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Welcome to the The VICI Code, where we unlock real stories of small business owners who have battled chaos, crushed doubt, and conquered their challenges. Faith, family, and finances. No fluff, just raw, honest conversations that decode the path to victory, one story at a time. What is up? Thank you for joining us today as we explore our latest purpose-driven journey, the $15 billion operating system, where we focus on the science of scaling, how to identify business bottlenecks, leverage AI for exponential growth, and maintain the discipline required to drive billions in sales while staying anchored in core values. What does it take to move the needle in $15 billion in sales? It's not a secret sauce. It's a system. Today's guest has been building those systems since 1997, long before dropshipping was even a buzzword. Brian Stewart, Brian Stewart is a prolific operator and CMO who has exited four companies and currently oversees a diverse portfolio from F45 franchise to automotive YouTube channels and high tech automotive studios. Brian and I connected through Dan Martell's Elite Mastermind and the Power10 Mastermind.
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He is the ultimate operator's operator. Driving sales isn't just about good marketing. It's about a fanatical devotion to systems and the elimination of friction. With a career spanning from the 1997 dropshipping frontier to modern AI-driven venture capital, Brian brings a level of battle-tested wisdom that fits perfectly with the Vici code philosophy and moving from chaos to clarity. We are exploring the architecture of growth. We're diving into Brian's Trademark Growth OS to learn how to eliminate the chaos that kills most businesses during the scaling phase. We'll filter Brian's high-velocity career through our four pillars, faith, family, fitness, and finance. Brian, thank you so much. I've been having this circled on the calendar for a while, man.
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Hey, I appreciate it and love that intro. Yeah, I want to jump right in the breakthrough, right? Growth OS and bottlenecks. There was a 1997 pivot when, you know, dropshipping was around. No one knew about it.
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Most people were still trying to figure out how to dial into AOL. And you were building a digital supply chain. Looking back at the 27 year journey, what was the single most painful breakthrough that taught you that hustle doesn't scale, but systems do?
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I think early on, I didn't realize I was building systems, but something in my brain while I'm a very creative person, I'm also very analytical, which is kind of the collab of my skill set that's facilitated this. But what got me there is honestly, when I was in high school, because this is when my journey started, I was 16 years old when I launched the first business. And I had a great collection of teachers because being in that mid to late 90s in school, we had the ability to learn HTML, to learn marketing, to learn Photoshop. And it was actually a school project that taught me how to structure what became the initial blueprint that has evolved over 20 years. Speaking to that structure in that project and how it really kicked off all this is I took what was a family business that I had grown up with as long as I can remember and I use that as my project and I got 100% on that project with a little note from my teacher saying you have something pursue this. was never the intent but literally you never know where that first idea that first business will actually come from because while I might not have said I was super passionate about the family business just growing up in it and at that point basically remembering the last 10 or 12 years of just being in sales calls with my mom or being in this with my stepdad etc like it ingrained something into me that was the initial hustle, but I've always been pretty intuitive and just kind of always pushed hard around my interests. And that's kind of how the story kicked off. 16 years old is weird. It's still weird to say that in here. It's been 27 years Yeah, you've been doing it for a long time and you're a young veteran, as they say. You created GrowthOS to eliminate chaos. When you step into a new company as a fixer, what's the one chaos indicator you see Honestly, it's lack of consistency. It's the shiny object syndrome. When you go back to the core of what the growth OS is, this is built off of my own companies and what I've found is tried and true. It's you come in, you step in the door and I just look at the foundational stuff of like, are your meta ads consistently running all the time? Are your Google ads the same way? Are you targeting the right people? And does your messaging sound like you? A lot of times it's that simple. I know my last executive role, which I exited in 2021, I came into that company. They were doing $900 million a year, and in two and a half years, we scaled to over $2 billion a year. And everyone's like, well, how did you do that? Again, it wasn't by myself. We had a great leadership team, but our my my counterparts on the executive team were all ops guys. I was the only marketing and kind of acquisition guy that was in that wheelhouse. So we took that structure again, their systems layered in my kind of accelerator, new customer acquisition. And in that growth, by just being consistent and not even adding like we did basic standard ads, really good retention marketing through SMS and email. And we had a really good merchandising and promotional cadence.
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And we scaled that much with a core team of 31 people to do multiple billions of dollars. So it's just go back to the basics and over and over and over. I think some people struggle, even myself. I want to be consistent, but you also wonder, you know, what else could I be doing better? There's always that, that perfectionist that kind of creeps in, but consistency always wins. And I think it's easier to AB test things when you are consistent. So.
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Because that's piece one. Because the other part of what the growth OS uses, it uses both human touch as well as modern machine learning and AI. But really the AI aspect or the machine learning aspect is now I can take millions of lines of data. put it through my methodology, my lens, and then it gives you a very consistent usable that starts with the traditional, like, here's your yearly roadmap of what you're trying to achieve, your high-level goals. And then it works backwards into what do we need to achieve by quarter, and then your monthly rocks, and then what turns into weekly actions, and then daily tasks. And as long as you're checking those box, but it always is monitoring and it's always evolving what your daily and weekly actionable should be that roll up to the yearly target, because that's where, again, I have this challenge sometimes. We like the new tech, we like the new shiny thing, we try to jump on that. While that is helpful to stay ahead, we don't want that to become the 90 percent of what you're spending your time on. You want it to be that 5-10 percent of that time. Really, that's what GrowthOS helps is wrangle founders and operators like me back into what we should focus, while Got it. Makes sense. Keep that big goal consistent and then, you know, iterate along the way with trying to make that that consistency day So I want to kind of go back to what you said, and you kind of got ahead of me on this. Actually, I wanted to go over how you help scale a brand from $900 million to $2.3 billion.
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At that level, the stakes are astronomical. How do you maintain the finance discipline to stay focused on the one constraint rather than getting distracted by the Well, again, as I mentioned, we had a superb executive and leadership team. A lot of them have come from Fortune 50, Fortune 100 companies. But we worked well together. But when I took the lens of what I focused on, it's less about the big revenue numbers, because it is highest day we ever had was $72 million in one day, which is nuts to think of. Wow. We focus on what are our specific targets that we go after that roll up into what the total organization so like a lot of ours is like attrition rate ltv customer acquisition or cactus some people call it now. And hitting those really, again, it's those foundational metrics and understanding what actions we take that target and really help us hit those marks. And then it's really just keep turning the dial. There's always a diminishing return point, but a lot of times the diminishing return, when you're going from a million to 5 million to 20 million to 100 million is the systems, the stack that you have in place Is usually only good to a certain volume or certain revenue number and then you have to do that. Evaluation and going to like one of your favorite things fitness which will talk about two is it's that bulking and leaning phase as you're trying to get in shape i honestly run marketing very similar it's like you're bulking is like okay i gotta get more eyeballs.
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Then you get this bigger pull and then you refine that pull down to back to the core audience, the real driver. But then you can't just keep pulling the same lever, you got to find the next lever so that you can bulk again, and then you lean that. Then you go from 1,000 customers to 10,000 customers, 100,000 customers to a million customers.
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It's a consistent cycle of identifying that opportunity. I know people have challenges where They'll be consistent, but you can only pull Google ad levers so much. There's a point where you've really optimized that channel and then you got to find the next channel, that next opportunity to build it to the same capacity as you did that first one or two. And then it's just compounding effect towards when you get to the end and you got 20, 30, 40 channels, 40 different touch points that then gets you the total volume, Yeah, I've never had it explained that way where you're bulking up and then leaning out.
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I like that. It's usually, you know, punching up and then, you know, you know, dialing in the system. But yeah, that definitely makes a lot of sense. And I have a question about leadology, right? Tell us a little bit more about that. So leadology is using AI. How are you seeing a leadology using AI in 2026 to help founders move faster So here's how leadology really started. Originally, cool name, grabbed it, I don't know, I think I've owned the name since 2005, something long, long time. But the idea is, if you think about it, is a lot of marketing that I focused on is developing quality leads. So it's the knowledge or the guidance of leading.
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That's kind of what the name behind it means. And What i've taken over the years of growing these businesses is now i have basically taken almost four years but really heavily the last year and a half of. Training my own AI with some things that are just out of the box was with with really cool connectors. A lot of people don't realize that you can quickly create a database with BigQuery that automatically natively connects with Shopify and meta and Google ads because really all you're trying to do is get all that detail. all the, everything you need about your customer, the personas, how they interact, their customer padding through the website, how they interact with those touch points. And then being able to have what I call, like, I look at my AI as it's my PhD assistant that is a PhD in every aspect of every vertical and knowledge base in the world that I would ask it. But then I put a lens to what I care about and why I say how I care about is because my focus has always been around scaling and growth, primarily customer acquisition. But we know retention is important because you don't want to always buy new customers. You got to nurture the ones that you have as well. It pulls all that in. Again, as I mentioned, it helps reign us in and keep us focused on what is the most important actionables Towards the targets that we established here's the big piece for me i am not a. It's not that at this point i actually pretty much trust a lot of the ai and a lot of the stuff that i've done i still believe in the human review human touch of. that interaction, because while it's smart, there's still an aspect of experienced human knowledge that we have, this feel we get when we're good at our craft, that that little extra layer is the difference to me of someone making it to 10 million or Yeah. Yeah. Um, let's jump into, uh, fitness again. I'm circling back to fitness. You know, I was going to do this. Uh, your portfolio includes F45 training franchises in the, in the VICI framework.
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We believe fitness is the foundation of leadership. How does your personal physical discipline mirror the repeatable So we'll talk about the F45 thing. I'm not typically, I'm, so let's go way, way back. The things that excited me that were physical growing up is I skateboard, I rollerblade, I raced motocross, I did those, I surfed because I grew up in St. Augustine, Florida, I bodyboard, I did those things. Those were the things I enjoyed was the physical working out as an activity. And as I got older, and even how I will talk about quickly on my current journey over the last, it's been less than 12 months. But it's why I like to F45, because there's circuit training to me, it's, it's less of just weights at a specific machine, even though it's stations, it's kind of switches up. And I'll call it it's, it leans into a little bit of my ADHD that I've not been officially diagnosed with, but I'll go with I probably have a little bit because I can hyper focus.
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But It's, it's, it's what I've always loved doing, because I love outdoors. I lived in Asheville, North Carolina up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. And we would hike, we'd go waterfalls, like that's the stuff that I love from a fitness perspective. And my wife, She'll she'll joke. It's not a joke. Actually, I don't train for anything. We'll go do a Spartan race or we'll go do a half marathon. She trains the entire time I put in a couple weeks of effort and then I'm the one pulling her at the end of the finish line. But that's also a mental strength that I have that I can kind of push through. But That's what I learned about myself from the physical fitness side that I love the most. And then fast forward to joining Elite, and one of our non-negotiables is working out daily. So I now daily spend roughly, probably on average, hour and 10, hour and 15 minutes.
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Sometimes I'll do an hour and a half, because I like doing a little bit of the, what's it called? uh, 75 heart. My wife's done it a bunch of times. Oh yeah.
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And there's certain methodologies and practices they But here's again, it goes back to my marketing. It was back to my consistent about just being consistent. Since I joined the league, I went from 212 pounds and I now I'm sitting at one 82. The difference too is my weight loss has slowed but I have now gained nine pounds of muscle Right and now and I'm not doing any photos publicly until I'm gonna do on the year mark I'm gonna do 12 months ago and I'm gonna do where I'm at now. It's already pretty radical. It's mostly noticeable my face first, but again, it's it's What I enjoy about fitness as well, especially because I have a daughter and a son, she'll be 14 next month, he'll be 12 in like a week, is they're starting to adopt that. They're like the right age for us to like re-adopt this commitment to fitness that we actually enjoy. For whatever reason, at times it does fall off. But when we get back into that groove, it's like the excitement, the enjoyment of it. And then seeing your kids, my daughter go in and I hear the Peloton tread running and she's on it and no one asked her to go work out. She just chose to do it herself. And that's kind of the full circle of like they're learning the enjoyment that I gained at a very young age.
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And then, you know, as we get into that hustle and grind of our careers, we're focused on growth and money. And then you start hitting that later part where the things you enjoyed earlier in life become more important, especially once you have kids. And Joe, Yeah. Yeah. I got a lot of kids. Um, and one of my older ones, he, uh, he's been coming to CrossFit with me lately and it's a great, you know, the endorphins are going, you know, we made it through a CrossFit workout, which is always, you know, something to be proud of. So seeing him get used to the workouts, it's, it's really good to, uh, to see family, join you because you've lead by example, right? And it's hard to tell your kids to do this or that when, you know, you're not even doing that. That's why it's, it's always weird to see some of these parents who are pretty aggressive in, you know, pushing their kids, but you look at them and you're just like, it's not, it's kind of falling on dead ears and the kid's probably not really, you know, as motivated as if, you know, you were right beside them So, um, yeah, I'm glad you point like my kids have seen me be an entrepreneur or be an executive their entire lives. Like I even had them, I don't like to say it this way, but trained where my dog office door is closed. They know I'm on a call and I can hear them quietly. Dad's on the phone. But then I would always open my door when I'm off so they could come in and sit and watch. So they learned the hustle and the grind of what it takes to be successful.
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But what I needed to layer on for them was the fitness thing. And, you know, Dan said something about a month into me being in a part of elite that like triggered of like, shit, I really do need to get in. This is actually it wasn't even about fitness. But it was about presentation and I understand presentation as being and he said one of his mentors talked about said to him. Why don't you wash your cars consistently? You have these beautiful exotic vehicles and you don't wash them, but like once every couple of months and they look dirty.
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And then we were just in a natural conversation about daily non-negotiables and the fitness. And for whatever reason, it just kind of clicked at that moment of like, it's the presentation of you. This is fitness is the presentation of you and your and how you outwardly present yourself before you can speak. It goes the same thing about your home, your vehicles. You don't have to have a fancy house or fancy car, but it's the pride in the commitment to take care of the things you have. And then that all translates into. as you mentioned, how we are teaching and guiding our kids by example. So it's like, maybe I had the career and the money part right, but if I don't have the taking care of the home and the fitness piece, then they're always going to be missing a component of what really will And it's funny that as a car guy, that it took the car analogy for you to actually make it a more consistent part of your week. And I wonder how the next Spartan's gonna go. I mean, for someone who didn't train and then showed up and still did well, and now that you're training, do you have a few Spartans on So I didn't, but I do. Let's see, what's today's date? Not this weekend, the following weekend, there's a Spartan in Houston. So I just decided last night that I'm going to sign up and I'm just going to go out there and do it. Because one, I just want to see, like I did also in Pearland, Texas, we have the turkey trot, which is the idea. Pearland struggles with communicating to its residents that they have these events they're putting on. So I just happened to wake up, you know, I always wake up around six o'clock and this was Thanksgiving Day. And I just was scrolling through and I saw someone mention it and I was like, Hey, Colleen, I'm going to go do this. I'm going to go do this run. And I just went out there and and did I could it wouldn't let me do the half marathon. So I did the five K and I had one of the best five K's I've probably had since I was probably twenty two years old. So like there's a Well, thirty pounds. And the fact as we get older, our joints are not the same. Right. Right. Still can push through that, but my goal is to get back to a consistent, like if I do a five or a 10K, be somewhere in the eight and eight and a half minutes and then train up to be able to do a marathon sometime in I've tried to, I've tried to train for the marathons. Um, it's a, it's a big commitment and, uh, cause just a lot of miles and, you know, you could be in really good shape and, you know, sometimes injuries happen. So good luck with that. I did a half marathon a few years ago. A marathon's definitely still on my radar. I want to do a, an Ironman. I don't know when that'll happen, but, uh, need more time to, you know, You just got to put it on the calendar and make it a non-negotiable. Because it's like, if you pay, because that's why my marathon I actually want to do in Hawaii. That way, I have to pay for the flights. I have to pay for the marathon. I have to pay for everything. Because then you're talking about it's not a small commitment at that point. Then it's Well, and it's a good vacation. It is. Uh, uh, you've, you've, you've had four founder exits and run multiple high stakes firms in the midst of that high velocity growth. How do you protect the family pillar? What are the non-negotiable systems you've installed at home to ensure you don't win a Well, I didn't do a great job for a long time. Um, It's also I know some men have this challenge as well as we kind of don't feel hopeful when our children are small. Especially like, you know, we did a lot of things naturally with my both our kids were breastfed, like, we actually made them food based off of we pureed whatever we ate. So they also learned all that. But it was Really, as I exited as an executive so again, it's not even been that many years you're talking about 5 years is where I knew I needed to slow down. I still haven't slowed down that much. But, um. I now make time so like, uh, until my kids got into middle school, the last, you know, my son's in sixth grade. So up through fifth grade, I started driving them to school. I would pick them up as much as possible. Um, I always try to adopt the, I wake up in the morning, do my emails, do things I need to do, help get them up, get them moving, obviously take them to school. And then I try, even if I'm not work day is not done, I try to be home now. and over the last four to five years when they get home, and then we'll hang out, I'll make sure they get going on their homework, and then while they're doing their homework, I go do my work again. It's an advantage we have as entrepreneurs where we don't have to just lock in in this constant number of hours. I like to break it up because also mentally gives me a little break. It's something in elite that we're coached on is our calendar. I honestly locked in my calendar probably in the last year or two when I was an exec. And then I've adopted and accelerated that more to the point of like I used to have to. Good or bad. Put reminders of like. Take my wife to dinner go buy flowers because I get so hyper locked in into what I'm doing. I don't think about anything else right or wrong.
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I'm hyper focused and those are and it's not the things I wouldn't want to do but I actually need something to stop me. Remind me because then when I go do that what that reminder is because like big thing for me for holidays is like I go Pick out the food and I cook the whole dinner and I cook very elaborate meals and then I'll go grab flowers But and then I'll put multiple bundles of flowers together into an actual vase and then I'll buy her little chocolates and I do this for my kids now to where when I'm reminded to stop I put a lot of time and effort just like I do with everything and But it really has been the calendar in that kind of consistency of like what my day looks like, that is now making the family side better. And honestly, I noticed it in my kids more to like, their call it attitudes are much better. They see me more than Yeah. And I mean, you're just being intentional with your time and it, it sounds silly, you know, and I'm right there with you, like having to, you know, block off time or put in reminders for that stuff. But that's the structure that, you know, makes us different. Right. And it, it allows us to be more flexible when we're not on the clock. So I, I, I like, I like blocking time off and even though it seems a little, a little too structured, um, I block off time to be not You know, when you think about this, if you think about the generation families that have generational wealth, and we're not talking about one or two generations, but it's been four or five, six generations. If you look at the structure they have in their families that a lot of people don't know if they fully see it, or maybe if they see it, they don't understand it. They feel like it's too constraining, but.
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It is that schedule, that consistency, that blocking, how a family properly run is the same as properly running a business. It's not done exactly the same, but it's the structure behind, are we sitting down and making sure we're aligned? Are we sitting down and addressing the challenges that we're having, the arguments that we're having? Are we sitting down and making sure we're teaching our children? And I just had this conversation last night with my daughter and one of her close friends on chores. And I was like, do you know why we give you chores? Well, because you don't want to do it. I said, no, that is not the reason. That statement didn't come out of my daughter, but I know she was thinking it. But I'm like, no. I said, technically, we would be happier if we just did it because it'd be done to our expectation.
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We don't try to set the exact expectation, but it's the expectation of you doing the dishes, you taking the trash out, you feeding the animals. It's you learning responsibility so that you can be a productive adult as when you go out into the world and you are then responsible. But where wealthier families take that, it's not just those responsibilities, it's we choose the extracurriculars that you're gonna do because there's the right lens on it. When I just had to have, my daughter's going into high school, and what's weird about high school now, it reminds me of when I went into college. You're picking what you're gonna do for the next four years in high school. She's gonna be an orthodontist. So our schooling here has both your normal classes, so she's in AP or dual enrollment, so she's all the way through going to be in college, even in even though she's in high school. But.
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It's teaching them that accelerated commitment of what it looks like, and I'd still balance this like OK, is this too much?
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Because their kids and we want them to have fun, but it's the same thing we had to learn, which is. This is a non-negotiable work and your commitment to your business, your clients, your employees, you can't deviate from that. And I think it's important, but we do want to make sure same for us. The kids still need to have time to have fun and hang out their friends and enjoy it but it's the same thing as us as adults like we can't just work 100% of the time we still have to have. That good i'll call it productive downtime, which means we're enjoying ourselves we're connecting with similar similar people like minded people and.
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Yeah, absolutely. And that my, uh, my 15 year old just started working his first, first week was his first job was, uh, he just started last week. And, you know, we're already talking about like, you know, well, you're going to pay for your haircut now. And, you know, like these little things that are like, We could pay for them, and we just need you to understand what a budget is. You're not going to learn this in school. You need to know how to manage your money and take care of yourself. But also, just because you're doing sports doesn't mean that you don't do chores. You still got to do all this stuff, because I got to work. I got to pay the bills. I got to do this. I got to do that. I got to make sure I get you to places. There's always going to be responsibilities. And really it is intentionally trying to overload them a little bit, like from managed a little bit, um, so that they are forced to, to, to manage their schedule better and understand. that you don't have to do it all, but if you wanted to do it all, this is how you could do it. And then you realize like you'll start prioritizing things and realize, well, you know, these things are important to me, so I'm going to prioritize these. And then these ones, you know, I'll get to when I, when I, when I can. Um, so that's, that's kind of like the, the, the lessons that we're going through in our house.
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We are the house that everyone comes to. We build a pool. It's not some crazy pool, but we build a pool because we wanted to be the house because one we can protect our own children a bit more with them being with us. But we've our house has become also the safe space. But the point saying that is. We'll coach and teaching our children while their friends are around. And I see this more and more where we'll tell them no. Or like my daughter went to the Houston Rodeo with my wife and some of her friends to see Forrest Frank. So he played there and we're having a conversation in the car because we also are the ones that take everyone to church as well. So all the girls and the boys come with us and we're having this conversation. One's like, Well, my mom said 50 bucks to pay for this part. So then you should you'll have more so that we can do this. And I said, look, it's not about the money thing. I said, it's about always. It's about the consumption, always having to do something, have something new, have something different. I said, we make you choose. Do you want this or do you want that? We can afford both, but you need to choose because if you choose to do X career and you only make 60 grand a year, you have to be able to afford. Hold on one second, yep. You have to. I want my children to be able to live within their means, whether they have a trust or have this other stuff because of what I've been able to achieve in my career. Everyone has to learn and a lot of times and the challenge that we have nowadays is through social media through other things everyone's understanding of what riches is The ultra wealthy right people were not making 10 million dollars a year Most people are not worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right? and that has become so normalized that I'm trying to level set them and get them to realistic that like I am rich and But I'm in comparison to these people that you are comparing that is actually rich.
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And but, you know, it's it's it's very thoughtful. But we try to, like, facilitate this across the friends group as well, because a lot of people just give their children Yeah. Yeah. And you got to pull them back down to earth really. Like you gotta hate to sound like our parents, but know what a dollar is worth. Cause they don't, I mean, they really actually don't like just have no idea. And so it, you gotta do them a favor. And at the end of the day, it's going to be just, it's going to be the same story as it went through with us, where like, we're going to look back at a point in time and be like, I understand now I get it. They may not understand now, but they will eventually.
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We always see little glimmers that it that it's clicking.
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They might not want to accept it yet, but it is. That's the success metric as the kids are getting older is you see at times that it clicks. but they're just not fully there. They still always Absolutely. Now let's wrap things up with a little bit of faith pillar. Whether it's spiritual or commitment to a higher mission, how does that anchor your decision making when you're doing turnaround consulting for a struggling brand?
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Let's see. What's interesting is I find the clients that I can help the most are ones that actually are more aligned religiously and culturally. And it's not even on purpose because we live in Houston, Texas, one of the most diverse cities that you can like. Well, what we talk about all the time is like if you look at my daughter as an example where it ties into this is like. We have all forms of Asian, we have all forms of basically every race, every culture, it isn't just one or the other, where I grew up, everyone looked like me. And the point in saying that where it's related to the consultancy side is there is an alignment in culture, in faith, that when your supporting function is aligned with you, you're able to push forward more. And it was the same thing when we grew at AppMex. When you look at the executive, you look at the culture of the company, we all were relatively aligned while we all had our nuances and our all of our preferences, you could probably say 75%. we're in alignment. And while you don't think that, oh, we're talking about business, and we're talking about growing, and we're talking about doing these things, but it is a mindset. It is a piece in there. If both sides aren't on the same page, and it's not just by corporate metrics, but also in your faith, in your cultural beliefs, you miss somewhere. And then that miss turns into Yeah, I always find that founders and leaders that have a higher calling for something greater than themselves, greater than the glory, just always tend to resonate better. And it resonates with the people around them. It passes it on to them and then it filters on from there to the other people that aren't in direct contact with that leader. So definitely having a higher calling, a higher purpose. You know, doing things not for yourself is really the golden rule, right? Like, you know, it's just easier, you know, when you're selfless Yeah, I mean, and then speaking on faith specifically, I mean, the last couple of years, we've had more of a full recommitment back to that. And honestly, it's in thanks to our daughter. we didn't push this on her, and she just started connecting with like-minded people, and we actually have a really great church that's near us that does a lot. It's a larger church, but what we like about it is just like their general methodologies, how they preach, how their practices, and then just their support, their camps, the life groups all the things they do and what I'm noticing even for both my kids who they are growing into they're also aligning with more of the like-minded people and again this is not a it's like it's a very diverse but again it's the faith is the commonality and it's just I don't know it's something I know from a faith perspective that has existed but something Greatly changed since lots of things culturally have changed since 2020 because I think it kind of scared a lot of people, but I like where certain aspects of it is going. And it's again cool to watch my children actually push me and my wife back into something we always believed in, but we just weren't fully committed. And we couldn't even answer why at one point. It wasn't that we just were mad or didn't have time. We just kind of fell out of that commitment, not in the belief, but in actually the time. And now it's a non-negotiable. Every Sunday we go as a family. We bring friends along And every Sunday evening when they have the kids life group stuff, the kids are gone. They're there every time. And It's great, it's good to see. And I'm glad that we made that choice again to kind of have it to this extent, this And that's the best part. It wasn't someone, oh, you should go again. I can't believe you're not. No, it was not one of those conversations. It's just like the fitness thing. It was the right timing, the right place, the right group of people that you just felt like we just naturally got pulled in. not Yeah, and I think, you know, over the last five to six years, primarily, you know, around the COVID time, I think people just really were looking around wondering like, man, what's, what is life? Like, what's going on? There's some real dark, you know, evil in this world. And it's like, I think it's kind of really led to, um, a resurgence of people, you know, wondering like, what, what is, what, what's life all about, you know, and, and what, what are we here for? And, um, it's good to see, I mean, I'm one of them, I'm one of them who've, who've, who've come back and, you know, wanted to live a life of purpose and not worry about keeping up with anybody or status or vanity, just looking out for each other and just trying to live a life that I mean, I've had my times in life where, you know, I was very angry, very upset. I lost my father when I was five. So like, but the one thing about faith whether I was angry or upset or whatever is if you actually just look at the lessons in there you can even almost remove the faith and religious lens from it there's good stories there's good ideology to follow When you pull that piece out like it's just in if a lot of people could look at it, even from that lens like it can help guide you in the right way, because if you even look at it from a business perspective you'll find. it's the consistency, it's the commitment, it's the all these things, there's these pillars that it does teach at us as a foundation that affect every aspect of your life in a positive way as long as you commit to those pillars. It's not the religious side and it's not these other sides, it's just look at it foundationally first if you are You know, like I said, when I was younger, I was angry, but I still we still always went to church and I still always like the stories in the lessons that were there like it was still interesting. Here's one last piece on this in college. I took a lot of theology classes across all religions because religion, to me, ties to cultural and also ties a lot to psychology, which leans into my marketing side. And it's just, I think the more people understand culture and different cultures, the easier it is. While people can be very different from us, we can still find common ground and ways to get along, which Yeah. Be nice. Be kind. Forgiveness. Right.
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All those things are just so important. And it just, it allows you to like, you know, the one thing with forgiveness, it's just, it's not so much for them. It's for you. Like you should not be carrying around that weight. that anger and dwelling on that. So I think that's the other side. Yeah, be kind, but also be kind to yourself too.
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And, you know, I think that's a really important lesson that I've been able to find a lot of peace with, you know, recently as I've been, you know, diving back into my religion. So, yeah. Brian, that's all we got today, man. Thank you so much for your time and for your candid look into how to scale 15 billion in sales and doing it for a very long time and consistently. If you're a founder ready to eliminate the chaos in your acquisition or operations, you can find Brian on LinkedIn or visit leadology.net. We also have his Instagram handle in the show notes. Brian, No, if you ever need to have questions with marketing and growth, just hit me up. I'm always happy to have at least a conversation. And the way I put it is I give information for free, but if you put me There we go. All right. Brian, thank you so much for coming on. Everyone, stay blessed, stay disciplined and keep scaling. We'll see you on the next episode of Vici Code. Thanks for tuning in to the Vici Code, where the underdogs rise and the numbers finally make sense. If today's story hit home, share it. And remember, faith fuels
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Welcome to the The VICI Code, where we unlock real stories of small business owners who have battled chaos, crushed doubt, and conquered their challenges. Faith, family, and finances. No fluff, just raw, honest conversations that decode the path to victory, one story at a time. What is up? Thank you for joining us today as we explore our latest purpose-driven journey, the $15 billion operating system, where we focus on the science of scaling, how to identify business bottlenecks, leverage AI for exponential growth, and maintain the discipline required to drive billions in sales while staying anchored in core values. What does it take to move the needle in $15 billion in sales? It's not a secret sauce. It's a system. Today's guest has been building those systems since 1997, long before dropshipping was even a buzzword. Brian Stewart, Brian Stewart is a prolific operator and CMO who has exited four companies and currently oversees a diverse portfolio from F45 franchise to automotive YouTube channels and high tech automotive studios. Brian and I connected through Dan Martell's Elite Mastermind and the Power10 Mastermind.
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He is the ultimate operator's operator. Driving sales isn't just about good marketing. It's about a fanatical devotion to systems and the elimination of friction. With a career spanning from the 1997 dropshipping frontier to modern AI-driven venture capital, Brian brings a level of battle-tested wisdom that fits perfectly with the Vici code philosophy and moving from chaos to clarity. We are exploring the architecture of growth. We're diving into Brian's Trademark Growth OS to learn how to eliminate the chaos that kills most businesses during the scaling phase. We'll filter Brian's high-velocity career through our four pillars, faith, family, fitness, and finance. Brian, thank you so much. I've been having this circled on the calendar for a while, man.
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Hey, I appreciate it and love that intro. Yeah, I want to jump right in the breakthrough, right? Growth OS and bottlenecks. There was a 1997 pivot when, you know, dropshipping was around. No one knew about it.
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Most people were still trying to figure out how to dial into AOL. And you were building a digital supply chain. Looking back at the 27 year journey, what was the single most painful breakthrough that taught you that hustle doesn't scale, but systems do?
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I think early on, I didn't realize I was building systems, but something in my brain while I'm a very creative person, I'm also very analytical, which is kind of the collab of my skill set that's facilitated this. But what got me there is honestly, when I was in high school, because this is when my journey started, I was 16 years old when I launched the first business. And I had a great collection of teachers because being in that mid to late 90s in school, we had the ability to learn HTML, to learn marketing, to learn Photoshop. And it was actually a school project that taught me how to structure what became the initial blueprint that has evolved over 20 years. Speaking to that structure in that project and how it really kicked off all this is I took what was a family business that I had grown up with as long as I can remember and I use that as my project and I got 100% on that project with a little note from my teacher saying you have something pursue this. was never the intent but literally you never know where that first idea that first business will actually come from because while I might not have said I was super passionate about the family business just growing up in it and at that point basically remembering the last 10 or 12 years of just being in sales calls with my mom or being in this with my stepdad etc like it ingrained something into me that was the initial hustle, but I've always been pretty intuitive and just kind of always pushed hard around my interests. And that's kind of how the story kicked off. 16 years old is weird. It's still weird to say that in here. It's been 27 years Yeah, you've been doing it for a long time and you're a young veteran, as they say. You created GrowthOS to eliminate chaos. When you step into a new company as a fixer, what's the one chaos indicator you see Honestly, it's lack of consistency. It's the shiny object syndrome. When you go back to the core of what the growth OS is, this is built off of my own companies and what I've found is tried and true. It's you come in, you step in the door and I just look at the foundational stuff of like, are your meta ads consistently running all the time? Are your Google ads the same way? Are you targeting the right people? And does your messaging sound like you? A lot of times it's that simple. I know my last executive role, which I exited in 2021, I came into that company. They were doing $900 million a year, and in two and a half years, we scaled to over $2 billion a year. And everyone's like, well, how did you do that? Again, it wasn't by myself. We had a great leadership team, but our my my counterparts on the executive team were all ops guys. I was the only marketing and kind of acquisition guy that was in that wheelhouse. So we took that structure again, their systems layered in my kind of accelerator, new customer acquisition. And in that growth, by just being consistent and not even adding like we did basic standard ads, really good retention marketing through SMS and email. And we had a really good merchandising and promotional cadence.
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And we scaled that much with a core team of 31 people to do multiple billions of dollars. So it's just go back to the basics and over and over and over. I think some people struggle, even myself. I want to be consistent, but you also wonder, you know, what else could I be doing better? There's always that, that perfectionist that kind of creeps in, but consistency always wins. And I think it's easier to AB test things when you are consistent. So.
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Because that's piece one. Because the other part of what the growth OS uses, it uses both human touch as well as modern machine learning and AI. But really the AI aspect or the machine learning aspect is now I can take millions of lines of data. put it through my methodology, my lens, and then it gives you a very consistent usable that starts with the traditional, like, here's your yearly roadmap of what you're trying to achieve, your high-level goals. And then it works backwards into what do we need to achieve by quarter, and then your monthly rocks, and then what turns into weekly actions, and then daily tasks. And as long as you're checking those box, but it always is monitoring and it's always evolving what your daily and weekly actionable should be that roll up to the yearly target, because that's where, again, I have this challenge sometimes. We like the new tech, we like the new shiny thing, we try to jump on that. While that is helpful to stay ahead, we don't want that to become the 90 percent of what you're spending your time on. You want it to be that 5-10 percent of that time. Really, that's what GrowthOS helps is wrangle founders and operators like me back into what we should focus, while Got it. Makes sense. Keep that big goal consistent and then, you know, iterate along the way with trying to make that that consistency day So I want to kind of go back to what you said, and you kind of got ahead of me on this. Actually, I wanted to go over how you help scale a brand from $900 million to $2.3 billion.
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At that level, the stakes are astronomical. How do you maintain the finance discipline to stay focused on the one constraint rather than getting distracted by the Well, again, as I mentioned, we had a superb executive and leadership team. A lot of them have come from Fortune 50, Fortune 100 companies. But we worked well together. But when I took the lens of what I focused on, it's less about the big revenue numbers, because it is highest day we ever had was $72 million in one day, which is nuts to think of. Wow. We focus on what are our specific targets that we go after that roll up into what the total organization so like a lot of ours is like attrition rate ltv customer acquisition or cactus some people call it now. And hitting those really, again, it's those foundational metrics and understanding what actions we take that target and really help us hit those marks. And then it's really just keep turning the dial. There's always a diminishing return point, but a lot of times the diminishing return, when you're going from a million to 5 million to 20 million to 100 million is the systems, the stack that you have in place Is usually only good to a certain volume or certain revenue number and then you have to do that. Evaluation and going to like one of your favorite things fitness which will talk about two is it's that bulking and leaning phase as you're trying to get in shape i honestly run marketing very similar it's like you're bulking is like okay i gotta get more eyeballs.
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Then you get this bigger pull and then you refine that pull down to back to the core audience, the real driver. But then you can't just keep pulling the same lever, you got to find the next lever so that you can bulk again, and then you lean that. Then you go from 1,000 customers to 10,000 customers, 100,000 customers to a million customers.
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It's a consistent cycle of identifying that opportunity. I know people have challenges where They'll be consistent, but you can only pull Google ad levers so much. There's a point where you've really optimized that channel and then you got to find the next channel, that next opportunity to build it to the same capacity as you did that first one or two. And then it's just compounding effect towards when you get to the end and you got 20, 30, 40 channels, 40 different touch points that then gets you the total volume, Yeah, I've never had it explained that way where you're bulking up and then leaning out.
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I like that. It's usually, you know, punching up and then, you know, you know, dialing in the system. But yeah, that definitely makes a lot of sense. And I have a question about leadology, right? Tell us a little bit more about that. So leadology is using AI. How are you seeing a leadology using AI in 2026 to help founders move faster So here's how leadology really started. Originally, cool name, grabbed it, I don't know, I think I've owned the name since 2005, something long, long time. But the idea is, if you think about it, is a lot of marketing that I focused on is developing quality leads. So it's the knowledge or the guidance of leading.
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That's kind of what the name behind it means. And What i've taken over the years of growing these businesses is now i have basically taken almost four years but really heavily the last year and a half of. Training my own AI with some things that are just out of the box was with with really cool connectors. A lot of people don't realize that you can quickly create a database with BigQuery that automatically natively connects with Shopify and meta and Google ads because really all you're trying to do is get all that detail. all the, everything you need about your customer, the personas, how they interact, their customer padding through the website, how they interact with those touch points. And then being able to have what I call, like, I look at my AI as it's my PhD assistant that is a PhD in every aspect of every vertical and knowledge base in the world that I would ask it. But then I put a lens to what I care about and why I say how I care about is because my focus has always been around scaling and growth, primarily customer acquisition. But we know retention is important because you don't want to always buy new customers. You got to nurture the ones that you have as well. It pulls all that in. Again, as I mentioned, it helps reign us in and keep us focused on what is the most important actionables Towards the targets that we established here's the big piece for me i am not a. It's not that at this point i actually pretty much trust a lot of the ai and a lot of the stuff that i've done i still believe in the human review human touch of. that interaction, because while it's smart, there's still an aspect of experienced human knowledge that we have, this feel we get when we're good at our craft, that that little extra layer is the difference to me of someone making it to 10 million or Yeah. Yeah. Um, let's jump into, uh, fitness again. I'm circling back to fitness. You know, I was going to do this. Uh, your portfolio includes F45 training franchises in the, in the VICI framework.
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We believe fitness is the foundation of leadership. How does your personal physical discipline mirror the repeatable So we'll talk about the F45 thing. I'm not typically, I'm, so let's go way, way back. The things that excited me that were physical growing up is I skateboard, I rollerblade, I raced motocross, I did those, I surfed because I grew up in St. Augustine, Florida, I bodyboard, I did those things. Those were the things I enjoyed was the physical working out as an activity. And as I got older, and even how I will talk about quickly on my current journey over the last, it's been less than 12 months. But it's why I like to F45, because there's circuit training to me, it's, it's less of just weights at a specific machine, even though it's stations, it's kind of switches up. And I'll call it it's, it leans into a little bit of my ADHD that I've not been officially diagnosed with, but I'll go with I probably have a little bit because I can hyper focus.
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But It's, it's, it's what I've always loved doing, because I love outdoors. I lived in Asheville, North Carolina up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. And we would hike, we'd go waterfalls, like that's the stuff that I love from a fitness perspective. And my wife, She'll she'll joke. It's not a joke. Actually, I don't train for anything. We'll go do a Spartan race or we'll go do a half marathon. She trains the entire time I put in a couple weeks of effort and then I'm the one pulling her at the end of the finish line. But that's also a mental strength that I have that I can kind of push through. But That's what I learned about myself from the physical fitness side that I love the most. And then fast forward to joining Elite, and one of our non-negotiables is working out daily. So I now daily spend roughly, probably on average, hour and 10, hour and 15 minutes.
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Sometimes I'll do an hour and a half, because I like doing a little bit of the, what's it called? uh, 75 heart. My wife's done it a bunch of times. Oh yeah.
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And there's certain methodologies and practices they But here's again, it goes back to my marketing. It was back to my consistent about just being consistent. Since I joined the league, I went from 212 pounds and I now I'm sitting at one 82. The difference too is my weight loss has slowed but I have now gained nine pounds of muscle Right and now and I'm not doing any photos publicly until I'm gonna do on the year mark I'm gonna do 12 months ago and I'm gonna do where I'm at now. It's already pretty radical. It's mostly noticeable my face first, but again, it's it's What I enjoy about fitness as well, especially because I have a daughter and a son, she'll be 14 next month, he'll be 12 in like a week, is they're starting to adopt that. They're like the right age for us to like re-adopt this commitment to fitness that we actually enjoy. For whatever reason, at times it does fall off. But when we get back into that groove, it's like the excitement, the enjoyment of it. And then seeing your kids, my daughter go in and I hear the Peloton tread running and she's on it and no one asked her to go work out. She just chose to do it herself. And that's kind of the full circle of like they're learning the enjoyment that I gained at a very young age.
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And then, you know, as we get into that hustle and grind of our careers, we're focused on growth and money. And then you start hitting that later part where the things you enjoyed earlier in life become more important, especially once you have kids. And Joe, Yeah. Yeah. I got a lot of kids. Um, and one of my older ones, he, uh, he's been coming to CrossFit with me lately and it's a great, you know, the endorphins are going, you know, we made it through a CrossFit workout, which is always, you know, something to be proud of. So seeing him get used to the workouts, it's, it's really good to, uh, to see family, join you because you've lead by example, right? And it's hard to tell your kids to do this or that when, you know, you're not even doing that. That's why it's, it's always weird to see some of these parents who are pretty aggressive in, you know, pushing their kids, but you look at them and you're just like, it's not, it's kind of falling on dead ears and the kid's probably not really, you know, as motivated as if, you know, you were right beside them So, um, yeah, I'm glad you point like my kids have seen me be an entrepreneur or be an executive their entire lives. Like I even had them, I don't like to say it this way, but trained where my dog office door is closed. They know I'm on a call and I can hear them quietly. Dad's on the phone. But then I would always open my door when I'm off so they could come in and sit and watch. So they learned the hustle and the grind of what it takes to be successful.
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But what I needed to layer on for them was the fitness thing. And, you know, Dan said something about a month into me being in a part of elite that like triggered of like, shit, I really do need to get in. This is actually it wasn't even about fitness. But it was about presentation and I understand presentation as being and he said one of his mentors talked about said to him. Why don't you wash your cars consistently? You have these beautiful exotic vehicles and you don't wash them, but like once every couple of months and they look dirty.
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And then we were just in a natural conversation about daily non-negotiables and the fitness. And for whatever reason, it just kind of clicked at that moment of like, it's the presentation of you. This is fitness is the presentation of you and your and how you outwardly present yourself before you can speak. It goes the same thing about your home, your vehicles. You don't have to have a fancy house or fancy car, but it's the pride in the commitment to take care of the things you have. And then that all translates into. as you mentioned, how we are teaching and guiding our kids by example. So it's like, maybe I had the career and the money part right, but if I don't have the taking care of the home and the fitness piece, then they're always going to be missing a component of what really will And it's funny that as a car guy, that it took the car analogy for you to actually make it a more consistent part of your week. And I wonder how the next Spartan's gonna go. I mean, for someone who didn't train and then showed up and still did well, and now that you're training, do you have a few Spartans on So I didn't, but I do. Let's see, what's today's date? Not this weekend, the following weekend, there's a Spartan in Houston. So I just decided last night that I'm going to sign up and I'm just going to go out there and do it. Because one, I just want to see, like I did also in Pearland, Texas, we have the turkey trot, which is the idea. Pearland struggles with communicating to its residents that they have these events they're putting on. So I just happened to wake up, you know, I always wake up around six o'clock and this was Thanksgiving Day. And I just was scrolling through and I saw someone mention it and I was like, Hey, Colleen, I'm going to go do this. I'm going to go do this run. And I just went out there and and did I could it wouldn't let me do the half marathon. So I did the five K and I had one of the best five K's I've probably had since I was probably twenty two years old. So like there's a Well, thirty pounds. And the fact as we get older, our joints are not the same. Right. Right. Still can push through that, but my goal is to get back to a consistent, like if I do a five or a 10K, be somewhere in the eight and eight and a half minutes and then train up to be able to do a marathon sometime in I've tried to, I've tried to train for the marathons. Um, it's a, it's a big commitment and, uh, cause just a lot of miles and, you know, you could be in really good shape and, you know, sometimes injuries happen. So good luck with that. I did a half marathon a few years ago. A marathon's definitely still on my radar. I want to do a, an Ironman. I don't know when that'll happen, but, uh, need more time to, you know, You just got to put it on the calendar and make it a non-negotiable. Because it's like, if you pay, because that's why my marathon I actually want to do in Hawaii. That way, I have to pay for the flights. I have to pay for the marathon. I have to pay for everything. Because then you're talking about it's not a small commitment at that point. Then it's Well, and it's a good vacation. It is. Uh, uh, you've, you've, you've had four founder exits and run multiple high stakes firms in the midst of that high velocity growth. How do you protect the family pillar? What are the non-negotiable systems you've installed at home to ensure you don't win a Well, I didn't do a great job for a long time. Um, It's also I know some men have this challenge as well as we kind of don't feel hopeful when our children are small. Especially like, you know, we did a lot of things naturally with my both our kids were breastfed, like, we actually made them food based off of we pureed whatever we ate. So they also learned all that. But it was Really, as I exited as an executive so again, it's not even been that many years you're talking about 5 years is where I knew I needed to slow down. I still haven't slowed down that much. But, um. I now make time so like, uh, until my kids got into middle school, the last, you know, my son's in sixth grade. So up through fifth grade, I started driving them to school. I would pick them up as much as possible. Um, I always try to adopt the, I wake up in the morning, do my emails, do things I need to do, help get them up, get them moving, obviously take them to school. And then I try, even if I'm not work day is not done, I try to be home now. and over the last four to five years when they get home, and then we'll hang out, I'll make sure they get going on their homework, and then while they're doing their homework, I go do my work again. It's an advantage we have as entrepreneurs where we don't have to just lock in in this constant number of hours. I like to break it up because also mentally gives me a little break. It's something in elite that we're coached on is our calendar. I honestly locked in my calendar probably in the last year or two when I was an exec. And then I've adopted and accelerated that more to the point of like I used to have to. Good or bad. Put reminders of like. Take my wife to dinner go buy flowers because I get so hyper locked in into what I'm doing. I don't think about anything else right or wrong.
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I'm hyper focused and those are and it's not the things I wouldn't want to do but I actually need something to stop me. Remind me because then when I go do that what that reminder is because like big thing for me for holidays is like I go Pick out the food and I cook the whole dinner and I cook very elaborate meals and then I'll go grab flowers But and then I'll put multiple bundles of flowers together into an actual vase and then I'll buy her little chocolates and I do this for my kids now to where when I'm reminded to stop I put a lot of time and effort just like I do with everything and But it really has been the calendar in that kind of consistency of like what my day looks like, that is now making the family side better. And honestly, I noticed it in my kids more to like, their call it attitudes are much better. They see me more than Yeah. And I mean, you're just being intentional with your time and it, it sounds silly, you know, and I'm right there with you, like having to, you know, block off time or put in reminders for that stuff. But that's the structure that, you know, makes us different. Right. And it, it allows us to be more flexible when we're not on the clock. So I, I, I like, I like blocking time off and even though it seems a little, a little too structured, um, I block off time to be not You know, when you think about this, if you think about the generation families that have generational wealth, and we're not talking about one or two generations, but it's been four or five, six generations. If you look at the structure they have in their families that a lot of people don't know if they fully see it, or maybe if they see it, they don't understand it. They feel like it's too constraining, but.
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It is that schedule, that consistency, that blocking, how a family properly run is the same as properly running a business. It's not done exactly the same, but it's the structure behind, are we sitting down and making sure we're aligned? Are we sitting down and addressing the challenges that we're having, the arguments that we're having? Are we sitting down and making sure we're teaching our children? And I just had this conversation last night with my daughter and one of her close friends on chores. And I was like, do you know why we give you chores? Well, because you don't want to do it. I said, no, that is not the reason. That statement didn't come out of my daughter, but I know she was thinking it. But I'm like, no. I said, technically, we would be happier if we just did it because it'd be done to our expectation.
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We don't try to set the exact expectation, but it's the expectation of you doing the dishes, you taking the trash out, you feeding the animals. It's you learning responsibility so that you can be a productive adult as when you go out into the world and you are then responsible. But where wealthier families take that, it's not just those responsibilities, it's we choose the extracurriculars that you're gonna do because there's the right lens on it. When I just had to have, my daughter's going into high school, and what's weird about high school now, it reminds me of when I went into college. You're picking what you're gonna do for the next four years in high school. She's gonna be an orthodontist. So our schooling here has both your normal classes, so she's in AP or dual enrollment, so she's all the way through going to be in college, even in even though she's in high school. But.
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It's teaching them that accelerated commitment of what it looks like, and I'd still balance this like OK, is this too much?
00:30:50.069 --> 00:31:27.861
Because their kids and we want them to have fun, but it's the same thing we had to learn, which is. This is a non-negotiable work and your commitment to your business, your clients, your employees, you can't deviate from that. And I think it's important, but we do want to make sure same for us. The kids still need to have time to have fun and hang out their friends and enjoy it but it's the same thing as us as adults like we can't just work 100% of the time we still have to have. That good i'll call it productive downtime, which means we're enjoying ourselves we're connecting with similar similar people like minded people and.
00:31:34.663 --> 00:32:55.920
Yeah, absolutely. And that my, uh, my 15 year old just started working his first, first week was his first job was, uh, he just started last week. And, you know, we're already talking about like, you know, well, you're going to pay for your haircut now. And, you know, like these little things that are like, We could pay for them, and we just need you to understand what a budget is. You're not going to learn this in school. You need to know how to manage your money and take care of yourself. But also, just because you're doing sports doesn't mean that you don't do chores. You still got to do all this stuff, because I got to work. I got to pay the bills. I got to do this. I got to do that. I got to make sure I get you to places. There's always going to be responsibilities. And really it is intentionally trying to overload them a little bit, like from managed a little bit, um, so that they are forced to, to, to manage their schedule better and understand. that you don't have to do it all, but if you wanted to do it all, this is how you could do it. And then you realize like you'll start prioritizing things and realize, well, you know, these things are important to me, so I'm going to prioritize these. And then these ones, you know, I'll get to when I, when I, when I can. Um, so that's, that's kind of like the, the, the lessons that we're going through in our house.
00:33:00.046 --> 00:35:12.987
We are the house that everyone comes to. We build a pool. It's not some crazy pool, but we build a pool because we wanted to be the house because one we can protect our own children a bit more with them being with us. But we've our house has become also the safe space. But the point saying that is. We'll coach and teaching our children while their friends are around. And I see this more and more where we'll tell them no. Or like my daughter went to the Houston Rodeo with my wife and some of her friends to see Forrest Frank. So he played there and we're having a conversation in the car because we also are the ones that take everyone to church as well. So all the girls and the boys come with us and we're having this conversation. One's like, Well, my mom said 50 bucks to pay for this part. So then you should you'll have more so that we can do this. And I said, look, it's not about the money thing. I said, it's about always. It's about the consumption, always having to do something, have something new, have something different. I said, we make you choose. Do you want this or do you want that? We can afford both, but you need to choose because if you choose to do X career and you only make 60 grand a year, you have to be able to afford. Hold on one second, yep. You have to. I want my children to be able to live within their means, whether they have a trust or have this other stuff because of what I've been able to achieve in my career. Everyone has to learn and a lot of times and the challenge that we have nowadays is through social media through other things everyone's understanding of what riches is The ultra wealthy right people were not making 10 million dollars a year Most people are not worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right? and that has become so normalized that I'm trying to level set them and get them to realistic that like I am rich and But I'm in comparison to these people that you are comparing that is actually rich.
00:35:13.088 --> 00:35:56.293
And but, you know, it's it's it's very thoughtful. But we try to, like, facilitate this across the friends group as well, because a lot of people just give their children Yeah. Yeah. And you got to pull them back down to earth really. Like you gotta hate to sound like our parents, but know what a dollar is worth. Cause they don't, I mean, they really actually don't like just have no idea. And so it, you gotta do them a favor. And at the end of the day, it's going to be just, it's going to be the same story as it went through with us, where like, we're going to look back at a point in time and be like, I understand now I get it. They may not understand now, but they will eventually.
00:35:58.454 --> 00:36:02.059
We always see little glimmers that it that it's clicking.
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They might not want to accept it yet, but it is. That's the success metric as the kids are getting older is you see at times that it clicks. but they're just not fully there. They still always Absolutely. Now let's wrap things up with a little bit of faith pillar. Whether it's spiritual or commitment to a higher mission, how does that anchor your decision making when you're doing turnaround consulting for a struggling brand?
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Let's see. What's interesting is I find the clients that I can help the most are ones that actually are more aligned religiously and culturally. And it's not even on purpose because we live in Houston, Texas, one of the most diverse cities that you can like. Well, what we talk about all the time is like if you look at my daughter as an example where it ties into this is like. We have all forms of Asian, we have all forms of basically every race, every culture, it isn't just one or the other, where I grew up, everyone looked like me. And the point in saying that where it's related to the consultancy side is there is an alignment in culture, in faith, that when your supporting function is aligned with you, you're able to push forward more. And it was the same thing when we grew at AppMex. When you look at the executive, you look at the culture of the company, we all were relatively aligned while we all had our nuances and our all of our preferences, you could probably say 75%. we're in alignment. And while you don't think that, oh, we're talking about business, and we're talking about growing, and we're talking about doing these things, but it is a mindset. It is a piece in there. If both sides aren't on the same page, and it's not just by corporate metrics, but also in your faith, in your cultural beliefs, you miss somewhere. And then that miss turns into Yeah, I always find that founders and leaders that have a higher calling for something greater than themselves, greater than the glory, just always tend to resonate better. And it resonates with the people around them. It passes it on to them and then it filters on from there to the other people that aren't in direct contact with that leader. So definitely having a higher calling, a higher purpose. You know, doing things not for yourself is really the golden rule, right? Like, you know, it's just easier, you know, when you're selfless Yeah, I mean, and then speaking on faith specifically, I mean, the last couple of years, we've had more of a full recommitment back to that. And honestly, it's in thanks to our daughter. we didn't push this on her, and she just started connecting with like-minded people, and we actually have a really great church that's near us that does a lot. It's a larger church, but what we like about it is just like their general methodologies, how they preach, how their practices, and then just their support, their camps, the life groups all the things they do and what I'm noticing even for both my kids who they are growing into they're also aligning with more of the like-minded people and again this is not a it's like it's a very diverse but again it's the faith is the commonality and it's just I don't know it's something I know from a faith perspective that has existed but something Greatly changed since lots of things culturally have changed since 2020 because I think it kind of scared a lot of people, but I like where certain aspects of it is going. And it's again cool to watch my children actually push me and my wife back into something we always believed in, but we just weren't fully committed. And we couldn't even answer why at one point. It wasn't that we just were mad or didn't have time. We just kind of fell out of that commitment, not in the belief, but in actually the time. And now it's a non-negotiable. Every Sunday we go as a family. We bring friends along And every Sunday evening when they have the kids life group stuff, the kids are gone. They're there every time. And It's great, it's good to see. And I'm glad that we made that choice again to kind of have it to this extent, this And that's the best part. It wasn't someone, oh, you should go again. I can't believe you're not. No, it was not one of those conversations. It's just like the fitness thing. It was the right timing, the right place, the right group of people that you just felt like we just naturally got pulled in. not Yeah, and I think, you know, over the last five to six years, primarily, you know, around the COVID time, I think people just really were looking around wondering like, man, what's, what is life? Like, what's going on? There's some real dark, you know, evil in this world. And it's like, I think it's kind of really led to, um, a resurgence of people, you know, wondering like, what, what is, what, what's life all about, you know, and, and what, what are we here for? And, um, it's good to see, I mean, I'm one of them, I'm one of them who've, who've, who've come back and, you know, wanted to live a life of purpose and not worry about keeping up with anybody or status or vanity, just looking out for each other and just trying to live a life that I mean, I've had my times in life where, you know, I was very angry, very upset. I lost my father when I was five. So like, but the one thing about faith whether I was angry or upset or whatever is if you actually just look at the lessons in there you can even almost remove the faith and religious lens from it there's good stories there's good ideology to follow When you pull that piece out like it's just in if a lot of people could look at it, even from that lens like it can help guide you in the right way, because if you even look at it from a business perspective you'll find. it's the consistency, it's the commitment, it's the all these things, there's these pillars that it does teach at us as a foundation that affect every aspect of your life in a positive way as long as you commit to those pillars. It's not the religious side and it's not these other sides, it's just look at it foundationally first if you are You know, like I said, when I was younger, I was angry, but I still we still always went to church and I still always like the stories in the lessons that were there like it was still interesting. Here's one last piece on this in college. I took a lot of theology classes across all religions because religion, to me, ties to cultural and also ties a lot to psychology, which leans into my marketing side. And it's just, I think the more people understand culture and different cultures, the easier it is. While people can be very different from us, we can still find common ground and ways to get along, which Yeah. Be nice. Be kind. Forgiveness. Right.
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All those things are just so important. And it just, it allows you to like, you know, the one thing with forgiveness, it's just, it's not so much for them. It's for you. Like you should not be carrying around that weight. that anger and dwelling on that. So I think that's the other side. Yeah, be kind, but also be kind to yourself too.
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And, you know, I think that's a really important lesson that I've been able to find a lot of peace with, you know, recently as I've been, you know, diving back into my religion. So, yeah. Brian, that's all we got today, man. Thank you so much for your time and for your candid look into how to scale 15 billion in sales and doing it for a very long time and consistently. If you're a founder ready to eliminate the chaos in your acquisition or operations, you can find Brian on LinkedIn or visit leadology.net. We also have his Instagram handle in the show notes. Brian, No, if you ever need to have questions with marketing and growth, just hit me up. I'm always happy to have at least a conversation. And the way I put it is I give information for free, but if you put me There we go. All right. Brian, thank you so much for coming on. Everyone, stay blessed, stay disciplined and keep scaling. We'll see you on the next episode of Vici Code. Thanks for tuning in to the Vici Code, where the underdogs rise and the numbers finally make sense. If today's story hit home, share it. And remember, faith fuels
