Episode 93: Part 2: G. Schischa, learn the language and pay for the toilet…

BEN: Welcome back to Money With Mak And G. Don’t forget to subscribe, like and comment on our podcast. Now we’re into part two of our interview with Glenn Schischa who wthe McDonald’s wordsas a motivated individual and an entrepreneur at heart, he was willing to take risks which led him to Asia as well as the west coast without a job. But ultimately, he found one with Disney. But he goes on to get his MBA. And on a fluke, he takes an on campus interview, which leads him to Orlando, where he gets to meet someone special, who we haven’t found out who it is yet. It’s with great pleasure, I get to bring back a close friend to tell the rest of his story of how his driving force is working somewhere with his set of values. I hope you enjoy part two of this discussion with Glenn Schischa, international strategist and entrepreneur.

GLENN: I get this call that they want me to come down to Orlando to meet with, you know, the CEO and to talk into the job starting out in strategic planning, which would kind of help to build a lot of the strategic direction where the organization’s going to go to whether it’s acquisitions, or this or that or everything. Okay, I don’t know anything about this product, just whatever. But a free trip to Orlando for the weekend. Again, I’m a starving student. I’m all over that. So I came down, and my first interview was with the CEO. Was that Rick? Yeah, well, and sorry, Rick, he asked me like, probably two or three questions, legally, he was not allowed to ask me. But he did anyway. And, he’s like, oh, I know, I shouldn’t. I know, I’m not allowed to ask this but I don’t care. You know, I just found that to be so refreshing and just open that I was like, wow, this is a great guy, you give a crap. He just wants to know who I am personally, you know, and not like trying to fit you into a bucket, be very careful about every step. He’s like, you know, we want to hire the right people, we want these people to be the right and the only way I can find out is in this process. So every single person in the organization I met with like that, and it was just being tested and came back. And I said, you know, when I joined Disney, it was about the brand, you know, the Disney brand, you know, and it was a great brand. I always joke that I was one of the few people at Disney that actually wanted to do my job. Because most of the other people at Disney were being an accountant, because they also hoped to get an acting job, or a writer job or a director job. You’re not the only one that was in finance wanting to be. But this group here, they were just all awesome people. And I said to myself, you know, you spend most of the day with the people you work, more than my kids, more than whatever, and I didn’t have any. So you got to be able to like them. If you don’t like the people you work with, you shouldn’t be doing it. You don’t get involved there. That should be your first radar, because you ain’t going to grow to like, it’s just going to get worse. I liked them all. It had international opportunities, because I knew I’d be traveling a little bit, but I’d be based out of Orlando. Oh, that sucks. Sunshine in the beach is one hour away. And because I was based out of Orlando, I knew I could be closest to be able to take care of my grandmother in a moment’s notice. So I said yes.

BEN: So this is my story. But the quick part was, I took a job with Tupperware and the day that I knew that I would pick the right spot, is when they came over the announcement in the entire building and they said, hey, please come outside to welcome our distributors. They were 98% female and they had these big public announcement systems with just music pumping, and they wanted you to dance and to be fun. And I was just like, this is the place for me.

GLENN: They were fabulous at making people feel special. Money is money, we all need to make it. But for a lot of those women in direct selling, you know, who are maybe housewives, maybe just working, they don’t get thanked or showing appreciation for all the things they do. Part of it was some supplemental income that might pay but part of it was just really about self worth, about having somebody appreciate what you were doing and recognizing that and that was fabulous.

BEN: And yeah, giving them opportunities. I completely agree. So you get into this whole thing, strategy, right? You’re doing some strategic planning.

GLENN: Doing some strategic planning. I helped build the well, I lead the building of the Tupperware website, you know, and of course, this was the early days of internet. And so I’m working to create the website. And of course, you know, this is those early days and the old people are like, oh, you’re new here, you don’t understand, we’ve been doing this for 20, 30, 40 years. This is just a fad, it’ll go away. Yeah. And I’m like, okay, we’re going to do this great website, let’s put like a coupon on it that they can print out to redeem it all. Oh God, no, the world’s going to end.

BEN: I could see that because we had a lot of great people there. But there was still a put in the past. And so you’re just like, oh my god.

GLENN: History can ground you, it can hold you back. And you have to figure out which parts are grounding and which parts are holding you back. And then you know, I got a little bit creative, you could say. And so what we did was, I guess they don’t call it this anymore but we sat and we went into the media room and actually burped Tupperware, which means you go around the Tupperware, and then at the very end, you squeeze to get some air out. And it sounds like a burp. And so we put on the website, find the Tupperware burp. And so we required people to go through all the website and go to all the different pages to try and find the burp. And if they did, they went into, you know, entering into a price and everything and all this stuff. And the world was just like, oh my god, first you got the lectures from the US. We don’t call it a burp anymore. We call it a whisper. The organization called it whisper. Everybody in the world outside the organization called it a burp. It’s a burp. So, you did that. And then of course, you know, Europe was like, oh no, the internet is horrible. You know, I’m fighting this, you know, and sure enough, three months later, they’re popping on board doing their own stuff, you know, they never come back and say okay, well, we did. Yeah, you copied it. But good. So those are really exciting times. So I was working on that, I was, you know, traveling to Europe, because we were traveling all over Germany. At the start. It was mainly Switzerland, because I was working on another one of my projects was, we have three different design centers that Tupperware so we had. And so each one of us said, oh, this has to be this way for the US, Europe is like it has to be the Europe and Asia kept saying, you know, that’s fine, but it’s all too big. It has to be smaller, because our cabinets are smaller. So everything has to be smaller. So it’s always funny. So when we made it like a colander, we had to make three colanders. So you had three talented people, investing time on the same thing. Instead of having three talents were working on three projects and having more. So we were trying to build at that time, which was an existence a worldwide product development programme, a worldwide product development team. And so part of the things I was doing was to try and show like a commonality amongst product lines everywhere you go. And that’s part of my international that I’ve realized is every place you go, everybody is different. Oh, we’re different. You don’t understand me. Belgium, the Netherlands is like two and a half to three hours from north to south and every 50 miles, they’re trying to tell me that the business there is 100% different than 50 miles away, and you just don’t understand. You know, the people are in Herning and are different than the people you know, and oh, those are those people down there. What do you mean down there? Are they like 12 hours away? No. They’re like a 45 minute drive or three McDonald’s down the road. Because that’s how in Europe, whenever I had to get anywhere because we didn’t have Google Maps. Everything was in relationship to the McDonald’s. Like I knew where all the McDonald’s words because I ate them all. And so oh, you mean that McDonald’s? No, no, the other oh, that one there? Yeah, they have the good chicken nuggets.

BEN: I remember they said our taxes are different from their taxes. They charge it on something and you have to pay them. It’s not so different. It’s like you’re like, going over there, you’re doing this design center coordination worldwide.

GLENN: What you ended up finding out and learning and I think it’s a fairly simple rule that I work off of which is amongst cultures around the world about 90% is the same. And if you think about it, fundamentally, we all have families. We I want to take care of our kids. And we all want the best for our kids and want our kids to have more than what we had. Okay, that’s universal, right? And we can focus on the universal, we can focus on the differences so we get caught up focusing on the differences. So the thing is about for every market, about 90% of it was the same, 10% of it different, right. But in many of those markets that 10% was critical.

BEN: You had to give it a nod.

GLENN: You couldn’t just ignore it and say it was only 10%, because that 10% could be stronger than the 90%. You had to understand it and recognize that the little twerking uniqueness that made that market different than the other. And so when we did the analysis, I think like 93% of all the product, or that the top 20 around the world 93% had commonality, right. But they were very strong, unique differences in each market. And you had to reflect that. That’s one of the things that Tupperware did great because Tupperware was this, you know, you had many other companies, many other direct sellers, selling companies, many other companies that have like a European head, and everything flowed from the head. And Tupperware was tremendously decentralized, right? So it was a little bit more economically inefficient because you had marketing in every department, every country and everything, right. But that allowed local countries to maximize their opportunities as they did, and they did. And so part of what we were trying to do was to keep that localization and maximization of a market while building an umbrella of link over and support. So we were in constantly reinventing, we own a lot of fascinating, cool stuff.

BEN: But you know, like, from what I could tell is that, and hopefully, I’m not overstating this is that you and I had kind of a different view on the world. And your view, you and I were different for sure. But Americans generally don’t have that open view that we see. And a lot of times, which I’m sure you get the same thing as, hey, you, like an American that we thought, you know, because you’re open to our culture, and you’re open to what’s going on. And I think, you know, the thing we tried to talk about on Money With Mak And G is an entrepreneurial spirit means being open to new ideas, to being open to pivots and so on. And from the stuff that we’ve done, you have to be open to the different cultures. And no, like you said, it could be really 90-10%, but that 10% could overshadow the 90%, just because they believe it in their country, we are so different. So you have to acknowledge that and then go with that.

GLENN: Like when you go into any market, you’re trying to learn the language. Yes. Now I have enough trouble trying to speak English. And I knew I could study Dutch or Russian. I could study it for years, which I did. And I chopped it up like you wouldn’t believe. But there was so much appreciation for the language because what you’re doing is you’re showing respect and saying you guys matter. And in general, the ones that miss that are the ones that miss that connection. And if you’re not connecting with the local staff, you’re not getting anywhere. And I had to bring change. So every market I went into was like the markets that you know, Ben, they’ve been down for 10 years. They haven’t lost the you know, everything shrinking, they’ve basically given up but they think what they’re doing is the best in the right way you can humanly do it, even though no success is coming. And you’ve got to be the agent of change and convince them that it doesn’t have to be like that. And if you don’t build relationships, you have nothing to leverage.

BEN: They made so much fun of me when I said the scada demo, which was like a Telenor novella. And that’s just like a soap opera that they used to have. And I thought I remembered it was pescado d’amour, which is the fish love. Yeah, it’s like a big gala, which means like, the heart of love or something like that. And they just laughed and laughed, and that little screw up because I was trying to open so many doors like, hey, you’re the pescado d’amour guy. Yes, I am. It’s pretty hilarious. And they would let you in and talk to you about stuff. And, you know, I think the skill set of being open to those new ideas, the skill set of being open to the cultures, it’s a really big talent. And it’s a skill set that can get you really far in your career. And in your life. I mean, especially from an entrepreneur’s perspective, right? You’re seeing the differences, you’re realizing which differences are actually valuable or not, and you’re putting them to really good use and they’re valuable.

GLENN: And ideas don’t get you to success, being exactly right does not know success. People get you to success, and you can’t get people on board, you’ll never get a great idea anywhere.

BEN: You can be 100% right and never get anything done.

GLENN: Yeah. So you’re one person in a huge organization and you need not that one person pulling the midnight oil, it’s getting the team running all in the same, in all of these great books.

BEN: You’re at Tupperware and you’re doing these interesting things. And then you roll out from corporate into the field. In the field, where was like one of your first like positions?

GLENN: First position was that over in Frankfurt. They managed in were targeted with opening up all of Eastern Europe. So I was going into you know, Czech Republic with the Waney, Latvia, wherever.

BEN: Scary at all? Because those are some pretty big names like people in the US go what it’s really over.

GLENN: The Czech Republic is gorgeous. They’re all amazing. Just remember, somewhat colder than the other.

BEN: So you’re going into these places and opening them up?

GLENN: Yep. You’re opening them up, you’re getting you know, because we’re very grassroots, our business is in the home. So you know, you’re having to make those connections. So you know, you’re going in, you’re meeting friends of friends, you know, just trying to find anyone to start to do some price sensitivity to try and understand what pricing you could probably pull off in the market, you know, start to build, start to understand income levels and how much you know. And so you’re really digging deep into understanding the culture, the mindset of people.

BEN: Which is it can be applied to the US too. This is the same thing. It’s just like instead of this country, it’s the US and you’re asking the same things but you’re figuring this stuff out and you’re in these like you’re pretty exotic places right? Not necessarily fully protected. I would say exotic from a villainous perspective. Completely different from what you were used to.

GLENN: Moscow? Four things on the menu? You have boiled chicken, boiled  beef, boiled pork and boiled fish. Okay. I’ll have the boiled beef. Sorry, we don’t have that today. Okay, I’ll have the boiled chicken. We don’t have that today. Okay, I’ll have the fish. We don’t have that today. The pork? Okay, let me go check to see if there is any, but yet there’s a two page menu on vodka. So I’m not sure that’s that exotic.

BEN: It doesn’t have to be cool to be exotic, because there’s a lot of exotic places that just don’t have really great food. But at the end of the day, you’re experiencing all this.

GLENN: Told you, from the last podcast exotic. I go to the bathroom. He asked me if I wanted one or two sheets or two sheets. And there’s a price difference between the two based upon the type of business I was going to do there.

BEN: Yeah, I was going to say I thought the question was, hey, are you doing number one or number two? Because I charge you different for those. I remember the first time that hit me was in a Belgian train station. I was like, really? I gotta pay? And I gotta tell you what I’m going to do. I’m not really sure I’m going to have to do number two right now.

GLENN: Yeah, I was in the city of Pushkin outside of Catherine the Great’s palace at this place that basically had a hole in the ground kind of like an outhouse that they charge for.

BEN: I’m going to charge you 10 cents to go to the bathroom. Okay.

GLENN: You’re the train going back and forth to the city and somebody is walking up and down the cars, selling things. And because it’s an entrepreneur, it’s commerce people trying to make money and it’s not just what you think. It’s bandaids. I never forgot, because a packet of band aids comes in a packet $20. That’s expensive. So don’t do three band aids at a time.  That’s crazy. That’s a great example. Buy in bulk and sell it individual for market. You buy a bulk of 20 bandaids and sold them one by one for a huge profit.

BEN: So you’ve been in Tupperware, you’re going into the field, you are learning about a number of countries that you’ve probably never really read anything about before. And now you’re trying to figure stuff out of Germany.

GLENN: And a lot of what we’re doing is if you think about as micro entrepreneurs is yes, you know. In our businesse, you know, you’re going into the grassroots of the country, all throughout the country and you’re meeting individual people that are trying to start and build their own little, let’s say Tupperware business and helping them to fulfill their dreams and some of these people, they were school teachers that are getting paid $200 a month, but where it hadn’t been getting paid in six months. And that’s just amazing. And she started with us. And after I think three or four years, she was earning close to a million dollars a year. And I wasn’t even near that but that’s the way it should be. She would it’s a risk reward. Right? What’s corporate, she was taking a lot of risk. In doing this, she deserves a bigger payoff. And she got it. God bless her.

BEN: Because a $200 over there is a big deal. And you know, that’s what you can live on and have a good life or not a good life. Wow. That’s interesting. So you had this kind of this mindset, you wanted International, which I always thought was really cool.

GLENN: International entrepreneurs, and then helping people. It was a perfect fit. It was awesome. And those were great run.

BEN: Me and Mary, what’s her name in Ireland that we both knew? She was just an amazing woman. No, we can’t talk. Well, nobody knows. Yeah, you said it, you’re supposed to say I got in the bathtub. I wasn’t. Okay, we love you. We love you.

GLENN: You more than welcome on another podcast to tell your story. You love to gather attention and get yourself into situations that you needed hotel staff to get you out of.

BEN: She was an amazing person that had this great personality that just needed an opportunity. And she took it and she did wonderful things. And for that I am grateful because she gave so much joy when I was over there.

GLENN: And what you heard thousands and thousands of times, is how that opportunity changed their lives. They don’t realize it because it’s all about the Benjamins. But on a lot of some made some really great money. Some made a little money, but generally, at least what we’re proud of in Tupperware is they all walked away happy about the experience. And it was life changing for him. It helped them to build self confidence. And that self confidence, which I was proud of got to flow through the family. So the kids got to see their mom glowing, and getting success. And that inspired a little girl that she could get success to maybe in life. And that was so rewarding. You totally got energized. And you had a sense of gratitude and reward. And when they got success, and they were on stage just number one, you know. And she’s in the great part about as you say, okay, did I do that to her? No, she did that to yourself. Because for every one of her there was someone else that said I couldn’t and so they didn’t. She did it herself. But I got the satisfaction of knowing that I had the opportunity to provide the tools. But she was the one that chose to take advantage, pick up those tools and work with them. And that was tremendous. I didn’t get her success. She got her own.

BEN: I was in accounting and finance. So I was just happy that I was part of the team.

GLENN: We’re all part of the same wheel that was doing the same thing, which was providing opportunities for people.

BEN: I have amazing memories of Tupperware, the different things that we’ve done, the different people I’d met, how there was a lot of gratitude. There was a lot of, you know, just thankfulness of it all. It was pretty crazy. So you’re doing the work out in Eastern Europe, and then you get the opportunity to be a managing director somewhere. I can’t remember what was the first place you went for managing director was that in Russia?

GLENN: So I did Russia, started up from scratch and that was a rocket ship.

BEN: Because I remember talking to you about Russia and you’re like, hey, dude, I need 4000 bats and bowls that you have, you know, that are ready to be destroyed or whatever, I’ll take them all. I’m like, I like this guy.

GLENN: But you had the ’98 crisis there and the ruble went from like, every single day the ruble was just jumping around devaluing, I have the pride of knowing that I am the only tough work country to have actually had a minus sales month. Because the ruble shifted the other way. So everybody returned, because we were on this dollar basis. And so negative sales one month, I mean, sure, that darn thing grew up to like over 100 million or something like that. But it was rather funny that when that month came in, and yet, yeah, your monthly performance report to corporate and had to explain how you ended up with minus sales.

BEN: Because I remember you like your school, me and all kinds of stuff. It’s like, Ben, you don’t understand. He goes, I’ll take the cheapest stuff, you can get me because that stuff is worth so much more here and if I could just get it for like, 10 cents? I can make some money.

GLENN: Because, again, different markets were different ways. You know, they didn’t care that it was the latest color or not. They were focused on functionality, they were driven by functionality. And if the product works, they were willing to pay for it. They didn’t care what color it was. So all of the stuff from Europe that nobody wanted, if they were going to give me 75% off for me to get rid of them? Thank you. Merry Christmas.

BEN: I love that because I was having a problem getting rid of stuff and nobody was doing that. You’re just saying give it all to me. I’m like, we’re sending more to you, let’s go. So that was awesome. Yeah. So you’re running Russia and you told me that great story about how all your computers disappeared that one time?

GLENN: Yeah. So you know, in Russia, you have some dark elements. So you know, in those days, you had a lot of mob stuff and a lot of gray work.

BEN: And we’re in the UK at the time, right? Didn’t we?

GLENN: Yeah, because I was managing both at that time jumping on both.

BEN: We’re hanging out here like, you’re not going to believe this. Yeah, they still have all the computers, but we’re paying when he gets protection money and for people who don’t know, that’s a real thing. And it’s a real thing in a lot of places. And, you know, you’re paying that money and then you’re like…

GLENN: You pay certain people who you hope have good enough relationships that other people won’t steal, or try to bother you because they’re afraid of those people.

BEN: Yes. And so they’re being paid and then all of a sudden, everything disappears, because somebody comes in in the morning goes, oh, my gosh, and then the computers are here, you make a call to the facilitator, and then all of a sudden, two hours later, or whatever it was, someone just shows up in the middle of the room with all the cables there. And you put that together. But there’s so many stories.

GLENN: And what was interesting learning because it was during a very crucial time in their history where they were making conversion, from communism planned economy to a capitalistic market driven economy, you know. So, I mean, a great example was when we saw this meeting space that we met, it was about 250 meters perfect. It was sitting for a year and a half not being sold, and we needed a space and we just needed it for about six months, right? And I’m just like, came up to the guy and I’m like, okay, this hasn’t sold for a year and a half. I’ll take it for six months, you can put it on the market, keep it on the market. All you need to do is give me two weeks notice I’ll be out of there. So at least you’ll get some revenue in for the next whether it’s a week or six months until you get rid of this, but we should get some free money in you know, and I’ll even remodel, we call remodel. I’ll even remodel the place, get it all painted everything because that’s what I’m going to need it for. A great deal. Free money. He says no. Nyet. I’m like, you know what, he has his number because in the old days in the Soviet Union, you had your number, you had your price. And that is what people pay. And he would rather sit on nothing to get an expectation of a price then to negotiate, get a little bit less or a little piece less. And sure enough, two years later, that thing was still not rented out. Yeah. But that and you were dealing with that mindset. So wasn’t this American logical, you know, way of going about it. It’s just you know, and you had to deal with that. And so some of the things couldn’t work and operate the way in which you want it to and your hope to.

BEN: Exactly. So you started doing Russia, you learned like a lot of great stuff. And then you move to other countries, right? That’s how we met because we met in London.

GLENN: In London, and we’re going to turn around the UK, which was awesome. It was a great adventure. It was crazy. It was a lot of fun. A lot of hard work. It was work hard, play hard, was really interesting. But it was really exciting because, like we talked about, we took a market that was down for 10 years in a row. And then just like within a few months, we started getting plus again and getting back on the track and to watch people that had been beaten down year after year, and to start to get hope, and to start to believe. And that’s probably one of the big lessons to learn there. If you’re ever in anyone that’s looking to do a turnaround, you have to have your strategy for what your next two to five years is, but nobody’s going to wait two to five years. Yeah, you need to combine short term wins and momentum to a long term goal. Yeah. And everything you do has to have a long term vision of where you want to be, but short term actions right now that help you to get things going, but also are aligned with where you want to be two to five years from now. And if you do anything that’s not aligned with where you want to be to five years from now you’re taking a step back. And so that’s kind of the interesting part. We got some early wins in the beginning, got people to believe that it became a snowball.

BEN: It was brutal, though. It was brutal for me. But I can’t remember how long I was there before you got there.

GLENN: Invoicing was down for six months. Remembering to sue people at the time. Do you remember that? Well, yeah, at the time I walked in my finance person had claims against my finance person being Ben just so we’re clear. My finance person had hit claims against 18 of our 25 distributors, or was it 22 of our 25 distributors? It was a lot. I remember going down to Surrey, we’re not mentioning that name because there’s probably still legal stuff going on. Okay. Going down to Surrey going into their house sitting in their living room. And they were distributors for the year last year, our number one best-best. And I come in, say I’m new here. I’m really excited to graduate. What can I do to help grow your business? And she breaks down crying and says, well, I have to be in court next week, because you guys are suing me. And once I get through, I can’t focus on anything else until I get through that and I was just like, oh, God, this is going to be a little bit longer and a little bit harder than I thought.

GLENN: You used to think I never told you I or maybe I did but I had probably at least a dozen distributors in my office crying their eyes out.

GLENN: Yeah. But also that was the place where I called a distributorship which is a business you know, because they had warehouse stocking, I called it, I got the answer machine and we’re just going to call her Susan because there was no Susan. I was going to say, Jane, but we have Jane’s there. I call her and Susan’s and say, and hear the answer from me. Hi, this is Susan. My knickers are down by me and I’m sitting on the toilet. So once I get off, I’ll give you a call back and she thought that was cute. Okay, this is a business. No, it was I’m sorry. It was like, welcome to Tupperware distributorship. I’m Susan, my knickers are down by my knees and I’m sitting on the toilet.

BEN: I was like a young kid when this was all happening. I was like dying.

GLENN: You’re just like, oh my god, we’re going to grow with it? But again, it was about modernizing, contemporarizingng your brand. We looked at the strategy, we looked at where we were, looked at where we weren’t. We started to build a retail channel with kiosks in the shopping centers and to build our brand and to get our awareness out. We talked with some of the large grocery chains about doing B2B’s and we got a lot of great successes. Really exciting. The Tesco Yeah, that was pretty exciting. We took them all whitewater rafting, didn’t know there was whitewater rafting in the UK. Yeah, we took him up whitewater rafting. Everybody got on the bus and told him we were going whitewater rafting. And he says no way. We’re not doing it, not happening. Absolutely not. I hate this. They pitched him on the hallway up. We did the whitewater rafting, it was the best trip ever, loved it, whatever. So why do you fight me on this? Because openness and an open mind. And that’s the thing because you had 20 years of history. And that was another lesson because it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, we had a business where it was a zero sum game. It was viewed as us or them. Our customers and which were distributors. They hated us. And we thought they were a bunch of not very intelligent people. Okay, idiots. And what you end up learning is you’re never going to get anywhere in there. Yeah. Until you break down those walls, build partnerships with your customers, build partnerships with your partners, and you know all your 360 degree partners from suppliers to other markets that you can learn off of and adopt and adapt to your customers, you know, building them love together that we’re all going in the same direction, running the same one, you’re never going to get anywhere. And once we got that, then we were running forward because they believed we were on the same page and they were knowing that a screw up that we might have done was a mistake. They really thought we were there just to screw them. Yeah. And once they realized that we were there to help them, but sometimes we make some mistakes, right? Things started to happen.

BEN: It was such an incredibly tough time, but also just an incredibly rewarding time as well. And you know, I look back and some of my best memories are of Tupperware. I just really enjoyed it. And it sounds like you did too, because you got the opportunity to be a managing director in a couple of different locations. You traveled all over the world. And we literally could sit here and talk for 2, 3, 4, 5 more hours on just all the fun stuff that we did. All the crazy times downtown, meaning the girls.

GLENN: Oh yeah, the girls in her. The girl that lived near the girl was kind of like the Paris Hilton type of person for the UK. She lived two doors down for me and Notting Hill. And she invites us over to see your place and it is the biggest pigsty you’ve ever seen. I mean, the most unbelievable pigsty, you’re walking over stacks of clothes. And she’s picking up what was toilet paper or tissue paper something picked up? Oh, I sponsor that. They give this to me for free. You know, I sponsor this. They used to be really free. And I’m like, God, if anybody saw this house, nobody would have given you a penny. She was so whacked out and then started talking about.

BEN: Wasn’t she shown us the magazines that she was in?

GLENN: Yeah, yeah. And her boyfriend that was like on drugs and in jail. And we both had girlfriends who were just like, oh, we got to get out of here. Get out of here. But at the same time, she’s really super famous. This is kind of cool. Maybe a paparazzi’ll get a photo. It’ll hit the newspaper tomorrow where I’ll get publicity and grow the business.

BEN: But I remember because we were over there at 9/11 too you know, and we remember people interrupting our conversation and our meeting and we’ve said yeah…

GLENN: The TV that they use for the World Cup because in Europe nobody goes to work when the World Cup is playing so you have to have a TV but yeah, I remember we’re sitting in the meeting and saw it. But in the World Cup they shut the world down. I mean if you don’t put a TV in the office people don’t show up, just have the most sick days.

BEN: So you put it in there and people are working but they’re also watching, just got to roll with it.

GLENN: 9/11 comes in surreal. You’re in a foreign country and you’re watching you know the towers go down in a foreign country.

BEN: And people can understand it, but they can’t understand it.

GLENN: And it just you know, of course the whole world shut down. So you know, we were supposed to be in Paris because we boarded up to Paris, we were supposed to be in Paris by like the next day or the day after. And you’re just whole thing was just surreal.

BEN: Because a week later, you know, I jumped on a flight from Gatwick back to Orlando. And it was crazy because I’d never seen in Gatwick the number of automatic machine guns and the number of dogs too because they had those I don’t know what you call them, not the sniffing dogs but the security dogs.

GLENN: Oh, yeah, like these German Shepherds, nasty, nasty. And I’m sorry, lovely animals.

BEN: But they were trained to be nasty.

GLENN: They were escorting the Jets, remember? Jets were coming to meet and escort a little bit.

BEN: And I got on the plane and people are like, are you crazy? You’re going to be on a plane and I was like this the most secure time ever. I mean, I got so many searches going through the metal detector. It was absolutely insane. And the other plane was only like 10% full. So I had like full rows to myself. And it was awesome. But those are just some crazy stories. We should go over those sometimes.

GLENN: Yeah, it’s surreal being in a foreign country then something like that happens in your homeland and trying to understand it, figure it out

BEN: And you know, just through our whole conversation, you know, one of the things just get people more comfortable with is, you know, taking risks and some of the things that you did, there a little bit off the beaten path for sure, right? You drove across the country to get to LA and you got this job with Disney. But then you turn around and you get your MBA from University of North Carolina, and then you get a job as a fluke with Tupperware and what I mean by a fluke is ou didn’t even know or was on the radar. And then you get One Buck Pierre and he’s not here. So you get this job, but then it leads you to Eastern Asia, leads you to Russia, leads you to Germany, leads you to the UK, and all these crazy places. And you know, as we stressed before, you know, I’ve talked about the path is not a direct path. And the success of individuals, especially when they’re talking about money, and their well being and their wealth, those paths aren’t straight, and you just need to continue to focus in on, you know, making just a little bit of progress every day.

GLENN: The part I would say that goes, maybe against the career grain. There’s a lot of people that are focused on career ambition. And what I tried to always do is focus on adventure. And because if you focused on adventure, you were doing things that were new, interesting and having fun. And if you’re lucky, then the rewards follow you. And sometimes it didn’t, sometimes it did. But they were always great adventures.

BEN: But it never gets any better unless you actually try and never get to any better, unless you put yourself out there. And that’s what we want to do. Because I was never comfortable with money when I was younger. I was never comfortable with CEOs, I was never comfortable with people in power. And over the years, I’ve slowly broken down those walls. And I’ve seen the amazing things that you who is a pretty average guy, but with just exceptional skills and talent, were able to do in the 50 countries you’ve been to. And I sit there and go, oh my gosh, I’m this average guy but I speak three languages and I’ve traveled and worked in over 20 countries, and I’ve done these amazing things.

GLENN: You only live once. If you’re focused on career ambition, you’re focused on the end goal, and you may not be happy and hope if you hit that end goal, I really hope you are happy. Or you can choose another path, which is to figure out what you like to do and do it and the universe will reward you for it.

BEN: But the whole thing about you leading a life of service, because of what happened at a very young age, taking those risks and being in those amazing places with an entrepreneurial spirit, which has an open mind. And the ability to work well with people I think is absolutely fantastic. So why don’t we go ahead and end it there. And thank you everybody for being here. Please subscribe, like and comment and time to wake up.

GLENN: Time to wake up and if you’re driving, oh, my goodness!

BEN: Oh, yeah. I think there’s some really great stories in there. And hopefully we’ll get a chance to get back and do that again. So we thank everybody for being here. And thank you.

GLENN: Thanks for the opportunity. Really appreciate you very much. You’re a brother to me, and we’ll do it.

BEN: We’ll do it again soon. Absolutely. I’ll see you later.