Mastering the Art of Delegation with Jason Duncan, Exit Without Exiting

The Real Jason Duncan is the founder of one of the fastest-growing privately held companies in America and one of the top entrepreneurial companies in the country. He is a multi-award-winning entrepreneur and founder of 12 companies who got his start in entrepreneurship as an unemployed schoolteacher in 2010. Educator-turned-entrepreneur, Jason now runs a mastermind called The Exiter Club that teaches entrepreneurs how to live #TheExitLifestyle through a method he calls #ExitWithoutExiting, which focuses on four core principles they can use to break free from the daily grind of business operations. He is also the host of the internationally syndicated podcast, The Root of All Success, which can be heard on all podcast players as well as viewed on YouTube. Jason lives in the Nashville, Tennessee, area with his high school sweetheart. He loves riding motorcycles and camping in his RV.

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Talking Points: 

• Jason’s background and becoming an “accidental entrepreneur”
• Jason’s personal experience being laid off as a teacher
• Why Jason left his first business and the limitations of creating a business around your personal interests and skillsets
• How can you exit a business without selling? 
• How to embrace delegation and take off the hero cape
• The 6 steps of delegation
• The law of discovery and how to avoid providing corrections under delegation
• How to identify, find, hire, and onboard the right people
• Finding balance with the laws of open cycles

Connect with Jason

• Visit Jason’s website: https://therealjasonduncan.com/
• Connect with Jason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/therealjasonduncan/
• Connect with Jason in Instagram/ Receive his free tips for hiring: https://www.instagram.com/therealjasonduncan/
• Follow Jason on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/therealjasonduncan
• Visit the podcast’s website: https://www.talentempowerment.com/

Connect with Tom Finn

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/therealtomfinn/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/therealtomfinn‍
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@therealtomfinn‍
• Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@therealtomfinn‍
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealtomfinn/‍
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/therealtomfinn‍
• Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/therealtomfinn

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Welcome to the Talent Empowerment Podcast, where we share stories of great leaders so you can lift your organizations, your teams, and your community. I'm your host, Tom Finn, and today we have an amazing leader who has already lived multiple lives; 13 years of experience as a pastor and spiritual advisor, four years of experience as a schoolteacher, and 12 years of experience as a very successful entrepreneur. You know him as the real Jason Duncan. My friend Jason, Welcome to the show.

I'm glad to be here, Tom. This is awesome.

Well, if you haven't met Jason yet, you might be the only one. But let me tell you a little bit about what he's been up to the last few years.

He's a TEDx speaker. He's launched over a dozen start-ups, consulted on dozens of start-ups and growth-stage companies, and worked with entrepreneurs. He's the founder of The Exiter Club an exclusive mastermind for select entrepreneurs who want to live the exit lifestyle, don’t worry, we'll get deep into that.

He's the founder of the real Jason Duncan Enterprises. Now, this is a world-class coaching and strategic consulting company serving entrepreneurs and business owners. Not just locally, but around the world. And if you haven't heard, he's also the host. Of the syndicated Podcast The root of all success, It airs on the C-Suite radio network. and on all of your favorite podcast platforms. I'm just delighted. To have you on the show today What an empire. My friend I imagine this has been one heck of a journey.

It has, you know, and the empire's status goes down significantly when you walk behind the curtain. But thank you anyway.

Well, well, look, you didn't wake up this morning with 100 episodes at the root of all success and this wonderful track record of the business. Tell us how it all started.

You know, in 2010, I was teaching school. I loved teaching school. I was an eighth-grade American history teacher, and I had only been doing it for four years, and I thought, you know, this is going to be what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. I loved education and I loved teaching kids. I enjoyed making an impression, and I was very good at it.

I was the number one teacher in my county for tests. You know, for my subject. My children's test scores were higher than anyone else's. I was good at the craft. Well, that didn't matter. When the government -because the government makes bad decisions for a living - when the government decided that they had to make some cuts because of the Great Recession, they had to cut teachers. I didn't have tenure. Was he the last guy hired in that particular building? And they had to cut two teachers out of that building, and I was one of the guys.

Last in, first out.

Exactly, and so they made the decision that way, and I found myself at a crossroads, I think, well, I love teaching. Why would I give this up? What am I going to do?

So, I thought first I would go, you know, get a teaching job somewhere else, but there was nobody. Hiring teachers around that time was just because the recession was hurting the entire economy, including education departments. Even private schools were out of the question; I couldn't get a job at one. It was that nobody was hiring anywhere.

So, I found myself an accidental entrepreneur. I decided that I didn't want to go into the corporate world. I wasn't ready for that thought. Well, let me just start a company and see. If I can make this happen, and it did. It worked. I put myself on a deadline. I said, you know, if I don't get some money coming in, a deal will happen by the 15th of August, which is the last day I was going to get paid, But I've got this summer to figure this out, and on August the 12th I closed what turned out to be a multi-million dollar project over several years with the local hospital, and that's when my entrepreneurial career took off and I ended up building that company too a significant status.

That was the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. And of course, there are lots of other nuances to that, as it led me to what I'm doing today. But that's how I got my start as an entrepreneur.

How did you feel when you got laid off and you were sort of facing this abyss of trying to find really, not just work, but something that moved you and that you were passionate about?

I was devastated. You know, I remember that day. It was in April of that year that I got the news, and I went to my wife's office on the way home. She worked for a local investment firm as a senior office manager, and I went to her office, and I stopped in. Of course, it's about 3:30 in the afternoon. She has another hour and a half of work to do before she can leave and return home.

And I told her, I said, "Hey, I just had this conversation with the principal. I'm finishing out the school year, but I don't have a job. Next year, she had a really "bad day" that day. I obviously didn't know that, but she'd had a bad day that day too, and it just compounded and there was devastation and fear in her eyes, and not so much fear from a financial standpoint, although that was in the background. But I'm afraid of myself. Because she knew how much I was made to teach. I'm good at it and I was, so I loved it so much.

I went on home, and she finished out her workday, and then it was a blur like, I don't know. I don't remember a lot of the decisions or conversations that we had over those next few days and weeks, but it was devastating to know that the thing that I had accidentally discovered, as you know, as a schoolteacher, was I was really good. That I was no longer going to get to do. So, it was a very dark period.

You know, it's sort of akin to professional athletes that retire from their sport, maybe a little bit too early, because they go through a transition where they're not sure what's next and what's behind the next door, and you had such a passion for teaching, and you were performing at such a high level. It doesn't make any sense that it would end, but then what you did is, you know, you sort of walked through that door, you started thinking a little bit differently and found something that made sense to you.

Yeah, and I think that I was talking about this with my mindset coach just the other day, you know, we live. As you can imagine, we live in this bubble of what's known to us, like what we know from experience and what we do believe is feasible.

And at the time when I was making $38,000 a year as a schoolteacher, you know, we lived in a decent house, had decent cars, and we had car debt and student loan debt. Every other American household had a couple of credit cards with two kids in a private school that we were trying to pay for. We have about all the things that anybody else might have. That was our bubble, our experience as we knew it?

As an example, it kind of whispered in my ear. Hey, one day you're going to have a multimillion-dollar company that is going to be recognized in national magazines. And you're going to be speaking on stages before, you know, thousands and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. I would have thought you were nuts because that wasn't even in the bubble. It wasn't something I could do. Once that bubble burst and I was forced to reconsider what was possible, new things came into focus and I started seeing what was possible. Well, maybe I can start a company. I don't know much about entrepreneurship or business, but maybe I can do it. And then when that started to succeed, the bubble began to blow up and expand. Even more, where I could see more opportunities, and now you know, some of my good friends are multimillionaires, and we, but, you know, we're all you know. We're running big companies, and we're doing successful things. We're going on trips that were not even a possibility. In my old life, it didn't. It didn't occur to me that things, I mean, I was just right to have This is a call to you. Today I was talking with the organizer of an event in Costa Rica in December that he asked me to speak at. Why would I? Why would this schoolteacher from Gallatin, TN be invited to speak to these? If successful businessmen from all over the world were in Costa Rica in December, they wouldn't. I had to change, and I'm very happy about the change, even though it was scary as hell on the way through.

Well, I imagine it was scary, but I also think that that trip to Costa Rica might be a pretty good time as well.

Yes, no, I've never been. So, this is going to be good.

You have this 'beginning, and then you have this sort of transition and you're going into entrepreneurship. And why didn't you just stop at the first company? You could have just said, "Hey, I'm going to. I'm going to lean into my first company. I'm going to focus here, and then I'm going to do what others think is the right thing to do. I'm going to sell that company and I'm going to sit down. on my porch and have a beverage, relax, and put my feet up.

So that scenario that you just painted is so minuscule in the realm of possibility for most entrepreneurs, it's very much like I heard a guy on Tik T.O.K doing a video about little kids who wanted to be NBA stars. And he talked about how many kids wanted to be in the NBA and there were in the hundreds of thousands. How many kids want to play college ball? How many kids? It's like the number of people who get to do that versus who wants to do it is like the numbers don't even match. It's not even a fair comparison. It's so low that it's less than 1%.

So, the entrepreneur experience is no different and probably even worse than the odds of experiencing what you just painted. Most companies that we read about are sold, and they come with the owner-founder, whoever gets to do it, you know, has FU money, as they say, and can do whatever they want. Sit on. Their porch, and do you know when they're done? That number is minuscule.

I don't know what the official number is, but it's minuscule. It's tiny, and the reason is that most of us, as entrepreneurs, build businesses that revolve around our personality, our ability, our skill set, and our network. And it's to be expected, but that's not sustainable, and that's what happened to me.

So, the reason I didn't stay in that business is that I started realizing that I'd built a business that revolved around me. Being the somewhat smart person that I am, I realized, OK, well I gotta get out of this. Let me just sell it. Well, the unfortunate fact is, if you build a business like that, your business is worth very little. Even if you're doing multi-millions of dollars and you're very profitable, it's not worth very much.

And that's when I discovered my business, even though we had a fantastic team, we couldn't sell it. I mean, I could, but it certainly wouldn't be the scenario that you talked about. So, I came up with a new plan. How can I exit this business without selling it? How can I exit this business without exiting it, which I now call exit without exiting, which is kind of my thing, but how do I do that even though I've never seen anybody do it? Nobody knew how to do it. There was no plan or structure. I figured that out. It took me about two and a half to three years to kind of figure out what was going to happen.

Now that I've done that, you know, I still own the business and I still get all the benefits, financially and otherwise, of ownership, but I don't have to. I have nothing to do with the day-to-day operations whatsoever.

So, your original question, Tom, was well, why didn't I just stay in there? I just knew, somewhere deep down inside, that that wasn't what I was supposed to be. That's not why I'm going to plan it. I work for an electrical and lighting company, which is not why I'm here. I didn't know what the heck I was going to do when I wasn't running that, and I went through like a six-month identity crisis when I walked away, but. I found a new bubble. I found there was more possibility, and I wouldn't have known it until I got out of my own way.

Well, I love that You said that because so many people begin to build a business with the expectation of a quick exit at some point. Sit on the porch and the way you articulate it; I think it is really important because most businesses are built around the founder. As you said, very elegantly.

How do we take a step forward to not building this around the founder? Give us one tip for the audience. Could you say, OK, there's a start that I could do something?

Well, the topic of my Ted talk was the tip that I'll give is that you've got to get used to delegation.

You've got to take off the hero cape and be done with the hero syndrome. I call it the "hero syndrome" when entrepreneurs feel like they are the only person that can fix the problems in their business. And whatever that problem is, they're the only ones that can solve it. They're the only salespeople. The only tech person, the only admin person, the finance person, whatever it happens to be, whatever your specialty is. You're the number one person at that, and you put on the hero cape, and you swoop in to save the day every time that needs to be done until you get rid of it. At The Cape, you're never going to be able to step away from the daily operations of your business.

You have built a job. Congratulations, you're a jab owner and not a business owner. You know, most entrepreneurs start businesses to build a better life, not a better job. But the unfortunate part is that most entrepreneurs who start businesses just want to build a better job.

And I don't know if that's even debatable. Now you get If you're doing it right, you should get paid more than you did in the corporate world, but you certainly spend a heck of a lot more time on it than you did in the corporate world. You know, the old adage goes, "You trade 9:00 to 5:00 for 24/7."

And so, the first thing that you have to do to not build the business around you is to embrace delegation and take off the hero cap. And delegation is not just assigning tasks to people; it's assigning that task, entrusting that task, and empowering that person to act on your behalf. And there are certain ways to do that. It took me about 18 months of deep study into delegation before I truly realized how to do it successfully because nobody taught me how to do it.

I never saw anybody do it. You know, most people either confiscate or abdicate. They don't delegate, they either assign it or then decide that you can't do it, just give it to me, I'll do it. That's confiscation. Even though we call It's a delegation

The other side is that they say, "Well, here we go do this task" and then never look back, and then they never check in again. That's abdication. That's not delegation. So, the one tip that you need is to delegate. You've got to deeply understand it and do it well, and that is your first step to getting out of the way.

Yeah, I think what I heard is, as you delegate, have a follow-up plan so that you can make sure that things are being completed or you can answer the questions along the way to lift that person and support them on their career journey because we can't all do this on our own. We need good people around us. We've got to lift them. Support them, and help We grow our staff, our friends, and our communities.

That's right; as a matter of fact, one of the things I teach my clients when I'm coaching them about delegation is the six-step process for how to truly learn to delegate. And that's the part of what you just talked about.

You know, you've first got to make a list of the things that you do regularly. Other people could do that, then second you. I've got to pick one of those things and decide you're going to delegate it for now, then 30 days, so there's just and then the third thing is that you check in with that person only once a week. You don't check in more than that because if you do, you run the risk of confiscating the task. If you check in less than that, you run the risk of abdicating, so you check in once a week, and then the fourth thing is like when you're meeting with them. You can only praise them. You cannot correct them, and that's the hardest part. Because if you start correcting them, you haven't empowered them to do it.

Empowering means empowering them to fail. They've got to be able to fail on their own or succeed on their own. And then fifth, once they can do it at 80% of your output, then it becomes their job permanently and it's off your list forever.

And then finally, you just go back and repeat that process until your list is empty, and if you follow that setup that I put together there, eventually you'll be able to delegate things without having to go through that structure of a program. You could just delegate, know just instinctively I've assigned, empowered, and entrusted this person correctly, and I don't have to go through those stages. But if you're learning, go through those six steps, and I promise you, you'll be a master delegator within six.

All right, I got to ask the Challenger question and it's coming in hot because on one of those steps you said you can't correct the person that you delegated it to. So, let's say I'm going through this process and the person is butchering the task. What is my role in terms of providing this individual with experience, education, and support without correcting them?

So, good question, and this is the point of contention in the entire process. So, you know, you picked the right one.

So, here's the thing: you will survive the dip. There is going to be a dip in productivity. There is going to be a dip in the outcome, and you will survive it. Everybody does, everybody has. Because remember at one point. You were the dip. You didn't know how to do it and you figured it out. So, give Bob the chance to figure it out to let him fail. Now the caveats are: Of course, if somebody is going to jail because of what they did, the building is going to blow up or somebody is going to die. There are legal and safety things that you have to step in and save the day. You've got to make sure that doesn't happen.

But short of that, this is only a 30-day test, so if Bob's butchering it, you know your job is to sit down and say, OK, Bob. So how did things go this week? Tell me, tell me how it went. Well, it went well, and he starts talking about how great he did and you're like, "No, you didn't”. Now you've got a problem. Bob isn't the right guy for that task, and at the end of these 30 days, you're going to say thank you, Bob. I appreciate you participating in this. You may return to your regularly scheduled activities. scheduled programming.

But if he says, "You know, I don't know. It's not working out the way I thought it would. So, what do you think? I'm doing it wrong. Well, Bob, what? Do you think you're doing wrong? And then he starts saying, "Yeah, yeah, that's correct. That's right, so I'm not correcting him, just letting him figure it out.

So the law of discovery teaches us that humans discover more by what they do on their own and their own than what they're told. So, you're short-circuiting the process by correcting Bob. You know, you've got kids, we talked about this pre-show. I've got kids. You know, kids don't learn that the candle or the fire is hot until they touch it. And you're saying you're a sadistic person if you take your kid's hand and put it in the flame, you've got to let them discover it. But you could say, "Hey, it's hot; don't touch it. Hey, it's hot. Don't touch it. Hey, it's hot”. You could say that Brazilian times You could tell him the correct way to. They're going to have to touch it.

Bob is going to have to touch the flame when the things start burning down. If he were to be competent and a good employee, He should recognize it and then make some corrections. If he doesn't recognize it and continues in that direction, well, you've probably hired somebody wrong. You need to fire him and go get somebody else.

Yeah, but well said, so let's talk about hiring and firing. You have since touched on it. Methods or principles or pillars that you stand by when you're looking to hire talent to do this delegation.

I'm glad you asked that. We are just in my mastermind “exit club” we just had our weekend workshop for the third quarter this past weekend here in Nashville, and the entire workshop was dedicated to how to invest in people, and there are four parts to investing in people that we have to do as entrepreneurs who want to live the exit lifestyle and who don't want to be involved in daily operations.

And the first one is hiring the right people to think that this is the absolute first one I did, so I spent a good hour doing a deep dive into it. It's a method that I've developed over the last 12 years of running my lighting company. How to identify, find, hire, and onboard the right people.

I think I might've said, fire hire the right people.

When you hire the right people, it makes all the difference in the world. It keeps you from having to fire people, so hiring's a 10. I've developed it. I've got a PDF document that I've developed called "How to Hire and Onboard the Right Team Members" and I'll be happy to provide it to your listeners. If people want to just DM me on Instagram and ask how to hire me, I'll be happy to send that out.

It starts with writing the ad runs and everybody thinks, "Well, that's done. Of course, you have to write the ad. And in your job hunting right now, just pick an industry, pick a title, pick something, and go on indeed or LinkedIn and just do a search and read the first six, and they will all sound like they were written by the same agency for a different company.

We are a very exciting company to work for. We've got great growth opportunities. We offer competitive salaries, wages, and benefits, and it's all the same crap. And as a job hunter, as I'm looking for a job, all of that just sounds like Charlie Brown's teacher. There is nothing about it that pulls me out.

The only thing they'll scan for is money because everything else just sounds the same, so they're just looking for the dollars. When you attract people that are looking for dollars, you're attracting the wrong people. Because you don't want money, you don't want a purely money-motivated person working for you.

There are only three reasons why employees work anywhere. Number one is opportunity. You've hired someone if they show up just looking for money, they are the wrong person. So when you write your ad wrong, you're attracting the wrong person, and that's why so many people hire the wrong people. They're attracting the wrong people.

So, what do you do with the ad? You write an ad in your personality as you, as the founder, or as the entrepreneur, are the owner of the company. Write the story that it doesn't belong but write the story of the company: what's going on, why you started it, where it's wanting to go while you're hiring this person, and be honest like, hey, we had someone in this position, and they were terrible because they were just a terrible fit. We made a mistake. We're trying to find somebody better. Are you that person? And if you say that, the Blah, blah, blah…Everything they're hearing throughout every ad that they read. Yours is going. They popped, and they said, "There's something so special about this. And I'll tell you a true quick story.

As an illustration, I've got one employee who works for my lighting company. He's been with me for eight or nine years, and he can tell you if you just go find him and just say, "Hey, tell me about the ad," he will tell you that he remembers the ad.

That's crazy. I didn't know how much the ad… it was important until after I hired him and he was on the team, and then he told me, "Let me tell you, Jason, why I wanted to interview with you as opposed to these other successful multimillion-dollar companies. I'm just a small Startup at that point. I said, "Well, tell me where he goes. It was an ad because I heard something I wanted to add. It sounded like a human sound like you sounded like a personality, like somebody I wanted to work for. So, I think one of the tips for hiring the right People are just writing better ads now

and it's coming down to authenticity. I mean, that's what I hear loud and clear, blaring over the loudspeaker. Here is to be authentic. You don't have to copy and paste from it. Somebody else's ad You have got to just be authentic and tell the story about what's going on.

Yep, yep.

Well, I love that You stated that I believe the other bullet point is I frequently consider whether there is a mission that the company is taking on. Is there something in the community? Are we lifting others along the way? I tend to find that when we're looking for talent, one of the key components is finding people that are mission-driven and have something going on in their lives that pushes them into this type of role.

That's right, well, and I think that's part of, if you go back to those three reasons why people work for you, it's an opportunity, recognition, and money in that order, and so the opportunity plays into what you're talking about there. What was that mission, Thomas? What are we? Where is this thing going? Are we just making widgets and we don't care what the hell happens next? Or are we? Is there some big picture that I get to play a part in?

As an employee and a team member of this company, that's an opportunity, and that's what people work for. That's what they want. I mean, you think about your experience, our listeners. Think about your experience as an employee or an entrepreneur. Why are you doing what you're doing? It is mostly because of the opportunity.

It has something to do with money, but that's third on the list. You want the opportunity to be recognized. Some people want badges and trophies. Other people want the title, other people just want a good attaboy every once in a while, but whatever it is, they want to be recognized that they're contributing.

Then third, the finances have to be, you know, commensurate with whatever it is that's going on. You can't just pay crap because you've got a great opportunity and recognition. But you also can't pay top dollar and have no opportunity or recognition. It's a balance of those three things, and one of my mentors taught me that a long time ago, and it changed my life, and how I look at hiring people.

So now that you've hired a ton of people, you've built a handful of companies, you've built a way to exit a company without exiting a company, and you're faring well. With the world, how do you manage all of this on a day-to-day basis? You're pretty heavy on social media, and you're doing a podcast. You're a member of the community. You're a husband and a father. There's a lot on your plate, my friend. How do you balance all of this?

I think I've got to follow my advice, which sometimes it's hard to do for us hard-working, you know, driven people, but I balance it the same way that I teach my clients to balance it.

I want to make sure you know I keep my eyes open, and cycle closed. I'm not a stressed-out person, so there's this. There's this concept called the law of open cycles It teaches us that stress is caused by having too many cycles open at any given time and cycles or anything else that must be done at any given task, or it could be a relationship, it could be something that needs to be done, so I manage those tightly and I don't let open cycles. I don't feel like cycles are open that are not necessary for me.

My wife, we've been married for 27 years. She's my best friend and lover. more than the entire world. It's like everything more than life itself. It's just that she's awesome. But she has a problem, like I used to, with accepting open cycles. She hears something and just kind of takes it, and so she's starting to realize, "Oh, this is a problem. I don't. I didn't need to start that cycle in my life. That cycle wasn't required of me”

And sometimes women are more empathetic and intuitive about things, and they think, "Oh, you know, I should. Do this because they're probably working. No, I'm like, "Nope, that has nothing to do with me. I'm not going to start that cycle”. So, I take my own medicine as somebody described me. A former employee of mine described the most laid-back, driven person they'd ever met, and I've never heard that before. And now I take pride in that. I think that's good; you know. I'm pretty laid back. I'm not over the top with anybody about anything. I don't get stressed out, and I think it's because I've learned a little bit about how the universe works. This is why I train my clients to do the same thing.

Yeah, this concept of open cycles is a really interesting one. I always think of my open cycles as, you know, when my wife asks me to, you know, clean the garage because it's a little bit of a mess and the kids' bikes are everywhere, right? And that's another task on my list, or perhaps I haven't yet written that handwritten thank you card, Jason. I certainly owe somebody, and it's sitting there on my desk, and I'm looking at it. I'm looking at it and I know I'm going to find time, but it's right in the back of my brain. Are these good examples of open cycles for people to be thinking about?

Yeah, it's a matter of fact. You just mentioned that I have two thank-you notes I have to write. I've got a dinner I'm going to tonight, and I'm always going to hand deliver them. I completely forgot until you just mentioned that. So, thank you.

So yeah, those are examples. I think your to-do list is your open cycle list, kind of, but there are so many other things. I mean, the way I look at it is this: if I'd prepared for this conversation, I would have my older. I've got two books that I use to illustrate this on my bookshelf over there, but one is a really thin, skinny book and one is very thick.

And what I tell people is that I'm illustrating this is that I want you to pretend that every open cycle in your life, every task, every relationship, is only on one page. I don't care how big or hairy the open cycle is, it's like I just need to write one thank you note, that's tiny, but whatever it is, it's only on one page.

The thicker your book is the more stressed you feel, the more stressed you are, the more stress you feel in life, some of us can handle a thicker book than other people. Some people are just manic, and they are all the time. They can't handle thick books.

But the point of that illustration is that you've got to tear the pages out as fast as possible and add pages as few as possible. So that's why you've got to manage both ends of that. You've got to manage the tearing out of the book, to keep your book small, you must manage tasks. If anybody wants to slide a piece of paper over and ask you to do something like "Nope, not doing that," I'm not doing that. I'm not going to take that on as my responsibility.

My kids are older. I have a 22-year-old and an almost-20-year-old. My 19-year-old daughter She's trying to figure out college again. She took a year off because of COVID and all that crap that was going on.

But anyway, she's trying to go back. Well, she's an adult. I know if she comes and asks me to help her, I'll help her, but I'm not going to go and say, "Hey, can I help you sit down and register for classes today." Now people might think I'm a creep as a dad. No, I'm not. My daughter has to discover on her own how to do this stuff. That's her job. whereas, on the other hand, my wife is worried about death. She's not registered for classes. Should I go help her like I'm not in that cycle of my life? I'm not putting that page up. In my book.

But if my daughter walked in right now and said, "Dad, I need some help," I'm going to adore that. She asked first. First of all, and then I'm going to sit down. I'm going to do it. I'll let her. I'll let her add that page to my book because it's the right thing to do, but I don't take them when they're not mine to take.

Yeah, well said, and you've built a beautiful melody here of balance and being able to manage businesses by using delegation. Manage your own life by using core philosophies that you stick to. And then make sure that it's overlaid with love and compassion.

I can see it coming through the video and I can hear it in your voice. Is there anything missing in your life right now? Or are we completely locked in?

More clients

Says every entrepreneur everywhere

That's right. Well, I mean that that's the conundrum. I mean, is anything missing? Sure, there are a lot of things that are not complete that I'm trying to see happen.

But no, I do not walk around with a sense of lack or scarcity. I'm living an abundant life. I mean, Jesus is my savior, and he said, "Hey, if you follow me, you have life, and you have life abundantly," and I experienced that every day. I don't have a problem with what I don't have. I mean, I’d love to have you know more clients and I will get them, but I don't sit today chewing my fingernails, wondering how I'm going to pay the bills, right? I like that's not part of my experience, but no, I'm feeling really good about where things are and where they're going. I'm even more excited about where they're going than where they are.

No, that's beautifully said, and if I'm listening to the show, I'm thinking, "Man, when I grow up, I want to be like Jason Duncan. So how do people get a hold of you? How can they find you, seek you out, work with you, and learn from you? Become your friend. What's the best way to do that?

The application for friends Right now I'm just kidding…

Well, I'm putting mine in.

But it's funny because some of our best friends in the world recently relocated to Florida from Nashville.

So, on the ramp up to their leaving, I mean, we hung out all the time. We saw each other two or three times a week. We get together for dinner, coffee, for breakfast. You know, whatever we were, we were all together all the time. And now they are not here, and so when I told him we were joking, I said, "Man, you guys were moving, so I might have to put an ad on Craigslist for new friends, and I think I'm going to go for an upgrade. I think there's some stuff I'd rather have. I'm going to look for it.

But on a serious note, to get in touch with me, just follow me on any social media platform. The real Jason Duncan: Instagram and LinkedIn, or the two places I hang out the most. Instagram, probably more than LinkedIn, but therealJasonDuncan.com. Is my website?

That's how you get in touch with me, and I'd be honored to connect and like it. I said if you're interested in how to hire people, you know, that's and I think it's a 15-page PDF. I mean, it's very detailed. It's not just your average one-pager or just trying to get your email address so I can put you on a list. It's real content and data that you can use if you just DM me. All you have to do is go to Instagram to do this. It won't work anywhere. Alternatively, go to Instagram and DM me how to hire. I'll just use the words "how to hire.” I'll be happy to send it to you.

Yeah, beautiful. Jason, thank you for being on the show. We are very grateful for the good work that you're doing locally. The good work that you're doing around the world.

We've covered a lot of different topics today for entrepreneurs, but, for people in general on how to live a successful life, how to do it in peace, how to be balanced, and how to look at the world in a smart and thoughtfully, and we'll find you at therealJasonDuncan.com and on Instagram as well. So, it has been a pleasure to have you on the show, my friend.

Great job, Tom. Thank you for letting me be here.

And thank you for joining the Talent Empowerment podcast. I hope this conversation with Jason lifted you so you can lift your teams, your organizations, and your communities. Let's get back to people and culture together my friends, we'll see you in the next episode.

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