5 Reasons Why People Fail To Scale In Real Estate – Trevor McGregor

 

Trevor McGregor says, “real estate is the world’s greatest wealth vehicle.” But how can you maximize your real estate business, scale, and succeed? Coaches, business advisors, and personal development experts tell you that you must first change your mindset to transform your life and your business. But changing your mindset is only half the battle. Join Trevor McGregor, Master Platinum Coach and Business Strategist, as he breaks down the five reasons why people fail to scale in real estate, how to overcome them, and why having a coach is the best way to transform your life and your business.

 

Get in touch with Trevor McGregor:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-mcgregor-93375862/

Website: https://www.trevormcgregor.com/

 

If you are interested in learning more about passively investing in multifamily and Build-to-Rent properties, click here to schedule a call with the CPI Capital Team or contact us at info@cpicapital.ca. If you like to Co-Syndicate and close on larger deal as a General Partner click here. You can read more about CPI Capital at https://www.cpicapital.ca. #avabenesocky #augustbiniaz #cpicapital

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Important Links

• • Joe Fairless
  • Dan Handford
  • Trevor McGregor
  • The Best Ever Podcast
  • LinkedIn – Trevor McGregor
  • Think and Grow Rich
  • Personal Power
  • Rich Dad Poor Dad

About Trevor McGregor

My first passion has always been people. For the past 25 years, I’ve been helping individuals to grow both personally and professionally. As a High Performance Coach and Business Strategist, I empower Individuals, Entrepreneurs, Business Owners and Real Estate Investors around the world to achieve their outcomes and live a life of passion and fulfillment.

I became a Professional Coach after 25 successful years of building and operating a large hospitality group and real estate organization, with over 50+ locations across the country. In addition to this, I also built my own private real estate investment company consisting of many different asset classes all over the world. In addition to that I was honoured to work for Tony Robbins as one of his top Master Platinum Coaches for over half a decade.

At this stage of my Coaching and Consulting Career, I’ve done over 25,000 Strategic Coaching Calls with Business Owners, Real Estate Investors, Fortune 500 Executives, Franchise Owners, Doctors, Lawyers, Professional Sports Athletes and Olympians as well.

So if you’re someone who isn’t just interested, but COMMITTED to living life at a higher level, I’d love the opportunity to speak with you and find out what’s working, what’s not working and where you truly want to go. If I feel that I can help you get there, I’ll be happy to tell you more about my Trevor McGregor International – Coaching and Mentoring Program.

 

5 Reasons Why People Fail To Scale In Real Estate – Trevor McGregor

We have an exciting show for you. Please like and subscribe as it helps us build our channel and allows us to keep bringing you great content and expert guest speakers.

I’m super excited about this episode. I’m going to give a brief story before we get into introducing our guest. Within our space, this apartment syndication, or as I like to call it real estate private equity where groups and companies buy these large apartment buildings to raise private capital from investors, there is a person by the name of Joe Fairless.

Joe Fairless is an author. He’s written one of the top books in this space. He’s a thought leader and a very expensive coach when it comes to this space. We are doing some research about Joe and we have been in discussions. You have talked to him a few times. Our mentor, Dan Handford, got coached by Joe. There’s a web going there. In our research about Joe Fairless, we found that he has a coach. Guess who his coach is.

I don’t know. Who is his coach?

His coach is a guy by the name of Trevor McGregor that we have right here. That’s why we were excited about this episode. We want to make the connection between real estate and coaching. This is not only about real estate or investing, this is coaching about life, business, and everything else.

When you see somebody who has got to that level of success and you find out that he has a coach, you want to pick the brain of that coach.

Success leaves a trail and we are going to follow that trail.

We have Trevor McGregor. He is a High-Performance Master Coach with over 30,000 hours of coaching experience under his belt. He has worked with clients from around the world including Fortune 500 executives, high-level real estate investors, entrepreneurs, world-class athletes, and business professionals. They all come to him for one reason and that’s a life-changing transformation. This interview with Trevor would bring tons of value to both active and passive investors on how aligning with a coach could 10X their business and their life. Thank you so much for being here, Trevor. We appreciate you coming here.

Thank you for such a warm introduction. I’m blessed and grateful to be here with you. We are in good company. We talked about not only what Joe Fairless and Dan Hanford have done. They are both good friends of mine. You guys are crushing it as well. Huge props to you. We are in that space where we are better together and we can learn, laugh, love, grow, and share with each other. Hopefully, that’s what we are here to give your readers. As August says, “Success leaves clues.” What I have done as a coach and as a real estate investor has given me a front-row seat to what’s possible in this business. I’m excited to be here.

It doesn't matter how great you are. Even the top athletes in the world always bring a coach to help them. Click To Tweet

We want to dive into where did your journey begin in coaching and what guided you to become a coach?

It goes back even further than that. I grew up in Canada. Born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. As a little boy, all I ever wanted to do was be an NHL hockey player. If you are a Canadian boy, all you want to do is play hockey. I played hockey at a high level but I had the speed but I didn’t have the size to make the big leagues.

I traded in my skates for some tech books and went and studied business. I went and worked in corporate like a lot of people do. I cut my teeth working for a company. In a certain year, they offered me an opportunity to come in and invest in this company. They thought, “Trevor’s a good employee. Let’s cut him into the company.”

I took all my savings and I took all of my 401(k) and RSPs. I put all of this money into this business as expansion and I even convinced my parents, because they loved me and they believed in me, to take out a six-figure second mortgage on the family home. I dumped all this money into this massive expansion that this business was doing. For the first year, it went well. I thought, “Here’s my chance to be rich, young, and successful.”

Around 2001, right around the same time those planes hit the towers, we were expanding way too fast. We were in five major cities across Canada and couldn’t hang on. To make a long story short, I lost all of that money I put into it. Gone forever. It was a low point in my life. I figured, “How am I ever going to pay back my loans, let alone tell my parents that I lost all this money?”

What do you do when you are down and out? You hire a coach. I scraped together a little bit of money and hired a coach. He said, “What’s happened to you is truly unfortunate but you are still a young man. You are married. You have two beautiful children. We got to look at different ways for you to climb back up the ladder, pay off your loans, and keep on keeping on.”

I remember saying to him, “I don’t know how I’m going to do it.” He said one thing that changed my life. He said, “How about investing in real estate?” I said, “I don’t know anything about real estate.” He said, “You can buy properties using other people’s money. Fix it up, refinance it, leverage it, sell it, do some with it, and rinse and repeat.”

My back was up against the wall. I didn’t know what else to do so I scraped together some other money from family and friends. I bought one little condo in Vancouver and that was a good experience. I then leveraged the money out of that and bought my first townhouse. That was a good experience. Vancouver was going through some great appreciation. I then leveraged both of those properties to buy my first duplex.

I don’t know about you but that’s when I discovered what cashflow was because this duplex cashflowed crazy. I then went on to leverage that to buy another duplex and another one and then a fourplex and then single-family homes. In a relatively short amount of time, not only did I have a beautiful cashflowing portfolio but I had enough money to pay off all of those failed loans including my parents. I paid them back in full. That’s when life restarted for me.

 

Going back to what you said, you fail in your first venture, understandably. You are excited about this company that’s growing. You got your back against the wall. You are smart enough to pursue a coach. My story is I have always been very confident. I have always been the breadwinner for my family and what have you. That pride doesn’t allow you to then go and seek help from somebody else in whatever business you are doing or in life in general because you think you know it all.

For me, a story I can briefly share is I ride motorcycles. I have been riding motorcycles. It was a long time since I had been riding a motorcycle. I thought to myself I was a great motorcyclist. I went riding with a physician, a doctor friend of mine. He destroyed me the way he was riding the bike. After we have done the ride, I’m like, “How did you learn how to ride a bike?” He’s like, “I got a coach and I learned it.”

I noticed a pattern. He would always have coaches with different things he did. That was my introduction to it. It doesn’t matter how great you are, even the top athletes in the world always bring in a coach to help them out. That was my way of learning it way later on in life. What was it about you? What was it about pursuing a coach in that situation that you went in that direction? What was it at that point?

I love your story. It’s absolutely the same thing. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I knew that if I started looking for somebody that had a little bit more life experience, financial experience, and maybe some wisdom. I stumbled upon this amazing coach and that changed my life. Going back thousands of years when cavemen used to sit around campfires with cavemen, cavewomen, and children, it was through sharing stories and experiences, and what was good and what wasn’t good.

That’s the only thing that ever has moved humanity forward is sharing. Our elders speaking to us and taking that wisdom and doing something with it. That’s when the coaching bug bit me. As I started to build my portfolio and started to work with other coaches myself because I saw the value in it, people started coming to me saying, “You are buying all these properties. How are you doing this? Where are you buying? What are you buying? Where are you getting the money to do this? How are you getting the banks to lend you some money?”

I found myself coaching my son’s little league baseball coach. I was coaching my other son’s soccer coach. Within a short amount of time, they went out there and applied what I taught them and they started to buy income-producing properties. I thought, “This is amazing.” It was around that same time that I was working with another coach of mine from the Anthony Robbins Corporation. You know Tony Robbins. Everyone knows Tony Robbins.

You might have heard of him. He’s 6’7”. He’s got big hands and big teeth. My coach said, “You are passionate about people, real estate, and business. Have you thought of ever applying to Tony Robbins because Tony’s looking for more business coaches?” I laughed and said, “I don’t have any official coaching experience.” He said, “You just have to have a passion for helping people and know a little bit enough to be dangerous enough that if you pass that along and help people co-create possibility, you’d be a phenomenal addition to our team.”

I poo-pooed it at the time but he kept working on me and so I said, “Finally, I put in a resume.” At that time, they got 500 resumes for Tony Robbins coaches. I made the shortlist from 500 down to 250, then 250 to 100, and 100 to 50. When you crack the top 50, that doesn’t mean you become a coach, it means you got to start the Tony Robbins journey. I had to read all the books, go to all the seminars, and listen to all the CDs. Even though I haven’t done that, it didn’t mean I got to be a coach but I had to go take my life practicum with team Robbins.

I flew down to Orlando, Florida and I took a whole bunch of coaching programs and certifications. I did my practicum. When the dust settled, they offered me a full-time position. I left everything I was doing to go work for the man, the myth, the legend, Tony Robbins. I spent half a decade as one of his top coaches on the planet coaching millionaires, billionaires, real estate folks, athletes, lawyers, and attorneys, but I loved real estate investors.

Real estate is the world's greatest wealth vehicle, whether you want to do it actively or you want to do it passively. Click To Tweet

Why did I love coaching real estate investors? It’s because I was one. Number two, real estate is the greatest wealth vehicle on the planet whether you want to do it actively or you want to do it passively. If you want to do it in Canada, the States, the UK, Asia, or as far away as Australia, real estate to me is a vehicle that can create impact and income. It was then through my Tony Robbins experience that I fell in love with coaching. I started to hire even other coaches, mentors, teachers, trainers, and facilitators where I was immersed in this stuff.

In 2017, I left Tony Robbins to open Trevor McGregor International where I have coached the likes of Joe Fairless and a host of other people that we both know. It is my passion where real estate feeds my pocketbook and coaching feeds my soul. There’s nothing better than seeing some of our clients or students go out there and create empires on their own and impact that rivals anything that they could have done pre-coaching.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you went through this low point in your life and real estate is what helped you get out of it and find success. I am sure that you are an incredible coach to people when it comes to the real estate side of things. You can guide them on how they can find success in real estate investing because you can relate to them. When somebody feels related to, that’s probably what makes an incredible coach as well.

You are spot on. I will give you 1,000 points for that. It’s like what Tony Robbins says, “Success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics.” Success is 80% psychology. That’s how you think and then taking that thinking and going out there and that’s where the rubber meets the road. For any business owner, any real estate investor, or anyone who wants to go from where they are to where they truly want to be, they got to start with, “How am I thinking or approaching things? Am I taking what I call intelligent and inspired action?”

Note that I didn’t just say take action. I said intelligent action, which means smart and inspired action which means that we don’t have to do this. We get to do this. There are no limits to what you can do in real estate. One of my famous case studies is the man, Joe Fairless. When I met Joe Fairless, he owned four single-family homes in Texas and those were worth about $60,000 a house.

He’d do these and then a tenant would move out and he’d have to repaint, re-floor it, and all these things. He found that he couldn’t scale owning these four single-family homes and that’s when we started to talk about apartment buildings, multifamily syndications, and all of these things where Joe got lit up about seeing the possibilities through scaling through apartment syndication.

He was teaching these little courses at the library. I said, “You are so passionate about real estate and you are so smart about it. Have you ever thought of starting a podcast to share it with more people?” Do you know what he said to me? He said, “That’s a stupid idea. Nobody’s going to want to listen to me. Nobody’s going to want me to put on a podcast. I’m only going to have my mom, dad, and my dog listening. No way. I’m not doing it.”

As a high-performance coach, I challenged him. I said, “I believe that you should think about it. I’m telling you, you would be phenomenal.” He took that advice and he started The Best Ever Podcast where there are over 3,000 episodes. He’s written three amazing books. He puts on incredible conferences. To date, Joe has $1.95 billion in assets under management.

I have had a front-row seat and took every single part of that because I started coaching Joe back in 2013. Every year since then, I have seen him apply the thinking and then use his hands and surround himself with good people and good processes to go out there and rinse and repeat through this beautiful thing called real estate.

 

That’s not all. He also made it his mission to become a coach and teach other people how to do exactly what he was doing. With the ripple effect of what we have started and what we have worked on, I can’t even begin to think of how many lives and businesses have changed, and how many dollars and impact has been created from where we started back in 2013 because both of us were passionate about people, impact, and real estate.

Let’s talk about limiting beliefs. A lot of people set limitations on themselves and don’t believe that they can take the next step. It seems like you have even helped Joe say, “I don’t want to do this podcast.” Look at how it turned out. As a coach, you don’t have to give us all your secrets, but how do you help your clients get over that step of the limitations that they set on themselves?

It’s important to first understand that change is hard. To go from where you are to somewhere you want to be because we haven’t done it yet and it’s unfamiliar with it or with what the process is, we tend to focus on the past because that’s what we are most familiar with. Where did we grow up? What did we do? How much education do we have? What are our beliefs about money? All of those things.

What I do as a high-performance coach is trying to get people to understand that the past is exactly that. It’s the past but let’s step into what we call the present to create what we call the predictable future. We have to leave the familiar past to step into the present to create a predictable future. “That sounds good but how do we do it?”

There’s a real secret that Tony Robbins and I use whether we are coaching real estate investors, business owners, attorneys, doctors, Fortune 500 executives, or Olympic athletes. Every one of these four words starts with the letter S. Let me drip them on you and drip them on the readers right now because they will be so familiar to you as I give them to you that you are going to start to think about how you are approaching each one of these words and how you can use these words to transform your business and your finances in your life.

The first S is what we call your state. Your state is your focus. Are you focused on why things aren’t going to work? Are you focused on what could work? Are you focused on how much work it’s going to be or how excited you are to embark on the journey? Wherever we put our focus, we put our energy. I’m not going to pick on most people but we are coming out of the backside of this pandemic. Most people are focused on why they are broke, why they are out of shape, and why they are fighting with their spouses.

If that’s where you focus by being broke, lonely, and fat, you are going to stay broke, lonely, and fat versus you asking a better question, “How can I get in great shape? How can I make some more money? How can I be in a loving relationship?” Where focus goes, energy flows. The first thing you have got to check in with is where’s your state? Where’s your focus?

We go to number two. This is my favorite one because number two is your story. Your story is your identity. It’s who you believe you are. Most people are saying, “I’m not smart and educated enough. What if I lose money? What if I lose investors’ money?” We have this belief or this identity that we are not smart enough, good enough, old enough, or educated enough. That’s a bunch of BS. What does BS stand for? We know what it stands for. For me, it stands for your belief system. If you are not in the right state and you have a bad story, it’s going to be pretty hard for you to recreate a possibility.

The first thing I as a high-performance coach do is get crystal clear on, where’s your focus? That’s your state. Number two, we step into creating a better version of your story so that you can stand on the shoulders of other giants who have already done what it is you are trying to do in real estate. You bet. You know where I’m going with the third S and that is your standards. The quality of your life will be in direct proportion to the standards you set for yourself. Think about it, where do you need to draw a line in the sand? What do you need to do to step over that line and never play below your standard again? It could be in your health, in your relationships, with money, or with traveling the world.

Success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics. Click To Tweet

As COVID opens up, I want more people to get out there and see how magnificent this beautiful blue planet is. Most of us don’t think about our standards or we don’t think, “How can I improve and make micro improvements every day?” If we go back now and you are owning a better state, you are owning a better story or identity, you are owning a better standard in terms of how you are showing up.

The fourth S is relatively awesome because it is what we call your strategy. Your strategy is, “Are you following a roadmap, a recipe, a blueprint, or a GPS so that you can go from where you are to where you want to be?” If you don’t have one, when would hiring a coach be a good time? When would going to a meet-up be a good time? When would partnering with a company like yours to put your dollars to work in beautiful income-producing assets? When would now be a good time to follow that strategy? You never want to enter a strategy without first checking in with your state, your story, and your standards. Those three must come before the strategy. Those are the four Ss.

I was also thinking about two important words, I am. It’s the way you speak to yourself a lot of the time. Those two words, I am, I used to write I am on the mirror with whatever I thought I was before. It makes an impact on the way you have talked to yourself.

When you brought up the words limiting beliefs, most people don’t realize that their brain is crawling around with ANTS. If you don’t know what ants are, ANTS are Automatic Negative Thoughts. If we don’t deal with the ANTS in our head or we don’t work on our beliefs or we don’t do affirmations like I am statements or incantations that might sound like Tony teaches, “Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better. Every day in every way, I’m getting smarter and smarter. Every day in every way, I’m making more money.”

Your brain doesn’t know what’s real and what’s fictitious. The more we impregnate it with positive words, affirmations, and incantations, we watch good videos, we watch good TED Talks, we attend good real estate events, and we listen to awesome podcasts and YouTube shows. We start doing something called stacking. You put good on top of good and now you are building a skyscraper of it and you feel and behave differently than if you didn’t do that stuff.

For everybody reading, Trevor and I grew up in Alberta. I’m from a small city in Alberta. He’s familiar with it. He was about twenty minutes away from me. It was about 20,000 people where I grew up. I was a small-town girl. I got kicked those limiting beliefs, threw them out the door, and moved out to Vancouver not knowing a single soul.

What did that lead me to? It led me to build a real estate private equity firm here in Vancouver and helping many people and creating movement across Canada. By listening to you, I already can see how you unlock the power in your clients. It’s all about putting the fear and limiting beliefs aside and then stepping into your power to create the life of your dreams. It’s amazing.

Congratulations to you. You are an inspiration for many people that think they can’t get out of their small town to go to a bigger town or they can’t get out of a relationship that’s not working to a beautiful relationship like you guys have or whatever it is. A lot of people think, “If I try, I’ll fail. If I try, people will judge me.” “What do you mean you are moving out to Vancouver? What do you mean you are investing in real estate? Don’t do that. That can be risky.” Our dreams get killed on the vine by some things other people say.

If all we do is walk around fearing failure, criticism, or unworthiness, those are the three things that hold most people back from doing exactly what you did. You can feel the fear but you have to do something that I call taking a new position of authority over the fear. If you didn’t take that position of authority over the fear, you never would have left small town Alberta to come to the great city that Vancouver is, let alone crush it with RE/MAX and crush it with your company and do the things you are doing now.

 

What I see you guys doing is creating a lot of impacts. When we make an impact as real estate investors, as coaches, as anybody, if you do create impact, oftentimes you get paid income to do it. That’s why I believe that coaching real estate, consulting, and bringing people together for the common good is exactly what we are all here to do anyway and we get paid for it handsomely.

We have to touch on the five reasons why people fail to scale in real estate. After that, we have our Ten Championship Rounds of Financial Freedom. I need to touch on those two very important points. Before getting to that, I want to talk about the journey of a student that comes through your program. I used to box for many years. A lot of times, when a boxing coach sees a kid walking into the gym, he already knows by the way he moves, and by the way he carries himself. For the first couple of days, he knows if this kid is going to make it or not. A lot of time, boxing coaches decide if they want to take someone on or not. Is that the case with you? Do you select your students or your mentees?

To be completely transparent, I’m at that level of my career where I look for certain qualities within people before I offer them coaching services. There are four things that I look for. It speaks to that boxing coach who can look and see who’s in the room. Number one, the first thing I look for is, is this person committed? You got to be committed. If you are going to play this game of life at the highest level, you got to commit to it.

Number two is you got to be decisive. As entrepreneurs and investors, we are going to need to make decisions. Not only do you need to be committed to this journey but you got to be able to make decisions and be decisive. Number three is what I call being coachable. I want you to empty your cup of what you think you know and let Coach T fill it back up with what I know works.

After coaching the likes of the people I have, after being a real estate investor myself, and after doing over 30,000 coaching sessions, I’d have to be an idiot at this stage not to be able to see what causes people to stay stuck versus what causes people to able to explode their results. Once I see that somebody is committed, decisive, and coachable, number four is what we call resourceful. To go from where you are to where you want to be is going to take time, money, energy, and effort. The rewards are incredible for anyone that shows up committed, decisive, coachable, and resourceful.

What does the journey look like? Is there an onboarding period? Is there an audit that you do on the person, their life, and their business? Do you put strategies in place? Walk us through that journey and what that looks like.

You are close. Once I identify that someone’s got those four characteristics, we do a discovery call. I find out a little bit about what their journey has been. Where do they want to go? Why did they want to go there? I’m able to discern pretty quickly whether this is somebody that’s either interested in success or committed to success.

If they are interested in success, that’s okay. The people I want to work with are the people that are committed. I call it being defiantly committed to success. If that’s the case, I give them 1 of my 3 options. I got a 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year package. It depends on what they need because, over the years, I found that different people need different levels of coaching. Different people need different hand holding, psychology, and strategy. That’s why my coaching program isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s customized for what each individual needs as they come in or what each couple needs or what each partnership group needs. At the end of the day, different strokes for different folks.

Bespoke coaching, custom tailored. Let’s briefly go over the five reasons why people fail to scale real estate. If you’d like to briefly go over that, I would love to hear the reason. With 30,000 hours, you must have talked to a lot of people. You might see a lot of different reasons why people can scale or hurdles that they put in front of themselves and other things. Talk to us about those five main reasons, please.

We have to leave the familiar past to step into the present to create a predictable future. Click To Tweet

Thank you so much. I would first of all say that this is universal. It doesn’t matter if you are in Canada, the US, the UK, Asia, or Australia. After being a real estate investor myself, coaching the likes of Joe Fairless and the Dan Hanfords of the world, and all these types of folks, these are the five things that continually hold people back. The first one is limiting beliefs. We got this 3-pound mask between our ears called our brain and our brain is here to keep us safe. If we think it’s going to be hard or we are going to lose money or we are going to invest in a place like Phoenix from here in Canada and that can be daunting, we have got to do some work with those beliefs to call out what’s underneath that.

I’m a big believer that there’s always a story underneath the story and whatever you are telling yourself on the surface, oftentimes we got to go deeper than that. I do a lot of belief work with people. That takes us to number two, which is a lack of a strategic plan. More people plan their trip to Mexico once a year, then they sit down and plan their business or their life. We get crystal clear on what are your short-term goals. That’s for me, 1 to 2 years. What are your long-term goals? That might be anywhere from 2 to 5 years, and then anything beyond five years, I called the vision for your business and your life. We take a look at short-term and long-term goals, and what is your vision. From that point, we reverse engineer a plan to start moving you in that direction.

Number one, we get rid of those limiting beliefs. Number two, we start to create that plan of action, and that takes us to number three because the third reason why most people fail to scale is the lack of systems for support. It’s not enough to get clear on the brain and create a plan, but if you are not creating systems, roles, responsibilities, protocols, leveraging technology, and defining what people should and shouldn’t be doing, you are fooling yourself. We work hard at not only setting up systems for support but robust systems that are going to continue to pay dividends as you use them by day, by week, by month, by quarter, or by year.

Number four, my favorite topic is poor time management. I will say it out loud. Most people suck at time management. I’m going to call it tight here. I don’t know if you ever heard of the rule of 168, but the rule of 168 decrees or means that we all have 168 hours in a week. 7 days times 24 hours is 168 hours. We sleep for a bunch of those hours. We eat, we pay the bills, we play with the kids, we travel, and we do things, but what are you doing with your productive time and how productive are you doing it? I teach something called the productivity pyramid, which I have become known for that starts to give you a real good understanding of exactly what you are doing with your time and what you should be doing with your time.

One last thing before we move to the next round is, when you work for that long as a coach, that many hours, that many different students and that many different life experiences. Even a gut feeling is in your brain. It’s the limbic part of your brain. Trevor is there answering, coaching, and saying things back because of the experiences he’s had with all these different students and his own life can automatically become the light and give the guide to the student asking the question and forgive me for keep calling it a student, but we can call it a mentee students.

What’s the number five?

The fifth and final one is the lack of execution. If you are not out there taking that intelligent and inspired action we talked about, you are fooling yourself because we can get rid of your limiting beliefs, create the action plan, create systems for support, and optimize and maximize your time management, but if you are not out there doing what you say you are going to do, you are missing the mark.

That’s the other thing about coaching is a good coach, teacher, mentor, trainer, or facilitator is going to hold your feet to the fire and make sure that you are doing what you say you are going to do. If we go back to the Joe Fairlesses and all the people like the Dan Hanfords that have come from the Joe Fairless camp, Joe’s cut from that same cloth that I am that not hitting on those five things is doing a disservice to people versus getting people to own those five things.

We are going to quickly step into the Ten Championship Rounds of Financial Freedom. Whatever comes top of mind. You are incredible. I can’t wait to see what you have to say on these questions, but let’s start with the first question. Who was the most influential person in your life?

 

Thought-provoking questions are coming. I have got several people that were instrumental in my life. My first one was my grandmother who was an entrepreneur. She owned a little corner store in a small town in Alberta. I always admired her for not going out there and doing what other people did, having a boss, or working in a job. I’d say that she’s been a big one. My parents have been a big one, but Tony Robbins as well has changed my life for the better in unbelievable ways.

Do you guys have each other’s personal numbers with Tony Robbins?

No. He keeps changing his number on me so I can’t get a hold of him, but thanks for asking.

What’s the number one book you recommend?

Without a hazard of doubt, Think and Grow Rich. I got six copies in the house. Personal Power with Tony Robbins. Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad, is it gets you to think and see through what I call a different lens. Napoleon Hill and what he shares in that book, oftentimes he’ll say that the secret is hidden throughout every page of this book. If you finally stumble upon it.

Spoiler alert, the secret of that book is the title of the book. It’s called Think and Grow Rich. He didn’t write the book Do and Grow Rich because the thinking comes before the doing. I teach a lot from that book. I love it. I got the audiobook. My kids listen to it in the SUV as we drive around. They can recite passages from it. It’s that profound.

If you had the opportunity to travel back in time, what advice would you give your younger self?

The first thing I would say to myself is to dare to dream. We have got three types of goals. We have got A goals which are things that we could probably achieve. B goals which are a little bit more of a stretch, but we could probably do them because other people have done them orC goals which are the real BHAG goals. I played C in my early years and went after some A and B goals without thinking about what’s truly possible in C goals.

I will often think about the Wright brothers. These were two bicycle mechanics that had the C goal of getting a flying machine in the air. Was it easy? No. Did they crash and burn a bunch of times? Yes. Did they almost lose their life? Yes, but eventually they got to their dream. Elon Musk. He is going to put man on Mars. I can’t think of anything bigger than leaving the planet and putting man on Mars. Sometimes you got to check in with where your A and B goals, and you do need to have some C goals. That’s what I tell my younger self.

The quality of your life will be directly proportional to the standards you set for yourself. Click To Tweet

What’s the best investment you have ever made?

The best investment I ever made was in that coach that I told you about when I was down and out. There I was broke. I gained 25 pounds and I got fat and it caused a huge dust-up in my marriage. If I wasn’t able to invest in that coach and didn’t have this person to take me under his wing and tell me, “This too shall pass. Out of all chaos comes order.” I don’t even know if we’d be talking now. By far that’s the best investment I have ever made.

What’s the worst investment you have ever made, and what lessons did you learn from it?

The worst investment I ever made was putting all that money into that failed business because I did it for the wrong reasons. I did it to go after money. I did it to go after I was going to retire rich and young. The universe took out a 2 by 4 and hit me over the head and said, “That’s not why you do things. You do things to expand humanity, experience, or life.” I was a little narrow-minded back then. I still believe that it was a good lesson for me because I wouldn’t be here talking to you if I didn’t go through those life lessons. At the end of the day, be very careful what you are investing in or why you are investing because it might not be what you are meant to do.

How much would you need in the bank to retire? What’s your number?

It’s funny you ask because I believe in creating multiple streams of income. It’s not about having money in the bank, it’s about having different streams. I have a stream of income from real estate, coaching, consulting, and keynote speaking. My wife and I launched a pretty successful publishing company that is doing seven figures a year that one income stream. I don’t say that to beat on my chest. I say that we have worked hard over the years to set ourselves up so that money wasn’t going to be an issue, and we also like to use some of that money to travel, to give to charity or special causes. I would say that the best answer is to see what you can do to set yourself up with multiple streams of income and diversify.

If you could have dinner with someone dead or alive, who would it be?

I’d love to have dinner with Napoleon Hill because he’s a rock star, and I think that he change the whole personal growth space. He and Earl Nightingale, Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Joe Dispenza, and all these amazing people have impacted my life. There are a few sports heroes that have passed that I’d love to sit with because I’m a big sports fan. To tidy it up, Napoleon Hill would be amazing to sit and pick his brain and listen to what he’s learned over his time.

If you weren’t doing what you are doing now, what would you be doing now?

A good coach, teacher, mentor, trainer, or facilitator is going to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you're doing what you say you will do. Click To Tweet

I’d be doing what I’m doing. I would find a way to stop doing anything that I shouldn’t be doing because coaching is not for the faint of heart. You are doing a lot of one-to-one work and group work that sometimes can get pretty heavy and sometimes get pretty daunting. I do believe that I’m cut from the cloth of wanting to help humanity go further faster and do something that I call turning decades into days.

I don’t want people to take ten years to figure stuff out when they can hire coaches, mentors, or people like you who have already done what they are trying to get into. I’m a big believer that what I found my calling and I will probably be doing this until I’m no longer able to speak. I’m starting to get the old Tony Robbins raspy voice already because I’d done so many sessions that I love what I do. This is ultimately what I’m here for.

Book smarts or street smarts.

Can we talk about a hybrid model?

Absolutely.

History is something that we should not ignore. You have to have some book smart and some understanding of where we come from, where are we at, and where are we going. Nothing trumps going out there and getting your butt whooped or making money, losing money, finding love, or losing love. I don’t think anybody goes through life in a straight line. It’s more like a roller coaster with a bunch of loop-de-loops and you feel you are going to fall out sometimes, but it’s exactly the way the universe was designed to teach us lessons and teach us things like compassion, empathy, diversity, and all of those things. At the end of the day, you need a hybrid of both.

If you had $1 million cash and you had to make one investment now, what would it be?

You are putting me on the spot because I would invest in real estate, but I would also take a little bit of that money and find some way to put it into cryptocurrency because I’m a big Wayne Gretzky fan and Gretzky said, “I don’t skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck is going.” With smart contracts, blockchain technology, and some of these rumblings of what’s going on in the world now. I’m a big believer in real estate and I’m always going to put money towards real estate, but I’m also seeing some cool things come out of the crypto community and starting to get my feet wet there in a big way.

What’s the best way people can reach you?

Thank you so much and I’m blessed and grateful to be here. You guys are awesome, and for anyone that wants to reach out, you can either find me on my website which is TrevorMcgregor.com or you can find me through LinkedIn or some of the social channels, but my website is probably the best place to find me.

Thank you so much. We can’t believe we got the honor to have you on our show. I’m so excited about it and we appreciate you coming on, your transparency, your story, all the lessons you have taught us, and our followings. We appreciate it.

You are truly amazing, Trevor. Thank you.

Thank you and right back at you. Thanks for having me on.

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