Meet Henry Daas, a personal finance coach, realtor, and author of FQ: Financial Intelligence. He has provided financial coaching for entrepreneurs and businesses during the pandemic.
“As an entrepreneur, you have got to recognize that something is broken.”
Learn more about Henry as he talks about his journey as a financial coach. Find out how to reach financial success in business along with a few business coaching tips that can help you make money.
Website: https://daasknowledge.com
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Twitter :https://twitter.com/daasfq
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coachdaas/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henrydaas/
John: Thank you for tuning in to the Business Sphere. Don’t forget to subscribe and share this episode. Joining me today is Henry Daas. He is a personal finance coach, realtor and author of FQ Financial Intelligence. Thanks for being on the show today, Henry.
Henry: Thanks for having me, John. It’s a pleasure to be here.
John: I’m excited because you’re from New York. I love New York. So prior to me being a father, I used to visit there at least once a year. But before we get into your upbringing, I wanted love for the audience members to know what your activities were, how did you get there, and maybe share with the audience members some of the stories of interrelations and transformation?
Henry: All right, good, good jumping-off point. So I described myself as a serial entrepreneur, I started my first business in 1991. I graduated college in 1981. So I spent 10 years only really had two jobs in my life. During that 10 year period. I worked for big multinational company, and then I worked as a computer programmer for the New York Stock Exchange. That’s where I learned about software. started my first company as an apple value-added reseller, people used to say, Oh, really, what’s your value add? I used to say me, you want to buy your stuff from me. It was as simple as that.
Since then, I’ve had different businesses and a variety of disciplines at a real estate company. As you mentioned, I am currently I just in this past October, I got my real estate license here in the state of Connecticut, I moved here to Connecticut, about a year ago. So it’s first time I’m living outside of the New York metropolitan area. It’s kind of interesting. I live in a country on five acres on a dirt road. So it’s a little, a little bit of a sea change for us, but it’s good dog good. For the last 10 years, I’ve been coaching entrepreneurs. As you mentioned, I wrote the book FQ financial intelligence 2018. I basically give that book away, I sell a course around it a 20-week course where I teach you pretty much everything I think you need to know about money.
I also coach people sort of ala carte, for you know, 500 bucks a month, I will coach you on how to level up your game, in terms of managing your money and growing it really a DIY approach. But if you wanted to use the skills that you learned to hire a pro to do it, that’s good, too. Whatever it is goal is to make money. What else? You know, I’m, I’m wearing my giants shirt here. The season is almost over New York football Giants don’t want to talk about how poor they have played. But I like sports, I play golf, I do a lot of stuff.
John: So amazing. So that gives me a lot to ask. Because this is a summary of a nutshell of six years. But before we get into drilling, I would like to ask you like upbringing-wise. Parents, Do you have siblings? How was it when you grew up? And then what? Those two jobs that you had? What made you want to move to starting your own business? So maybe that can get.
Henry: That’s a good, a good jumping-off point. Look, one of my ad-lib lines, my well-rehearsed ad-lib lines. As I say I had a very normal childhood. I have the therapy bills to prove it. And I did. I was born in Brooklyn. I grew up in New Jersey. My mom was straight out of Brooklyn so it was my dad, but my dad was really a country boy at heart and he wanted to move to you know, the suburbs in the worst way possible. And so, in the late 50s, they moved I have an older sister, she’s three years older than me. And I grew up in suburban New Jersey public schools, you know, played football, basketball, baseball, did all the things collected baseball cards, I still have a whole bunch of baseball cards.
Prices have gone haywire since the pandemic so I kind of stopped collecting them for the time being waiting for prices to normalize. Yeah, I went to school for electrical engineering. Although I really want to be a polystyrene major. But my parents especially my mom, who was a depression baby born in 27, she was the poster child for depression babies lived her whole life in a scarcity mindset. She’s like, you know, become an engineer. They’re always in demand, what’s yours, right? And I graduated 81, which is the same year that the IBM PC was released out to the world, right? Remember the old PC 80. For those of us who are old enough to remember, there were about $7,000. And I think they might have had 640k of memory, we’re really going back into the archives here.
But it was a it was kind of a sort of a happy accident. Because I worked for this, I worked for Honeywell, I was will tell you what, here’s a big multinational company. And that’s where I learned how to program computers. I took basic and Fortran in college. But that’s when I really learned how to do it in a real paying job. And then I parlayed that to a job working for the New York Stock Exchange, building the trading systems that were used on the floor back in the 80s. But in the back of my mind, I always thought I was going to work for myself, you know, my dad was a middle manager engineer at a big engineering company, my mom was a schoolteacher.
They worked hard, they save the money they invested, they always believed in investing in the stock market. So I learned about the stock market bought my first stock when I was 17. Chrysler for the record, after the government, bailed them out, and haven’t looked back. So I’ve learned, I learned my, my money skills organically by doing, you know, not by reading book, but by doing it by trading every day, and watching markets and learning everything I can. And even with everything that I’ve learned, I barely scratched the surface. That’s how big and vast it is. Anyway, I’ll pause there. So you can interject.
John: Amazing, because I just finished a book called When by Daniel Pink. And it’s so important to understand, like, it’s not, 7you know, people talking about, like, what profession you choose. But it’s timing as well because industries pivot based on decade long cycles of the global economy right now, we might be going through a huge phase of crypto or, you know, energy crisis or, you know, turbulence on, you know, fractions in terms of political divide, right. But then there’s that tech boom like you mentioned in the 80s 90s 2000s, where it was all about, like automation and China, things make things more efficient and productive while back in the maybe 40s and 50s. It was all automotive, right? So right, when you’re born makes a huge difference on what profession you choose, and what your parents see. And as you become more wise and you become more, you know, global perspective, you can kind of appreciate what their intent was at the time because that’s what they saw. And they’re gonna try to give you guidance based on what they brought to the table. So at that time, did you regret any of the choices that you made? And how was that value-added reseller kind of business? And how long did you kind of keep that going for, for that period in New York?
Henry: Well, there’s a couple of interesting things that you bring up there because, you know, as a parent, I have three boys there, my oldest just turned 30 my middle one is 25. My youngest 21 still in college, I’ve got two college graduates one, one in college. And you know, the data points that you as a parent have are you know, they’re let’s face it, they’re old. I was talking to somebody about you know, having a Christmas club and going to the bank on a Saturday because it was the only time it was open. And I remember when the very first ATM opened up, and it’s like, Oh, my God, I have a card and I can go and I can get money. I mean, it was life-changing. The funny thing is my pin number, this is kind of a weird one. But the pin number I have now was assigned to me by the bank because you weren’t allowed to change it. They mailed it to you. So here I am 40 or 50 years later, and I still use the same code that I never picked. So go figure. It’s just sort of embedded, but you do what you can, but you have to update those maps because you mentioned things like crypto and NF T’s. And I look at it and it’s like, you know, this is strange and wondrous and interesting stuff. But I can’t really wrap my head around exactly what it is from an investment standpoint. I was talking on another podcast, and I was using the sort of vessel analogy I run a couple of mastermind groups, which are younger people and I teach them about investing. We do zoom calls, like 1every two weeks. And I And there I was saying yeah, okay, so So Bitcoin is a vessel for value, right?
Essentially what it is and what I’m trying to figure out is it the Titanic? Right? Is it the Lusitania? Is that the Andrea Doria? Or is it? You know, the HMS Beagle? Right, which is which was Darwin’s ship, right? Is it going to strike an iceberg? And obviously, Bitcoin, I was away for the month of January, my wife and I went to Africa on a safari. And I really scrupulously ignored the markets. And I come back and it’s like the world’s gone crazy, right? Crypto went from 50 something 1000 down to 30. Something 1000? Yeah, it’s a big hit for a couple of weeks. Is it going to strike an iceberg? Or is it just that it’s so early that we don’t really know where it’s all gonna go? And it could change the world? Will the blockchain change how transactions are handled? Right? Think about the blog, think about. Some will talk about real estate just for a minute, I’ll go down. Think about title insurance, which I believe is a racket, right to wreck. Let’s call it what it is.
Title defects are very rare, but when they happen, they could be cataclysmic. But imagine if the title was every piece of property, everything that people owned, lived on the blockchain was on it was in a very by verifiable place in that blockchain that’s encrypted and can’t be really tinkered with. That’s, that’s life-changing for certain businesses that could put certain businesses out of business, right, they no longer need to exist. That’s a massive, massive change. At but I don’t think that we as a society have quite figured it out. Because it’s this is like, we’re like five minutes into this. Right? NFT is the same thing my former business partner called me wants to start a business in NFT. For art. And I, my first question out of his mouth is Do you even understand what an NF T is? Because that would make one of us because I’m not really sure I’m still figuring that out. And yet economies are going to be built on these concepts. So you better get better learn yourself up on him pretty fast. In my opinion, anyway, I’ll leave a space.
John: And it’s disruptions of change, right? And adoption is key. And in this is where the world is moving,
Henry: If people are gonna fight you on disruptions, right? If you think the title insurance companies are going to lay down when Henry das decides to start a business where every title to every piece of property goes on the blockchain, and they’re busy, they go out of business, they’re gonna fight back. Right? So a lot of the tumult that is going on now, and let’s not kid ourselves, again, I’m 62, almost 63 years old. I’ve lived through varieties of downturns and political discord. If anybody who’s out there who’s you know, 30 years old, thinks that we’re at some unique moment in time with the political dissatisfaction here in this country in the culture wars. We’re not. It’s only the only reason it’s amplified is because, everybody in the world now has a mouthpiece via Twitter, or Instagram, or whoever the fair-haired platform is to disseminate their innermost thoughts. I mean, we were on this Safari, and I’m one of the people we were with, and these were strangers to us was taking pictures of everything he ate. Now, I know people who do that, but that, to me is just kind of weird. I’m like, of all the things to document in your life, you’re gonna document what you ate. Alright, I guess so. I don’t know. I’m, maybe I’m a Luddite, or maybe I’m out of the mix. This is but there’s all this data that’s out there floating in the world. Unnecessary, unnecessary noise that’s getting amplified.
One of the reasons we have problems with you know, COVID disinformation, and all this stuff is everybody’s carrying a Hollywood studio in their pocket. And they’re not afraid to use it, and how am I going to filter my way through that stuff in order to come up with some intelligent, original thought and apply some critical thinking, makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.
John: So thank you, I really appreciate your, you know, some of the content that you’re just providing. I would like to call that a rant. I just, I just want to ask you, Henry. So during those initial years, or the decades that you were a business owner, what were some of the things that you learned? You were a bar, your value-added reseller. And there’s Channel Sales on IT platforms, out different pieces of hardware-software. I actually used to be in that space a little bit. So I’ve noticed, but outside of that, how long did you do that for? What were some of the pros and cons? What did you like what you didn’t like, and how did it go?
Henry: Well, we again, so starting in the early 90s, it’s just pre-internet. Right? There was there were dial-up networks. There were E D I networks and other things like that. But they were slow and cumbersome. You know, I remember our first ISDN router that we had 1.5 megabits, I think it was I thought I died and went to heaven, faster than a T one line. Of course, people are like, What the heck is a T one line? Just to give you some context, when the ISP issued that to us, they gave us a c plus three address I had 64 static IPs. That’s what was issued to us. That’s how early this was. But incomprehensible at this stage of the game, I don’t even know what you would pay just to get just to pay to get one static IP, they’re going to Nick you for 2030 bucks a month or whatever they give us. 64 right out of the box, I guess nobody ever figured out now that we were gonna run out of these pretty soon. So it’s kind of interesting. So you’re still using phones, but no real texting. There were in the run-up to the web 1.0, which would be 98,99,2000. When all these freshly minted companies were coming out, and they were creating beautiful and wondrous websites, these were all the first first-generation websites. Problem is that they were unusable. There was not enough bandwidth in the world for you to take advantage of these things. And a lot of them crashed and burned. So there was a speculative mania that ended in a sort of a cataclysmic crash.
I remember I knew this guy created I don’t know if this is PG rated or not. But I’m going to tell you this was the real URL. It was called fucked company. Right? I’m like, how did you get that URL? He says, Don’t ask. But it was a real thing, a real company, a real website? And people would send in rumors of a company’s demise. Right? Can you imagine? I mean, that went on for a couple of years, if that wasn’t an indication that something bad was going to happen. And then it did. In 2001, I guess it was the the.com crash. And it reshuffled the deck, right. A lot of people lost a lot of money, but a few people made a ton of money during that time. Depends on which side of the trade you were on. These things happen. Is that going to happen in the crypto world? Probably. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it probably will.
John: Yeah, so going into this business, and how did you Pharaoh and what was the pivot to then becoming that coach?
Henry: Well my pivot was kind of interesting, and I didn’t realize it now. I didn’t answer your question. I went off on a tangent. we are 10 good years in that business. My business partner and I, we had that company, we spawned off at leasing company. So we were, we were leasing equipment. So I came up with something that I called the sushi model, right? So the hardware was the you know, the raw tuna in the center. And the service contract that we had, I created something called a repair 24-hour repair or replace service contract on every piece of equipment that went out. Because I’ve been dealing with corporate clients, and they really liked that. So that was the rice that went around the tuna and then we all we wrapped it in the seaweed, which was the leasing. Right. So we would, we were doing what are called True operating leases. So if a company needed $5 million of equipment, but only had $250,000 in their IT budget, we can make that work for them. So instead of having the capital outlay, we lay out the capital, we lease the equipment back to them. We have the service on top of it. And the leasing costs on top of it was like printing money was a great, great, great model. The problem that we ran into was really twofold. A number one was by the end of the 90s.
These fair haired companies like buy.com, which I think is now requitan 10, but they were called by.com There was so much margin compression and margin erosion that was getting to the point where all of these companies that were trying to sell hardware that we were selling, were doing it below our wholesale cost. So margin just evaporated. So that was a huge, huge problem. And then of course the when the bomb went off and all the people who were consuming all the stuff that we were providing to them didn’t have the capital anymore even didn’t even have the expense budget anymore. Clients disappeared. But after all of that, that wasn’t really what led to the breakup of my company. It was the fact that my partner and I after 10 years weren’t seeing eye to eye. And that was really what it was. It was actually the impetus for me to hire my first business coach in 1999, was how do I get out of this engagement with somebody that I don’t want to be partners with anymore. And it would took a couple of years, and it was pretty miserable. And it was expensive.
And it was tough. So the object lesson is be very careful with who you decide to partner with. Because your fortunes are intertangled. And, and extra cating yourself from that is a Herculean task. And it took me three years. It wasn’t until later. I had a home theater business, I built spec houses, I did a whole bunch of stuff during the, what I guess people call the otts from, like 2000, to 2010. And it was then that I decided, as I hit the age of 50, that I’m going to take all this expertise, and I’m going to share it with people by hanging a shingle as a coach. And then one day I said, I’m a business coach. Just like that day that I said, I’m an apple bar. Right, I announced it to the world, one out and marketed to the world and went from there.
John: So how has it been as a coach? Because this is what you do right? Now, it sounds like this is what your passion and what a lot of people want to eventually come with all the wisdom and experience that you have. And especially giving back right like making in other people’s lives. So what is it that makes a good coach versus a bad coach and or the right coach for you?
Henry: The client is who makes or breaks it. I mean, there are no barriers to entry to becoming a coach. I went through a year of training with Coach Phil, I spent a lot of money I went through all of it, I wanted to learn the marquees of Queensbury rules for being a coach. And so I went through that process. I didn’t have to, I could have just said I’m a coach. But I wanted to learn what the coaching world was all about. Then I cherry-picked out the things that I liked, and I threw away the stuff that didn’t work for me. And then I added in all my expertise as a business owner, and I created my own perimeter, I call it coach approach strategic advisor. So I have to coach training. But there will be times where I’m going to act more as a strategic advisor. Right, we’re going to talk about things that you wouldn’t talk about as a coach, right. And there’s a concept that called leading don’t lead your client to a to a conclusion, well, sometimes that conclusion is right there based on years of entrepreneurial experience, I’m not going to go through silly tortures games for them to figure this out for themselves. Sometimes I’m just going to give you the answer. Right. That’s just how it is. But the client is the one who will dictate the success or the failure of the relationship. It’s just as simple as that you put the work in. I know I’ve helped a lot of people, I’m a good coach, I at this point in time, I don’t have to, I can just say that I can say I know I’m a great coach, actually. But I can’t coach you if you’re a crappy client. I just can’t do that’s just the old school Boomer and me if you are not that guy, there’s nothing I can do to change that. You have to change that.
John: So is there a specific avatar persona type of person that would fit your kind of ideal type of client list that you feel based on your experience and expertise and wisdom can guide and transform?
Henry: Well, the client, the coochie, whatever you want to call them? Number one, they have to be coachable. And not everybody’s coachable. And what does that mean? Maybe? Well, it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people doesn’t mean you’re a doormat, you’re just gonna follow me and say Yes, sir. Right? I say jump and you say how high? No, no, no, no, no, it has to there has to be given take. But think about anything that you’re doing. If you are resisting, right? Resisting things, resisting change. Eventually, one of two things are going to happen. You’re either going to acquiesce to it and say, okay, resisting, resistance is futile. I need to change some stuff, or you’re not. And one of the fundamentals of entrepreneurship is, is this idea of infallibility or invincibility? Most entrepreneurs have a chip on their shoulder and say, you know, hey, just bet against me, right? Just bet against me that what I’m doing is not going to work. Well, my answer is, well, if what you were doing was working, then why are you talking to me? Honestly, you know, in intrinsically, intuitively, that something is amiss, because nobody calls me up and say, and says, Henry, everything’s great in my world, but I need a coach. Right? That’s the rare cat who does that I’ve mentioned this on other blog, I talked about Tiger Woods because I’m a golfer. And Tiger Woods back in his heyday, when he was winning like one out of every two tournaments back in 2002,3,4, he fired his coach, and he hired a new guy, and he changed his swing. I remember, he made a statement where he said, he didn’t like the way the ball was going into the cup.
And I thought to myself, That’s really strange because the goal of the exercise is to put the ball in the cup, do I really care how it goes in the cup if it goes in the cup? Well, that’s why he’s Tiger Woods. And that’s why during that stretch, he was the greatest golfer, whoever plays playing a different game than everybody else. He was a man playing with children like that. But he was not satisfied, because he always knew that he can get better. Now, that’s a rare cat. That’s a coachable guy, who’s not afraid to change something that the outside world is looking at and saying, it’s not broken, why are you fixing it? Right? As an entrepreneur, you have got to recognize that something’s broken, you’re gonna pick up the phone, or you’re going to call me because something’s broken, you may not know exactly what it is. And that’s where as a coach, you start, let’s figure out what it is. There’s something sticking in your Craw, there’s something keeping you up at night, what is it could be one of the zillion things. I’ve heard everything under the sun, I can’t sleep, I can’t manage, my AR and AP, I’m making money, but no money is translating back to me. I can’t manage the people that are all over the place. I have no processes bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, it goes on. We have to figure that out.
John: Interesting. Is there a specific arena that most clients who reach out to you are looking for? Is it mainly the finances? Because that’s your expertise? Or is their business ownership? Like because you’ve been in business? Like, is there a specific type of person?
Henry: I’m working on a book. It has the unlikely title of codfish. And I talked about this another podcast. So what does codfish stands for? It stands for customer support operations, development, finance, infrastructure, I.T sales and marketing human resources, I call them the seven silos of business, whether you’re a solopreneur, like me, or your apple, a $3 trillion company, you have those seven silos at work, you don’t have eight, you don’t have six, you got seven, right? Every business on top of that has an origin story, and we’ll grow out of one of those silos. Right. So my first company abacus grew out of the customer support. Arena, I knew that there was again in the late 80s and early 90s, there was a an absolute knowledge vacuum when it came to computers because there were so no, but we had that I possess that we had we possess that. So that that was the reason that you wanted to buy from me is because, we would provide the customer support that the CompUSA used in the computer stores. And all the big monolithic companies that had grown at that time were simply incapable of providing. But your business may have grown into something else. Some people that grew out of the finance area, or, you know, HR, right, they had a bunch of people who had skills, right? I know a bunch of guys who were really good at SEO.
So let’s build that sort of thing. A lot of different ways to start that story. But what you’ll realize very shortly is of those seven silos or two that you’re probably really good at as an entrepreneur. There are three that you’re probably Yeah, I’m okay. I’m passable. And there’s, there’s probably one or two that are your Achilles heel. You mentioned finance. I’ve got clients who are as dumb as a box of hair when it comes to finances couldn’t tell the difference between a balance sheet and an income statement, and a statement of cash flows. But I remind them that anything that you’re no good at, you can hire somebody who’s really, really good at it and passionate about it, and lives and breathes it. So go hire person and don’t sit there trying to become an expert in something that you’re just not going to become an expert at. Right? You’re just not. So that’s a key thing. So recognizing those things early on and figuring it out. Right. I like to tell people, we want to maximize your strengths and we want to do everything to minimize your weaknesses. And don’t tell me that you don’t have weaknesses because we all have weaknesses. And the old saying is if you spend a lot of time working on the weaknesses, which end up with is a bunch of really strong weaknesses. Why are we wasting our time with that?
John: Oh, these are great analogies and great tips, Henry, I’ve always been a big proponent of focus on what you enjoy doing. Have fun doing it, and what you’re strong at, right? Because there are going to be a lot of people like, you know how not, you know who it’s really like getting people in places where you’re not strong. If you’re weak at finances, hire an accountant or bookkeeper. If you’re weak at sales and marketing, hire an expert in that arena. If you’re strong, weaker HR operations, there are people. So focus on what you enjoy doing the most, you wake up passionate, wanting to do more of what you enjoy doing, and focus your energy and time because whatever stresses you out, will continue stressing you out, you’re never going to be at the level of someone that’s been doing it for 5,10, 20 years because that’s what they breed learned, and have processes in place to refine the art. And I always take the analogy of like, a home renovation project. There are a couple of those flooring people we know people roofers. But as a general contractor, you can’t be the greatest at painting, electrical plumbing, flooring, because there’s experts in each of these matters. And these are trained experts with 10,000 work hours of 10,20 years that they can spot a mistake and diagnose it and fix it right away. But nowadays with information at its disposal, YouTube, you know, social media, whatever it is, people think they can do everything themselves. And they don’t want to pay for an expert, because they feel that Why waste my money on this when I can figure it out myself.
Henry: Well, that’s called false economy and I’ve done some huge renovations over the years a loft department in manhattan a house in Westchester so. I know it well I had a home theater business that built stuff, I could build a house from scratch if I want I have the skills and I had a frame I know electric. But here’s there’s a couple things I’m not going to do, I’m not going to go on a roof, because if i go on a roof and i fall off I’m going to get paralyzed and that’s just stupid I’m going to hire somebody who lives and breathless roofs right? and I’m not going to do plumbing, because if i screw the plumbing up I’m going to be up to my ass and you know what and i don’t want to do. That I’m going to hire a pro think of your business the same way right? What are the what’s the roof? what’s the plumbing? right focus on the stuff that you’re really good with. Or you know what don’t use your hands at all, and work on the design the what we did when we did our renovation is my wife’s a designer I’m an engineer we work together to build our own plans. We hired a general contractor we knew what we wanted to do we had a budget set, and we went about doing it but I didn’t use a nail gun I just supervise people and hire them and the, when we ran into situations, we would pivot or something i would have to look at them and i would i had a line that i came up with i would point at something and i would if i didn’t like the way it was done i would look at it and i would say.
Does that i look professional to you? that’s all i had to say. appeal to people’s pride in how they do their work, right you ask them you’re gonna sign off on that in good conscience, leave it up to them most of the time they’ll redo it and they’ll do it the right way right? but you don’t want to end up having to redo a whole bunch of stuff it’s twice as much work and twice as much money, so stay ahead of that in your business. So as far as areas as far as the silos the people fall down and it’s different for every single case some people like i said are a box of hair when it comes finance some people have so many numbers and so many metrics they’ve got every little piece of data but they can’t figure out what exactly it all mean right. I mean what does it means? does it mean you’re making money you’re not making money where are the headwinds that you’re facing are your margins eroding, or is your staff bloated right do you not have enough staff are you going to burn out people and they’re going to fall by the wayside? but the biggest issue that i run into with entrepreneurs and I’ve seen this and i don’t mind my sharing this is that just when we start to really make the good progress they bail right they finally get overtaken by the resistance and say you know what this is just too hard, I’m going to continue to do things the way they’re doing even though i know that it’s not really working because it’s just too hard for me to change the way that I’m programmed to do this in a better way that’s really me as a coach that’s whats frustrates me the most.
John: It seems like a lot of it is on them right? it’s mine it’s all on them.
Henry: It’s their balance sheet it’s their income statement it’s their employees right? it’s their w-2s and their w-9s to their to their contractors everything is on them, i don’t you know I’m like i said I’m an advisor and I’m a coach, and I’m a mentor and I’m a cheerleader and I’m i play all these different roles to make you perform not make you, but to help you perform the best possible you that you can be right ? that sounds like a an infomercial but really that’s what it’s all about it’s the whole purpose of being involved in an engagement here you’re paying me for my expertise whatever it might be. I adapt to you as opposed to me selling a program that says if you follow this program you’ll reach the promised land my personal opinion is, those don’t work because unless it’s custom-tailored to the way your brain works eventually it’s going to fail.
John: So how do you set up a business for financial success ? because it seems like you have quite a few clients that you’re working with coaching, and you know everyone comes from different walks of lives they have different opinions, they have different goals but most importantly they want to grow their wealth or profit or income statement revenue and,
Henry: And whatever it might be.
John: So if you don’t mind sharing like what are some of the key pillars, some of the ways people can start even thinking about how to approach things differently?
Henry: Well chapter one of my book is called the psychology of money, so when i wrote i actually wrote it as a course. And then it was later on that i turned it into a book after people said you should turn this into a book that’s your lead magnet, so I said when i wrote it i wrote a table of contents of 18 chapters and i when i wrote it i started in chapter one and I finished the chapter 18. And the logical place for me to start was the psychology of money so what does that mean? what’s your mindset right? I was raised by a woman who was a depression baby she lived in a scarcity mindset her entire life, she worried about money every single day of her life without fail because that’s how she was imprinted as a youngster right growing up in the depression in Brooklyn in the 1930s everybody was poor, nobody had money nobody had jobs right? that’s what you saw at a young age and that stays with you your entire life, no matter how hard you try.
I inherited a lot of that i think about money every single day I’m always living in scarcity even though i have money, i do i worked hard to not allow it to get in the way of my living my life because i understand that my most precious asset above and beyond money is time right? so I’m going to have if I’m lucky 80 years on this planet i want to maximize everything that i can do that doesn’t mean it eat drink and be merry because tomorrow you may die, but yeah there’s a little bit of that but we have to achieve a little bit of a balance so you’ve got to understand, am I in that super scarcity mindset ? or am i a riverboat gambler who’s just you know doing you know parlays on fanduel every five minutes, or am i somewhere in between right? so before we can figure out really what your goals are, I gotta understand how your brain works right, i can teach you how to trade stocks it’s not that hard I mean really not, but what i can’t teach you is how are you going to react when the market takes a 10 percent or 20 percent correction like it kind of was trying to do during the month of January, how are you going to react? are you going to just go into a hole are you going to sell everything, because if you can’t handle the downside risk you can’t really trade right there’s risk? Risk and reward or you know two sides of the same coin and you can manage that.
John: And this is great, because I’ve seen a lot of business owners giving up during this pandemic, and it’s interesting to see how they react in certain situations and circumstances, and time tells a lot of things in terms of how people perceive things how they you know run their business run their lives, because if they’re at the pulse on news or anything that scares them, then you know are they the type of people that you want to work with, as a coach or even want to partner with as a business owner. So i run an agency and i i feel like people I want to work with this long term want to really focus on their real progress right? growth building authority etc., so for me that’s the type of people I want to work with but they have to be clear on that, and they have to understand that when things are bad what happens when things are great everyone doesn’t bother you, you know no one complains right? you know the last two years, I’m sure you’ve seen and heard and you know the people that you’ve worked with have expressed a lot of concerns. Maybe share some stories because i know, because the last two years it’s really been working on people’s mind right like this pandemic has really affected a lot of people in different walks of lives, different areas from personal relationships business every everything really.
Henry: Well when the pandemic hit march of 2020, we actually happened to be in park city utah skiing, because that’s where my you know our youngest son goes to college so the whole family was out there, and you know we’re skiing and having dinner and we had a bunch of his roommates and friends over and then trump comes on tv on march 11th and says we’re locking the country down for two weeks, and we’re just okay we’re having fun here and that was like wow! this is really really serious stuff, and then we got back i opened up my coaching practice for April, May and June for three months at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 i opened it up to anybody who wanted, i put a couple of notes on some different networks I’m part of and I had over 100 conversations with probably 60 different people sort of lost count, i thought maybe i get one or two people who wanted to talk about things and it’s like all of a sudden i was overwhelmed happily so. And i started every conversation with the same thing i said look your business went from doing you know 20 000 mrr i think the first person i talked to who was in the travel business, her business went from 20 000 mrr to zero overnight, just ended fell off a cliff and i said.
John: That’s one of the listeners mrr is month old revenue
Henry: Monthly recurring thank you john I should be careful using. Yes, monthly recurring revenue right? nice little business very low overhead, went completely and i said listen if this stays like this until the end of 2021 you’re gonna be okay, are you gonna be able to feed your family and do this, and i asked that same question everybody and universally people said, yeah you know i might have to live like Gandhi but i think i’ll be able to to to get through that now that was at that time. In March I used my crystal ball and i said based on the pandemic of 1918 and the data that i have available to me, we should probably be coming out of this at the end of 2021 which was basically a month ago because we’re doing this on what’s today’s date January 31st of 2022. obviously, I was young and foolish when I came up with that concept but, yeah I said you got to just look at circling the wagons and saying okay this is an extreme black swan event you got to see whether we can what we can do, just to make sure that everybody’s fed and happy and healthy and to survive very very it’s like the bottom rung of Maslow’s pyramid of needs right ? and if your viewers aren’t familiar with that just google it you’ll see a little you know pyramid that shows you what the basic needs are, sleep, food you know water that’s kind of at the base level. So when the uh when it’s when a black swan event right an unpredictable cataclysmic event comes people tend to circle their wagons and look at the most basic things that they need in order to survive and, if you can check all of those things off you’re probably in pretty good shape, because no matter how bad they are they don’t last forever.
I remember when it first happened for a couple months into it, one of my you know the kids were depressed about it and i said hey your grandmother lived through five years of world war II, right my mother was in high school and started college during world war II, and she used to tell us the stories about that you know there were no men around and if there were men around you just assume there was something wrong with them because every able-bodied man was over there fighting the nazis and fighting in the pacific theater, right that’s just how it was everything was rationed it was you know it was really pretty terrible but yet, they all did it and they all managed i said that’s five years you’ve been doing this for five months right so get a little context to things, right? move down to basic to the basics and then you can look at okay what can i do out of the ashes of this? I’m in the travel business and nobody’s travelling? So what do we do, well we’ve got to go when we have to look at what your core competencies are, what is it that you do well and how can that be repositioned into something that people do need, and that’s where you start always knowing in the back of your mind that this is not a permanent change, it’s a transitory event this too shall pass and I thought it was really important for people to recognize that fact right ? when you’re in the hurricane you can’t tell you just never think the wind’s ever going to stop, and then one day it does and one day this will stop too hopefully not too distant future we’ll see.
John: And I love you mentioning like contact perspective, because if you are too comfortable with what you have you have to relate right to how your parents, your grandparents or other people in different parts of the world are you know having their lives disrupted right? like if you feel in North America we can’t have gasoline, well you know certain parts of Africa don’t even get water on a daily basis right, like put yourself in other people’s shoes and then realize that life is not that bad overall. we still have choice, we still have internet we still have you know food and shelter like there’s people out there that they, they’re just wishing one day things can change in their.
Henry: There are three billion people on this planet who do not have access to clean water I mean we just came back from Africa we were in Kenya.
John: Exactly
Henry: On safari and we’re seeing how these people live, and what it is that they have to do they live on you know 3500 dollars a year right? they’re very resourceful nothing goes to waste they repurpose everything, they live a very carbon-neutral life it’s pretty amazing it’s almost embarrassing as a westerner to go there and realize, one day one of the Maasai tribesmen who was taking us on our game rides who were taking photographs, he picked up a stone and he started you know filing his nails with it right. I have the stone he gave it to me he said this he says this is what we use for you know personal hygiene, we take a we pick this rock it has a nice little surface on it and we use that to file our fingernails.
John: And I love you mentioning South Africa, because not only that like if you’re able to travel to not just worse western countries and first world countries go to second third fourth world countries right? like, learn to see what you are other people live because first, we’re western countries we comprise of what five percent, ten percent of population in those small numbers. So if you believe that what we have is scarcity and not enough, go there live there for a month, live there for a couple of days see if you can endure that, because I’m a big traveller i love going to the world countries to see how other people ingrain myself in cultures to really understand that we’re so fortunate, we’re so lucky to have everything we have choice, abundance but people take it for granted and that’s where you know being exposed to a lot of different situations and knowledge of societies gives you more of appreciation of what you have. so I know we’ve taken a lot of time henry can you share with the audience members what’s the best way to reach out to you, if there are some last final nuggets that you would love to share that’d be great.
Henry: All right, well you can reach me a couple different ways, my personal site is henrydass.com so that that kind of has a aggregation of all my sites, my business coaching, my financial coaching you know linked to my real estate so if you want to buy a house in Connecticut or sell a house in Connecticut I’m your guy, and my baseball card collection and my golf trips I have to add. i think i have to add a section for this safari because we took 20 000 photos my wife and i and I’ve been kind of combing through them, you made an interesting point do you know that only one in 10 Americans will actually visit a foreign country in their entire life, that’s a mind-boggling statistic and I’ve been all over the globe, yeah maintaining perspective and what it is that you do, and where it is and how blessed and fortunate you are to live in arguably, and regardless of all the dysfunction that you read about and you see on CNN or fox news or whatever. We are America is a brilliant experiment that for the most part has worked out amazingly well, we take for granted our freedoms we take for granted I think sometimes our ability to speak out about things that we don’t like without repercussions when you look at, other countries that are suppressing human rights, it’s pretty frightening what’s out there in the world. So don’t again don’t lose perspective on that but anyway, so you can go to henrydass.com you can download my book fq financial intelligence for free 100% off it’ll take you to book baby and you’ll get a coupon which I think i have to update because it probably expired, but yeah I encourage people to read it if you want to engage me you can click on uh you can go to das knowledge daas knowledge, which is my business site and you can click on the get my help and set up a strategy session i don’t charge for any of that, I’m happy to talk to people well you want to talk about business you want to talk about finance, you want to talk about I don’t know baseball cards I don’t really care happy to do it that’s what I do.
John: Amazing, that’s it, well thanks a lot henry I really appreciate your time, ultra blessed to have this opportunity to you know learn a little bit about yourself share with the listeners about you know, what have you been up to how you can share and help so many other aspiring entrepreneurs in their journey, and hopefully shrink time and that’s the key piece that a lot of people want, they want to be efficient and by reaching out to a coach or mentor someone that has already walked through the challenges and tribulations you’re going to make less mistakes hopefully. So thanks a lot henry for all the great insight and knowledge that you share with us today.
Henry: Thank you for having me I really appreciate it
