How do you come back from a mess and create success? And how do you get your spouse to support you? Gary Norris, Rebel Entrepreneur and leader in the real estate investment and personal development company, Strongbrook, shares how he was able to bounce back from his financial mess and earn his wife’s support. Tune in now!
P.S. Be sure to check out Part 2 when his wife Carolyn shares her side of the story. REALLY good stuff!
Gary Norris Bio:
Gary is the author of “The ABC’s of Success” and owner and host of “The Rebel Entrepreneur Radio Show,” a powerful real estate investing podcast encompassing a mix of mindset, humor, and empowered entrepreneurship! Gary has had the pleasure of featuring well-known entrepreneurs such as the CEO of The Og Mandino company and Dave Ramsey’s business partner to the lesser known, but wildly successful and inspiring Rebel Entrepreneurs who are making a difference and moving the universe! A favorite guest that Gary would love to have on his podcast one day is the legendary Rebel Entrepreneur, Mr. Glenn Beck!
Chris Miles Bio:
Chris Miles, the “Cash Flow Expert,” is a leading authority showing entrepreneurs and their spouses how to quickly free up and create cash flow and lasting wealth TODAY spending time doing what they love most! He has been featured in US News, CNN Money, and Bankrate, interviewed internationally on TV & radio and has a high reputation with his company, Money Ripples getting his clients fast, life-altering financial results.
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Listen to the podcast here
Prospering With Your Spouse Part 1 With Gary Norris
It’s such a blessed day. I’m grateful to have you guys on with us. As a reminder, be sure to check us out at MoneyRipples.com and be able to check out our blogs and events we’ve got coming up. We’ve got great events coming up. We’ve already got people registering for things that are 4 or 5 months out. We love to be able to have you participate, get to know you better, and see how we can serve you as well.
I want to bring on a special guest here. His name is Gary Norris. I’ve known Gary for the last couple of years. He is a great, amazing man on a personal level. He has a heart of gold. On a professional level, if you get down to his credentials, so to speak, he’s the author of ABC’s of Success. He’s also a business owner and also the host of the Rebel Entrepreneur Radio Show. That’s at RebelBizRadio.com.
He talks a lot of things about real estate, entrepreneurship, and all those things that I love, which is doing things against the grain. You are being that rebel and thinking different like Steve Jobs says. He interviewed everybody from Dave Blanchard, who is the CEO of The Og Mandino Group, Dave Ramsey, which we all love on this show, and everybody else from there. Eventually, if any of you guys got great connections, this guy wants to get connected to Glenn Beck. If you’ve got those connections and get him one degree of separation away, he would love to know.
The reason I brought on Gary is that we don’t like people that are just Doritos-type people. They are not empty calories. We don’t want people that are phony. We don’t want people that are not the real deal. Gary is a very sincere guy. The success that he and his wife Carolyn have achieved has been amazing, especially considering the nice little challenges that they had several years ago. It was similar to mine in a lot of ways. They were able to bounce back and be very successful business owners in a great company called Strongbrook. I want to be able to bring on Gary here.
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Gary, how are you doing?
I’m doing fantastic. How are you?
I’m loving life.
I’m glad to talk to you again. We’ve got to know each other for a little bit in the last couple of years, dating back to first Facebook and then in person, and since then, several events. You’ve become a good friend of mine and my wife’s. There’s not enough good we can say about you. It’s an honor even to come on and be part of your show. Thank you.
It’s a pleasure to have you on. The reason I have you on is there are a lot of great experiences you have to share that I know people that tune in to the show will love. I’m pleased to have you on. Let’s have you start. I gave you a little intro but tell us more about you.
I appreciate that. I’m an average guy. People that know me will say that about me. Frankly, I love the radio. It’s a good thing because if you saw me, you would say, “That man has a face for radio. Keep him off the television.” I am a down-to-earth guy. I cut my teeth in entrepreneurship because I couldn’t stand the thought of working a 9:00 to 5:00 job or a cubicle job. Before I realized I could cut out on my own and do my own thing.
The only type of jobs I would seek out were jobs that kept me outside of an office. I went into outside sales. I’m thinking, “That’s an answer for me. If I could become a sales guy and only work for companies that would give me a territory where I could work outside of the office, that would give me at least the spirit and feeling of being my own guy. I can work on my own.”
The blessing was I ended up getting that perfect job. I became a drug rep or a pharmaceutical sales rep. It was fun telling my kids as they were young when they went to school, “If your teacher ever asks you what your daddy does, tell them he sells drugs.” I did that for eight years, but eventually, I even got out of that. The entrepreneurial bug was biting me so bad that I took a leap. On March 8th, 2005, I left the pharmaceutical sales rep world and have never worked for somebody since. We were approaching ten years in March 2018. It has been a fun journey.
Happy anniversary almost.
The journey hasn’t always been fun but it has been good. When I say it has been a fun journey, as you know from my story, we’ve done a lot of good and lost everything along the way. I went through a financial reset both financially and almost maritally. I almost lost a marriage, which maybe I will talk about if you want. We’ve recovered since 2011 and have gotten everything built back up and then some. It came to hard lessons learned. I will say no failures were done because a failure is when someone failed at something and then never tries again or never comes back. I take failure as feedback. It’s not failure. It’s feedback. If you can learn from it and you can still do things, then you are better off.
Failure is just feedback. If you can learn from it, you can still do things, and you're better off. Click To TweetTell us more about that experience. What happened?
My first passion for being my own boss was real estate. I was a pharmaceutical sales rep. I was in my late 30s. I saw this guy in my neighborhood who was a friend. I got to know him for about two years because we lived down the street from each other. He was 25 years old and quit his job. I didn’t know what that meant. All I knew was he was 25 years old, and I was in my mid to upper 30s.
He’s home during the day with his family and his small kids, and I’m missing out on life with my growing family. I said to him, “What do you do?” He was like, “I don’t do anything. I do real estate.” That’s a big open-ended question because when he said, “I don’t do anything,” he did a lot of things. He had things rolling that he didn’t have to do a lot of things. He had things being done. He opened my eyes a little bit.
At the time, I then came across Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and that opened my eyes. If your audience has not read that book, it’s a must-read book to open your eyes to a possibility. That was my journey back in 1999. I started listening to this neighbor, and he told me, “I started helping people do real estate.” He taught me the only strategy he was using, and I implemented it while I was a pharmaceutical sales rep. In 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002, in that four-year period of me doing that one strategy, I had nothing but success.
I got to the point where in 2005, it was going so good with my estate ventures on the side, knowing nothing. I quit my job as a drug rep. You mentioned Doritos. Gary’s not this type of guy that’s a stuffed bag of Doritos. Back then, in 2005, I thought I was all that and a bag of chips. I thought that I was the man. I was a 40-year-old guy thinking, “I’m good. I’m awesome.” In 2005, ‘06, and ‘07, if you were in real estate, you could sign your name and have a library card, and you could get a loan. It was that easy. Everyone was making money.
I thought it was just me and my math skills but everything started to come crashing down when 2007 and 2008 came. My real estate market has started changing. I was making money. I was partnering with other people in other business ventures. I had a business that’s not even real estate related. I went and partnered with a guy and started doing some sales and marketing for him. We had a team of six guys working for us. A financial mishap there happens. They took off and left my wife and me high and dry with a huge amount of debt, a company that went under, and six employees we had to let go of.
I found myself eventually $200,000 in debt, not counting my real estate, which was starting to implode. That lesson carried me in 2008, ‘09, and ‘10. I was barely hanging on, trying to find something, and almost giving up to where it doesn’t take much to realize you are not even a bag of chips. In fact, you are not even the empty crumbs in the bottom of an empty bag.
I was majorly humbled in 2009, ‘10, and ‘11. It took me three years to humble myself to realize there’s got to be something. That’s where the rebel entrepreneur in me woke up. I tell people to be a rebel. What does it mean to be a rebel entrepreneur? It’s when you are finally to the point when you are sick and tired of being sick and tired. You’ve got to do something or else, you are going to throw in the towel.
I wasn’t willing to throw in the towel. My wife and I wanted to stay married. We wanted to keep our children alive. There were times when that was extremely hard to do. Lo and behold, we got up, took life on by the horns, pulled up our pants and said, “Enough is enough.” We started learning, mentoring people, and doing whatever we could to help them become better people. Entrepreneurial-wise, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be an entrepreneur but I needed to go out. I needed to find a system that I could tap into, which is what I encourage real entrepreneurs to do.
I don’t want to go stake. I don’t have $500,000 to go open up a franchise of Subways or Quiznos. I don’t have $1.2 million to open up a McDonald’s. Those are systems that you can take advantage of but it wasn’t for me. It’s not for most Americans. In fact, it’s not for anyone I know. I knew the value of tapping into a system. I just had to find one that I could access that could do all the heavy lifting for me. As long as it was profitable, ethical, and fun, maybe I would tap into it and build a business around it. That’s what I’ve specialized in doing.
I’ve tapped into a $40 million business. I could access it for $500 a year to be able to have them do fulfillment and do a lot of referring, create some major income, earn a great income, and create more value for others in a leveraged way. That’s what I started doing. My journey went from I was all that in a bag of chips in my own mind to losing everything in 2011. I even lost three homes in foreclosure in 2011. In 2010, I helped 35 people avoid foreclosure. The next year in 2011, I lost three of my own. I had 13 houses, and I ended up losing 3. I had to pay people money to get rid of some of them.
Eventually, I had to get rid of my whole portfolio as I was starting over. It was miserable. The whole time it was miserable, I was like a sponge trying to learn what to do next and what to do right. From 2011 to now, my life has dramatically improved because I stopped worrying about Gary and started focusing on other people and how I can help them. That truly is the story of my past.
My future is wide open because I have the heart of a servant. I try to help people get connected to opportunities even if they are not an opportunity I want, just opportunities in general. That’s what your show is about. It’s creating the cashflow to free up the ability for people to do something different so they can get a better result in their life.
That’s an amazing story. Let me ask you a few questions along with that. You are seeing a great amount of success, and I know anybody who has met you probably sees that version of you. The story, I’m sure, is powerful for a lot of people. In that process, how was Carolyn, your wife? How was she during this whole process? Was this tough on her?
The day will come you will have to have her on your show to share her version. Her version is powerful. When I was going through our financial reset, and we were losing our homes to foreclosure, etc. my wife was numb because her husband had been doing these things. He was trying to make life happen and be an entrepreneur. I see the outside of the funnel. I’m trying to send all this stuff into a funnel where I know we can make money. My wife lived in reality. She lived at the end of the funnel where the actual money came out. That money was very little compared to the big funnel where I was pouring all my ideas into what worked and wouldn’t work.
She, along the way, became very depressed. I don’t blame her. She was very closed up. She wasn’t a big believer in her husband as a provider, decision maker or financial man at all. I had done things against her will with business opportunities, and they came back to bite us. When that happens, she’s proven right, and I’m proven to be a schmuck. When I finally found some stuff that was working, she had no reason to believe me that it would work. In fact, she didn’t believe me that it would work. She was numb to the whole fact that I was doing things and making money.
A few years ago, I had made $130,000 in about a fifteen-month period. This company was going to give me a $35,000 bonus check in Las Vegas at a convention. They wanted me to go there so they could award it to me on stage and people could clap. My wife said, “You are telling me you want to go to Las Vegas to get a check. Are you telling me that they won’t give you that check if you don’t go?”
I said, “They will give it to me.” She said, “Going to Las Vegas is not a money-making activity. You are just going there to get a check. If they are going to give it to you anyways, why spend the $200 or $300 to get you there while you could do other things and make money for our family?” She had a point, but then again, I thought I had a point.
She was like, “Here’s the deal. Go to Las Vegas for a week. Here’s your budget of $200. Make it happen,” and I did. I made it happen. I found people to carpool with. I made arrangements for a hotel to sleep on the floor. I did all of this to get this check awarded to me to prove to my wife that I’m back on track. Something happens to Carolyn the night before. I’m already in Vegas. It’s about 12:00 AM. The day before we are getting this check awarded to us, my wife was like, “My husband might be getting this check. What if he really did, and I’m not there to help him?” She surprises me and shows up on the day I’m getting this check offered to me.
About an hour before I got this check award, she showed up with 2 of our 3 kids. She was there able to witness that. In fact, I had her called up on stage with my kids to receive this $35,000 check. It was the point when my wife woke up and became a new person. It was the person she always was that she let hide underneath her depression that I didn’t know even existed.
The most important thing you can do is share your ideas and express them to each other. Click To TweetShe took the microphone that day as they were asking me to say a few words. They were passing the microphone to me, and my wife reaches out and grabbed it. She takes the microphone and says, “This check for $35,000 represents we’ve helped people through real estate.” The bonus check was for helping 75 homes purchased through our real estate program. It meant 75 families had bought homes that would not have been bought otherwise without our help.
She took the check and said, “Even though this represents that, I’m telling you what this check represents for me. This check has got my life back. It represents my family is back. It represents that I found something my husband has put his thoughts, efforts, and faith into. I’m going to jump onboard. I’m going to put my thoughts, faith, and efforts into this as well. My husband and I are going to be a couple to be reckoned with while we go out and help more families get into more houses because I believe in this now.”
Since then, we have been given those checks 5 or 6 more times but that’s not the point. The point is my wife woke up. When she wakes up, the universe moves. In fact, that’s a title of a book she’s writing, which is Move Your Universe, and she does. We’ve had the blessing of helping hundreds of people tap into their greatness to do something. They may not have otherwise done that if we weren’t there to help them find a way to express themselves. That’s the purpose of why I do what I do.
There’s something powerful about that story. I’ve heard you tell it before, and I’ve heard Carolyn too. It’s fantastic. You are right. We should also have her on the show to get her end of it. The thing I love is that I know there are a lot of people reading this who want their spouses to get to that place. The reason I had you share that is that I know a lot of people who have spouses that aren’t quite there yet.
A lot of the people that tune in to this show usually are the ones that are saying, “We are wanting to learn how to get more out of this but how do I get my spouse on board?” I will ask you that same question. What would you tell them? What do you think it takes to get a spouse onboard to start aligning and living these principles together rather than feeling like you are having to always fight each other or prove to each other?
I would have answered this question differently a couple of years ago for my whole life. Once I witnessed my wife waking up, I could have done so many things before then that I didn’t see. I didn’t see it because I thought I knew best. I thought, “I can do this. I have an idea. I can make this work.” Here’s my suggestion. Engage your spouse in your ideas. Let them be part of your dream. Let them be part of your idea.
If they don’t like your idea, don’t see it or don’t have a good feeling about it, honor their wishes. Honor their feelings. Let them know that you are there for them even if you don’t go down a pathway of an idea. That’s what I didn’t do, unfortunately. I had an idea and she said, “I don’t have a good feeling about that.” Idea after idea that I went and did anyways, every one of them ended up crashing.
I lost the faith and trust of my wife. She lost it in me. I never gave her a chance to express it and be a partner with me. It wasn’t until this one work that she realized that the power of something that could work is very empowering. Once she was onboard with it, we became even more successful and empowering to others. I would dare say the most important thing you can do is share your ideas and express them to each other where you both come from the same space. You are either supporting it to move forward or not supporting it and choosing not to move forward.
With your situation with where you started to work with Strongbrook, did she have her doubts?
She had her doubts for fifteen months. 1 of the 3 homes we lost to foreclosure was the home we lived in. That was a tough thing, being married for almost 25 years and bringing your family out of a home and into a situation where you are hundreds of thousands in debt. We no longer had credit and were moving into a rental home where we were used to raising our family in our home.
When we moved here to Utah from Idaho, we went to open up an account at a credit union, and we couldn’t even open an account. They said, “I’m sorry. We can’t open an account for you.” That was an unbelievable feeling of failure that came upon me that day to watch my wife break into tears, saying, “I have been married 25 years. We can’t even open an account in a credit union now when we’ve had perfect credit for 24 and a half years?” In other words, it took my wife a while to believe in anything after a crash like that.
For 18 or 15 months, she was numb to the fact that I was working with this great company called Strongbrook. It helped people get into real estate even though we couldn’t play, helping hundreds of others to play. Thankfully, eventually, she saw the goodness of what was happening, and it woke her up. I should tell you this. She said, “Strongbrook is a pretty good company. They tell people and teach people how to take assets that could be under appreciating assets and turn them into a high appreciating asset like 401(k)s and home equity.”
My wife took that personally and said, “I am an underperforming asset. I’m seeing my husband perform neat things and sitting on the sidelines. I’m going to start performing and help people.” She became a great asset to other people by sharing with them how to wake up to reality, take life by the horns, and be responsible for yourself. When my wife woke up, she hasn’t slowed down yet. She amazes me every day. She amazes me more and more, and I’m blessed to be part of her life.
We are at the end of our interview here. I want to give people a chance to be able to either connect with you or if they ever have questions. If people want to follow you or connect with you, what’s the best way they can go about doing that?
I love to reach out to people. RebelBizRadio.com is where I have my Rebel Entrepreneur Radio Show. If they want to get to know Carolyn and me both, we have our website at GetYourRebelOn.com. If you want to learn more about the company that we work with, Strongbrook, there’s a unique way to find them that you can find through Chris. Go to MoneyRipples.com, his website, or go to MoneyRipples.Strongbrook.com. You can find us that way as well. Anybody and everybody are welcome to reach out to us. We love working and networking with people that are like-minded. Anyone that tunes in to your show is a person we would love to join on our network or our circle of influence. I appreciate you. I appreciate you letting me be on the show.
It has been a pleasure. I know our audience got a ton of value from your experience and your wisdom. Thank you so much. I appreciate that.
Thank you so much. I appreciate you. To anyone reading, Chris Miles is a man that can help you get where you want to go with your cashflow issues. You are a money ripple creator.
I appreciate that so much. This was a great episode. Make sure you go out and apply these principles. Don’t just read. Be a doer of the word, not a hearer only. I wish you a great and prosperous week. We will see you soon.