like?

Dr. Travis Parry 
Yeah, you gotta go somewhere.

Jos Willard 
If the business is your vehicle, what kind of vehicle is it going to be? What kind of terrain can it cross? What kind of speeds does it move at? It might sometimes be, you know what, a business is actually not the right vehicle.

In which case, great. So how do we turn this business into something that somebody else will want that we can get rid of quickly so that I can move to the right vehicle? So step one, we need to figure out where we want to go and why we want to be there. Step two, we got to figure out what's the vehicle to head us in that proper direction. Because even if we don't know exactly which beach it is, we can't put it in Google Maps or wherever and get an exact roadmap. We know it's going to be west of here, or it's going to be in this type of place and I need a vehicle that's going to be able to travel from where I'm at to

that type of place. Right? So figuring out the vehicle. And then it's the third thing is realizing, okay, well, if my vehicle needs to look like this, if my business needs to be a service business or it needs to be a manufacturing business or it needs to be XYZ, what does the vehicle need to look like? Does it need to be open on weekends? Does it need to be open nine to five? Describing the vehicle that will get you there is describing the business. Right? So what does the business need? What are the parts that it needs to get you from where you are?

to that place that you want to go. And then you have to decide, am I the kind of person, do I have the skill set that I need, and do I have the values required to drive that vehicle? To pilot that vehicle to where it needs to go. If you are not, then you have to ask yourself the question, am I willing and able to become that person?

it's possible there's outside your values, in which case you shouldn't try to become that person. If it requires being the type of person who's willing to rip off everybody and their dog, well, you know what? Maybe that's not worth being that person. So deciding, am I the right person? Can I become the right person? And then again, asking the questions, why do I need to be that right person? What gets me from here to there? Those are the first three things that you've gotta do.

Jos Willard 
Cool. So yeah, those are your first three things. Knowing where you want to go, knowing the vehicle that you need to get there, and determining whether or not you're the person that can drive that vehicle.

Then with those things, we can put the systems in place, we can do the mental work, we can move the levers in your head, we can help you be the person that you need to be. But if you're by yourself and you're DIYing this thing, and you're just going, where do I start? Start with where do you want to go? And then what vehicle do I need to get there? And then am I the person to pilot that vehicle, or do I need to get somebody else to do it?

Dr. Travis Parry 
Well, but you know, you mentioned a lot of great things here. And the number one thing that I heard you mentioned is the values. talk a lot about values in my first book, achieving balance and give some steps of how to really identify what those values are. Um, how do you suggest people come up with these values? What, how do you, what, what's your system? What is your, you know, way of, of trying to uncover these? Cause I think people know, yeah, these are my values, but most

have never written them down in their life. They wouldn't know where to begin. What do you suggest?

Jos Willard 
It comes back to asking questions and being willing to question yourself. We have a lot of values that we have just sort of absorbed. Hang on, I remember his name. Wayne Dyer. He wrote in his book, Excuses Be Gone.

after he had done a bunch of studying on the Tao Te Ching and things like that. He was always good at studying all the different... He's a very spiritual guy. I don't think he nailed everything down. He had a lot of family troubles and things like that. But he had some good insights on some things. And one of the things that he talks about in Excuses Be Gone was the idea that...

Memes are mind viruses and that means, you know, just like if you went to a doctor to say, hey, I'm sick, the doctor would start asking you questions. Well, you know, what are your symptoms? What's your history? Have you been hanging around anybody else that had those symptoms? Right? They start trying to do the detective work of where did these things come from? We can do the same thing with memes or beliefs, which includes values, right? So you can say, well,

I value x. Okay, great. What symptoms do you have that say that you value

Jos Willard 
So basically what Wayne Dyer is saying is that the same detective work that you would do...

to find out if you've gotten sick or some sort of disease, you can do that same thing with your beliefs and with your values. You can say, okay, well, what symptoms am I showing? What signs am I showing that say that this is actually a value of mine? That I actually believe this. Do I actually in my life display this? Do my actions indicate that this is actually a belief or a value of mine? If it is, or if it isn't, where do I think I got it from? Who did I hang out with that has these same beliefs or has these same values?

Dr. Travis Parry 
Yeah, well said. think the process that you've talked about of finding where you spend your time, approaching your values and looking at your priorities and matching those with your time and your money. That goes a long way. It definitely resonates with me, the work that I do for my clients. And I know that there are people out there who this message really has resonated well with them. If they want to reach you and just, and they want to, you know, get some more help and

Jos Willard 
Do I actually feel the way they do? Do I get along with them now the way that I used to? Is this actually a value or is this a value that I think I should have because all of the people that I was hanging out with as a kid said I should. And so asking your questions of what's actually important to me, am I taking the actions that show that this is actually important to me? And if you're not, then it's a case of being able to, okay well...

Dr. Travis Parry 
and follow you. What's the best way to reach out to you?

Jos Willard 
If my actions don't line up with that, is that because I'm not living my values or is it because that's not actually a value of mine? I've had a number of people say this over the years, but I love it. If you show me your bank statements and your calendar, I'll tell you what's important to you. Because the things that are important to you are the things that you're going to spend your money on, you're going to spend your time on, and you're going to put energy into, regardless of what you say your values are.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Joss Willard, you've been a pleasure to talk to. It's so great to have others using a different voice, saying the same message in a different way. I am a big believer in there are many ways to connect with people and there are similar messages that need to be spread. And you're definitely one of those voices that I have enjoyed having this conversation today. It's so refreshing to hear.

Jos Willard 
The best way to reach out to me is probably my email, joss at josswillard.com. You can find me on LinkedIn and my website is very, very creatively named joswillard.com. J-O-S-W-I-L-L-A-R-D dot com. And on there, the first thing that will pop up is a book a call with me to sit down and just do 15 minutes of what's important to you right now. Where are you trying to go?

Dr. Travis Parry 
how our voices do, know, sing in harmony with each other. so yeah, if you've enjoyed connecting and listening to our conversation today, please, you know, do connect personally with Joss and any last words, any last statements you'd like to, you know, kind of wrap up here with today.

Jos Willard 
I schedule a limited amount of time in my calendar for those things so everybody and their dog can't sign up for them. But by all means, if you click on there and there's one available in the next week or months, grab it. Happy to have a chat with you. Or just email me again at jossajossweather.com and let me know what's going on. I will spend a few minutes with almost anybody. That's part of my value system, even though I'm an introvert. I make that time. But I'll tell you very quickly.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Yeah

Jos Willard 
don't waste other people's time. So it doesn't take very long to go, yep I can help you with this or you know what here's a place for you to go where you can find things that are going to be a better fit for you.

Jos Willard 
You're welcome, thanks.

Jos Willard 
Last words is always a bit ominous. because of my arm. Any last words? crap. No, so I think the short version is this. Yeah, like you said, Travis, fundamentally, principles never change. Methods do all the time. Principles never change. And the most important thing for somebody who's listening to this out there is saying, you know what, I want to make some changes in my business. I want to make some changes in my life.

is

Start where you're at. Grab somebody and say, hey, I need some help with this. I need to make a change here somehow. You'll find someone who will guide you to the right principles. If you don't like the methods, that's fine. They may not be the person for you. And if you don't like their values, your values are not aligned, they're definitely not the right person for you. But there are enough people out there, like Travis, you and I could talk to the exact same people who have the exact same problem.

and some of them will be great. Working with you is absolutely the best possible idea for them because they resonate with you, they think like you do, or they need your difference of thought, whatever it is that makes them a great, great client for you. And out of that same crowd, that same person will be a terrible client for me, even though we're working on the same principles. Our methods might be similar, might be slightly different, but there's just something that says, you know, I'm a Travis person or I'm a Joss person, they're both great guys, but I

Dr. Travis Parry 
No, but yes, you know, being able to move forward and take some action will get you to where you need to, far, far greater than sitting and contemplate. think that's the, that fear of sometimes perfectionism or, know, maybe that fear of success or imposter syndrome. There's a lot of things that people get stuck with. So thanks for mentioning that just thank you for being here. If you enjoyed this conversation, you know what to do. Like share, subscribe, do all the things until next time. Remember.

Jos Willard 
work better with this one because I firmly believe in that. There are way more people that can benefit from help from the right person. It's just finding that right person. So if you're out there and you're thinking, man, I need something, start somewhere. Grab somebody and say, hey, are you the right person? Check them out. And if they are, great, run with them. And if they're not, great, use them to slingshot to the next person, to the next book.

Dr. Travis Parry 
Live life on purpose. Thank you.

Jos Willard 
And the most important thing is take an action. It might not be the right action, but taking an action nine times out of 10 is going be far better than sitting there and going, I'm so overwhelmed. I know I want things to change, but I don't have the first clue how to change it. And so I'm just going to sit here and not change anything. Take an action. Do something. Reach out to someone. Maybe it's me, maybe it's Travis, maybe it's somebody else, but do something.