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Today’s episode features an extraordinary entrepreneur and thought leader, 
Chad Jenkins. Chad is a prolific business builder, having launched over 50 companies and authored impactful books like “Just Out of Zero” and “Friction Fuel.” With a passion for helping other entrepreneurs unlock exponential business growth, Chad brings a fresh perspective on leveraging what he calls “collaboration currency”—an often overlooked but incredibly powerful asset in both business and personal wealth building.
Host Dave Wolcott guides the conversation as Chad shares his unique journey from humble beginnings on a small farm to building multiple thriving businesses. Chad breaks down the essential mindset shifts and frameworks that have fueled his lasting success, including his VCR model (Vision, Capability, Reach) and the transformative power of collaboration. He invites listeners to see friction not as a frustration, but as an opportunity for innovation and value creation—whether you’re an experienced business owner or someone seeking to create new income streams.
This episode is packed with actionable wisdom and real-world examples, including how to identify untapped value in your skills, build meaningful strategic partnerships, and apply simple, repeatable models that deliver massive results. If you’re looking to scale your existing business or take your first entrepreneurial leap, Chad’s insights provide a clear roadmap to 10x—or even 100x—your impact.
In This Episode
- Why friction is your greatest opportunity for innovation and profit
- The VCR framework: Vision + Capability x Reach
- Harnessing “collaboration currency” to create new revenue streams without extra capital or risk
- How simple, effective collaborations can unlock exponential growth for any entrepreneur
We all have vision. We all have the capability. We also have reach. When we talk about reach. The reach is a trust relationship that you have with another person and or group of people and or associations and or something bigger.
Welcome to The Wealth Strategy Secrets Of The Ultra Wealthy Podcast, where we help entrepreneurs like you exponentially build wealth through passive income to live a life of freedom and prosperity. Are you tired of paying too much in taxes, gambling your future on the stock market, and wanting to learn about hidden strategies for making your money work for you? And now your host, Dave Wolcott, serial entrepreneur and author of the best-selling book, the Holistic Wealth Strategy.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. Today’s episode is going to stretch your thinking, spark new ideas, and quite possibly change the way you approach both business and wealth creation. I’m joined by Chad Jenkins, a prolific entrepreneur, thought leader, and author of Just out of Zero. Chad has launched over 50 businesses and now helps other entrepreneurs unlock exponential growth through one of the most powerful underutilized forces in business collaboration. In today’s discussion, we’ll dive deep into why friction, what people avoid, is actually your greatest opportunity. How to tap into your own collaboration currency to create new revenue streams without capital or risk. And the VCR framework, vision plus capability times reach, and how you can apply it to grow smarter, faster, and with more impact.
And lastly, why some of the most innovative partnerships in the world are built on simple, repeatable models that anyone can access. Whether you’re an experienced entrepreneur looking to scale through strategic partnerships or someone sitting on a game-changing idea but unsure how to take the leap, this conversation will give you the roadmap. And now onto the show. Chad, welcome to the show.
Dave, so excited to be here.
Yeah, really grateful to have you on and really pick your brain for a little while. I think the audience is really going to enjoy this discussion, really about stretching their mind. For those entrepreneurs in the audience or those thinking about being entrepreneurial, Chad really has some really exponential concepts around how you can think about collaborations around growing businesses. And we actually, on the wealth side, it’s kind of interesting, right, because we have a lot of people who are looking to make passive income or create additional income opportunities for themselves. So even if they’re in a W2 job and one of the best ways to be able to do that is with a collaboration, right, that actually doesn’t, you know, cost you anything. You’re using your intellectual, you know, capabilities and capital to put something together with a partner and, you know, really take that vision, you know, forward. So, you know, excited to kind of unpack some of your concepts here today. And maybe we can start off with just talking a little bit about, you know, your background.
And, you know, I’ve read your book as well, Just out of Zero, which is just so good. You have a lot of really good concepts. But, you know, tell us kind of how it all started for you.
Yeah, so started. I’m from Charlotte, North Carolina, and I grew up not very far from here, so there are about three of us left in Charlotte. I grew up about 45 miles outside of town in a little place where I joke time moves backwards. So I was on a farm, and I spent most of my days putting up barbed wire fence, mowing pastures, and riding horses or training horses. And I knew at a very early age that I wanted something that was a little bit faster pace. And I felt like there was nothing I could do to get out of here. It’s a very small town, 1500 people when I was born, and we lived 10 miles outside of that large metropolis. So things move kind of slowly.
And I, at one time, somewhere around eight years old, I can distinctly remember one hot day in South Carolina where the humidity’s up 100% and so is the temperature. And I was like, man, this. How in the world am I ever going to get out of here? And it clicked for me that I had everything at my fingertips through leveraging the art of collaboration. I didn’t know it at that time that it was the art of collaboration that I really began to fully embrace, but I began asking questions about what could happen if I took something and combined it with something else. What would it create? And it’s just a constant program or formula that I began to run. So that kicked off at the time. I would go to different horse sales throughout the week with my father, and we traded horses as well. I’d been riding horses since before I could walk.
And one of those answers was, what could I take if I combined X with Y, and would it create Z? Were those skills you talked about the capabilities that some may have because they’re thinking about or beginning to aspire to be an entrepreneur? You have what I now have, intellectual property called collaboration currency. We all have it. And it is the most untapped, unlimited, and almost untapped resource that you have. Even as an individual working a regular corporate job or an entrepreneur who’s wildly successful, there’s a lot more meat on the bone. So, for me, at that age, I mentioned I’d been riding horses since before I could walk, and I was going to horse sales. So I would take the capability that, the ability that I had created over time and combine it with people who wanted to sell their horse. And at that time, at 8 years old, I was, we’ll call it, a late bloomer. I was very small.
And if you saw a peanut-sized kid riding a horse of any size, you, too, as an adult, thought that you could ride the horse. Not 100% true, but I converted that to $20 per horse per night that I rode through the sale bar. So at 8, 9, and 10 years old, I was making at least a few hundred bucks a week. And I continued on that, combining things that I had on the farm, and developed a landscape company, and then got big into horse trailers and feed and tack and panels and gates, and retail, and then on and on and on to the tune of about 50 different organizations. So, looking back through all of those, what was the key item, which is the second book, Friction Fuel, is that I’m drawn to pick up on friction that exists in existing processes, i.e., businesses or the processes inside of businesses or industries. And I outline in that book that there are three different types of friction. Just like you pull up to a gas pump, there’s friction that everyone is reacting to.
This is the type of gas that every business is running on. You don’t have a choice. If it were a train, you are getting off the train track because you’re going to get run over. That’s the type of friction that everyone is aware of. The next type of friction, mid-grade or plus, as I often reference it, is the type of friction that’s being delivered to you, what most people would consider a complaint. And then the last type of friction is the type of friction I’m most excited about identifying, which has helped me create all those businesses. That was the type of friction that no one in the industry has an immediate behavioral response to, not even a complaint. But if you’re able to create a solution for that industry, everyone buys it.
So being driven by the awareness of friction, all three types, of course, you’re going to start with what’s most obvious, and then through intentionality and a little bit more research and just a little bit more attentive awareness, you’ll find the other types of friction. Of course, starting at the age in entrepreneurialism that I did, I didn’t have the luxury of working in an industry for years and years identifying those frictions and then going out, taking a leap of faith and creating a company, I was way too young So I had to be keenly aware of frictions that were affecting other people in which I could find ways to create value from those and then leverage the art of collaboration to make it real and ultimately make it recur.
Spoken like a true entrepreneur, starting very early, going against the grain. Right. And becoming innovative, you know, and, you know, doing problem solving. Love that. Would like to unpack, I think, you know, two core concepts here, and I guess the first being friction. Let’s kind of unpack this one a little bit, and then let’s move into the collaboration concept after that. But, but really, friction.
It’s interesting because I see that whether you have a business or not out there, as a listener, I think there’s a lot of parallels to basically how you’re also running your business, which is your financial statement, your relationships and your family, your friends, your spiritual capital, your emotional capital, your intellectual capital, and all these different things. So I can see as you talk about these different types of friction. Friction in our business can sometimes be easy to identify.
Right.
And then we want to figure out this way to solve that, but also the friction in our lives. And I think the key point here that’s really interesting, actually, is that as humans, we really see friction as bothersome. Right. Like I’m being weighed down, I’m being anchored by this type of friction. But what’s unique about your approach is you’re really saying that friction is actually the opportunity.
Absolutely.
Friction is the complete opportunity. So if you can not only recognize that, but you’re going to kind of have this paradigm shift in your mind to see, okay, bring on, you know, more friction. Right. That’s the opportunity. And I think there’s a real parallel there in life as well. Right. Because kind of figuring out what you want in life and creating your vision, you know, which we’re going to get into vision later as well, really stems from what’s not working right now.
Indeed, yeah. So the definition of an entrepreneur goes back to 1860. 1864, I believe, is the John Baptiste, say, if I’m not mistaken.
Yes.
To take something that exists, that’s performing at X, and increase the performance of that. Well, the awareness of something could be better, is the complete ease of identification, friction, and just being able to. And everyone who’s listening to this, I would argue everyone is an entrepreneur. I would dare say if we went back to about the time we were in the third grade, and we would ask any of those children, including us, is there anything that you identify that could be better. Of course, the answer is yes. Right. But the convention is that you and I both need to make 100 on the math test and the English, and the chemistry. Instead of leveraging your skill set, which is way better in chemistry, and maybe mine’s better in math, and us working together.
So, going back to that particular time and understanding that, it makes me say, often, we’re all entrepreneurs. We all have this capability. We come pre-wired with it. You are drawn to be aware of friction. It’s just at what level of intentionality are you picking up on it? And if you do aspire to be an entrepreneur, you have the fundamental skill set already. What we’re talking about today is just kind of a formula of friction identification. Leverage the market, leveraging the market twofold. And this is a concept that I also have in the Just Out of Zero book, but it’s called remove the film.
And remove the film stands for exactly that, you’re aware of a friction that you have identified. Leveraging the market is the first to understand. If I do create a solution, how big of an impact could it make? What is the depth of the market? And then the second portion is probably what we’re about to lead into is leveraging the art of collaboration. There’s already. There’s somebody today, right now on a Zoom call, that for whatever idea you may have cooking up in your brain, maybe in your cubicle, of how to make something better, there’s an entrepreneur on a Zoom call that would delightfully collaborate with you and participate in the impact of that. Probably even only get paid after there is success. Because there’s so many capabilities in the world. What I most identify with is the folks with capabilities and the folks with what your class, what you’ll hear me talk a lot about, is reach.
They don’t have the same level of vision that other entrepreneurs have. And through the combination of those, is what empowers us all to create new and unique value. Happens over and over and over, even while we’re on this call.
Yeah. So let’s talk about collaboration a little bit. Right. I think it’s important to really try to simplify that construct. It seems very simple, right? Collaboration. But there’s so many different forms of that. Dan Sullivan’s got his own idea of what a collaboration looks like. Partnerships have been around for centuries.
Right. Different types of things. But how would you define and view a really successful collaboration? What does that look like for you?
So I first start with the definition. When I really began to embrace this some time ago, I wanted to get to a very authentic expression of it, and very reachable or understandable. So, collaboration to me is the unique value that’s created from the combination of two or more people, places, and things. And so, upon that definition, you can take that in this most authentic form and look back at the entire world. And basically, no matter where you are listening to this with your eyeballs, you can see things. Everything that you see, everything that you’ve ever seen, and everything that you will ever see started as an idea in someone’s imagination. Remember, we came factory-installed with that, no matter where you are in your life. Additionally, whoever had that idea did not create the outcome that you see only through the art of collaboration.
And we’ll go back to the definition, combining two or more people, places, and things results in everything that you see now. So, on those two fundamental, and I would argue, very true definitions of building blocks of the world, why not your ideas, leverage the art of collaboration? You have the capabilities to bringing those ideas that you have to life just by leveraging the art of collaboration. Just like everything you see, this camera that’s connecting us, this 80 inch TV behind the camera, this microphone, the Internet, that Mac mini, the car you’re driving, everything is the result of a collaboration, started as an idea and then it began to combine with two or more people, places and things that result in everything that we see. So that gives us all the same level of opportunity.
Yeah, it’s really the heart of entrepreneurship, right? Is. Yeah. Taking that lower level of productivity and making it, you know, something bigger. You know, one of the things we do in our mastermind or we’ve done in our mastermind exercise is just, you know, this really simple concept where, you know, we handed out a set of paper clips to everyone in the room and say, okay, now you’ve got two minutes to describe. Okay, what can, what are the uses? You can come up with that paperclip, right? And people come up with like 10, 20, 30. The overachiever’s got like, you know, 50, right? He writes down 50 things in 20 minutes. But then you then say to the group, okay, now the 10 people at your table, right now, you guys all work on this together. And what can you come up with in the same two minutes? And it’s 10x100x type.
It’s really like a 100x type of answer. So something really simple like that can be very profound and demonstrate the ability of what that collaboration. Right. Can kind of look like, and what type of outcome you can get.
Simple ideas when multiplied through collaboration can deliver 100x outcomes.
Yeah, I think you touch on two key things there. The art of collaboration it’s what you have to give. That’s the first and only through combination do you create the outcome. So, giving is a prerequisite. When I talk about the combination of two or more people, places, and things, that means two people are giving, two things are giving, two places are giving to two people or things. So, for an entrepreneur and ultimately all of us as humans, we’ve been giving unique skill sets. What do you have? What do you possess that, if you had this mindset running, how can you give it to someone else? Not what you can get, but actually give it to someone else, and it would create a bigger outcome; the doors just start opening for you. But if you take one step back from that and say, okay, what’s really going on here? It’s a super powerful component, and that is a combination.
Yeah. And for the listeners out there, right, if you already have a business, right. This is a massive way to exponentially grow. Right. Without taking on as much risk. Right. You don’t have to take on all of the cost of the infrastructure of a certain solution.
You can just partner with somebody else to really kind of exponentially grow, which is really 10x thinking versus 2x thinking. And then also again, for those folks who might be W2 or thinking about that next business, or retiring from their W2 and getting into something else, what better way to really become an entrepreneur? To get into business by taking your capabilities and combining them with somebody else. Again, it reduces your risk, you know, lowers the floor, and really increases your upside. Right. With every sort of Runway.
Yeah. You know, I work with entrepreneurs all over the world on a daily basis, just about every continent, and helping them identify ways to leverage the art of collaboration so they can grow like no one else in their industry. You mentioned 10x, and that’s true. I see more of a hundred x, and I’ll give some insights as to why. These ideas that you have that you’ve been sitting on for a long time, I mentioned there’s someone on a Zoom call ready to take their capability and make your idea a reality. What I would say most of us as humans have lots of ideas, and entrepreneurs specifically have an abundance of ideas. What if every time you had an idea, you had a community that you could share it with that wanted to take their capabilities and help you make that a reality? The only other question is, how are we going to split the outcome of this success? So it is absolutely 10x thinking, but it results in a hundred x outcomes. Because I don’t need to schedule a meeting with my lawyer to turn around and have a meeting with lawyers to turn around and have another two or three meetings, and then we might get to an agreement that we might start in three to six months. I could have done this six times next week.
Chad, can you give us a couple of examples of some successful collaborations you’ve seen?
Yeah, absolutely. You would like big examples in the world that you could easily Google and you know, I’ll tell you one that I recently ran across, I think it was in Toronto and I just happened to look that somebody actually sent it to me and it was this one would be a little bit of humor as well. So, Kim Kardashian has an organization called Skims and Nike. They too collaborated. 5.7 billion market cap change, in one 24-hour period. I don’t know how much faster you can do and create. I don’t have a solution to create that type of market cap change in that short a period of time other than leveraging the art of collaboration. So that, of course, on one end of the scale, the other end of the scale of countless.
We have just over 500 collaborations around the world that are currently operational. A lot of them. I’ll give you one, a new one, because this, and I think I mentioned a little bit even before our call, we’re launching an apprentice, a collab apprentice level for 18 to 24-year-olds. So there’s a wonderful gentleman from Germany who is here in the US on scholarship to play basketball, and his mother had a complication with her breast and she had surgery. Well, she was unable to sleep on her stomach for four months. Therefore, she did not sleep for four months. No,w kudos to her. She’s quite inventive.
She created a pillow, had a friend who had some memory foam. She creates a pillow and has taken as far as getting a patent approved in the U.S. it is an approved medical device in the U.S. but in getting introduced to this particular gentleman, the website is done of course in German and it has other languages, but when you change the languages it still shows in Euros. It’s a little hard to get a bunch of sales in the United States if you’re not delivering in two days and making a one-click buy. And most of the folks on this call certainly understand that, being from Germany, you may or may not. But combining his capability of the pillow with all of that work that they’ve already done to be approved and patented in the US, connected them in collaboration with the digital marketing Firm and with what I would classify as a reach component. Well, the digital marketing firm did all the website updates and the reach component, which was a gentleman who had extensive ties into the pharmaceutical industry and also the healthcare industry.
So that is a three-way collaboration. He now doesn’t have to figure out websites, he doesn’t have to figure out how to integrate Stripe Connect. He also doesn’t have to figure out how to talk to doctors and then train pharmacists on how to talk to their patients or their clients that come in, their customers on how to use that pillow. And it was a hundred times change in the first 30 days of their volume.
Yeah.
Awesome. This is one. There’s so many different examples like that.
Yeah, very nice. So why don’t we talk about this VCR concept, right, that’s out there. Why don’t you, why don’t you kind of explain what that means?
Yeah, sure. So VCR and no, not like some of us had. I’m starting to show my age, right? Because there’s a swath of us that had VCRS way back in the day. So VCR stands for the V is for vision, the C is for capabilities, and the R is for reach. So, a good friend of both of ours, Dean Jackson, originally coined this formula, and it was vision plus capability multiplied times reach equals success. And you can kind of look back at different successful businesses and trace back their origin. And someone had a vision, and either they created capabilities or they engaged, maybe writing checks on the front for someone else’s capabilities. And over time, they may have bought some reach from Facebook or Instagram.
In today’s world, maybe a billboard on an interstate that’s a reach component. And only through the combination, or one would argue the collaboration of vision, capability, and reach, were they able to reach the level of success. So it’s a very simple formula, but yet it is absolutely profound. When we think about vision, there’s a few different types of vision. You have the ability to see your ideas in black and white, or this idea that you have to create new value in the industry that you’re in. Maybe you’re sitting in a cubicle and you’re fed up because you know you could make it so much better. Maybe you see that idea in color, you could really describe it to me. Or is it possible that you really thought about this, you know, two or three ways that you could create this new value? I would argue that you have a 3D vision around that idea.
And then last but certainly not least, some ideas. When I engage with entrepreneurs, I would argue true visionaries, they see their ideas in 4D so they know what it looks like, smells like, tastes like, and feels like. They know not the paths that you could take to get there, but very similar to Google Maps, they know exactly the route to get there the fastest, and they know which collaborating parties are required to create this outcome. So that’s the vision component. When we think about capabilities, there’s a clear distinction between capability and ability. And I’ll make it as simple as I possibly can. You may own a piano, it is capable of creating some very nice music. Though you might have the ability, in alignment with my personal skill set, you might only be able to plink out Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, two wildly different things.
So when you think about entrepreneurs and even anyone on this planet, we all have vision, we all have capability. We also have reach. When we talk about reach. The reach is a trust relationship that you have with another person, or a group of people, or associations, and or something bigger. So the reach component is a multiplier to the capabilities that you have, but only after a vision is applied. In this whole formula, vision is the absolute catalyst. I would say most of us who are listening have heard it’s all about the execution. We do know what somebody’s executing on, right?
Someone’s vision. So I’ll give you a little funny as well. Perhaps you and I were walking in downtown Baltimore at night, and it was close to 12 o’clock, which is graciously beyond my bedtime. But if we were about to round the corner of a building and we did not know what was around that corner, we might slow down, we might pause our conversation in some parts, or we might even cross the road and walk on the other side of the street. But perhaps you had the vision, clarity to know there’s nothing around that corner, you would keep walking. You need a lot less courage to take chances on your entrepreneurial visions if you truly do have what I would argue is a 4D vision. So in many things that I’m engaged in, I would make polite suggestions that if you do not have a vision partner who has the ability to see future outcome potential at that 40 level, find one. Because your ideas can become real and recurring when you implement the capability of the VCR formula.
Again, vision that you have combined with someone’s many capabilities, and then multiply it by someone else’s reach, and that is a very shortcut path to success.
Yeah, I mean, this is just such a fantastic, really thinking model.
Right.
It really truly simplifies the complexities of business, the way we think about business. Right. Because we all get kind of mired in all of these different aspects. Of a business. And it just. That’s exactly it.
You hit this ceiling of complexity. But I think when you can really simplify it into these specific terms, you know, those are really the core ingredients. I was curious if you’ve thought of this with respect to, like, you know, with respect to Colby or Eos or the model of integrator, for instance. I, you know, I’m kind of thinking like the, you know, the visionary is probably typically like the higher quick start on a Colby. Right. The entrepreneur. And then maybe the capabilities really kind of come from that integrator that could kind of help drive those in terms of if you were to layer on a who, not how, on top of VCR. Right.
I was kind of thinking about who’s for that.
Yes. Yeah, definitely you’re who’s for that. So I’m a. I really enjoy working with a genius because I feel like it’s very reachable and understandable for many others.
Yeah.
So I assume most know it. Six Types of Working Genius, written by Patrick Lencioni, and your wonder and invention. Visionaries. The wonder is asking questions. What if. What if we change this? What if we took out this step? I would dare say Elon certainly starts with wonder and invention or wonder. So the invention portion, of course, is what is the plan? What are the plans that we could potentially leverage to make this better? I love discernment, knowing if it’s a good plan or not a good plan. You know, from the.
The whole model is based upon one word, widget. So W for wonder, I for invention, and then D for discernment, and then the middle right there, the galvanizing. I think it’s just a wonderful skill that sometimes goes overlooked. So, galvanizing is the person in your organization or on your project team. You probably know them very well because they get everybody on the same page. It is just an amazing skill set. In my personal profile, galvanizing is third. I’m sorry, galvanizing is fourth Invention Wonder, discernment, galvanizing.
And then the last two, enablement. So you think about the person on your team or in your organization who runs around making sure everyone has what they need to do their job. And then lastly, tenacity. So all of my assistants have enablement tenacity. And I am thankful for that because it is the end of the way my working genius is spelled. And certainly frustration for me on the Enablement, tenacity. But if you want to think about how something could be better, I’m definitely your guy.
Yeah.
Unlimited plans.
Love it. Chad, can you explain your business model? You’re doing some really exciting things that I think could, you know, really open some doors for some of the listeners out there with respect to Colab Partners. You know, colabcon, kind of what are you putting together that people could actually participate in accelerating this, this type of concept?
Yeah, sure. So over the last four or five years, I began to recognize a pattern after so many companies started and grew and sold and merged and exited, and it was always about the value that was created, which was where my passion lay. And I definitely became less excited about creating yet another company. I’d gotten pretty efficient in IT and built companies to help me create companies. HR, accounting technology, digital marketing, etc. But it became very apparent to me that the secret sauce was the ability to identify ways to create new and unique value and then make that real and recur from systems and processes. I figured out as well I could go a lot faster if I would just take that capability and that level of vision and combine it with others who already own companies. And so I began to do that, and it was just so enjoyable.
It’s absolutely what I was made to do. Not starting and creating and running a bunch of companies, though I’d done that for many years. And when I further inspected, there was a huge opportunity for everyone else around me to do the same thing. So that’s when it kind of led me to create what is now the collab. So the collab, as you would expect, is built completely upon leveraging the art of collaboration and leveraging what each and every individual has as their unique value contribution, which could be their vision, it could be their capabilities, or it could be their reach. And so in the Colab, part of the onboarding is really to unpack and identify what we call your collaboration currency. So basically, what’s in your wallet that at the end of a 30 day period, maybe like that hundred bucks that a lot of people have squirreled back, you didn’t spend it, it’s not worth as much on day 31 as it was day one. And so all of helping people understand they have so much more collaboration currency in their business, in their own individual capabilities that they could utilize to give to someone else, participate in the outcome of that, which would defy the margins in their industry because they’re not sending out the same invoices, trading time for money and somebody else, which is that Somebody is everyone else in their industry.
If you think about it, the sign on the door says you’re a plumber, you’re a chiropractor, but that’s not the way you do what you do. The way you do what you do is the secret sauce. So helping entrepreneurs kind of bottle that up and then having a mindset shift with them to how they could combine it with someone else and then participate in the outcome is what is making the CO lab grow exponentially faster than anything I’ve ever done. And it’s so rewarding. You know, if you think about it, we talk about capabilities even on this call, and many folks have ideas. And the convention is to go raise a seed round or begin to get friends and family to throw some cash in and get started. It also became apparent, with me looking backwards, that we were starting on that farm. I didn’t have a lot of cash, but I had access to lots of resources, and I just combined them to create new and unique value.
But when I look at capabilities and most specifically cash, what is it used for? If you have a bunch of cash and you have an idea, you’re immediately going to buy someone’s vision. I need somebody to help me with a marketing strategy that’s pretty common. I’m gonna go by someone’s capability, I need a prototype, and I’m looking for manufacturing out of China. It’s just a capability. That’s it. And then lastly, now that I got my idea, the marketing strategy, and I have my prototype of whatever I created, maybe it’s a new house plan or a foot massager that you got made out of China. Now it’s time to pour the gas on it. Well, I’m going to go buy some reach, I’m going to go run some ads, billboards, and sponsor some things.
Well, when I looked at that, each one of those things that I needed or recognized that other people were spending their money on were capabilities that all entrepreneurs already had. If you think about it, most entrepreneurs would much rather get a higher return than the guy with the same sign on his building down the street. And the way to do it is to partner on the outcome, stop trading time for money. One thing I also became very aware of is that every time I would sign an agreement, third page, bottom right, 50,000, 50% on the front. That probably sounds familiar to a lot of us. There was a common thing that happened the second that the ink was dry. Everything changed. Their top salesperson or marketing person left, and your account rep is no longer there.
You get those nice emails, or perhaps tariffs happen. Interest rates went down. Interest rates went up, guaranteed. Everything changes when you leverage the art of collaboration. As we outlined here on the call, everyone is dialed into the outcome. It takes a huge management burden off of you because the outcome manages everyone’s behavior. So it’s just a little different way of thinking about it. So that’s one thing that really drove me to originally create the COLAB itself.
You already have what you need, vision, capability and reach. The only question is how you’re combining them.
One changed the way that I was originally creating businesses. It’s the way that I go to do business. And I was leveraging the art of collaboration oftentimes in my businesses, but I’d never really called it that. And I didn’t get super pure and authentic in leveraging it. I am now. And as I see the transformation in the mindsets of these wildly successful entrepreneurs, they’ve done it the conventional way. I think there’s a saying that most of us have heard. They’ve always been collaborating up top and competing down below.
I’m here to share with you. The quicker that you take that to heart and begin leveraging the art of collaboration, when you’re down below, the faster you’ll be on top. So the collaboration or the CO lab is my way of creating that system and helping other entrepreneurs, or even aspiring entrepreneurs, realize that in short order.
Awesome. And what is the URL that you could share with people if they want to learn more about that?
Yeah, sure. So the CoLab is under my organization, SeedSpark. SeedSpark stands for seed vision, spark growth. So, seedspark.com is where you can find out a lot more information about the CO Lab.
Awesome. Wanted to make sure that we got that in. Yeah, no, it’s. It’s really fantastic what you’ve created, Chad. I’ve heard so many success stories of people kind of coming out of there, and I truly believe this really could be the first domino for people to really exponentially increase their wealth, increase their freedom through expansion opportunities. So it’s really neat to see and frankly, I don’t see anyone else in the market doing anything at all like this or zeroing in on this.
So, it’s pretty cool what you’ve been able to do. Chad, I know you’re a super successful entrepreneur, you’ve had business after business, you’ve had exits and things like that. Tell us some of your top productivity hacks. I know you’re an early riser and a health nut as well as I am, so can you share some of your top ones with the audience?
Yeah, big hack. Listen, find quiet time, all the good stuff’s there. Inside, it’s not outside. So you mentioned kind of an early riser. That is true. Another little shortcut. Pick your own time to go to bed. So mine is 8:58.
I would encourage you to pick just yours. Most people say, “Oh, I’ll go to Rent and go to bed around 9 or 10 or 11 or it’s all over the board.” But I’ll share with you. If you pick a very arbitrary time and you own that time every time you look at your watch, you’ll do the simple and reverse math to figure out how much longer till that time, which will greatly improve your probability of getting to bed close to that time. Now that’s who most of us travel all the time, multiple time zones, sometimes in the same day. It can be a little tough entertaining, but picking your time, your individual time to go to bed, is a game-changer. I like to do it early, and the quicker I get in bed, the quicker I get up. The second that I open my eyes, a huge hack begins, the second that you become conscious, with gratitude.
Thank you, and don’t stop until you run out of things to be thankful for and then open your eyes. Watch how that shapes and shifts your day and the things that happen after that. I’m a big believer in meditation. So after that, I meditate and then go to the gym for a couple of hours, and I enjoy about 30 minutes in a sauna or steam room a day. It’s another form of time when you can just be quiet and listen. There’s one thing that I left out the night before. When you pick your time to go to bed, I keep a handwritten journal beside the bed. I make two entries every evening, which are two questions I would like my factory-installed supercomputer to answer for me while I am asleep.
So what I’m using to communicate with you guys right now runs at about a Commodore 64 speed, but we all come also factory installed with a supercomputer. So one little hack that I started, this is probably 10 years ago now, is whatever is on my mind right before I feel like I’m about to go to sleep. I write down two questions, one at the top of the page, one in the middle of the page. Sometimes, when you wake up the next morning, get done with gratitude meditation, that answer hits you like a ton of bricks. Sometimes, three days later, a much better answer comes to you, and I go back to that same paper, flip back a couple of pages, and write down the next answer, which is an absolute game-changer and a hack. But yeah, some of those things are awesome for creating a much bigger outcome for yourself. You have the right answers. Sometimes we’re just not listening.
Love that. Powerful. It’s like Keith Cunningham’s thinking time. Just kind of, you know, taking that to the next level. There are just those simple questions, and really, it so resonates. Just, all the gold, all the good stuff comes from within. And it’s crazy because we go out into the world and whatever it is, social media, I mean, you can’t even fill up your gas at the gas station nowadays without a screen, a monitor, you know, flashing you the, the market news, you know, what’s going on. You go to the gym and there’s, you know, 82 different monitors.
Right. Flashing all of the bad news that’s out there in the world. You know, you’d think the world’s about to kind of blow up, but when you can become intentional and set your way, it’s very powerful. Chad also didn’t share with you when he wakes up, which is at.
Yeah, about 3 to 3:15 each morning, naturally.
Okay, 3 to 3:15. So that’s, that’s pretty solid. You got me beat there in terms of an early guy, so that’s pretty powerful. But that morning time, I know for me that is super precious as well. Just really, you know, thinking and how, how you can, you know, again, apply that to your business, apply that to life, and, you know, get clear on what’s important.
So, Chad, really want to thank you today. I know we could, we could really go on for a long time, but you’ve introduced, I think, some very powerful concepts here to the listeners. So I encourage you to really, you know, kind of really try to internalize some of these thoughts. Again. He outlined these things very simplistically, but that simplicity really removes the complexity for you to start doing, you know, 10x100x type thinking and think about some different applications. In fact, maybe that’s a good one. In fact, I will commit to trying that out tonight. I’m trying to put down two questions, and maybe I will do it in a VCR or friction-type format. Some questions.
Right. And kind of see where I get to. So look forward to doing that.
Yeah, that’d be awesome.
Any place where people can reach out to you. I know you also run a podcast and do different things. So any. If people want to learn more or follow you, what is the best place?
Yeah, I would say we’re quite active on LinkedIn. So many of the concepts that I create to help other entrepreneurs, we synthesize and post on LinkedIn so that folks can get nuggets there, and they’re actionable. Intelligence. Of course, there’s always, there’s always more to the story, but I try to put it in bite-sized chunks enough that you can read it and then go take action. A big action guy, I don’t like to talk about a whole lot.
Awesome. Chad. Thanks again so much for your time and wisdom today. Appreciate it.
Likewise. Really appreciate it, Dave. I enjoyed it.
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