Overcoming Scarcity Mindset - Unlock Abundance and Transform Your Life with Adam Allen

This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story.

And now, Sebastian Rusk Adam, welcome to the show.

Sebastian Rusk

Thank you, Sebastian. Thanks for having me.

Adam Allen

Hey, thanks for being here. I appreciate you taking some time out of your day to hang out with me for a few minutes. and share your story with our audience. I know you and I recently connected through Dan Martell's mastermind group, and I'm kind of the new guy in the group. So I always lead with being the podcast guy. I'd be grossly negligent to not try to get new people on my podcast when I'm the new guy. So you're one of the first few I've had on the show. So glad we got a chance to do this and get it handled here. So welcome to the show.

Sebastian Rusk

I'm glad you've built the platform to do it because I don't have one of these.

Not yet. We're trying to change all that though, Adam. Hey, so, uh, you know, the show's called beyond the story. So you can imagine on the show, I like to tell people's story. So for some context, uh, for our listeners, let's go back to the beginning of the story and, and wherever the beginning is for you and help our listeners better understand a little bit more about you and your backstory and what really brought you to present day with, with what you're working on.

Yeah, so I grew up very religious. I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I feel like that's played a huge role in who I am today because I believe in a higher power, and that higher power kind of drives everything I do. Because a lot of people can say that business is just business, but in all reality, we have platforms, we have businesses, we have opportunities to invest in people and to make things bigger and better. Yeah. I was about 18. I served a mission for the LDS church and lived in Brazil for two years. Just got to knock on doors. Actually, you don't knock on doors there. You stand behind the gate and clap. You have to learn how to clap just right to aim it at the right door or the neighbors come out, which is kind of funny. So I did that for a couple of years. I would have considered myself a very shy person before that. And that kind of wrecks you. When you have to go knock on doors all day long and meet strangers, it kind of changes you into a different personality for sure. When I came home from that, I waited tables for a little while, went to school. I actually graduated from the University of Utah with a bachelor's in Spanish, of all things, even though I speak Portuguese as a second language. And I was just bored after that. I actually went to school for engineering and architecture. But because I'm an idiot and didn't look into school very well, I missed the mark on a block course, which means it would have reset an entire year later. So I jumped in and I was like, hey, just let me get whatever degree I can while I'm waiting. And then I'll jump into that. But by the time I got done with my bachelor's, I was so burnt out from school because it's such a business that I was like, man, this is a waste of my time. So I kind of kicked back and I was like, I'm just going to go into corporate America. You know, they don't care what your degree is in. They just care that you have one because it means you can stick to something. But sadly, I was way over qualified for any entry level position and way under qualified for any good position of any kind. So I was kind of stuck in this spot where being a waiter or a bartender made me more money. I had already started a small family. My wife, we got married in 2010 and we had already had our first little girl on the way when I was in this stage of like, oh man, what do I do? And my dad, who lived in St. George, and I was back up in the Salt Lake area, again, going to school, he kept pestering me. He had this firefighter buddy that had a cabinet shop that had kind of gone out of business. And he's like, hey, just come down and buy his machinery from him. And I had done quite a few cabinet jobs as a kid, worked in a couple woodshops. I was a woodshop nerd as well in high school. And I was like, ah, you know what? Running my own business sounds terrible. I don't want to do that. So I ignored my dad for the better part of a year and my dad just kept poking. And I still don't know why to this day. I don't know why he thought I was capable, but I finally just bit the bullet and I was like, all right, corporate America sounds awful. I'm going to move back to sunny St. George and I'm going to open a cabinet shop. And I grabbed one of my good friends from high school who was a woodshop nerd as well, and had worked in several of these cabinet shops with me. And we just jumped in headfirst. We had no idea what we were doing. We knew how to build cabinets. We had no idea how to run a business. And we just started. We started figuring it out from scratch, from ground zero. We had no money and nothing to go on. So it was really, really scraping by for the first couple of years there. But I had some big changes happen. And this is kind of what started a crazy spiral to where I met you. It took a lot of years, but What happened was I was sitting there one day and I was like, man, there's got to be a better way. And I had this hardware salesman show up and he's like, hey man, have you ever read these two books? And he slid me a couple books. One of them was this one right here, Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, which is about theory of constraints, which applies to anything really, but it applies to manufacturing very, very well. And he's like, you guys should like figure this out. And the other book he gave me was called Two Second Lean by Paul Akers. And it's basically the gist behind it is just do anything, anything you can to save yourself even a couple of seconds. And if you get in the habit of doing that every single day, your life will elevate dramatically over time. Well, for some weird reason, the concoction of these two books together broke my brain. I didn't sleep for an entire week. I ended up in the nuthouse by the end of the week. My wife was pregnant with our second child at this point, and she committed me at the end of the week. It was super fun. So I went from no sleep for a week and them testing me for drugs several times because I seemed like I was on meth or cocaine all week because I was like, oh my gosh, it's so easy. All you have to do is make life better a little bit every day and work on what you can. And they finally ended up giving me drugs by the end of the week to put me to sleep. And I slept it off for about three days and came back to life, but with a brand new like head on my shoulders. So we went from in the beginning, just trying to like build everything all at once to looking at it in a perspective of like, okay, what can I do today? I can't build an entire house worth of cabinets in a day. How many cabinets can I build in a day? And we started breaking it down and breaking it down and breaking it down to where we could create an actual flow of product that we could predictably see how much we could do. And even with just the two of us still, we were into it about two and a half, three years at this point, we went from taking two, two and a half, three months for a big custom home. And we're working on pretty big homes down here. Most of the time they range in like the 8,000 square foot range, some of them up to the 15,000 square foot, kind of crazy. It took us two to three months. to build the cabinets for a house like that. And we cut it down to two to three weeks because we just started looking at it from a perspective of, okay, what size of chunk can I get done today? And that started a totally different kind of spiral too, because since school, these were the only two books I had ever read. And honestly, in school, I did my damnedest to never read a book. I would watch the movies and do everything I could to avoid reading and learning because it was just so forced and boring and crappy. Uh, but it started me on a spiral, I think over the last, what it's been like seven years now, I've read a little over 230 books and just keep grabbing them and keep running. And that is how I ended up with you because I actually hired a guy. I had a guy come from Ireland, a good friend, uh, and just hang out with us. He's a lean friend from the two second lean, uh, culture. And I had hung out with him in Ireland one year. at a summit. And then he came over here and he hung out with us for about a week. And at the end of the week, he's like, Hey, Adam, you're doing a pretty good job with a few things, but you've got this poor boy mindset from West Valley and you just keep working with the same shitty old tools and you got to figure some things out. So he actually slid across the table, a book called buy back your time. And I was like, huh, All right, well, let me look into this thing. So I read that book and man, it was almost, my wife almost wanted to commit me again because it was another trigger where I was like, Oh my gosh, if I go buy the better tool that I don't have to tinker with all day long and I can get the job done twice as fast, I can make twice as much money. And I was always just, you know, I was in this fixed mindset or this scarcity mindset with like, no, I've got to do what I can with what I have so that I can make money to buy that machine or that tool. And that's the safe way for sure. But if you've got a full pipeline of business and the ROI is there, Jump on that tool, make your life better, make your customer's product better, make the quality better, make everything better. So quick synopsis, like that's, that's the crazy, crazy journey. from childhood to learning how to talk to people to starting a business. There was also another crazy instance in there, which was right before I brought my friend from Ireland over, where COVID and the backlash of COVID damn near put us out of business. We were this close to bankruptcy. And luckily, we got in our turtle shell and we weathered the storm. And that kind of put me in that spot of not spending money on machinery as well. But graduating out of that scarcity mindset has been like a whole new world for me. And I'm not running around throwing dollar bills around that I don't have by any means, but I am looking at things with a brand new light of, okay, is this going to serve my customer and is it going to serve them faster? And is it going to serve them better? If so, it's a good idea.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've lived a lot of that scarcity. That scarcity mindset will keep you trapped exactly where you don't want to be. And once you're able to move away from all of that, I was just having this conversation with my girlfriend about a weekend cruise that we booked. And she's like, I think it's too expensive. And I'm like, compared to what? Like, do you want to go? Yes or no. That's all. That's the only thing that matters. Cause I'm a man of faith too. So I don't know. I don't really get, I don't really wrap my head around this whole, like telling the universe, but God did create the universe. So I can get down with the whole idea of the notion of the more you say, I can't afford that. Um, that's too expensive. I'm going to buy the, you know, the $5 bacon instead of the $7 bacon. I mean, it's just the minute details that you're literally telling the universe, God, whatever you want to refer to it as that I'm scarce and I'm concerned and I'm worried and I'm, and they're cool. Don't sweat it. We're going to keep you right there in your safe zone safe. but we're not going to grow and we're not going to expand that. And I actually broke the cycle of scarcity in my generational line. I did it with my daughter because this whole, my mom and the old school mentality, and she still doesn't, we still got to get onto her about it. This whole idea of like, it must be nice. And you know, my response is it's, it's fucking damn nice. You know why? Because I made it that way. But I also made a decision that we're no longer going to sit here and utter words and have conversations. Our words have power and we're not going to start to utter things like, we can't afford that. I don't have the money for that. That's too expensive. And we're going to replace all of that with we're abundant and we're going to make, what do you want? Order what you want. I'll never forget reading a post from my buddy, Jesse Elder, A couple of years ago, he said, start ordering from the left side of the menu. Because the more you order from the right side of the menu, the more you're telling the world what you don't want and where you want to stay. And I thought, huh. I never, and my sister started to adapt to that. My daughter's 23, completely self-sufficient. I raised her on my own. I joke now I'm like, hell, she'll pick up a bar tab or order an order an Uber for us. When I'm in Dallas, you know, I said, what more could you want from a parent on that? Cause she's like, it's not money. It's just not an issue. I'm not independently wealthy and rich. I just don't worry about money because everything always works out and everything always takes care of itself.

It does. And I mean, even just to take your analogy of the bacon, right? I'm not going to buy the $7 bacon. I'm going to buy the $5 bacon. It's really crazy because you start to put yourself in these positions where You are purchasing the lesser item, which is going to give you a lesser life. In the bacon analogy, it's probably more processed, less healthy, and you are going to drag ass throughout the day because you ate crappier food. Right. Similarly, if you if you buy the cheap, like little vacuum, you know, Dyson is the stick vacuum. Why? Because it's amazing. If you buy the cheaper one, which I have got on Amazon, I'm like, I can't be that much different. Right. Within less than like months. The thing was broken, wouldn't work anymore, had to find parts for it. Dude, the Dyson I have out there now, I've had for like, I want to say five years and that sucker still works perfectly because I finally was like, I am sick of this. I'm buying the nice thing. I'm going to buy one that actually works and makes my life better. Yeah.

So I'm on my second one on Amazon from who knows where, so I'm learning that lesson too. Cause I'm like, well, this was only a hundred bucks. Well, if you buy it four times, you could have bought the Dyson once.

Exactly. Exactly. And when it comes to, you know, health and mentality and wellness and all of those things, the more you choose the poor version, the more you become that poor version.

Yeah. I, I, I down to the minute details of an Uber. You know, if an Uber Black is within $10, I would prefer to be picked up in a suburban or an Escalade versus a Honda Civic that smells like a goat farm.

Yeah. You know what I mean? My wife and I, we've, we've talked about the, you mentioned, you know, the words you choose. We've talked about that quite a bit lately because we do have the, the poor habit sometimes of saying we don't have money for that. We now have four and a half kids. So money is a tricky thing when you have that many kids running around, but we've started shifting our words to we're not spending our money on that. You know, we are going to spend our money on this. We've decided to spend our money on this, because we run what's called a profit first. I don't know if you've ever heard of that.

Yeah. Mike Michalowicz.

Yeah. We've got all of our bank accounts separated and we basically pre-balance them, pre-determine where we're spending our money. So we even have one little debit card that's called our fun card. And that's what my wife takes to get, you know, treats for the kids and drinks and whatever it is. And once that money's gone, We don't, we're not poor. We're not missing out. We don't, you know, it's not like we don't have money. It's just that we've chosen to put our other money in other places. We're saving for gifts for Christmas. We're saving for our future vacation. So choosing your words can really dictate what your kids are thinking too, because a lot of times they'll be like, oh yeah, we're poor. And it's like, no, we're not poor. We just choose to put our money where we prefer to.

Sure, sure. No, absolutely. I think another great, very powerful choice of words and phrase to use is we're just going to figure it out.

Yeah. You know, that's something my wife actually gets mad when I say that, because anytime she's like, oh, man, we need to get like 500 bucks by the end of the month. And I'm just like, all right. And she's like, what do you mean? All right. It's like, I'll figure it out. And she's like, we always do that out every month. And I'm like, well, if I don't have to every month, then I'm just going to, you know, push on the business and try and grow it and make it better. And she's like, but you can just figure it out. And it's like, well, yeah, I can, but I'm going to spend my time focusing on the business 99% of the time. But if I ever have to hurry and figure out how to get 500 bucks, I'm going to do it.

And it's going to be easy. Hey, Tony Robbins says, if you can't, you must. And if you must, you can. Exactly. Adam, I really enjoyed this conversation, man, learning more about you and, and your story and what you've been able to go create, but we really dialed into the scarcity mindset and how you've lived that and how it didn't, it didn't serve you. And when you made that shift, things had drastically changed. I think our listeners and people to get the opportunity to discover this episode. If you're, if you're struggling with this scarcity mindset, I really hope this episode's helped you out because it's just a decision. It is a decision to say, we are no longer speaking like this. We are no longer using this word choice. We are no longer thinking like this. We're shifting it completely into abundance and that everything works out and it works out because I said, it's going to work out the end, you know, not, but, but, but, you know, but man, I really appreciate your time. I've enjoyed our conversation here. Any final thoughts for our listeners based on what we've chatted about today or anything else that comes to mind?

Yeah, I mean, the one thing I would think a lot of people who are trying to shift into that abundance mentality oftentimes will get stuck. Well, I only have this much money. The one word that comes to mind is prioritize. I believe that we are here to be tested. The only test that we have is prioritize. How do we prioritize our time? How do we prioritize our money? How do we prioritize our health? How do we prioritize our family? If you can learn to prioritize, you can learn to see that abundance. And then all of a sudden it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

I love it. Those are great final thoughts. Thanks again for your time, Adam, and great insights and conversations. I really enjoyed it. I look forward to being on your podcast one day soon.

We will make it happen and I will see you in what, an hour or so?

An hour and a half. That's it. That's it. For some berating from the one and only Mr. Dan Martell. Every time I ask a question, I know I'm in the firing lane there.

All right, man. We'll see you soon.

Absolutely. Thanks again. Until next time, friends.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. We sure do appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, Launchlab.com Studios. We'll talk to you next time.