Episode 30: Learn What It Takes To Start A Business And Set It Up For Maximum Success With Trevor Anderson
Starting a business is exciting. Ideas come in, your vision is in place, and you’re ready to take on the world. But as business expert, attorney and consultant Trevor Anderson tells Anand Sukhadia, starting a business always involves risks. And you should be ready to take those risks if you’re equipped with the knowledge that will help you take on anything. Trevor emphasizes that small businesses and entrepreneurs need to have a vision that is more than just making money. That, along with other important factors will help them set up a business for maximum success. How ready are you to start your own business? Join in and see for yourself.
I'm grateful our LIMITLESS paths have crossed. To support our mission to bring the most value to our tribe, please consider supporting via donation.
Paypal: https://paypal.me/OMLIFE?locale.x=en_US
Donate with Cryptocurrency:
Ethereum Address: 0x8b97a6ed16d5947b1712f817e81053d47608b36a
Follow Anand: www.anand.life
IG: @anand.life
Follow om.life Wellness Modern Recovery Spa: www.om.life
IG: @omlifewellness
The Greatest Wellness Technology Investment of Anand's Life - Watch the video and hit me Up to Go Limitless: LimitlessOnePod@gmail.com
---
Listen to the podcast here
Learn What It Takes To Start A Business And Set It Up For Maximum Success With Trevor Anderson
Are you thinking about becoming an entrepreneur and starting a new business? We're going to be learning about the biggest pitfalls that new business owners face and how to set up your business for maximum success. We are blessed to have a business expert, attorney and consultant to help us navigate through the unchartered waters of entrepreneurship. Trevor Anderson has a wealth of experience and insight representing and advising businesses and entrepreneurs of all sizes on both legal and strategic matters. Trevor advised and guided Fortune 100 companies on business issues ranging from performance optimization, development and execution of strategic initiatives and analyzing business risks.
He provides advisory and legal work on a range of business issues, including entity formation, corporate governance, contract negotiations, mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and investor relations. Trevor is singularly focused on providing massive value to his clients by providing legal solutions that are sensitive to and promote their business goals. He believes business founders, owners and executives can fully realize the purpose of their businesses and leave a positive lasting mark on society. Welcome to the show, Trevor. How are you?
Starting A Business: There’s a lot of risk associated with being a sole proprietor. It is easy in the paperwork side of things, but it comes with a lot of risk.
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Anand. It's been a while.
For all the readers out there, we were in the same networking group for about a year and a half, two years. It's called BNI International. Trevor was our Business Attorney. There was so much knowledge that he was able to provide on a day in and day out basis. I wanted to get him on because I know a lot of people out there, especially these days during COVID, there's a lot of uncertainty out there. There's a lot of my friends and readers that are looking to start their own side hustles and businesses. I want to make sure that everyone out there looking to start something is going to start off on the right foot. As an entrepreneur for a long time, I started out and I made a lot of mistakes. I had a lot of things that I wish I didn't do in the beginning and wish I had done to put myself in the right place. You're the guy to talk about it. Let’s get right into it. Trevor, what does living a limitless life mean to you?
First of all, thanks for having me. It's always great to have these conversations with you. I took plenty in the past. I'm looking forward to this. A limitless life is pretty simple. It's living a life that's free of fear and having an abundance mindset. It's removing the barriers for becoming the best version of what I can be. For me, that looks like being able to experience growth and change in my own life and me as a person. Also, contributing to the quality of life of those around me. That’s my mission. It is to improve the quality of life of everyone in my surrounding.
What do growth and change mean to you?
It means that when I wake up a few years from now, I don't want to be the same person that I am now. Core beliefs, principles, are things that I want to use to guide my life. The biggest shortfall sometimes in living a life is being static. There are tons of experiences and new ideas out there, constantly changing and evolving. As a person, living a fulfilled and content life, you've got to evolve too. That's the growth. That's the change that I'm talking about.
I believe that everything in this world and this life is energy. Energy can't remain static because it needs to express itself in whichever wave and form. The ocean is never static and still. It has to move in order to create more life and beauty that it does. Our lives are the same way. The moment that we start living into a little box and then repeating the same things on auto mechanism, that's when our growth in life, happiness and our drive stops getting created. We start living a life where like we're on a parachute and we're slowly descending down into a not interesting life.
It can even be worse than that. We all have this fear of uncertainty to test our boundaries, to extend ourselves past our comfort zone. That's how you grow and change. Once you stop doing that, it's like these concentric circles that get smaller and smaller in your life. New boundaries start getting smaller because you're afraid to extend yourself. All of a sudden, a life that you're living that is out here is this. Your experiences and the things that you're getting out of life diminish. I want to fight that with all my energy and power.
I tell my friends whenever I recommend to work with Trevor is you're the most non-lawyer-y lawyer that I know. You are growth minded. A lot of times, a lot of attorneys are risk adverse and they're telling you not to do a lot of things versus you are showing people how they can expand it and grow which I love that mindset. That's why I love working with you and love recommending people to work with you. Let's get into your story. Tell us about your background and how you got to this place in your career.
Starting A Business: You can always start new businesses, new ventures. But if something comes through and it wipes you out even on a personal level, it’s tough to recover from that.
I have a non-traditional background to get into where I am. I launched a law firm, The Anderson Firm. Prior to that, I was an undergrad. I was a Philosophy Major. As my father always told me, you have two choices. It's law school or you can ask people if they want fries with that. There are only two things you can do with that degree. I was like, “A lawyer, that's a respectable career. Let me study for the LSAC, get into law school.” I got into a pretty good law school. I get all right in it. I got onto this conveyor belt. Out of law school, I joined a firm doing an insurance defense work which, for people who do that, more power to you. It wasn't for me because I was working on behalf of these giant insurance companies and not feeling fulfilled. I took a break from practicing law. I joined Ernst & Young as a consultant.
I moved from Atlanta to Charlotte then up to New York. I was working for these large multinational financial institutions, banks, assets management companies, the Wells Fargos of the world and Goldman. I did that for almost three years. I enjoyed the problem-solving component of it. There was this urge of feeling like I needed to help people. I wanted to assist real people and moving paper around, making a few extra bucks or saving a few extra bucks for these companies that make billions of dollars wasn't hitting that need for me. I left that and went back to practicing law. I was doing that for a couple of years before I decided to start my firm.
Can you tell us a little bit about the decision why you decided to start your firm versus working with your previous firm that you were in?
It's an interesting story but a defining moment for me. I was, from the outside, a successful person. I was an attorney. I was working as a consultant for a big four accounting firm, all titles that when you're young like, “You should aspire to do this.” I wasn't satisfied with it but I didn't know why. I was going through the motions. I'd be like, “Society tells me if I'm a lawyer, I am associate and I should try to make partner at a law firm. That's the end goal, to make partner.” I was doing that because I didn't know any difference. I wasn't listening to myself and the warning signs. Back in 2018, I found out that I had an underlying heart condition causing an irregular rhythm.
I was scheduled to go in for a procedure to get corrected, a cardiac ablation. They put me under anesthesia. I'm in the hospital. As the cardiologist gets in there, they realize there are a bunch more issues going on with my heart than they thought. It was too dangerous to do the procedure so they backed out. They don't perform it. That day when I woke up from anesthesia about a minute later, my heartbeat stopped. I went flatline. No pulse, no nothing for 59 seconds. I woke up to this tech on my chest doing chest compressions, yelling at me, trying to bring me out of it. There I was, for no apparent reason, my heart started again. First of all, I didn't know what the hell to do. I had never experienced something like that before. I had no idea how to interpret it. It shook me to my core. I took two weeks off from work.
I went to a cabin in upstate New York, reflected on life and what I wanted. I realized that I was on a dead-end path for me. I was pursuing a career that was, one, probably killing me with stress. Two, I didn't want the end goal. I looked at the lives that a lot of the partners at the firm was living, I didn't want that. I had to strip things down to get to the essence of what motivated me, what drove me, my why. I realized that what gets me up every morning is a desire to help people unlock their potential and live fulfilled lives for themselves. From that moment on, I knew I was never going to be a partner at a big law firm. I had to strike my own path. It took me a couple of years to get things going and get the infrastructure in place to be able to launch this firm. In the meantime, I dabbled in performance coaching. I did some consulting work on the side. All of those things were tools to try to help me achieve my why. I bring those into my law firm.
If we could backtrack a little bit, when you flatlined for 59 seconds, do you remember what you were thinking, where you were, what you got? Was it black space?
I get asked this question a bunch. I didn't believe it at first. Weeks later, I had them print out the EKG strips. For me, it felt like it was a brief moment. I remember waking up out of anesthesia, laying in the recovery bed. I remember sitting up and saying, “I don't feel so good.” From there, if anyone's blacked out or passed out before you get this tunnel vision and then goes black. I don't remember a single thing until I can hear a ringing in my ears and then someone's voice screaming my name over and over. That's when I opened my eyes and saw the nurse doing impressions on top of me. It was wild. My family was there. They're all crying. I wasn't quite sure why. It was traumatic for some of us.
It's so apparent that when you're faced with death, that's when you truly want to start living and appreciating every moment. A lot of times, we'll go through life and we don't have that same appreciation. I probably look at what happened to you as a blessing and so to you to propel you in every day and being more present in each experience and moment that you have.
Present and intentional. Everything in our society is designed to sweep you up in momentum down a path, whether it's in a career or this idea that you have to get married, buy a house, have a kid and then you work for 40 years and then you retire. This whole mindset has a ton of momentum. If you're not actively asking questions on it or trying to change the narrative, that’s the life you'll live. That's great for some folks. There's nothing wrong with it but if it's not right for you, that's what opened my eyes. I needed to have this massive wakeup call that was like, “Trevor, this isn't right for you. You need to change something. You need to do something.” My mission is to help people get to that point without having to die first.
Maybe that should be part of your mission statement, before you die you have to live. Let's move a little bit into the services that you offer at your law firm. Let's go into some of the common pitfalls that you can face in business and some of the things that you need to do to prepare yourself.
I help create the foundation for small businesses and entrepreneurs to achieve their strategic goals. What does that tagline mean? It is that when you're an entrepreneur or you have an idea, it's your baby. You want to bring this idea to fruition. There are a million things out there waiting to undermine you, to sap your energy. It prevents you from getting there. My job is I bring the legal expertise, the coaching and consulting together to get help you eliminate those obstacles and achieve those goals. It's a combination of things. I like to start working with small businesses and entrepreneurs at any stage of their business but the earlier the better. There's a ton of paperwork that goes with starting a company.
You need to form an entity with whatever state you're operating in. If you're operating multiple states, you have to register in multiple states. You have to decide, “Am I going to be a partnership if I'm with another person? Am I going to be an LLC? Am I going to be a corporation?” I help them make those decisions because each decision has different trade-offs, benefits and consequences. It can impact your ability to grow, expand and bring on investors. I help with the beginning of the life cycle. There's a ton of advisory work after that. Understanding what people's goals are. What are you trying to achieve? That's where the coaching and consulting part of things kick in, is helping you to be laser-focused on achieving those things. I do things like if you're looking to buy other businesses, helping to structure that, figuring out the risks associated with that. Also, where you can get economies at scale or unlock additional profits or performance. It's along the whole life cycle of a business.
I've never had an attorney or even an accountant asked me what my business goals are. They're like, “Send me the information. I'll either incorporate for you or I'll do your taxes.” There's no added value helping me structure myself.
Starting A Business: When you’re starting a business with a partner, it’s like getting married. It’s a long-term commitment, there’s going to be ups and downs and you have to figure out how to work through them.
That's a serious problem because if you are a professional, in my position, a lawyer, my job is to make sure that you are successful as an entrepreneur. It's not to draft contracts, that's part of the protection. It's to help you achieve your dreams and goals. If I'm not doing that or if your lawyer, accountant or professional is not helping you get there, they're doing you a disservice. You’re writing a check for them. They could be great attorneys and accountants, great contracts they're putting together but they're not going that extra mile for you. When I was doing the coaching work, I organized this idea around three principles or three pillars.
Every small business and entrepreneur need to have a vision of what they're trying to accomplish. It needs to be more than just making money. How do you get other people motivated to work for you and with you if the whole idea is to put dollar bills in your pocket? It only goes so far. The next thing is that you need to have a culture of dignity. Treating your peers, employees, customers and clients like humans, not inputs and outputs. The last thing is you have to deliver with consistency. Without consistency, everything else is lost. I bring those three principles into all of the advice that I give to entrepreneurs. That’s where helping to create culture comes into play. That dictates success.
I’m constantly making sure my team knows what our purpose and our vision are. To do that within every aspect of the business, we're all about helping and inspiring through health in our community and the planet. That goes with every action, whether they're cleaning a float tank or interacting with a guest, we make sure we're discussing this on a daily basis. Once it's ingrained in that culture then everyone else begins to understand it. The customers that come through leave five-star reviews because they understand what our mission is. It's pretty much everywhere throughout our business.
That's awesome because that's what you need. You need it to permeate everything that you do. There's this great story floating out there. I don't know if that's true or not. In the ‘60s during the space race, there was this reporter floating around NASA trying to interview anyone to get details about the moon launch. Finally, she came across this guy, “Do you work for NASA?” He's like, “Yes.” “Do you want to answer some questions?” The reporter asked this guy, “What are you guys doing here?” He's like, “We're sending people to the moon. That's what we're doing.” The reporter’s like, “What's your job here?” “I'm a custodian.” The person who's sweeping up the floors had bought into the mission because that vision was so strong in the organization that top to bottom, side to side, everyone was on the same page. That’s how we made it happen.
I know a lot of people out there that they want to do something, whether it's consultant work or side gigs. They're like, “I'm not going to incorporate it now because it's an investment. I'll start accepting payments to my personal account and people can Venmo me. Later on, I'll maybe do it the right way and incorporate.” What would you say to somebody who's beginning starting out thinking of making a decision like that?
Be careful. There are a lot of risks associated with that. Being a sole proprietor is easy on the paperwork side of things because it’s just you. That comes with a lot of risks. When you are operating in that capacity, you don't get the benefit of protection when things go wrong. Let's say you are acting as a consultant and sole proprietor. You give advice to a company that turns out to not work well and maybe they lose a bunch of profits as a result of it. That company is probably going to sue you. If you're a sole proprietor, they get to access not only the company's assets but your personal assets, cars, homes, savings, you name it. They get their hands on it.
That's the last thing that we want. However, if you were to form an entity, LLC, corporation, a lot of what that company could get after in a lawsuit stops with the company's assets. They don't get after your personal assets, which is huge. You got to protect your life and family because you can always start new businesses and ventures. If something comes through and wipes you out, even on a personal level, it's tough to recover from that. I've got a great story for this. A client I used to have was two brothers who wanted to start a business, like fish wholesale sales. Random business but they started it. It's two brothers. They’re family. They don't need an entity, an operating agreement or a partnership agreement. They're fine. For 10, 15 years they were killing it. They grew this business from nothing into generating $50 million or $60 million revenue a year. It’s a massive business.
One of the brothers had enough. There was some issue in the family. He didn't want to work with his other brother anymore. He wanted out. They did not have any structure in place, any documents to help them determine how to deal with this. As a result, their only way out was through a lawsuit. One brother sued the other brother and the company. They ended up spending over $150,000 in legal fees. It took almost three years. At the end of it, the brothers don't even talk and acknowledge each other. The company itself had to get dissolved because it wasn't a legal entity that survived this issue. The family’s in turmoil. It's awful. All of that could have been avoided if at the beginning or early on, they had put together an operating agreement. If you're an LLC that says, “If one member wants out, this is the process we follow. This is how we value their portion of the business. This is how we get them out.” They wrap that in place. They would’ve spent $5,000 on an operating agreement instead of $150,000 on a lawsuit.
It's a lot of savings. I've been in these experiences before where I've had business partners. They were doing the same amount of work or there was a disagreement on some aspect of the business. It becomes sticky when you don't have a solid agreement. When the agreement is made then both parties know exactly what they're responsible for, when it's not made then everything becomes, “I might do this. Maybe this is not worth my time.” There’s no understanding of responsibilities and delegations.
I always tell people, when you're starting a business with a partner or several partners, it's like getting married. This is a long-term commitment where you are going to be in contact with this person. For the foreseeable future, you're going to have insight into their life. There are going to be ups and downs. You've got to try to figure out how to work through them. If you don't, it ends in this ugly divorce. Everyone loses in that situation, except the divorce attorneys or the litigation attorneys, they win. I don't do that. I want to prevent that from happening for people.
You gave a lecture that I attended. You talked about some interesting case studies on some amazing things to do in a business and some things that you need to avoid. Can you give us some other examples of that?
Those two brothers are a great cautionary tale in why you should hammer out these details early, clearly and hire someone to help you figure these things out. I've got another one often overlooked. A client of mine is a tech-based startup that does 3D printing. A lot of the growth is around bringing in outside capital, investors, venture firms. The attorney that they had create the entity didn't authorize enough stock in the company. There's this difference between authorized stock and issued stock. Authorized is how many you tell the state company has, called a million. Issued is how many you give out to people. Five hundred to this person. One thousand to this person. They weren't paying any attention and they issued more stock than they had authorized, which is a huge problem because it invalidates then a lot of these agreements.
They had people contributing tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to their business whose ownership stake is in question. If they had someone along the side of them guiding them through this process, that's where we jump in and say, “This is the issue. It's easy to fix if you do it in advance. We just authorize more shares.” As a result of that, they missed out on funding from one investor because they found out. This is indicative of how you run a business you're not aware of the details. You don't ever want that. Another round of money had to get pushed back until we fixed it. That's another thing. There are so many moving parts when you're an entrepreneur that if you try to do them all, try to be a master of them all, you're going to miss things. That's where getting a reliable teammate in place to handle aspects of it lets you grow at an exponential rate rather than incremental.
I've got a bunch of people negotiating the purchase of a business before talking to me. This is a client of mine. They agreed to terms that were horrible before they got me involved. Once those terms are agreed to, it's hard to negotiate something different. The deal went through on those terms and they had waived a due diligence contingency. We found out that there were all these problems with old equipment, bad contracts with vendors. It ended up costing them another $70,000 to fix. We could've avoided that if I had been involved a little bit earlier. Those are things that you need to be aware of. As an entrepreneur, there's a ton of excitement. When you were starting your company, I'm going to guess you were excited to get it started.
The temptation is to focus on the idea, “Let's grow the business. Let's get our brand together. Let's get our name out there. Let's get customers, clients. Hire a team. Let's get moving. The legal and accounting side, we'll do that later because that's an expense. That impacts my cashflow.” Tying into what we were talking about is that if I'm doing my job right, I get viewed as a value add, not a cost center. The things that I'm doing, the expense that you pay in legal fees or coaching fees, the client looks at and they're like, “That was a good deal. I thought it'd be more expensive. I got a lot of value out of this.” That's the goal. You've got to attack these people early because it's easy to push it to the side.
You're saying that you have your consultant along with your attorney services. How do you wrap it up? Are people paying for a particular service and then they get the coaching included? Is the coaching a monthly subscription? How does it work for you?
There are two different models but the most common is you hire me, you get the full treatment. It's just one fee. It's not confusing. It’s pretty straightforward but you get everything. You want coaching help, I'm there providing some coaching. Setting up bi-weekly or monthly calls that are focused on, “How do we achieve our strategic goals?” There are no legal components to it. It's about maximizing performance. It all comes back into it. If you don't necessarily want the legal fees, there are also packages of coaching services and consulting services that I offer. A lot of them are for 6 or 12-month periods because, like all good things, results take time. Change takes time sometimes.
Accountability is so important, especially as an entrepreneur. There's this mindset sometimes that we think we know everything. You don't know what you don't know. Every time I run into something that is a little bit outside of my scope of wisdom, then I have to start scrambling to figure out the solution. If we can work with someone who can foresee some problems that might come up ahead, it maybe 3 months, 6 months, 12 months down the road then there's always planning involved. My philosophy in life is always to be proactive about these things rather than reactive. When we're reactive, we think with our fear-based mind. When we're proactive, we think an abundance mindset which always gives us multiple options on how to proceed.
Entrepreneurs are Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. They’ve got the world that they've created and they live in it. Their perspective is all based on this world. They don't realize that there are all these other risks, opportunities, different ways of approaching the business, all kinds of things that exist outside this bubble. Sometimes it takes someone from the outside world to give you that perspective to, all of a sudden, blow the bubble up or expand it. That's what I try to do on the coaching perspective.
Even if some things don't ever come to fruition, you're going to be forced to expand your mind into figuring out solutions for things. It's a good practice in self-development as an entrepreneur. That's why entrepreneurism is the ultimate self-development. You mostly got to improve yourself in order to become a better leader, entrepreneur and businessperson. I love the journey because it's never complete. It's always constantly evolving.
Starting A Business: Sometimes it takes someone from the outside world to give you the perspective to all or to suddenly blow the bubble off or expand it.
It's a lesson in humility too, being an entrepreneur. If you're being honest with yourself, you realize like, “I don't know how to do this. I'm going to make mistakes.” You have to be willing to make them, learn from them and keep moving forward.
During COVID in 2020, a lot of business owners have struggled with a lot of different challenges. I know a lot of people that their revenue is down. Some people's revenues are up if they're in food service or other industries like PPE. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs that are not doing as well as they were prior to COVID? Would you recommend diversification? Would you recommend they go even harder in the paint on one area of excelling? What is your take on that?
It's going to be dependent on each entrepreneur but it ties into what we're talking about with having a vision. If you know what your vision is, be rigid there. Double down on your vision but be flexible on how you get there. A great example, there's a pizzeria in Hudson County that when COVID, hit all the restaurants shut down, can't do anything, the revenue dried up. This person's vision was to create the best pizza experience that he can. You can’t have people coming into the restaurant anymore. What do you do? He made make your own pizza kits with a video and all the ingredients so you could order it online, you go, you pick it up, watch the video. It’s an instruction on how to create this great pizza.
It's in line with his vision because he's still helping people create a pizza that's fantastic. He's not the one doing it anymore but it opened up a whole new stream of revenue that he didn't have previously. Sometimes it's a fine line because you don't want to diversify yourself into non-existence. There's always a temptation to take the shotgun approach where you're like, “My main revenue stream is gone. I have these seven other ideas. I'm going to try them all.” They don't necessarily tie into one another and connect to your vision. They're not furthering your purpose. All that's going to do is pull on your energy and your resources. It's going to be hard to be successful in those things.
It's not about reinventing or inventing new income streams. It's about little pivots that are aligned to your mission statement. If you're one of those businesses that are challenged or experiencing challenges in your revenue, there's no bad time to pivot. It comes to the front of our mind when we're struggling. You can do this when you're successful too. It's about creating complimentary services or products that are aligned with your overall strategies. Sounding like a broken record but that's where having the strategic goals matter. That's where having the vision matters. That's where having partnerships with professionals who understand those goals is also important because they can help advise you and direct you on those things.
I'll give you another example. My cousin has a catering business. They do Indian delicacies and sweets. They have a restaurant. During COVID, everything was shut down. Their online business was doing okay but the restaurants were nonexistent. They decided they have all this food in stock, “Let's do grocery delivery.” The grocery delivery soon became the most profitable part of the business in which they can utilize their inventory. As things started coming back, they were able to shift back. I know a lot of other food delivery services that were able to do that. Another example is a good friend of mine. He has a lighting company. For eight months during COVID, he was not able to sell one light because people were not investing in infrastructure at that time.
One of his business partners has a family in China, they were able to get PPE contracts. Because they were so reliable, such a great brand in what they did serving the police departments, the sheriffs in Jersey City, in hospitals. With their lighting, they were able to get in PPE when nobody else was able to because leveraging their contacts. That became their biggest source of revenue during that time. It kept the business alive. We always got to look to see what resources we have and then what resources do we need and how we continually do not give up when the cards are low because there are always opportunities out there. We have to look sometimes outside of our scope of what we think we have to do.
There's always a temptation. I, myself, at any given time, there are fifteen ideas for companies and things that I want to try. There's always a temptation that when I hit an obstacle in what I'm currently doing, that I'm like, “Obstacle, I'm going to pivot to this new idea,” and explore that. The insight comes in understanding is, “Is this obstacle an immovable one, immutable that you're never going to be able to overtake? Is it something that is hard?” Almost all of the time, it's something that's hard. There's almost nothing that is insurmountable. Understanding that difference is crucial in knowing are you pivoting away from a problem or are you pivoting to a new solution to the problem.
That distinction is vital because if you're pivoting away from a problem, you’re going to run that life forever. Every venture you start, when you hit a roadblock and pivot to a new venture, you're never going to see the success that you deserve because there's never a path without obstacles. If you're pivoting to a new solution to get past that obstacle, that's how you grow and experience great success in your ventures. I tie everything back into this, that's where having a vision and having the strategic goals matter. How you get there is less important than getting there.
Let's pivot into a little bit more about you, Trevor. Especially with your background and your near-death experience, it opened up your mind, your heart, your spirit to living more. During COVID, you did a lot of traveling, whereas most people did not. You visited places like Egypt. You explored America, the national parks. Tell us a little bit about your rationale for making those decisions for traveling when everybody else is shutting down and staying put.
For the first six months, we did that. We were locked down in a bubble, not interacting with anyone, not leaving our apartment. For a month, we went to Pennsylvania and rented a house because 3 or 4 people in our building had COVID. We didn't know what to do. We got to a certain point. Maybe my perspective is a little different but my fiancé is a physician. She still had to go into work. She was still seeing patients. They were taking all the precautions that they needed, all the PPE, all the social distancing, disinfecting, the whole 9 yards. None of their physician were getting COVID and weren't getting exposed. Meanwhile, we're free spirits. We love traveling. That was a big part of our life. We love socializing and being around people. We were withering because we weren't living our lives.
We were sacrificing so much. We made the decision that we can't continue to live in stifling fear. There's a healthy fear out there. We took precautions because COVID is a serious thing. It's something that we need to be aware of and we can't be stupid about. I could get hit by a bus crossing the street. There are calculated risks that you have to understand what you can and can't take. My risk profile, I was willing to take some of those. In August 2020, we decided to visit my family in Montana. We flew out there wearing two masks and gloves but we still did it. We went to Alaska to check out Denali. We're still abiding by the guidelines but we realized that if we let this fear of the unknown control our lives, we weren't going to have much of a life to live. We weren't willing to do that.
Everybody has to take their own risk profile and their tolerance to mind and let everybody live the life that they want to live because we only have this one opportunity. For all those people, they're saying, “You shouldn't do this. You shouldn't do that.” Focus on yourself. Try to not be in fear. If you're in fear then take all the precautions, stay at home, do whatever you need to do. For the people that are not living in fear, “We don't want two years of our lives to go by and not be able to experience this beautiful life because it's so short. It could go at any moment. Why not expand ourselves?” I look at it as we can either live in love, which is an abundant mindset or we can live in fear, which is closed-minded mindset and scarcity mindset. We always get to choose that every single day and every action, every interaction, every conversation we have.
My experience in 2018, I wasn't expecting to flatline that day. It was a routine procedure. Who knew that this could be something that happened? Looking at what risks we're willing to take, appreciating the fact that this can all be taken away from us at any moment. It doesn't mean that you need to be reckless but there's an abundance of things that can be done to experience life. If you're willing to take those steps and do that, there's reward, fulfillment and things that you can unlock about yourself. That's the best I can do because I can't advise anyone on how to live their life, I shouldn't be. If you live in fear, it's a one-way path to a truncated life. There's this concept coined by the Greek, it’s by Aristotle called eudaimonia. The most common translation is called flourish.
It's this idea that as any living being, your job is to flourish, which is to be the best version of this living being. Whether you're a dog, if a dog has to flourish, it needs to be the most dog-like it can be. To be a human to flourish, you need to be the most human that you can be, to make use of all of our faculties to experience the life in only the way a self-aware being can. If that's the purpose, that's the lens you use. You analyze risk in a different way. Am I going to be afraid of something that's limiting my ability to flourish? If I am, it has to be a huge risk in my mind. If it's not then I'm willing to accept it because flourishing is more important.
Thank you for sharing that, powerful stuff. Trevor, why do you think you came here to Earth as Trevor Anderson? What did you want to experience?
That ties right into that concept. Our purpose, mine in particular, is to live the most human life that I can. For me, that is exploration, adventure, critical reasoning, community building. That's what we should all be striving for. Humans are social animals. We have the ability to have critical thought, be self-aware and have these intellectual conversations and push the bounds of knowledge and experience. Why we're all put here is to try to do that. I specifically feel like I was put here to pursue my why is to help people get to that point.
What role does God or spirituality play in your life?
I have a fun past with God and religion. I was raised a Roman Catholic in the Midwest. I always had questions. I was a nightmare for my Sunday school teachers. I left that faith. I had a stint in the Christian Nondenominational Movement. I also asked too many questions for that particular community and left that. I consider myself an atheist but one who is always willing to change my stance based on what I learn, see and experience. If there's a God, I have no idea. Spirituality, believing in maybe something greater than yourself, I do but it's the Laws of Thermodynamics. It's out there. It’s interesting because my perspective how we live our lives can be looked at a set of data. To put a value judgment on it, did you live a good life, a bad life is a construct that we drop on top of that. Religion, a lot of times, is that construct. I've essentially removed religion and created my own constructs. I'm still making the value judgements. I'm not necessarily sure where they're coming from. They're influenced by the Judeo-Christian model. I'm not quite sure. What about you?
What God means to me is it is this intelligence that created all of this beauty. Knowing that I am a part of it, you're a part of it and then everyone is a part of it, even the people that do bad. We need an entire spectrum and a range of what negative and positive is. We get to be in this planet, this 3D reality and maybe we go into 4D soon. Who knows? It's showing us the entire range of what's out there. It's everything. One of the coolest things is when I had one of my psychedelic experiences. I invited you last time we got together for lunch, if you ever want to join me and maybe open up, it might open up some things and give you another perspective on all of this.
It showed me how what's inside of our minds is larger when what this universe even has. There's so much limitless potential within us. What makes a person like Elon Musk do the things that he's able to do versus someone who's not doing those things and limited in their thinking? It’s what they're thinking. Maybe there are some opportunities. If you've ever seen that Good Will Hunting movie, it was based on a guy who was a janitor. He became this mathematician. It was based on a true story. There’s that quest for limitless is that's what this life for me is all about. The more I go inward, the more I understand how to create this outward reality. I believe that we're living in a spiritual realm and we're playing it out on a physical plane.
I agree with that. A lot of the limitations that we experience as people are manifestations of our beliefs. Our mind is incredibly powerful and limitless in its potential. If we're not constantly willing to bring in new data and experiences, we impose a limit on ourselves. To tie this in, when I went to Egypt, for example. I saw things there that blew my mind. The Great Pyramid, it's tough to explain. It boggles the mind. It's rationally impossible. We still don't know how they were created. I don't know if we will but some person made this. That's a reflection of a culture of people that had removed a limit in their social construct that we have in our own. I don't necessarily know what that is but that's an example to me of the potential is there. The limitations are self-imposed. It's exciting to think that way because you become a master of your own destiny and outcomes.
Starting A Business: Being an entrepreneur is a lesson in humility because if you’re being honest with yourself, you have to be willing to make mistakes and keep moving forward.
It's important to monitor what comes into our mind because we’re these beings and we want to take a shower. If the shower, this water is all muck, dirt and nonsense coming into on our body and we're bathing in it. You take the example of fear in society through all the news media, the politics, the division and we're bathing in that constantly. That's the reality that we create in our physical reality. If we turn all that off and then we start reading philosophy, Emerson, Thoreau or even some spiritual texts that talk about love and light and we're bathing in that then that's the reality and community that we create. It's up to, individually, the input and then what we put out. We're a reflection of all the inputs and outputs that we have. Our brains are a receiver and a transmitter. We have to take responsibility for all of it because the only choice we have in this life is how we think. Don’t let our thoughts be influenced by outside forces that want to form your mind into hate-filled or fear-filled person.
Not to force an analogy but that translates to well to people who are launching a new venture with a unique idea. There are so many negative forces that will work on you if you allow them to. For better or worse, we live in a fear-based society. There are people who are going to tell you, “You can't do it.” People who will say, “You shouldn't do it.” If that's who you surround yourself with and take that in, you're going to be limited because you're going to reflect their fears. If you start surrounding yourself with people who encourage you, believe in it, support it then you start believing it as well. There's a lot of power to what you're saying.
I want to thank you for coming on. That was such a great conversation, so much was discussed. It's powerful for the readers. It helped me on a lot of levels. How can we learn more about that you?
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. I love our conversations. You can find me on Instagram. It’s @TheAndersonFirm.PC. You can visit my website, which is TAFPC.com. You can always give me a call (551) 220-4419. I've got an office here in Jersey City. Find me on LinkedIn, Trevor Anderson, The Anderson Firm, PC. is a page there. I'm happy to answer any and all questions that anyone has about what we've talked about. If they have questions about their business, strategic goals that they’re trying to accomplish, any challenges that they're facing or they want to talk to me about Aristotle, that's cool too.
For anyone who's reading, is going to see the vision, the passion and the heart that you put into everything that you do and the way you communicate. If you're a new business owner or even an assistant business owner that is looking to up-level, Trevor is the guy. Hit him up. That's how we grow in this community is we support one another.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Important Links:
Trevor Anderson - LinkedIn
About Trevor Anderson
Trevor has a wealth of experience and insight representing and advising businesses and entrepreneurs of all sizes on both legal and strategic matters. Trevor advised and guided Fortune 100 companies on business issues ranging from performance optimization, development and execution of strategic initiatives, and analyzing business risks. He currently provides advisory and legal work on a range of business issues, including entity formation, corporate governance, contract negotiations, mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and investor relations. Trevor is singularly focused on providing massive value to his clients by providing legal solutions that are sensitive to and promote business goals. He believes business founders, owners, and executives can fully realize the purpose of their businesses and leave a positive lasting mark on our society.
