Next Level Pros
#136: Title: "I've spent over $1M on my education" - My Advice to the Youth - Chris Lee Unplugged
Thu, 30 Jan 2025
Welcome to a new episode of Next Level Pros! In this special episode, the roles are reversed! Today, Cameron interviews Chris Lee, a successful entrepreneur, family man, and host of the Next Level Pros podcast. Chris shares his extensive entrepreneurial journey, from his early days of door-to-door sales to building and scaling a multi-million dollar solar power business. He discusses the lessons he's learned from both his failures and successes, the importance of continuous learning and personal development, and his insights on the impact of AI and technology on the business landscape. Apply to be on the show: https://forms.gle/hwDijQPFyKCEtHNs8 Highlights: "Go and fail as much as possible. If you're living at home, this is the perfect time to fail, right? Your safety net is pretty strong, right? You don't have to worry about food on the table. You don't have to be worrying about a roof over your head, but you can go out and you can fail." "Transparency is one of the biggest things that I learned from my mentor Todd at Vivint. A lot of business owners operate in the dark, meaning that they only allow a certain amount of information to go to their employees, and they treat them, probably like they're dumb." "For me, that's what I took from the education system, and I've been able to apply, and that's where I would say most of my success has come from, is being constantly hungry for learning." "You will not lose your job to AI. You will lose your job to somebody that knows how to use AI, and that person will be more and more efficient because of it." Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 11:13 - Lessons learned from business failures and successes 20:50 - Transparency and culture in business 27:07 - Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs 34:00 - The importance of personal education and continuous learning 44:00 - Chris Lee's views on AI and its impact on business 48:36 - Chris Lee's political views and support for Donald Trump 54:00 - The role of AI in education and the need for adaptation 59:16 - The most valuable skill in public speaking and sales Want me to teach you how to grow your business? Text me! 509-374-7554 Want access to more of my content? Click the link below for all of our latest updates and events! https://linktr.ee/nextlevelpros Want to be a guest on our show? Apply here!https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YlkVBSluEKMTg4gehyUOHYvBratcxHV5rt3kiWTXNC4/viewform?edit_requested=true Watch my latest Podcast Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/next-level-pros/id1687030281 Spotify- https://open.spotify.com/show/1e0cL2vI1JAtQrojSOA7D2?si=95980cd4e55a437a YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/@NextLevelPros
Chapter 1: What benefits did Chris Lee gain from the American education system?
My teacher had a specific question for you. Cool. She wants to know how education underneath the American school system has benefited you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Ooh, good question. So, big fan of education, but not traditional education. Sorry, teacher. My buddy, he goes, I have a business idea and I'd like to get started.
If he has an idea to go start and learn a business, just try something new, where would you recommend he start or when?
If you're still in high school and still under mom and dad's roof, like that's an incredible time to be able to take risk. Your 20s should be the time that you take the most risk. So like the best advice I could give to any person is go and fail as much as possible.
Today, I have someone quite special on this interview. Not someone, you know, like your friends or your parents, like everyone else is doing. I have someone quite a little bit more important, at least in my eyes. Today, I'll have Chris Lee on our interview. He's a family man, businessman, man of God, and in my eyes, a very, very successful businessman. Chris, real quick, run it down for my class.
What has been your past?
My whole past. Your whole past, in a nutshell. So I've been involved in entrepreneurship for nearly 20 years. And so, I mean, there's a lot that goes into my past. Started off knocking doors, very similar to you. which I think is the foundation for any great entrepreneur.
They've got to learn how to sell, and knocking doors is probably the easiest way to, well, easiest meaning the fastest way to be able to develop up that skill. Not indoors for many years, selling different products. Anywhere from when I was 17, well actually just after my 18th birthday, I started selling Cutco. Did that in a... cold calling type fashion.
I served a mission for my church which required a lot of door knocking for two years and then ever since then been involved in different sales industries, sold pest control, sold cars, sold alarm systems and automation systems and ultimately solar systems. And so all those products besides cars I sold door to door in some facet. and had initially started out doing it to pay for college.
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Chapter 2: What essential advice does Chris give for aspiring entrepreneurs?
But ultimately, fall of 2016, I decided to walk away. I was an executive for a business at that time, making a half a million a year. Had a company credit card that I could put anything on it. I was the VP of human capital is what it was called. I was over recruiting and developing out teams. And you know, I had what would be considered a incredible job, right?
Like I could go to any steakhouse, any ballpark, any place in the country, bring in recruits, have a good time, sell them on the vision of the business, everything like that. It was, it was a great job. It was a great job, but ultimately it wasn't fulfilling me in a way that I knew that I could go and build.
And I had learned everything that I needed to learn by going back to work for someone else. And so fall of 2016, I stepped away and everyone thought I was crazy. Cause like I said, I had, I had the dream job, the perfect job, uh, uh, when, with working with somebody else and. for the next year, figured out what I wanted to do next.
And I explored the international energy markets, did some projects there. I really spent a lot of time understanding internet marketing and I learned Facebook ads. I took a drop shipping course where I spent some money and I was drop shipping teeth whitener and flashlights all over the world and realized that that skill set would be well applied to a much higher ticket product.
And I knew the solar industry. I'd been in the solar industry since 2014. So I'd spent almost three years in that industry. Actually, three and a half years at that point, mid-2017. And so ultimately decided to take that skill and apply it to generating leads for solar. People said they were good. So I'm like, man, we might have something to actually go and build a business off of.
So fall of 2017, launched a business out of my garage.
bootstrapped which means it didn't take any outside investment didn't have any loans or any outside capital to be able to grow the business and just bootstrapped it myself out of my garage and kept expenses extremely low and invested in all the right things and so November 2017 is when we started marketing December 5th we had our first solar install
of 2017, so 2018 was our first real year in business. We did nearly 16 million in revenue. Year number two, we did 32 million, then 34 million, then 89 million, then 233 million. And eventually becoming the sixth fastest growing company in the nation, as recognized by Financial Times. Inc. 5000 put us as number 12.
Um, that's out of any privately held company or industry in the U S and, uh, it was, it was a wild ride. We, uh, built it up to 1100 employees and eventually exited or sold the business off to, uh, to private equity for nine figure deal. And. Uh, I stayed on for about a year and a half running the business and then had a drastic life changing event where me and my boys were hit head on.
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Chapter 3: How can transparency shape a business culture?
since then been involved in things that allow me a little bit more flexibility with my time to be able to spend time with my family. And so now I run a private equity group. I have a podcast. It's consistently ranked top 20 in the nation for business podcasts. If you go to Apple, you can see it's called Next Level Pros. It was initially branded as the Founder Podcast.
We recently changed the branding. But yeah, there I interview very successful business owners and then I also do live consulting for businesses that are wanting to scale their business. And so we run that. And then I have recently we bought a flooring business that we're scaling up. I have a business that's involved with Major League Baseball coaches in which we train youth. It's called Vetted.
So we give youth baseball players access to major league baseball coaches. And then I have an agency, a real estate development company, and then my info products in which I train businesses through masterminds and workshops and weekly calls and those type of things. So that's where I find a lot of my passion now and I travel around the world speaking on stages.
This last week I spoke down in Las Vegas At an event that was full of mergers and acquisition professionals, people that buy and uh, roll up businesses. Uh, so I was, uh, training them or did a 90 minute presentation from stage this last week, uh, down there. And so, um, but yeah, I, I've spoken on stages all around the world.
I've spoken in Paris, uh, you know, all, all throughout the United States. Um, yeah. So I, I love, love educating, love, uh, teaching and, uh, recently started a, a youth mastermind here in, uh,
in the Tri-Cities where I met great people like yourself and it's my way of giving back and sharing a lot of the knowledge that I have with the next generation so they can really build budding entrepreneurs today.
Awesome. Dude, your highs are so high and your lows are so low. It's incredible to see how deep you've gone and how far you've dug up after that. Dude, bankruptcy on the 2.2 million? Yep. Oh, brutal, brutal. Yep. I have a lot of respect for missionaries who can go out and sell because you are selling the hardest product I can imagine, right?
I mean, you're pretty much going at the door and saying you need to change the trajectory of your life, right? And it seems so hard to sell. Do you think as a missionary your sales have improved? So how do you mean? Like for the, because in my eyes it's really hard, hard to sell, right?
Yep. I was a pretty good missionary.
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Chapter 4: What is the importance of continuous learning in entrepreneurship?
Yeah. I had a lot of, a lot of what you call success. Yeah. So, you know, I think luckily God, God gave me the gift of gab very early on and, and really, More than the gift of gab, I'd say the gift of boldness. I think being able to challenge somebody and get them to commit to something that will change their life and better their situation.
For me, any product that I've ever sold, whether it's the gospel or knives or pest control or whatnot, is stuff that...
believe in like one of the the biggest things I tell any entrepreneur like if you can't get behind this product go find a different product right like I have to with every bit of myself really believe that I'm going to better somebody's life by them buying my product and so I think I That's something I learned very early on that I wanted to be behind the best products, the best services.
And so if you look at all the things that I've sold since I was little, whether it's knives or the gospel or pest control or anything. I have all those services and products in my home. I still go to church. I have a big block of Cutco knives. I have pest control services. I have home security. I have solar. All those things I'm a big proponent of.
Chapter 5: How is AI transforming the job market and business landscape?
It's not just something that I sold, but it's something I believe in.
Nice, nice. You had Todd as a mentor at Vivint, CEO of Vivint. What are some lessons or information he's given you that really changed your trajectory?
Yeah, so I think one of the biggest things was transparency. Todd, a lot of business owners, they operate in the dark, meaning that they only allow a certain amount of information to go to their employees and they treat them probably like they're dumb, frankly. Where Todd, what I saw him do is he created a very transparent program.
Like if I came in as a salesperson, I knew exactly how much money the manager was making and this, that, and the other. And that didn't bother me because there was a clear path of how I could become there. And so Todd was always very, like created clear paths in his organization. There weren't hidden pay scales, right? He wasn't paying one guy this and somebody else in the same type of position.
It was like, if you wanted to get paid more, you had to do X, Y, and Z. And then also anytime that the company was struggling, he was very transparent of like, hey, this is the battle that we're going against in the business. So like one of my favorite stories was actually before I came to work for Todd.
where the crash of 08 started happening and the markets were, there was not a lot of cash in the market in 2009, 2010. And in the summer sales game, you pay an upfront check and then what's called a backend check. And at the end of that sales season, Vivint didn't have enough money to pay the backend checks.
And where a lot of other business owners would have gone and tried to figure out a solution to get the money or whatever else and just not even let their people know that they were in trouble. Todd chose a different path. He went to everybody and said, look, we don't have enough money to pay you. But we are growing this business. This is the vision, the direction, and everything else.
He said, if you guys will sacrifice and invest your back-end checks into the business, there will be an equity upside that you'll be able to benefit from. And it was something like 90% of the sales force chose to invest. They could have taken the money. He was good for the money. He would figure out a way to get paid.
But it was like 90% of them that took their paychecks and put it towards investing in the business. And a couple years later, Vivint sold for $2 billion. But that, for me, was just such a testament of trusting your people, being authentic with your people, and creating transparency of what's working, what's not working. Because the flip side, when my first business failed,
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Chapter 6: What was Chris Lee's journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur?
Chapter 7: How did Chris Lee's failures contribute to his success?
Chapter 8: What unique insights does Chris offer on personal development?
And where a lot of other business owners would have gone and tried to figure out a solution to get the money or whatever else and just not even let their people know that they were in trouble. Todd chose a different path. He went to everybody and said, look, we don't have enough money to pay you. But we are growing this business. This is the vision, the direction, and everything else.
He said, if you guys will sacrifice and invest your back-end checks into the business, there will be an equity upside that you'll be able to benefit from. And it was something like 90% of the sales force chose to invest. They could have taken the money. He was good for the money. He would figure out a way to get paid.
But it was like 90% of them that took their paychecks and put it towards investing in the business. And a couple years later, Vivint sold for $2 billion. But that, for me, was just such a testament of trusting your people, being authentic with your people, and creating transparency of what's working, what's not working. Because the flip side, when my first business failed,
I was everything but transparent right like to the outside world we were crushing it to my employees we were crushing it everything else but behind the scenes we couldn't make payroll and everything else and I was just scrambling and doing everything else then ultimately it came to an
uh, ahead where we ended up having to file bankruptcy and it really caught a lot of people off guard because they didn't understand the struggle that the business was going through. And so, um, I think that one lesson taught me a ton about creating culture and buy-in and everything else.
And, and so it's something that I've, uh, ultimately really, really, really strived to apply across my organizations. The other thing is just from a pure business strategy standpoint, like, um,
You don't have to pay the most to pay the most, meaning a lot of times people in sales, they look for the highest percentage of commission that they can make versus the total compensation that they can make because great organizations take money that they would have paid to the sales rep and put it into the support that allows the salesperson to go and sell and produce more, which ultimately means more money.
And so it's better for a company to have big margins and be able to support the customer experience, which means the sales rep and internal customer experience, the employee, but also the end user. And so I'm a big believer behind margin. Charge a lot, pay a little bit less. create an opportunity to be able to go and grow.
And there's more compensation than just a paycheck to anybody that works within the organization. You can compensate through helping them develop physically, economically with their associations and their spirituality. And just really providing a pathway to help them get there. And so those are a lot of the lessons that I learned from Todd.
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