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Today we are joined by Dale Walls who shares his journey going from a rough childhood upbringing to the Marine Corps to building a 200 person IT Services business to today running the Lion’s Guide.
Dale’s core success philosophy consists of establishing clarity, having courage and leading the way. Having the knowledge that you need to enact your vision and always seeking truth.
The more clarity you establish, the more your confidence grows, and confidence leads to courage, courage leads to action. You’ve got to take ownership and go lead the way to that vision.
Learn more of Dale’s rock-solid insights and strategies in this episode.
Hey everyone and welcome to the show today. We have a really special guest joining us. I’m honored to have Dale Walls on the show. Dale, at the age of 17, was lost in life without purpose or direction, an only child of a broken home, and living in his grandmother’s attic. While being stitched up following a bloody street fight, he agreed to attend a week-long boot camp hosted by the American Legion run by the U.S. Marines. This set Dale on a lifelong path in leadership and high performance. Following an honorable enlistment, veteran Marine Sergeant Walls returned to his small hometown where he founded an I.T. service company, Corsica Technologies, that he led to be one of the top providers in the United States. After two decades of growing Corsica to eight-figure revenues and making multiple acquisitions, Dale sold the company and founded Lion’s Guide. Now he spends his days fulfilling his passion to help others learn high performance and leadership skills to apply in their lives so they might achieve their own personal and professional goals. Dale, welcome to the show.
Thank you, happy to be here. I’m honored, thank you.
Yeah, and I just have to share briefly with the listeners the shirt that Dale is wearing. Dale, if you want to just kick this off with this shirt that you’re wearing. It’s got an awesome picture of a lion on the front of it. If you can explain the inception, it’s super cool.
Yeah, you know, and if there’s you can see it on the back, you’ve got the red stripe down the back. You know, like as was mentioned, joined the Marine Corps. There were marines for life, always marine, once marine always marine. And this was one, you know, Lion’s Guide today, we’ll maybe jump around a little bit. That’s like my business today with Lion’s I’m fortunate, and we’ll talk about wealth strategy or whatever, that I’m fortunate to do to have thought of what’s going to get me out of bed in the morning.
Over the years of learning leadership and high performance, I always got questioned. I guess when I was running Corsica, you know, I’d get people coming to me and go, “Dale, I don’t get it. The company’s booming, you’ve been married for almost 20 years, you’ve got three kids at home, you’re running marathons, you’re training jiu-jitsu, you’re coaching youth sports, you’re president of the youth association. How the heck do you get all this done?” And after my exit from Corsica, I hit that spot, right? I said, “What do I want to do with myself? You know, I’m young, I’m 42 years old as of this recording, and obviously I’m not going to roll over.” You hear all that, all the people’s talk about this, right? Like that sitting on the beach, you know, it’s good for two weeks, man. You know, you got to be doing something. And so quickly, I was just like, “What do I want to do with myself?”
At first, I wanted to make t-shirts. I wanted to make, you know, you see all these cool t-shirts, Grunt Style and all these cool brands out there. It’s like, man, I just, I got all this inspirational stuff I’ve seen, I want to make t-shirts too. And I was working with a market strategist who kind of heard my story just as you told it and obviously in more detail as I was introducing myself or whatever. And after the second or third session of kind of talking about Lion’s Guide, the brand I was trying to build, he goes, “Dale, you know, I just got to ask you, with all your experience and all these things that you’ve done, do you think the best thing you’ve got to offer the world is making t-shirts?” And I was like, “Well, what do you mean?” He’s like, “Man, there’s so many people out there that want to know how you’ve done this and how you do that.” And just like people had asked me over the years, I said, you know, so at first I was slapped to the side and took it as a compliment or whatever, but I guess it stuck because by the next morning I just kind of woke up and I’m like, “Yeah, you know, especially in the latter portion of Corsica Technologies when we’ve got 200 people and business growth.”
You start as an entrepreneur, and that’s hero leadership. You’re doing it all, you’re serving it all, whatever. Then you become a business owner and it requires a little bit more leadership and delegation. You got a small team, they’re running the system for you. And then there’s this level that I got to, fortunately, when you got 200 people or multi-regional, and now my job is really leading leaders, right? My team were the heads of the various departments: finance, marketing, service, etc. And so this conversation and the epiphany, I guess, I had and what’s going to get me out of bed in the morning for my next chapter in life was the fact that I loved coming in each day at Corsica, working with my team, one-on-one meetings, the team meetings, and helping them solve problems, helping them get better, helping them solve their problems. Certainly a ton of them were in the business, and then there were personal ones too. And man, I loved that. I loved when they’d hit me with a challenge that they faced, and I go, “Man, go read this book,” or “Hey, here’s some tips for you.” And it was so fulfilling, and I’ve since reflected back and said, really, that was why I started Corsica Technologies in the first place.
I’m not a tech nerd, you know, I’m not all excited about new technology per se, but even though I can probably make your laptop stand up and do a backflip, what I got out of it was like I got all that training in the Marine Corps, IT, and what I loved was taking what I knew and serving small to medium businesses with their problems. It was just that start-being-of-service mindset, and it’s very fulfilling for me. And in looking back, that’s it again, right? It’s not tech this time. It’s just to get two decades of experience in personal, professional growth, business growth, and so on. And I love it. I love when someone goes, “Hey man, help me. Tell me this. How did you do that? What could I be doing better?” And so there Lion’s Guide was born. This is what I do, and I’ve been doing it for the last year and had a lot of fun, a lot of success with it.
Yeah, that’s outstanding, Dale. There’s really just so much to unpack in your initial bio. So I’d love to just actually backtrack a little bit and, you know, tell everyone, what was it like? I mean, it sounds like you had a pretty tough childhood. What was really your inspiration for joining the Marines? You know, a lot of people don’t really do that, right? And then how did you go from the Marine Corps into founding an I.T. services company? I mean, those are two massive transitions, really.
Yeah, you know, for me, growing up in a fatherless home, I mean certainly people had rougher lives than I did, but I come from, jokingly especially back then, Mayberry. Everyone knew who I was, who my parents were. Everyone knows everyone around here. It’s grown quite a bit since those days, but not a ton of people go to college around here. It’s a blue-collar town, bedroom community even, and not having any male role models in my life to help guide me. Even though I was living at my grandmother’s house, my grandfather was physically disabled from a stroke, incapacitated, so we were all serving him. My grandmother the most, certainly my mom and I. Until my grandfather passed, my mom and I actually shared the bed in the attic. We were living there. My father was gone.
I was that kid who had no model to aspire to and was running amok. I knew right from wrong; I wasn’t doing terrible things, but I was testing the world and seeing what I could get away with. One day, my mouth got me in trouble. I got in a fist fight, came home, and I was a bloody mess. I still remember to this day, I walked in the door, my grandmother sees me, and here she is, senior looking at me like, “What is going on?” I was busted up, so my mom had to take me to the hospital to get stitches. I was sitting there, and this was at the end of my junior year.
When you finish your junior year, you get these letters from Boy State inviting you to come or whatever. So I’m sitting there in the hospital, I just got the Novocaine needle in my lip, which everyone loves, it’s like the worst part, on the inside of my lip. I’m getting shot up, and the nurse or whoever gave it to me leaves the room. I see my mom sitting over there, and to me, she had tears in her eyes. She looked at me and said, “Will you go to this Boy State thing?” I don’t even know if she knew what it was, but she asked me. And that was the time I remember seeing that my directionless life wasn’t just about me; it was hurting those around me.
So I said yes and went there. It’s like a boot camp of sorts. The Marines are doing that aspect of it, it’s hosted by the American Legion, and there’s a lot there. I honestly don’t remember a ton about the week other than sitting with a young corporal doing duty. We did duty at night, and I was sitting there talking to him. Honestly, he had been drinking, he had just got back, he’s like half cut, talking to me about the Marines and what I’m doing with myself and why. I left there and depped in right away. I enlisted, so I was enlisted during my senior year of high school.
I was passionate about computers. This is the late 90s, so the internet was still dial-up and the like, but my cousin and I were figuring out how to play the video games at the time, Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, against each other over dial-up and stuff like that. That was fun to me. I enjoyed figuring that stuff out. So that’s the job I got in the Marine Corps, doing what ultimately was called tactical data networking, where we’re doing everything I.T. Not only in the garrison but in the field. We’re hooking up the satcom, we’re building Cisco equipment, websites, and I was in at a really fortunate time where I had to know everything. I had to know how to run cable all the way up through building websites and everything in between, you know, PCs, user management, whatever. And so that’s where I got my concern goes from.
Yeah that’s really cool and then did you have any type of, you know, light bulb or transformational moment when you transitioned out of the Marine Corps? Because, you know, I know for a lot of military folks, transitioning out is an extremely challenging process. So what was really that inspiration or light bulb moment that said, “Hey, I want to start my own business”? And you probably had very little capital, very few resources transitioning out. How did that work for you?
Yeah, zero capital to be honest. So in the Marines, kind of to that servant mindset, I had customers on the side, right? We all start with that side hustle. And on the side, I had a few customers out in town who, I think my first one was my wife’s employer at the time, was a leasing company. I remember maybe we were at the Christmas party or something and the guy’s like, it classic at the time, “Well, how come my Blackberry calendar doesn’t look like what’s on if it was a Blackberry, look like what’s on my computer?” And I’m like, “Oh, watch this.” And he’s like, “Wow,” and he’s blown away.
I then started doing hourly service for them and they introduced me to other people, so I had like 10 accounts on the side that I just billed by the hour. And as we got closer to my EAS, I told my wife, “When we get back home,” because we were coming back home, we had been away for all those years, and I said, “When I get home, I’m going to do this back home.” And so that’s what I did. I came back and I took a job. I had clearance and stuff, and here near DC, there were plenty of job opportunities for me, especially in IT.
I got out, took a job, but started learning like, okay, how do I do this for real? I ended up incorporating in 2003. Same thing, put an ad in the Yellow Pages. My cousin, who I talked about earlier, was doing HVAC systems at the time. It is always kind of a chicken and the egg situation: people won’t give you a job unless you have experience, but how are you going to get the experience if no one will give you a job, right? He was kind of in that situation. So I told him, “Hey, I’m going to put an ad in the Yellow Pages. You can go serve them while I was working in DC, and I’ll pay you x dollars an hour.” That started, and that grew. Then he was full-time, and then I needed someone to administer it, so I hired my wife full-time, and the rest is history. There it was.
Excellent. Yeah, that’s excellent. So you know, Dale, we talk about overall wealth strategy on our show and in our community, and we discuss kind of an alternative wealth strategy. What would you say that is for you today? I know we’ve kind of talked about real estate a little bit, you’ve built a business, you’ve had tremendous success there. What does wealth mean to you, and do you have a personal wealth strategy that you could share?
Yeah, I mean, what is wealth? Certainly having monetary success, you learn that that’s not what it’s all about, right? You want to have fulfillment like we talked about earlier, right? Spending all that time on the beach, as you think it’s going to be, it gets old real quick. So for me, wealth contributes to personal freedom so that you can go do the things that you want to do, less of what you have to do, so to speak.
In building a business, like I’m a student of Kiyosaki, that was a significant part of my life. Rich Dad Poor Dad and all those books, all the way up through Tax-Free Wealth, etc. I’ve read a majority, if not all, of the Rich Dad series. That really started to open my eyes, right? Again, I’m still that guy who had to learn this stuff. I didn’t have a dad saying, “Hey son, this is how you invest in real estate,” or “This is how you should be building your wealth.” I didn’t have that; I had to go find these resources.
I ended up in real estate because I was making money with Corsica, and I was going through my small town, and it was breaking my heart. I’m seeing all these dilapidated buildings right on Main Street, so I just started buying them and fixing them up. I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, kind of had an understanding of the real estate aspect of it, and I was kind of in that B quadrant at that point. I had a business with excess personal income that I needed to put somewhere. To me, I was reinvesting back in the community. These dilapidated properties, no one wants them anyway, so you can get them for cash for relatively inexpensive.
My goal was just not to lose on them. My primary goal was to help clean up the town; my secondary goal was not to lose money. That got me into this game of, you know, what’s possible here. I started acquiring properties, really dilapidated properties I could turn into Class B’s, single-family, multi-units. Some I had to demo, and some lots I still own today. Like I said, my goal was to help clean up the area.
Yeah that’s excellent. Just to back up a sec, I think for listeners, most folks are familiar with this but if you’re not familiar, Robert Kiyosaki’s Cash Flow Quadrant is such an illuminating graphic. It’s very simple, but it really explains four different quadrants. You can be either an employee where you’re W-2 salaried, or you’re self-employed like you just own your own business and you’re working inside the business, or you can be a business owner, as Dale pointed out, which is someone who’s actually running a business system where the entire thing can run without him or her, and then you also have an investor. What’s interesting about this is when you can align yourself as a business owner or an investor, number one, you’re actually most set up from a tax standpoint. All of the tax code is really a roadmap of incentives for business owners and investors. So once you apply yourself in that way, you’re really going to be set up quite well. I think that was really a key learning point. Thanks for sharing that.
Yeah, 100%. People ask me about that. Certainly, if you haven’t read Rich Dad Poor Dad, my favorite of the series has been the Cash Flow Quadrant. I think that’s kind of where some of my biggest takeaways were.
Yeah, for sure. So Dale, let’s jump into a little bit from a personal development standpoint. Earlier in your bio, you mentioned a super impressive list of activities that you’re doing from marathons, jujitsu, being an awesome father, and an excellent business owner. So you must have a rock-solid personal development program, and I know that’s part of the format of what you’re doing with Lion’s Guide as well. Maybe you could share with us a little bit about that.
Yeah, I mean, at its highest level, kind of at my core success philosophy is around three elements: establishing clarity, having courage, and leading the way. For the interest of time here, I feel like clarity is about having a vision, having the knowledge that you need to enact that vision, and always seeking truth. So when you talk about real estate and folks trying to find alternate investment strategies, it’s really about having a vision for what you want. What do you want to get out of it? What do you want to see? In my case, I wanted to clean up the town. In other people’s cases, it might be wanting to get a profitable rental. Whatever it is, you’ve got to bring clarity to that.
The other element of clarity is knowledge. What do you need to know to make that happen? What resources do you need? What skills do you need to learn? And then there’s the truth. For this type of conversation, market analysis is about running your calculators. What’s the truth of this thing? What does it look like? Dealing with real information and being honest with yourself, and so on.
The more clarity you establish, the more your confidence grows, and confidence leads to courage. Courage leads to action. I’ve found that the more you can invest in establishing that clarity, the more confident you become. We fear the unknown, so our goal needs to be to shine the lights on it and go find those answers so that you can have the confidence you need.
Finally, the third element is leadership and leading the way. This isn’t new to anyone who’s listening, but it’s the truth. No one’s going to give it to you. No one’s going to say, “Here, here’s your first real estate property,” or whatever your wealth strategy is. You’ve got to go out there and find it. The truth is we all have our own struggles and things that we’re trying to accomplish, so we don’t have time to solve everyone else’s problems. You’ve got to take ownership and lead the way to that vision and the things that you want. Establish clarity, have courage, and lead. That’s really the core of my philosophy today.
Yeah that’s awesome Dale, that really resonates. I’m part of the Strategic Coach program which is really focused for entrepreneurs, and they have this concept called the Four C’s. The first C is basically making a commitment to do something and putting that out there. The second one is having the courage to actually try to achieve what you’re trying to achieve. Once you have that, you gain clarity on what it is you’re trying to do. Lastly, once you’re implementing it and successful at it, you build a new capability. It really becomes a life cycle of growth. If you think about any of the successes you’ve had, it’s kind of similar to that. I like your aspect of adding the truth to it. It’s one of the things around investing as well. I think being an entrepreneur, it’s all about being growth-minded and asking questions.
From an investment perspective, I had several financial planners in the early days. I had four young kids and I was scratching my head wondering how I was going to put these kids through college. The financial planners just said, “Well, the market’s going to go up and down but you’re going to be at seven percent.” I pulled out my Excel and started comparing that to what I could do versus a passive income approach. I took that investment thesis and now as I look at syndications and everything and factor in the tax benefits and cash flow, it’s amazing once you do the math. I really like that concept of the leadership and the truth behind things. Let the numbers talk; don’t let what’s in your head or how other people are influencing you about something.
100 percent, yeah, absolutely. It’s like the cliche: measure twice, cut once. If you aren’t measuring twice and getting that truth in front of you and instead you’re operating on assumption or misinformation, you find yourself a mile off track or maybe in a losing position because you just didn’t do that diligence. You don’t want to be there; it’s a long climb back to where you want to be.
Yeah, and it’s about being educated about your decisions. That’s what Warren Buffett talks about: if you’re not educated, that’s where the risk is. Things are risky, but when you become educated and you trust your sources, the truth will prevail. Absolutely. Tell me also, on this topic of personal development, how about from a morning routine perspective? I know for me and many others, that was really one of the foundational things. I consider it an anchor in my lifestyle to be able to get a lot of things done and be very intentional about it. In the Marines, we certainly didn’t have time for things like that, but can you share with us your morning routine and success habits?
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve kind of broken my day up into my personal development time early, then my business development time, and then what they call the manager’s afternoon, where that’s when a lot of my engagements are mostly. But my early time, my personal development time, you know, reading every day, get up, read. I’ll be honest, like my first part of my day is I get up, my wife and I both get up at 4 a.m., and the first part of our day is we have basically a coffee date with each other, and we kind of catch up, you know, because when you have kids and businesses, it’s hard to find time even there. Her and I have been married 22 years now, grew together since my time in the Marine Corps, and so we really know that we’re number one. So we actually start our day there, and that’s our quiet time when the kids are still sleeping.
But then at five o’clock, we turn to, we both go work out in our respective areas. Meditation has become a big part of my life today just from the mindfulness perspective, which I’ve come to appreciate. It’s kind of like a new area for me for my own personal growth because I’ve always done the physical stuff, the distance running, the jiu-jitsu, and all that, but kind of digging into that mindfulness aspect. So I brought meditation into my routine in the mornings now. I do use that quiet time before everyone else is up to kind of set another hour aside for work on whatever my major project is at that time. That quiet time before the rest of the world wakes up is invaluable; you can get so much done. So really, that’s my day. I start with my wife, get my workout in, get some reading in, and focus on my major project.
Yeah, I love it. I mean, I think meditation has got to be, for me, one of the top three skills that I’ve learned in life. If you don’t have, let’s say you were at a point where you couldn’t have that physical exercise or doing different things, you always have your mind and your breath, right? Everything is about your own perspective. I’ve actually, even with my kids over the years, incented them. I’ll pay you 200 bucks if you can just meditate for five days straight. It’s 12 minutes each day, that’s all it takes. It’s nothing but just something to encourage them into that. It’s been one of the most powerful practices that I’ve developed over the years as well. That’s really cool and definitely leads to what you were talking about earlier, right? Getting clarity as one of your pillars, meditation is just absolutely key for that.
Are you still running, Dale, or is that your main kind of sport that you’re doing?
You know, I hung the shoes up a few years ago. I ran the Marine Corps Marathon for five years, and it takes a lot of time to run these long runs. If you’re doing it right, you’ve got a 16-week kind of training. Especially with business growth and a lot of stuff, I kind of said, “Hey, I need that time back to focus on other things.” But since I’ve dove into this world of what I’m doing today with Lion’s Guide and hosting a podcast, meeting now ultra runners, running’s a thing. These guys, my new circle, if you will, are all high performers, some special forces guys who are just pushing it. I’m like, “Alright, I’m going to do an ultra this year.” So I’m going to get back into running.
I ran David Goggins’ 4x4x48 last year. Are you familiar with that?
I did that last year, which was a good feat, but my new friends tell me that doesn’t count, they don’t consider that an ultra. So I’ve got to do that and an ultra this year. I’m going to get back into running and get as far as a focused practice, and yeah, that’ll be mine.
Impressive. I got into running from the Marine Corps because I had never run before that at all. You have to do the physical fitness test, which is three miles. To do a max score, it’s three miles in six-minute miles, so 18 minutes. I think my fastest time ever on a fast course was 17:30. I did a couple of marathons myself, but I found that it was very tough on the body. I got into triathlon as a way to complement that. Now, I’ve got a couple of years on you, so I’m doing a lot of hard cycling, which is really excellent because it’s lower impact, it’s a very dynamic sport, and you can take that as far as you want. A lot of competitive folks in the field.
Yeah, I think that’ll be after this for me because that’s the same thing I hear a lot of. Tri talk, and you hear it, you want to go test yourself. So yeah, get this ultra in and then look up to that.
Awesome. Dale, if you could give just one piece of advice to our listeners about your wealth trajectory, what would it be?
Yeah, I guess regard to that is to treat it like the business that it is. One of the things that I’ve learned early on in business, businesses, you’re in business to make money, not to make friends. That comes with, because I see a lot of stuff online, if we’re going to talk real estate, a lot of folks that are managing their properties and they’re just being too lenient. They’re not being real. Look, we’ve had forced leniency with the forbearance of evictions and all that stuff in the past two years, but you’ve got to treat it like a business. You’ve got to look at, you’ve got to know what the numbers are, you’ve got to know what your intentions are, you’ve got to get smart on, like you said, the tax opportunities and things like that so that you can have constructive conversations with your advisors.
You don’t need to be the expert in taxes, but you need to be capable of carrying a conversation with your CPA or your wealth advisors because at the end of the day, they’ve got a job to do, but it’s your money, it’s your wealth, it’s your goal. You need to help guide them to where you want to go, if that makes sense. That takes treating it seriously, learning what you need to learn, and not being passive about it. Again, back to leading the way, take charge of it.
Yeah, excellent. It’s your future, right? If you don’t take charge of it, somebody else will.
Yeah, I mean, how many people, you’ve mentioned Buffett, how many people have to tell you to get out there and get the knowledge you need to do it right?
Exactly. Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. I’m sure the listeners are really going to love this show. Do you have anywhere if people want to learn more about Lion’s Guide or yourself, any places to connect or any resources that people could reach out?
Yeah, I mean, the hub of it is lionsguide.com.. If you go to the website, you can branch into whatever social platforms you’re into. We’ve got a Lion’s Guide podcast, which, similar to this, talks a lot about high performance, leadership, things like that for people who are looking to grow. I’m on LinkedIn, probably most active there. You can find me easily, just look for the beard. Yeah, and YouTube, the podcast, all that stuff’s out there. But lionsguide.com, if you get on there and you register for free, you get access to some basic training I have out there. I also run leadership workshops for 12 weeks weekly where we dive in, dig in, and go through different high performance areas to help people break through to their next level of themselves.
Excellent. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that to make sure everyone can find it. Dale, thanks again for coming on.
Thanks, Dave. I appreciate it.