Justin Brock | Scaling Success: US Marine, Entrepreneur, & Advocate for Veteran Transitions - Mick Unplugged [EP 26]
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Are you ready to change your habits, sculpt your destiny, and light up your path to greatness? Welcome to the epicenter of transformation. This is Mic Unplugged. We'll help you identify your because so you can create a routine that's not just productive, but powerful.

You'll embrace the art of evolution, adapt strategies to stay ahead of the game, and take a step toward the extraordinary. So let's unleash your potential. Now, here's Mick.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode. And today we have a very special and remarkable guest. He embodies the spirit of determination and success as an eight-year U.S. Marine Corps veteran. He transitioned into entrepreneurship a decade ago and recently sold his business. And I need all of you to sit there and pause for a moment. $70 million. Wow.

He continues to run the business as a minority owner and is passionate about helping veterans and others transition using his expertise in direct-to-consumer marketing and operational efficiency. Please welcome me and give a great honor

My man, Mr. Justin Brock. Justin, how you doing, buddy? Thank you. Not sure I'm deserving of such an endearing intro, but, you know, we're working hard and we're very appreciative that you allow us to be on the podcast. No, you definitely earned it. And I would expect and want nothing more than for you to be here, talk about your

background, your success and inspire others, because that's what we do on the Make Unplugged podcast, right? We look deeper than your why and talk about the because and the things that everyone overcomes. And Justin, I'm going to let you go and say your thing, because I believe this and I know that you're the embodiment of this. There's no blueprint to success, right? Like anyone that tells you that there's a blueprint, you do these two or three things and you're going to be successful. They're lying to you. Yeah.

What success really needs is a motivator and that motivator has to be you. So Justin, I'd love for you to talk about your journey a little bit. Yeah, man. So, you know, starting out, I didn't even know that selling a company, I never even thought about that, you know, getting out of the Marine Corps, it's all just about how am I going to replace the income that I have so I can provide for my family in that environment.

immediate goal was actually pretty low. I was just saying, okay, I need to make $60,000 so I can feed my family and buy my kids clothes when they need them and that kind of thing. And thankfully I knew someone in the life and health space and I had seen them do pretty well in it. Right. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to try that. The job that I had in the Marine Corps didn't have a direct translation to anything. And I just wasn't the guy that was like thinking, okay, I'm going to go Marine Corps to police officer, firefighter.

So grateful people make those choices, but it might, that wasn't what I wanted to do. I tackled the life and health space. And for the first time ever, you know, what I realized was the harder I work and the more that I prospect, the more money I make. And so it became this kind of almost like a little reward addiction where you'd go out and just sell and then make money. And so I got actually pretty good at individual sales. I was going door to door, direct mail leads, old school way. And I

I got pretty good at it. I was able to get in the house and I was 26, so I had a lot of energy for it. And I started winning some incentive trips and then I'd get around other people that were top producers. But then while I was there, I'd make friends with guys that were not just top producers, but top agency owners. And then it dawned on me, okay, these guys have other people working for them and they're doing the marketing and the operation. And then

have these guys doing the production. And I said, okay, got to build towards that, you know, and then I would learn a marketing, you know, niche from them. But all the while, this kind of like success ladder, I feel like is like really just attacking the opportunity that's six feet in front of you. It was never like there was this grand plan. There still isn't, you know, right now I'm trying to continue to grow that company, grow the personal brand, but really the vision is just

help more people and money becomes kind of a, like a scorekeeping metric at some point. It's not necessarily like, okay, some people, I've seen people write comments on these things, like talking to people like, oh, if he's really successful, not just me, but like all kinds of people, if he's really had that much money, he'd be on a beach somewhere, but they don't get it that the

people that find that success, it doesn't matter how much money they make, they're going to want to continue to do it. And that's why you see billionaires like Mark Cuban and Richard Branson and all these guys that still have these passions and they still spend their time trying to solve problems and do things because, you know, that's just the way it is. But I think we're all just trying to solve that next problem. And then you see what's possible at that level.

And then you solve that problem and you get to that, you know what I mean? Like you're just kind of clawing. And then there are times when I didn't have friends that exited and I saw, you know, how they were able to value that business. And I'm like, wow, okay. I didn't realize what I was building could be so valuable. It did give me that another target, but I was five, six years in really before that even kind of came into focus as a possibility, you know? So

I think people need that. And that's important. You know, when people say, what's your what's your why? And what's your like you said, I love that. Not just looking for your why, but your because. I think sometimes people are so focused. They hear that. What's your why? And so they create a why. But the why almost for me was just why not? Like, why not grow to the next?

level. What am I going to do? The process is fun. I remember going on vacations as a kid and we would go with the church to like Yatlinburg or Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and they'd put us all on a bus traveling together. And I remember my dad complaining about it. As a kid, I thought this is fun. And he would say, well, the journey is half the fun. But as you're building businesses, that's true. You find a lot of passion in watching your business grow and the people within your business succeed.

And I think that's really important because I would say the number one gratifying thing that I've seen in growing a business is watching other people succeed because of something you created. And when you do that and you really feel that way too, it becomes easy to hire and recruit and build a team because people feel that compassion that you have for it. And I just hope and

And pray that I can maintain that, you know, continuously because, you know, I don't want to lose sight of not only what got me where I'm at, but, you know, selfishly, what was the most beneficial thing for me? And that was, you know, watching people win along the way. So I love that. Right. Because you're essentially saying that's your because. And so for me, and you said it so eloquently, I never say that your why is not important.

But it's your because that's your accountability. Your why should always evolve, right? When I was a kid, my why was my mom, but my because was because I made her a promise. My kids then became my why.

But the because was because I needed to create a legacy. And so that because was my accountability for success. And you're saying the exact same thing. And I tell people this, the recipe for scaling a business is this, success that breeds success that breeds success. That's the simple formula for scale. If you can show other people how to be successful within your business, within your team, and then they show other people how to do it.

That's how you scale. Like all the other stuff, I'm not saying it's irrelevant, but it's a minute factor in scaling. There's nothing, no hurdle that comes up, no technological hurdle, no breaking point within the scalability of my business, no team building, no middle management having to create those things. None of that's going to stand in my way. And it's not because they aren't things that I have to overcome, but...

if you know the whole while that that's not going to stand in my way because I have to continue this path, then when those things pop up, you can find a way. And the good news is, man, there's tons of mentors and leaders out there that are helping with all of those things. And sometimes they're not even in your industry. They're like in another industry, but there's similarities. And if you can

figure out ways to tap into things that other people have done, whether paid or just by, you know, becoming a friend of theirs or some sort of business partner, no matter what it is, when you can attach yourself in some way to someone who's overcome something you have just makes it that much easier. But, you know, that,

Even without that, there's some hurdles that I got through with just brute force. You know, you run through the wall hard enough. Eventually you get through it. But sometimes it's like a cheat code to just get the tip from someone else. There you go. There you go. So, Justin, we got to talk about the 70 million, brother. Yeah. It's just like I, you know, I've exited businesses. 70 million is a big number. Yeah.

But even when I started thinking about selling, I wasn't really thinking about that number. First friend that I had that sold actually was a pretty big one. He sold for around 50 million. And what I learned from that one is it was a volume business. We had to help a lot of people. There's no way you could help a handful of people. Each one of our customers is worth a smaller amount of money. If I called it a $1,500 to $2,000 lifetime value of a customer, lifetime value of a customer, then to get to that number, obviously, you're going to have

have a large operation. And so we took a few different approaches and, you know, if I was doing it all over again, and the goal was just to get to 70 million, I think I could shave off a little bit of energy that I spent on things that were maybe more expensive and time consuming. And I guess that's all of us, right? Hindsight's 20, 20, but getting there really was the

The number one thing for us was creating a controlled, we call it a controlled distribution center where we had, you know, employee agents and employee service team where we could really control the outcome. So we actually have several thousand agents that are contracted with us around the country that we make overrides on, right? Like we're the FMO or the middleman or whatever people want to call it.

And we make a small sliver of revenue, but we have very little control over how much each one of them produces. We can try to get them to produce more, but they don't work for us. We kind of work for them, right? Our agents internally, though, the employee side with a much smaller group of agents internally, we were able to do all the marketing, all the accountability. They're having to show up, you know,

We do 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 8, 15 a.m. every day or Monday through Friday. We're doing training Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. It's different types of sales training. Monday, we're doing, you know, just kind of a company wide meeting, getting everybody on the same page. Friday, we're doing an accountability for what we just did for that week. They're always able to keep that team, you know,

in the right mindset and the right headspace, we're able to identify quickly what they need. Is it, do we not have enough leads? Do we not have the marketing right? Are the leads bad? We never want to say the leads are bad, but at the top, sometimes we're thinking, okay, can we make the leads better? But then also is this individual sales person

you know, making enough calls, why aren't they working in this one? Not like you can really start to get to the point where you could fine tune and find everyone's inefficiencies. And then you develop that mid-level sales management and those people that are doing reporting where we really got to the point where you were able to get out of the business and work on it. And just, just, it begs this concept is

that our growth rate and the number of tentacles we had into the market and our media brand dictated a very high multiple of our EBITDA. So 70 million, you know, it's not like we made 70 million last year. And you know that just for the audience, we had a high multiple, you know, it's in the 10 X, you know, kind of multiple of EBITDA, right? But when you're looking at that level, a lot goes into that. One, you know, they're getting me, right? I have an employee contract with them.

They're buying like that continued growth. They show the pattern that we have collectively and they're getting the media attention, all the marketing, all the we built our own software tool in that, you know, they're getting software. So there's a lot that goes into that number. It's not that it's unattainable at all, though. Like I said before, we did it in 10 years.

not even really aiming for that. You know what I mean? Like if I was going to go and try to build the same operation under the same market conditions, if the market conditions are the same, but I know what I know now and I had that 10 years, it'd probably be 150 to 200 million. You know, it's just because I know where not to spend money and where to spend the most time. End of the day, it's enough.

And I wanted to make sure we locked in some of that success for our, sorry, for the family, you know, to make sure that no matter what the market conditions. And like you said, you know, Mick, you have a background in the insurance space on the PNC side. And we see this with PNC right now. It's a tumultuous market. You know, you have coastal...

used with roofing is causing rates in places like florida to go sky high and california i think it was like state farm pulled out of like in like all of california or something so you know there's always things that can happen and so that's why when we came to acquisition it was like we could just keep building and i had friends that were like i'm going to build a legacy company and i'm like i still want to build a legacy company i still have

retained equity in our business. I'm still very involved and still want to continue to build that business, but I didn't want to get so fixated on it that

I still have that little bit of fear, you know, and I think that that's important. I went to a business class. It was actually a it was a Grant Cardone thing. It was a 10X360. And they made us do the John Maxwell belief lid assessment. And I filled it out. And then at the end, they told us what Grant's results were. And my belief lid was higher than his. And, you know, he's a pretty confident guy. Yeah.

I was thinking, man, so there's definitely market conditions that can change things. And so I wanted to make sure, okay, let's get to this level. I get to the point where it's like, are you narcissistic in thinking that you can always replicate the same results? I'm absolutely sure that I can grow more businesses and be successful, but I'm definitely felt blessed in that the timing of the time that I was building in that industry was also ideal. That's why I said earlier, could I ever

I replicate it faster under the same market conditions. Yes, but we're never guaranteed those market conditions. You know, we happen to be in a right industry at the right time. You know, COVID really positively, unfortunately for, you know, so many people, I hate to ever say that COVID positively impacted anything, but our industry technically, it kind of positively impacted it. So it kind of amplified our success, you know,

That month we were down in COVID. I had that full month, you know, we had to close the office. I went home. I actually used it as a stepping stone to create a bunch of online curriculum that we were able to leverage and go back now. And I tell people, I'm like, man, you were at home all that time. Like if you could have just taken that 30 days, you know, 30, 69, depending on where someone was and really leverage that time, man, that was the time to like set yourself up. And we did. And it was one of those launching points, but there's always these different like trampolines where you're,

you'll have a honey hole of leaves that'll come up. And now one thing I know is when one of those honey holes emerges, I'm going to spend money faster. I'm going to spend more and I'm going to have more intention in leveraging it because it's not necessarily going to be there forever. Yeah, there's all kinds of lessons in business, but it's fun to grow. And if you're having fun with it and you're enjoying it and then timing the market perfect,

well, man, like if you get 20 million, 30 million, 40 million, a hundred million, there are differences, but there's not all that many differences. I mean, if you got 5 million liquid somewhere, you're going to, you could make 250 to $500,000 in interest off of it for the rest of your life. So like, what are we even talking about? It's all like fake money at some level. So yeah, I'm glad we got the $70 million valuation, but

I fully intend to do my very best to make the remaining 49% worth 100 to 200 million in the next five years. I love it, man. I love it. I want to unpack something that you said earlier, and it's a mantra that I have.

I have. You've got to be able to work as a CEO. You've got to be able to work on the business and less in the business. And I personally feel where most green or newer entrepreneurs or maybe you're years in, but you're not growing at the rate that you want to grow is because you're not wearing your CEO hat the majority of the time. Right. Like we know you're going to wear multiple hats. I totally get that.

But, you know, one of my mentors is Damon John, and he says all the time, you have to know your business in order to grow your business. And I feel like a lot of younger CEOs or, again, CEOs that have been stale, they don't know their business enough, meaning they don't know their numbers. They don't know their true KPIs. They can't tell you their sales cycle time. They can't tell you their per employee ROI. They can't tell you the out.

of certain things. They can't tell you the cost of goods, right? So it doesn't matter the industry. I love that you said you've got to focus on working on the business as a leader, because again, you're never going to grow or get to the margins or numbers that you truly can when you spend half of your time trying to be the head of marketing. And I know it's 2024, right? And a lot of entrepreneurs think, oh, I've got to do all these social platforms and this and that. But then you spend so much time doing one post, right?

the rest of your business has gone to crap. And so I'd love for you to elaborate a little bit on that, on techniques to work on your business, because I feel like that's the biggest failure that most CEOs have. Yeah. So, you know, I started off selling and honestly, I've been

through the end of 2019, I was still the top individual salesperson within my business, even though I had multiple salespeople, but I was working, I hate to quantify it. I would say it's somewhere in the 70 to 80 hours a week, you know, that,

It was all kind of a means to an end concept that I would tell my wife all the time, you know, I'm working until seven or eight at night because I'm trying to get ahead. And then eventually, you know, I started telling myself like, okay, I have to do something or I'm just lying to her and I'm just gonna keep working to the bone

Right. Because you can dig yourself into a big hole where you have to work that much. And then to dig yourself out, you kind of got to get a little deeper. Right. And so January 2020, I told myself it was me and I had one other agent who was technically inclined. And I said, me and you, January 2020, we're not selling anymore, which our busy season is in the last quarter.

And so January is like kind of a good time for us to try to go to reset, mix it out. So we said, uh, so we're not going to sell, we're not going to sell any insurance anymore. We're going to completely work on it. So it was a cold Turkey thing and fast forward. And it's amazing. Like to think the times that we would have people tell us that we were like,

like wow you guys are doing so much and you're so much more sophisticated than our business and now thinking back like in 2020 i felt like our business like a dinosaur you know but we were able to really start compounding that then i started hiring some of the first people i hired were content um because we were doing some content creation that's where our brokerage side where our recruiting started coming in i hired a videographer who was like videographer social media all that hired a graphic designer which is so funny he's now my my chief operating officer

So he started off as a graphic designer, but he just had a high attention to detail rate. I ended up hiring several more of the creative space over time, but I would just kind of hire and place around. And then I would take internal agents and administrative employees and then shuffle them based on what they showcased as skill. You know, early on when you're building a business from the ground up, like you can't go out and hire and recruit, you know, six figure employees.

you know, C-suite executives, right? Like you'll bankrupt your business doing that. So you have to find and cultivate talent within. So I used a lot of entry level marketing positions, entry level admin and entry level agent positions to find the people that I thought were worth more than they realized. You know, our company is still running on these are all our department heads now. Our CMO started off as an internal agent.

Our COO started off as a graphic designer. And then, you know, even like my director of contracting, my director of commissions right now, they started off both working the phone with the front desk. There's good people out there that nobody's ever taken a chance on. And they're smart and

intelligent people. You know, I see a lot of people say people don't want to work these days. And I think that they do. I think that they just want to find somebody who sees them for who they are and helps them, you know, tap into something they haven't been able to tap into elsewhere and appreciate it and feel like what they're doing is part of something bigger than themselves. And so we

we tapped into that and now we're getting to the point where i'm i kind of come into the business and i keep i try to keep temperature checks on things and i get reports and stuff but like i try my best not to influence anything anymore because i'm i want them to influence it and like

you know, I still have tough moments where I feel like they're off course on something and I'm trying to like hone it back. But my goal is to get completely out of it. It's actually next week. I'm going, I travel a lot now. I mean, like I was telling you earlier, Mick, I'm just did the game, game one of the finals in Ballston. That's why I'm in this business center right now. But next week I'm taking my family on a week long vacation. And my goal is to turn the phone off the entire time and get on the laptop 15 minutes a day. We're kind of like a

a synchronization day, a point in the day. And I have a friend that did this who also sold his business. By the way, super important thing for people, whatever level you're at, get around other people at that level in some way. It doesn't mean you have to run around physically, but you need to be talking to them. And so people that have sold their business,

you know, you got to get around other people that sold the business. Cause it's not like all our problems go away. You know, like a lot of times we're having, you know, a little bit of psychological like effect of like, okay, how does this liquidation event going to like kill my motivation or it can be a little weird. So like to be around other people that are going through it or have been through it is impactful. But if you haven't sold your business, if you're just in that building phase, you know, find other people that are doing something similar and have them as allies, you know, you're,

There are people out there and you can teach them something and they can teach you something. That's some powerful for me. But one thing he did is he took his family to Hawaii for a week. And during that trip, he, for the first time, probably in, you know, five or six years was disconnected for like five or six days straight, you know, but he would do a 15 minute daily on his lap.

top sync up meeting where he would just kind of check in with the COO and make sure there was nothing that needed his immediate attention. And then if the answer was no, he'd turn it back off. If it was yes, he would try to put that fire out and then turn it back off.

I'm going to try that next week. I hate the word try, so I'm going to do it next week. There you go. And the cool thing too is it's a stress test. Where do they still need me? And how can I make them in the future not need me in that area? And that's what really working on your business becomes. At first, it's just...

literally getting out of the money, the income producing activity. It's funny. I spend all my time taking somebody that when they first get an insurance, it's like you need to focus on income producing your activities. But then eventually you got to focus on getting other people to focus on income producing activities so you can be that mid-level. And then eventually you even have to develop the mid-level so you can be at the top.

at the top. And, you know, I hate, you know, some people are probably gonna be like, oh, it's a pyramid. Well, everything's a pyramid, man. You got to build yourself up. Or if you don't think you're in a pyramid, you're probably at the bottom. You are at the bottom. Right. Totally agree. So Justin, I know that you're passionate about helping veterans, especially with the transition period. So what are some specific programs or initiatives that you're involved with and how do they support veterans? Yeah.

Yeah. So first of all, you know, our industry, people in our industry who are veterans tend to have a leg up and we're dealing with elderly population a lot. And I mean, you know how it is right now. They don't respect college education the way they used to. They're especially like when you get into the middle class population, but they respect veterans. When you're a veteran, instant respect. Right. You know, so they do really well in our industry.

As soon as I got through with this event, this M&A event, I started writing a book called Purpose After Service. So I'm about eight chapters in complete right now. It'll be out soon. And that whole thing is conceptually to just get that book out there to people so that they can find the idea. The idea in the book really is that you think when you're a service member.

When you're a Marine soldier, I feel like those grunt side jobs that when they go to transition out, they think, what else is going to have as high of a calling as what I felt doing this? What else matters? Right. And so it isn't that insurance matters that much, but you can impact lives differently.

Within any vertical. So if you're in real estate or if you're in insurance or if you're, you know, whether it's Medicare, PNC, health insurance, you could sell, you know, damn ice, you know, or cups and still impact people because you can build a business where people within it benefit on multiple levels.

And so the book is really about that. What I'm going to do, I'm self-publishing it. I have four books on Amazon right now. They're all in the Medicare niche, so very, very niche-focused books, three for agents, one for consumers that are Medicare-focused. But this one will be on there on my author profile, Purpose After Service. And the whole goal with that book is to put it out there in any

royalty proceeds that we get from Amazon and the other self-published portions, we're donating to Tunnels to Towers. I like that charity a lot, you know, but the goal is to just be, this is not a money-making book for us. We want to give it away. If somebody calls up our office, we'll send them PDFs of the book for free. You know, we just want to get it in the hands of veterans, but also family members of veterans, because sometimes family members of veterans identify that they're struggling the most. With vets, you know, there's the old

known statistic that 22 veterans a day are attempting or committing suicide. That is, you know, that sucks. But a lot of it is just because they're not finding that purpose, that next step. They're automatically, you know, and this is a stereotype, I guess, but it's like they're automatically, you know, more often a certain type of person mentally, they were chasing some sort of purpose or higher calling or,

you know, something like that. Right. And whether they found it in the military or not, they're certainly often struggling to find it outside the military, you know? And so that's the concept of the book. It's not to say do this, it's to say, do anything and understand that

But in that process, if you apply these principles that you've probably picked up in your service, you can affect change and find purpose. You don't have to run into burning buildings. You don't have to get shot at. You don't, you know, not all heroes wear capes sort of thing, right? You know, not all...

honor comes with carrying an M16 around the desert, you know. So that's really what it is. And I know that a lot of veterans are also suffering from the effects of other things like post-traumatic stress disorder and things that can exacerbate the issue. But I know a lot of veterans, you know, being in the Marine Corps for eight years, I have a lot of friends that had PTSD.

I can tell you in most cases, it's not any kind of psychological disorder they have, like post-traumatic stress disorder that's causing the issue. It's that they're failing to get into a routine of perfect after service. And that's the whole message for me is like, if I could help 10 of them, you know, get to a point where they're happy. Because I know when I can get them in the right mode, they'll help a lot of people.

So if I can help 10 veterans do that, they might help 100, 1,000, 2,000, 10,000 people or more with something. So that's the goal. And that's how we want to help is to push that arena over time. I absolutely, once I'm finished with that, want to get into a way

to plug them into more opportunities. So if anybody's listening to this and they're like, Hey, I want to help veterans. I want to hire veterans. I do have a goal of creating kind of like a staffing or job placement or high level recruiting agency that places veterans with good opportunities, you know, in a not a not-for-profit way. And I'm not there yet. So, but if you are interested in that, reach out to me so we can kind of have you in your, in the Rolodex. Cause as soon as that book goes and we start promoting, that's one of my next initiatives.

Well, I can promise you this. When the book drops, we will be back on the podcast and we'll talk about it. We'll even do a couple of live streams as well, too, because at Make Unplugged, one of the missions that we have is to support all of our past, current and future servicemen and women. So, Justin, whatever we can do to support you, we are definitely going to do as well.

do as well thank you so much man i appreciate that and it means a lot you know because there's a lot of them out there that need a ton of help and they uh they deserve it you know there's a lot of people that are trying to help them too so i'm absolutely aware of that but i think we all have different voices that speak to different people and you know mine might speak to someone yours might speak to someone that the other people that are out there helping don't reach so you know

it requires it to take, it takes a village. So. Absolutely. Well, Jess, I'm gonna get you out of here on this. Where can people follow you, find you and all of that for my guy, the $70 million man. That's what I'm calling it. So two, two spots really. I mean,

You can go to justinbrock.com. It's a little bit of a splash page for our niche and what we do, but I try to get really active on Instagram and YouTube. So on Instagram, it's at the Justin Brock. At YouTube, just kind of youtube.com slash Justin Brock and take you over to our page. We put a lot of free content on both of those platforms.

There you go. And I can promise you, you will learn something the moment you get to either of those pages. When I visit, I write down some notes as well. And Justin, I appreciate just the alignment that you and I have. And so, you know, anytime you want to come back on the podcast, let's do it. Anytime you need anything from me, let's do it. Ladies and gentlemen, make sure you are following Justin Brock, the $70 million man.

Hey guys. And listen, this has been a great podcast. I've been listening to Mick and he's put, he puts out great content, gets great people on, has great messaging. So if you're listening to this, please subscribe to the podcast. This is going to be a good one. There's going to be consistent value and it's worthy of that. It's worthy of a review on any podcast platform you're listening on. I appreciate you, Justin. And for all the listeners, remember your because is your superpower.

No, I'm easy. Thanks for listening to Mick Unplugged. We hope this episode helps you take the next step toward the extraordinary and launches a revolution in your life. Don't forget to rate and review the podcast and be sure to check us out on YouTube at Mick Unplugged. Remember, stay empowered, stay inspired, and stay unplugged.