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Adam Carroll – The Shred Method™
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You have found Authentic Business Adventures. The business program that
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brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie. My name is James Kademan, entrepreneur, speaker, helpful coach to small business owners across the country. And today we’re welcoming/preparing to learn from Adam Carroll, who’s also a speaker, a documentary filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Shred Method. And if I remember correctly, this is to help people get out of debt.
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Is that right, Adam? That’s exactly right, James. I know we’re going to have a lot to talk about because you and I are like simpatico here.
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I love it. So tell me, let’s start out. I don’t even know where to start out. The documentary filmmaker thing just sounds awesome. So let’s start there.
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It is pretty awesome. It’s a really interesting story, too, because I think it’s like an entrepreneurial tale that has all sorts of different sidewinding paths that we took along the way. I have been a speaker on the college campus scene for a number of years. Oh, wow. And literally 15 years of going out and just teaching college students all over the country. I had it, James, that the student loan debt problem was getting bigger and bigger.
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I was hearing from students that would have, they’d say, Oh, I have 20,000. Then it was 40,000. Then it was 80 or 90,000. I heard kids have 125 grand for a bachelor’s degree. I just kept thinking, This is insane that this is even going on. I had this wild idea which was based on every other business model that I’d had, which was write a book and go speak on the book. I was going to write a book called Broke, Busted and Disgusted, True Tales of student loan borrowers.
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And I was sharing this with a friend of mine, a younger guy, about 10 years younger than me, super creative. And he said, Adam, that would make an amazing documentary. I said, Yeah, you’re right, Kelvin, but I don’t know the first thing about documentaries. And he goes, Yeah, me neither. Let’s do it. So we decided to crowdfund the documentary project, and we raised $67,000 in 45 days through IndieGoGo, which is like a Kickstarter channel, right? Kick starter IndieGoGo. And it was all basically through my network, who all willingly gave. And we had enough to fully produce, edit, and finish a full length feature documentary that lo and behold, we ended up selling to CNBC in 2017.
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Really?
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Yeah. So everyone said, Hey, there’s no way you’re going to make any money with an indie doc.
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I was just going to ask.
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Yeah, never. They would tell us there’s no way this is a passion project. Just chalk it up to experience. You’re never going to make any money. Then over the course of 36 months, we cleared several hundred thousand dollars in licensing fees and speaking fees and all that stuff with the document.
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So there’s money in documentaries.
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There can be. There can be money in documentary. There can be. I would say that there is also this subset of documentary filmmakers that want to support every other documentarian out there. So just the fact that we were doing one, we were getting outreach from all sorts of people who had also been on IndieGoGo building documentaries telling us tips and strategies and what to do and what not to do. So even that was awesome because we got in with people who are doing documentaries on young doctors who are committing suicide and all sorts of these things.
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All right. Dang. That is impressive.
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How much time did that take? Was that just a part time side hustle thing, or is this like quit your job, devote all your life for the next seven years to this thing?
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Yeah, this is a really astute question because when we started, we thought, oh, we’ll shoot at it, produce it, and we’ll be done. And then I was listening to a podcast by this gentleman who was a screenwriter out of LA, and he was working on a book, a manuscript of his own. And his agent said, Hey, man, don’t do this unless you’re willing to spend two years doing it. And the gist of the podcast was that anytime we birth something into the world, and you’ve probably experienced this with the show and other projects you’ve worked on, that you think you’re going to get a lot done in the first year. And then it’s like, oh, this is an uphill battle because we’re still in that launch phase. But by year two and certainly by year three, everything was on autopilot and it was just running. So was it a full time deal? If you asked my wife, she would say yes, it was probably a full time deal for me.
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All right.
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My business partner on the project who did all the video editing and he was the director of photography and all that, he would say it was a full time job while he was working on it. And it was a really, from my perspective, it was a great partnership because I was going out and drumming up relationships and business and eyeballs and all of that. And he was very detail oriented. He got all the music, all the intellectual property on the music bot and paid for it. He was doing everything necessary, set us up on Gum Road so people could download the film and watch it whenever. He was remarkable at that. I think we stayed in our own lanes in terms of our unique abilities for the project. Nice.
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That had to be a challenge right there. Documentary, I imagine there’s a lot of moving parts.
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Oh, my gosh. People in there.
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But then those people have to get along.
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You can’t even imagine, James. We had Teams of six or seven going at one time when we were doing the crowdfunding campaign. We had a social media team, if you will, like two or three people working with us on that. And we were paying them as we could. They were all contractors. But getting everyone wrangled because we were all pretty much virtual, getting everyone wrangled, getting on meetings, trying to organize that. It’s project management, and it’s a really valuable skill once you’ve gotten some practice on it to use it in real life. But it was such a blast. Looking back, that’s just one of those things that I look back and go, we did that.
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That’s cool. So have you gotten feedback from people on that? People saw it, or do they even know that you’re part of it?
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Yeah. So what’s crazy was I do a lot of work with credit unions in the state of Iowa and around the country for that matter. But the credit unions in the state of Iowa really rallied around this message and said, hey, we want to support you. So what does this look like? And I said, well, we’d really like to get sponsorship to put the movie in every high school in the state. And so there’s 100 counties, I’m sorry, 99 counties in the state of Iowa. And there’s probably, what, 280 or 300 high schools. And we ended up getting into about 240 high schools in the state of Iowa. And then it started expanding out from there. And the credit unions all stepped up and said, Hey, we’ll sponsor the film being shown in every single high school.
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That’s awesome.
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Yeah. It was really cool. I’m trying to remember your original question why I was.
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Going to the… The feedback that you got.
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From it. The feedback we got. We were getting emails from educators saying, this is incredibly eye opening. My kids, they’re sobered by what you’re sharing. They’re asking really deep questions. They’re taking… We had basically a viewer’s guide, downloadable PDF document, and it was meant for students, teachers, and parents to have a more intelligent conversation around the cost of college.
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And.
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So the families were even emailing saying, Thank you so much for doing this documentary. We had no idea that this level of debt was out there. And what I found, ultimately, James, was the students that we were really trying to advocate for were the ones who were already deep in debt. They had gone into school, signed on the bottom line, didn’t realize that over four years, the 40,000 they were borrowing was going to turn into 75 with interest. They didn’t have any concept about what paying $75,000 back looks like. We wanted to give them that impression, and we did with the doc. It was just very validating. Everyone came back and said, This is so important. To this day, there are still high schools that air the doc in their financial literacy classes.
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When was your two year period when you recorded it and went through all that?
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We shot the majority of the film in 2015. We edited it in 2016. When I say we, really, my business partner, Kelvin, was the one who was doing the editing. In the middle of the project, Kelvin is very much a millennial, loves adventure, and it’s hard to get him pinned down because he loves projects and he loves doing a project and then bailing from the project and going out and doing something fun. So he’s in the middle of it. He’s like, I just got to go. I’m going to go climb. His goal was to climb 114ers, the 14,000 foot peaks in Colorado, 100 of them in 100 days. And he ended up doing 105 in 100 days or something like that.
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Holy cow.
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Yeah. Living out of his Toyota Prius and just going and doing that. So he was gone for three months and came back and I was like, Dude, we got to get this done. This is an ice cube melting on our table right now. We got to get it done. God bless him. He got it finished, perfected it. It looked awesome. The music was awesome. Then we started rolling it out. I would say that through 2017, we were really engaged. Then come 18 19, it was living. It was out on people’s websites, people organization’s websites like Thrivent Financial out of Minneapolis. They picked it up. They were a sponsor of ours. They were airing it on their website and their members could access it at any time.
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We.
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Had partners like that in it. It lived on into 2018 and summer 2019. Then both of us went our separate ways in different projects. Now it exists. It’s out there. People still rent it. We had a monthly check from Gumroad, from folks who find it, stumble upon it, rent it.
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Nice. It doesn’t hurt.
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Yeah, it’s good deal box money at.
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This point. Yeah, right? That is awesome.
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So.
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Tell me what happened after that then? You’re like, all right, we did this documentary. You spent a bunch of time in there. What now?
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Well, so I got back to… I mentioned that I had been speaking on college campuses for a very long time, and I would say that I took a little bit of a hiatus from that in the midst of doing the doc. And then when we went out and we really started pushing it. What was fascinating about that was we were getting push back candidly from universities who are saying, We’re not going to invite these guys in. It was interesting.
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Because you’re saying, Don’t use this product.
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Yeah, we were saying, Why would you get student loan debt if you’re not going to use your degree? Or not sure what the return is going to be or whatever. We were ultimately just saying, Be intentional. Know what the ROI is. Figure it out on the front end.
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And there was a clear delineation between those on one side that said, don’t let these guys in. And the other side of the coin or the line that these people were saying, this is really important. We’re always going to get students, but they got to know this stuff.
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So.
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The number of college gigs I did was going down and the number of more commercial projects I was doing was going up. These were speaking engagements around… Some of it was around financial literacy, some of it was around leadership, high performance type topics. And then, of course, lo and behold, in 2020, the wheels fall off the society. I think many entrepreneurs, and I would love to hear your story on this, many entrepreneurs probably were left standing there going, Okay, well, what now? What do we do? How do we adapt? This is going to be a very broad brush statement, but I think the reason that we become entrepreneurs is because we have the ability to pivot and flex quickly.
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Totally.
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It’s a huge part. Yeah. We sat back and I say we was one of my operations people and I, we were just sitting back one day saying, Okay, so it’s March, it’s April. The calendar is becoming clear for the rest of the year. That’s everything. Everything, literally, like tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of businesses up in smoke. And I said, What do we have? Let’s assess what we have. Well, we have the doc. I have a couple of Ted Talks that are out there. One went viral, so what could we do with that? I had. Then we started digging into some of the product or intellectual product that we have, and The Shred Method came up, something that I’d had. I’d been limping along with it, telling people about it. We decided to really dive in headlong and just make it hum in 2020.
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All right. Tell me about the goal. Let’s start there and then we can figure out exactly what it is.
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Well, we exist to create freedom in people’s lives. The lion’s share of people that we talk to… And again, if it’s me in front of a group or one of my other presenters in front of a group, when we talk to them, we’ll say, What keeps you up at night? What are the things that typically bother you? The responses we get are usually things like, I don’t know how I’m going to afford retirement. I don’t know how I’ll ever afford college for my young kids. I don’t know how or what health care will look like in the future and how I would ever be able to pay for that. Generally speaking, what they were saying was, We have a lot of uncertainty and we don’t know how we’re going to deal with that.
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If.
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You go to any financial planner, nothing against them, but they would say, Well, you just have to invest more.
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We just.
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Got to put more money away and make sure that you have a big, shiny pile of money by the time you’re ready to retire.
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That.
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Always felt very speculative to me. I don’t know if we can stamp in concrete, Hey, you will return 8 % to 10 % returns in the S&P 500 Index over the course of 20 years.
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Not this year.
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Not this year. History has proven it out, right? Over 100 years or whatever. But man, in the midst of that 100, there were up years and down years and sideways. And in the midst of that, the people who are uncertain about their future are going, well, this doesn’t make me feel good. Now I have to risk even more to get where I want to go.
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And.
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So in The Shred Method, what we have created is not only a mindset, but a software program that’s based on a complex algorithm that will show people how to blast away all of their debt, their mortgage included. Most of the time between three and five years. On the high end, it’s usually seven years.
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Holy cow.
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But the majority of folks we deal with, it’s three to five years. When we show them that, people are really surprised. It’s like showing the caveman fire and they say, What’s the magic bullet here? What’s the secret sauce? Our line is, It’s not magic, it’s math. The math is that every loan you take out, and your listeners, I’m sure, have car loans, mortgages, credit cards, student loans, whatever it may be. Every loan we take out is the bank’s way of making compound interest. So we are the vehicle for the bank’s ability to make compound interest, to make profit for their shareholders or for their members if you’re a credit union.
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I started challenging that. If our goal by the end of our lifetime is to have our net worth skyrocket, and we’re really counting on the last couple of doubles in the compound interest game, what if we did the opposite and we blasted away our debt first and then leveraged up really quickly into our retirement? That would allow us to achieve compound interest that much faster.
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In.
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Essence. All right.
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So this is an app?
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It is an app. It’s a piece of software. It’s a web app. It’s not just an app, James, because one of the things that we really do is we focus on coaching our members, our clients.
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Who help.
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Repair their relationship to money, their understanding of why they work for money. Because most people, we’re still functioning on the money program that was embedded in us when we were 0 to 9 years of age. And it’s the messaging that we got from our parents like, Well, we’ll never have a lot of money, so we might as well spend it now. I have a friend who that’s their logic. We never have a lot of money, so we might as well spend it now. It’s just this circular game that they play where they never will have a lot of money because they always spend whatever they have.
[00:17:56.190] – Speaker 2
Interesting. The money never gets to the point of actually working for them.
[00:17:59.370] – Speaker 1
That’s.
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Right.
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We begin to coach people on understanding what are those limitations that they have and then removing them from their. All right. Ultimately, yeah.
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Interesting. There’s an education aspect to it.
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There is.
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Is this in a way of classes or Zoom meetings?
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Great question. Tell me.
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About that a little bit. Yeah, a.
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Little bit all the above. We recorded… Again, this was back in 2020. I started saying, I want to teach people how this works. We were brainstorming business models and how would we do this. We landed on, let’s create a course that somebody can go through in a matter of several hours, but they could go through the course, know exactly how The Shred Method works, and then there’s a monthly subscription to the software that we describe as a behavior modification tool.
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The.
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Software is engineered to teach you what to do on a day by day, week by week basis.
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All.
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Right.
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So though I imagine the users of the software have to enter in their either debt, I imagine debt and income, and then the math plays a big role in that.
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You got it. Typically, we’ll tell people it’s good if you start with either a savings account or a home equity line of credit is the other magic tool.
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And then.
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We plug in income numbers, we plug in other bank accounts that may be getting deposits from time to time, and then we plug in all of your debts. We’re looking at what are your consumer debts, credit cards, car loans, student loans. We’re looking at your mortgage, and then we’re looking at any investments that you have coming out monthly, weekly, quarterly, whatever it may be, because we want to Not only we’re looking at the entire picture, James. So it’s not just how do we blast away debt, but if you’re trying to build wealth over the long haul, what is the most effective way of doing that? And we’ll go in and literally show you the Delta between pouring money into a Roth IRA versus what would happen if you paused that for a time and went after the debt as if it was your job and then really leveled up on Roth IRA or 401 or other contributions.
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Got you. All right, that sounds cool. So how did you get interested in the whole debt game?
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So this is a little bit in the way back machine, but in ’04 and ’05, I was… How do I start this? We’ve had a couple of whoops babies, my wife and I.
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Okay.
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You know that saying, that phrase? Yeah. They’re happy accidents, right? They showed up. We were like, Oh, gosh, we’re going to have a kid. My wife said, No way are you going to go speak and travel the country while I’m at home taking care of these kids. We got to do something about that. I was reaching out to my friend saying, I got to get a job somewhere. What should I do? One of my friends said, Hey, you really ought to look at the mortgage industry. This is a really exciting place to be right now. They had a client who was in that world.
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Sure. This is early 2008.
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It’s early 2008. I was a wholesaler in the mortgage world calling on mortgage brokers trying to sell them the loans through my company. Oddly enough, I think everything happens in its own time, in its own place. It was during that time that I was figuring out how to read credit reports and really figuring out personal finance at a deep, deep level, like a granular level. I got super intrigued by it. Then the writing was in big red letters on the wall and like, 506, what was coming down the pike?
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I.
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Said, you know what? Why don’t I start a mortgage brokerage? Because I want to help people.
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All right. It.
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Was a terrible, terrible time to do it. 07, 08, 09, 2010. But I did it for four years and we had a very successful mortgage brokerage for the better part of three and a half years. Then I started realizing we were saying no to more people than we were saying yes to. So underwriting got really tight and I decided that I was going to go right back to speaking because that’s where my heart was. But that’s what got me started in it. I love the idea of finance. I loved understanding amortization tables and how to secure loans. We did everything from investment properties to primary residence to second homes, all of it.
[00:22:42.600] – Speaker 2
So you just got into the… Essentially, I suppose it would be a retail mortgage game right before 2008?
[00:22:50.020] – Speaker 1
I did. And it was the subprime mortgage crisis. So all the subprime deals were just in the toilet.
[00:22:58.650] – Speaker 2
But.
[00:22:58.910] – Speaker 1
There was still a lot of prime business. People were still buying homes and we were still able to refinance people from time to time, if it made sense for them financially.
[00:23:08.030] – Speaker 2
We.
[00:23:08.620] – Speaker 1
Were insulated a bit because as I mentioned, I’m in Iowa, so the price appreciation, depreciation didn’t happen as much when we’re at. But it was a wild time. It was a really wild time.
[00:23:20.850] – Speaker 2
That’s crazy.
[00:23:22.690] – Speaker 1
Wow.
[00:23:23.080] – Speaker 2
So did you have employees in all that, James?
[00:23:25.740] – Speaker 1
We did.
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All right.
[00:23:27.310] – Speaker 1
We did. I had loan officers. I had a processor who handled things for all the folks in the office. I had a commercial office space. We had six or seven offices in there. And there was a nut to crack every month just to be in the office.
[00:23:42.500] – Speaker 2
And you.
[00:23:43.060] – Speaker 1
Don’t realize until you’re in that world, by the time you factor in commercial leases, your copier lease, insurance on the business, all the various expenses that you have going along with that, it was a it was a costly endeavor. We had to do a pretty significant amount of revenue in order to make money.
[00:24:04.640] – Speaker 2
Yeah, the static cost for any retail business.
[00:24:08.180] – Speaker 1
Yeah, and I would love your take on this. But when you drive around now and you see new storefronts going in, do you question the logic of that?
[00:24:21.010] – Speaker 2
Yeah, there are days. I just was in Portland this past weekend, and there’s a lot of stuff that was boarded up, shuttered up. And there’s other dispensaries popping up everywhere and stuff.
[00:24:35.340] – Speaker 1
You.
[00:24:36.140] – Speaker 2
Just wonder, they still got their foundation that they have to pay for.
[00:24:41.760] – Speaker 1
Maybe.
[00:24:42.110] – Speaker 2
Real estate is cheaper there, I guess not because.
[00:24:45.340] – Speaker 1
I.
[00:24:45.530] – Speaker 2
Don’t know if it ever really drops even with a lot of bad days in a row. So yeah, it made me wonder because I guess from my point of view, I also wonder.
[00:24:56.480] – Speaker 1
About the.
[00:24:58.460] – Speaker 2
Expense of the building, the insurance, all that stuff. Now you still need either you or an employee’s in there that you’re paying for a time to be there so that when the detail people walk by and walk through the door, that there’s someone there to take.
[00:25:13.200] – Speaker 1
Care of them.
[00:25:14.500] – Speaker 2
So it’s a lot.
[00:25:16.560] – Speaker 1
It’s a lot. I do that math in my head all the time. That place has to be two grand a month or five grand a month or whatever.
[00:25:24.210] – Speaker 2
I think about that. We just went… There’s a fundraiser at some sub sandwich shop for my kid’s school. And I remember it was just three of us, myself, my wife, my kid, we laid down 50 bucks at that place for just sandwiches and drinks.
[00:25:39.850] – Speaker 1
What.
[00:25:40.950] – Speaker 2
In the world are in these sandwiches? Yeah, right. I’m like, Oh, you look around this building. It wasn’t free. So it’s just one of those sub sandwich. That’s where we’re at now.
[00:25:51.810] – Speaker 1
Totally. It’s crazy. Case in point, too. There was a storefront not too far from us that they moved in. They were probably there six months, maybe nine months, and then moved to a different location. And we drove through the shopping center and my wife said, Oh, look, that boutique is gone or whatever. I was like, You know what’s wild about that? The lettering that they put on that building was probably $10,000. You don’t realize how much signage is and those kinds of things. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, I think what I find really fascinating is the game of business. How am I going to sell enough ice cream bars as an example to pay the, like you said, the square footage, the overhead, the people, the owner, probably the franchise fee? What does that look like? How can you actually do that?
[00:26:52.100] – Speaker 2
Yeah, it’s interesting. I love that you call it a game because I call that to people all the time. I remember I sold my first business and they’re like, Oh, you sold your baby. I’m like, No, that wasn’t my baby.
[00:27:03.180] – Speaker 1
A.
[00:27:04.320] – Speaker 2
Game. It’s a game. Totally. So it’s fun. Awesome. I want to talk about the Ted Talks.
[00:27:11.880] – Speaker 1
Forget about that.
[00:27:13.110] – Speaker 2
Two of them. Let’s talk about one. How did you get into that? Either invited, I don’t know exactly how that works. What were they about? Tell me about the one that.
[00:27:23.400] – Speaker 1
Went viral. It all starts with a conversation I was having with my Mastermind partners. We were talking about our businesses and the way we structure Mastermind meetings. We would do 15 minutes of here’s what’s going on in my world, and then about 45 minutes each, the other two would pepper the other with questions.
[00:27:44.450] – Speaker 2
I was.
[00:27:44.990] – Speaker 1
Going through, I’m doing these speaking gigs and I’m at this level and I’d like to be at this level and trying to figure out how I get to that. One of my Mastermind partners said, What about a TED Talk? I said, Oh, I would love to do one. I got to figure out how to get on a TED stage. I think that’d be so cool. And he said, I have an idea. Why don’t you just put at the bottom of your signature line, a solid double dash line and underneath in big red letters say, It is my big dream to one day to deliver a TED Talk. I would be forever grateful if you could help me accomplish that.
[00:28:19.360] – Speaker 2
And I.
[00:28:20.120] – Speaker 1
Was like, yeah, why not? So I go home that day and I change my signature line, double dash line. It’s my big dream to one day do a TED Talk in big, bold, red letters. I’d be forever in your debt if you could help me do that. I just started sending emails out like normal, not paying any attention to what’s on my signature line. Most people don’t. And about six weeks later, James, I get an email out of the blue from a student whom I’d presented to at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
[00:28:51.180] – Speaker 2
Oh, nice. Just down the road.
[00:28:52.910] – Speaker 1
His name is Aaron, and Aaron emailed me and said, Adam, I’m on the curation team for a TEDx event that’s happening at UW, Milwaukee, and you were the first person I thought of. Would you be interested in coming and delivering? I’m thinking, surely I have to try out or audition or send in a whatever. He had the selection ability to just say, I dub the worthy of having a TEDx talk. I prepped and prepared and did all the homework and read the books and all that stuff to get a TED Talk ready and went and delivered it. And it was great fun. It was very nerve racking. There were only 150 people in the room, so it wasn’t a huge audience by any means.
[00:29:33.670] – Speaker 2
But.
[00:29:35.080] – Speaker 1
The video quality was not great. Oh, no.
[00:29:39.510] – Speaker 2
So I’m.
[00:29:40.260] – Speaker 1
Watching a video and I was like, This is not going to go viral. This is not really probably going to make much of a splash on YouTube. But the topic of it was called the changing economic realities of College. And looking back, I would completely rewrite the headline because it wasn’t clickbaity enough. But at any rate, I delivered the talk. They put it out there. It was getting hundreds of views. I think now it has 25,000 views, maybe.
[00:30:10.900] – Speaker 2
All right.
[00:30:12.220] – Speaker 1
And so I get done with that. I was like, Well, hey, I did it. I’m excited. That’s one more thing to check off the list. Check on.
[00:30:18.740] – Speaker 2
The box. Yeah, that’s right.
[00:30:19.970] – Speaker 1
I go home, not three weeks later, I get an almost verbatim email from a woman who had also seen me present, who is now a Masters candidate at the London Business School.
[00:30:33.500] – Speaker 2
She.
[00:30:34.210] – Speaker 1
Sends me an email. Her name is Sarah. Sarah sends me an email and said, Adam, I’m on the curation team for this TEDx event at the London Business School. You’re the first person I thought of. Would you be interested in coming across the pond and delivering? Let’s talk. I reached out to her and I said, Tell me, what do you need to know? What do I need to do? I’m interested. She said, Listen, just give us a couple of ideas on what you want to talk about, and we’ll choose, and then you can go from there. Lo and behold, here comes my second one. The topic of this one, James, I was trying to figure out what it was going to be. I had this idea rolling around in my head that I wanted to play a game of monopoly with my kids with real cash.
[00:31:22.930] – Speaker 2
I.
[00:31:23.780] – Speaker 1
Went to the bank and I pulled out $10,000 in American currency and all the denominations of bills you’d find on a monopoly board. I went home on a Sunday and I set up cameras and we played a high stakes game of monopoly. Then I started building out the talk based on what I learned from the game of monopoly. And that became the talk that went viral. And it went from, I mean, literally had zero to a million in nine months.
[00:31:55.800] – Speaker 2
Wow. And then from that.
[00:31:57.560] – Speaker 1
Point forward, it just kept clocking more and more and more views. So I think it’s probably up around the 6.2 million views on YouTube and got picked up by ted. Com. So it’s on the main TED site as well.
[00:32:12.070] – Speaker 2
Wow, that is impressive. And how long ago was that that you reverted it?
[00:32:17.680] – Speaker 1
So I delivered that in 2016.
[00:32:22.580] – Speaker 2
Okay.
[00:32:23.240] – Speaker 1
2016, real close to the same time the documentary was underway. It was a super busy time.
[00:32:29.530] – Speaker 2
That’s awesome. Tell me about how you gained the audience. Was it just the Ted people put it out to the ether and people gravitated towards it, or did you have to push it, market it somehow? I did.
[00:32:42.880] – Speaker 1
Push it and market it, and they told that they… The internet, the interwebs told me, Hey, if you’re going to send this viral, what you need are a few things. You need an army of people that are promoting it and putting them on playlists on YouTube. Because the more those Ted Talks get on a play list and they’re pushed up in the algorithm, so they’re shown more and more and more. I have this idea known as the power 100 list, and these are the 100 people in my life that love and respect me.
[00:33:14.520] – Speaker 2
Now.
[00:33:15.150] – Speaker 1
My list is like 275, so I keep adding to it. When I meet someone and say, Hey, can I put you on this list? When I need something like a little marketing juice or promotion of something, I reach out to them and then they will push it for me. I’ll give them like, Hey, if you would go do this step by step by step, and I put together this free report, or I’m going to give you a copy of my book or whatever it may be. Ultimately, what happened was it started getting shared, the views went up, the commentary. The commentary, so the comments on a YouTube video will also help spike the algorithm.
[00:33:53.640] – Speaker 2
Oh, just volume?
[00:33:55.830] – Speaker 1
Yeah. It’s the number of comments and the number of comments under comments, like sub comments. Oh, wow.
[00:34:01.890] – Speaker 2
Okay. Get the conversation rolling. That’s exactly right.
[00:34:04.960] – Speaker 1
What was fascinating was, this one I think I titled, right? It was titled When Money Isn’t Real, the $10,000 experiment. All right. We probably got three or four Reddit user groups on the string that were talking about, It’s all Fiat currency anyway. It’s fake money. Money isn’t real. So they went down that rabbit hole. Then we had some people who were like, Oh, it must be nice to be part of the 1 %. What an asshole this guy is. Sorry.
[00:34:40.100] – Speaker 2
Great.
[00:34:40.770] – Speaker 1
What a jerk this guy is. And it was hard reading some of the comments because I’m a middle class guy. I pulled the money out of my home equity line. Having a good time. Having a good time with my kids.
[00:34:54.310] – Speaker 2
Yeah. You got to keep it, right? You got to go back.
[00:34:58.830] – Speaker 1
So they got an award for first, second, and third. They didn’t get to keep their winnings, but it was more money than they’d ever seen in their lives. I think my son won. He had $6,300 in cash in his possession at the time.
[00:35:15.960] – Speaker 2
Good for him.
[00:35:18.280] – Speaker 1
I think there were a number of factors that really pushed it viral. Without question, the fact that it was done at the London Business School, it had a little bit of cash aid to it as well.
[00:35:28.120] – Speaker 2
Okay.
[00:35:28.570] – Speaker 1
And candidly, I think it’s a pretty good talk. I really worked hard on it. Yeah, sounds good. I tried to intentionally hit every single word the right way. Yeah, that’s cool. That is.
[00:35:42.140] – Speaker 2
Very cool. So then do you get a nut every time the thing is played? No.
[00:35:47.520] – Speaker 1
Or it’s just? No. All owned by TED. All owned by TED. Ted gets all of the commercial revenue from their channels. Okay.
[00:35:58.600] – Speaker 2
But I will.
[00:35:59.280] – Speaker 1
Say I would be remiss if I didn’t say there has been business that’s come from it. Yeah, probably.
[00:36:07.250] – Speaker 2
Opened some doors or bring some awareness.
[00:36:10.080] – Speaker 1
And said, hey, we want to have you come present at our group or whatever. So it’s been great.
[00:36:16.140] – Speaker 2
So you’ve done a lot of stuff, the presentations, the talks, the software, all that jazz. When did you first start your own business?
[00:36:25.540] – Speaker 1
Well, this particular business I mean, technically, I opened my doors in 2004. Oh, wow. Okay. I’ve been doing this for 18 years under the same C Corp. The C Corp has had a number of DBAs and pivots and twists and turns. But for the most part, I’ve operated as either a solo entrepreneur or as an entrepreneur since 2004. Wow.
[00:36:50.850] – Speaker 2
What was your first business way back then?
[00:36:54.710] – Speaker 1
The company is called National Financial Educators.
[00:36:58.710] – Speaker 2
Okay. and the.
[00:37:00.140] – Speaker 1
Idea was we were… And again, I say we. I had a business partner at the time. He and I had self published a book called Winning the Money Game.
[00:37:08.730] – Speaker 2
Oh, nice. And we were going.
[00:37:10.310] – Speaker 1
Out and we were presenting the Money Game program to high schools and colleges all around the country. All right. So that’s how we got started. And so you.
[00:37:19.530] – Speaker 2
Were speaking almost right away? Yeah.
[00:37:22.130] – Speaker 1
All.
[00:37:22.740] – Speaker 2
Right.
[00:37:23.730] – Speaker 1
There was a bit of a runway, obviously. We didn’t go right from zero to 60, but I would say within a year to maybe 16 months, we.
[00:37:32.600] – Speaker 2
Had.
[00:37:33.190] – Speaker 1
Enough engagements rolling on an annual basis that it made sense to continue doing the business.
[00:37:40.680] – Speaker 2
Now speaking is interesting. I’m so fascinated with speakers because one, I envy them because they can travel and they have more freedom than I have just with family and all that jazz.
[00:37:54.590] – Speaker 1
Or.
[00:37:55.160] – Speaker 2
I guess probably more than I’m willing to give up as far as that goes. But it’s interesting how when you’re first starting the speaker circuit, you’re getting like, hey, you can speak with us and get $0.05 or something like that. Then when you get your name known and more out there referred, then you’re making actually real money and then it’s really good money. Then you’re like, Holy cow. When you break this down for hours, this is insane.
[00:38:17.860] – Speaker 1
Crazy money. Yeah.
[00:38:20.690] – Speaker 2
It sounds like you were able to ramp that up over the course of a year or two?
[00:38:26.160] – Speaker 1
I would say easily within two years, I was at a point where I could make enough money speaking that I didn’t really have to do anything else. Oh, that’s awesome.
[00:38:36.220] – Speaker 1
In all honesty, James, one of the things that I’ve always wrestled with, and my resume would play this out, is that I get bored easy. In between speaking gigs, I’d be like, Well, I’m going to start doing this. I’m going to start a YouTube channel, or I’m going to do this documentary project, or I’m going to write another book. I’m sure it’s driven my family crazy a little bit because I always have my hand in something.
[00:39:04.130] – Speaker 2
But.
[00:39:04.790] – Speaker 1
I like it. To me, it’s a little bit like a lab for playing the game of business. It’s always on for me. But I will say that my ideal, and as I look to the future, I’ll deliver somewhere between 25 and 45 engagements a year at.
[00:39:24.960] – Speaker 2
A.
[00:39:25.560] – Speaker 1
Level high enough that that will more than cover all of the needs of my family and provide for a secure retirement and all that. I think my goal is just to become as good, if not better than the best of them out there. Nice.
[00:39:41.120] – Speaker 2
I’m.
[00:39:41.740] – Speaker 1
Always honing that craft because I think it’ll be with me forever. Very cool.
[00:39:47.800] – Speaker 2
It’s interesting. Every entrepreneur that I meet seems to have just a plethora of ideas. The challenge is not necessarily starting one of those things, picking which one.
[00:39:58.110] – Speaker 1
Totally.
[00:39:59.100] – Speaker 2
Just quilling this, put away those 999 so you can work on that one.
[00:40:04.360] – Speaker 1
Oh, my gosh.
[00:40:04.990] – Speaker 2
A thousand ideas you have in a day. And I.
[00:40:07.370] – Speaker 1
Wish I had been implanted with that knowledge 15 years ago because I probably would have gone, No, not yet. No, not yet. Not this one. This is what I’m on and what I’m after. Think and Grow Rich, the book by Napoleon Hill, he describes it as definite n ess of purpose. And I think the most talented entrepreneurs among us just have 100 % definite n ess of purpose. They cannot be swayed from whatever path they’re on.
[00:40:39.030] – Speaker 2
I really.
[00:40:40.570] – Speaker 1
Love that. I think that’s an amazing feat and something I think every entrepreneur should really hear and double down on is, if you know exactly what you’re doing, just go do that and don’t divert from it.
[00:40:54.060] – Speaker 2
Yeah. There’s something to be said about the power of focus. That is.
[00:40:57.140] – Speaker 1
For sure. So for sure.
[00:41:02.670] – Speaker 2
Oh, my gosh, my brain. The Shred Method, I’m sorry.
[00:41:06.090] – Speaker 1
The.
[00:41:07.140] – Speaker 2
Software is a website, web page that they go to and with a paywall, I imagine. Yeah.
[00:41:13.130] – Speaker 1
In actuality, the ShredMethod. Com has all sorts of free tools, resources, guidebooks, downloadables. Nice. We have a savings tool that if you can go to The Shred Method, you can plug in your simplified data, your income, your expenses, your mortgage, and it’ll spit out here’s how fast you could be out of debt. And what I often tell people, my team tells people is that’s not even the whole story. That is enticing, but we can juice that even more and show you how fast you could be out of debt. And in all honesty, James, for some people, it’s not about being out of debt. It’s more about just creating efficiency with their income.
[00:41:54.470] – Speaker 2
So they get.
[00:41:55.380] – Speaker 1
To keep more of what they’re making on a day by day, week by week, month by month basis. What are some of.
[00:42:01.800] – Speaker 2
The mistakes that you see people making just more or less universally where they end up in these financial.
[00:42:09.040] – Speaker 1
We’ll call them dire.
[00:42:09.770] – Speaker 2
Straits, but even financial challenges?
[00:42:13.890] – Speaker 1
I think this is my overarching philosophy, but I think we live in a banker’s business model.
[00:42:20.650] – Speaker 2
And I referred.
[00:42:21.880] – Speaker 1
To it earlier that we are their compound interest leverage point. And the more debt we’re in, the more wealthy the people who are loaning that money out become.
[00:42:33.280] – Speaker 2
And if.
[00:42:33.920] – Speaker 1
We never challenge that notion, then we are doomed to pay the compound interest that that debt requires. And so one of the things that I see people doing is, and I should trademark this, but they payment themselves into a corner.
[00:42:49.720] – Speaker 2
And what I mean by.
[00:42:51.450] – Speaker 1
That is they’ll say, Well, I can afford the payment on that. So yeah, I’ll get that. And then before you know it, you have so many payments, you’re backed into a corner, you can’t do anything else because those payments have you locked down on your current income or your current lifestyle.
[00:43:06.070] – Speaker 2
When.
[00:43:08.250] – Speaker 1
I mentioned that we exist to create freedom in people’s lives, freedom and flexibility are all about having discretionary income and time.
[00:43:18.390] – Speaker 2
Money and time.
[00:43:19.510] – Speaker 1
Money and time. And if someone is working their tail off to make money, to make payments, to pay the banker, then they have no money left and they have no time.
[00:43:31.160] – Speaker 2
Therefore, they.
[00:43:31.500] – Speaker 1
Have no freedom.
[00:43:33.310] – Speaker 2
And with.
[00:43:34.280] – Speaker 1
The Shred Method, one of the things that we’re trying to do is help people get really lean in their bills. So we minimize all their payments. We pay off credit cards, car loans, student loans, and eventually the mortgage. When you’re lean and you have access to the money, so there’s a ton of liquidity, and you don’t have to get someone’s approval to get access to it. You don’t have to go back to the bank and get it approved, then life’s your oyster. You want to take a month off vacation? You can do it. You want to take time off at work and you got two weeks? Take two weeks and don’t sweat the, Oh my gosh. How am I ever going to afford my bills if I go do this? In my mind and in our team’s mind, this is our goal. We want to help people understand that there is a different side that you can live on that.
[00:44:21.960] – Speaker 2
Is.
[00:44:22.740] – Speaker 1
Full of freedom and options and flexibility. But it requires you have to have a different mindset around that.
[00:44:30.840] – Speaker 2
It’s interesting how, I guess for a lot of things, debt can be a tool.
[00:44:35.750] – Speaker 1
I’m trying to think.
[00:44:37.730] – Speaker 2
Grant Cardone said something about if the debt is making you money.
[00:44:41.370] – Speaker 1
Then it’s justified.
[00:44:42.770] – Speaker 2
But if it’s not making you money, don’t do it. And that’s how I feel.
[00:44:47.260] – Speaker 1
About pretty much all debt. I’m not averse to leverage at all. We use leverage, but we use leverage like Grant Cardone does to make money. And I think that’s the distinction is, and even the house, people will say, well, my home is my biggest asset. Or Robert Kiyosaki said, Your home is a liability. It takes money out of your pocket.
[00:45:10.080] – Speaker 2
But I can.
[00:45:12.500] – Speaker 1
Make a point that my wife and I, we blast away our mortgage in about three and a half years. We redeployed $200,000 of that into an investment that generates about 800 bucks a month, which coincidentally is about what our mortgage payment is every month. All right.
[00:45:32.730] – Speaker 2
So we.
[00:45:33.250] – Speaker 1
Live rent free in our home because we blast away the mortgage, deployed $200,000 in investment, and the money from that investment pays our mortgage payment. Oh, very cool.
[00:45:43.450] – Speaker 2
At the same time.
[00:45:44.580] – Speaker 1
We’re shredded, so we’ll knock out the mortgage in no time. The investment that we made in three years’ time will return all of our investment, plus another 50 to 75,000 bucks.
[00:45:55.560] – Speaker 2
If you do that enough.
[00:45:57.160] – Speaker 1
Times, you can create financial freedom in short order.
[00:46:00.990] – Speaker 2
I view my.
[00:46:02.700] – Speaker 1
Home as one of my greatest assets because I’m looking at how do I deploy equity from my home into something that generates cash flow, allowing me to be more free and flexible. It’s a tool.
[00:46:13.500] – Speaker 2
It’s a tool.
[00:46:15.180] – Speaker 1
I.
[00:46:15.590] – Speaker 2
Suppose just like with any tool, you have to know how to use it. That’s exactly right.
[00:46:19.040] – Speaker 2
Otherwise, you’ll end up smashing your thumb or you want to take the analogy.
[00:46:22.500] – Speaker 1
That’s exactly right. If you don’t know how to use a hammer, you’ll hurt yourself.
[00:46:27.100] – Speaker 2
Interesting. Tell me, how do you market The Shred Method? Because that’s one of the bigger challenge. It is.
[00:46:38.090] – Speaker 1
The way it was originally started was there was a B2C and a B2B model. The B2C model was we would go straight to consumers and we would just sign up users.
[00:46:49.020] – Speaker 2
In.
[00:46:49.890] – Speaker 1
My ideal business plan, the five to seven year plan, we will acquire 10,000 monthly users, 15,000 monthly users. Because of the monthly subscription fee will be an acquisition target to some firms. We want the revenue and.
[00:47:06.210] – Speaker 2
Or the data.
[00:47:09.220] – Speaker 1
Then the B2C model is, because the software is duplicatable, we can install other versions of The Shred Method, though it may be named something else, to people who want to white label the software as their own product. Got it.
[00:47:25.340] – Speaker 2
Okay. So in that case.
[00:47:26.650] – Speaker 1
We would go to financial advisors, insurance agents, mortgage brokers, you name it. And right now, the way we’re marketing for individual users, we found great success going into communities where the leader of that community is already on our side because they really like the product.
[00:47:48.570] – Speaker 2
They go to.
[00:47:50.230] – Speaker 1
Their tribe and say, These guys are awesome. You really need to check this out. Oh, and by the way, we have this discount or deal with them, and we’ll get dozens of people signing up through those means. Super cool. What have been some of the.
[00:48:05.860] – Speaker 2
Challenges putting this thing together that you maybe didn’t foresee? I’m not.
[00:48:10.850] – Speaker 1
A developer, so understanding the code is interesting and probably not so secretively, we have an Indian development team that are brilliant. They’re really intelligent folks, but they work opposite from us. They’re at work at night when we’re sleeping and we get up and do a 7 AM call and then they go home and go to bed. That’s been challenging because you got to figure out how do we project manage something where we’re working opposite time zones, but.
[00:48:46.420] – Speaker 2
We still need to get.
[00:48:47.100] – Speaker 1
Stuff done in short order. But they’re all fun exercises and hurdles to jump. Was it hard to.
[00:48:56.590] – Speaker 2
Find developers?
[00:49:00.160] – Speaker 1
Yes and no. I always rely on referrals and people I know and the experience of others. I reached out to my network and I just said, I’m looking for this. Another Mastermind partner reached out and said, I think I have the company, they do this. They build white label Ubble software. Companies that want to white label what they do, they do that. It’s been a good fit.
[00:49:28.020] – Speaker 2
Nice. Very cool. What have been out of all the things that you’ve done, what are some of your favorite things? That’s a medley to choose from.
[00:49:39.670] – Speaker 1
It is a medley to choose from. I always love the creative process. I think the common thread pulled through all of these businesses that I’ve done is if it was on the speaking side, I was having to craft a new talk. I really like just the creation process that writing the jokes and thinking through my interactive exercises and how am I going to get their attention right away and all those things. I love that.
[00:50:07.000] – Speaker 2
When I wrote books.
[00:50:08.790] – Speaker 1
I love the creative process of writing books. There’s something about sitting at a Starbucks for six weeks, three mornings a week, just jamming out on my laptop. And then finally, seeing something come to fruition. Oh, nice. I’ve got a number of them. I got four Amazon best sellers. Nice. But when you put these books together and then you see a final product, and in all honesty, these cost $1.20 to produce, and.
[00:50:38.590] – Speaker 2
They’re sold for $15 online, $10 at events. We’ll sell quantities of 100 to 500 at a time to colleges and universities. That’s all right.
[00:50:49.150] – Speaker 1
That creative process is something for me. The TED Talk, same thing, writing the talk, the documentary, the creativity that went involved in putting it together. I would say out of all of them, I loved the process of creating the documentary, I think, most from an experience perspective.
[00:51:10.200] – Speaker 2
But I’m really digging into what it’s like to build a software as a service company.
[00:51:14.370] – Speaker 2
Nice. I’ve interviewed a lot of people that are going down that road. It’s very interesting. It’s clever. There’s money to be made. There’s help.
[00:51:24.480] – Speaker 1
That you can.
[00:51:25.520] – Speaker 2
Offer people. There’s value. Totally.
[00:51:28.450] – Speaker 1
There’s multiples on the back end if you sell it right. We have high intention and low attachment on. Our intention is to do certain things. Whether or not they happen is irrelevant, we’ll be fine no matter what.
[00:51:44.040] – Speaker 1
High intention, low attachment.
[00:51:46.620] – Speaker 1
Because I know some people that get so attached to whatever they’re doing in the outcome that then they’re just crest fallen when it doesn’t go the way they want it to. Oh, sure. For me, it’s like, what’s next? I’m going to give this its due and we’re going to make it happen. And if it doesn’t happen, then we figure out what the pivot is. But I really feel strongly like a 9 or 10 on the belief scale that this will scale to 10,000 users and we’ll have someone say, Hey, we’re interested. Nice.
[00:52:14.860] – Speaker 2
This podcast would be the launch of.
[00:52:16.670] – Speaker 1
I hope so. I hope so, James. Your cut will be coming to you. I promise.
[00:52:21.540] – Speaker 1
Tell me how people can find you.
[00:52:24.450] – Speaker 1
The easiest way to find me is AdamCarrol.info. That’s two R’s, two L’s, AdamCarroll.info. Not to be confused with Adam Carolla or Adam Carol, the Formula One race car driver from Ireland, or the singer songwriter from Austin, Texas. Holy cow.
[00:52:41.660] – Speaker 2
I didn’t realize there were that many Adam.
[00:52:43.090] – Speaker 1
There’s a bunch of us. Someday I’m going to start a show, James, called You Don’t Know Me From Adam, and I’m just going to interview Adam Carols on the show. It’s going to be awesome. That’s genius.
[00:52:55.090] – Speaker 1
The other way is obviously at TheShredMethod.com. You can find us on the site. If it intrigues you at all, run your numbers, see what happens. We’ve got an evergreen webinar you can watch. Most of the stuff out there is not behind a paywall. You can get all the data you need to really understand it. Then if you want to dig into the course and the software, that’s when you make the decision. People can learn a.
[00:53:19.700] – Speaker 2
Lot just from showing up at the website and playing around a little bit.
[00:53:22.690] – Speaker 1
Yeah, totally. Very cool.
[00:53:25.020] – Speaker 2
Hey, Adam, I appreciate your time. This is awesome. James, I appreciate you.
[00:53:28.450] – Speaker 1
Thanks for having me on the show. It’s great to be with your tribe. I hope we got some value, some nuggets shared today.
[00:53:33.590] – Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. I love talking with entrepreneurs, of course. We’re talking with entrepreneurs that have done a lot of things, that’s even better.
[00:53:42.080] – Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly.
[00:53:43.850] – Speaker 1
This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the a business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie. If you could do us a huge favor, click that big old subscribe button, smash that big old thumbs up button, and of course, comment and share this with all your friends. I guess it even helps if you get mad in the comments.
[00:54:04.780] – Speaker 1
Yeah, totally. Viral, viral, viral. Criticize my hairline or something and see how many people comment on it.
[00:54:11.160] – Speaker 1
My name is James Kademan and Authentic Business Adventures is brought to you by Calls on Call, offering call answering and receptionist services for service businesses across the country on the web at callsoncall.com. And of course, The Bold Business Book, a book for the entrepreneur in all of us, available wherever fine books are sold. We’d like to thank you, our wonderful listeners, as well as our guest Adam Carroll, the documentary filmmaker. Can you tell us, what’s the name of the documentary?
[00:54:38.360] – Speaker 1
Yes, the documentary is Broke, Busted and Disgusted.
[00:54:41.520] – Speaker 1
And can people find it somewhere?
[00:54:43.390] – Speaker 1
They can find it. Yeah.
[00:54:44.200] – Speaker 1
If you go to BrokeBustedDisgusted.com and you go to the download link, you can actually download or watch the video in real time. And I think it’s three bucks or something like that online.
[00:54:55.010] – Speaker 1
Nice.
[00:54:55.750] – Speaker 1
Yeah, very cool. Super worth it. Watch it with your kids.
[00:54:58.830] – Speaker 1
Awesome.
[00:54:59.480] – Speaker 2
And then the founder of The Shred Method, tell us the website for The Shred Method as well.
[00:55:04.220] – Speaker 2
Yeah, The Shred Method can be found at simply TheShredMethod.com. And we have a savings analysis and a Keylock guide that you can download for free. All sorts of good things out there.
[00:55:15.660] – Speaker 2
Nice. Super cool. Past episodes can be found morning, noon, and night. Podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. Thank you for listening. We’ll see you next week. I want you to stay awesome. And if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.
