Riding The WAVES Of Entrepreneurship With Rodric Lenhart
Looking at other successful people, it can be so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the only way to succeed is to want what others want. This episode’s guest reels us back and makes us confront what matters most: the core of who we are. Michigan-born lifelong entrepreneur Rodric Lenhart sits down with Tom Dardick to talk about his inspiring view around entrepreneurship, riding the WAVES through the five phases entrepreneurs go through. Rodric also shares insights from his experiences building and selling businesses, traveling the world, and building his personal dream home. Extending his wins, he shares how he is helping others through coaching, podcasting, writing, and creating a foundation that helps kids travel overseas who would otherwise not have the chance. Tune in as Rodric shows us the true meaning of entrepreneurship. Don’t miss out on his evolved views, which are dripping with value to all with ears to hear.
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Riding The WAVES Of Entrepreneurship With Rodric Lenhart
My guest is Rodric Lenhart, who, as an entrepreneur and a coach, has quite a remarkable story. He's walked through the 5 Phases of Entrepreneurship, which is his book and we'll get into that as well as many other aspects of how we might improve and be the author of our own lives. Without further ado, let's jump in and welcome Rodric.
I'm still trying to find my way as to how guests will fit into what I've been doing, but I like the idea of 58 out of the gate. That's awesome.
I had no expectations. You probably experienced this too, but now that I'm a host as well, it's like I have to go from host to guest. The day just bounces back and forth like that sometimes.
I guess I'll find that out as time goes on here. I still feel like I'm on roller skates where I want to leave the room, but I don't want to sit there and say nothing, either. You have to find that balance. As you said earlier, it's a conversation. We have a lot of things that are in common with each other and we're trying to help people move past whatever obstacles might be holding them in place. I have my methods. You have something we'll get into with the five phases, and looking forward to hearing about that. The giving heart, the service to other people, the wanting the best for people, the wanting people to be the full expression of themselves, that's what we have in common.
I was on Selling With Love, if you've ever heard of that podcast. It's Jason Marc Campbell. We were talking about sales and how coaches, in particular, I'm in a handful of masterminds. One of them is for complete newbies. They're coming out as CTI or I went to Brown for my ICF, but they're brand new and they don't know how to get their first client. They think sales are icky. For the first thing I say, I've been in sales my whole life.
If you believe that what you have to offer will help someone, you're doing a disservice not to offer it to them. As soon as you change that mindset, you can sell anything if you believe in the product and that's what holds most coaches back, is they don't have something that's vetted yet, and they don't know that it's going to work for other people so they don't market it at all. They're scared.
Some of that is also even if people have something they think is valuable, they feel like they're intruding or they're crossing some boundary. They've been conditioned, perhaps, to believe that the defenses are always right, which is untrue. The person that's going to screen out something. There was a comic strip back in the day where I remember seeing where it was the general was there and they were fighting with bows and arrows, and the salesman was tugging on the coat saying, “Here I had a machine gun,” or something like that. They’re like, “No, I'm too busy.” It's all mindset.
There are certainly new coaches, but it's anybody in any industry. When you come out of the cocoon and you're ready to fly and deliver whatever it is your art is to the world, you have that it's unproven to some degree. We all have that inner critic and the saboteur and the voice inside that says who are you to be telling other people what to do or what to buy or what they need?
With Imposter Syndrome, people have this feeling even when they're still very accomplished. It's not about the actual line item accomplishments. It's something in addition to that.
I have a whole chapter in the book called Monsters and Mountains. I start with a Maya Angelou quote, and you've probably heard it, but it's her 12th book and she's going, “They're finally going to find out. I don't know what I'm talking about. I've run a game on everyone.” We all have those feelings and the only difference is you learn how to push past them and you know that the other side isn't as scary. That just comes with experience.
There are two things that I've observed that help us in this situation. One is where we have to retool what we think of in terms of how learning works, where people think that they've heard it once, twice, three times and they know it. Studying these things in depth makes you realize we are way denser than we might think. In other words, we might need to hear something 100 times before it sinks in as to what it means. It's the full expression of whatever that lesson might be.
For that reason, hearing it from a slightly different perspective. The other thing is you've got a unique voice. Every person has a unique voice and that unique voice hits people in slightly different ways. That can be that Tumblr clicks for somebody, and you never know when that's going to happen. Going back to what you said, Rodric, about if you feel like you have value, you should be stepping up because you never know. You might be that Tumblr clicks for somebody that unlocks something that might've taken them five years if it hadn't had that conversation with you.
A lot comes up for me in that rephrase there. When the student's ready, the teacher appears. That’s certainly one. A long time ago, I wrote an article called Different Lips for Different Ears. I've been in that position, I don't know how many times, and we were talking before we did this about the place I'm at now. My house in Virginia, it's a mountain house. I remember being on a call. I travel a lot. I've been to 60 countries now on 6 continents in 46 states. I've been around a few places.
I was sharing coaching time with Melissa, a hospital CEO. She was in my cohort at Brown. We were splitting half an hour just going over whatever we were working on. This was right after COVID started to let up, but there were still mask regulations and country-to-country. You didn't know what you needed. It was a hassle to get around.
I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel in Amsterdam on this call, and she said, “If you build something that you don't want to leave, then travel is just work. Why would you bother doing that?” Light bulbs started going off, and I was like, “I've always gone out to get the things I needed. The peace, the quiet, the solitude, the nature, the experience, because I lived in the city.” When I sold my last business, I was able to come out here. I don't see a person, a plane, a car or hear a siren for as long as I'm up here. It’s everything I dreamed it could be.
You said 2,000 acres, Rodric?
Yeah. How many times had I heard that, Tom? A thousand, but that day, when Melissa said it, it clicked. That was Tumblr.
Let's get a little bit into what led you to that place then because what you're describing now is a place that is in the sights of maybe a lot of people who might be tuning in if that lifestyle's what they'd want to do, they'd like to at least have that option or whatever might be. They might be on that journey to make that happen. You've got a little bit of a roadmap or a way to share. People might be able to follow that dream, that path. Do you want to talk a little bit about the five pillars?
There's a lot to it, but it boils down to its very core essence, what do you want for yourself? We're not taught to think that way. As you were saying earlier, we all have different models of how to get there. Mine's called the WAVES Method. If you read the book, go to the website, or wherever you're going to encounter the WAVES Method. That's your Why, Authenticity, Values, Exploration, and a Statement of purpose. It's your passionate why. Why do you get up every day other than a paycheck?
Authenticity is not what your parents, pastor, or partner want but what you want, and it's okay to be selfish while doing this. Values, what makes me tick? Invariably, and I know you see this too, but when you're going through a values exercise, I was on a call with one of my clients, who's a musician in Denmark. What he had listed as his values changed almost on a 180. By the time you start, you're like a toddler, and you know why. Why is that your value?
You build that and the E in WAVES is you take that out into the world and the highs and lows of your life and you explore it. I tell my clients to take that values list with them. When their day is shit, they can look at that values list and go, “What am I not honoring right now? Why do I feel this way?” The same thing when they're in flow and everything's awesome. Why do I feel this way? Ultimately, building a statement of purpose. I primarily work with entrepreneurs, but every business owner that comes to me has a mission statement for their business. About 2% have a personal mission statement. Think about that disconnect. They know exactly what direction to take their business. They have no idea what direction they want to take their life.
I open up the book with a Tolstoy quote, and it's from Man's Search for Meaning. Ivan, the main character on his deathbed, looks up at his wife and says, “What if my whole life was wrong?” I read that when I was twenty-odd years old. I never forgot it. Much of the reason that I built my business is the way I did, the reason I'm able to be here. I grew up with nothing. I grew up listening to my parents argue about money. It all shaped how I was going to build my business. It was always very much to feed what I wanted as a person and nothing else.
That takes some courage and a few other ingredients, of course, too, because it doesn't seem to be the normal template. The normal template is you have to find some way to serve other people. You have to find some unique selling proposition, all these sorts of competitive edge. Work harder, work longer, work smarter, all these sorts of things. You're starting with the end in mind in a way, with the values, the why, and understanding what's real and true deep down.
If you look at the most successful people going back as far as you want to go, where would you rate their authenticity as human beings? There are some exceptions, but the best music artists, the best artists, the best business owners, even as crazy as Amazon has become, but you look at a Bezos that was 100% him and what he wanted to do and what he believed in. Now, what do you know, he is a quadrillioner. We are taught to want what other people want for us.
If you are single and focused on who you are, and again, it takes work, you got to do that, the inner work to figure out what that looks like. If you only focus on that, how can you not be successful? Every day is not work. When you hate your job, you don't want to go in. You don't want to leave. I don't have to do anything. I can go fiddle with the hot rods out in the garage if I want to, but I'm here with you because I love what I do. That's the difference. We donate everything we do.
I did see that. That's incredible.
It all gets donated to the foundation. I'm here because I love it. What do you know? It's becoming a success. I just keep walking through open doors as they come, and here we are together.
That is inspirational in the sense that if you do anything other than that, almost by definition you're off course. We wonder why we're tense, stressed, unhappy, or whatever might be. It seems mysterious to us. Beginning with those core things, it seems like you're going to get right with the focus and the alignment of our energy.
It's one of those very simple things that none of us do. Why are we all overweight? We just have to walk and eat better, or we just don't do it. This is no different.
Whenever I think of this condensed wisdom, I always think of the four agreements that were easy to remember, impeccable with your word. Very simple thing to remember. It takes some doing to keep to that because as soon as you decide on something, you have to stick with it. As soon as you don't, you're no longer impeccable with your word.
Great example.
The other thing that we talked about earlier that I want to circle back to, maybe in a self-serving way, because I feel like I'm starting with my podcasting career. Truth be told, my show is just a way for me to talk about what I'm passionate about, which is the Eye of Power. There's a whole world to podcasts I'm learning about. You started with a big splash. I'd be interested in hearing about how that happened. How are you getting on radar screens? How are you getting traction? What's the secret sauce there?
I'll take you back to the book launch. The podcast launch wasn't wholly different. My book was the number one bestseller. It hit number 1 in 7 categories on Amazon. I had no expectations. If I sold 10 or 1,000 books, I knew I put my all into it. However many it was, you know how the chips fell. People think incorrectly. I was one of those people that you write a book, list it, and people come to buy it. If you build it, they'll come. You start to hear crazy stats. I know you've heard them around podcasting as well, but the average book lifetime sells 200 copies. Ten a year for twenty years, and there are 500,000 books come out every year.
Getting into the top 100 of anything or becoming a bestseller is incredible odds. The James Clears of the world and Hal Elrod. I was with Hal out in Austin, and Miracle Morning sold 5 million books. Do you know how hard it is? You're in the top 0001%. It all comes down to launch. The launch was 85% of the book. It didn't take me long to write and edit the book. The launch was incredibly hard and expensive, both in time and money. I was doing eighteen-hour days leading up to the book launch and every podcast interview, reaching out to everybody I've ever known. The podcast is no different. I was a little bit lighter because I was only two months out of the book launch. Same thing. Lots of social media, lots of individual reachouts. We decided to launch it. I was live in Austin on stage, so that helps, too.
There were only 30 people in that room, but there was Hal, Justin Donald, Mark Murphy, and some influential people in there. It's like anything else in life, it's just the effort you put into it. Podcasting is no different. If you list your podcast, you're 1 of 5 million. You have to promote it and promote it. If you look at Hal right now as an example, he is in hardcore launch mode, and that's for the relaunch of Miracle Morning. He has not let up.
Hal told a funny story. He was on stage with Justin Donald and Amber, who was putting on the event. He said he set a goal to sell 1 million books, which, again, a mind-blowing number. He said he worked every day and he got to the end of the year, and he was 987,000 books short of his goal. I died when he said that because you're thinking, “Clearly, he went out and hustled and sold 1 million books.” No, it's a slog. It's the same thing for the podcast. You've got to be doing it because you love it and then you are. That's what ultimately will make it successful.
I had a novel come out a couple of years ago and it wasn't self-published. I had a publisher and I had all the illusions you were talking about there, Rodric. Thirteen thousand sales in the first year sounds darn good to me. I had all kinds of delusions, a grandeur, and all the rest of it. I'm realizing, based on what you were saying, I thought the number was much bigger if you include self-publishing the number of books that come out a year. I thought it was over 4 million. I could be wrong about that.
That could be very well true for the $0.99, twenty-page eBooks that come out and it's just flooded.
Maybe that's it. It's almost the new business card. Now, it seems like the podcast is the new business card. There's always a moving target there. That means that there are two beautiful things. One thing is that you don't have to get somebody's permission. You can go do it. You don't have to know somebody or be established or anything like that. The other thing is we need to be in the pursuit of our unique thing like we were talking about earlier. It's our unique voice. It circles back to the waves where you get to your why. Once you're clear on that, your unique voice will shine through that much easier. Would you agree with that?
A hundred percent. In the book industry, in particular, it was offensive, but I had a lot of people ask me, “Did you write your book?” I'm like, “Yeah, I wrote my book.” I never thought of another option. What's the point if I'm not writing it myself? Especially with AI, how many people are just “pumping out books?” I had a long conversation with an artist friend of mine about how, yes, to your point, it's a lot easier to publish something. It takes a few clicks of a mouse, and it doesn't have to be good, to be vetted, and to be edited. It can be absolute crap. You can put it on Amazon for sale. The people immediately know that it's not the author's words.
You see that in social media. You see that in videos. You see that in podcasts to some degree, where that level of authenticity, human beings still have that BS meter and you know it in an instant. It's an energy thing. I don't think it's a left-brain thing. It's why we still go to concerts and want to be with other people. It's very much a heart-to-heart unseen thing that you know that this wasn't their work, and you toss it. I don't think we're ever going to be fully replaced. I guess I'll put it that way.
The energy piece of it is key because when we boil everything down, that's what it all is. As soon as you start borrowing or using others, and maybe that's analogous to all the publishing things and all the noise out there. You're muddying the picture up, and then people can't see it as clearly, and therefore they can't respond as strongly.
You look at how many people call themselves authors, and then you look at what they've written. You don't want to take it away from them. They did something. It's not anything, and it still takes some hutzpah, whatever you want to call it, to press the publish button and put yourself out there, no matter what it is. It's probably the way Stephen King looks at you and me. I'm like, “No, I'm an author. This person's not an author.” That's exactly what they're saying.
To say we have a book, everybody's got a book in the sense that everyone's lived their life. Everybody has their set of experiences and their perceptions, and they are unique to them. A book, by definition, means we think it's valuable to somebody else. That's where we start having, when we say valuable, we're bringing in Values. The V in the WAVES. Now we've got a little bit of a metric, a scorecard that says, “Is this valuable or not?” If it's the same thing I've heard twenty times but all clichés and it doesn't offer anything else that I haven't heard before, my metric score is going to be different than somebody that's hearing it for the first time.
The question becomes, “How do you get your unique? What are you doing that's going to have that aha moment?” Whatever it might be, it doesn't have to be dramatic. It needs to be something that, again, goes to the A, the Authenticity. It's got to be something you've lived and know, then you're going to have energy that can then, therefore, be felt by somebody else.
I work with the 5 Phases of the Entrepreneur are real fast. Tell me if any of these have resonated with you or any of your clients. The believer. “I've got this thing, people are going to want my thing. I just need to get it in front of enough people, and I'll be a billionaire in six months on a beach.” That's uninformed optimism. There's the showman. Some people do want my thing. I've got the house, I've got the SUV, and I'm working 25 hours a day, 8 days a week. I could take a vacation, but I can't because the thing will fall apart without me. This is a lot harder than they told me it was going to be. Now you have informed pessimism.
You move to the anxious philosopher, and this is who I typically work with. I work with a late-stage showman into the anxious philosopher. This is, “Lots of people want my thing. I've built a successful business. I have all the Western metrics of success, yet I wake up every morning and say, is this all there is? I feel isolated. I feel alone because nobody wants to hear about my first-world problems making $250,000, $500,000 a year, and why I'm miserable. How dare I?” The anxious philosopher feels isolated. He knows he or she needs to make a change in their business, but they don't know who to ask. “Should I go back to corporate? Should I start another business? I have all the things. Why am I not happy?”
My job's going to move you through that level as fast as possible and figure out why you are in that position. You go on to the peaceful warrior where most things you do are aligned and on purpose, and you're building a business that feeds your soul first so that your cup's full so that you can feed others. Ultimately, you go on to business Buddha and can infer what that is. I've got a quiz on the website MillionDollarFlipFlops.com. It has 12 questions and takes you 3 minutes. It helps you self-identify where you are on that list and then gives you the tools to move to the next level if that's what you want. That's always the caveat.
The Peaceful Warrior is where most things you do are aligned and on purpose and you're building a business that feeds your soul first so that your cup's full and you can feed others.
Have you encountered people who were at a certain phase who wanted to stay at that phase and didn't want to advance any further?
The example I'll use is telling people that they need to make at least $20,000 a month profit to work with me privately. That number doesn't have to be $20,000. It can be $2,000. The idea is that maybe you know a way, and I ask this every time I'm on every show, but I have yet to find a way to teach someone that money's not the answer. You have to live with that. If you think that you're at $1 million and you're miserable and you have problems, when as soon as you make $10 million, then you won't have problems, you won't be miserable. I can't teach you out of that. You have to experience that.
Some people are in levels 1 and 2. I don't want to call it evolution, but they'll get there eventually in this life for the next, and it's anything else we do. We'll all figure it out eventually. Some of us just pay a coach or a mentor, or we pay somebody to get us there faster. Who's the person who's already there, who can teach me so I can get there faster and avoid all the pain? That's ultimately what we're here for.
I like that. That's good. Did you live those five phases, Rodric?
Absolutely. I've built multiple 7 and 8-figure businesses. I'm a lifelong entrepreneur. I've had probably twenty businesses in my life, various sizes of the service industry, brick and mortar, online, and with employees as a solopreneur. I've done it all as an entrepreneur. I've lived every single one of those. I found that you get to that anxious philosopher, and I would start over, “Wait, I don't have all the things that they told me. I'm still miserable. What happened?” If you read my story, I went through anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and worse. That's when I was making more money than I knew what to do with. I was making more in a month than my parents had ever made in a year when I was miserable.
Money is not the answer.
You lived the fact that money isn't the answer. That's one way.
I've always ad hoc coached people because they see the life I'm living and that I have a business and they say, “How's that possible?” They're working their tails off. They can't go on vacation. I usually spend six months or so of the year out of the country, and they couldn't figure out how I was doing it. I would help those closest to me.
When I sold the last business, I moved up here to the hills and I was away from everybody. I was on a beach in Thailand. I looked over at Nicole. I had sold the business about six months prior, and I said, “We've got to give it all away.” I wrote this in the book, but it was all this in here. That's why I wrote the book. Other people can benefit from this. It's silly for me to go fiddle with the hot rods or do some woodworking and just die with all this experience inside my head.
That's what drove me to write the book. Since becoming a professional coach and working with people from accountants to lawyers, hospital CEOs, nurses, musicians, and 15 or 16 different countries at this point, we're all the same. It's the same reason we started the foundation. We're one human family. There's no them, there's only us. We all go through these same experiences. If you can help somebody avoid that pain in any way for a $20 book, then life is well served.
Something that comes up a lot in my thinking is how profound we are the same and how everybody's unique. Everyone's got the unique things that makeup them, like a fingerprint. We might not be 100 at any one thing, but we have a mixture that's uniquely ours, and that gives us that unique voice circling back to what we were talking about earlier. When you boil it all down to the things that matter, pretty much we all want the same things. There's so much more that unites and connects us than there are those things that separate us.
Part of the beauty of life is that there's something to learn from everyone.
We need to be able to dial into our uniqueness. It's appropriate to show every individual and never lose sight of the fact that we are one family, everybody is made the same, to wants the same things. It boggles my mind that we can be so different when nobody's walked the life that Rodric has walked. No one knows what you know. Same thing for everybody. No one can replicate that exact thing, yet it's also equally true that we all pretty much are the same. It’s just a very profound juxtaposition of notions to me that I wrestle with a lot. What do you think along those lines, Rodric?
Million Dollar Flip Flops: Peace, Prosperity, and the Courage to Change Course In Life and Business
Part of the beauty of life is that there's something to learn from everyone. That's part of what I love about culture and technology and that you and I can have this conversation right now where we never would've met many years ago. There's a lot of beauty in that. It's that connectedness that, ultimately, we're all after. Our foundation is called Send A Student Leader Abroad. If you buy the book, courses, or anything, that's where all the money goes. We're partnered with EF Tours and our goal is to send 1 million kids abroad in my lifetime. It's for kids that are hustlers, grinders, and not going to be able to afford a trip like that.
You're in seventh grade and you're going to Europe with your class. That's what it is. I was that kid who couldn't afford it and listened to my parents argue about sending me. How that changed my worldview forever inspired my love of travel. That's why I've been to as many places as I've been. It taught me early on that there's no them, and that there's only us. Imagine the effect on the kids who otherwise would not be able to have that experience being able to go. They experience that for themselves, just like the money thing. You can't teach somebody that other people are the same as you. They have to go experience it in another place. You bring that back to a community that's not having that conversation, typically the exponential effect that will have. That's my big why. That's why I do all of this.
I love that vision. That is incredible. That is something. How are people tuning in right now, what would they do to help your cause there?
MillionDollarFlipFlops.com, we'll send you off to everything. It'll connect you to SASLA, which Send A Student Leader Abroad. It will connect you to all my socials, which I'm @MillionDollarFlipFlops on every channel. Instagram is typically where we hang out the most. That's the way to connect with me. Anything you do on our side of the equation, I call it the left side of the business, but anything Million Dollar Flip Flops gets donated to the right side of the business or Send A Student Leader Abroad.
Thank you, Rodric. I enjoyed our conversation.
Thank you, Tom. This has been great.
I'm very impressed with what you do, and I'm very happy that we were able to get together on this.
Likewise.
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Once again, I'd like to thank Rodric Lenhart for joining me. We had a wonderful conversation, and I'm feeling very thankful that I had a chance to connect with him. He has traveled the world and he's a musician. We've got a lot of interesting things to discuss, so I hope to have my relationship blossom from here with Rodric and learn from him. We'll see what happens from here on out, but I very much appreciate him coming on.
Especially, what he said about you having to live the fact that money is not the answer. You can tell it, we can say it, there are certain lessons in life where we have to live it to internalize these kinds of things. I appreciate that, as well as many other things that Rodric shared with us. Thank you again, Rodric, very much appreciate you.
Important Links
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About Rodric Lenhart
Rodric Lenhart is a Michigan-born lifelong entrepreneur, multi #1 best-selling author, and sought-after speaker who started his business journey at a young age.
Over the last thirty years, he has expanded his ventures to create multiple multi-million dollar companies in both product and service industries.
Having traveled to more than fifty countries across six continents, Rodric brings a unique worldview and a deep appreciation for freedom and autonomy to his work - donating all profits to his foundation Send a Student Leader Abroad in partnership with EF Tours with a goal of sending 1,000,000 kids on life-changing trips.