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100% Made in the USA - 595,000+ Sets Sold - Worldwide Patent
Welcome to the Own Your Life Podcast, where our goal is to help bring hope, healing, and peace by sharing our experiences and inspiring you to own your life.
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Own Your Life Podcast. Today we have with us an entrepreneur that actually Matt and I have a lot in common with. In terms of selling everything and moving somewhere where they don't know anybody, and having a business with their spouse. Please welcome Rob Kessler to the podcast.
Rob Kessler: Hi
Ashley: How are you today Rob?
Rob: I'm doing fantastic. I just did another interview a little while ago and I had enough time to slide out and go cut the grass, take a shower, make it in time for you, and get all primed up and ready to roll.
Ashley If you wouldn't mind could you give us a little run down of your background?
Rob: That's tough. So, I was born in Detroit and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Met my wife later in life, we were together for about 5 years and decided to sell everything we own as you said and move to Los Angeles, that's where we knew nobody. That was 5 1/2 years ago and about a month and a half, two months ago we sold a lot of that stuff including a business, and moved to Atlanta, Georgia.
My new residence is here in Atlanta but I've always said I've sold the biggest things everybody always buys, houses, cars, and diamonds. I've built in an industry or industries that you need to have good relationships with and I've been able to take that relationship and try to make it digital with the new company and that has made us stand out from the get-go.
Matt: I was looking over your profile and stuff like that and learned a little bit more about you. So, tell me about the yacht business. So how did you get started in the yacht business and what does that look like? I am a huge boat guy, I love boats. I know a yacht is not a boat. I get it, it's pretty amazing regardless.
Rob: So, we owned a couple of commercial buildings back in Wisconsin and after a couple of years in Los Angeles we said you know what we are definitely not going back to Wisconsin we need to just cut off our ties. Those last little anchors that are holding us there other than our family which we can't cut off. We sold those buildings and were thinking of another business to do and I am very passionate about boating. My wife has grown up on boats. I got to be the once a year I would go to my aunt and uncles in Detroit, go out on their 50 foot and I was like, " This is the best thing ever." I would get that weekend jolt once a year.
We moved to the marina in Los Angeles when we first went there because we knew we wanted to be close to the water. Through a buddy of mine that I knew from high school I met a captain. So, I helped him with his charter business. I didn't really like the way his boat was set up, I just didn't think it was conducive for a big group. I thought there was an opportunity in this business. We sold those commercial buildings and bought the boat that we bought, which is a Sea Ray Sundancer, it's more of an express cruiser. Most of the other guys live on their boats and it's like I don't go in my underwear drawer there. These two story boats you just can't get 12 people together, and the Sundancer happened to be the same boats my aunt and uncle had. I just remember being able to put 10,12 people around the table and said, God this is great. We found our little niche in that, we ran it for the last 3 years and we're closing on that business on Wednesday I think.
Matt: That's awesome and nuts. What other boats have you been on? I'm the same way because I grew up always going to the lake. My dad had a houseboat, it was really small, it wasn't a 50 footer by the way. It was something that we had to work on every time we went down because it was always broken down but we still love it. I know house boats and stuff like that obviously on lakes is a big thing. But you're telling me that the big thing is actually... On a house boat you have a 2 tier level, you actually have 3 levels on some of them depending what it is. Did you have to get a special captain's license? Did you have to do certain things in LA? I know there are a little more restrictions in that for the business to flourish.
Rob: A little more? It’s Los Angeles there's a lot more of everything there. Yes, I'm 50 TON Master Captain about to upgrade to a 100 TON. In those 3 years I put a 1000 hours on the engines of that boat. It turns out that the yacht charter business is this new thing for people. We had a lot of tourism in Los Angeles so we were getting a lot of those clients and then COVID hit. We were freakin', we were wondering what we were going to do? We might have to leave the house we're renting and go get a storage unit and leave me and a dog and my wife on this boat and try to survive that way. We just didn't know what was going to happen.
After being down for a month, they started opening us back up and our business actually exploded. The beauty is we have 15 or 20 million residents and there was nothing else for them to do so they started finding yacht charters and going out on the water. As we are all finding out now, being in the open ocean, fresh air, outside was absolutely the best place you could be. Even with thousands of guests and thousands of charters we never had any issues with COVID.
Business just exploded and it was a fun little chapter but it's getting more and more competitive, there are more and more people coming in which is good because if there's more people, there's more attention to it. We were off the point. Let's do a little bit more service, let's offer a little bit more, bump the price a little bit more and we just had a little bit better clientele.
We've had some major celebrities on the boat, Pauly Shore shot the final scene of his new movie on our boat. Iann Dior is some big kid. He has a number one song of 2020, he was on the boat, I had no clue who he was. He was super cool though. So we had NFL and NHL and NBA players and people just found us. My wife is a stuntwoman and so she would have some of those higher ups come through from the industry. We just tried to set ourselves a little higher and word got around, it was great.
Matt: I think that's the whole point of all business, raise the bar a little bit and provide a better service. If you can provide a better service it doesn't matter what the price is. People always pay more if you provide more value, or more service. That's what I have always thought and what I have always preached and it's exciting for me to hear your yacht business is exploding because of that, it's awesome.
Rob: Yeah, we are out priced by boat, we're 50 feet over all the models of 44 foot Sea Ray Sundancer. We were outpricing 59, 60, 65 foot boats because of just the stuff that we offered. Our clients still left and said this was a great value, I feel like I got my money's worth. So, they win, we win, we do less charters, it's more profitable and it was great for everybody. It was a really great experience, we just met really super incredible people. My wife and I like to do things for 3 to 5 years and then what's next?
Matt: I understand.
Ashley: Awesome. You mentioned your wife is a Hollywood stunt woman. How did that happen?
Rob: She fell into it.
Ashley: Ha-ha.
Rob: So we got to California, I knew I was going to do my company Million Dollar Collar. That invention had already started. So, I knew when we moved that's what we were going to do. Linda was a small group and personal trainer, she had her own gym in the building that we owned and their wasn't a way to transition that to another trainer because people were really there for her.
So we got out to California and she said, "I don't know what I'm going to do." We were fortunate enough that through selling my business and the house and the other stuff that we sold which was everything we owned. We had enough reserves that she could really go and explore and figure out what she really wanted to do. We were hanging out with the only people we knew. I'm much older but these kids were like 25, 26 years old, they had German Shepherds, we had a Rottweiler, we were going on hikes, they were the leasing people in the apartment building we moved to, they were the only people we knew.
So, we're out one day and Linda's like, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do. She thought she was going to work for Beach Body Corporate because she had done stuff for Insanity and some other stuff for Beach Body already. This guy was like, hey you know one of my former residents was a stuntman do you want to meet him? She's like, yeah sure. So a couple of days later we went and worked out with them and he told her all the horrible things about the industry and she goes cool let's do it, what's next. So, he started introducing her and she's got a business degree so it's show business and she took that to heart.
She just went and trained her brains out, when some women say do it like this, in a specific way and she would mirror it exactly. She just picked up stuff quick, people would say hey go do this and she would go do it. She'd say I did what you said, that was really great. They said, nobody does what I say, you did what I said? So they were willing to go further for her, and further for her. She was just always there showing up and busted her butt. It's been about 4, 5 years now and she has 50 credits, she's been in major movies, TV shows, she's just amazing. It's been fun.
Ashley: That's awesome. Has she sustained any injuries doing that?
Rob: She took an elbow training once and shattered most of the stuff around there so I met her at the hospital with a bloody face and they kept saying where were you? How did this happen? What's going on? I wasn't even there dude, I'm here to support and love my wife.
Other than that she always has random bruises so she'll be getting dressed and oh there's a new one? she'll be like yeah there was more training yesterday. I felt I got a knee over there when I was working out.
Matt: That's crazy. What was her biggest film role? I'm interested in that, I interviewed another stunt guy so it was cool to hear that. What was her biggest break?
Rob: The biggest things that you would know she was a Skrull in Captain Marvel so she fought Brie Larsen in a bunch of scenes, she was one of the Skrulls that went flying out of the ship when it exploded in one of the fights. She was on Grey's Anatomy, she got hit by a car and slid across the ground on a bike. She was in Tenet, Christopher Nolan's new masterpiece. Definitely some big stuff there, a lot of big TV shows, Bless this Mess she was Belle's double for that, Fear of the Walking Dead, Walking Dead. She was in Legion, all kind of Marvel stuff. She was all over. Linda Kessler you can find her on IMDb and see her stuff she's all over the place. The list is getting long, it's hard to remember.
Ashley: So what is your dynamic with you two working together?
Rob: So when we are clicking it's because I know she's super detailed, contracts and follow up and that stuff is dialed in. I'm like we can do this, we can do that and she's like we could do that but if we did this then it would actually work. I have a tattoo of a really loose koi fish and one’s blue and one’s green that represents each of us. We've known since we started dating that we really are different and we balance each other off and we appreciate the things that the other person has that we don't that's when we're our strongest.
We worked together for so long. Growing up I was in real estate when I was 23, 24 years old and I would see these husband and wife teams I'm like you wake up together, you have breakfast together, you go to work together, and lunch and dinner and you go home, you go to sleep that sounds awful. Then I met Linda and it was like I want to wake up next to you, and go to work with you, and do it. Our building was really great where I had about 2500 square feet for my screen printing shop, she had 1,000 square feet for her gym and a long skinny office. Our desks were back to back. If she had a question or I had a question we were always right there and we would go off and do our thing for our businesses. It's worked out, we have definitely had our battles but we spend that much time...
Even before we got married, 5 years in we were like we spent 20 years together because most people wake up and spend the whole day apart and then come back together at night. We're spending so much time together we have a lot more years under our built then actual.
Ashley: That's right. What would you say is some of your best advice for other people that are working with their spouse or that want to?
Rob: So the advice that I keep referring to that I haven't quite followed yet but I want to. If it won't matter in 5 years, don't waste 5 minutes. It's hard in the moment but when you look back and you're fighting over something so stupid it's like who gives a crap. We might not just see eye to eye and typically it's because I'm trying to articulate something and then she's trying to articulate something. We're both saying the same thing but we're seeing it differently and we're fighting for our point we're just like, I think we're saying the same thing. It finally takes one of us to stand back and say I think we're on the same page.
Ashley: We don't know what it's like at all do we Matt?
Matt: No, not at all. I am usually fighting for what is right so that's how I usually operate. It is what it is, at the end of the day we want to choke somebody out and other times it's like how do I live without you? That's the way we usually operate.
Rob: Yeah, all in, totally passionate.
Matt: Absolutely, all the time. I know that you’ve had multiple businesses, you're doing tons of stuff, I know that Million Dollar Collar is the deal. I know that there are so many different things within Million Dollar Collar that are super cool like the stuff you showed me before. I'll let you rap that. As far as Million Dollar Collar what makes you so passionate about Million Dollar Collar and obviously the follow up question to that is why you dislike ties so much?
Rob: I've come up with a bunch of ideas over the years and not really followed through with any of them. If you can see in this photo, for the viewers that's an actual photo from my wedding day, it was before I even said I do. My shirt was just a sloppy crumbled mess. I got married on the beach in Jamaica so it was very casual. I hate ties because probably for my car salesmen days when I was forced to wear a tie when I was 21, 22 years old. Doesn't even match my shirt but I got the dumb thing on so shut up and leave me alone, let me go sell some cars.
So, we got married on the beach. My shirt was terrible and I was like the biggest day of life and my shirt may have looked good in a couple of pictures. We flew the photographer down and he took 2500 photos and there's maybe 5 or 6 that I'm like okay my shirt looks good.
To me the dress shirt is the most versatile thing that a guy can wear. I can dress it up, I can dress it down, I can wear a tie, I can tuck it in, I can untuck it, I can roll the sleeves. There's just a bunch of ways to wear it. I just hated that there was no structure in the front.
After I got home from Jamaica I googled everything I could find and everything was around the collar. Look, the collar isn't the problem, it's the front of the shirt. Come to find out dress shirts were designed to be buttoned all the way up and worn with a tie. The big manufacturers just haven't caught up to the times.
I took the idea of a collar stay, I made it 9 inches long and shoved it down the front of the shirt where the buttons and the holes are in part of the shirt called the placket. I stuffed a piece of cardboard down there to start, showed my new bride and she instantly got what I was trying to do. I went through the house finding every plastic and tested that and washed it and dried it and sent it to the dry cleaners and it totally melted to the shirt and so I ruined another shirt. So I had to make friends with dress shirt friends so I could take their old dress shirts and test things.
After 3 years of RND I got it perfected, I got it patented. Actually our attorney called us while we were on our 10 day move from Wisconsin to California and said, "Hey your patent was approved." So we knew we were on the right path with that. It's been about a little over 5 years of sales, little over 400,000 units sold, no ruined shirts. Not one shirt has been ruined by my product. We've gone in a bunch of different directions.
I was really fortunate when I got there, one of the kids at the leasing office was Jeremy Piven's personal assistant. So I got a bunch of his shirts right before he went on Kelly and Michael so got in with Piven right away and started with other celebrities. I taught myself how to sew and I'm taking these guys 4, $500 Ralph Lauren purple labels and I'm cutting open, opening stitches and doing it. I just found a way to figure it out and just went after it.
It's funny watching a 6'2'' guy , covered in tattoos, walking around with a sewing machine. What is happening here, I got stopped in a couple of elevators.
Matt: Do you know how to use that thing?
Rob: For one thing, there's one thing I can do on the sewing machine, that's put Million Dollar Collar in.
Matt: I was in the car industry as well, wore the ties and hated it. It always made me mad because generally the new guy back in the day, would sell a car and the new guy would get his tie cut. When you started in the car business you were broke so usually you're broke so when they cut your tie and you're like, awesome now I have to go buy this tie that I didn't want in the first place. Now I have to spend more money on what I just made.
Rob: It's funny because my dad would actually cut people ties off because they wore it to work. He didn't want that. Look like your customer and people just aren't walking in wearing ties. I think of who is left wearing ties in the industry everyday: bankers, politicians, lawyers. Nay, I'm good without a tie.
Matt: I feel that.
Ashley: And with that too with COVID and impacting a lot of businesses with people working from home and not dressing even in a dress shirt anymore did that affect your business?
Rob: Well I'll tell you it affected a massive deal we had on the table. The perfect storm of 3 horrible things happened to one company as we are about to sign a deal. We had samples already made, we were right there. That sent us back to the drawing board which ended up starting our own dress shirt line. We talked to every major brand out there, those guys just don't want to pivot. I feel like coming out of COVID you can't just be Ralph Lauren or Express with the same old shirts that you've always had like you're going to have to emerge with something unique.
I literally have the only thing that speaks to the massive majority of the market. I've seen studies that say 88 to 90% of dress shirts are worn without a tie most of the time. While I'm pitching PVH for Calvin Klein's and all these major brands they're coming out with a collar that stretches one inch. Who cares if the collar stretches nobody is wearing a freaking tie. They were so excited about that technology. You guys are the Titanic and can't even pivot. We said forget it we're going to prove that we can make a shirt that is going to sell based on this technology. A couple of guys made a shirt that was a little bit shorter and made $200 million dollars a couple of years ago with nothing proprietary so we figured we'd go after that.
We launched goTIELESS, the first shirt designed to be worn tieless. Also now on the website at Million Dollar Collar we have stock of Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Van Heusen, Tommy Hilfiger, Kenneth Cole that I buy. I put Million Dollar Collar in so you don't have to screw with it. You can grab a shirt that you already know and love, the size you know, the color you want, ship it to you and it's already done and ready to roll.
Ashley: That's awesome.
Matt: And I'm sure you're referring to UNTUCKit right? The guys of UNTUCKit, is that the shirt you're talking about?
Rob: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We talked to those guys, we were really close to those guys who's going to wear an UNTUCKit shirt with a tie? We thought it was a good thing, look, we talked to Men's Warehouse, they have sales people, they have tailors, they have dress shirts in 2,000 locations. They were like, I don't think it's for me. I think it is. You hear no a thousand times and you just keep going and finding another reason to...
If he says no, I'll try this and if they say no. We are in 650 dry cleaners and tailors right now. I am catching up to their 2,000 locations and they're in bankruptcy. Who knows? We'll figure it out.
Ashley: Right. It sounds like you have a lot of resilience too. Where does that come from? And being able to keep pushing past the no's. I know a lot of people just fold when they get rejected.
Rob: I don't know man. My dad built the business when we were little and I watched that grow from nothing to the third largest independent in the country. I know he had a lot of challenges. I was fortunate that my aunt and uncle had businesses. My grandma ended up having the largest bridal shop in Detroit, she started with 2 dresses she made herself, sold those 2 made 4, sold those 4 made 8 and she started that from nothing. I am fortunate to grow up around people who are doing business.
I get really stubborn when it comes to some stuff, behind my screen right here is a 5,000 piece puzzle and on the floor in a box I am working on a 13,000 piece puzzle. I'll just sit there, it's 8 or 9,000 pieces of white that I'm like will this fit, will this fit, will this fit, my wife says, you're nuts.
For me I can get out of my head and just know that I can try and try and try and when it's done it looks amazing. I try to focus on solutions not problems. You are going to have problems in life no matter what. I get hit, and I say what if we do this, what if we do that, and that has helped me through all this.
Matt: There is so much wisdom in what you just said. There's a lot of people, especially with the puzzle thing, I can't do the puzzle thing and she's amazing at that. I'm completely out, I get way too frustrated. I know that showing up, that's not necessarily it but showing up does help. I feel like when you win or to get to the win I feel like you have to have a reset, you have to be able to reset at some point and I think that the reset is almost inside of the journey. Which is unusual in itself, because some people have to take time out to have the reset but it sounds like from your description that the reset is inside the journey which is very rare.
Rob: It's part of it. Don't get me wrong there's days that it's 10 in the morning and I say forget I'm going to go and do something else, today is just screwed. It could be as simple as the stupid printer that doesn't want to work and I am ready to throw it through a window. Not every day is that, I am fortunate that I have a partner in life that is going through the same thing.
We have 5 LLC's between the two of us, there's days when she's down and she doesn't know what to do and I'm there to support her and lift her up and there's days I'm ready to throw in the towel and I'm like what am I doing with my life, 43 years old and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I sit and make excuses and I pout and she supports me and kicks me in the butt and says let's go. Take a day off, have a cocktail and reset tomorrow. Tomorrow is always a new day. Don't be afraid to scrap the day and just focus on something else.
That's one of the great thing with the yacht charter business being a captain. It forced me away from my desk. When I was away from the desk sitting at the helm, making sure everyone is having a good time but my mind is going. I am not trying to get quick books done, I'm not trying to respond to an email, I'm not trying to do all this. I can't do anything but think. That's one of the things that the puzzle does. I put on some music and now we live on 5 acres so I sit on my riding lawn mower for 3 or 4 hours and cut the grass like Forrest Gump. It gets me away from the computer and I can just think and let my mind wander and get creative. If you don't break that rhythm I have a hard time coming up with good ideas.
Matt: What prompted the move from LA to Atlanta cause you're not going to do any charters in Atlanta obviously?
Rob: No , so we're closing on that business on Wednesday. That was a tough, tough decision but my wife came out here in January. She got a job for 2 months to work on something Marvel. There's huge production here in Atlanta, far more than there is in Los Angeles. So she would get a couple days work here and there. Not usually the 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 week runs and those are the big pay days obviously. When you're locked up, otherwise it's hustling from one job. I only worked one day this week instead of 5 so she was here for about 2 months, she found a house and we closed on it 10 days later. I was home packing up the other house and we had a little moving truck. I drove 3 days cross country with 2 dogs. I unbolted the front seat of the moving truck so my 120 lb Rottweiler had a place to lay down and spent 3 days in the car.
When we decide stuff it's like both of us are like okay we're doing this now. We're all in and then we look back and we're like holy crap that one happened fast. Within about 15 days of finding the house and deciding we were going to live here we moved across the country. I've been flying back every weekend to run charters.
Ashley: I think you guys have us beat. Matt and I decided in January that we were going to move to Tampa from North Carolina and then maybe a month later we sold our house and then a month after that we're here.
Rob: That's quick, that's moving. It's better sometimes not to think about it, just do it.
Ashley: Exactly. I think we're both the personality that once we make the decision and talk about it and it makes sense and we just do it and we just move on.
Rob: That's how we are. Once we're done with something, it's how we finish this up so we can... We just commit to something and we're all in. It's fun, it's a whole new adventure. I had never even been to Atlanta before I bought this house. I never saw it or anything, I trust you, let's do it. Now I get to do home depot runs and buy new tools. I gave up everything, I owned this 1927 duplex in Milwaukee where I did all the work on, did all the work on our commercial building, 6000 square foot building, built that all out ourselves. I had all the tools, but when you go and move into a 800 square foot apartment in Los Angeles you don't need tools anymore.
I felt I left a little bit of my manhood in Milwaukee when I went to LA so now that I'm rebuying all my tools again I'm starting to feel like yeah. Do I need this tool? Probably not but it feels good. I think I should have that on the wall. What does it do? I don't know but I'll use it, Honey I'll figure it out I'll find something to use it on.
Matt: Did you go out and buy the biggest lawn mower out there or the biggest tractor?
Rob: I did. I got a 61 inch Husqvarna, it goes like 25 miles an hour or something, it's crazy. I just cut 3 acres in an hour, whipping around, it's fun.
Matt: Are you Tim the Toolman out there?
Rob: Yeah, I think I could tweak this thing and get a turbo on it or something.
Matt: From your point of view if somebody is going to start a business, looking to open a business, open do anything successful what is the piece of advice you would give them to hop into the business game?
Rob: One don't do it for the money, do it because you're passionate about it. Our boat business grew because we both were passionate about boating. We haven't spent a dollar in advertising, I get more visitors to Bella's website unpaid then...
I spend $180 a day on Million Dollar Collar ads. I'm getting the same traffic to both. Yes, 2 totally different industries, one has just a natural attraction , the other I have to educate everybody on. We were just passionate about it and into it, the screen printing business was the same, the real estate investing was the same, we loved it. it was never like we were out of , it was never like we were out of energy or we were too tired to do anything.
We lost a lot of friends when we bought our commercial building because we would work a whole day and we would be grinding on the building at night, because we knew we were going to rent out half of it to 8 potential new tenants. We had to build that out so we could earn that revenue and we always had enough energy. We would finish a full day and go work on that till 2 in the morning and when you have that passion and you're doing it because it's something you love, it's a lot easier to get through. Especially the no's and the hard times. If you're just doing it for the paycheck if the money's not there you're going to bounce and not stick it out.
Ashley: Yeah.
Matt: I've heard that from multiple people too that if there's a back door you'll take it. Sometimes you have to seal the back door to make sure you actually succeed sometimes too.
Rob: Yeah. We know where our strength is, we find a niche in an industry, we exploit it , build it and we'll sell it to somebody else who is going to take that and grow it. We did it in real estate investing in our office buildings, I did it in my screen printing business, we've done it in this yacht charter business, obviously Million Dollar Collar is a niche product. Linda's done it with her gym, she started training in the park near our house after work in the spring 1 day a week and by the end of the summer she had so many clients she quit her corporate job to do the gym thing full time. She just loved it, naturally she has always had a 6 pack, she works very hard. She's one of those people that you work out with and you're just doing 150% because you want her to say, "Oh, nice job Rob, good job over there that you're doing." You're like, yes she saw me. Her gym just grew amazing, she's just great. When you're passionate about what you're doing it's just easy.
Matt: That's awesome. I loved the answer.
Ashley: Absolutely. So I guess with everything what is one piece of advice that you would leave our listeners with?
Rob: Always be learning. I got to Los Angeles and knew nobody like I said one thing that led to another that put me into a men's networking group. One of the guys I met was one of the founders of Expedia. He's become one of my closest friends and confidants. That men's networking group put me in a place where I was gladly the dumbest guy in the room most of the time.
When you're around people... If you want to go somewhere you can't go somewhere where nobody else has been. The founder of Atari was there and Akon [?] was a member and I mean the number one reality show in the world producer. The people that were there were inspiring and willing to talk to me and tell me how they did it and how they got through and where they got and to me being around that thing... Mentors are the best thing you could possibly have. Find a group, find 1, find 20, whatever you can do.
Ashley: Yeah, one hundred percent. We totally believe in that, just having somebody who can see a little bit further then you is so helpful and impactful.
Rob: Yeah, my buddy he's closing major deals now. He's an adviser and an investor and he's way out of my league but he'll take time . He went over our contract for selling this business and giving us his second review. He saw how hard Linda and I work on everything that we do. He's willing to put in the time. Don't waste a mentor's time, somebody that's made it your trading time for dollars.
Those guys have worked hard enough that now they have time on their side. The worst thing you can do is take their advice and do nothing with it. That's why Linda got where she got because everybody said do this and she did it. And she said I did that and it was great. Okay I'll give you more time, all I want to do is see you succeed but if you're not going to listen to me... Then she's had people come to her and say how did you do it? She says, " Do this." And then they never do anything. Well, I'm not going to keep helping you if you're not going to... It's a two way street, a mentor gets something out of it and then they give something. It's got to be give and take.
Matt: I know that a few of my mentors I don't know if they said it to you or not. They're like, if you have a problem, I want you to come to me with 3 solutions, I want you to think about it before you come to me. I want you to be you, I want you to be able to mentor yourself at some point, in some areas, but I want you to come to me for the big stuff. Just being able to think is one of the hardest things that anyone's going to do. Being able to think through some of the problems you're going to bring to a mentor.
Rob: That comes back to what I said earlier. Focus on the solution, if you're focusing on problems your life is going to suck. Oh this happened, oh I have a dent in my car, got a scratch, I got this, I got that. So what, you have a scratch go get it painted. You got a dent, get the dent knocked out. You're out of gas, go buy gas. There's always a solution and if you focus on the solution the problems don't mean jack because everybody has problems. It's where you spend your energy that's going to benefit you or hurt you.
Ashley: Yeah, absolutely. I've heard it said that, if we saw what other people's problems were, we would gladly take our own over them.
Rob: Probably. Linda sometimes she'll be like all of a sudden she would feel super overwhelmed. I heard someone say one time, If the problems get bigger then you just love the [?]. If all of sudden you're facing things you never did before, oh this is crazy. I think I got a little better at what I was doing, now I have the next step of problems. If you have bigger problems that means you're making moves in the right direction.
Ashley: Where would you like to send our audience to learn more about you if they're interested in Million Dollar Collar or even looking at the yacht business, I know you're selling it or things like that?
Rob: Milliondollarcollar.com is the website, everything is on there. We have 650 dry cleaners like I said, we have mail in service. Anybody who can do basic sewing skills can install this. I taught myself how to sew and it's pretty easy. Everything is there, I'm on LinkedIn if you want to try and connect there. We have Instagram and Facebook as well. The yacht business is Bellaboating.com but like I said that's closing in a couple of days. I got something that's a little spin off of that one stay tuned.
Ashley: Awesome, we will put all of that in the show notes so everybody can find it. Until next time everybody please share this message with someone who needs to hear it. Please subscribe and rate and review us. Until next time, own your life, because your life is your responsibility.