The Action Academy: From Passive to Passionate – Brian Luebben

Welcome to another episode. Today, we’re thrilled to have Brian Luebben, an entrepreneur, podcaster, and real estate investor. Brian’s journey is nothing short of inspiring—from climbing the corporate ladder to leaving it all behind to travel the world and build a thriving media empire remotely.

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Bronson Hill: Welcome, welcome, welcome, friends. I’m so excited to have Brian Luebben today. He is amazing, the idea of going from being passive in your investments to being passionate.

And, at the end of the day, we all want to do something that makes a difference in the world. We all want to live in a place where we feel most alive. I found this interview to be so inspiring.

I hope you enjoy it. Please share it with a friend and let’s jump in. Brian, welcome.

How’s it going, brother? Good to have you today. Have you been on the show?

Brian Luebben: Dude, when and where are we traveling together? 

Bronson Hill: We’ve got to figure that out. 

Brian Luebben: Yeah, I mean, you were speaking off here and it’s like, he’s passive guys, he’s passive investors.

They’re traveling around the world, man. Like, what are these guys doing? I’m all in.

Bronson Hill: Well, you know, it’s funny, I traveled six times internationally last year. You traveled for six months straight, which sounds like it was a great and terrifying experience as well, just for the length you were gone. But no, I love it.

I love I’m always planning my next trip. We talked about, you know, Nepal and India coming up and you’re getting ready. You got a couple of trips coming up.

Where’s your next big trip you’re doing?

Brian Luebben: Yeah, so I just got off of a season of like, I felt like a freaking marshmallow, you know, and so I think it’s a cool little side tangent, which we can go into the whole introduction and everything. But yeah, there’s so many people that are listening to this podcast and they’re just like, man, I can’t wait for that day where I could be like Bronson and Brian and traveling and I’m fully passive. And I’m here to tell you, my brother and my sister, you will get the passive income that you’re looking for by listening to this podcast.

But afterward, if you think that you’re going to live a passive life, you are wrong because that’s what happened, man. I feel like a freaking marshmallow. I just got off of Columbia and I went to Hawaii to see Brandon Turner, the tall bigger pockets, bearded Brandon.

Yeah, the bearded real estate investor we all know, know and love. And after that, I’m just like, man, this is too much. I need to go do some hard stuff.

So now I’m buckled down here in Austin, Texas, focusing on the investing, focusing on the business. And then I’m earning my next season of leisure, which will be in July. We’re going to go back to Europe and do a bunch of fun stuff for about a month and a half, but yeah, eight months for the first trip immediately after quitting my job in 2022, that was an experience, to say the least.

Bronson Hill: Yeah, I want you to get into that and we’re going to jump into that. And this is great because you have the Action Academy, which you’re teaching people how to take action and how to get going. And even at 29 years old, you were able to quit your job.

And you know, my book Fire Yourself. You’re able to fire yourself. Your book is From Passive To Passionate: How To Quit Your Job – Grow Your Wealth & Turn Your Passions Into Profits.

So talk to us a little bit about your journey. I think it’s a really cool compelling story that you did in a very short time, even very, very young. A lot of people are 40s, 50s, or older and like, man, I want to do what you did in your 20s.

So talk to us about how and why you did what you did.

Brian Luebben: Yeah, so I did a pretty traditional upbringing, you know, graduated college marketing degree, found out about variable income, aka Commission. And I was like, man, I got to go all in on that thing. So I went to sales and sold my way into a position.

I had no business and qualifications so I got into a pretty good sales job right out of the gate.

Bronson Hill: What kind of sales can I ask? I was in medical device sales for 10 years.

Brian Luebben: So you’re probably familiar. So it was the uniforms.

Bronson Hill: Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Luebben: Yeah. And I say and I say the name of the company because my mission and my message are to help people will replace corporate with cash flow and go from employee to entrepreneur. It was still a wonderful company and a wonderful experience, which is actually a really cool point that I like to talk about on the podcast, which is the most difficult position to leave is good enough.

Yeah. The most difficult position to leave is good enough or, you know, in your relationships. How many people do you know in a marriage?

That’s good enough. Yeah.

Bronson Hill: You know, most people settle, right? And that’s the thing I had. I called the golden handcuffs, right?

I was making over 200 K a year working a corporate job and it was too good to let your family’s like, why would my family’s? Why would you ever want to leave your great job over 30 hours a week? And so for you, you came to that same point where you’re like, this is good enough is not good enough for me.

So how did you get to that? Like what happened there?

Brian Luebben: Yeah, so I was working the sales job made to the top of the company. I was number eight out of 5,079 reps. So I like to say that because some people will be like, oh, I’m the top sales rep.

You have 12 people in the company.

Bronson Hill: So I gave you like 0.1% or something.

Brian Luebben: So I did the thing over four and a half years was making a quarter million a year. And so I was on cloud nine man until I did this exercise that I always recommend people to take because I enjoy sharing my story, but also tactical things that people can listen to on this podcast and go do today. I looked at my boss’s boss.

I looked at my VP, my regional VP and I was like I’m about to be you in five years by crush like that will be me and that guy was booked back to back on Zoom calls and 15-minute increments. He wasn’t seeing his daughters grow up. He was overweight unhealthy traveling around not seeing his family and not making candidly that much more money than me maybe a hundred thousand additional for twice the workload.

I said I don’t want to do that. So long story short, we could dissect it, but I ended up beginning to invest in real estate. Once I made that realization I saw my progression and I saw that the goals that I wanted for me and my life did not align directly with the goals that the company had.

And so I was like it’s time to get out of here. So long story short started buying some rental properties. I didn’t have a sexy portfolio.

I did it in the easiest least sexiest way ever. I house-hacked the co-living strategy right into the other bedrooms out started up my podcast where I interview multi-millionaires every single week for two and a half years now Action Academy podcast ended up becoming its own business, which I built a couple of other businesses on top of along with the real estate was able to leave that job March 2022 March 17th. So it’s almost the two-year anniversary that I went to travel full-time around the world for eight months afterward and now built my own business off of the back end of that and now we’re doing over a million a year from that almost pure lights pretty pure cash flow.

We’re running like about a 70% 60% margin on that one man. So it’s a blast.

Bronson Hill: That’s amazing. You know, there’s a lot of things about your story. I find I’m sure there’s way more to it.

But like me, I was someone that you know, I had that revelation. I was making money, but I didn’t want to keep chasing and I those calls from the sales manager or a boss like hey, you know selling more widgets or how’s this going to the other quarter no matter how good you do you always chase to the next big thing and it was like you know slap on the back. Hey, what are you doing next quarter?

What’s happening here and still even though it wasn’t necessarily a time for money trade is that you brought up a really good point that the goals of the company were different than my personal goals and it’s just something a lot of people don’t get to but I think it’s really powerful. There’s a transformation journey that happens there. I remember I actually left about two and a half years ago somewhere time frame to you and are sitting right at this right where I’m sitting right now at my desk and having this revelation of like imagining those quarter and calls from my manager saying how are you gonna sell more stuff and just what came out of my mouth was thank God.

I’m not working that job anymore, right because it allows for this life that I can travel and I can do the things that I want to do and it’s interesting where it’s landed. I think both of us are not yachts and my ties and just simply travel for the sake of travel, but you’ve kind of doubled down with hey, I’ve got more purpose. I’ve started multiple companies.

I’ve got a seven-figure of multiple seven-figure businesses like talk to us about that. Like what’s kind of your why that’s that’s major because you don’t have to work in the way that you’re working, but what’s pushing you to do that man?

Brian Luebben: And that is my mission. That’s like my mission and my message. I want to share with everybody is everybody thinks that what they want is that they’re going to quit this job.

They’re going to go sit on the beach sit my ties like you’re talking about and that that’s they’re going to be their existence, but that’s if you’re a high performer and you financially get to a point where you’re able to do that and retire you aren’t able to emotionally and mentally retire. That’s the kicker. I get really pissed off Bronson.

I listen to these podcasts and read these books acting like financial freedom is the answer financial freedom is the beginning of life. It’s not the end. It’s not the end destination.

It’s the start of the race like when you become financially free, you’re walking up to the starting line, and then the guy standing there with the gun saying go and now that is when you as a human being are now running your race for the first time in your adult life. You’re running your own race. You’re becoming your own man, your own woman, your own business owner.

So it’s just like that is a message. I want to get across is it’s not just about the passive income. The back passive income is the ultimate tool to yield the final destination, which is what I call passionate income.

So what can you get paid to do that you would already happily do for free? So they talk about that in grade school, right? Elementary.

Oh, yeah, if you work if you do something you love you’ll never work a day in your life. I was like, oh, thank you. Mrs. Johnson. That means so much to me, you know, but I got a mortgage, you know, people are listening to this. I got kids to pay. I got kids to feed.

I got bills to pay. What are you talking about? So it’s a combination of the art and the science to use a Tony Robbins term.

We use the we use the science of passive investing and through real estate businesses creating your own business stuff like asset classes that are able to yield the freedom to utilize the art, which is okay. What am I great at? What does the world want?

What is the market need and what can I get paid to do and then that intersection is where your passionate income is and for me, it originated from just necessity. I had so many people reaching out to me hundreds of people each week asking, hey, you’re traveling. You’re working this corporate job.

How the hell do you pull this off and you’re still not bankrupt years later and making more money now than I was before in my corporate job? So how did you do that? And I would just help people for free and then we can go into the business process, but it eventually built itself into its own company now we help six-figure employees become seven-figure business owners and it’s the most fulfilling and rewarding thing you’ve ever we’ve ever done in our entire lives and it’s amazing.

Bronson Hill: Well, I love what you shared so much about what you shared is so powerful. I was getting goosebumps just the idea that like, you know, in a lot of people that you said they’ll start out thinking I want that lifestyle or I don’t have to work, but we’re made to work. We’re made to do something, but it’s you know something like 65% of people don’t like their jobs.

They don’t like their managers. They don’t like what they do and that’s a tragedy, you know, it’s a tragedy that that’s the case. I mean we should be at a place where you know, once we have enough to support ourselves, like you said, then you can approach the starting line.

You can start creating for yourself for the world for there’s a Japanese term called Ikigai, which is like all those things come when you are talking. I was like all those things coming together at once and it’s amazing what happens and there’s a proverb violation proverb, but like it says, “without vision people perish” and I just see so many people just going through. I’ve got the job that I have to have.

I’m in the mirrors. I mean they’re doing the they’re going through the motions. They’re doing it because they have to do it and when you get to a place where you’re free, then you can be like well what if I didn’t do all my money if we had money and time or know what would I create?

What would I do with my life and you know, it’s the idea of watching your cell like seeing the world needs more people that have come alive that have come alive with what they’re here to do and really get to discover their purpose. Now you got this at a very young age. I know you work with a lot of people that are older.

What do you say to somebody that’s kind of like in you know let’s say they’ve got four kids and they’re working a job they still don’t like and how do you work through that or work with people that are kind of have some also some challenges to just okay go from oh yeah I want to quit and go do this but I can’t right now like how do I what are the what’s the step between here and there especially if there are some external challenges there like that.

Brian Luebben: Well you just gonna believe in yourself, man. No, I’m about to drop a quote and this quote is about to be so good and it’s about to tie in so well with everything that you just said it’s another Asian proverb that you guys are going to go stop what you’re doing you’re going to leave this podcast a five-star rating and review.

So another one that I love man is action without vision is a daydream and then vision with no vision without action is a daydream action without vision is a nightmare. Oh, wow. Okay.

“Vision without action is a daydream action without vision is a nightmare.”

Bronson Hill: Is that your quote? 

Brian Luebben: No, it’s an Asian proverb.

Okay. Okay, whatever. Hey, whatever you do in life.

There’s always a small Asian child that does it better. I promise you. So anyways, what it all boils down to is at the end of the day, you have people in all these different socio-economic conditions, right?

You know, a lot of people are saying hey Brian, this is awesome that you say this. I work 60 hours a week. I have three kids four kids.

I have a mortgage. I have these bills. I have this car payment.

I have student loan debt. Okay, cool. 

Step one, first and foremost is people have things backwards.

We hear the words analysis paralysis thrown around like it’s some terminal disease, right? Absolute bullshit or bull crap. If you want to edit that out.

I don’t know if I can cuss on here. It’s fine. But absolute bull crap.

So analysis paralysis only exists because you’re allowing it to exist. You can simply make the decision to change that today. People wait for the confidence to take action.

But the reality is that the confidence in the action is what yields the confidence. Taking action is what yields confidence. So you can literally do yourself and like work yourself and move yourself and act yourself into anything that you want.

So people are sitting on the sidelines and they’re like, well, I don’t know what I want. I don’t know how to get started. I don’t know where to go next because they’ve never properly taken the time to actually diagnose and determine where they’re heading in general.

If that makes sense. So for me to bring this down to earth, right? Whenever I speak woo-woo, I’m going to bring it down into a tactic.

So for me, I was in my corporate job. I said, what life do I want to live? And I wrote out what’s called a Three-Year Vivid Vision.

It’s a wonderful book by Cameron Harold. And I also wrote about it in my book. Yeah, Cameron is now a personal friend of mine.

And he came and spoke to our community now. And it’s been awesome. So he writes about what would you do if you had unlimited money.

If money wasn’t an object, what’s your perfect day? What’s your perfect week? What’s your perfect business look like?

And I wrote in my cubicle working that job. I was at my desk writing this out. And I said, man, I wake up and I’m in Mykonos and I walk out on my balcony and I can feel the cobblestones warm from the Greek sun rising in the morning.

And I don’t have any calls. And in the afternoon, I have some business meetings. I could do virtually from anywhere with a Mac and a mic and I can make money anywhere around the world.

That is my dream. That was my three-year vision. I wrote that out in 2020.

And if you do the math, I did it in 2022. So I did it a year early. So that is the number one thing that you guys need to focus on is you need to create a vision of your end destination because we use the end destination and the end vision to determine the investments in the asset classes that we participate in today.

For instance, how many of your listeners right now are buying single-family real estate or attempting to and they may be saving up money for a year, or two years? They’re looking for that house that will cash flow them something and they still haven’t made the move on the house, right? That’s only going to give you $150, $200 to pass a cash flow per month.

If you’re lucky, if you’re lucky. And these people that are doing this have $50,000 of cash in the bank. They make $300,000 a year.

I’m like, wait a second. So if you just had clarity, you’d realize you can’t invest in this asset class at all. Yeah, it’s not going to move you towards where you want to go.

You need to do a commercial. You need to buy a small business. You need to do something along those lines.

So there are three levels of clarity and I’ll get off my soapbox here for a second, but I just created this framework and it really is helping people and I want to share it on all these podcasts. So the three levels of clarity are directional, sequential, and tactical. So directional, where are you going?

What do you want? Do you want to be location-independent? What role do you want to play in these partnerships?

Do you want to be the capital, the more passive side? Do you want to be the operating partner in these partnerships? What role do you want to play?

What does a perfect week and a perfect day look like? Where are you living? Directional, sequential.

How fast do you want to get there? That will determine what investments you invest in and what asset classes because if you want to replace $10,000 of passive cash flow in a year, you can’t do that through single-family real estate. You have to do that by buying a small business or something.

So sequential lets you know, okay, here’s my timeline. I want to do this in two years. That impacts your asset classes, which leads all the way down to tactical, which is now I know where I’m going and how fast I want to get there.

And then only these two or three asset classes are the asset classes that would yield this outcome. So now I go find the people that are doing these asset classes and I steal their models and steal the tactics that are very easily and recognizably documented across the internet. Because Bronson, correct me if I’m wrong, people have bought real estate before, correct?

Bronson Hill: Of course, for many years. 

Brian Luebben: So why are we all so emotionally trying to make our own models and systems to do this? You don’t have to.

It’s that short answer of the answer.

Bronson Hill: It’s like, just do what other people are doing. Yeah, exactly. And I love, you know, I can tell from you, that you’re similar to me.

I had a goal for three years. I want to leave my job and I was able to leave in like two and a half years that we came before. But it’s always like creating a goal.

And Tony Robbins talks about that. Create a goal and then continually change your approach. Be willing to try different things.

So if you have an end goal in mind and this is what I tell people too, some people like it’s all about making the decision, right? Once I made the decision that I was actually committed to leaving my job things. I didn’t know how I was going.

I had no idea how I was going to do it. I said, oh, maybe real estate, maybe thought that I tried different things. But once I committed to it, then it actually began to happen, right?

And so it’s in the moments of decision that your destiny is shaped, right? So you make that decision and I have this theory that life has an action bias. So if somebody has a great theory and they have a great goal, but they don’t, they just are creating plans, but they don’t actually do anything.

The person that does, starts taking action and then steps back and reflects that and just says, okay, how did this work? Okay, let’s change whatever and just keep doing that. It’s amazing what can happen, right?

And I think, you know, anybody who’s an entrepreneur is all about trying different things, figure out what works and that doesn’t work. Try it everything or add on to this or double down on that. And it’s just amazing for a lot of people.

We get stuck in like you talk about analysis paralysis, but a lot of times it’s because we haven’t made the commitment that we’re willing to do the work to do what it takes. We haven’t either come up with a clear enough vision of like, this is like Cameron Harold, a vivid vision, or we haven’t actually committed to that outcome, right? So how are you, it sounds like you’re doing a fair amount of mindset work as well as helping people to move forward.

What are some assets and some different approaches you find people are using to be able to get closer to their financial goals?

Brian Luebben: Yeah, so it’s actually been a super fun thought experiment. So like you said, it all boils down to like where you’re trying to go, right? So we, what we did is we went from the traditional like online course model.

So one of our core businesses is the Action Academy. So we do like the podcast, our business, and try our business models. Let’s give all the information away for free and sell the implementation, right?

Tired business model. So the best calls that we have internally, we’ll post on the podcast for free. We’ll post on YouTube and I’ll make a video on it.

I’ll send a newsletter because it’s the implementation that matters because, at the end of the day, it’s not as much the how, but it’s more so like the where and the who, right? So where do you want to go? And then who’s already been there?

So what we do in the core business is we just have every single person that is already financially free is like half the community and then the other half of the operators that are trying to pull it off. So the main ones that we’ve seen have been for short-term cash land flipping has been huge. I wouldn’t necessarily classify that as a passive asset.

It’s very much an active asset, but from a fast cash generation standpoint, dear God, man, people are ripping in the land right now like in that rhyme that was catchy.

Bronson Hill: I didn’t mean to do that. That’s another book. That’s another book for you there.

Brian Luebben: Yeah, ripping in land flipping. So self-storage has been huge. Multifamily has been huge.

We’ve got a lot of people doing mobile home parts. Now business acquisition has become a lot more in vogue. We have a lot of people that are buying everything from laundromats to car washes, which are slightly more active, and then going all the way to service companies like small like five to ten-man service companies.

I have a buddy who just did a hearth installation company stove installation company. So it just depends on what your end destination is. But if you’re really looking for faster cash flow, the business acquisition route has been found to be a little bit better.

We’re currently looking at a couple of different businesses to vertically integrate and I’ll kind of bring this down to earth here in a second because I’m kind of floating away with all this different talk for the audience. But right now we’re looking at CPA firms like legal practices stuff that we can vertically buy and integrate within our community. But the short answer to the question is for the listener, you need to decide today what you’re optimizing for.

Are you optimizing for cash flow or for equity? Because that heavily influences your investment vehicle. So I would make the assumption that a lot of you are investing for cash flow, which most people don’t even realize like they’re like, I want to do this multifamily property right?

But like you’re not going to really get the payout from that until three to five years down the road when the balloon matures. So it’s like if you would have known that then maybe that wasn’t the best cash flow vehicle to begin. So yeah, so I’ll pause there.

Bronson Hill: Yeah, it all comes down to people and people and systems. Yeah, I know that’s it, man. That’s that’s really a really good word and I think you know for me having over 2000 calls with high net worth investors.

A lot of people are trying to figure out what to do. And a lot of times I found there’s there’s another conversation that’s a passive versus an active role where somebody’s got a net worth of 5 million or something. It makes sense to maybe find deals to do where you’re not as active in it.

We’ve done a lot more things on the business side. We’ve done a lot more. We found real estate.

We have 2000 multifamily units, but we found in general a lot of the you know deals like there’s cash flow coming or there’s things down the road that will cash out, but it’s it’s insurance and the costs have gone up whatever. So we’re our ATM machine fund. We’re doing our business.

You know, we have a private equity thing we’re involved with oil and gas other things that produce cash flow. So yeah, it’s so important to figure out what you need to optimize for. What would you say is if you were going to give some advice to someone who’s in a similar situation that you were in who’s in a job who’s working who’s making good money and maybe just doesn’t really see the need for it right now.

Like, okay. Well, why do I need to watch your lookouts? I’m making pretty good money now or what’s the urgency right?

Like what’s the reason someone should start figuring out how to invest and make money while they sleep or make money outside of their job?

Brian Luebben: So I’ll say that that is a completely personal thing. And in our business, we have made the conscious decision to not be the person to not be the person or the message that moves the needle there because I don’t know about you, but like convincing someone to get up and say, hey, I want to lose weight or convincing someone to get up and say, hey, I want to quit my job. They just simply haven’t faced enough pain.

Pain is awful. We all shy away from it. But it’s also the greatest motivator if I hadn’t been denied an $82,000 bonus during COVID then maybe I would still be at that job.

Bronson Hill: Wow, you know, they were going to pay it to you and they just say we’re not going to pay you or correct.

Brian Luebben: Yeah. 

Bronson Hill: What happened? What like how could they do that?

Brian Luebben: So they fired I think 10% of the workforce overall because we all went through that and I was one of the ones that remained and I was like that’s when I hit everything. I was like the top and they said, hey, we can’t justify paying out bonuses at this amount when we just fired, you know, they thought it was a bad PR look.

Bronson Hill: And that’s busy. That’s the moment you realize it’s very difficult. You don’t have the control that you think you have and that’s where we’re one health issue away from one family member getting a health issue.

Yeah, if something happens it’s out of our control or whatever, and all of a sudden, I mean something like 40% of Americans would struggle if they had a $500 emergency payment. Like it’s kind of shocking, but it’s true.

There are a lot of people that don’t have things in place. What happens if a family needed some sort of financial somewhere other or a transplant was really expensive and you couldn’t do it? So to be able to like you said a lot of people say so you’re more on the side of when someone’s made the decision then you’re like now what how it’s implementation of what now what okay, I’m going to do this better on how you’re showing them the how you’re giving them the tools to how to get there.

Brian Luebben: Yeah, so the kicker is like you can’t force someone to move that doesn’t want to move. You can’t for just like even with an addict you can’t force someone to quit drinking unless they want to get sober. So it’s just a matter of pain.

They haven’t felt the pain yet, but it will come eventually and then it becomes a conversation of the pain of discipline versus the pain of regret, right? Yeah, so so what we do is we find the people that are like hand up and a lot of them are listening to this podcast. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be listening, right?

They felt that pain and you know, some people may listen to this and say hey, I enjoy my job. Well, that’s wonderful. We want you to have the optionality of freedom, right?

Because when that manager changes when the ownership changes and all of a sudden you star employee number, let me check the spreadsheet 472.5 like hey, sorry, you’re the one on the chopping block, you know, you gave your all to the company, but they’re not going to give your all to you just like with real estate with oil and gas with anything that you invest in never love something that doesn’t love you back ever. Yeah, you can’t love a real estate deal.

Can’t love that multi-family apartment. You can’t love that job that doesn’t love you back. So yeah, when people come to us and they say, okay, I make 100 to 600,000 dollars a year.

I have a couple of rental properties. I want to scale this thing. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

All I’ve done is save my money and buy real estate with my own money because I’m a high-income earner. They’re like now, what do I do? I said welcome my brother and my sister.

Let’s get to work and then we get into the scale conversation and the biggest the biggest detractors that we’ve seen are a lack of confidence, lack of clarity, lack of community, and lack of capital. Because I host the four C’s. So I posted so I hosted a hundred free coaching calls because people were always constantly asking me on my podcast how did you do this?

And so I said I’ll just coach 100 of you for free and I did for 15 minutes each and like those I just took notes and then that’s what we turn our business into is from those notes. So if anybody’s looking to start a business, this is called establishing your MVP, your minimum viable product. Yeah, so we did that.

Yeah, so we did that and then every single we asked the same question that you just asked like what’s stopping you and they’re like, I’m a lone wolf. I’ve been investing by myself my entire life. My family, my friends, and my co-workers all think I’m stupid.

I don’t know anyone around me who buys multifamily or buys businesses like I’ve never even heard of that. I don’t know where those people are which leads into capital. I don’t know where to find money.

I don’t know anybody that has money. I don’t know anybody that invests. Why would anybody invest with me?

Which leads to confidence. I don’t know what I don’t know. Therefore, I cannot do it.

You know, so they’re waiting for that confidence to take the action right which goes back to the action taking the action is what yields the confidence and then it goes back all the way down to community and in commercial real estate and business acquisition and life all roads lead back to community because the cash flow gets you out of your job, but your community keeps you out and that’s whether you do a paid one, a free one.

You’ve got your own freaking tribe of people that you roll with. It just becomes more and more increasingly difficult and expensive to find people who are operating at high levels. Like today the people that I look for advice for are the ones that are doing 10 million dollars a year in top-line revenue.

And so I’m like, okay, how do I get lunch for that guy or a hundred million dollars a year like now for me to get coaching from them? It’s more expensive, right? Yeah, so that’s what we do is we’re just like, okay, you need capital partners.

You need operators. You need mentors. You need people holding your hands through these deals because another online course module is not going to help you buy that 30 units that you want to buy you need somebody that’s walking you through and holding your hands.

So like that’s what the business became. Yeah, so that’s what we do day-to-day.

Bronson Hill: That’s awesome. And I know I can tell there’s a lot of passion there for really helping people to get there and you have a passion to help a million people achieve financial freedom. Talk to me a little bit more.

This is more of a personal question, but for you Brian Luebben personally, what’s the thing that really drives you because obviously you’ve got financial freedom? You’ve got multiple businesses that are seven six seven-figure. What’s the thing that continues to drive you personally?

Brian Luebben: I give you a tactical answer or I can lead with the truth. Which one do you want first? 

Bronson Hill: Well, I think you know, I’m going to go with that.

I just go to go to the truth and go to the deep, you know.

Brian Luebben: I think you’ll understand it in people that are entrepreneurs on here will understand it. I’m addicted to the game. I love the game of it.

I’m never going to stop. It’s just been in my I think people are born entrepreneurs or they aren’t and they just spend their entire life going through school, going through, you know, work and they just keep bucking against the system and like, why are we doing it this way? Why can’t we do it a different way?

This is inefficient. Why don’t we do this? And then eventually passive income unlocks them to finally be like themselves.

And so just the game of business is so absurdly fun and fulfilling. Not even the accomplishments of it that it’s actually difficult to celebrate the accomplishments of it, but the process of the climb. I love so so much that it’s just a blast for me to do now from a tactical perspective to bring it back down, right?

You asked the question previously, like, you know, what keeps you motivated? You know, even back when I was making the money that I was making, right? Core million dollars at like twenty-four, twenty-five, and twenty-six years old is a lot of money.

And I’ll tell you how much it costs for me to live and travel around the world about ten thousand a month. Honestly, it doesn’t cost that much money. I don’t have debt at all.

So I’ve got a twenty-three hundred dollar dream apartment here in Austin, Texas. I’m looking over the water downtown right here. And then I just go travel a lot.

But I got advice from a mentor. His name is Ben Kenny. He’s a big entrepreneur and he was like Gary Keller’s right-hand man and Keller Williams.

And Ben gave me some wonderful advice where he goes. He’s like you get everything that you want out of life at about five hundred thousand dollars of take-home income. A five hundred thousand dollars of take-home income.

Personally, say you buy whatever house you want for the most part. You can get the boat if you want it. You could travel with the family.

You could do whatever vacations you want when you’re taking home five hundred net free and clear after taxes. He’s like you can do anything you want after that. It’s just gravy.

So you have to create a different game to play. So the game that he recommended that I play that I’ve been playing ever since is the game of the millions. So game one is how do you make a million a year?

Okay. Game two is how do you get a million a year? Game number three is how you pay your team a million a year?

How do you pay your top five people each a million dollars a year? Game number four is how do you comfortably personally give away a million dollars a year? So that forces you to think bigger because if we go all the way back to the beginning of this conversation, why did I leave corporate?

Because my vision was too big for their vision to contain. And you run companies yourself. So you know that everyone’s like where I want to find rock stars.

I want to find a rock star partner a rock star operator a rock star person to run this business or partner with on this fund or run or work for me and my company. I’m here to tell you my friend unless you are a rock star, you will not attract a rock star that works in business as well. Your vision needs to be so big that other people’s rock star-size visions can fit within yours.

Yeah, and until you like as the CEO that is your job is to make the vision so large that you can take somebody that is like that person that guy that girl and they’re like everything that I want in my life. Like they’ve got these big dreams goals and plans you’re like how do I bring that into my world? And so for instance, my COO Caitlin, has a dream right now.

I’ve already got her financially free. She’s already good already with what we pay her today. She’s she and she lives her dream life and now she’s like I want to take my kids to world school.

She’s pulling her four kids for young kids out of school and she’s going to take them around the world as a family and anybody that has kids. That’s how crazy that idea is, right? Especially and she’s going to teach them.

She’s going to teach them you know different lessons of different curricula in different countries. They’re going to like have this world school experience and we did the math and that’s going to cost her $87,000 to pull it off with her family on top of living expenses. So I’m like, okay, well, let’s create a plan for you to make that so I can like we can fund that.

That’s amazing. Yeah, and that type of stuff is what keeps you going so now it’s like her kids are like in my world and I’ve got another guy that’s like a freaking ex-marine sniper. That’s working with me.

He wants to create a private equity fund. I’m helping him do that. Another guy that’s my media guy wants to travel around the world and play guitar and make YouTube videos.

And so he’s a consultant. How do I get him out of his job? That’s how you keep going.

Bronson Hill: That’s amazing. I love it.

Well, there’s a lot of passion there man. I just know we’re kind of getting short on time. I just wanted to say, man, I just talked with you.

I can just tell you you’ve got a lot of passion for what you’re doing helping others get there. I’ve heard great things. We’ve got some investors that have been a part of your group and so I was like when I hear somebody’s name multiple times.

I like to say let’s let’s connect with this guy. Let’s get so I just love getting to know you and having you on the show man. I’d love to do some more connecting and like I said, we got to do some travel together.

So let me know. It’s the last minute. If you want to come to Everest let me know man.

It’ll be fun. But how can people get in touch with you? Follow what you’re doing kind of you know, get about your book.

You want you talk about how people can reach out to you.

Brian Luebben: Yeah, not too hard to find at Brian Luebben everywhere. I recommend for people to start I would say listen to the Action Academy podcast. We do an episode every single day for two and a half years.

I’ve done over 37 countries in seven different time zones. We’ve interviewed millionaires billionaires all the sort every single day. If you like hearing me talk, that’s what I do.

And I ask questions and shut up for the most part. The book From Passive to Passionate: How to Quit Your Job – Grow Your Wealth – Turn Your Passions Into Profits. We discuss a lot of the mental theories today, but that’s the first half of the book.

The second half of the book is about how to navigate and negotiate seller financing and businesses, real estate, and how to create your own funds. What role do you play on the operations team? Very, very hyper tactical even how to run and manage your cash flows with the profit first system is in the back half of the book.

And then lastly, our group is the Action Academy Community. I would highly recommend listening to the podcast first read the book first and see if you get a vibe and then you can go jump into that ecosystem if you feel like it. But we just are here to help people go from employee to entrepreneur through passive income.

So thanks for having me, Buddy.

Bronson Hill: Really appreciate you being here man. Today’s been a lot of fun. Thanks so much.

We’ll have you back in the get in the future. 

Brian Luebben: Thank you, brother. Anytime.

Bronson Hill:  All right. So I love this interview with Brian. I hope you got as much out of it as I did.

I love the idea of really creating the end goal in mind and also what steps you’re going to be able to get there. I found in my experience when you commit to something you actually say this is what I want to have happen in my life. I want to be financially free.

I want to have this much, you know, I want to have $100,000 in annual or monthly passive income coming in. There are ways you can do it but you have to commit to it first, and then people start taking actions. So his group is called the Action Academy.

You should check it out. I’ve heard great things about it but anyway, you can see the game that he’s playing right and it is the money. Tony Robbins talks about this as well that money is like a game and it’s like a board game that you’re playing and when you first learn a game you think about how you’re learning moving the pieces around you don’t know what you’re doing and somebody’s showing you things and you’re just not good.

But over time the more you play it the better. You get and then you get intuitive to see opportunities before they come and so some of you listening. I know there have been a lot of opportunities you’ve had to be able to create some of you who are new haven’t had those opportunities so appreciate you being here and I’m really excited about some things that we’re creating in our business about trying to help individuals to learn how to raise capital.

So that’s something we’ve mostly focused on passive investors but I’ve raised over $40 million in the last four or five years and I’ve had some things to teach. I’ve done some coaching in the past but we really haven’t done it widely. And so we’re looking at creating more in that space.

So I’d love to have you reach out. You can shoot me an email at [email protected]. If you’re interested in learning more about that and before we launch we’re trying to get some feedback from individuals to see what would be beneficial. So anyway again, I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Please feel free to share this with someone you think needs to hear this and make sure you like and subscribe to this podcast this video and look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Mailbox Money Show. 

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