Hey everybody, this is Coulton Woods and you're listening to learning from the experts.

So here's the deal- I know how frustrating it is to waste countless hours sifting through wanna-be experts who never actually help you in the end.

Then to learn years later that there was a real expert who could have helped you 100 times faster than learning it on your own.

I've created this podcast to save you time and money while taking you on a journey with me as I learn from real experts who can actually help you grow your business.

My name is Coulton Woods and you're listening to learning from the experts.

I'm so glad you joined me on my second episode here.

I'm super grateful to have you and I'm excited to kick this off and I'm going to tell you guys a little bit about how I got started in business and how I epically failed at it and had no idea that there was so much more that I could have done.

But obviously you just learn from it, right?

As I started college I always had a really high interest in business.

I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.

I always wanted to own my own business and work for myself and make it happen.

My goal was to go into marketing and get a business degree through marketing.

I didn't even know that they had an entrepreneurship degree at the time, which is what I ended up graduating in, but at the time, I'm trying to get a marketing degree and I remember all these classes that I had to take and none of them were teaching me business stuff.

You have to take the foundations that just give you your base foundation for life.

And you know what, I just want to take one business class at least a semester even though I've got all of these foundation classes, who cares, I'll just take a business class and try to kick it off a little early or as early as I could, you know.

So I took an online business class and technically we were supposed to start a business online, but really we were just supposed to start any kind of business and try to make any kind of money to get the grade.

And so I remember racking my brain over this, what can I sell, what can I do?

And all these ideas that I had, I just didn't have money for. I was a super poor college student. I didn't have money.

We're living in the cheapest place we could find and trying to pay the bills.

I remember all of these ideas.

No, I can't do that…

I don't have money for that...

I'm just killing myself over this idea.

One day I'm walking from one class to another.

I mean it was cold outside and I think I had a big coat on and you know, you're just trying to get from one class the other and not be outside as much as possible.

Well I remember I need to check my phone, it vibrated or something, I have to see what that was.

So I go to pull my phone out and as I pulled it out, I don't know if you've ever done this or not but I pull it out and it catches on your pocket or your jacket and you end up flinging it through the air.

It's almost like you meant to throw it and that's kinda what I did.

I pulled it out and somehow just threw it as far as I could in a way and I just kind of watched it as it floated in the air and just kept floating in the air and then smashed on the front of it and slid for 20 feet on the concrete and I don't know about you but if you have ever done that, you just don't even want to pick it up because you just know it's demolished.

If you haven't experienced that yet, good for you, but I just knew it was going to be totally toast so I go over there and I thought oh man, there's no way it cannot be broken, it would be just a miracle if it wasn't because I don't have money to pay somebody to fix it.

I'm just hoping it's not broken.

But I knew it was broken.

I pick it up and sure enough the front of it is shattered to pieces.

I could barely see anything on there.

It's just so shattered and you can see scratch to from it sliding for 20 feet.

And I thought man, I do not have money to fix this.

You know, I'm a poor college student.

These things are expensive.

Back then I had an iPhone 4.

I don't know if you remember those, but they're glass on the front and the back and the corners.

So no matter what you did, you just broke it.

Yeah.

Good Times.

So I thought, I need to fix this. I really enjoyed taking things apart as a kid.

I don't know why my dad always thought it was weird.

I remember I bought a new paintball gun, I love paintball and I bought a new paintball gun and the first thing I did was take it home and I took it apart and disassembled the entire thing just to see how it worked because I like to know how things work.

I don't know why and I never had a problem taking things apart and putting them back together.

It was just fun, I'd take it apart, put it back together and then knew how it worked.

That way when I was paint balling and something went wrong, I knew how to fix it and take care of it.

So I thought I'm going to fix this.

I can do it.

So I ordered a screen off eBay or something and it comes in and sure enough, I had to watch 20 YouTube videos just to try to figure it out exactly.

And I'm taking it apart and I got this little dinky screwdriver that the screen came with that's half plastic and it was just not good cause I have really big hands and it's a tiny screwdriver.

That probably wasn't the best idea anyway to do it myself.

So I take it apart and I mean it took me an hour and a half for sure.

Took me so long just to pull it apart because I'm being so careful.

I mean it's my phone and if I screw it up, I'm done.

I pull it apart.

I'm having so much fun, checking everything out, looking at it, seeing how things work, you know, just kind of seeing it and I get it back together and sure enough it works.

I'm like holy cow, I just fixed this.

And I learned so much about how the phone works and how it comes together.

I can fix these things, this is cool.

Then I thought, light bulb!

I can do this for my business, for class, right.

I'd never broken a phone before that.

I haven't even broken one since.

So I don't know, it just happened to break it at that time and it worked out cause that became my idea for a business.

I got to submit the idea tomorrow for what I'm going to do anyway, so this is perfect, this is what I'm going to do.

I got it all together.

I bought a couple of extra parts that I could afford because I couldn't afford a whole lot.

My teacher had this local marketing business and he's like hey, you know what?

I'll get you a little bit of exposure for free.

So he sent some stuff out, kind of got the word out a little bit for me.

And sure enough, I started getting calls.

I created a free google voice number so people could call me on that and wouldn't have my cell phone and so I got a few calls from it.

I was shocked and I would literally meet up with them.

I lived at an apartment complex.

I would literally meet them at the clubhouse and I'd just say hey, meet me here at club house of my apartment building.

I was super open about it, you know, and the first guy that I ever repaired anything for ended up being my longest term customer, my best customer ever.

It was crazy.

I fixed a lot of his stuff, but the first time I was super nervous.

He'd say "my phone screen is broken."

I got a part for that and then he'd say "okay, my iPod's broken."

I got a part for that too!

And he's like cool, can you get it done right now?

And I'm like, yeah, I can do it right now.

So I'm literally trying not to sweat bullets while I'm fixing this guy's phone and trying to have a conversation with them and not act like I'm super nervous.

So it takes me a while.

He's just hanging out, he's having a good time.

I put it all together and he's like, Oh, dude that looks good.

You did a good job, here's your money, here's your cash.

And we'll see you later.

Then I said, Hey, you know what, thanks so much for bringing it in and if you got any problems, or if you have any questions just let me know.

I'm here to help you know.

And he was like, Hey, I like the job you did, you know what?

I got three other broken devices at home.

Do you want to fix those too? And I'm like, yeah!

Let me order the parts for it, we'll get it fixed.

And that was the start of my phone, tablet and computer fixing business.

I'm in college, my first year of college, I was really excited and I'll tell you more of the story of where it went after that, but essentially what I wanted to talk about is everything that I learned, I learned through YouTube.

I learned it through blogs and just reading up, I really had to dive deep to learn all these things and then whenever I had a problem or an issue I would google it to try to figure out what was going on and sometimes I just happened to find this crazy weird thread that someone told or said something that ended up working for me because there's a lot of issues that can come from working on phones.

But what I noticed is a lot of the repairs that I would do, the experts on YouTube, either they wouldn't quite say everything or wouldn't show all of what you were really supposed to do in order to make it a smooth repair.

Honestly I think they did that so that they could get more business because people would screw up their phones, you know, thinking, oh, I can just do exactly what he's doing but not look out for all these other little things that you had to just kinda know about. If you didn't, you could screw up a lot of stuff.

And so I think some people did that so that they could get more business and get people questioning, sending questions in and then hopefully just have them send the phone to them so they could fix it.

And then two, I noticed that some experts just knew what they were doing so much that they didn't quite understand what they were doing in a way.

They were showing you how they're doing it, but they didn't realize that if you were new to this you need to be taught how to do X, Y and Z before you do it.

They were so used to it that it wasn't a big deal to them.

It just seemed like something small that you just wouldn't really even know or that most people would just kind of know about it, you know?

And so I learned that it's just interesting because some people purposely don't tell you everything and other people don't tell you everything just because they know it so well.

There's so much of an expert in it and it's amazing to me because as I would teach other people how to do it like employees that came in, first off, I'd do it in front of them and then have them ask any question they could and then I would have them do it and then ask any question they could.

There's such a big difference in questions when they are doing it versus when I do it and they're just watching and when I'm not there.

Even when they're watching a YouTube video or reading about it, they don't understand it enough to know what to look for exactly.

And then it made sense.

What I've realized is, it is the same thing for online experts, for a lot of businesses, there're so many books, there's so much material out there and yes, a lot of them do give a lot of value.

But there's a huge difference in the environment that you're in between reading a book and trying to apply it and just learning it through the book versus actually doing it and applying it and then having questions about certain things that you can't really find an answer for or there's so many different answers from all these other wanna-be experts that you just can't tell what is actually the real one.

There's just a huge difference between the actual environment that you're learning in and I've just learned for myself that I can read a book, but if I applied it and actually was doing it while reading that book, I internalized it so much more.

And then I've even realized that if I could have the expert with me as I'm going through these things such as a coach, it's even more applicable and gets the job done faster.

It's even more insane how well it works but what's interesting is in my business, what I didn't realize was I went through YouTube and I had learned everything I needed to in order to make money through the labor side of my business to just accomplish the work that needed to be done.

Whereas I didn't understand how important it was to understand the marketing side of my business to get people into the door so I could do the labor side or have somebody else do the labor side for me in my business.

So that's also something else to think about.

What are you focusing your time on?

Are you focusing on learning from actual real people or real experts that are going to help you grow your business.

Or are you focused more in your business, working in your business instead of on your business.

That's a big, big difference there.

So what can you do?

Where can you go?

What can you learn?

Where can you apply it?

What expert is out there that can help you 10X your business?

I have been listening to a lot of Grant Cardone lately and 10X has been in my vocabulary recently just because of how much I've been listening to him.

That's what I have for you.

Think about where you're at and I hope that helps you guys and if you want to check out some of the resources and tools and some of the experts that I have preapproved, just head on over to learningfromtheexperts.com and check it out.

Thank you very much guys!

Are you looking to jumpstart your business by learning or getting help from the real experts?

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