Matt: From the crossroads of America in the Hoosier state of Indiana, this is Get IN, the podcast focused on the unfolding stories and extraordinary innovations happening right now in the heartland. I’m Matt Hunckler, CEO at Powderkeg, and I’ll be one of your hosts for today’s conversation. I’m joined in studio by co host Nate Spangel, Head of Community at Powderkeg.

And on the show today, we are joined by Scott Jared.

Scott: If you’re 25 years old right now, and you say 15%, And you can earn 7 percent on it in 30 years, you’ll have exactly that amount of money. If it earns that 7 percent at 5 percent withdrawal rate will pay you your salary. What that means is if you have 100, 000 running a financial calculator, 100, 000 of income earn 7 percent on it for 30 years, you’ll have 2 million in that account. 2 million at 5 percent will pay you a hundred.

Matt: Scott Jarred is the CEO of INVST an independent registered advisory firm. He’s also the wall street journal bestselling author of Future Hack and author of a new book called Accelerate that you’re gonna get a sneak peek of today. INVST is not your run of the mill at a financial advisor.

They are going to, we’re going to get into that today. Uh, Scott and his team help their clients reach financial freedom and design the lives they want to live on the show today. We’re going to dive into powerful frameworks to help you achieve your financial success. The most important things to do at each stage of life to build true wealth.

What it means to have a personal CFO and how to be the CEO of you. Scott, welcome to Get IN.

Scott: Thank you. This is great. Awesome to have you here, man. Absolutely. You have such an incredible, um, story. And I’m curious just to hear kind of your perspective of how did you learn the importance of personal finance?

Not having money is a good lesson learned. Yeah. I can relate. Yep. So growing up, we grew up in a very poor environment. My mother and father separated at a young age. My mom had me when she was 19 and we moved from, we were living in Illinois, Danville, Illinois and moved to, uh, Indianapolis. And when they separated, there was, she had never really worked.

So it was, we moved into section eight housing. Wow. And it’s where you could live and you know, it was basically food stamps and things of that nature. And I had a younger brother and sister, so it was always about. Scrimping and sacrificing to be able to even survive. And it was like, even so fear mongled that like, if we were trained, like, if you ever even leave the house, someone could take you, like social services would come and they know that you’re out, loan a home while my mom’s out waiting tables, trying to make money to bring it back.

So that fear was always there. So you knew that, so money was always a catalyst to getting what you want, and we never had it, so it was always like, you can never do anything in that, in that way, so from a very young age, it just was very, in my mind, just seeing that you’re, you’re trading time for dollars, and you’re living in this like, fear based environment, and we were so far from free, like even, like, I remember I would try to sneak out just to go get a blockbuster video.

We, my, my dad actually, you know, they were divorced, but he brought us, he got us a vcr. It was like, oh my gosh. So we can actually get away for a minute and get, so we’d sneak out and I would try to figure out money to go get, even just to re rent a movie to watch.

Matt: Mm-Hmm. .

Scott: And I just remember that being the, the source of freedom in that point.

So it was always about money and sacrifice to get there. So. It was almost like it was a blessing to be able to get to the point where, you know, you’re going to have to be really good to figure out this path in another way.

Matt: You mentioned fear just being a powerful kind of current through your childhood.

How do you see fear affecting people when it kind of comes to you? Building personal wealth.

Scott: I think it’s the biggest thing. It’s either you’re living in fear, you’re living free. So all your decisions are made in certain ways. Um, a lot of times, like even in your space, you work with tech entrepreneurs. A lot of times that, that hurdle from leaving their job to create this thing that they have, there’s a lot, there’s a fear to that, and it could be, I don’t have the time or I need to do the research for, I can make that jump, or I don’t have the money or my family’s not there.

So we make up all these excuses and things out of fear that could be real or not real to be able to make that jump because you know you have a bigger purpose of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Matt: Well, how did you kind of develop your relationship with fear and start to shift that dynamic in your childhood?

Scott: I think I’ve become, I learned how to always see something out. Like, so when you’re stuck in this scarcity world, And you want something else, the best thing to do is just to think about what it would look like on the other side. So, at a young age, you started to learn about what it is that you want, and then you started to vision for yourself what an ideal family would look like.

What a, what having money would be, like what would you do with it? What would your impact be? So you started thinking differently. Because you knew that the current environment you’re in wasn’t really a good one. So you started to train your mind to think about what that could be and what you could accomplish.

So that was the skill set that was learned is that it wasn’t the money, it was actually your mindset over money. And you start to be really comfortable being uncomfortable a lot. Right. I like that.

Nate: Well, take us back, right? I know that you’ve been like, I mean, hard work is a testament. That’s like selling it short, right?

Take us back. I think in my research, I learned about your paper route and how your singular paper route turned into managing some paper routes. And just take us back to that first job.

Scott: So you go back to like when you’re stuck in it, you’re working and you’re seeing you’re scrimping, sacrificing, trying to get by.

And like, how do you add value to the family? Yeah. Well, luckily back then they actually had paper routes still or something there, but it was really the only thing that you could do in that neighborhood. I thought you could make money except for like selling drugs or doing other stuff. I was a paper out kid too.

So 12 to 18. Yeah, we were lucky. Yeah. Yeah. So 12, 12, they’d let you do it. Yep. So I just helped the guy run around. I was like, Hey, I’ll help you collect money. I’ll help you do certain things. And then eventually. The service was that there. And then the guy who was in charge of the whole route said, Hey, do you want to take this over?

And I was like, yeah, heck yeah. But that would hard work is, you know, when everyone else is asleep, you’re up at four o’clock in the morning, you’re getting the papers ready and you’re delivering them before the people wake up. And then you got to go to school and you got to do all this stuff that. So you’re doing things that don’t, people don’t want to do.

At the end of the day, you would get and you’d have extra papers. What do you do? Do you throw them away? Or do you literally go down the street corner and try to sell them? So you learn how to maximize every single thing that you do. But if you deliver exceptional value and you can create awareness, like the paper is important, and then you can spread it in a section eight, so now you’re trying to sell papers and a poor neighborhood and you got to go collect the money from people that have no money.

It’s like the most impossible job ever. But if you do good enough and they’ll say, well, why don’t you take on the neighborhood next door and just take on this? So it became a small little thing to a big thing and it was very beneficial because I knew I needed whatever dollars we could make would be able to be able to give you that freedom and take your brother and sister to get a frosty at Wendy’s or go to get a movie or be able to have any type of life at all.

Matt: When you were kind of envisioning that future and working towards it, who were some of those people that were Helping maybe show you some way points of like this, there is this different life out there.

Scott: The hard thing is like when you grow up, and it’s a lot of this social divide anyway, is when you grow up in those environments, everyone in the environment is trying to do the minimum that they possibly could to get by.

Matt: Yeah.

Scott: So if you look at like, if you’re on food stamps today and you make so much money, you get taken off. Every child you have actually produces more revenue back because you get paid by the kids. So think about that in the environment you’re living in, it’s all about minimal, like being as minimal as possible.

Don’t try to expand out. Don’t try to grow. So in the entire society, it was like that, like the whole area and the only ones that were doing well were doing stuff that it’s like illegal. You shouldn’t be doing. You’re like, well, I don’t really want to participate in that. Yeah, but that’s how it was like the largest.

People that were doing bad stuff or in those neighborhoods. And I knew him, so, yeah, but I’m like, I don’t really want to go down that path. And one day a helicopter landed in our backyard and it was the owner of the entire, all these section eight housing projects.

Matt: Oh my gosh.

Scott: And I’m like, man, that dude just landed a helicopter in our backyard, in our car.

You can see the ground when you’re driving through it. Like you keep your feet high. So I started to wonder, I was like, what is that person doing that we’re not doing? What is the path there? And every now and then you’d run into someone that actually had a really good job that actually drove in the city and had like a job and you’d ask them, like, how do you, what do you do?

Like, what’s your thing? But that was literally so foreign because most people were doing blue collar stuff and all that. Like you didn’t know even what those possibilities were. So when you find someone that was doing something different. You, I would be just curious, like, how do you do that?

Matt: Like, I know that, you know, it, it was several years until you started what became Invst, but it seems to me like those early ingredients of curiosity and following that curiosity to like really even being like imaginative and imagining a different future were probably some of those like early seeds that led to starting Invst.

Scott: Yeah.

Matt: Can you maybe fill in the gap there between, uh, you know, seeing the helicopter land and Uh, starting a company now that serves over 10, 000 people and is eventually going to serve a million plus people.

Scott: That journey for me, we were just talking before the audience, like we all three have chipped teeth, like we’ve all lost our teeth. So, Matt lost it, um, flag football, I lost mine, BMX, bike racing, or actually not a skateboard, but BMX bike racing again the third time. Yep. And then, Nate, you lost

Nate: Yeah, I lost mine wrestling.

Wrestling. So, yeah, we got chipped teeth.

Scott: That’s it. So in our neighborhood there, we had this like field that was just there. So what else are you going to do? So we’d like literally converted it to a BMX bike track. And what I was always looking for something to change, to get me out of something. So like, it just became my life.

Like you fixed it up out of trash. We put skids down and the next thing you know, One day Matt Hoffman’s in town and he comes and rides on our track. And I’m like, oh my gosh, I want to be like Matt Hoffman. This dude’s like the, and now if you know who Matt Hoffman is, it’s like back then he was really coming up.

Now he’s like the man. Yeah.

Matt: He’s like the Tony Hawk of BMX basically.

Scott: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s pretty sick. So then I was like, man.

Nate: He came to your track in Section 8 housing? Yeah. Yeah. That’s sick.

Scott: And we put the mats down and he did the first backflip on a half pipe and he obviously bailed on the mats.

But I was like, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. So now you’re like, Oh, I want to be like him. So the next thing you know, we got Bob Evans to sponsor us and we got on the BMX circuit and we’d literally be in there like the movie Rad, which is my favorite movie. Oh yeah. With, with no, just wearing like jeans and whatever, just smoking dudes on the thing with basically trash bikes.

And then one day the. Someone broke their arm in a track and they bulldozed it down. Oh wow. And I think one of the stories that I had is I cried like crazy, but then I was able to switch off, I’m going somewhere else.

Matt: Mmm. I’m

Scott: like, I’m done. So I literally just quit. And then luckily my mom met, um, got met a guy and then was able to get enough money to move out.

And then we moved to the suburbs and the, I walked into the school for the first time and the coach came up to me and said, Hey, you look like you could play a sport. You want to play football? I was like, never played football before, but sure. And that was my next thing. So I went from one to the next. How old were you there?

I was, uh, eighth grade. Eighth grade. What high school? I ended up going to Greenwood. Oh,

Nate: Southsider.

Scott: They first let me play basketball and I can only hit a granny shot. I didn’t even know what the sport was. I didn’t play anything with, I was just a grinder. And, um, then that, then I saw the, the, the seniors come in and they were going, they were going, or the juniors, and it was a really good class.

And they were, there was a guy who was going to go to Purdue, he’s a freak athlete, and his roommate at Purdue is, um, Mike Hallstatt. Casual. So you can imagine that for me going, Oh, well now I want to be like those guys. So it was always, there was some person in my life that I was always looking up to or striving to be.

Nate: But maybe not in like a formal mentorship role. Like these are people that you see and they’re doing their thing and you’re engaging with them a little bit, but they’re not like, hey, they’re taking you under their wing as like a formal mentor.

Scott: Yeah, you’re more like, you’re looking at what they’re doing and you’re more shadowing their success.

Nate: Did you have any formal mentors growing up?

Scott: Um, I don’t, maybe, I don’t, I think I was too shy to like ask them for that. I think it was more like I would follow and I would just be, around. I would, I would attract it.

Matt: Working with these successful people. Are there some consistent habits that you see successful people do more than others?

Scott: Yeah. So like in the BMX world, there was certain things that I noticed they were doing and I just did it. It wouldn’t no matter what the bike was, this is how he performs, how he got off the line, how he did certain things. So I got to the football field. I was like watching what All Star would do and Jamie and these guys and the way they would train and how they do that.

And what they did to get to college, and I did the same thing and got to college. Nice. So, Where’d you end up going? I ended up going to Ball State.

Nate: There we go. Alright, so, Chirp, chirp. Yeah, so came, came over from somewhere in Illinois, and then now you just been a Hoosier. There we go. That’s what I like to hear.

Scott: And it was cool, cause like no one, they would even ask you like, who wants to go to college, and you’re like, And there and I didn’t raise my hand because it was never really an option for me.

Nate: Yeah,

Scott: I never thought that was I know what that meant, but I knew I wanted to play football. So my first year was the University of Annapolis and then I transferred.

So my senior year, I had a break in my leg and I thought I was, I had a lot of opportunity. I thought I was gonna go to Ohio State or a big 10 school. And, um, I ended up just getting a walk on letter to those schools, and I knew I needed a scholarship, so I picked, it wasn’t my first choice, but that’s what I did.

So then I learned that, so once I got there, and I was like, this wasn’t for me, this environment wasn’t what I wanted, and I was, I remember sitting in a class, and we had to interview other people. My mom had actually got a good job at a local real estate development firm, and I got to go shadow for a day, and I met the AutoCAD guy.

Probably the lowest paid, besides my mom, probably one of the lowest paid people there, and he’s showing me Autocast, like, man, that’s awesome, I want to build stuff. Well, who has the best architecture school in the state? Well, it’s Ball State.

Matt: We have that in common, too. I was a CAD detailer in Lafayette, Indiana.

Yeah, it is. Didn’t end up doing it, but, you know.

Scott: So I was always shadowing someone to get there. I was like, I want to do that. So I walk in the architecture school, it’s like, hey, I want to get into architecture. What’s your major today? I was like, well, they told me if I did criminal justice, I would be better served there.

Like, what’s that mean, man? But, uh, well, they’ll, they’ll help you get through school and all that. And I go, well, I want to be an architect. How do I get in? They go, we only take presidential scholars. Like, what’s your GPA? I was like, it’s a two seven. And she was like, have you ever built anything? I was like, yeah, I built a bike track in my backyard.

And she was like, Okay. I go, well, how do I get in? And he goes, well, you, you have to apply. I was like, well, who picks like these people? I was like, what’s their phone number? Let me call them. That’s great. And needless to say, I ended up working my way in the hustle. I like it. And then got in and realized I couldn’t draw a straight line.

Architecture was not my right path.

That’s awesome. So you’re always, um, you’re always seeing something that you’re attracted to. And what I learned quickly was that I can actually start to get what I want. By training my brain to go get it. No matter what it was. Yeah, that’s how you build habits, right?

That was it. So it was ingrained in me at a very young age. And then the hard work pays off. And then envisioning what you want. Which becomes the framework for everything that we do today.

Nate: I think some people, like, I agree. I’m like one of those people too, where it’s like, I can. Visualize it and speak it in like almost will it into its manifest it some might call it

Scott: Yeah,

Nate: but for the people that get lost in the like daydream to execution people like they can’t seem to link those two together Do you have any advice there?

Scott: The smart people, the really, really smart thinkers in the world live in this linear world where everything’s and that is what happens is when there’s a point to take massive action, they spend so much time thinking about that, and they can’t move themselves to the next stage of exponential. So I was fortunate to be not that smart.

It’s because I was like, I had no choice either. Like I, Hey, There was no comfort anywhere I was. You had to always move out. So the, so that question is, is like, so what is the next step? So we want you to, if you’re going to fall down, fall down, but fall forward, don’t fall, fall down, fall forward. So that’s where, when you’re so, and when you’re so intelligent and you’re, and you’re like a philosopher, you’re looking at what you’re doing instead of making a step that I’m going to do this.

They don’t take that first step and when they fall down, they should fall forward and it’s okay, get back up.

Nate: I, I like that term of fall forward, right? Cause a lot of times people are, especially some of the smartest people that I know are so worried of failing or like what’s going to happen if things go horribly, horribly wrong.

And it’s like, even though it’s like you’re falling, yes, but if you have that mindset of falling forward, I would just be curious to hear your, your opinion on the idea of failure. And that like overthinking paralysis by analysis that sometimes can hinder some of the most intelligent people from actually taking that step.

Scott: Exactly. And that’s my gift is I’ve learned how to fall and fail so many times. I keep failing forward all along the way, which makes me so much better at what I am right now. Because there’s nothing, no financial thing, nothing that, that anyone that presents to me now that I haven’t already overcome or been in that because I’m so far ahead already.

So when you go from the. Oh, I was born in this bad situation. No, I wasn’t. It was a good situation. Oh, they took my bike track away. No, that’s actually a good thing. No, I couldn’t get the football scholarship. That’s cool. I couldn’t draw a straight line. So you start to figure out that all these failures are actually the raw material to finding who I really am.

Matt: That mindset is one of your superpowers. Yeah. It seems like.

Scott: But every one of those weren’t the right things.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So INVSTseems like it’s one of those right things. Yeah. Tell me about the spark, the spark that led to what is now this incredible company.

Scott: So the story continues, we, I got out of the, there’s three disciplines in the architecture program, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban development.

Didn’t really think I could do landscape architecture, wasn’t really into that, but the urban development sounded really cool, buildings, things, cities and stuff like that. So I got a master, I got a degree in urban development. And then I thought I could be a developer, but I had no money. So the next step was in, um, I got a master’s in tech, technology, information and communication.

Cause at the time that’s where all the rep, so I was like, I could do that for a little bit. So I kept making these, these paths. And what I found in school was that they’re training you to get a job.

Matt: Yep.

Scott: And they’re, they’re teaching you how to be the best professional. So in this program, it was like teaching to do corporate consulting goes for the big, you know, big five consulting firms go into that.

So it’s like, all right, I’m going to be the best corporate guy that you can imagine. So you go from this to this corporate guy, right? So now I’m trying to, I’m putting on these personas of what I’m going to be. And so I get out and guess what? It’s tech crisis. Where are the jobs? There’s literally no jobs.

Matt: Like year 2000.

Scott: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah. Big, big. com bust.

Scott: Boom. Yeah. I get a job at Merchant Wired, which is a, um, a company. It was a Simon thing where they’re connecting, connecting things together and, um, like all their, all the retailers. And I remember watching the, the World Trade Center get hit with, uh, the thing, and we’re sitting there, we got people in the, and we’re like, man, so this whole, like, world’s coming down.

It’s like, great. I’m gonna be stuck doing temp work at 13 bucks an hour for the rest of my life, and I spent all this time to get here.

Nate: Mm hmm.

Scott: Luckily, there was a position in AT& T that opened up and it was a training program in Atlanta. And it’s like, look, if you come in, we’ll train you. But if you don’t hit your quote in the first six months, you’re fired.

So what I did. High stakes. Holy smokes. Sounds good to me. Get me out of Indiana. Let’s go. Yeah. So we went and we destroyed that. Me and my buddies went down there and we just done in a few months. Got in. Why do you think you outperformed? It was, Oh, this is the, if there’s no choice, there’s no way we’re not like, if anyone can do it, we’re making this work.

It’s going to work. And then the traditional model was like, you work the phones, leads come in on the phone and you call and you try to work in. So we were trained to take very technical solutions, make them very easy to understand to get there. Yeah. What I found is that connections were more important.

So I would go out on the street and I’d find, um, people that were working with the large companies, so, that were making, that had transitions. So back then there was, um, there was like AirTrain Airways, which was now, which is part of Southwest and some of these. So I would get in with them and go straight to their CIOs and tell them why AT& T, you know, It would be the solution for them, and this is why they need to hire them.

And so within months, we were, I was like, blown it out. And like, you can go wherever you want in the country.

Matt: So you weren’t even hitting the phones. You were just like, hitting up people on the streets and being like, who’s your CIF?

Nate: Did you say you were an introvert? You said you were shy earlier. I was shy, yeah.

Yeah. What was the big change that took you from shy to not shy?

Scott: I think I analyze, I’m, I’m a quick start. Like, if you look at Colby, I don’t know if you guys use indexes. So. I’m a, I’m a high quick start first. So I’ll jump into something quick and my second is a fact finder. So I spent a lot of times like, so if we’re in a social environment, I’ll sit back and I’ll observe before I. Interject, which is a, it’s a, it’s different. It’s different that way. So I have that high fact find in me. So that’s where that extra extra introvert comes in. That makes sense.

Nate: So you’re, you’re crushing it at AT& T. You’re just ripping it. They say you can go anywhere. Where do you go?

Scott: So we go Tampa. They buy a division of IBM in Tampa.

And. Which is awesome. We’re going to Tampa. So we brought a couple of my buddies down. We got an apartment together. We’re on the water. Finally made it. I actually got a car. I actually had to have my girlfriend sign on the loan for me, who’s now my wife. Nice. Which worked out. Because if my daughter did that, I would want to.

To have a conversation with her

as as the finance guy, resident finance guy. I don’t know if that was the best move, but it seemed to work out.

Put my $700 card for my credit card, actually got a car. So moved down there like life was good. And next thing you know, we’re firing the IBMers that have been there forever.

They’re changing comp plans. You have no control of your destiny and this whole thing is starting to happen. So I went back to this like trapped, stuck, not able to move. I knew I was put on this earth to do something bigger. And it was like very, like, it just hurt my soul. And I just remember coming in every day with lack of purpose, lack of things.

And my roommate at the time moved down and he was in the financial industry. And he was working for Farm Bureau Insurance. So he’s a financial expert. He sold car insurance. Like he’s a financial expert. Yes. That’s great. And my wife, a girlfriend at the time, now wife, she was working a paycheck, so she moved down there on a whim too.

So we all took it a chance. We all moved down. He’s like, there’s car insurance is more expensive in Florida than it is in Indiana. And then she is like, well, I can go get a job, gets a recruiter and she starts selling 401k. So like sports marketing doesn’t like. What am I doing? Like, I’m not making any thing and I’m actually doing better.

I’m making good money. And we came out as like, let’s do what we were trained to do. Let’s do business consulting for businesses and we’ll give it away. We’ll just go to them. We’ll help them find lost money, help them recapture, and we’ll sit down with the business owner and help them scale and grow. I don’t know anything about finance by any means.

I don’t know. Anybody’s got a 401k and an IRA and raw. I didn’t know all the specifics of that. All I knew is when someone called me, I felt very much just distrust on what they were doing. I was like, this has got to be a huge opportunity. Yeah. And so we took my paycheck, dropped it into the business account.

He quit his job first and we started what’s now called Invst, but it was called Jared bunch consulting back then. So we would go out to our friends and family and business owners that she was working with and go and say, let me help you. What are you going to charge? Absolutely nothing. I’m going to find lost money.

I’m going to put it back to work. I’m going to create two to 5 million of additional wealth for you by being efficient and effective with. Everything that you are doing.

Nate: You just walk in there and you sell, you tell them that. That’s it. That’s a good pitch. So it’s like, Hey, we’re not going to take it.

You’re going to pay us any money unless you make some money. I got to add value. If I’m in the value creation world, we got to create value. Who’s your first customer? Who’s the first person that said, sure kid.

Scott: A group of three guys left. AT& T to start a government contracting business, consulting business.

And they called me and was like, Hey, we need group health insurance. I was like, great. You need four employees for that. You have three. And that’s how it started. This company is ginormous. It ended up becoming a very large tech thing. And we helped them. So that was like my first one. And the HR manager loved me at AT& T.

So every time someone was wanting to do stuff, he’d call me. He’s like, Hey, Scott, these people are trying to do this. And then, but that was, I remember that was the first big thing we did. And then we helped them. And then. And then my, you know, Lauren sent me another client, they were doing SAT prep. So think about that business today.

But that company, we ended up helping them a lot of ways. And now those founders have split off and done different things. And you can see it’s like, cause you do a good job for one person, they tell two more. And then you start to spread by just doing the right thing over and over and over again.

Matt: How did you eventually go from not knowing anything about 401ks, not knowing anything about these different investment vehicles?

To taking control of your own personal finances.

Scott: To me, the secret was reading the books and there’s, there’s a lot to be told in stories and there’s a lot to be told in other stuff. So like, I love the rich dad, poor dad stuff. Like I would read those and like who took my money, like, and. So there’s all these different things like cashflow quadrant and all that.

So I started just really digging into what successful people did, not necessarily listening to what the industry was telling us to do. I was very much a rogue thinker in the way that I would look at. I would just follow the patterns again, just like I followed, uh, my trail all along, I would say, Oh, that guy’s a stud, like, what’s he doing that we’re not, what’s the helicopter person doing that we’re not, and what would happen is I would get in those rooms and I would get invited to, like, it’s amazing now I work inside billion dollar family offices and stuff like that, there’s things that they do differently that when I went and got my degree, for instance, like you had to get securities license and be a professional.

And all. But when I got my CFP designation, which is a certified financial planner, literally everything they taught you in there, but the way wealth is created was the complete opposite. So even today we get all our, our advisors with them all get CFPs and I’m like, now I got to retrain you on how money actually works.

Matt: What do you think is the biggest difference between those two, like how to actually generate wealth versus what is trained to CFPs?

Scott: CFPs are very linear in thinking, they root you in your past, where you are, they take the framework is about using financial products to your financial success, that you aren’t your most important asset, the products are, the products are designed by the institutions anyway, that are designed to separate you from your money.

And there’s the wealthy understand that the power of their wealth is exponential. It’s, it’s quantum thinking. It’s, it’s a different, different way of being.

Nate: Elaborate a little bit on quantum thinking for, for the people at the table that might not know what you’re talking about there.

Scott: Yeah. So if you think about linear, right, one plus one plus one, it’s a linear approach.

Like Warren Buffett’s the greatest, Investor of all time. So he would say, well, it’s actually exponential growth. So you’re looking at the compound interest curve of things that are going. So it’s almost like going from like using, um, map quest to ways, because like, as he’s going, as you can see, oh, here’s all the landmines, here’s the police cars, all that was, we’re starting to go quantum thinking is about being able to use.

To understand where you currently are and being aware of what’s happening. Like I’m aware that I am stuck in this like bad environment. Cool. How do I adapt? So every time I was always aware, I’m self aware, I think, right? Sucks a lot. Like it’s not fun. How do I adapt to get myself out? So when you start to change the way that financial plans are built that, Hey, put my max out your 401k, do this for a long period of time and IBM is going to take care of you.

AT& T is going to take care of you. These things are going to happen. But the reality is life is not this perfect vehicle.

And even ways as you go, you start to find these things. So you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re making adjustments and you’re moving. Quantum is. You’re looking at a compass. Like I’m looking so I’m so future istic that I can see so much further.

I’m headed this way that you are now adapting and being aware more effective and efficient. So everything that we do is about controlling your controllables and being able to adapt and to your changing environment all along the way.

Nate: Well, you said you’re, you’re futuristic, right? So futuristic that you wrote a wall street bestseller called future hack.

Yes. Right. And it had 130 hacks about, I want to give us a little, give us a little taste of, of what’s in that book and maybe a couple of the hacks that, uh, that have really resonated with your audience.

Scott: Okay. So we’re, we’re talking about like quantum thinking. How do you get yourself in that mindset? What would be the worst thing that could happen to you?

The worst thing? The worst. The worst thing. The absolute worst thing. Like dying. Bingo. So go there for a minute. If it happened today. So we’re here, like, like literally you got to feel your soul at that point. You’re now in it. What was your, what would they say about you? What would be on that, on your epitaph?

So Matt’s writing it out. He’s going to tell your story.

Nate: What is, there’s a, there’s like a whole framework behind this about writing your, your, uh, obituary, right? Like I, who, there’s a famous book and there’s this whole framework, right? So there’s one.

Scott: So if you think about it, if you can get clear on where you are, Right now, what would you want your life to be if I could extend your life longer?

Yeah, what if I give you the next hundred years? Well, I can’t live 100 sure you can there’s longevity Lifespan all this stuff is happening. Why are we limiting our thinking? So now if I can give you this gift for the rest of your life Now, let, let me give you the pen and you design the life that you want.

Nate: That’s a lot cooler than 401k. Right.

Scott: A 401k is just separating you for your money. You can’t use it for anything. It just buys and allows other companies to get rich off of you.

Nate: Okay. Do you have, do you have another one? Another one? Uh, like top? You One that readers usually resonate from your, from your first book.

Scott: Yeah. So the most important thing is getting your why clear. Once you get your why clear and you know where you’re headed, now we can do the work. But it starts with you. So you’re the most important asset. Everything over that is outside of that. The next, You. You. One is a financial game board. Played chess before?

Absolutely. Are you a chess player?

Matt: I am,

Scott: yeah.

Matt: Chess. com? Uh, I have, yeah. Alright, I’m gonna have to send you an invite. Chess. com.

Scott: Okay, alright, I’m a little rusty. Me too. Perfect. It was cool, I remember I, when I was in college, they sent out these things like, you might want to travel the world. I was like, yeah.

So it was 9, 000 to go, which is crazy for this. It was an architecture program. And I maxed out all my student loans, took everything out of my credit cards that I could to go. I remember one day they had a big chess board out there and I was like, what’s this? And I learned how to play. Incredible. And that was how I learned.

And we’d sit there cause you’d be hours with a bunch of architecture students who are weird anyway. Where were you when you learned chess? Uh, I think we’re in Europe. In Europe. Yeah. Amazing. So I think in Greece or something at the time, cause it was on one of the ships that we were on. And we just played and played and played, but each piece has a different power, has different things that does in your financial life.

We’ve identified there’s 20 different. There’s 20 different things we’re analyzing that are always moving and adapting at the same time. So, if we’re going to be adapting and awaring, how do you put your financial life on a game board and then play the game of chess with each power, each piece has different power, has different moves that it can do, and then let’s play, let’s simulate that if we make this move, what happens?

Simulate this move, what happens? Yeah. To where you get to, so once your Y is clear and then we build your game board out, then we can start to move. So a hack is literally once you’re clear with what you want, then we got to start with your present position. And build that out. We’re not planning. What we’re looking at is where we, how we optimize right now.

We’re setting your compass out. This is what life would look like. Cause it’s foggy. We know what it looks like. And then we back into the specifics of how we get there. That’s the strategy.

That’s it.

Matt: So, uh, pulling the thread on the, uh, chess metaphor, uh, let’s, let’s talk opening moves for someone early in their career, just starting to make money.

What’s one of your top financial tips more pragmatic more practical obviously got to get your mindset, right? you got to get a lot of those other things kind of in check from habits and everything, but from like a Personal finance perspective what kinds of things should they start doing now?

Scott: You know it’s funny because everyone makes this game of finance so complicated mm hmm.

It’s really not yeah, you just really need to protect yourself You need to get organized and you need to pay yourself first.

Nate: What do you mean by pay yourself first? My boss pays me. What do you mean by I need to pay myself? So when you, when, so

Scott: when you get your paycheck, who’s the first person you pay?

FICA. Yes. You pay the government first.

Nate: Then what do you

Scott: pay?

Nate: Uh, usually I feel like everyone’s, everyone, uh, oh, I mean all these, all these, all these gurus, all these gurus tell me. Take your savings out first. Take your uh, or like your, all the other payments that you’re making or whatever.

Scott: Yeah. ’cause every dollar you set aside for you now is multiplied exponentially in the future.

Nate: Mm-Hmm.

Scott: paying yourself first is taking that money off the top. So when I got my job at at and t, I would save 70% of my income because I was used to living on nothing. Yeah. What am I, what am I doing? But that became a huge stair step for me to be able to grow what I did right now. So those first dollars that I saved 20 years ago.

Mm-Hmm. are worth. So much more now than what you saved even two years ago. Even the rule of 72, $1 in 10 years is worth two. Right. And then in 20 it’s worth four. Yeah. So $1 saved. That was 2003, so we’re now into that. So every dollar’s worth four times that.

Nate: Yeah. My grandpa once told me it’s not about timing the market.

It’s about time in the market. That’s right. Yeah. Exactly.

Scott: I like it. And you’re right. And you think about the market and those time periods. We had a 2008 crisis. We had a 2000, was it 13 or no? 18 where the number one performing asset was cash. Yeah. And then you had not even COVID, it was, it was like last year, like 2022.

So you had those three years with the bad years of the market, but over those 20 years, it was actually a pretty good run.

Nate: So pay yourself first. That means you got to put some savings away. That’s the first thing. A minimum of 15%. Minimum 15%.

Matt: Protect yourself. And then what was the third? Organize. Organize.

Talk a little bit about how, You should organize when you’re early in your career. So you would call INVST,

Scott: we would, we would organize, we’d, we’d connect.

Nate: Well, I don’t think that that’s like a joke, right? Because it’s like a 20, 23, 25, 26, you’re like, man, I got 10 nickels, you know? Like, I’m not like, I don’t have like this complex strategy that needs all these things.

It’s like, why would I call someone? I can just like, like, it’s not worth their time. Like the average person doesn’t want to talk to the 25 year old. Exactly.

Scott: In our world, you don’t want to talk to anybody, especially at that age. I don’t, you know, heck Mike’s son doesn’t even want to talk to me half the time.

I can only imagine. And that’s about that. As you start to get to that generation, what that is. What we would do is organize your money the right way. And we use a, we use our wealth builder to do that. Okay. And you got to look at it four dimensionally. Your net worth statement, no matter what it is, how good, how bad, is what it is.

Assets minus liabilities or net worth. Most people have no clue what that is. When you connect all your accounts, it pulls in that financial data. So now we can see what your net worth is today. And then more importantly, we’re optimizing your cash flow. And we break it down in this, this certain categories.

So your gross income, how much you spend to protect, how much you spend to pay for your liabilities and tax, and what’s left over is for lifestyle. And we organize it very simply that way. Protection is only four things you protect yourself with. It’s protect your assets, protect your income, protect your life through legal documents, like your legal side, and then your life.

And there’s only four types of insurance. Once you get yourself organized, now you can start to tackle the game of finance. Like we’ll have NFL players come in that have no money and we still do the same thing.

Matt: Yeah.

Scott: And, or college or residency students.

Matt: That’s your opening. You gotta, you gotta get those things.

Scott: So to get organized, you gotta have a financial game board to be able to organize yourself the right way. And I’m not talking about mint. com or anything like that. They don’t have any rules. They’re just trying to sell you more products. Yeah. But now once you know where you are and where you’re headed, and then you’re paying yourself first, you can’t really do anything anyway until you get a year of liquidity.

That’s what we got to do. But we got to make sure we’re protected and we’re building that. And you know, if you’re, if you’re 30, if you’re 25 years old right now and you say 15 percent and you can earn 7 percent on in 30 years, you’ll have exactly that amount of money if it earns that 7 percent at 5 percent withdrawal rate will pay your salary.

What that means is if you have 100, 000 running a financial calculator, 100, 000 of income. Earn 7 percent on it for 30 years, you’ll have 2, 000, 000 in that account. 2, 000, 000 at 5 percent will pay you 100, 000.

Nate: That’s quick math. That’s good public math too. I’m impressed.

Scott: I’m impressed with that. I’ve been doing a lot of financial planning or looking at financial positioning and strategies for a long time.

Now, how to reach financial freedom faster? Because once you get the 100, 000, what do you really want? Instead of trading time for dollars, you want to be where you’re financially free, Your work optional. So now you’re going to work on your own terms. Does it need to take 30 years or can I shrink it to 10 years?

I’m doing 15 sooner. How do I get multiple court curves of that happening faster? And I can shorten the path where now you’re making. Decisions on, on your why now, not necessarily on the job and the things that you think you need to have, where you are financially free

Matt: When you’re in that kind of financial middle game, if you will, I’m still going on this chess analogy, I would imagine the strategy is different for everybody.

because people have different career paths. They have, uh, different family lifestyle decisions. But what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people make in their midlife?

Scott: They don’t protect themselves. I have had three, four, five, five friends of mine become disabled over the years. Gosh, I’ve had people die.

I’ve had four or five friends commit suicide because of mental issues. It could be health, mental, that kind of stuff. Yeah. But a lot of people don’t protect themselves.

Matt: Yeah.

Scott: The ones that are doing well, we had them protected and we’re using, they’re getting income from these other areas and now they’re able to live their full purpose.

My good friend, Dave McCauley, he was, we graduated together. He had an accident in a pool, became paralyzed. He was working for BATS trading. We all went to tech, we got master’s degrees together. This company is going public. It was a big deal. They said, look, we’ll pay you salary forever. Just stay on. We don’t care.

And you know what he said? I don’t want to be here. I have a bigger purpose and he, he went back and started an art gallery for paraplegics like himself. That’s awesome. To help them through art. Now he’s got the impossible dream. He was actually doing that down in St. Pete, Florida, where we had the IndyCar and he literally had paraplegics out there on a boat teaching them how to sail and they were on CBS news and all this stuff that’s possible dreams.

So now he’s living this dream. He’s got art galleries in New York and Miami and St. Pete. And we pull that, those life policies, the disability claims, that money, we use that as the catalyst to be able to buy the real estate, to do the stuff, to allow them to do what it needs to do. That’s incredible. But without that, you don’t have a permission slip.

You have to then live within this confines of what that is. But a lot of people don’t think of protection whatsoever. And I remember being on the subway that day. We were getting that stuff done when we’re, and I’m, I’m heading out to the airport and literally I have all the stuff and the accident happened the next, like that weekend.

Matt: Yeah. Wow. That’s incredible. I love success stories like that. And I bet you have so many just thinking about the number of people you serve. Um, you know, I, while we have you here, I would love to get some insider info. Uh, what is one personal finance tip or trick that most people don’t think of that right now you see is a really powerful tool.

Scott: You have to be so intentional with what you want, like until you can get to really know what you, what you’re striving for. It’s really impossible to come back and. and put the money back into it. So a lot of it’s your mind over your money. And the most important tip is that you are the most important asset, hands down.

Until you understand that and you believe it, you’re going to be in this due state. And we want you to be so free in what you are, what your be is, like, like you’re in your moment, like, you know who you are and what you’re doing. The money then comes after that. But if there’s no, there’s no hack, there’s no trick, really.

It’s a combination of all these things working on you that’s getting there. But until you know what you’re here to do and where you’re going, if you don’t. That’s it. Like you are the most important asset. It’s nothing to do with the money.

Nate: I, I think that’s a great segue. I was reading this about you and, and something I think your grandpa told you about the three legged stool of life.

Yes. Right? And can, can you dive into what that three legged stool of life is and, and how you focus on that?

Scott: So I, my grandfathers both died at a very young age. My parents obviously were split and there’s, we have a lot of dysfunction in our family. And it’s not fair that I didn’t get to have that, but I’m not going to sit there and dwell on that at all.

But I did notice that when I met my wife, her grandfather was always the most happy, go lucky, fun guy you’ve ever met. He was actually in our business. He was a Lincoln general agent. He was like one of the most well known here in Indy. At the time, so he’s back then it was a lot of insurance and annuities and he’d walk around these little pennies, little baby pennies.

And he’d always walk around and give people pennies and just make their day. That’s great. So you want to talk about a guy that, and he would like, Oh, my wife’s not cooking dinner. So what he’d do, he’d just go down the street and find out what other people in the neighborhood were cooking and he’d just jump in their house and have dinner.

And it was like that. That’s what I should do. Yeah. There you go, Nate. Even, even when he had, he had houses in Naples and all this stuff. And he would go, what are the widows doing today? And go down there and play bingo with them and stuff. So it was like always in his B state is what I would call it. Yeah.

And so when I was getting married, he had passed away right before and it was horrible timing and all that. But I had asked him first if I could marry his granddaughter and he wrote this whole thing out for the grandkids. And in the grandkids, it was like what life should be. I was like, man, what a great guy that he could actually think this thing through and put that on paper.

What’s so interesting, why does it have to take your entire life to put that on paper? But he said life is like a three legged stool and each of the, each of the legs are equally important. Resonated with me so much when I gave the best, the speech, I just quoted that. Yeah. I love that. But the three legs is physical, right?

Mental. So if your physical body is not right, and then if your mind’s wrong, and the third spiritual

Matt: Connected to a higher power, and

Scott: they’re there and. And it may not be in a God sense, but it’s like, what are you spiritually doing? Like, like he literally believed that every person he touched was an impact with those pennies and what he was doing, people that weren’t there.

Obviously he believed in God and was, you know, always singing the loudest guy in church. And it was like, this is unbelievable, but that’s where, who he was. So he was spiritually good. His mind was like clear. His physical body was good. Yeah. And once you know that those are the three most important legs and you’re focused on those areas.

Most, most everything else works itself out.

Matt: What do you want to have on your obituary? I’ve thought about that a lot. Matter of fact, I go to strategic coach. There’s a lot of thinking tools you do. And every, every time you rewrite your, what those are. And to me, it was, at the end of the day, it’s like, if you don’t have a good family, then what good are you?

Nate: Mm hmm.

Scott: And I just love the fact that, I’m glad my wife actually likes me, it’s important, and your kids turn out well. Like, and you build that legacy. So, making sure that those are the frameworks of what that is. I would love to change the industry. I think the industry is broken. I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there and I think what we’re doing could radically make it better and we want to transform it and we believe we’re the right, we have the right voice.

We have the right strategies. We have the right approach that we can do that.

Matt: I see it happening. I really appreciate everything you’re doing for our community, um, everyone that you’re helping generate wealth and live the life of their dreams.

Scott: And think about that. Once you add, when, when people, when everyone around you is rich.

And define it however you want to define it. You define your own richness. Absolutely. You end up being, you end up giving back. In a big way. Yeah. So all the, like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, they just gave all their money away. Yeah. So there’s a huge component of that. We build this up families, this, and then you build back and you get society.

It’s better overall. I love it. It goes, it goes full circle. It does. And that’s all about the whole accelerate. It just keeps circling and building and generating more power.

Matt: Tell me a little bit about what’s different about your new book. The Accelerate

Scott: This, this book is, I mean, you see the arrow, it’s just going straight up.

Like, like you’re killing it. I love it. The, the problem we’re trying to solve is everyone wants to be free and people want to live in fear. I’ve lived in, from everyone I’ve talked to and all that, that’s what they’re searching for. How do you define it for yourself? And if you’re going to build a financial strategy, what are the principles of doing it?

So we created the Financial Freedom Wheel and there’s six core principles that’ll help you have peace of mind and harmony and build long term value and wealth. I love it.

Matt: That looks like an approachable book too. That’s good. I hope so. Yeah. Absolutely, man. Version 1 looks good. I’m excited to read it.

Nate: We’ll, uh, we’ll have to link it in the show notes so people can go, uh, giggle with their copy. And then if they show up at a Powderkeg event, then maybe they can get it signed. Yes. Ooh, there you go. Yes. Ooh, there we go.

Scott: I like it. And then we can do a link where you don’t have to talk to anybody and get started.

Nate: There you go. All right. Come on. Nate, lightning round. I think it’s about that time. Yep. I think it’s about that time. All right. Let’s do it. Scott, this is, I hate to say, because this whole conversation has been great, but this is my favorite part of the show. Great. Uh, we’re going to dive into the lightning round.

I’m going to ask you three questions all around Indiana, about Indiana, and just your lifestyle within Indiana. All right. And, um, and it’s just quick, no wrong answers, top of your head, what you’re thinking. Got it? Got it. All right. Outside of the amazing entrepreneurial ecosystem, what is Indiana known for?

Scott: Sports. Any sport in particular? Amateur sports. The Amateur Sports Capital of the World. Basketball, let’s go. Hoops, baby. The one game

Matt: I wasn’t good at. That’s fair. The one that I was. The one that I was good at.

Scott: Well, you have the height for that.

Matt: Well, if you ever need a fifth man, you know, let me know. They don’t let you foul as much as they did back when I played.

Probably the best for our team. No.

Nate: What is a hidden gem in Indiana?

Scott: The hidden gem, I think it’s gotta be the culture. Oh. Every time I’ve left, when I went to Florida, I knew nobody. But for some reason, when people came in, there was an instant trust that happened. And I think it comes from our Indiana roots, where we are just genuinely, like, good, wholesome people.

And when we start having children, like where do you want to raise your kids? Indiana. Like we have values that are so strong and I think we take it for granted, but go away for a little bit and come back and tell me where you want your kids raised. Now trust me, I’m in the beach and I was fighting my wife, like this is the dumbest thing.

We spent my entire life trying to get out of Indiana and I’m right back here. But our values and our culture. And there’s why, there’s reasons why players stay. There’s people that come from other countries, other places, you know, and stay in Indiana. Yeah. It’s their home. Absolutely. That’s a great answer.

Nate: That’s a, that’s a really good one. Final question of the lightning round. Who is someone that we need to keep on our radar? Someone who is doing big things.

Scott: I think the biggest things that are happening right now is this whole AI transition. I was literally listening to, uh, uh, Peter Diamantis. And Abundance360, I cannot remember the guy’s name, but he’s a Google person in there and he’s talking about that AI in the next few years may not be able to actually replicate all of humankind.

But we’ll be able to replicate a million humans in the next few years. So what those AI people are doing and what’s going to happen in a transformation that’s happening very quickly is going to hit us before you know it. And it’s, and it’s, it’s so important because it doesn’t just, you think about it in a technology sense, it’s not like Moderna vaccine was literally built on an AI algorithm that was able to find the pattern quickly to get that out, to be able to solve COVID.

Yeah. And then Pfizer and all them got it and then rolled it out. Say what you want about COVID, but they were able to get the vaccine quicker than anybody. What happens when that’s cancer? What happens when it’s Alzheimer’s? What happens if you live into 150 to be able to transform the way you go?

Nate: Mm hmm.

Scott: So, this is gonna happen so fast. Like, this whole book and all this stuff, the reason why the principles are important is because it’s gonna be a framework that stays the course of time. But the way we do personal finance today is going to go away. Everything’s accelerating. It’s not. Like, the way we do trades, the way we do stuff is all gonna be different.

Quantum. Yeah. It’s gonna go from linear to exponential to quantum thinking, and this is what’s, what’s happening.

Nate: Dude, you know who you need to meet? He needs to meet Toph. Yeah. Do you know Toph? Oh yeah. Oh, you guys, you guys would be buddies. I love, just like the same, I get the same energy, the same vibe.

That’s it. Uh, that’s a good, that’s a good one. Yeah. And, uh, yeah. We’ll look into, and I’ll put that in the show notes, local AI guy who’s doing some similar stuff there, put on your radar, Jake Miller, with the team at EIG. He gave me a demo of what he was building maybe a month or two ago, and it blew my mind.

That’s awesome.

Scott: And that’s why Deepin, you guys like Deepin, like he’s in our, he’s our AI officer for INVST. Like most companies don’t have AI officers. Well, what we’re building is going to be different. I love it. And it’s going to go, things are speeding up faster than you could ever imagine. It’s You’ve got that compass and you’re skating to where the puck is going.

It’s the compass, but we got the principles, we got the framework, and, and now it’s just putting in those, this new technology is about to hit us.

Nate: Yeah.

Scott: They took all my books and put it in. You can start asking questions and Scott will answer the question.

Matt: Yeah. I love that. I love that. Hope they come out good.

Scott, thanks for being here, man. This is great. Absolutely. Congrats on everything, all the momentum, all the acceleration. Uh, and we’re excited about, uh, some of the things we’re doing with INVST here coming up.

Nate: All right. Absolutely. Check the show notes. If you want links to, we’ll put both books in there.

Um, this was an awesome convo. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you guys.

Matt: Yes. Rock. This has been get in a powder kick production in partnership with elevate ventures. And we want to hear from you. If you have suggestions for our guest or segment, reach out to Matt or Nate on LinkedIn or on email to discover top tier tech companies outside of Silicon Valley in hubs like Indiana.

Check out our newsletter at powderkeg. com/newsletter. And to apply for membership to the Powderkeg executive community, check out powderkeg.com/premium. We’ll catch you next time and next week as we continue to help the world get in. Since you just listened to this podcast, you might be thinking about starting one for your company.

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