How Craig Schulze’s Personal Brand Story Started

How Craig Schulze’s Personal Brand Story Started

Sean: Hey, guys. Welcome back to the show, Sean here, and I’m so excited that we have a speaker, a business coach, an author, an entrepreneur, and an investor on the show today. His name is Craig Schulze, and I am super pumped to learn from him. I do want to be kind of like this guy someday if you guys know what I mean. He’s the founder of the One-Shot movement. He’s been there, done that. Had a lot of ups and downs in life. And my gosh, I’m super excited to listen to him, and I’m super excited for him to share his story with you and me as well today. So without further ado, Craig, welcome to the show.

Craig: Yeah, really looking forward to spending time with your audience, and adding as much value as I possibly can.

Sean: Awesome. So, Craig, usually I start the podcast with the founder’s journey. What led you into entrepreneurship and what allowed you to hone your leadership and management skills?

Craig: Yeah. Look, I think I guess for me, life hasn’t always been easy, and I was always a big dreamer. I left home when I was 15 years old. It wasn’t because I wasn’t loved. I got brought up by beautiful parents, but in very poor and not many opportunities where I grew up.

Craig: So I left home to get a good education, to get a good job. So financially, I’ve been self-funded since the age of 17. I became an engineer, and I didn’t have a burning desire for trading time for money, so I fired my boss when I was twenty-one years of age to follow my dreams and passion. And that was a fitness industry. So 21, I knew – I bought about a fitness club. I knew nothing about business, probably at 21, not too much about life. But what I lacked there, I made up for the will to do whatever it takes to have success, and that meant personal development, growth. I would read books on sales, marketing, you name it. Every single night I’d fall asleep with a book across my face and I learned how to build a business.

Craig: Three years then, I was a multi-award-winning trainer, so imagine one of the states of Australia. I was the number one guy in that state, and I started building up notoriety, which is one of the keys to success. And what I do coach a lot now, is to be that leader in your niche, that market leader in your niche, and more opportunities will come your way. Moving on from there, I set up five fitness clubs, sold 22 franchises, started investing in property. And in my mid 20’s I’m like, “Wow, business is easy. Yeah, this is an easy game for me.” I would start a business, build a business, make money investing property and so the wheel was working.

Craig: And I hit my first speed hump in business, which was a global financial crisis. And at that time I nearly lost everything. To give you an idea of what happened is banks stopped lending me money so I couldn’t sell franchises. Banks stopped lending me money so couldn’t pay for the renovations to the hundreds of thousands of dollars to start a new gym. Banks stopped lending money, not just that my gym clients were going “Craig, we love you, but we’re going to – we’re worried about our income.” A lot of people right now are worried about their income same back in 2008, so I lost a lot of my clients and then the US dollar to the Australian dollar changed that much. My equipment cost went up hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight, and this is one of my biggest lessons in business was risk management. So I was an aggressive guy that everything went really well and I nearly lost it all, and it took me three years to come out of that. 

During that three years, I changed my whole paradigm of how I went to make money, and there are just some important things to understand that really relate to where we are today in 2021. I realized that I had all my eggs in one basket, so my fitness club, retail people would travel in my local community to be clients, and I’m going, Wow, well, we’ve now got social media. We’ve now got our first smartphone. We’re now got better internet tools. Now we have Zoom, we didn’t have that back then. We now have wi-fi that’s connecting people more and giving people all around the world an opportunity. I’m going to go online, so I then started selling products to my gym clients.

Craig: Three years later, I was making more money doing that than owning five gyms. And then in 2011, a company said, “Look, Craig, we’ve heard about your success. We’d like you to help us expand our product range around the world.” And for the next 10 years, which is to where we are now. I built a business into 100 countries and over six million US dollars in that time traveled all around the world.   But in 2014, I went through my biggest challenge in life, which changed my whole vision and perspective of life, and my wife and I, we lost our first son. He was a stillborn baby. And from that, that led to me building out a personal brand, and that was around the whole idea, which is what I said in my son’s funeral. “My son didn’t get one breath on the planet. We’re all in the game. Go out there and make the most of your one shot at life.” And you know, it took me four years before I launch out. In 2018, I wrote a book called You’ve Got One-Shot. And then I had a podcast where I interviewed over a hundred and fifty of the biggest thought leaders in the world.

Craig: I have invested very heavily in myself. So I’ve worked with some of the biggest names in the world, invested about half a million dollars into my personal growth and journey. And for the last two years in lockdown, my businesses, my investments, my assets – so I’m a private investor in a number of companies now. What I learned back in 2008 and I said, I’ll never be in that position again, 2020, when we’re in lockdown, people losing their jobs, losing their houses, I positioned myself to be quiet in a good position. The only thing I didn’t factor in was lockdown. So being locked as a prisoner in your own environment hasn’t been found. That’s sort of the snapshot story of where I am on my journey today.

Sean: That’s an amazing journey. And there are so many questions I could ask just from that. And actually, one of the things that I would start with is when you mentioned that you were able to make more money than owning a couple of gym franchises and that’s an amazing thing and were you doing that? You mentioned you traveled around the world, so I imagine that you made $6 million traveling around the world just by working remotely. Is that right?

Craig: Correct. So, yeah, so what happened there? I went through the challenge in adversity. And I read a book, it was called The Next Millionaires. I mean, this book was written in about 2006, and it was a highly acclaimed professor, Professor Paul Pilsner, and he basically said the next millionaires from 2006 to 2016, it kind of came out of five core areas. And the five core areas were the wellness industry, the e-commerce industry, the information industry, the direct selling industry, and the distribution industry. So not product creation, but shipping other people’s products. So I said, OK, it’s and early 2008, maybe I can become one of the next millionaires.

So I need to find a product in wellness, and I need to have somebody else’s product, I need to build information and education around that. I leverage somebody else’s platform and I was able to make a six-figure income in my third year promoting their products. And then it was just about scale and leverage and looking for something that I could then take to the world first to market. And that was the concept around the world’s first adult stem-cell technology, and that’s really where that all started.

Sean: So when you went into this stem cell adult technology, that is what you were saying about working remotely traveling around the world. A lot of people would want that kind of life, Craig, you know that right? And a lot of people ask me, like, How do you work from home? I work from home, but I run a digital marketing agency, and a lot of people would say, Oh, but you need to have this skill and that skill and you need to have this kind of diploma. What were the barriers to entry? Was it difficult for you to start? I mean, from owning gyms and being a fantastic instructor to learning these new things, what was the journey like, and was it worth it?

Craig: Yeah, I think the good, it’s a good question, because if I started doing what I was doing, then 10 years into my entrepreneurial journey, that the outcome possibly could have been a whole lot different. Because of that 10 years in business, I learned how to sell, I learned how to market. I had influence over people, so people trusted what I said. I’d build out about resilience of challenge and adversity. There was a period of time where I was running my fitness clubs, and when I get home at eight o’clock at night and then I’d run online webinars to people around the world just to kick start to see about it. But the whole idea of that book was really a major breakthrough for me. So I mentioned one of the key areas wasn’t about product creation, it was about finding somebody else’s product that was unique, that was in high demand. I was first to market, and if I could find that product there, then you could promote somebody else’s product. By doing that, you take away all the risk, you take away all the investment. You do take away a little bit more profit. But in the end, I was leveraging on the back end of breakthrough technology. And that’s one of my keys to success, I have the leverage of franchising businesses, I have the leverage of property of found online ways to make money. So I’ve made money selling in leveraging eBay, for example. I’ve made money online by setting up membership sites. I have made money leveraging different tools rather than going out and trying and reinventing the wheel. I find something that’s going to work, and then I’ll go and put my skills to the work. And that just uses influence, education, and this absolute desire to do whatever it takes for success.

Sean: When you use the word leverage. I mean, I live in the Philippines. A lot of our listeners are from the Philippines and Singapore, and some of them might not understand it at a deep level. So when you say leverage, is it right when my understanding of it is you don’t need to invest capital and you just, as you mentioned, use your skills, influence, and know-how, and education to distribute these products and sell them?

Craig: Yeah, look, I mean, I can talk about leverage, I got on my website. I’ve actually got a big banner, “create leverage and you can become unstoppable.” My mentor first taught me this concept back in 2002, and he said, Craig , if you can leverage time, money, and meaningful relationships, the world will be your oyster. So how do you leverage time and money now? You know, when you’re in a job, you’re trading time for money. So one thing that you need to do if you’re in a job trading time for money is, “Ok, what can I sell that somebody has, and somebody want where I can make a little bit of extra money, you know, so you could do that as a side hustle of some sort make a bit of extra money?” And once you make it a bit of extra money there, you might be able to free up time. Or you might not, you might use it to invest into a property, for example, or you might use that money to start building a team around what you’re doing to leverage money and time.

Craig: So this whole, it’s sort of like a concept you’re not taught at school. But what you’re trying to do is free up your time. So I mentioned to you before the show due to lockdowns made a lot of money over that 8 years and been 10 years now. But the last two years, I haven’t done any events, not one single live event.

Craig: I‘ve barely gone out to do the work, but what I was able to do was at the start, I put in all the work upfront. I build a really big, good, high-quality asset, and then now I’m getting paid for the building that works at the front, you know, and I’m not investing the time in like I am. I’m working on projects and different projects around the world, but there are lots of ways to leverage.

Craig: So you can, what I call, you know, business alchemy. Business Alchemy is creating something out of nothing. So I’m a business alchemist, for example, might be, you’ve got a digital marketing agency. Let me leverage your agency and I’ve got a client and a customer, and I bring these two things together and I make money out of that. So I have nothing but I have a potential customer and somebody delivering a service. That’s what’s called business alchemy, or an example of it.

Craig: So I looked at leveraging platforms, so I found a good boutique fitness brand, and I said, this has got a great good product to market fit. It’s a really good price. It’s a really good business opportunity, a really affordable way to get into the fitness industry. So I help franchised that company because it was a good product to market fit. Now again, with the direct selling company, I found a good product with a good platform that had forty-seven offices shipping into 150 countries. What I did was you’ve got a really good product, a really good back, and a really good platform. I have the influence, and the skill to take your product to the world, so I leveraged the platform.

Craig: But leverage, again in the word of making money. I say make money on money. So making money on money is now I make money off, you know, 10 different ways because I mastered one way, but then invest more money into property. So I’ve probably most wealthy now as a property investor, but I did that through building cash flow in a business, redeploying that money, smart investments. And that’s a key thing. Smart investments, not invest in anything, smart investments that are going to help you and the holy grail, as if you can leverage and develop meaningful relationships.

Craig: And that’s one of my chapters in the book is about leverage, and I’m happy to give you an electronic copy that you can give out to your audience if you want as well.

Sean: That’s going to be amazing.

Craig: Up there is how I built my podcast? So I’ve interviewed probably the biggest names in the world on my podcast, and I leverage my story, my contacts, to get better contacts on my show. And, you know, I built an incredible podcast that way as well, so leverage is the keyword, but there are lots of ways to leverage as well. Leveraging people skills, so these platforms are at work and you know, you probably know all of those platforms better than me. That’s a good way to leverage to create more time freedom. I’m not great at creating videos, so it’s no point me spending 10 hours to create a silly small forty-second main video. Why don’t I leverage a platform that’s already out there that specializes in that? And that’s a really good investment of my time.

Sean: Very good stuff.