Aaron Walker Live From The Greenway!

It’s an awkward time to talk about what you should do with your money in the “Leveraging” season. Some people were used to living in that stage just a month ago. Now they’re hoping to get it back. It’s 2008 all over again.

“Leveraging” describes an established, successful business owner who’s passed the stages of survival and success. The time’s come to cast a long shadow of significance. Your impact will now drive deep into your corner of the world, and touch lives very differently. If that’s you, congratulations! But don’t get comfortable.

My “Leveraging” stage began with our mastermind groups online. After an awful day in 2001 that changed my life, where I struck and killed a pedestrian with my car, everything became about leverage. I couldn’t just work to earn money anymore. From then on, I would do business with purpose, or I wouldn’t do business. Period.

You’d be surprised how many entrepreneurs do the exact opposite. They keep chasing the old hamster wheel, aiming for “Bigger, better, faster, more.” It’s okay to want “more.”. The question I had to ask, after my pedestrian incident, was “More what?”

I promise you this: if the answer is “more money,” you’re fishing in the wrong pond. We’re recommending here for you to want “more of what you have, for more of your fellow human beings.” More wealth. More knowledge. More wisdom. More power. More joy. For more people.

The More, The Merrier

Hopefully by now, you’ve realized success and failure are both illusions. I don’t know how much your portfolio took a hit during the Coronavirus scare, but I lost a fortune. It’s “here today, gone tomorrow.” We’d do well to remember the words of King Solomon, writing in the Book of Ecclesiastes:

“The race is not to the swift or battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.”

So you might think, “Well, Big A, if everything I’ve earned is nothing but an illusion, I don’t see why it makes a difference what I do with it.” Don’t misinterpret this to mean your success is smoke and mirrors! You’ve worked hard for what you have. You wield power and influence because of it. But not as much as you might think, and not just for your own good.

What I mean is what I’ve heard Rabbi Daniel Lapin say about money: it’s a spiritualessence. Recessions don’t happen because people burn huge amounts of cash in a bonfire. As soon as humanity’s collective confidence falls, so do net worths. Whether it’s the value of your portfolio or revenue from anxious customers, your financial strength depends a great deal on your fellow human beings. 

That’s why it’s important to see this stage of understanding money as an opportunity to make investments in people. To spread your message wider. Use your deep pockets to impact new segments of the marketplace. We started online mastermind groups for women and young men, for example. They’re not “profit centers.” They’re new wells of life.

Priorities

Back in the “Living” stage, your priorities went this way:

• Acquiring Plenty
• Giving More
• Saving Steadily
• Investing Habitually
• Spending Gradually

As you move into Leveraging, your priorities shift again. They start to look more like this:

• Acquiring Broader Markets
• Giving Boatloads
• Saving for Future Generations
• Investing Strategically
• Spending Because You Can Help

You can’t stop acquiring customers in this stage. You might have some extremely reliable, large accounts. You might feel like you only have to cater to those accounts to keep them going. I could simply keep working with our men’s master mind groups. Luckily, I married my high school sweetheart. She wasn’t having any of that! 

Maybe you can survive on what you have. If so, I suggest you experiment with some of the revenue to see what’s possible. You should try Acquiring Broader Markets. At the very least, you should explore to see if you’ve sold yourself short. 

There’s also no excuse not to be Giving Boatloads by now. If God has blessed you with financial abundance, trust me - He’s expecting you to bless others! And there are so many ways to do it! My friend Kevin Thompson, owner of the Relationship Accelerator Network, incorporates giving with family vacations. 

Kevin pays for underprivileged families to travel, stay and enjoy amusement parks like Disneyland along with his entire family. There’s no need to write big checks to non-profits if you don’t feel the calling there. Just go bring joy, relief or momentum to someone else’s life.

The Leveraging Stage assumes you can afford to work if you choose, rather than because you have to. Along with that, there’s a likelihood you can afford college, weddings and other significant contributions to your children’s future. 

So if you’re going to enhance savings, you should be Saving for Future Generations. Now’s the time to help figure out how to help your grandkids go to private school, or cover significant expenses your adult children have trouble handling.

Your habits of where you put money to work also become more selective in this phase. You move toward Investing Strategically, where the payoff causes resources to flow to multiple beneficiaries, including yourself (and excluding, if you can lawfully manage it, the government). Ideally, your personal household income needs are covered by passive sources of income that multiply indefinitely.

When you spend money in this stage, you Spend Because You Can Help. You hear of a cash-strapped widow in church having trouble paying her light bill. You quietly write a check to cover the cost for the entire year. Your son-in-law’s business is struggling; you help him cover debts and keep the cash flow above water. You meet a poor family while handing out Christmas dinner baskets at church; you pay off their car note. You sponsor ten young men into our new Iron Sharpens Iron Emerging Man master mind group.

Who Does That?

If you’re in the Leveraging stage, people should be asking that question about you. “Who gives away thousands of dollars like that?” “What kind of man is so selfless to pay my medical bills?” “Who knew I needed $5000 to pay off debt?”

YOU DID! A man of God in the Leveraging stage of financial literacy. The man younger entrepreneurs should dream of becoming. A man tithing and offering ninety percent of your income instead of ten. We have men like that in our mastermind groups. That’s why God gives a man wealth, privilege and honor - to make everyone around him better.

Trust me, this is an exciting and fulfilling stage of life. I’ve never felt more humbled, honored and purposeful than when I look someone in the eye and tell them, “Let me cover it.” There are usually tears. They’re usually mine.

But there’s a steeper climb yet to come. The final stage of an entrepreneur’s life, where you make the greatest contributions. A season where you almost walk into the arms of God fighting to give away the last penny of what you have.

That’s the “Leaving” stage. And we’ll discuss it next week.