- More people should
be hard on themselves, we go around bubble
wrapping ourselves, right. We've been training those on for too long, like be hard on yourself, take
the fucking bubble wrap off, take the training wheels off. No one did that for me, man, and we came to this country
and it was just like, hey, go figure it out but it was don't take
risk, go get a good job, fuck that, be a fighter jet, be a fighter jet, go to battle every day, take risk, that's what a fighter jet does. A crop duster has a routine life and it's fucking boring. (applause and cheers) - Hey everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that are gonna
help you actually execute on your dreams. Alright, today's guest is an INC 500 CEO, twice over, who's company
made Entrepreneur Magazines list of the top 15 franchises, that is all a very, very long
way from where he started. His family came to the US with 200 dollars after fleeing Soviet
controlled Armenia in 1980. Overnight, he went from
having caviar for breakfast to having to dumpster dive
to avoid going hungry. His family risked
everything to trade comfort for freedom, something
he's grateful for today but back then it meant
excruciating poverty, it meant cramming an entire family of five into someones spare bedroom,
it meant moving 14 times in his first two years
in this country alone, it meant washing his hair with gasoline to kill lice and growing up heavy set because he couldn't afford quality food. It also meant having to
build up from the absolute bottom in the face of people
who did not want him here. Prejudice and bullying
were near daily occurrences that chipped away at him,
filling him with anger and at least initially, sent
him down a very bad path, he was fighting a lot, being a jerk and at one point even
being the getaway driver in a home invasion that ended
in a police helicopter chase, can't believe that's true. Finally, after getting
jumped by more than a dozen gang members and beaten savagely, he decided he was going
to turn his life around, he got in shape, started personal training and decided he was going to
help people for a living. Luckily, one of his clients,
a successful entrepreneur taught him the basics of sales and that was all he needed. In the years that followed
he built a massive empire by delivering a ton of value and charging a fair price for it. Today, a true rags to riches story, he is the CEO of Fit Body Bootcamp, ranked number 350 in
Entrepreneur Magazines list of the 500 fastest
growing franchises, earning hundreds of millions
of dollars in revenue per year and is considered the fitness industries most trusted advisor. He host the biggest
fitness business seminar in the world and has been
featured in media outlets such as Ink Magazine, The Huffington Post, Doctor Oz and countless others. So please, help me in welcoming
the author of the book, Man Up, serial entrepreneur, speaker and business consultant, Bedros Keuilian. (applause and cheers) So, your story is one of the most insane I think I've ever heard in my life. So, how do you leverage
the bullies, the darkness, the prejudice, all of that
to do something powerful and positive. - You do have to embrace the darkness, you do have to embrace the rage. One thing that recently clicked for me, about a year ago I read Tim Grover's book, Relentless and I think
within the first two or three chapters, Tim talks
about how he was working with Dwayne Wade and trying
to get him to come back and be better than ever and
he said that if he could just get on that basketball court and bring 48 minutes of controlled rage to his opponents, you're
good, you're a winner and I realized for the last 20 years I've been bringing controlled
rage to my industry and I know that's probably
not the politically best, correct thing to say, I should
say that I have a bigger purpose and impact and I do. We've got adopted kids
and charities and causes but it's the fucking darkness
and the rage that drives me. - I love that and that's
something that, ya know, in your answer you obviously
anticipate that people want you to say something
more lofty or beautiful or whatever it is that they're looking for but I found that to be 100% true. That at the end of the day
there's beauty and light in the world and I think
they both serve a purpose. My question and I resonate with Tim Grover as much as you do, how
do you control the rage, like most people are
broken by the experiences that you went through, so
how do you actively turn that into something useful. - Well, it's not so much
controlling the rage, it's knowing that when I
had all that anger and rage and I channeled it towards
car jacking and home invasions with my friends, being the getaway driver and getting caught by the police, like, karma was not good to me, right, when you decide to car jack someone and you later find out that night that they're in a gang
and now they're back for retaliation and they're
beating the crap out of you in front of your girlfriend,
who's like panicking, right, you realize this is karmic justice and so I had to take that
rage and use it for good and I figured at that point
if I used it for good, good things would happen cause I used it for bad and
bad things were happening to me. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer but I do know how to connect dots and the dots were when I did bad, bad happened to me and by god, I better start doing
good or I'm gonna die. And so, thankfully the only
constant I had in my life was after senior year of high school I finally decided to figure
out how to lose weight just so I could ask some
girl out to the prom, I never did ask her to the prom but I lost weight senior
year of high school and that kind of got
me involved in fitness and working out. So I was always in the gym, which was bad because now I'm a strong, steroid using, angry young man, just on a
mission to destroy, right. My goal wasn't to go
and to destroy things, it was you have it, I
want it and it was mine. Bad way to look at things and today it's the opposite and I wanna serve you and I wake up every morning
knowing that I can wear one of two shirts, what can you do for me
or how can I serve you and I choose the one,
deliberately, every single morning and how can I serve you. And ever since I've done
that it's been the most selfish thing, so I take
that darkness, that rage, the anger and I just use it for good. - Why do you think it's so useful? - I think it's useful for me and I think more people
oughta embrace that darkness, that rage because gives you
a sense of being invincible. The truth of the matter is
whether you're growing up, you're a foreigner like
I am in this country and you're growing up
against bigotry and hate and being broke and moving
around from school to school and being bullied and picked on or you're an entrepreneur
and you're trying to build your business, turn your idea into a dream and help people, you're gonna
come across adversities, challenges, set backs and you gotta have a reason
why and most people who succeed ultimately
have a strong reason why. But if that reason why is fueled, I look at rage and darkness
as this super charger, I have a reason why and
the super charger on top of that engine is my rage and darkness. And so, I think more people
oughta put themselves in positions where they
deal with adversity and challenges so they can
develop some sense of anger and darkness and rage. Like, I'll be very frank with you dude, between the ages of four
and six I was molested by two older boys,
consistently, in Armenia. What my parents don't know
is when we escaped Armenia, they thought they were
bringing us to freedom, they saved me from that, like I grew up with a chip on my shoulder, all men were the fucking
enemy to me, right because of what happened to me and I was fist up everywhere. So, only in hindsight, Steve Jobs says, when you look back all the dots connect but I realize all that anger and rage was coming from I have to
go protect myself, right. But in that ability to disassociate, when you're being molested
over and over again you have to disassociate
and mentally disappear, I realized that I
developed some super power and you don't have to go and get molested, you don't have to go
and get raped and abused but you can go take on a challenge that you've never done before. In 2010, I kind of call
myself, I'm a meathead, I just lift weights and
put 'em down, right, I kind of painted myself into that corner, why not go run a marathon, so I trained for six weeks
and went and ran a marathon, it was the most painful thing I ever did but I realized that was more the suffering and the pain and the more pain I had, the more it put me into the
zone of wanting to dominate. So it is a super power, so I must now go back and put
myself into these challenges, rock climbing, I was afraid of heights, took on a six week challenge,
started climbing rocks, wanted to fight a
professional MMA fighter, so I hired him, trained for six weeks, went in the ring and got my ass kicked and choked out but each time I did that it gave me the sense of I can get over any obstacle and if I can
get over getting choked out and punched and the pain of 26.2 miles of a marathon or overcoming
my fear of heights, surely I can build a business, surely I can take some
criticism online, right. But not enough people
are willing to build that mental, emotional toughness
and the moment they do they'll persevere. - I love that and I love your analogy of you having the why and the rage that sits on top of it
becomes a super charger. Talk to me, what is the why and one thing I find so
interesting in your story is when you take any of
detail it's like the never ending parade of hardship but the through your lens of karma and it turning into basically
whatever you're indulging in, you found something so beautiful and your empire, having seen
so much of what you talk about and all that, I know it all
comes back to that sort of the beautiful things that
you're trying to bring into the world but what are those things. - The things that I'm trying
to bring into the world are the things that I needed most and truthfully I'm still healing myself, I'm healing myself. We've got 57 kids adopted
through Compassion International and every year we donate
a quarter million dollars or more on Christmas,
right around Christmas to the Marine Corps Toys For Tots and I've been supporting the
Shriner's Children's Hospital since 2009. If you look at all three of those, they're all child, kid centric stuff, what am I trying to do, I'm trying to fix that
little boy inside me, right, I'm trying to help that little boy. And of course, I was a
fat (bleep) growing up, eating Velveeta cheese,
bologna found in the dumpsters, I mean we were dumpster diving
when we came to America, I was literally eating out of dumpsters. So, when you grow up with
no nutrition background, I know you can relate to this,
your background is similar, very unhealthy background, I realized that I've got bad genetics because I've never took
the time to eat right, never took the time to work out as a kid, so as I grew up, senior
year of high school is when I started to actually work out, I realized how much tougher it was for me than kids who were
athletes and who's parents kinda controlled what they ate, et cetera and gave them some nutritional guidelines. So I've always been a late study, for me I realized most
people go to the gym and statistics back this up, 89% of gym members never get results, 89% of gym members never get results and the 11% who do get results
are either former athletes or personal trainers or
taking the time to study up and so I wanted to create a
model that wasn't expensive, like I was really that
broke foreign kid trying to figure it out. And so, it was easy enough for me to go, alright, we're gonna
create this bootcamp model where it's one trainer, many clients and we make it more affordable
and convenient for people, I'm gonna break all the
myths about fitness, there's no overnight lose
30 pounds in 30 days, I'm just so sick and tired of hearing that and I fell for that as a kid. So, everything that I've fallen for, every pain that I've had I'm
just still trying to solve right now and I imagine
that I'll go to my death bed trying to do that, just trying
to constantly heal myself, it is the most selfish thing I'm doing. My mentor, Jim Franco, who is
a personal training client, he was a little rough around the edges, he was in his 60s and he came
from the automotive world and he owned the software
that goes into the AutoZone and the Pep Boys, his
company updates the software, so what kind of filter and
oil and et cetera for your car and so he was very well to do and Monday mornings I was very tired, I was a personal trainer, a fry cook and a bouncer at a gay bar because a gay bar paid more by the way, people always ask, why at a gay bar, they pay three dollars
more than the straight bar and those three dollars
per hour is a lot for me at that time. And so Monday morning
when I was training him, I was tired and exhausted and he goes, "kid, what's the matter with you," I'm like, "Jim, I've got
two jobs on the weekends, ya know, I'm exhausted
by the time I get here." He handed me the Tom Hopkins
cassette tape one day, he just shows up to his
personal training session and goes, "listen to this tonight," and so I listened to Tom Hopkins, Tom Hopkins leads to Brian Tracey, Brain Tracey leads to Zig
Ziegler, Tony Robinson, Dan Kennedy and before you know it it's self development
and I realized the value of giving and the more I
give the more I'll get back. So Jim Franco, who's
just trying to help me get better at selling personal training so I don't have to have two side jobs, inadvertently kinda pulled
at me into self development, personal development and
then understanding the value of service, being a servant leader as opposed to, and that's what he was, he had no obligation to help me, he was paying me, I was training him yet he was mentoring me
in between sets, right and he would hang around
if I didn't have a client afterwards and he'd talk to me. For the first time I
felt like, ya know what, here's someone who's well to do, who's giving me their time, I didn't wanna let him down and so I would listen to the tape, I'd go, "Jim I listened to it," he'd give me the next one, "Jim, I listened to it," he'd give me the next one and I was brain washed
into personal development, self development,
marketing, sales persuasion, influence and giving. - What I find really interesting is that so many people are given advice and so few people actually
do something with it. What was it about either the
guy that was mentoring you or you that actually made
you go listen to the tape and put the advice to use? - Two things. One, I didn't wanna let
Jim Franco down, my mentor and the other thing was
I was just sick and tired of being poor and broke minded and hustling and grinding, trying to figure things out,
find a loophole in things and so I figured there's
gotta be a better way. When the pain is great enough, you start taking action,
the pain was great enough, like, I knew that I couldn't
be a personal trainer in this big box gym for too long, I knew that I had to do something more and so, again, I'm not the
sharpest knife in the drawer but I can connect dots and
I figured somehow magically or through some weird law of attraction Jim Franco was put into my life and I needed that old dude
in my life to set me straight and call me a kid, I
needed that tough love. - So, talk to me, in that it
reminds me about the story you told about the
difference between being poor and being broke. Define those two because I
would say by your definition you weren't poor. - So when we came to America
we were poor and broke the way I look at it because we would always run out of money before run out of month,
we decided, ya know, do we run out of electricity or gas cause some months we
couldn't afford to pay both and being broke is being without money, being poor is being kinda
scarcity minded, poor minded and we just realized that
money's for the rich, money's for the Americans,
it's for the people who were born here, who went to college and that's how I grew up. And later Jim Franco taught
me, hey, you know what, you can't be scarcity minded, you can't, you have to live in abundance, you have to understand that
people just want a solution to a problem and they
don't care about the color of your skin, about the
level of your education, they want a solution to a problem, so he taught me, he had to
break all these old patterns that I had, right. - What were some of the patterns? - Some of the patterns were
that money's for the white folk and not for the foreigners. - You actually thought that? - Yeah. Cause that's how it was because every time we went
and got more food stamps it was all foreigners, there
was no white people in line, at least not in the parts
of Santa Ana I was raised. And so I felt that
money was for the people who were telling us to leave this country, go back to your own fucking country and that also puts a chip
on your shoulder, right, against them, I guess I
had some reverse racism towards white America, now I realize for no apparent reason, there was a couple of idiots
in every culture I imagine. But that was one pattern that I had, another pattern that I had was being proud to be blue collar, like my dad was like, and he still says this, work is holy and I believe that, work is holy but the fact that he had so
many jobs, a paper route, pumping gas, worked at a pizzeria and so because of that mindset blue collar, blue collar,
we were always a blue collar mentality and I took pride
in being blue collar. Another pattern Jim had
to break he was like, dude, be white collar, don't use the shovel, sell the shovel, I'd never heard that phrase before, I'm the guy that took pride
in I could dig a deeper hole, a deeper trench, I could outwork you but that's still trading time for dollars. And so to be able to break
those limiting belief systems that I had, to me was huge and all of a sudden I realized
I'm no longer poor minded, I may end up broke again,
I do really well now but I may make one or two
bad decisions with my money or my investment and
end up being broke again but I'll never be poor
and I know how to get back from broke because I know
how to add value to society, solve problems and exchange for money. But I'll never be poor again and poor is a state of mind
of feeling out of control, scarcity minded, taking
pride in being blue collar, no one should ever take
pride in being blue collar period, period, you've got a brain, you've got a solution
to a problem that people wanna pay for, put it out there. Like so many people
probably come up to you, I know they come up to me,
I've got this great idea and one day I'm gonna do it, when is that day and I was that guy, I've got this great idea
and one day I'm gonna do it and Jim was like, "when is that day, kid?" and I'd always tell him, "I'm
gonna open a gym one day." what is one day, he goes, "have
you ever put a date to it?", nope, so he had to break that pattern of being a procrastinator, right. So he goes, put a date to it, oh, that was scary, if I put a date to it, what happens if I fail,
he goes, "try not to," immediately I go to failure and it's nuts to have this
entrepreneurial mindset being installed in you when
where you're coming from is poor minded, broke
minded and scarcity minded. - So when you say scarcity
minded, abundant minded, what do you mean? - Well, a scarcity minded person says, "uh oh, somebody else opened up a gym across the street from me,
they're gonna put me out of business, I better charge less." The abundant minded person says, "Someone else opened up a gym
across the street from me, I better out service them, out work them, out social media them." So the scarcity minded person
is always the sky is falling, the chicken little mentality, the oh my gosh, if Trump goes into office then we're all screwed,
oh my gosh is Hilary goes into office then we're all screwed, I don't care who's in office anymore, I control my own economy, the economy can crash and go back up and back down again, I will find a way, as Tony Robins says, I'm built for winter, I just didn't know it. And so, more people need
to be abundant minded in that, if the economy
crashes, I just have to deliver more value and create this
category of want about myself, if competition shows up I
have to out service them, out work them, out social media them versus shrivel up and dying. - So if you met someone who
literally they're fresh off the boat from somewhere communist country, don't speak the language, you know what's in store for them and I give you like an hour with them, what are like some key principles
that you're gonna teach them to endure. - Oh, great question. Thing number one is don't
go find where the group of your people are, in other words, if my dad had come to southern California and instead of living in Santa Ana, Anaheim, Garden Grove, that area, we had moved to Glendale,
where there's a whole bunch of Armenians, we would
not thrive like this we would not thrive because it
blows me away when immigrants come to this country and then they go to Little
Italy, Little Armenia, Little Saigon, get the fuck
out of the Little Saigon, go to little white America,
learn the language, assimilate, understand the culture, like blend in to the fucking
fiber of this country because when you do life
becomes increasingly easier. It's when they come
and handicap themselves and they stay in their own culture, they're in the United States,
I mean there's literally Little Armenia in Glendale, don't go there and I might get hate email about that, I love the culture, I'm
just not gonna go grow up there because economy is
done outside of that culture, it's done in this culture. And so, thing number one is
put yourself in a position where you're gonna thrive not where it's gonna be comfortable. Number two is most
immigrants will come here and they'll think blue collar, how am I gonna trade time for dollars and so job number one, job number two, job number three, get minimum sleep. My argument is how quickly
can you think of a service, a product, a business
model that you can deploy in exchange for money, right, how can you leverage yourself and I wish I understood
the concept of leveraging and scaling my knowledge,
I didn't know that until my late 20s and early 30s, like my kids know that now,
one's 10, one's 12 years old, like I didn't understand leveraging scale. And so I teach them leveraging scale. - That makes a lot of sense. You talk about this notion
of staying in your zone of genius, what is
that, what's the concept of 5%, 95%, what's that whole thing. - Yeah, yeah. So, I believe I'm good at one thing and I'm good at building
fitness businesses because I'm passionate about fitness, I was a fat kid, fitness changed my life and so I wanna help more
people in that area of life. And so, every time I
try and deviate it out of my zone of genius,
which is fitness business or the business of fitness, if I tried to make a
funnel, run a Facebook ad, edit videos, I am operating
outside of my zone of genius and so I learned very quickly
that there's only about 5% of the things that you do that move the needle. We end up doing a lot of things, like most entrepreneurs
end up writing the payroll checks and doing their own taxes and setting up their own funnels and ads and campaigns, why because it's easy, it's drag and drop, who
cares, that's not your zone of genius, you can hire someone and outsource that. But I realized very quickly
that I can outsource 95% of the things, the trivial stuff, so I can outsource and
focus on the valuable, the 5% which is for me is
delegate, motivate, sell. And the more I can delegate out, the more I can motivate my
team and my business partners and my clients to buy and
use and purchase again, it's a better idea, so it's
delegate, motivate, sell, that's my 5% and most
people need to operate within their zone of genius and just outsource everything else and when you do life becomes a lot easier. - Makes a lot of sense. You've got GSD, what does GSD stand for? - Get shit done. - Yeah, I like that. - Ya know, nothing happens
until you get shit done, everyone's got a great idea, it'll make me this many millions and it'll have this many people, nothing happens til
you get that shit done. - So how do you teach people to do that? Your masterminds seem pretty impressive, super intense, which is
a word I would definitely slather all over you, how do you train them to do that? - I love the mastermind environment, I love the coaching environment because through a course I
can't transfer this feeling of intensity, of obligation and duty, I really feel like I've got
this obligation and duty to reach my fullest potential, for two reasons. One, I feel if God or
whoever the super power is put some gift in all of us, we are doing that super power a disservice if when we die we haven't
reached that full potential. Number two, what kind of fucking example am I leaving for my kids, right, dad chose to take the easy path every time instead of the hard
path, that's what I did when I was younger, when I
was involved in helicopter chases with the cops, no longer do I wanna take the easy path, I'll always take the hardest path and it becomes the best path. And so the big thing here,
when I'm coaching my clients is if I have 12 months with them and I get to meet them three times a year in person for two days at a time, I'm able to transfer that intensity, I'm able to get them to
stop thinking in the weeds and start thinking in the clouds, like be, think in that
5% instead of the 95% as we talked about earlier, I get them to understand
their duty and obligation of whatever their gift or
purpose is on this planet, I can't do that through my courses. I've got a lot of courses that I created thinking that it would help people and I realized the courses
don't transfer the intensity, passion, purpose, duty, obligation but I can get in someones
face and with love transfer that feeling and I believe that might be another gift which still is training, it's coaching, just instead of fitness I'm coaching you on your outcome in life. But man, I love the coaching
aspect for that reason because I can truly follow up with you and go, hey, you made a commitment at this mastermind and in
90 days we're gonna see each other and I don't want
you to be the one client who came and said, uh,
I didn't do it, right. And so when I put some
of that pressure on, now many of my clients do quit and leave, they do quit and leave. - Because of the pressure? - Yes, yes and that's okay. They still wanna stay crop dusters and that's okay but I see
fighter jet potential. - I was gonna say, now
you have to define that. - Okay. - So fighter jets versus crop dusters. - Fighter jets versus crop
dusters is that I believe we all are raised as fighter jets, just we get neutered by
parents, by grandparents because of the fucking filters they had and viewed life through,
the experiences they had, teachers who go, "you don't
wanna disappoint yourself, just go to college, go get a good job." Go to college? Don't go to college,
today, don't go to college, it's the worst thing you can do unless you're going to be a doctor or an attorney or an accountant or some kind of an architect, don't go to college, you
can do a lot more in life without going to college. And so again, teachers,
professors will end up neutering us and they
take that fighter jet, that hunger, the claws and
fangs, they fucking defang us. Alright, so now we're crop dusters, I don't wanna take too many risk, I just wanna live a good life and they wanna be average and mediocre, that's the crop duster. Yet, everyone inside has this hunger, see the fighter jet didn't go away, it's just been suppressed,
you've been neutered and that was me, hey don't take big risk, just go get a job, go
be a smog technician, like that was the advice I was given, go be a smog technician, right, so I'd be the guy
putting the fucking probe in the tailpipe of your car then saying, you can go get
your car registered Tom. That was it, that was it? And so I realized very quickly
that I've got this hunger inside me, as I talk to
others, they got this hunger inside them, oh that's the fighter jet trying to get out, that's
the claws and fangs trying to grow but
society, parents, whoever have set the standard for
you to not play it safe, take risk, what if you lose, what if you lose, who cares, as long as you don't die
you can come right back. And so the fighter jet
mentality is someone who is just determined, relentlessly obsessed at achieving an outcome in
the face of all adversity. The crop duster is someone
who's always looking for the easiest path, the loophole, I used to be a severe crop duster, the crop duster hits a
snooze button everyday cause they'd rather take 10 more minutes of mediocre sleep than getting
up and dominating their path. Every morning, on my
nightstand there's two stacks of fucking dominoes lined up
and at the top of this stack says, you're a loser,
the top of this one says, you're a winner, if I
hit the snooze button, I've hit that first
domino, the loser stack, the rest of my day's gonna suck. Now, with that mentality
am I gonna ever hit snooze again, absolutely not
because I've sold myself on the idea that when
I hit the snooze button I'm an absolute loser,
I'm scum of the earth, my day is destined to be shitty, some people go, you're being
awfully hard on yourself. More people should be hard on themselves, we go around bubble
wrapping ourselves, right, we leave the training
wheels on for too long, like be hard on yourself, take
the fucking bubble wrap off, take the training wheels off,
no one did that for me, man, when came to this country
and it was just like, hey, go figure it out but
it was don't take risk, go get a good job, fuck
that, be a fighter jet, be a fighter jet, go to battle everyday, take risk, that's what a fighter jet does, a crop duster has a routine
life and it's fucking boring. - The example that you
gave of the alarm clock snooze button is brilliant, if I come to you and I am a crop duster but I'm really serious that
I wanna become a fighter jet but I don't know what to do, are there other mechanical
things like that that I can do that empower me, like how do I cross that chasm? - Yes. The way you cross the chasm
is by building a morning ritual, like I had no ritual, so I would wake up, hit the snooze button, it would go off again, I
would hit it one more time and then I'd get up (grunts) what do I do? Today, you can set your clock to me, you know by exactly about 6:05, 6:06 I'm sitting on my couch
on the right hand side of my living room and a
sniper could actually shoot me everyday at that time, not
a minute later or sooner. And the reason is because
I wake up at 5 O'Clock, never hit the snooze button, have my morning ritual of taking a shower, water, coffee, protein shake,
playing with Cookie, my dog and then getting on my couch and then literally looking at my iPhone, what are the three things
I'm gonna do this morning, that's in my 5% that's
gonna move the needle, that only I can do, that
I'm capable of doing, then I put my iPhone
upside down, on silent and then push it away from me. Like, all of that, to me, is a ritual, it's no different than
going back to fighter jet, I guess the fighter jet
pilot doesn't just jump in and go, "alright, let's
start dropping bombs," he has to go through a check list, right of dropping the canopy, turning this on, checking that, making sure the GPS works, guidance system, okay great, fantastic, now he takes off. So you've gotta build a mechanically, where mechanically is concerned,
yeah don't hit the snooze button but make a list the night before, do a brain up, what are
the three to five things that you need to do
that's gonna really move the needle in your business
or in your life, right and then go and do that. And so, for me, I make
the list the night before, I dominate the morning, by
9 A.M. I'm off to the gym and you know I am cause
you can look at my stories and it's like, hey, it's 9
O'Clock and I'm off to the gym to go crush another workout,
then I go to the HQ, it's the same fucking routine but it's such a great routine because everyday is a challenge, the weight room is a challenge,
my work is a challenge, I get to the headquarters
and we've got a new challenge cause the Federal Trade
Commission wants to know how we're selling so many franchises, that's a good problem to have. Again, in life we're
gonna have good problems, is just are your problems
first world problems or third world problems,
I used to have third world problems, no money, no
opportunity, no hope. First world problems are the
Federal Trade Commissions is auditing you cause your
franchise is growing so quickly, I'll take that, right,
that's what we want. - I love that. And when I think about
what it is that allowed me to be successful, it was
the ability to generate that energy from nothing, to not have any particular
hunger or anything in me but to leverage the pain,
to leverage the darkness, to knowingly turn inward
and say I'm gonna turn this into something. How do you teach people to do that? - Well, it's not easy and
I think the best teacher is environmental exposure
and again this is why I love high level coaching,
if someone wants to create a brand like you have with Quest, their fastest route is to be
within you and your partners circles, it's environmental exposure, what does Tom do every morning, how does he think, what
is the first thing he says to his wife, what is
the first call he makes, what does he look up. Like, I'm curious, what do
you look up on your phone first thing in the morning, are you responding to
text messages, emails, I wanna know cause I wanna
get to where you are, environmental exposure. So if I had it my way, I
would be attached to your hip if I wanted to be the next Tom, so environmental exposure
is the number one teacher to turning people into fighter jets, it's not a light switch,
it's a dimmer switch that goes up over a year. - I wanna talk about that
transition in your life from not being a good
leader, recognizing that which is already pretty extraordinary and then becoming a good leader, what was that transition like and why is the punch line, Man Up. - Well the transition was really painful, see I thought I was an
entrepreneur, I wasn't, I was a business owner and
as a business owner, ya know, I owned five personal training gyms and when you're in the
right parts of San Diego and the economy's
thriving, you get clients, it's easy enough. And it wasn't until I started
coaching and consulting personal trainers after selling my gyms, the economy crashes and that's when I decide I'm
gonna start this franchise because one on one personal
training is no longer feasible for most people
and this is the time to create this franchise. Well, I had to hire more team members, more employees and I
realized in that moment, in fact I even took on a business partner and I realized in that moment
as I was going through this that my employees are
showing up a little late, they're leaving a little
early, they're kinda doing the bare minimum and I wanted
to give them feedback, Tom but I didn't know how, I
didn't know how to give them feedback and I, looking
back it was because I didn't wanna hurt their feelings, I cared about their approval,
how they felt about me and because of that I
wouldn't give them feedback but something happened, I
would start feeling animosity towards them, like I don't want them here, I don't want them to be around me, before you know it that kinda
turns into this adversarial tension that was between
me and some of my employees and me and my business partner, who I felt he should be doing this but instead he was doing X
but I never gave him feedback, I was always passive aggressive. And so when you're passive
aggressive towards people you're afraid to give feedback, you don't know how to
communicate to a team and don't have clarity of vision, hey, we're growing this Fit
Body Bootcamp franchise, great, are we gonna be international
or just in the United States, I don't know, well how
many locations do we want, I don't know. And I never took time to
have clarity of vision, what do I want, when do I wanna buy, how am I gonna get there. And so we were launching,
starting Fit Body Bootcamp in 2010, by 2012 we were
an official franchise, by early 2013 I was having
anxiety attacks so bad the first one I had, I
thought it was a heart attack, my throat was closing
up, I was tunnel vision, my hands were sweaty, arms tingling, I couldn't breath, my heart's racing, I could hear the thud lug
in my ears with my blood pressure just pumping and
I thought this is how I die and thank god, I stumbled
outside and fresh air just kind of set me straight
and I was sweaty and fine but I was like, alright, I
can go dominate my day again. But that night I tell my
wife, "hey, I think I cheated death, I think I cheated a heart attack," she goes, "You're an idiot, how
do you cheat a heart attack, we gotta take you to the doctor, dummy." So we go and the doctor's like, "hey man, it wasn't a heart attack," he
put me through the EKG test but "what you did have
was an anxiety attack, do you have a lot of stress in your life," and of course my wife rolls her eyes and I go, "I don't know if
I have stress in my life but I take NyQuil and
Vicodin to go to sleep and then I take Adderall and
pre-workout in the mornings to beat the foggy headedness,
yeah I guess I do have anxiety in my life," and he goes,
"well you gotta stop," and I go, "I don't know how to stop, just prescribe me Xanax,
give me more meds, give me more drugs," and
he did, he gave me Xanax and took that for about four days and Tom I was like drooling
out of the side of my mouth, what's the point of taking
Adderall and then Xanax, they're counteracting and
I realized I don't have any clarity here, like mental
focus, I gotta figure this out without the drugs. So then I tried to will
away the anxiety attacks, still trying to grow our
Fit Body Bootcamp franchise, still no clarity, no
ability to communicate, no vision, I was a poor leader, I got to the point, in
fact, where I was avoiding coming to my office because
I didn't want to see my business partner and my employees because I felt it was them against me and by this point, even
though we had franchised a year earlier, we were losing
more franchise locations now than we were gaining. See, people just the success
of Fit Body Bootcamp now, they don't realize that I
was 640,000 dollars in debt in 2013, now I was an entrepreneur, I was no longer a business
owner, I was an entrepreneur, like holy fuck I'm
trying to build an empire and it's imploding on me. One day my wife and I and
our kids are on a small little vacation cause
that's all we could afford, at Palm Springs, we went for three days, on day two I got a text
message that was basically some bad news about my partner
doing something really stupid and I text him and I said,
"hey, is it true that you did this stupid thing," he
says, "yeah, bro, I fucked up," and he sent it to me. I told my wife, pack up the
shit, we're driving back to Chino Hills and then the entire drive from Palm Springs to Chino Hills, which is about an hour and a
half, the whole time I'm just, it's time to man up, it's time to man up, I am literally saying those five words to myself, in my head, wife's quiet, kids are quiet in the back, it's time to man up, it's time to man up because it was time to man up and have that painful
conversation with my business partner and say either you go or I go but we can't both run this thing and I was ready to let
go of Fit Body Bootcamp. And so I said, hey, meet me at the office, I'll see you there. And so one, it's time to man up at a time, I started having the
conversations with my employees, I need you to be here on time, I need you to meet my
expectation, then I realized, wait a minute, I'm being
a fucking hypocrite, I'm hitting the snooze
button, I'm not showing up on time cause I don't
wanna be around them, I gotta suck it up and I gotta be there, I gotta be there. So this learning process
of being a fighter jet continues, like there's
different levels of fighter jets and so very quickly, I
realized that when you say it's time to man up, it
really is stop making excuses, take control of your situation
and rise to your potential and I knew I had this
potential to build a big brand, a franchise where I can
help millions of people every morning, world
wide and it feels so good to wake up and do that today but for this to happen I had
to become an effective leader, I had to get self disciplined first, stop being a hypocrite, I
had to learn to communicate and give feedback and not feel
like I need their approval whether their going to
accept it as criticism, I have to have clarity of vision, where is my business going,
how many locations do I want, by when, how are we gonna get there, I didn't have that. Today, we're super clear on that, we know exactly how many
locations we need to gain everyday to hit our goal of 2500 locations by the year 2023, I never had that. Then, of course, I was
so emotionally reactive, something would happen and
I would just emotionally react, today, I just think,
think, process and respond. - What do you think is
the reason that any of us are here? - Man, I don't think that we
would be here if we didn't have a purpose, I can tell you that. I truly.. - A purpose that's given to us or.. - Nah, nah, it's our job
to develop that purpose, it's our job to find and hone
in and craft that purpose and the purpose is usually
crafted through some level of suffering, it's the
heroes journey, right, like in film, the hero is down and out and he loses the girl and the
house and goes on this journey and he finds strength
and wisdom and knowledge and he comes back the hero. We have to go through
that level of suffering, like for me, everything that
happened from being molested to literally one day
eating caviar for breakfast cause my dad was a member
of the Communist Party, the next day starving in Italy and wondering why are we
sharing one fucking banana for a family of five,
what the fuck is going on. And there's this hunger that everyone has and it's always neutered by a family, by teachers, by culture and
I believe you wouldn't be put on this planet if you
didn't have this hunger and if you explore this
hunger and for me it was then being a fat kid,
then being a foreigner, then a fat kid and then fixing my problems and then realizing I have
the solution to other peoples weight loss problems, for
someone else it might be a financial thing, ya know,
they fixed their financial problems and they realized
they can help everyone else financial problems but
you have to go through the suffering, you have to
be hungry enough to deal with the pain and come out the other side with some scars, cause scar
tissue is infinitely more resilient than regular tissue. But again, goes back to
most people feel like, yeah, I think there's
something great in me but I don't wanna explore
it, I wanna play it safe, I'm gonna stay bubble
wrapped, I don't wanna risk it but we wouldn't be put on
this planet if we didn't have this greater thing to accomplish. Now, some of us are gonna be Elon Musk and we're gonna shoot a fucking
Tesla to the Mars, right and that's okay and
others are gonna create a fitness franchise or
a supplement company that actually delivers great nutrients, that help people optimize
their performance, some other people are just
gonna be really great therapist, they're gonna keep,
throughout their life maybe save 10, 12, 15 people
from killing themselves, whatever your purpose is
you've gotta develop it, you've gotta develop it
but you wouldn't be put on this planet if you didn't have it, I'm convinced of that. - Alright, before I ask my last question, tell these guys where
they can find you online. - Best place to find
me is BedrosKeulian.com or on my social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube at BedrosKeuilian. - Alright, my last question. What's the impact that you
want to have on the world? - That's exactly it. The impact I want to have on the world is that we're all here
with so much potential yet we, most of us, it's unfortunate but most of us leave with
majority of that potential untapped. By the time I die, if I
can get a loud enough voice to share with people that mom
and dad don't write your book, school teachers don't write your book, those two fucking dudes who molested me didn't write my book, I'm the author of my own book, you're the author of your own book, so many people give
the pen to someone else and if I could just help enough people realize that they hold the
pen and there's way more pages to be written and they could write it, then I've actually served my impact and I believe that's
the thing I wanna leave. - That's an amazing answer. (applause) Bedros, thank you so much for coming. - Thank you, appreciate it. - Alright guys, I am beyond
in awe of what he's done, his story is astonishing
on a level that I almost don't know how to convey, to come to this country with no money, to literally be diving in dumpsters to try to eat, to have to fight that hard against a system and people
that don't want you here that are heckling you and in all of that to somehow to still
find his way to creating something beautiful and
that's what I want you to understand. To be a fighter jet, to be intense, to wade into the darkness, to
bring out your full potential all in service of something beautiful, trying to build something
that is helping other people, this is somebody that looked at his life and said, being a jerk, getting in fights, doing all of the bad shit that I'm doing, it isn't leading me
anywhere that I wanna go and so he flips it and
builds something out of that, builds something out of
wanting to connect with people, build something out of
wanting to do amazing things for other people
and relentlessly goes after that skill set but the thing
that I hope nobody misses in his story is that it's
the suffering that leads to that and I think that
a lot of people get lost in that and that is my big fear and that is the thing that I
don't know how deal with that, I don't know how to put
people through that kind of pain to see them become something but when I see a story like this and I understand somebody
that wasn't broken by it but they were able to grow stronger and build themselves out of it, that to me is incredibly inspiring. So whatever you're going through, I hope that you will lean on his story, I hope that you will
see in what he was able to accomplish, the future
of what you're able to accomplish because
it is truly limitless. Alright, if you guys haven't already be sure to subscribe and
until next time my friends, be legendary, take care. (cheers and applause) Hey everybody, thank
you so much for watching and being apart of this community, if you haven't already,
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