You're listening to the Creating a Brand podcast where we deliver weekly interviews on topics

to help entrepreneurs make their first or next step in business the right one.

I am your host, Alex San Felipe. Has the current state of the economy hindered your plans to

launch a business or even negatively affected your existing company?

Thankfully, there is a way to build a business that will not only survive but also thrive in any economic situation, including this one.

Today's guest is John Meese.

John is a serial entrepreneur who has worked alongside Michael Hyatt to build and sell Platform University, just named one of his many achievements.

Today we're talking through John's book titled Survive and Thrive, which covers foundational principles for building a business that can stand the test of time, no matter what is happening in the world around it.

For links to resources that will be mentioned during this episode, please visit CreatingArand.com slash 104. And now here's my conversation

with my friend John Meese. John, welcome to the Creating a Brand podcast. Thank you, Alex. It's

my pleasure to be here. I'm really excited to have you on the show, and I'll explain why real quick. I've actually been

reading your content for nearly a decade at this point. So it's an honor to finally have the

opportunity to speak with you and, of course, have you on the show. So thanks so much again for

being here. And I'll mention two quick things here that I really wanted to to kind of open up with. And this is kind of off topic

for the episode we'll have today. But I want to let you know that I had a bad mindset, like a

wrong mindset about what it meant to start a business for a long time. And I read a blog post

that you wrote about having the proper mindset when breaking off from a 9 to 5 job and starting

your own business that that just completely changed my

perspective. I mean, it caught me dead in my tracks. And I actually talked about that in the 100th

episode of the show, which is, if anyone's curious, I hasn't heard, you can go to creating

a brand.com slash 100. And that actually, I talked about it. And that was a perspective that you

really helped me with many years ago. And the second thing I'll mention is my wife and we started a small group ministry at our church years back and it had become one of the largest in the nation. And I'm really

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