John Corcoran: 11:12
Don’t.
Jeremy Ames: 11:12
Yeah, not in a way that’s helpful for your average investor who’s trying to accomplish a particular goal.
John Corcoran: 11:17
Right? Right. So so you explain this and what what did you decide that? Well, actually the the business is not so much like the real estate projects, but actually creating a model around this and helping more people. At what point did you have that light bulb moment?
Jeremy Ames: 11:35
Well, that was one of four companies David and I started at that point in time. So let’s.
John Corcoran: 11:39
What.
Jeremy Ames: 11:41
Let’s not overblow.
That we had this perfect crystal ball. Like this was going to be the thing, but it was one we were excited about. And so we said, hey, we think there’s a market here. And we had this idea of, hey, we’re going to go to all the local mortgage brokerage brokerages and all the local real estate brokerages, and we’re just going to get their top people and we’re going to get access to their clients, because our hypothesis is that their clients don’t know that they can use this. And so we started the company, and we worked with these attorneys to build out what we thought was a much simpler way to approach it, to help investors understand what they could do and get these accounts set up.
And we went out to these mortgage brokers and real estate brokers, and we did a lot of classes, and we got very little business because it turns out the people who were the best at these particular places didn’t want anything to do with us. They were too busy making money. It was all the people that wanted to spend time with us were the people who didn’t have clients. Like, this is super interesting. Maybe this will help me get clients.
John Corcoran: 12:39
Yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy Ames: 12:41
And it wasn’t, you know, we didn’t have this magical business breakthrough until we had a buddy who was a CTO at a local company, and we were talking to him one day and he said, hey, you guys should advertise on Google. And we said, Google the search engine. And he’s like, yeah. And so he starts talking to us about pay per click advertising, which.
John Corcoran: 12:57
And this was, was this maybe 2004 2005 timeframe.
Jeremy Ames: 13:00
Early 2003 man.
John Corcoran: 13:01
2003 okay. Very early. Yeah.
Jeremy Ames: 13:04
So in 2003, he’s talking to us about Google Pay per click advertising. I’ve looked it up since, and at the time they were doing $1 billion in revenue, which sounds huge, but now they’re like 100 billion, right? So it was just a drop in the bucket, right? And I remember talking to him and for me, the light bulb went on when he said, and you can set a budget for the day. And I said, oh yeah, but what’s the minimum you got to invest?
He’s like, I don’t know. You can probably do like 10 or 15 bucks a day. And I said, this is genius.
John Corcoran: 13:29
Yeah.
Jeremy Ames: 13:29
That’s right in my budget.
John Corcoran: 13:31
Yeah. And so we.
Jeremy Ames: 13:32
Started advertising on Google Pay per click. And at the time we were getting clicks for $0.10 or $0.50. I mean, some of those today are going for 35 or $40. Yeah. But all of a sudden, this really niche business idea that we had, we could go find these needles in a haystack.
This person that’s in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, that wants to invest their retirement funds to do this thing other than buy stocks, bonds and mutual funds. And that was really when Guidant started to take off within 45 days. We, you know, hired our first sales person because we just could not keep up with the volume of leads that were coming in even at $20 a day was our budget for leads when we started.
John Corcoran: 14:07
Wow. Amazing, amazing. So a kind of combination of a solution that hadn’t that well, a need in a market, right? There’s people that had this, had retirement funds, wanted to invest them in alternative assets. And then you had a solution that wasn’t widely spread, that wasn’t explained.
There weren’t a lot of other competitors out there that were doing this. And then you have this tool that produced traffic to your website, got exposure, got your message out there, Google pay per click advertising. So kind of like three big things that that made it successful from early on.
Jeremy Ames: 14:41
Yeah. And the thing I.
Like to point out about the experience with Google is that anytime someone’s looking for a business, you’re looking for the rising tide that’s out there. I know lots of other people. I’m part of the entrepreneurs organization, and I’ve got lots of other friends who had businesses that started at the same time that were sort of really unique. You know, maybe they’re a retail. I have a buddy who had a niche, high end fly fishing shop that became the largest online retailer of fly fishing gear before he sold it in like 2013 or whatever.
And it was all about that moment in time with this new tool coming online that was changing how people could reach out to and connect with customers.
John Corcoran: 15:22
Yeah. Game changing.
And maybe it was also a River Runs Through. It came out too, and that got a lot of people interested in it.
Jeremy Ames: 15:29
He credits that movie.
John Corcoran: 15:31
Yeah, yeah.
Jeremy Ames: 15:32
That movie at that point in time.
Blew it up all of a sudden because he was in Silicon Valley, he said, Silicon Valley, every billionaire and every aspiring entrepreneur wanted to be a fly fisherman.
John Corcoran: 15:41
But it’s so true. If you are part of a wave that is that is increasing, it makes it so much easier than being in an industry that’s, you know, contracting. Yeah. Which frankly, to me, I mean, that’s how I felt about my previous profession, which is practicing law. You know, I knew like when the Alexa devices started coming out, that or, you know, Siri, that eventually it’s going to be at this point where you’re going to say, like, draft me an NDA.
And now those technologies are kind of converging, you know, and that, you know, people will start using those things instead of lawyers. All right. So Guidant. So that that’s the origin story behind it. And then you also you and David have started other companies together.
We’ll get to Doxa. But you mentioned a couple of other companies early on. Any any kind of like saw still a little painful stories around companies that you started that I know there’s one in to tell.
Jeremy Ames: 16:32
Because I’m not somebody who finished college. But I like to tell people I still spent half $1 million on my education. And that education was called New Wire Investor. So we had been running Guidant since 2003, and it was growing like crazy, right? We were on the Inc. 500 list a couple years in a row.
Things were going well. It was growing like like a bug. But the problem we kept running into was that for people who didn’t know yet what they wanted to invest in, trying to find the options out there was just really confusing. And at the time, there were all sorts of models. I don’t know if you remember these, but like daily Candy had a newsletter and there were a couple others like that where they had these huge audiences of people that they’re delivering this information to.
And so my thought was, we need that for alternative investments so people can understand what are all the options of things that are out there other than just stocks, bonds and mutual funds that you can invest in? And so I started crafting this idea and building this team, and we got an amazing CIO who came on board. We had this team of writers, we built out this cool website, and then we launched this thing and then realized, oh, shoot, like Google’s not picking us up because we’ve got this subscription model. So then we pulled the subscription model down and we started expanding the content. We were starting to get some eyeballs, but we still weren’t clear how we were going to make money.
And, you know, eventually we stripped this thing down and ran it pretty lean for a while, and it just sort of eked out an existence. And we sold it for, you know, maybe 25% of what we had invested into it. And for me, the big realization is that you remember that movie Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner?
John Corcoran: 18:18
Of course.
Jeremy Ames: 18:19
With business, it’s bullshit. You don’t build it and they come.
John Corcoran: 18:25
Right?
Jeremy Ames: 18:26
If you don’t know who your customer is, then it’s very likely that you’re building the wrong thing.
To help them solve whatever problem you think you want them to solve. Now. If I could go back in time and take off this hubris that I had built, because I had one company that started to really pan out, and now I thought I was this business genius. The insight I have now, I would have been, oh, why don’t I just start a newsletter that doesn’t cost anything, start delivering some things. See if I can grow some eyeballs of people that are interested in this.
To me, one of the big lessons that I’ve taken away from that is that so often we think when we have this idea of something we want to do, that we’ve got to go out and get a quarter of $1 million and build all this stuff out, rather than take a step back and go, what are the 1 or 2 assumptions that this idea relies on? And how do I go test them?
If you have time, I’ve got 1 or 2 cool client stories of people who I think did this really well.
John Corcoran: 19:22
Yeah, let’s hear them. Let’s hear them.
Jeremy Ames: 19:24
Okay, so one of my favorite clients is Spiro Agnew. He was a guy who worked for IBM for a long time. And he just got tired of the constant travel. He had kids that were growing up and he was missing. He wasn’t making it to baseball games or, you know, Girl Scout meetings.
And he said, this is enough. I’m going to start a business. But he didn’t know what he wanted to do. And so he’s looking around at all these different options franchise options, startup options, acquisition options. And one day, while he’s in the middle of his search, his wife says, honey, you have got to go clean the garbage bins.
So have you ever cleaned your garbage bins, John?
John Corcoran: 19:59
Probably. But not not eagerly.
Jeremy Ames: 20:03
And sparrows were nasty like this, and and there’s no way. He told me. He said there’s no way I was doing cleaning this garbage bin. So he gets online and starts searching around somebody.
Somebody has come up with a solution for this thing.
John Corcoran: 20:21
Yeah. Okay.
Jeremy Ames: 20:22
And he finds this guy in southern Florida that has what amounts to a truck that he has modified to be like a mobile car wash for garbage bins.
So he calls this guy and he says. Hey, can you come out and do my spot? And he says, no, I’m not going to drive 90 minutes to do a $15 service for your garbage bins. But but he talks to him for a few minutes at the end he says, but if if you want to buy a truck, I’m happy to sell you a truck. He gets off the phone with him and he’s doing this. He’s like, is there an opportunity there? He’s like $100,000 for this modified truck. It is no joke.
So after thinking about it for a couple days, Spiro channels his inner Girl Scout dad, and he goes to the grocery store with a clipboard. And when people are coming out of the grocery store, he just starts talking to him. He’s telling him about the service, asking him if it’s something they might be interested in.
And then he made this offer to him. Hey, if you want to cut me a check for your first three months, I’ll give you this discount. If I end up moving forward and buying the truck, then you’ll get your first, you know, three months for this, and we’ll go from there. If not, you know, I’ll send you back your check and, you know, thank you for supporting me. He got 60 people to sign up that day.
So then. Then that was enough validation for him to go. Okay. That tells me there’s a market here. I’m going to go out and invest in this first truck.
Well, now he’s got three trucks and he services something like 10,000 garbage bins. He has an entire city that he signed up because he figured out that there was one city who had a green initiative. And so he sold them on the idea of this machine because it does it in a green way as opposed to what people normally do, which is dump it down their gutters. Which in that particular area of Florida means it actually goes Into the water system.
And here’s the genius part. The city told him that all of the bids that they get for city services, they have to get from three different providers. So what he did is he went to the three people that were submitting bids for the waste management contract for the city, and he inked partnership deals with them to be a part of their.
Be a provider for them. Be a part of their. So he’d get the business no matter .
What. So it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter who won the contract. And he picked up something like 7000, 7000 accounts on that one.
John Corcoran: 22:31
So where did Guidant help with the acquisition of the truck? The $100,000 truck?
Jeremy Ames: 22:36
So what we did was we helped him roll his retirement funds. He invested that in the to start the business, and he used the proceeds to buy the first truck and some other things for his company.
John Corcoran: 22:47
That lesson of him going outside the grocery store, there’s so many people that would stop right there and wouldn’t do it, you know, wouldn’t have the courage, you know, or they’d show up to the grocery store and be like, I can’t do it, you know? And but the courage to do that is phenomenal, you know, because that because that saved him, you know, $100,000, you know, expensive lesson if, if there wasn’t a market for it.
Jeremy Ames: 23:07
Yeah. And, you know, I’m telling you a story of something that worked out. But I can tell you a story, one that didn’t.
John Corcoran: 23:11
Yeah. Let’s do it.
Jeremy Ames: 23:13
So I had this idea, this epiphany. At one point, I went on this trip to India. I actually went to an entrepreneur’s organization university out there, and I had an EOE friend that was from India, and we went and stayed with his family for a week, and he took me around to meet a lot of business owners. And one of the things in this area of India is they have a really robust sort of textile manufacturing business. And so I got to go tour the Robert Graham shirt shop and all these other things that they had out there.
And I was just fascinated. I suddenly had this idea. I was like, okay, what if you could build a website tool? Because my hypothesis was, there are so many people out there that would love to be a fashion designer. But when you think about the logistics of managing inventory, building the pipeline to produce this stuff and then ship it from overseas and then distribute it to customers, it’s just unrealistic.
But what if I could build a digital site that allows people to digitally develop something, and then that design could go off to this offshore production firm that could then print the fabric and do all these things. So I decided the way I was going to test this was I would test this concept for shirts because at the time I was in love with those shirts. You know where you flip the cuffs inside out and they got some cool other design on it.
And oh.
Yeah, those are Cool. You’re really hip. Yeah. So I had this idea, so I created some digital designs and I tested, you know, like building ten shirts for myself.
And I walked away from that experience with ten amazing shirts. And the realization that this business model was not going to work with current technology unless I was willing to invest the next ten years of my life to figure out an entire new industry that I didn’t know at all. Because up to that point, every other business I had started was a services based business. This was a combination of technology business with a logistics and manufacturing.
John Corcoran: 25:05
Yeah, there’s multiple different pain points and challenges and industries you have to figure out through that.
Jeremy Ames: 25:12
Yeah, but I learned that. Ilearned what it was going to cost me to ship things overseas. I learned what it was going to cost to print a piece of custom fabric with this design that you created, Like I have these shirts that have, you know, pictures of my kids on them.
John Corcoran: 25:24
That’s cool. I want to ask you about that kind of another pivot point with Guidant, because I know in your origin story. So you guys originally were in Seattle, Seattle, very high cost of living coastal city. And you ran into a problem with hiring, getting good people to come come work for you. And one of the epiphanies was leveraging remote talent from all over the globe, which actually led to the next company.
So tell us a little about that part of the story.
Jeremy Ames: 25:52
John, I remember the moment that everything shifted for me. I was in. So every month, as part of being in the entrepreneur organization, I meet with, you know, 7 to 9 other entrepreneurs in non competitive industries. And so I remember I’m at one of these meetings and we’re doing this roundtable about the biggest challenges we’re having in our business right now. And we’re going around the circle.
And eight out of nine of the people are talking about recruiting and retention, and all of a sudden, this pain that we’ve been talking about for the last 2 or 3 years in our business, I’m thinking, oh, this isn’t just an US pain. This is what’s going on in our market. It is getting harder and harder to recruit and retain really great people because of the dynamics of cost of living and the certain types of talent that were in the area. And these other huge companies like Amazon and Microsoft that were sucking up every. Lots of competition and paying.
Them massive amounts of money. And so we ended up pursuing a three pronged approach for how we were going to deal with that. One is we built our own offshore development team. Second was we partnered with an offshore company because a lot of what we do, like the bane of our existence, is that we’re chasing small business owners for information. And guess what small business owners suck at and hate collecting data.
Doing paperwork. Yeah, I’ve still never met a business owner that says I can’t wait to start a business because I love paperwork.
John. I can’t wait to dig in and do some more of it. Yeah.
And so we’re constantly chasing people for information, and then we’re getting the wrong stuff and having to communicate that. So we had this thought, okay, what if we could train an offshore team to translate what clients are sending us, route it to the right place and then push it back? If we could do that and we could do that at this sort of cost basis, that would allow us then to ramp up in these other parts within the US. And so we saw it as an amplification strategy for what we were doing stateside. And so we partnered with this other company there.
It’s also what led to me going to Boise. But we can talk about that later if you want. And we worked with this offshore company for about four years and it was going poorly. We had a lot of turnover. It felt it didn’t feel like the people were really integrated into our culture.
And the challenge with our business is I can’t find someone off the street that can walk in day one and start working here, like what we do is too niche and too unique. I can’t even hire people who have done 401 K administration before, and just plunk them in and expect that they can start doing it on day one. They almost have to relearn some ways to do things, because what our clients need is so different. So for us, what really matters is we have to have people get part of our culture. They have to become ingrained in how we think and how we work and stick around for a while, because we have to invest so much time and effort and energy to get them up to speed.
So it wasn’t working for us, and we were literally at the point where we were considering shutting it down. We actually had a proposal to just shut it down and, you know, try something different. And David came back from an EO event and he said, hey, Jeremy, I met this woman that has set up Bpos for EO and for McKinsey. What if we started our own business and just did this for ourselves? And I thought about it for a minute and I said, we cannot be the only ones that are struggling with this particular problem.
So we said, let’s try it. And so we started with Guidant as the first customer to try and really figure this out, because one of our hypotheses was that experience we were having, like, we could do better, we could find more engaged people, we could pay them more. We could create better infrastructure for them. We could create a better culture that was going to feel like a win win. And we really sort of proved that out on Guidant as the first customer and then raised some money and recruited a team to build that business out.
And, you know, David has since left many years ago to go run that because it’s growing like gangbusters. In fact, they recently just started franchising.
John Corcoran: 29:59
Wow. That’s exciting. How do you see, you know, with AI the role of AI. Like how do you see that plugging in to what you do. What what Doxa does.
Jeremy Ames: 30:10
To me, AI is no different than the conversation about offshoring or having global talent is, if you’re looking at it as a just a replacement for what you’re trying to do today, you’re going to miss the opportunity that’s there. You know, a business is all about growing. And yes, you want to have efficiency. But efficiency today is fine. But if you don’t reinvest those dollars into creating more value for your customers, your business isn’t going to be around long enough.
And so when we looked to leverage global talent, we thought, this is going to give us an opportunity to actually uplevel our US team, to pay people more, to give them more challenging roles to hire, you know, hire talented people. And it for sure was that I think AI is going to be the same thing, but the same thing. I keep telling my team, if you’re not experimenting with it on a daily basis to help you figure out how you’re working in your job, like you are going to be the people that become Expendable in the market and left.
John Corcoran: 31:11
Behind.
Jeremy Ames: 31:12
Yeah. For me as a CEO, it’s really important that I figure out how to get as many of our team members to embrace it, not just for the value of the business, but for their value as individuals, because the people who can learn how to leverage AI, how to take their unique, creative human ability to put things together and discern what makes sense for the particular customer or situation that they’re trying to resolve. Those people are going to become super powered.
John Corcoran: 31:41
That’s right.
Jeremy Ames: 31:42
The people who don’t know how to do it are going to be like my dad, who when I used to come home from high school, there’d be a post-it note on the VCR that said, hey, could you hit record.
For the Yankees game at 4:10 p.m.?
And who still has to call my baby sister when he needs to do any updates to his phone? I mean.
John Corcoran: 32:00
Right, right? Right?
Right. That’s funny. Yeah. Actually, this this summer, I wanted to teach my kids a bit about everything that’s happening in AI. And so I created a a chat bot project in ChatGPT, which we called Summer, where I uploaded.
We had this, this trip that we planned and we were staying in multiple different locations. And usually it’s dad, where are we going? Where are we staying next? Does it have a hot tub? What’s the gate code?
All these types of things. I was like, I don’t want to deal with that. So I took all the instructions for the houses the Airbnbs were staying in, and I uploaded it. And then we could ask Summer all these questions all the time. And it was everything from what’s the door code, what’s the address of where we’re staying to?
Is there a coffee shop nearby to what’s the best bike ride to do when we’re in Coeur d’Alene? You know, all those sorts of things. And it was really cool and fun and exciting to experiment with that with my kids. Of course, now the kids are going to be like, this is just expected to them, like just normal to them. But it was a little bit of an epiphany like, wow, this is really cool, at least at the beginning.
Jeremy Ames: 33:02
I love that, and I want to tell a story of my own because my I was talking with my son one day and he was talking to me about this thing he was struggling with, with a project. And I said, hey, have you, you know, used ChatGPT to do this and this and this thing? And he said, my teachers say I’m not allowed to use ChatGPT. And I said, well, let me help you understand, dude, your teachers don’t see what’s going to happen in the future, but this is how things are going to get done. So you’ve got to learn this.
I mean, don’t use it to write your paper. Think about it this way. It’s like if you want anybody to give you cover at school, as long as you’re not using it to write your stuff, but you’re using it to edit things, you’re using it to ask questions and help you think through stuff and help you clarify things. I said, that’s awesome. And so last year, for his personal project, he decided that he wanted to develop this card game that he and I had come up with on one of our trips together. We had been playing this card, this football card game, and he, my son, was a competitive Pokemon player.
He actually went to the Pokemon World Championships a couple years years ago.
And so he had this idea for I want to create a card game that’s a trading card game like Pokemon, but with these cool sort of football characteristics. He calls it for sports dweebs like people who are kind of nerdy but also like sports. And so he built out a a mock for this game for his personal project in school. And as summer was coming up, he his, you know, Jill and I were talking with him about what he’s going to do. And we were big fans like, well, you should get a job.
You haven’t had a job. It’s it’s about time to have that experience. And he said, dad, but what I really want to do is I want to see if I can turn my game into a business. And I was like, oh, this kid knows how to manipulate me, right?
Yeah, I’m the guy. I’m the guy who works all day, every day talking about.
Small business ownership and Empowerment. That’s the right button to push.And so I said, okay.
I’ll make you a deal. If you are willing to commit a minimum of 12 hours a week to this project, Including an hour that you’re going to meet with me every Sunday. We’re going to sit down and we’re going to use it as an accountability source coaching thing. We’re going to talk about what progress you made, what your plan is for the week, what your long term goals are. And he said, yeah, let’s do it.
And John has been so fun. I’m not sure this thing’s ever going to go anywhere.
John Corcoran: 35:20
Did you develop it in ChatGPT or Lovable or what did you do?
Jeremy Ames: 35:25
He has used a lot of ChatGPT, both to develop images of these cards and players that.
He has concepts. For, but I’ve also really been pushing him to use it to help him clarify his thoughts, use it as a strategic partner. Yeah, thought thought thought partner.
Get random things on it and say.
Hey, I want you to put the perspective of somebody who’s a game designer and help me pick this apart. So it’s been a really awesome learning opportunity to help him think about how he would do that. Okay, so you need to start developing eyeballs on this game and people who can help you test it.
Yeah okay. Now go use ChatGPT as a thought partner and start to come up with what your plan would be. What’s your hypothesis. And so right now he’s got a plan. There’s this there’s this board game show that’s happening in Idaho here in a couple months, and he’s queuing up to have printed cards that he can bring there.
And wow, cool test. And it’s all building up towards this big thing in Salt Lake.
But we’ll see. We’ll see where it goes. Regardless, what a cool learning opportunity it’s been to just be a part of having those conversations with him.
John Corcoran: 36:22
Absolutely. You know, I think a lot about that for kids. You know, I got four kids and their oldest is 14, youngest is six. And I think about like this world they’re going into, you know, and like how do we prepare them for it? I don’t know, but I don’t feel that the education that they’re getting right now is really preparing them for it.
I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what they should be doing, but it just seems like the way that we’re teaching our kids is not really preparing them for it. And I totally agree that they need to be playing around with these tools and learning them so that they are ready for whatever comes next.
Jeremy Ames: 36:55
And it’s the only way to learn. In fact, you know, we talk a lot about it with our leadership team about how to think about AI internally. And I think my observation is it’s not like we can build some course that’s going to magically solve this for our team, because the minute you build that course three months from now, it’s irrelevant. The only way that this works is if we’re creating space for people to actually experiment with, using it to try and solve problems, that’s how they’re going to learn, because it’s not necessarily about what the technology does today. It’s how to start to think differently in the same way that you remember when Google first came out.
Yeah, we were.All really bad at searching for the things that we.
Wanted. Yeah.And now, you know, even my kids will be like, oh, I can’t find that. And I’ll be like, okay. And I’ll do my own sort of Google thing and it’ll pop right up and they’ll.
Be like, how did you do that? I’ve been searching on Google for more than 20 years like that. My brain just thinks through what’s the right thing to type in here that’s going to help me get the outcome that I’m looking for. And I think the same thing is going to be true of AI.
John Corcoran: 37:50
In so many different ways. Yeah for sure. Jeremy, this has been so much fun talking to you. I know we’re almost out of time here, and I didn’t prepare you for my last question, because I’m a little rusty because I didn’t do a lot of interviews over the summer, so that’s my excuse, but I’m going to ask it to you anyways, but I think you’ll be fine. I’m a big fan of gratitude, a big fan of expressing gratitude, and taking the time to acknowledge people that have had a big impact on our lives and our careers, especially people that are still a part of our life.
So less so our third grade teacher. More so someone who’s still in our life. Key clients, investors, business partners, that sort of thing. Is there anyone that you would want to acknowledge? Any peer contemporary, you know, business partner, investor, friend?
Jeremy Ames: 38:35
Stepping up to the Oscars. So let me start with my wife, John.
When I started my first business, I had nothing, you know, and there’s something about when you connect with someone that loves you before you have anything that gives you a certain amount of safety. Like, I don’t think any of it’s possible without having that support, I think about how much energy is required to get a business up and off the ground, and I am so grateful that I wasn’t having to spend that time and effort and energy trying to keep a relationship on the rails, because my wife is just so easy to, you know, get along with and be with. And I would say the same thing about my business partner, you know, even when we are not on the same page about how we think about getting somewhere, we call it violent agreement. I always know we want the same things and we share the same values. And so it’s just a question of beating it up until we get to the right answer to move forward.
So I’m super grateful for that. And you know, I’ve had maybe three or 4 or 5 different business coaches over the years for different points when I needed different things. So I remember, you know, in 2008, right after my son was born, the IRS came out with this memorandum that created some confusion and some concern around some of what we were doing on the self-directed side. And I remember at the time, feeling almost paralyzed because I also was knee deep in a bunch of real estate investments that were all going sideways. And so the fear was just overwhelming me.
And I remember I went to this event and I saw this guy, Mark Moses, speak, and he was all about think big, be big, punch brick walls. And I thought to myself.
That’s CEO of Coaching International.
Yeah, yeah CEO Coaching International now.
But this even predates that. And so I remember thinking this is what I need. This is the balance I need in my world right now. And so for a year we worked with Mark. And he helped us sort of punch our way through the fear and get out to the other side.
And at another point in time, I had another coach that’s well known in EO, Warren Rustand. Warren’s first person who convinced me, Jeremy, you need an executive assistant. You’re trying to do all these things. And let me tell you, you’re doing a lot of them poorly. I think the thing he really opened my eyes to is. I had this really strong independent streak from when I was really, really young.
And so I was really bad at asking people for help. And he says to me one day he says, Jeremy, how do you feel when someone asks you for help? And I said, well, I feel amazing, like I love it. It’s the thing I love most. I love to give back to people.
I love to see some light come on for them or some new epiphany. To be there like that makes my entire day.
And he’s such a great question. He said, okay.
That’s what you’re stealing from people when you don’t ask for help when you need it.
And I was like, oh. That’s such a great question. Yeah, yeah. I love the heart.
Word is one of my favorite guests on this podcast, and it took years to get to him because he’s like an enigma. Like it was, it was like impossible to track him down. It’s like he had a Facebook page you could message that he didn’t even, like, respond to.
And eventually he’s old school. You gotta drive. To his compound in Tucson and just track him down
I probably should have done that. It would have been faster to get him on the podcast, but I eventually did and he’s a brilliant guy, so that’s great. Did I cut you off or are you good there?
Yeah. Two more. Just quick shoutouts. I know you’ve interviewed Dave Parker before. He was our very first board member. He was our first, what we call adult supervision. That helped us in the early stages when we had no idea what we were doing and lacked a little confidence about it.
And then Stephen Roche, who came on and helped support and mentor us from 2007 and has been a long time shareholder of the business. He has since went on to do amazing things. He ran the Walton the Walton family office for five years, and he was the president of Bill Gates Investments for four years.
It’s really crazy when you see situations like that and you say, oh, that guy was helping us long before all these other really amazing people realized he was awesome. Like, how lucky were we? Yeah, we just kind of came across his path.
John Corcoran: 42:51
That’s it. That’s what I say when I hold up this picture of me with this unknown guy. Oh, yeah? Yeah, that was from about 2010.
Jeremy Ames: 42:59
That’s when he only had three kids.
John Corcoran: 43:02
Yeah, something like that. I think at that point. Yeah. I mean, my biggest regret is I didn’t invite him on the podcast. I, I could have, I should have thought about it.
I was just starting the podcast at the time and I could have and I didn’t. And so I tell people all the time, like, you know, that person that you’re meeting now, at some point in the future might be the world’s richest man slash craziest person. So you might as well, like try and get some time with them, you know. Well that’s great, Jeremy, thank you so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about you and Doxa and anything else you’re involved in?
Jeremy Ames: 43:33
Yeah. Guidant. Easy. It’s guidantfinancial.com.
That’s Guidant. Yeah. We did the branding when we were very new. guidantfinancial.com. It’s hard to spell.
It’s not guidance. You can check me out on LinkedIn if you want to Message me. I’m. I try to respond to all my messages from people, and I’m happy to be helpful wherever I can. And then I do have a podcast called Create the Life You Want.
It’s where I interview people that we’ve helped start businesses, and we just talk about their journey. And my hope with that podcast is we’re just trying to get people’s stories out there, like of real people, not necessarily the people that have become billionaires, but these real people who went from, like Spyro, who went from IBM to creating his own thing. Because there’s not only a I think a connection you can make to real people who are doing it, but then hearing some of the strategies they use and some of the things they struggled with, I think can help people find strategies for how they can move forward, if that’s the thing that they’re dreaming about.
John Corcoran: 44:29
Yeah, that’s so cool. Jeremy, thanks so much for your time.
Jeremy Ames: 44:31
Yeah. You bet. Thanks, John.
Outro: 44:36
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