EFR 866: Amazon Expert Tells How He Made $1 BILLION DOLLARS in Revenue (& How You Can Too) with Shaahin Cheyene

00:03 - Shaahin (Host) So what I'm about to say is very controversial. Innovation is bullshit, and this is the reason why, If you are Steve Jobs, if you are Jeff Bezos, you have the resources behind you to innovate and to educate the marketplace on your innovation Unfortunately, everybody else. There is a much faster path to creating wealth and that's by finding something that already exists and telling a better story. Finding a market that is hungry for something and feeding it that, and you just tell a better story and sell it. It's a far faster path to wealth than innovation. Hey, this is Shaheen Shan and I am here on Ever Forward Radio with Chase talking about business, entrepreneurship and some of the secrets that I use to create a company worth over a billion dollars.

01:06 - Chase (Host) Hey everyone and welcome back to Ever Forward Radio. I'm your host, chase Tuning, army veteran wellness entrepreneur, certified health coach, and today I'm sitting down with Shaheen Shahan. Shaheen has been called many things in his life, including quote, the Willy Wonka of Generation X, but his favorite one is simple the world's leading Amazon industry expert. His serial entrepreneurial career has spanned more than 30 years, earning over $350 million, and, in fact, his Amazon products have outpaced Fortune 500 companies sales on the platform, selling millions of units worldwide. And in today's episode we are diving into what he has found to be the core principles, the foundational tactics that are going to help anyone start a business, scale a business, and why he believes that innovation is dead when it comes to making money in the new marketplace. And Shaheen's business success is only part of his story. In fact, the bigger picture here is what is possible, no matter your starting point, because during the Iranian revolution in 1978, he and his family fled just to survive. In fact, at age 15 years old, he left home, his home country, with nothing but the clothes on his back. Now he's a thriving entrepreneur, family man, and he is here to share the wealth, literally how to make more money, but how to make more joy in your life so you can spend your time where it matters most. And no doubt Shaheen can relate to me when I say that, whether you're a side hustler or just really passionate about what you're doing, long before you ever start scaling your business, it takes focus and it takes energy. Long before you ever start scaling your business, it takes focus and it takes energy. And I'm not trying to overstimulate my body with just coffee after coffee or more caffeine. I'm also trying to preserve my sleep health so I can get deep, restorative rest and recovery, so I can get back after it again tomorrow. So that brings my attention to one of my favorite ways to do that these days in a tasty, delicious gummy the Flow Gummies from today's sponsor, cured Nutrition. This is your all-natural brain boost in a bite-sized chew.

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04:28 - Shaahin (Host) So I tell people this all the time. So you know, I was very successful at a very young age and I did it mostly by fuck around and find out. I had nothing. I came from a poor family or, you know, the lower middle-class family, certainly when we moved here and I had to just figure it out without the internet, without any of that stuff happening.

04:56 To answer your question these days, I think you have to have multiple streams. So my thing initially was I did one thing. It got huge, massive, to the point where we created over a billion dollars in revenue and we can talk about that. And I thought to myself man, that's it, that's the thing. And after that thing was over, I was always looking for the next thing, like the one thing that I'm going to do.

05:15 But as I realized, as the internet developed, as all this new technology is developing, as AI is developing, I don't think that anybody is going to be stuck to one thing. I think you should have one area of focus. You should have multiple areas of fascination, because if you're not somebody who follows your fascination, as Kotler says in his book the Art of the Impossible, talking about having things that you're truly, genuinely fascinated by but have nothing to do with you making money. Having that focus is amazing, but you need to have multiple streams of income. So what I do now is I teach people and empower people to create recurring streams of revenue, and I believe very strongly that one of those has to be e-commerce. So selling on, particularly on the Amazon platform, is one of the lowest barrier to entry ways to creating incredible wealth in the coming years.

06:17 - Chase (Host) So you're saying is this like drop shipping? Is this creating your own product and putting it up on Amazon? You know, when you say e-commerce, can you walk us through what exactly that means? Because I want to just really think, you know, I'm the beginner entrepreneur, or I want to adopt that beginner mindset again. Maybe I'm a multi-year entrepreneur, maybe already established and successful, but you know, I believe, getting back to that beginner mindset, we can, you know, look for a new offshoot, new opportunity.

06:41 - Shaahin (Host) Totally so. If people are watching this, I'm sure you've seen the TikTok culture, the quick Instagram culture around people that are like bro, do drop shipping. I made 50 grand. Check out the girls in the back, check out the jacuzzi and my whatever helicopter, lambo, blah, blah, blah.

06:58 All right, drop shipping is bullshit. Not that it never works, but basically what you're talking about is buying product from somebody who's already making it and selling it and shipping it on a different platform than whatever it is they're selling it on, or maybe they're a wholesaler, but you're selling it on a platform and making the difference in money. You never received the product. All right, can you make money on it? Sure, you can get lucky. The problem with that is the second. You find something, there's 50 other people who found it and even if they don't, eventually all those other people will catch up. So you're really playing a race to bottom because you're going to have to keep dropping your price and eventually somebody's caught with a hot potato that you paid $20 a piece for but now selling retail for $5 a piece, so inevitably you're going to have to get out.

07:48 Yes, the people who make a lot of money on drop shipping are the people who sell the courses on how to do drop shipping.

07:55 - Chase (Host) Yeah, so that's the funny thing it's like teach a man how to fish right Instead of giving him the fish.

08:05 - Shaahin (Host) Newbies, people who have never sold anything or don't have a lot of experience selling things and I'm a lifelong product developer and seller is that they think, man, I'm going to create a better mousetrap and it's going to be so good, because I know mousetraps and I'm going to create one that's so amazing and everybody's going to come knock down my door to get this better mousetrap. Fact is, no one gives a fuck. Nobody cares. I told my wife I would not curse.

08:28 - Chase (Host) So I'm going to try to not curse.

08:30 - Shaahin (Host) We both have Persian wives, so you know. So I thought to myself okay, how's the way I did it? And the way you do it is you have to go distribution first. So what you do is you find a hole in the marketplace that needs to be filled. You find a vulnerability, you seek distribution. You think how am I going to sell this? You think distribution first and then you feed that need with a product.

08:57 So you're not developing a product and then going out there and spending a bunch of money trying to find a market for it. The problem with that is you got to educate the marketplace. Now, if you're Steve Jobs, you've got Apple behind you. You're Elon Musk, you've got Tesla behind you. Go develop a Cybertruck buddy, have a good time. Go develop the new iPhone. But if you're not that, if you're, like most people struggling in life trying to figure out how you're going to get from step A to step B with the least amount of friction, trying to use leverage right, how do you do that is by giving the market what it needs. So you have to erase from your mind the idea of I'm going to develop a better mousetrap and replace it with how am I going to tell a better story, and that's what we teach.

09:44 - Chase (Host) So then, what do I do next? Do I learn how to tell a better story? Do I learn how to really craft and curate and understand my own. Like what does it? What does it mean? To tell a better story, to become a better entrepreneur.

09:57 - Shaahin (Host) So super easy. So we can get into the weeds of it. I'll skip all the technical stuff Again. Anybody that wants to know the technical stuff how do you open up an Amazon account? You know all that stuff I can. I can share with them later for free, with your permission.

10:09 The basics of it are this there's really great analytic software and I'm happy to share with everybody a list of those resources that can actually go onto Amazon Most people don't know this and find out what the sales are of those products. Now here's the thing. I tell people this and it's not always correct, but generally speaking, you want to go with your ethos. If you are 230 pounds Brazilian jujitsu guy does keto muscles, all that stuff you don't want to go into selling candles or fruity, flowery things because you saw that it sells a lot. Right, you go towards what you know. That doesn't mean you go to a product for sure. That means we find a niche.

10:59 I tell people this all the time. The riches are in the niches. Once you discover that product, there's a series of things you have to do in order for it to succeed in the online marketplace, and that's where the storytelling comes in. Each of these platforms has a different language that it speaks, for example, etsy. Etsy is an arts and crafts marketplace I don't know if you know supposed to be things made by hand, although shockingly, in later days it looks like people are making everything by hand in China. I'm very surprised.

11:29 - Chase (Host) Made by robot. Hands, yeah, made by robot hands.

11:32 - Shaahin (Host) It's made by some kind of hands, but the buyers who buy on Etsy, generally speaking, are more craftsy. So the story that you tell behind the products that you sell on that platform are going to be different than the story that you tell on a marketplace like Amazon. And the story that you tell on a marketplace like eBay, which is very price driven and I know people that are making seven figures, eight figures selling products on eBay and on Amazon is that you have to make it more directed towards value. So you have to learn kind of this dance, but it's a lot easier than most things that people do. So if you think, all right, man, first thing I tell people is you need 10K. If you don't have 10K that you can burn tomorrow like let's walk outside, you got that 10K, you're throwing it all on red right. If you don't have 10K that you could do that with, don't call me don't call anybody.

12:26 - Chase (Host) Why 10K? You're throwing it all on red right If you don't have 10K that you could do that with don't call me, don't call anybody.

12:30 - Shaahin (Host) Why 10K? Where does that number come from? 10k is the bare minimum in reserves that you need, particularly in the Western world, but certainly in California, to be able to invest in some business and get a reasonable return. I used to have a friend who was really big on gambling and he would take us into casinos, blackjack, those types of things, and he had a whole system and he taught us how to do it. And one of the important things I learned from that experience and I'm not a big gambler at all was that you have to have sufficient bankroll. If you don't have enough money, a, you're stressed, so that stress shows up and you lose. And you don't have enough money, a, you're stressed, so that stress shows up and you lose and you don't have enough to give yourself an opportunity to win. Now, that's the minimum.

13:09 Preferably you want to have 20K, but now let's assume you're the kind of person that's got 10K or 20K sitting in an account. You did whatever You're like. You know what? Dude, I'm going to freaking hustle, I'm going to go out, I'm going to drive Uber, I'm going to do TaskRabbit, and there's no reason If you're young and able-bodied, or even just able-bodied, particularly in major cities. If you're not in a major city, get to a major city. You should be able to put together in a reasonable amount of time I'd say a year or less 10 or 20K. If not, that's a different conversation. Once you have that money, so now what are you going to do with it? You put it in the bank. You're going to get what? 4%, 5% on a CD or treasury bond?

13:48 - Chase (Host) That's not going to help you at all.

13:49 - Shaahin (Host) Nothing. Yeah, you can invest it in stocks. Yeah, maybe you win, maybe you lose. What we know is you can't time the market. So obviously you will come to the conclusion that, man, I got to reinvest this in some kind of a business. So you go, all right, so I'm going to start a business. Well, what are you going to do? You're going to go buy a restaurant chain, like a Subway, a coin laundry, something like that. Those are going to cost you a minimum of a hundred grand to 300 grand, usually, sometimes between 300 and 500 grand. And what are the chances you become rich from a coin laundry or from a little restaurant or a coffee shop.

14:20 - Chase (Host) Well, if you listen to Cody Sanchez, she is the biggest advocate for laundry laundromats. At least the last time I checked, not from one of them.

14:27 - Shaahin (Host) Yeah, true, true, true. Yeah, it's a business system that's very different. Right, with your 10 grand, which would be a down payment, you'd have to get an SBA loan you got a long way to go to creating generational wealth. Now take a look at Amazon. You launch a product. That 10K is just starting. You launch the product, you mess around a little bit. There's a lot of companies. Now you could fail, you could lose the whole 10 grand.

14:54 But there's also no limit, there's no ceiling to how much you can make from that 10K and I have done it myself personally is start a company for 10K or less and sold that company for seven, eight figures to larger companies that want to take these brands, want to roll them up and do those kinds of things, and I've had my students who've sold their companies, so it's not uncommon. So it's one of the few places where you can take a small amount of seed money and turn it into that. And, moreover, how present do you have to be at the restaurant? How present do you have to be at the coin laundry? These e-commerce businesses, these Amazon businesses, can be set up, set it and forget it. You can employ people overseas with great ethics, great morals to run your company completely and you just do the oversight and the stuff that you enjoy doing. Currently, I run over a dozen Amazon companies myself. Wow, amount of time I've spent on them this week. Goose egg oh, come on, really.

15:55 - Chase (Host) Goose egg. My team does everything, man. Okay, props to you. That's amazing. That's the goal. Right, that's the goal.

16:08 - Shaahin (Host) That's the goal Now. It took me a while to set that up and that's what I teach people. Generally speaking, you're going to have to invest minimum of four hours a week to get that going, but you can have your day job, man. You can keep your day job. You can keep whatever you're doing and have this going, and then once this starts generating revenue for you, then you can you can slowly get rid of your day job and diversify.

16:24 So I take the money from my Amazon businesses, I invest them into cashflow positive real estate and I've been doing that for years. So we've got a beautiful portfolio of cashflow positive real estate that a lot of the funds go into. I invest in the market, I invest in other companies and startups, and so I've got multiple things and I call this principle no bad days, and the reason is this If you've got all your eggs in one basket, you can wake up in the morning and go crap. I was investing in stocks, bonds, options, futures. I've done all that stuff and the market took a dump. You're having a bad day, dude. You might be having a bad year Now if you're diversified and you've got your money in e-comm. You've got your money in some stocks and bonds. You've got your money in real estate. You've got your money in all these different areas. If one thing goes bad, chances are those other things don't go bad and in fact, a lot of times they run opposing systems.

17:15 - Chase (Host) Right, yeah yeah.

17:16 - Shaahin (Host) So you've got to be diversified and you can relax. So now I've got a little boy and I'm married and we travel most of the year when he's not in school. So maybe three, four months out of the year we're gone, we take off, we go to Europe, we go to. We were in Italy sailing on the beach, and one of my friends is this billionaire and his yacht and just enjoying the coast of the Mediterranean Sea out there, and we're working on our laptops when we feel like it. But what we know is when I'm sitting there, my kid's fishing off the boat and I'm looking at him, I'm looking at my beautiful wife, we're enjoying this beautiful food that's prepared for us, we're making money because somebody's buying what we're selling outside, and that's really the lifestyle we get to enjoy our lives, not constantly be working, so work less and earn more.

18:07 And that was really the shift that happened for me, because in my younger years, you know, when you're in your 20s I don't know how old you are 39., 39. So I'm almost 50 now, and when you're in your 20s, you have kind of this tendency to go, like you know, straight to the wall, like, and if you find a brick wall you're going to bust through it. You have the energy to do that and you can grab a hammer and a chisel and whatever it takes. You're, you're, you're breaking through that wall, right If you're, if you're alpha enough, if you've got enough energy. As you get older you start to learn that, hey man, you don't need to do that. Sometimes you can walk around, sometimes you can go over, sometimes you can go on.

18:43 - Chase (Host) Sometimes the wall isn't even real. We just made it up.

18:46 - Shaahin (Host) There you go. That's some next level stuff there is no wall.

18:48 - Chase (Host) Yeah, that's for sure, my experience at least. Hey, what's up? Everford family, let me ask you something when was the last time you felt truly rested or like your brain was firing on all cylinders? If you're chasing better sleep, more energy and a longer, healthier life, like I am, then listen up, because this just might be the simplest upgrade you can make.

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21:37 I want to go back just slightly, to kind of just. I want to keep this very practical and tactical for the new or the recurring entrepreneur you're missing. So when I hear drop ship, when I hear product e-commerce if it's not a product that I am developing or I'm doing the R&D on and creating, I feel like the natural worry for me would be supply chain. If I'm relying on this product that I found that fits a niche and also an interest, it's really not up to me. If shit goes sideways, all I can do is control my portion of that chain. But what do we do when the supply chain of our e-commerce or dropship goes sideways? How much control do we really have over this type of monetization?

22:24 - Shaahin (Host) Perfect. I can explain this to you very well. So what I'm about to say is very controversial. I will start it by saying I love this guy, jeff Bezos. He's an awesome guy. I attribute a good portion of my wealth to him. I'm very, very happy that I've spoken to him in the past. Very happy that he launched Amazon and the Amazon marketplace, spoke to him once past. Very happy that he launched Amazon and the Amazon marketplace, spoke to him once.

22:47 Now, here's the thing that I want to say Innovation is bullshit, and this is the reason why, once again, if you are Steve Jobs, if you are Jeff Bezos, you have the resources behind you to innovate and to educate the marketplace on your innovation. Unfortunately, everybody else. There is a much faster path to creating wealth, and that's by finding something that already exists and telling a better story, finding a market that is hungry for something and feeding it. That and I'll go as far as saying this Steve Jobs did not invent the iPhone as we know it. He invented the iPhone brand and story, but somebody else had that technology. Innovation is bullshit People who think they're going to be innovators. So I'll tell you a story.

23:51 So, sometime around 2000 ish, I was researching smoking. I was hanging around a lot of people who were smoking, particularly cannabis. I'm not a smoker, I'm not a cannabis guy, I'm not a weed dude, even though I like Reagan music. Um, I tell my son there's two kinds of people in the world the ones that like Reagan music and everybody else. Right Cause if you hate Reagan music, there's something wrong with you. But I came across a lot of smoke around me and I thought to myself dude, you know what this is bullshit Like? Why are people burning plant matter to get the active element? There's gotta be a better way. Searched and searched and searched. Nobody had done anything. But there was a lot of research by the big tobacco companies in technologies where you could achieve that. You could extract the active elements particularly nicotine is what they were interested in without getting smoke-torn carbon monoxide. So I went about developing a product that would extract the active elements from any plant substance without creating carcinogens. That smoking did, and it became the first digital vaporizer ever made. We created that entire industry. I patented it. It was the first vape company to ever go public, really, yeah.

25:15 And when I first invented it, it was large as a ketchup bottle and it was an amazing product because you would just put herbs directly in there. There was none of that weird liquid, that stuff that comes from China or whatever, and it was all ceramic. You would push a button. It had a microprocessor, a USB cable in there, which was unheard of. What year was this? This would be around 2000-ish. Wow, usb charger on a.

25:41 Yeah, it was a long time ago, but the technology had just like arisen. Right, it was just coming about. I think we had FireWire back then, but we had a USB port in the devices because the idea was you were gonna connect it to your computer and your doctor would be able to manage the amount of dosage that you get of whatever it is that you're getting through the device. I was building them as medical devices and, long story short, basically invented vapes. What you see now that's out there all came from technology that I developed in those days and in fact I watched that movie. Uh, big vape on the jewels that came out and those guys 100%. Uh, took my whole pitch and like all that stuff was crazy. But we were way early on in the game and so I've been very and that company was very lucrative. I was producing those things for like 40 bucks and there was no competition for a long time. I was selling them for $400 and it was great.

26:37 - Chase (Host) That's a margin.

26:38 - Shaahin (Host) That was margin. But people constantly wanted it to get smaller. People buy what they know and people wanted things that look like cigarettes. So we kept reducing the size. I didn't want to add additives to the plant matter. I was like, just put your plant matter in there, just put your tobacco in there, you'll get the elements. And eventually we got down to the size of a cigar. People still wanted it the size of a cigarette and we realized quickly that the only way to do that would be to liquefy the active ingredient, the nicotine or the cannabinoids to liquefy them and you'd have to add chemicals to them and we didn't know what those would do to your lungs when you inhale them.

27:17 So I got out. I was not interested in doing that at that stage. So I sold the company somewhere around 2006,. The company went public. So, like I said, it was one of the first publicly owned vape companies. But we were. We were first on the market. We innovated. That didn't exist.

27:35 I don't think any of that stuff would exist if if I hadn't developed that technology. And did I make more money from that than the stuff I'm doing now? No, I did all right, I made some millions. It was great. We had a great time. We flew all over the world, we were selling them in Europe and Amsterdam and it was the first of the vapes ever.

27:56 But what would have been better for me to do in retrospect now this is the almost 50-year-old me talking to the 20-something-year-old me would have been let somebody else put that out and you just tell a better story and sell it. It's a far faster path to wealth than innovation. There is no money in innovation anymore and unfortunately, companies like Amazon and these big Walmart-type companies have really even though they like to play like they love innovation, they come out with innovative stuff. They don't really. They want price and they want market dominance. They're not interested in innovative products and educating. That's not their. That's not their model.

28:41 They have a long tail model. They want to sell 50 million things. Amazon wants to be the everything store. You ever see the smile on Amazon. It goes from the A to the Z, right A to Z. Look at these innovative things that we're selling. So if you want to be successful in business, don't innovate. Learn how to sell. Learn how to tell a better story. The number one skill that I tell young entrepreneurs out there who want to be successful is learn how to sell, learn how to tell a story.

29:24 - Chase (Host) What if I already have a business and my primary goal right now is to scale that, to grow that, would you still say? Don't try to innovate in your own business, just try to look for something that you're already doing, but just make a better story about it.

29:42 - Shaahin (Host) So my friend Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, chuck E Cheese's amazing guy, by the way, there's a great podcast on him out right now called Business Wars. I don't know if you heard of it no, no. It's on the Wondery Network.

29:53 - Chase (Host) Oh yeah, okay, okay.

29:53 - Shaahin (Host) And it's Chuck E Cheese's versus someone else, and it's the story of Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari. Nolan talks about how to basically destroy your competition.

30:06 - Chase (Host) How do we destroy our?

30:07 - Shaahin (Host) competition, how you destroy your competition. That's his thing. He's always thinking about the other guy, and I like to tell this and I tell this story in my book too this tactic While you are sleeping, your enemies are planning your demise. So I tell people to write that down and put it up somewhere, because, as you have a business, rather than thinking about how am I going to innovate, think about how you're competing in the marketplace and what your competitors are doing. And you can. You can, of course, innovate in areas of your life. So you can innovate in your sales process, you can innovate in your SOPs for your employees and the product that you put in Now. You can do all of that. But what I'm saying is is, as far as the product or service that you're putting out, you don't really need to innovate. If you look at who you're innovating for like, does the market really want an innovation from you or do they just want reliability? Do they just want consistency? People want consistency. People want to be delivered the same thing.

31:16 Starbucks is it good coffee? Absolutely not. It's not. No, but do you know, if you go into a Starbucks here or if you go into Indonesia, do you think it'll be the same level of coffee in both places. More or less? Yeah, more or less. And that's what people like. People want their Frappuccino done in that way. They want consistency. Do you see Starbucks going out there and developing some insane you know, keto beverage or you know something like that? No, they're not doing it.

31:43 - Chase (Host) They're not doing it.

31:45 - Shaahin (Host) And that's how they continue to be successful, and that's Starbucks. Yeah. So it's our ego that makes us think, man, I want to do better, I'm going to do better than you know, the next guy or whatever. You don't really need to. We have, especially as alpha entrepreneurs, we have this thought. We have this attitude of like man, I'm better than that I can, I got some magic thing and I'm going to go out there and really your customers, the people who are going to be paying for you, the people who are going to be giving you their money, they don't want that, they just want like consistency. They want like you know what, dude, just deliver something.

32:20 There's so much mediocrity in the world, so much, so much. And you see this by traveling. Like you go to Europe, like we went there, and we go to a restaurant and the guy's like it's mama's food, he brings it to the table and he looks at how you're eating it. And like the guy's the waiter, he's not a slasher. You come to LA and you walk into an Italian restaurant Okay, what do you want?

32:44 Okay, you know anything else, and like they don't care, they don't care about you, but they're doing one thing. It's like at the moment you're doing one thing, you thing You're the way. Why are you not bringing excellence to what you do? The world is so mediocre, People bring mediocrity to everything. So if you can just be excellent, just be present, 90% of the game is just showing up. You could do so much better. And when you get to the level of Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or an Elon, by all means dude, you've got. You've got that privilege of innovation. Go create blow torches and and and cars that are that look like look like something from Mad Max.

33:24 Go do that.

33:26 - Chase (Host) I want to go back to, um, I want to pick your brain a little bit more on. I don't know if you said these exact words, but you know annihilating our competition. So if we're, if we're going to table innovation for right now in our current business and we're going to go after our competition and I say go after, I'm not like hey, don't go to their place of business and burn it down, kind of thing, or slander the name of the internet.

33:47 No, no, we're not about that life. But if I want to go, all right, I'm not going to try to innovate in my own business, I'm going to try to just make sure I am better than my competition.

34:00 - Shaahin (Host) What does that like? Practically look like Sure. So I agree with you. Anything that's legal, moral and ethical you can do. Now if you think you're sitting here and somebody else doesn't have the same idea that you have and are already doing it better than you, you're probably wrong. Already doing it better than you, you're probably wrong. Where you succeed is by finding your strengths and capitalizing on them. Now that doesn't mean you don't need to be crafty.

34:26 There was a guy most people I don't know maybe now some people know about him. His name was Carlos Castaneda. Carlos Castaneda was an anthropology student. There's a lot of controversy about him and he was kind of responsible for popularizing this idea of these like Mesoamerican shamanic traditions in the 1960s. He was a UCLA guy very mysterious.

34:46 The whole thing got culty and went up in a ball of fire, but he wrote these bestselling books was the teachings of Don Juan, where he talks about his time with this Yaqui sorcerer in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico and they went on these journeys and the reason why I'm bringing this up is one of the concepts that he talked about is this concept of stalking, of looking at the world from a predator-prey type of viewpoint, and I always thought this was very interesting about Kessing. By the way, his books are fricking beautiful. I think they've largely been forgotten now, but the teachings of Don Juan was a New York time bestseller. It was, it was. It was absolutely an an an amazing book. So take them with a grain of salt. It's the validity of them is is questioned, but if you, if you think of them as fiction or narratives like that, it's amazing lessons.

35:37 - Chase (Host) I'd say better than most things.

35:40 - Shaahin (Host) So he talks about this concept of stalking, and I found that very interesting, because if you look at the world in a predator-prey type of way which, if you look at the natural world, it does work that way you got to take a pick. Which one are you going to be in this situation? And if you're not going to be prey, you're going to be predator. And what do predators do? They stalk.

36:02 So you want to stalk your competition. There's no reason why you can't call them. There's no reason why you can't buy the product. There's no reason why you can't go out there and buy your competition. There's no reason why you can't find what their weakness is and capitalize on it. So, for example, on Amazon, I teach people order your competition's product, read all their reviews, try their product, have five people try their product and find out what sucks about them. I guarantee you something sucks. Now you're going to go out there and you advertise your product as the solution to all those problems. Boom, you're being. You're being aggressive, you are stalking, as Castaneda would say. Right, you are the lion, you are the predator, right, and you've just changed your mindset from being prey to predator. Now I know this probably sounds pretty weird the language of it and you probably don't want to tell anybody that you're a predator. I get that in these days. Register for that, isn't there an?

36:58 - Chase (Host) app for that. You don't want to be on that one.

36:59 - Shaahin (Host) Yeah.

37:00 - Chase (Host) But as you're describing this, I'm kind of laughing in my head. I never thought about it in this caliber, but, um, you know, before I devoted my life 100% to ever forward radio and becoming a full-time podcaster. This was part of my job, and also I was an online coach at a health coaching company. Yeah, that's what I am by trade, by education and certifications and all that and why a lot of what we talk about on the show is health wellness driven, and I would do that. I would sign up for other coaches courses, I would go through their coaching curriculum, I would you know what's the term. I would get into their pipeline and I would just see okay, what message are they putting out? When is it a text? Is it an email? What's the protocol? What are the recommendations? What are the resources? What? Who are they using? What are they quoting? Like I would just dissect it instead of like a consumer or a client.

37:51 I was a predator. I was putting myself into that animal kingdom and just observing everything, and then I would take that information and go okay, cool, If I was questioning is what I'm offering worth this price point? That answer was solved or oh, they're doing this and I'm doing that. I would then kind of go back and tweak my offer a lot more. And you know, I also. I guess I would say I do the same thing now I, as a pod, as a full-time podcaster, I consume just for fun as listening to a podcast maybe two a month, Sure, and honestly, one of those is a podcast about podcasting. It's all industry, it's all stats and updates and so, um, but I do look at a lot of other shows as a predator I'm like, okay, oh they, they tweaked their intro, oh, they condensed the length, or they added this to their show notes?

38:39 Um, if you're not, if you're not doing that, then like how are you, how are you really innovating what you're doing?

38:45 - Shaahin (Host) I'll tell you, I've studied wealth and successful people for over 40 years, I would say and I've met a lot of millionaires and a few billionaires, and I've studied a lot of the great people, a lot of the wealth that we've seen. People like I've studied Bill Gates or Elon or Bezos. And you look at these guys. I'll tell you one of the things who do you think they are? They are not prey, they are relentless, ruthless entrepreneurs. Now you can argue, some of them are more ethical than others. Some things that they do are ethical.

39:21 At times, To get to that level of wealth, you're going to have to be very aggressive and some people are going to be knocked down as you're running to your goal. It's just the sad truth of the way things are. Yeah, Now, if somebody wants to reach that level of success, you got to be honest with yourself and you got to be willing to take no prisoners along the way. Like I said, moral, ethical, legal, always. But are you willing to take your competitions customers? I know I am competitions customers, I know I am. I know that in the supplement business dude, if you're advertising your list of resellers on your website, I will be downloading that list and going to every single store. There's nothing moral, legal, ethical about that. You're not going to like it as my competitor.

40:14 So now it becomes a game of ping pong. Are you going to try to do the same to me? I'm going to find your sources of traffic on Google, on Instagram. Moreover, you know I've got a podcast booking agency right now. We're one of the largest in the country. It's called Podcast Cola. I'm going to find out what podcasts you've been on or your people have been on, and then I'm going to get booked on those podcasts, or I'm going to have my doctors that espouse my supplement products go on all of those shows and we're going to go after your market. That's fair play. We're on the racetrack and I'm just coming, coming, coming any way that I can. You got to either get out of my way or run faster than me.

40:50 - Chase (Host) There are no secrets, right, it's all. Success leaves clues, and it's just. Are you willing to commit the time to look at these clues that are being left behind and stitch them together, or just sit there and just be like you know, screw these guys? Yeah, they figured it out more than I did.

41:03 - Shaahin (Host) And, in all fairness, for me not everything is on the table. When I do trade shows, when I talk to people and they bring up other people's products, I never talk bad about somebody else's product, even if I know the product is complete BS and I know the product is not what they plan out to be if they're charlatans or whatever. I never talk other people down because I don't want them to talk me down, and I also feel like you want to put positivity into the world. It doesn't mean that you can't go after your lunch relentlessly, but I still feel very strongly that you want to put positive things out into the world. There's enough negativity. There's enough people doing nasty stuff to each other. So go out there and get what's yours, but do it in a way that's positive and put out positive energy out there and people go oh well, how do you know what's positive and what's that? You know, dude.

41:52 - Chase (Host) You know, you know, you know, you know. Yeah, I love that. I want to go back to kind of the beginning of all this. You were talking about new business development and then I also heard you talk about investing, particularly with that initial nut. You know that 10 K, maybe 20 K. Would you recommend someone? If, let's say, we have $10,000? Yeah, would it be wiser here in 2025 to take your 10 K, your time, your resources and put it into your own business? Or take that time and research a business to invest in?

42:23 - Shaahin (Host) Some people are going to tell you that 10K isn't enough.

42:27 - Chase (Host) And certainly if you're trying to invest it's not as much as it used to be, that's for damn sure.

42:30 - Shaahin (Host) Yeah, 10k isn't as much as you think.

42:33 I think I like doing it in my own business because I have total control. But, more important than that, if you lose the money, don't lose the lesson. Not everybody wins, not everybody's going to make it. Most people are not. Most people are going to take that 10K and they're going to burn it whatever they do, be it Amazon, coin, laundry, restaurant, whatever. But you will learn and you will get back up.

43:00 That was one of the things when I was first coming to this country. We came here I was, I think, like five years old. I didn't speak a word of English. We came from Iran, didn't have a lot of money, moved into a neighborhood that was like up and coming Neighborhood was going way faster than we were, and neighborhood that was like up and coming neighborhood was going way faster than we were. And you know my dad was working at pizza shops. He was working at laundries, you know, just trying to make ends meet.

43:21 And I would go to school being this kid who, like, didn't speak English, and get the shit kicked out of me all the time. And at a certain point I realized I just keep going back and no matter how hard they knock me down, I would just keep getting up and eventually I learned martial arts and learned how to defend myself. But I realized that quality is the quality of a lot of the friends that I had that really, really succeeded in life, and some of them are super famous rock stars and musicians and actors and people in all areas of business. The ones that made it weren't the ones that never got knocked down. It was the ones that weren't afraid to get knocked down but just kept getting back up. You could not put them down and I can mention names that would blow you away, that we went to school together that came from less than me, that came from more than me but still had that quality about them.

44:14 - Chase (Host) Sorry if I miss it in there, but would you say take the money, invest it into your own business or invest?

44:20 - Shaahin (Host) in another, no great question. So I think, definitely invest in your own business. I think you don't have enough to invest in somebody else's thing, I mean, unless you've got like a hot tip on some stock and you're willing to burn and bet it all on red and see what happens, right? It was very rare that something like that happens unread and see what happens, right? It's very rare that something like that happens. You want to have control and you want to take educated risks because you don't have a lot to burn. So I would say start a business. Start a business where you've got unlimited upside or a pretty high upside and a very low risk.

44:52 You're not going to burn all the money overnight, right? So if, like, failure happens, it'll happen in cycles, in stages, so you have an opportunity to stop and shift courses, right? You're not going to lose all 10K at once. You'll invest 5K, then you'll have 1K, then one more K, then you might make some money. You might lose some money, you can tweak it, but at the end of that spend, you will either have made money or have something that's making you money, or you would have learned how to do it.

45:18 - Chase (Host) And then if you have to go out, and get another 10K.

45:20 - Shaahin (Host) Well, now you know how to do it. Now you know what you're going to do. Different, that's the key Online gurus, again, this TikTok goldfish culture of like check out the shiny thing, would tell you that, man, you're going to make it and the majority of people will pay the money to these courses. They'll pay the money to these gurus, they'll buy the course and even, of no fault to the gurus, even if they were legit, that's where the pressure is released and they're done. They don't follow through with the work. So, before you do this, you've got to make sure that you're committed to putting in the work. And then you got to look into it and go man, you know, if this is how much money I have right now, how am I going to take this money and double it in a year? That's a good. That's a good good. Like goal, like conservative, you're not going to be in a jacuzzi with Lambos, with bikini girls, but if you're consecutively doing that.

46:12 - Chase (Host) If I got $1,000 and I make it $2,000, then I make it $4,000, then I make it $8,000, then I make it $16,000. So I think that's a great little nugget to go. All right if I can just take what I got and the goal is, through my own efforts and work and failures, just double and then double and then double, that's right. A product, service that you just wholeheartedly believe in and love and trust and have been using forever and have, I think, a personal connection, not like an in, like an inside scoop kind of thing, but a personal connection to you.

46:45 Know, investing can be a great way to go. I've done it and will continue to do it. But also, I think, even if I had another great opportunity, if I had an extra, let's say, 10 grand, I probably would take it back and just put it back into myself, unless it's one of those unicorn personal products. Because at the end of the day, if I can double my money, amazing. But if I burn that 10K on my own and I'm not an actual idiot the entire time through, I'm going to have $10,000 worth of lessons that I can then apply to the next thing. You know, it's like you know your own kind of master course, your own master class, your own mastermind, your own this, whatever that you invest in and you know at the end of the day, you've got something tangible for it or you got a lot of lessons.

47:34 - Shaahin (Host) Yeah, objectives, strategy, tactics. So objectives, what are we trying to achieve something tangible for it? Or you got a lot of lessons? Yeah, objectives, strategy tactics. So objectives, what are we trying to achieve? Do you want financial freedom? Do you want to create your job? Do you want to create generational wealth? You want to create legacy wealth? What is it that you want? Most people don't know. You got to ask the question strategy what strategy are we going to implement to get that objective? And tactics what tactics are going to are we going to implement to get that objective? And tactics, what tactics are we going to employ to execute on your strategy? They could be Amazon, they could be eBay, they could be selling it, I don't know country fairs, whatever it is. What are those tactics? And so we look top down, like that, and we ask the right questions and then we execute on those results.

48:19 - Chase (Host) My brother just went through this. My brother. He recently sold. He has a candy company a sour candy company he just sold to Hershey.

48:26 - Shaahin (Host) No way.

48:27 - Chase (Host) For a publicly undisclosed amount. He shared that information with me and I'm very proud of his work paying off. But when you look at what he did, he just told a better story to a product that already was around. Um, and his tactic, I'm curious to get your take on. It was and still very much is, and this is what he attributes all the success to of this brand shout out sour strips, uh was. I want to get my product into as many hands as possible. Yeah, would you say that that tactic applies universally in business. You know, is it? I just want to get my product, my service, into as many hands as possible with products?

49:07 - Shaahin (Host) Maybe? Yes, it depends. So I'm much more of the mind of no matter how bad the economy gets, you can take over the higher end of the market. There's a lot less competition at the top than there is at the bottom. If you're at the bottom, you're doing race to bottom, you're competing on price and that's it.

49:26 So people don't care about your brand, your story, all that stuff as much. They just want the cheapest widget that you're selling At the top. Yeah, it's going to cost you a little more to deliver, but then you have money to do that. So that's not always the case. Also, you can sell something for a little bit to a few people, or sell something for sorry, a little bit to a lot of people, or something for a lot to a few people.

49:54 There's plenty of people out there and since the dawn of time to today with enough money to buy the highest end thing. In fact, a lot of the people I know will go out there and they'll buy the thing. Like I'm really into Porsches, I've been a Porsche consumer and aficionado for a long time and sometimes I see my friends go out because they know I'm really into Porsches and they'll buy a Porsche and they time and sometimes I see my friends go out because they know I'm really into Porsches and they'll buy a Porsche and they'll come back and I'll be like dude why did you buy this, not this one Right?

50:23 Your wife is going to be driving this and she's got six kids going to like, oh yeah, I thought the turbo was better. I said, well, it is better. Is she going to be track racing? Like she does not need a turbo 911. You could have just gotten the. Ah, you know you didn't. They didn't tell me, but they just want the best. They don't care, the money doesn't matter and you can access those people. You just have to change your mindset. If you're not in that mindset, you might not realize it. I mean, so many people I know will just go out there and just want to buy the best thing, the best watch with the. They don't know what all that stuff does, they just want the best. And those people can be your customers and they're a lot less PETA than everybody else. Pain in the ass.

51:04 - Chase (Host) Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm sure.

51:05 - Shaahin (Host) Yeah, the Lord, down the thing you go. I've got a lot of real estate businesses where we do short term rentals, airbnbs, those types of things, and in those businesses, I'll tell you, when we reduce our prices to fill the vacancies, we get much lower grade people that are much more pain. The more we charge, the more we make. It's far less hassle dealing with someone who's going to pay $500 a night than somebody who's going to pay $200 a night.

51:31 - Chase (Host) Yeah, I mean think about it. Yeah, anytime you've ever gone above your personal budget for anything, just think about the way that you act in that experience. You know when I you know whenever I would book a 79, 99, you know holiday and express room, you know would really not care at all about the experience. But if I'm booking a room of the four seasons, like I have a completely different demeanor, room of the four seasons, like I have a completely different demeanor, and so you know, if that's how you think you act, you know I say that about anything. You know get a, you know a cup of seven, 11 coffee, or you for 89 cents, or you go to Starbucks and drop five bucks. I mean you, you appreciate it a lot more. And so just take that perspective into your customer, your consumer, your, your soon to be customerbe customer. Go after that mindset.

52:18 - Shaahin (Host) Yeah, and I teach this in our Amazon Mastery course as well. Most people don't understand money. Not only that, most people don't understand pricing. There's a great book I recommend to people by this guy named William Poundstone, and the book is called Priceless the Psychology of Pricing. This book changed everything for me as it comes to pricing psychology. Now people think, oh, what's pricing psychology? I'm going to charge as much as I can. More money is better, right Wrong. Our brains did not evolve to understand numbers. Numbers are not something that are in our DNA, and I'll give you-.

52:54 Beyond what we can literally on our fingers. Yeah, I'll give you a perfect example of this. So there was a period of time after my first company when I would go on expedition. I worked with a bunch of pharma companies. They hired me to develop new drugs or to discover new substances. So I would go on expeditions to places to discover new products, and also for myself and my own companies. I always wanted to find the next Herbal E, which was my famous product. By the way, anyone interested, check out the book Billion. There's going to be a film Paris Hilton is producing.

53:24 - Chase (Host) I saw that. Yeah, that's wild.

53:27 - Shaahin (Host) The film's going to be coming out in the next couple of years. They're in production of it right now. So I was in the Amazon rainforest, just happened to be there. We had taken this little banana boat that was taken on water in the middle of the Amazon river. I'm talking piranhas, anacondas, nobody speaks English. I had a guide with me who was part tribesman of this one uncontacted tribe mostly uncontacted tribe and we were going to be first contact with them. So we went out. It was a day or two days journey and they had come out a few days and they kind of saw us and we saw them and they had some things to trade and I had some things to trade with them. And so day one we went there.

54:14 It was very precarious, I mean, they had all kinds of things that could kill you and they were very aggressive. They were not like super friendly, like what's up, bro, they were, they were very aggressive. And so day one, you know, they gave me some beads and like a monkey skull thing and you know some cool, cool shit. I still have it and I gave them money and somebody had explained to them that you take this money and you can exchange it for, I hate to say it, but for sweets and soda, which they don't have. But that's what they wanted, right? And I will mention also that these were known as a tribe. That was cannibalistic, so you don't really want to argue with them. Yeah, I can gamble with that. Yeah, day two goes by, you know so. Day one, I only had to argue with them. Yeah, I can come over that. Yeah, day two goes by, you know so. Day one I only had large bills with me. So I actually gave them $200. Right, and they gave us a bunch of stuff and they were like cool, day two goes by. Uh, you know, I'm down to a 50. I gave him two fifties. They gave me a bunch of stuff.

55:13 I thought it was like being very generous and after about a week all I had left was like a bunch of ones and fives. I mean, I wasn't expecting to take a big bankroll with me, right, because I was just giving to them and they would. They would go somewhere to the tribe. Somebody would have somewhere along the way, like a cola, and they bring the cola, the chief would get it. Six of them would be there and they would just freak out over the soda, because they had never had soda before.

55:36 I mean, these were, I'm not. They didn't have Western clothes. These guys had not, they did. It was so bizarre to see them with a bottle of something manufactured. I mean, they were literally their fabric. Everything was made from stuff in the jungle. They were not. There was nothing produced by our hands. They had not seen people like us. And on the last day things got really heated because all I had was like I had a stack of um of of of bills which added up to what I gave them the day before, but the day before I'd given them more bills because I had been out of the larger bills.

56:09 Yeah, so it was actually more dollar value in in the bills that I gave them, but fewer actual bills. And we realized in that moment they got very aggressive, like they were gonna. They were gonna like you know, spear us or something they thought it was less because they didn't know the numbers. So I tell people often so one of the tricks that we do by the way, I didn't get killed we got.

56:31 - Chase (Host) We got some beans. I gave them everything that I had my.

56:34 - Shaahin (Host) You didn't have to eat your crew or anything to survive. No but we ate some crazy stuff, I you know. I'll tell you about that another day Some really crazy stuff. There's no good food in the Amazon. It's a couple of weird fruits and stuff and everything I have to imagine.

56:47 Yeah, Everything will kill you. But what I learned from that was that and from this book is that we did not evolve to understand money. So oftentimes what I teach my Amazon mastery students is this that when you have a product and it's not selling, people naturally think well, I'm going to sell it for cheaper. Well, no, you might be selling it too cheap in the marketplace. So we had a product which was a supplement and nobody was buying it in 1999. So somebody on my staff dropped it and dropped it until it was like 599. Nobody was buying it. We're like we're going to cut it out. And they came finally, came to me and said look, we got a warehouse full of this stuff and I looked at it. The reviews were good, the product looked clean, the story was great. I was like mark it up to 5999.

57:34 - Chase (Host) I was going to say did you go up?

57:35 - Shaahin (Host) And they were like what they were? Like we can't do that. It was a big pushback. I was like you're right, mark it up to $99.99. And the good thing is like most companies should be run like a dictatorship, not a democracy. If you're starting a business, understand that the democracies do not work. For successful businesses, especially small to medium-sized businesses, they need to be run like a dictatorship. There needs to be a captain of the ship. So I made that decision and immediately we started selling them and within 30 days we were almost sold out of the product. It was because the price points were all wrong. People understand value. They understand value in relation to surrounding things. There's another great book by a guy named Cialdini or I think he pronounces it Cialdini called Influence, which I recommend to people I know that one.

58:23 - Chase (Host) Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

58:24 - Shaahin (Host) He's written. Like the candidate, he's got a follow-up book to that called Presuasion, which talks about that. But it all comes full circle back to if you want to make money, learn to tell a better story, learn to sell, find mentorship, get educated on how to do that and don't be afraid to spend some money doing that. One of the great stories I love I think it was like about Abe Lincoln is like they asked him you know, if you had, you know, 10 hours to cut down the tree, what would you do? And he said I'd spend nine sharpening my ax and one cutting down the tree. And that's what we forget, especially with people that are entrepreneurial, people that, like us, that are very alpha in how we approach the world. We just want to get out there and smash and do it, but we need to spend more time sharpening our blade and less time cutting down the tree, doing smarter rather than than working harder.

59:22 - Chase (Host) So then, what do we do once we have the money? Yeah, is it a matter of coming up with a different spin on the same story. You know, once we have the money, what's the tactic next to one? Maintain and two, not for, not for. Like you know, just enough is never enough. But okay, I made my first $10,000. This is life-changing money for some people, or just an extra $10,000. Who wouldn't say yes to an extra $10,000. That's great. Yeah. Now, if I can maintain this system, how can I make that $10,000, a hundred thousand dollars?

59:55 - Shaahin (Host) It is a show on TV. I love the show. I don't know if it's still on. It's called the profit with this guy, Marcus Limones.

01:00:01 - Chase (Host) Yeah, I never saw it, but I remember seeing like previews for it and stuff. I'm familiar with it. Dude, it's so awesome.

01:00:13 - Shaahin (Host) He is awesome businesses and he talks about profit process product or no. What is people process product? Sorry, the three Ps right, and I think we think, especially if you haven't started a company or started a business, particularly a products business or a business where you're selling something, you think that, okay, so I make it, I made money, that's it. It's going to run like that forever, not the case? You're constantly tweaking things for a couple of reasons. One remember about your competition. Right, they're thinking about how to eat your lunch while you're sleeping. Your competition is planning your demise. It's happening. Somebody's thinking man, this guy got ahead of me and now I got to take him down.

01:00:53 - Chase (Host) They're thinking that the Jocko Willink approach to business. You know, know, I remember seeing this interview. People ask Jocko, why do you get up at 345 am? Because he's like my enemy is up before me.

01:01:03 - Shaahin (Host) If.

01:01:03 - Chase (Host) I'm not up. My enemy is, and they're planning my demise, you know. We can be a little more reasonable we can bring the Navy SEAL tactic into business here I feel like I'm up at six it's okay. Yeah, I get that.

01:01:15 - Shaahin (Host) I get that. I think that's one of the reasons why you want to do that, because you know that's right. Your enemies are up earlier than you doing that, so you want to be ahead of the game there. But also, again, I think it goes back to what we're talking about, about just bringing excellence and just showing up. It's 90% of the game is just showing up, and I feel like that's what the majority of people are missing.

01:01:46 There's something called perfection paralysis, and I've coached a lot of people who've had that. It's the guy who goes man, I want to invent this thing, and then he just spends all his time perfecting details and no one gives a fuck about it. He's the guy that will spend months getting his patent and he's not coming it out and he's holding it as a secret and not telling anybody about this great idea that he has, and then it's too late. 50 other people have come up with it and it's too late. People always ask me about patents and trademarks. I say forget about it. If anybody's crazy enough to do your idea, kiss them on the forehead, let them run with it, and then you come a couple of years later, once they've forged a market for you and spent all the money and made all the mistakes.

01:02:30 And then you take over. It never happens. It never happens. In the over $1 billion in revenue that I've made, I've had my products knocked off maybe twice, maybe twice.

01:02:41 - Chase (Host) That's impressive. Yeah Well, is that just like that you're aware of? I'm sure you had a stout legal.

01:02:45 - Shaahin (Host) I know that might get you demonetized, so I'm not going to say it. But the herbal e-days when we were doing that, there were a couple Asia knockoffs of our product and the products came out and we were like, oh, this isn't our product. Somebody's like literally knocking us off and I was like, all right, goes in the bin. Next thing, right, like if people want to buy, like I'm going to start putting we put. There's a period of time where we just start putting holograms on our product and it just cut it all off because nobody else had the holograms and you know it was like hey, you want the real one, put the holograms.

01:03:21 - Chase (Host) That's cute. Let me just I'll do this, yeah.

01:03:24 - Shaahin (Host) You. You can't when you have when. If you hit it big and watched his first movie that I saw, I was like, oh my God, this guy is one of us. He's one of these guys who comes from a humble background. He's created excellence in his life and he's had this dream. That's impossible and he single-handedly went out there and made it happen. He became the first Asian movie star to break Hollywood. That had never happened before. He was the first and action star Mm-hmm. So Bruce Lee talks about absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what's specifically your own, and that's always hit home. For me, I think it's one of the most important things.

01:04:23 - Chase (Host) I mean, yeah, who can argue with that? I'm just kind of like mulling that over. I haven't heard that quote in a while. That's really good. That's really good. I want to share something. Uh, get your take on it. I also think, when it comes to business in life but we'll just stick with business here as well it all comes down to the, the depth, the extent and the tenacity of our decision-making process. What we execute on only matches the level and the conviction of our choice to act on that. Earlier this year, like last week, we're like Hill. January 7th, my wife and I sat down like we always do and went over goals, really looking at finances, and I was like, coming through the business, and last year one of my businesses increased revenue by about 230, 240 K and this year, for 2025, I said I want to. I want to maintain, I want to add a hundred K.

01:05:28 So I want to go up to three 40. At the end of that conversation I decided I said no, I want to go seven figures. And just the act of me saying that out loud, choosing a different action, has me acting completely different. Just setting a much more outlandish goal if you will. But uh, you know I'm going to get your take on that, you know, is it is that too high in the sky by just going oh, I want, you know, I want the biggest that I can. I want to just really see what I can do. I think, in my experience and other entrepreneurs, you have a level of proof that you've proven to yourself. You know, I'm in eight or seven of my entrepreneur journey and so it's. I'm not just like, oh, I quit my job yesterday and I want to make a million dollars tomorrow, kind of thing. Um, so do we have to have that kind of proof in our entrepreneur journey to make these very large goals and then, therefore, to take large action steps?

01:06:21 - Shaahin (Host) What do you mean by proof?

01:06:23 - Chase (Host) Uh, like I've proven to myself that I can double. Basically, we're saying I, you know, I made $10,000 on my own, I made a100,000 on my own, I made $200,000 on my own. Do we need that level of proof in our business and ourself to set that much larger goal and then take action towards it? Or, with the right tools and the right plan, can we just set that goal to begin with?

01:06:43 - Shaahin (Host) So the short answer is it's just mindset right. So, like there's a guy right now looking, I was talking to a guy yesterday who's in the oil business and he's looking to go out there and buy an oil company. He called me up. He was asking for some of my advice. I was talking to him about it. I know nothing about the oil business. He's probably going to end up buying this company and making half a billion bucks on the billion half a billion, half a billion on the deal.

01:07:08 So I look at it and I go how's's he doing that and why can't I do that? I just don't have the same information that he has. He's done deals like this before, he's made that kind of money before. He just knows. But, moreover, his mindset is different. So I like what you said about your mindset. It's really about mindset and I'll tell you a little story.

01:07:33 I'm not a religious guy at all, but I'm a student of history and I'm a student of religions and most people know Judaism, one of the oldest religions. You know you've got Islam, you've got Christianity. There's a religion that came right around the time of Judaism or maybe just a little bit after, called Zoroastrianism. I don't know if you've ever heard about that. I know your wife is Persian, she'll probably know it. They still exist all over the world, but in Iran there's a good community of them and the ideas of Zoroastrianism is very simple. At its core is good thoughts, good words, good deeds. That's it that builds your entire universe, and I always like that about that particular religion.

01:08:19 I don't like religion as a system of control, which largely, I feel like it's become in modern history, but I do like some of the lessons of it, and so that particular lesson from Zoroastrianism. I'm like, wow, man, they knew that that's what led. And when I talked to my kid, I talked to him about the same thing. I'm like, dude, it's your mindset, I don't want to go to school. School sucks, school is this. And I'm like, okay, so guess what? If you think you're right, or you think you know, if you think it's going to be good or if you think it's going to be bad, you're right.

01:08:51 - Chase (Host) So make it good. It was the Henry Ford quote. Whether you think you can or you can't, you're right.

01:08:57 - Shaahin (Host) Yeah, and that's what it is. But a lot of times it's a shift in mindset. But as entrepreneurs, we all have, I think you call it is it called a glass ceiling? Is that what you call? So we all have kind of like this paper ceiling. We think it's glass but it's paper and sometimes, to your original point, there is no ceiling there. We can go endlessly but we don't see that.

01:09:22 So I've got a friend who's a mentor of mine, one of the most successful entrepreneurs I know. Guy's also a billionaire. He's got all the things the yachts, the cars, the houses, all that. And I always come to him and I'm like, dude, okay, I got it. Here's the idea. It's going to be crazy. I give him the pitch and he's like that's good. I'm like and this is amazing, we're going to do 10X. And he'll just stand there and look at me and go 10X. And I go, yeah, yeah, we're gonna do 10X the money, we're gonna buy this company, we're gonna do these things. And he goes think bigger. I go, okay, okay, let me think I'm gonna double that. Okay, 20x. I'm thinking 20X. I'm thinking like I don't know how I'm gonna 20X it. I barely had a plan to 10X it Like 20X is crazy and he's already at 100. But he sees it, he's done it, he's been there.

01:10:13 What's the difference between me and him? Yeah, he's older, he's got more experience, a lot more money, but and he owns a plane Very different, but with that said, at the end of the day it's just the mindset. I don't have his mindset. I'm learning, I'm learning, I'm learning Every day, I'm getting closer, but I don't have his mindset. So it's the single most important thing, it is the most essential thing.

01:10:41 It's not enough to be told, it's not enough to just affirm it for yourself. That's a step. You have to believe it. You have to believe that you can make it happen. It's like when we do punching in martial arts, you punch past the wood. It's like when we do, you know, punching in martial arts, you punch past the wood like it's almost not there to break through. I used to do that when we were kids and we're taking karate. You know you'd break the wood and be like, yeah, hey, but the way you do that is you look past the wood, right, and so it's the same thing in business. You have to be able to look past your limitations and so far, the only way I found that doing that is having a mentor, having somebody who's been where you want to go, where you can model their success, and even if you're seeing a ceiling above you, they see no ceiling, so you can borrow their mindset for a moment.

01:11:29 - Chase (Host) If you think you're hitting a ceiling in your business, go look in the mirror there's your ceiling. I want to shout out this product here. I use these exogenous ketones, ketone IQ, before every podcast.

01:11:43 - Shaahin (Host) Is that right?

01:11:44 - Chase (Host) For like two years now, and the co-founder CEO, michael Brandt's personal friend, and he hosts these kind of like quarterly dinner things and we're attending one and he was talking to some other friends of mine that run another small business and we're talking about how they're like this was, this was a couple years ago, like this year, you know, we want to take it to like multiple seven figures or they said a very specific number and he just stopped them and he's like, why not? Why not a billion? Just so nonchalant, just like he's already like he's thinking like a hundred X all the time and to date, like my friends still tell me about that moment as one of the most pivotal moments in their business because it immediately was just like, oh, we were capping ourselves, we weren't thinking punching through the wall, that's right Through the board, that's right Through the board, that's right. So shout out, michael man, you're already. You're thinking billion dollar all the time. Great product too.

01:12:40 But as we get to kind of wrap up here, this has been incredible. Thank you so much for for your time and your experience. I want to ask you to think about. You know, go back to the very beginning of your entrepreneur journey. If you could go back and tell yourself what 15, 16 year old self um one piece of advice that would enhance, or give the probability of enhancing your personal life as much as it did your professional life. What do you think would it be?

01:13:09 - Shaahin (Host) I think it's know thyself right, know yourself. You have to have a unwavering belief in who you are and what you're truly capable of, and, I think, also seeking mentorship, never working in a vacuum and choices. One thing we know is that the decisions that we make bring us to where we are. All the decisions that you've made in your life, that I've made in my life, have brought us to this point, here and now, in everything that we're doing. That's what it is. So making decisions is essential.

01:13:57 One thing we know about decisions is that sometimes things are left to fate, and it's not you, it's not me, it's just the way the wind blows.

01:14:06 I believe you can create your own luck, but, with that said, when you make those decisions, the thing that we know is that the more choices that you have scientifically proven, the better decision you're going to make. Now you might make the original thought that you had as far as a decision goes, but having 20 decisions, 20 choices to choose from, allows you to make better decisions. So look at things from the standpoint of surrounding yourself with great people. You want to surround yourself with people above you, people below you, both financially, from a mindset standpoint, people who have your back around you, because there's no price that you can put on good friends and good friendship, that it'll get you through a lot of hard times, and that life really isn't about winning or losing. It's about the journey and getting through that journey in a way that's impactful and finally do cool shit with cool people and make an impact on your world in some way that will give you the significance that you seek. That's what I would say Do more cool shit.

01:15:24 - Chase (Host) Do more cool shit. Cool shit, yeah, um, and to your point there on uh, you know luck. What's the quote? The harder I work, the luckier I get. The harder you work, the luckier you get.

01:15:35 Yeah, it's all possible. Well, this has been incredible. Thank you so much. My final question the whole point of Ever Forward Radio is to help me and my audience propel forward in life, to keep moving ever forward in a unique or collective part of our life. What do those two words mean to you? How would you say you live a life ever forward?

01:15:56 - Shaahin (Host) I live a life ever forward. Well, if you're not moving forward, you're either standing still or moving backwards. So I guess that's part of it. I think, if you're asking me how I personally live a life that's moving ever forward, is through self-reflection. That's the first thing that comes to mind.

01:16:13 So I think there's two kinds of people in the world. I think you've got the kind of person that feels that they're at the mercy of their fate. The world is happening to them and there's nothing they can do. So they go out into the world and they're a victim to their circumstances. And then there's the second kind of person that says you know what? I'm going to take control of my life. Two things I need in life control and perspective, and I can switch them and use them in any balance that I want Control and perspective. So in every situation that comes in my life, I'm going to ask myself do I have control of the situation, yes or no? No, then I just need more perspective, and that's how you keep moving forward in life, because you might not be able to control the circumstances around you, but what you can control is your mindset about those circumstances, and that's what drives all of us forward I love that.

01:17:14 - Chase (Host) Do I have control or perspective? His home for me as well. I'm a big, uh stoic fan. Yeah, and uh, that's you know. The driving principle is, you know, do I have control of the situation or not? Am I going to react or respond? Um, the only thing we do have control over is our response to our circumstances, right? So control or perspective, yeah, that's gonna come in handy. Tune, that's gonna come in handy soon, uh, with uh new, new dad life, I'm sure. So much I'm not gonna control.

01:17:46 - Shaahin (Host) well, you understand your kid, your kids. You have your ideas as a father of what you want them to do. But, dude, that's a person and they're going to have their own ideas about how the world's going to go, how they want their lives to go. So part of it is you being the mentor, you being the guide and just gently guiding them. You become a decision architect. It's similar to what we teach in our Amazon course to people how you become a decision architect and, if it's okay with you, I'll give out the email to everybody.

01:18:17 - Chase (Host) Everything you share is going to be in the show notes.

01:18:18 - Shaahin (Host) You guys can just email me with the code ever forward in the subject heading and I'll give you the Amazon course for free. It is dark zest at gmailcom. That's D A R K ZS-S at gmailcom. Put ever forward in the subject heading, I'll give you the course. It's like 300 bucks. You get it for free. No credit card, nothing.

01:18:37 - Chase (Host) I just want people to be empowered to do that. Yeah, I got to ask where did Dard Zest come from?

01:18:42 - Shaahin (Host) You know I wrote a book a long time ago with a title. I spent a lot of time with the Aztec people people or the I should say the descendants of the Aztec people and we documented uh Aztec medicine man over the course of five or six years and the the Mexica people actually living in Mexico is a incredible experience and uh the book came from that.

01:19:06 - Chase (Host) Interesting. Yeah, that's very curious. I'm going to lean into that. Yeah, if you anybody wants to email me, I'll send you a link to the movie. You guys can watch it. Cool. Uh well, this has been incredible. Thank you so much. Yeah, of course, for more information on everything you just heard, make sure to check this episode show notes or head to everforwardradio.com