https://youtu.be/ze-E_TMWwrU
Randy Gage is a thought-provoking, rags to riches entrepreneur who has published 14 books in 25 different languages including the New York Times bestseller Risky is The New Safe.
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Apply Leverage With Randy Gage
Our guest is Randy Gage, that I have been following Randy for the last probably 15 years, early 2000 when I first was introduced to some of his work, the Prosperity Series, and I never thought that I was gonna have him come on my interview, but this is a very exciting moment. Randy is a thought-provoking, critical thinker. He also is a rags-to-riches entrepreneur, if I may say so, and he has published 14 books in 25 different languages. One of his books, Risky is the New Safe, was actually a New York Times bestseller, is a New York Times bestseller and he's coming up with a new book, Radical Rebirth, that I already pre-ordered and can't wait to actually receive it in the mail. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Randy.
Hey, great to be on with you. Is that album you're holding, is that CDs or was that cassette tape?
That's CDs at least. Yeah. It's not quite, although I have, you know, I was straddling that age of cassette tapes to CDs and I no longer can use them, right? I now have to go to the MP3, but I saw on the website that these are still available in MP3 format.
Yeah, that album is at least 20 years than a bestseller for us. It's kind of my overview principles on prosperity, I guess, would be the best way to describe it.
It was fascinating and it's a little bit spiritual, probably more than I am kind of vied for. But I was very intrigued by this series and I dug into some of the other resources that you offered at the time. And anyway, it's pretty interesting. So tell us a little bit about your background. I think it's a fascinating background, your entrepreneur journey, how you got here and how you became an entrepreneur in the first place and how you built up your speaking and author business.
Well, I took a circuitous route to being an entrepreneur because I feel like I was born an entrepreneur because when I was 11, you know, I come from a poor family, single mother who raised three kids by herself, knocking on doors, selling Avon products, and I raked leaves, shoveled snow, babysat, delivered newspapers, just any kind of thing. And in a big way, I mean, I actually, as I was delivering the hometown paper and I knew people went to the drugstore on Sundays and they would buy the copy, the Sunday edition of the New York Times or the Washington Post.
And so I wrote those papers and said I've got a distribution company here. I was a paper boy but I wrote it on a letterhead that said Gage Distributors and said you know we distribute newspapers and I would like to be the agent here in Madison, Wisconsin. And they said, OK. And so I started doing Sunday delivery of my hometown paper and then the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. And I actually sold that company to a grown-up person for a few thousand dollars when I was...
When was that? How old were you?
I was probably 15 at that time. So I started that way, and then I was a teenage alcoholic, a teenage drug addict. I made a lot of really poor choices. I ended up in jail for armed robbery at 15 years old. And then, of course, had to make some new decisions in my life, right? And so I resolved to get out and play, work hard and play by the rules. And so I went back to working for people. And I had started as a dishwasher in a pancake house. And so I became a cook and then a manager, trainee and a assistant manager. And I just got in the world of being an employee. But it took me some time to realize, no, that's not what I want to do. If I'm going to be in the restaurant business, then I need to find a way to own my own restaurant. I think I'm psychologically unemployable, so I found my way back to being an entrepreneur.
That's awesome. So how old were you when you kind of made the jump or start to make the jump to get into entrepreneurship and building your own thing?
So that was my early 20s. And then I also got introduced to direct selling. With Amway was the first company that I ever heard about and I joined. I didn't make any money with them, you know, but they seem to have done pretty well without me since they're still doing about $8 billion a year. So they survived the loss of me as a contributor, I guess. But I saw that, you know, I was exposed to that. And then that again, that was again, an entrepreneurial business where I could be my own boss. So I've done that for many years now, ever since I was 20.
You also produced some programs about multi-level selling and marketing, right?
Yeah.
I recall that you had some talks on that as well that I heard.
Oh yeah, and I've done very well with that. I've made literally millions of dollars with my distributorships over the years. I love it because it was perfect for someone like me who was a high school dropout. So there were no big companies recruiting me and offering me a corner office and a company car and insurance, vacation benefits and all that. I was just a kid from the streets. I was able to become a multi-millionaire doing that. I still love that business to this day. I love the business to this day because it has one of my other really important criteria is for entrepreneurship, which is the ability to apply leverage. You've got, if you want to be successful as I believe an entrepreneur or an employee, you're going to have your highest degrees of success if you can find a way to employ leverage in what you do.
Are you talking about financial leverage or you're talking about all kinds of leverage?
All kind of leverage. I love financial leverage, like real estate. I like to be able to buy a million dollar condo with a few hundred thousand dollar down and leverage money. I like to leverage my time, like I did in all those years with direct selling. I like to find ways to generate money, even if it's not leverage. Sometimes, like I wrote a blog about this recently that would be really good for everybody listening. If you go to my website, the title was Beat Your Burn Rate.
I believe either one, entrepreneurs or employees can become wealthy. But either case, you've still got to apply leverage. And it's okay if you're an employee and you're trading hours for money, right? That's the thing we're trying to escape. Because if you trade hours for money, there's a finite limit to how much wealth you can create because there's a finite amount of productive hours you can spend in the day, right? But if you trade hours for money and then take that money and leverage it through investments, through real estate, through some other type of business, then it really gets sexy.
There's a finite limit to how much wealth you can create if you trade hours for money. But if you trade hours for money and then take that money and leverage it through investments, through real estate, through some other type of business.Share on X
And if you could find a way to earn where you're leveraging your time, leveraging your, you know, you mentioned I'm a speaker and an author. What am I doing there? I'm leveraging my knowledge. So I can write, my new book is out January 12th, right? I wrote it one time. It can sell millions of copies around the world and I don't have to rewrite it every time. I can, you know, I can practice leverage with that. So I think that's really a critical key is that I look for is, is there ways to apply leverage? Because then I'm going to get more exponential growth as opposed to just incremental growth.
Incremental growth that's fascinating. So how do you become a speaker? when was this point when you realized that you can apply the leverage of speaking and Step beyond doing directly selling yourself and maybe selling through other media But but being bigger than just a distributor but being more of a thought leader.
I wish I could take credit for my brilliant strategy for doing that, but it was completely by accident. I was in direct selling. I was doing pretty good, but I noticed some of my people were struggling. I thought they need training on how to do this. So I created, and the first rank you could achieve was called supervisor in that company. So I said I'm gonna do a supervisor school. Once a month, we get together on a Saturday, I'd rent a hotel meeting room, get a whiteboard there in the front and I would explain, here's how you become a supervisor.
And then other people started saying, hey, can we come to your training? We heard about that. I'm like, yeah, you know, give us five bucks to help cover the donuts in the meeting room and you can come. And then people started flying in from other cities, then people started to say, hey, can you, if we bought you a plane ticket and we sent you to Chicago, could you do a training for our group there? How much would it cost?
And so I totally fell into that, just backed into it because I realized, OK, if I could train my team, I could train other teams, teams from other companies. So that's how it started. I had my first midlife crisis right on schedule when I turned 40, and I said, you know, I'm tired of doing these seminars. I'm gonna retire, and I'm gonna play softball and race my vipers and drink out of a coconut. And I had a very dear friend, a guy named Bill Gove, who was the first president of the National Speakers Association.
And he told me, you've got to be back on the platform. This is who you are. This is what you, you're one of the greatest in the world at that. You've got to do it. And I thought, and that really did intrigue me because I was going crazy being retired. And then I thought, well, but I don't want to do seminars on how do you get a prospect's phone number. If I have to do that, I would stick a fork in my eye. And I thought, I'd rather do seminars about the important stuff, the principles of prosperity,
