Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like side hustle pro today will be sharing a wild story of eight figures at 29 9 figures by 31 losing it all in the rebuilding process to drop these value bombs I brought Brandon colluchio in the EO fire studios and

Brandon teaches you how to unleash your inner savage and turn your life around when it all goes horribly wrong and today for our nation will talk about business and financial success how it can be deceiving will talk about adversity being our greatest teacher will talk about how we validate ourselves and so much more and the big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Brandon and ours sponsors the gold digger podcast hosted by Jenna Koocher is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network

the audio destination for business professionals the gold digger podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips social strategies business hacks inspirational stories and so much more one of my favorite recent episodes is titled how I've built an unmatched team culture and insanely important topic for all business owners to dive into listen to gold digger wherever you get your podcasts wondering how to leverage a virtual assistant to save you time and money all while growing your business get delays ultimate guide to working with a virtual assistant today just tech

fire that's f-i-r-e two five five one two three to get started Brandon say what's up to fire nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with what is up fire nation what's up john in my opinion the thing that most people would disagree with is that when you become financially successful everybody believes that there's a finish line

and I've seen it so many times with successful entrepreneurs that I've worked with they get to the point where they have millions in the bank and they come to me and they go is this it is this what everybody was losing their mind about is this what it's supposed to feel like and then suddenly they realize that there's this emptiness that there's something that's missing and I've seen that happens so many times and I've seen that in myself well that is why we have quite the interesting title fire nation of eight figures by 29 nine figures by 31 losing it all and

rebuilding such a wild story I want to talk right now about what it's like to have a nine figure business to really have nine figures of net wealth at 31 years old and then losing it all tell us that story.

So to be clear, I had built about nine figures of total enterprise value right now my personal net worth was not nine figures, but it all started back in private equity working on nine figure multi hundred million dollar companies in my early 20s and then finding out that that wasn't what I was looking for right I was becoming this corporate finance person and realized that I'm a truly an entrepreneur and I want to serve the world and I wasn't getting that it's scratched in that community.

In that in that business really it's financial engineering and there's a little bit of entrepreneurship, but I was given the opportunity at the age of 26 to go out and build a business I was recruited by a couple of guys out of the healthcare business and they said Brandon look if you can help us raise some capital will give you a third of the company and you can pick any title you want so we did that we went out and raised several million dollars went out and built a business and ultimately sold that business for just under 67 million dollars in the next.

It was probably about two and a half three years later and so you know I'm thinking I'm smart I'm at you know about 29 years old and I'm ready I'm like this is it I'm going to go out I'm going to build you know a billion dollar empire and I was introduced by people by guys in private equity that it bought our firm they were like look this is Brandon you got a medium is you know future billionaire you really did understand this kid and what he's up to and so I went off and I started to real estate development company on the side as well while I was still working at the company after we sold and we'd done about 40 million in real estate.

So you know if you added all up and then I had a couple other seven figure mentors that were going on all at the same time if you added all up it was well over a hundred million dollars in total enterprise value and then one day my life completely changed forever I was at my real estate development office with my partners there and I got a phone call from my lawyer and he said Brandon the investigation that was going on into that healthcare business that you sold about a year and a half ago has come to a head and the government has decided that they're going to make a decision and they want to make an example out of that.

This case and anybody who was deeply involved now I was the CFO of the company I was a significant shareholder and so they viewed me as somebody of interest and my lawyer said to make things worse you're somebody who was viewed as kind of the responsible adult and you also have private equity background some a little bit of pedigree and that doesn't actually work in your favor in this case you're viewed as a trophy and so unfortunately there's a list of about 12 people who are going to be indicted and you're going to be in this case.

Your name is on that list and in that moment my entire life changed my entire identity of who I saw myself as a law abiding positive productive member of society a transparent individual who is just really out to try to build businesses and impact the community suddenly that identity crumbled and the series of events that unfolded you know ultimately resulted in you know multi multi millions of dollars being frozen and seized to me having to ultimately accept a plea deal.

And take accountability for what had happened and some things happen that are regrettable, and I took accountability and what ended up happening is I had to resign from my real estate development business sacrifice all of my equity all the other opportunities that I had in the pipeline essentially just fell apart right and so I went from this the pinnacle if you will of entrepreneurial success to not knowing who the heck I was anymore and that happened John like that it happened so fast and

And what I share with people is that if you're an entrepreneur, particularly if you're in a high we'll call it a highly regulated market, healthcare, financial services, if you're selling products over the phone or over the internet, highly regulated by the FTC, your inches away from a very similar situation.

And I did not fully appreciate that.

And what it's like for someone who doesn't see themselves as criminally minded individual, it is the complete destruction of who you think you are.

And it forces you to go back and to look deeply at whether or not your actions were truly in alignment with who you believe yourself to be.

And that process, that process of introspection and that process of going and digging really deep and trying to understand who you are and are you really acting in congruence with that person.

That's a difficult process. That's a difficult process for many people to go through, but it's through these moments of adversity when we are forced to find ourselves.

And so, you know, it's not the full story, but after everything that happened, I decided that I wasn't going to stop my mission, my mission was always to serve.

And so I simply was given this opportunity to reveal who I truly was and that is to teach and serve others.

And so I did that through various forms, which I'm happy to dive into if that's something you want to talk about, but it ultimately allowed me to reveal my true purpose to myself.

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