Clayton Morris: I am so prepared. I’ve been working on this all month, my friend.

John Lee Dumas: Yes!

Clayton Morris: I’m ready to burn rubber.

John Lee Dumas: Clayton is a news anchor, a husband, and father of two. When he’s not interviewing presidential candidates, he’s building his successful real estate investing business, helping investors buy their first rental property, and building financial freedom. After some epic failures, he’s learned how to build a meaningful life.

Clayton, take a minute, fill in some gaps from that intro, and give us a little glimpse of your personal life.

Clayton Morris: Well, you know, as a little kid, I used to sneak downstairs when my parents thought I was in bed. I was obsessed with television since I was a little kid. So, my parents thought I was in bed; I’d sneak downstairs and watch Letterman and Carson. I was obsessed with the idea of broadcasting, and I knew that was a career path I wanted to take, that I was so compelled by what David Letterman would do by breaking down that fourth wall of television and sort of spinning the camera around on his cue card guy. So I just knew I needed to be a part of that, and I would dream about it.

But then, I did see my Dad lose his job at 13 years old, so I always had this fear of money that the rug could be pulled out from under us at any time. And I grew up with a lot of really negative associations with money in my life, like, “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” “We’re not the Rockefellers,” “We can’t afford to do that.”

But I always knew that there had to be a better way, so maybe an entrepreneurial way of creating money where I didn’t have to work for a paycheck, and seeing my dad come home and, really, kind of blaming other people for the reason that this thing collapsed for him at his office, and out of work. It was the first time I really was fearful, scared.

But I took this really long, winding path in broadcasting across the country to get into real estate investing as a way of really securing with a future, not only for myself, but for my family, so that I knew that rug-being-pulled-out moment wouldn’t happen for my kids, that they wouldn’t have to see their dad sort of crying in the kitchen at night. I wanted to be able to set up success for my family in that way from a young age because I just knew that I didn’t want my family eventually to have to go through those same pain points.

Yeah, that’s a little glimpse into those moments, those key moments. So, if any parents out there listening, such an important lesson for kids as they stand there and they watch that, they can be shaped their whole lives. There’s a difference between what happened to me and what happened to Richard Branson. He saw his mom just doing whatever it could to be a success, and she was an entrepreneur, and she could do whatever, and that informed him. Quite the opposite happened to me. So not to start off on such a dour note, but...

John Lee Dumas: Well, no, we’re going to keep the dour note going, so don’t you worry about that. But what I do want to say before we get there is, Fire Nation, sometimes it is crazy on what seems to just be little things. Like, families, you know, we all seem to grow up with this on some levels. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” We think, as a parent, that we’re giving good values to our kids, but on some levels, these kids are just like, oh my God, money is like this sacred thing that I always need to be terrified of not having.

And what that can build into your subconscious can really be damaging, especially for anybody that wants to get into the entrepreneurial game, that wants to get into the business game, the mindset of scarcity instead of the mindset of abundance. So we really need to think and choose our words wisely when we’re dealing with the child, the children, the younger generations. There’s a great book that I point to, he’s actually a past guest at EOFire, T. Harv Eker, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. That book really helps you unlock, sometimes, that subconscious scarcity mindset that so many of us have.

Now, let’s talk, Clayton, about revenue. You know, we’re in the money game right now, we’re talking about issues that you dealt with money, and I know a lot of people in Fire Nation are resonating with that. How do you, today, generate revenue in your business?

Clayton Morris: Well, I’m fortunate in that – and I felt I was ready for this interview, because I’ve been listening to you for a number of years and, it’s funny, because I never felt worthy of it. But now, my business has exploded, and there’s some key things that we’ll get to a little bit later that really put in place, that now I feel your audience would benefit from hearing because this all happened for me recently. I have a turnkey real estate investment business. And so, what that means is that I buy deeply discounted properties. I understand real estate; I’ve been doing it for a couple of years. I totally gut and remodel the houses, I put a tenant in the property, I do it in affordable markets across the country where I can get very deeply discounted, affordable properties. We’re talking like $30,000.00 or $40,000.00. Cash flowing monthly rent, $700.00 or $800.00 a month, or if it’s a duplex, upwards of $1,100.00 to $1,300.00 a month.

And then, I sell that property to busy investors. I have clients in the National Football League now, Major League Baseball. I have clients in Switzerland, Australia. I have clients who’ve started with zero properties with us and didn’t think that they could buy a rental property. They had no idea that they could create passive income, and now they have 15 to 20 properties with us.

So my specialty, really, is helping first-time investors learn how to get started with buying their first rental property. It’s that fear that I hear so many people internalize; it’s what I was talking about earlier. I knew that if I could really start to utilize my platform as a broadcaster, and tap in, and kind of get into that core of someone’s personality where they’re held back and they think that they need to just work for a paycheck, they could actually take that 401k money that’s been sitting there and borrow from it, or that money that’s sitting in an IRA and not doing anything for them, and help them realize that they could turn that money into money that’s actually working for them instead of not doing anything for them.

Reaching out to people who have those same goals about wealth building, but they just don’t know how to take those steps. And it’s those types of people that I’ve just had an overwhelming success in the past few years, it’s been really amazing. So I think I’m really effective at helping people overcome their fears, and that’s really how I generate revenue.

It’s not even about the house, and the walls, and the drywall, and the roof, because who cares? They’re all the same thing; they’re a 1,000 square feet, roughly, three bedrooms, one bath, whatever. But it’s really about helping people overcome their fears and anxieties about taking that first step into creating passive income that I think is my key to generating revenue right now. My vulnerability, I think, is a key part of helping people overcome their fears of success.

John Lee Dumas: Clayton, you said some powerful words. You said you didn’t feel worthy of being on EOFire until fairly recently. And I think that’s a nametag that a lot of us put on ourselves, especially when we do the “compare and despair” thing. There’s always gonna be people that are more successful than us. There’s always gonna be the Richard Bransons and the Mark Cubans that anybody can look up and say, man, that guy is so much more successful, or that woman is so much more successful than me. Fire Nation, compare and despair; the one person that you should be comparing yourself to is you yesterday, and if you win, you win.

Now, I do want to shift, Clayton, into what you consider your worst entrepreneurial moment. Now, I’m gonna challenge you here, really be concise with this story. Get into the meat, take us to that moment, and tell us that story.

Clayton Morris: I had some successes flipping houses in Florida when I first got into the real estate game back in 2007. I had flipped a one-bedroom condominium in Florida, and then I got a little overzealous and flipped a second one; and this all happened right before the crash. I saw the warning signs, didn’t listen to my gut. I took it a step further, and ended up taking that money that I had made from, actually, physically flipping houses – which is not really what I do anymore, the sort of speculative game – and decided to really go outside of my comfort zone in something that really didn’t make sense to me. I really didn’t listen to my gut.

I invested almost all of that money into a speculative land and housing community in North Carolina. Now, I’ve only ever been to North Carolina one time as a kid, so I didn’t even know what I was really investing in. And the whole thing went belly up, I mean, the collapse happened and foreclosure. It was a Phil Mickelson golf course associated with this housing community. I think even he pulled out, the contractors pulled out, and yet, there I was, left holding this bag of property, and a construction loan on a property, and ended up going through foreclosure.

Now, for a kid who always had these fears about money, and fears of this idea that I lack and that I need to sort of hold onto things, to wake up one morning and to find my bank account and my assets of my account were frozen because I suddenly had to basically deal with this foreclosure. These lawyers were trying to get at any savings I had, and I had no access to anything. I literally went to work, and I couldn’t even buy breakfast because of my account. I jumped online to see what was happening. Imagine just seeing everything you have with a zero balance and an inability to do anything with that money. That taught me a lot.

John Lee Dumas: Well, I want to dive into that, Clayton, because you have listened to EOFire for quite some time now. You know the makeup of our listeners, of Fire Nation. We’re entrepreneurs, small business owners. What is it that you really think that our listeners, that Fire Nation, can take away from, really, that chain reaction that resulted in that disaster that you call your worst entrepreneurial moment?

Clayton Morris: That it’s never as bad as you think it is. That, even in those dark moments – if you sort of get a little esoteric about it, I’m a big fan of Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie – and what you learn is that the only thing that’s really wrong is things that occurred in the past, fears of the past, or fears of the future. But if I just would sit back, I’d turned off the computer, and I just took a deep breath, and I realized that, in that moment, everything was totally fine. It was totally okay. And now, take action one step at a time to start to pick yourself up and move forward.

But our anxieties, and fears, and all of the roadblocks that we think we experience in our life actually don’t exist. They’re not there. They’re some fear of the past, or they’re some fear of the future. But when you sit back, put your hands over your head, and take a deep breath, you realize it’s all gonna be okay.

John Lee Dumas: Which book would you recommend Fire Nation start with?

Clayton Morris: In that regard, you know, because I grew up struggling with a lot of these really limiting beliefs and memes, as Dr. Wayne Dyer would say, I think picking up Loving What Is by Byron Katie. She is really a sage walking among us, and her four-step process which she calls The Work is remarkable, it is transformative. I mean, people who are debilitated by agoraphobia, addiction, fears of anything in their life, can go through this simple four-step process of having it all flipped around and will be transformed by it. That would be the first book, and I would also recommend The New Earth by Eckhart Tolle.

When you start to think in these ways, and you really start to realize that our brains have the power to shape our reality. And there’s so much research behind it, so much science, it’s actually proven at the metaphysical level, what we can change with our minds, negatively and positively, because our bodies don’t know the difference. So if you dwell on the negative, you’re gonna create cancer in your body. You know, we see it. Doctors – there’s a lot of – this research is now overwhelming. And the same is true of positive thought, and reinforcement, and really building your reality on what you dream about, what you focus on, journaling just a little bit, and focusing on those positive things that create gratitude in our lives. Those would be two that I think could really move the needle for your audience.

John Lee Dumas: Clayton, let’s shift into one of your greatest “Aha!” moments to date. I mean, you’ve had a lot, but zero on one that you think’s really gonna help, aid, assist Fire Nation in their journey, and take us through that story.

Clayton Morris: I had, a number of years ago, rebuilt myself after this collapse in real estate, and I started to acquire rental real estate. I started to buy affordable properties. I started to lay the groundwork with some great systems, and I started to do it slowly and incrementally. And before I knew it, I had built up an enormous amount of passive income every month, like thousands of dollars coming into my family that was basically covering my mortgage, covering a lot of my expenses. And then we added kids to that mix, so that’s a moving needle. Right?

But my biggest “Aha!” moment came because I had always been chasing things. I had always gone after the mysterious unicorn, get-rich-quick thing. Right? Chasing the shiny objects. And my wife had basically had enough of it. And after a number of different – you know, listening to your show over the years, and then just feeling the pull to try different things – which is fine, you know – and then they would all sort of fall apart, and it was never authentic, it was never real.

Finally, my wife had just had enough. She and I took a two-day trip to Napa together, and in tears, she just said, what are you chasing? What are you chasing? If you look around, you have everything in front of you that you need, and you can start to teach people about the successes that you’ve already created that you don’t even know you have. And it was so true; I had been buying properties for myself and my family. That’s when I had this eureka moment, and we actually came back to my whiteboard in my office, and we came up with this idea of the freedom number.

If I could help other people realize that they could attain financial freedom with this simple formula, it’s the thing that has totally changed my life. I put it together – in fact, for your audience, if you’re driving right now listening to this formula, don’t worry about it because I put together a little cheat sheet for you. If you just go to ClaytonMorris.com/fire you can get the free cheat sheet. It walks you through exactly how to do this. It basically takes you through the simple process of looking at your personal expenses and your family, you add them up for six months of your personal expenses, and then find the average for one month. Okay, is it $5,000.00 dollars?

Because most people, John, will say, “I wanna be a millionaire,” but they don’t realize what they’re saying. They don’t really need to be a millionaire, they just want to create financial freedom in their life, and it may be way less than that. What if your monthly expenses were $5,000.00? What if you had enough rental real estate, a few properties, five, six, seven, eight, nine properties that literally covered your entire monthly expenses? That’s financial freedom. You don’t need to be a millionaire to achieve that, you need to just create enough space in your life where you create peace and tranquility, and that can literally come from your freedom number.

So once I tapped into that, I said, oh my gosh, this is it. I started talking to people on the phone. I literally said, you can call me and I’ll talk to you for 30 minutes, anyone; and my calendar just started filling up. And I started helping people tap into this idea of acquiring financial freedom with hitting their freedom number. And the first thing I do when I get on the phone, people say to me, they’re so excited, like, “My freedom number is seven.” “My freedom number is 12.” And it’s like how you structure your podcast, you ask certain key questions. It’s the same thing I ask of my investors that I talk to.

And they get so excited because I’ll get emails from them saying, “I couldn’t believe that was all I needed to do to achieve financial freedom,” and it was a game changer. That is my biggest “Aha!” moment. I had it in front of me. I had been doing it for my family, and yet, I was chasing all this other garbage, you know – I’m gonna make a YouTube channel, I’m gonna go over here, I’m gonna do this – all this garbage. But when I got down to that really core element, everything, everything just exploded for me.

John Lee Dumas: I get the question all the time from entrepreneurs that are starting off. They’re saying, John, what’s the one activity I can do to just really blow my business out of the water, to scale, to leverage? My answer is, do you think that really exists? Do you think there’s that one thing that’s just gonna blow your business out of the water? Because, of course, if there was, then everybody would be doing it, and where would be then? So my answer to them is always something that you just broke down, Clayton, and I want to go back to it, and that’s “engage”.

You actually said, hey, I wanna talk to a person. And then, I get my listeners all the time that think, John, but that’s not scalable, that’s not leverageable, I can’t just scale one-on-one conversations. And I’m like, no, you can’t now; you can later. You need to have these one-on-one conversations to understand people’s struggles or obstacles or challenges.

I mean, Clayton, you can assume what they are because you’ve been through them, but until you have those one-on-one conversations, then you start to hear their language coming back, and you start to use that language when you’re having conversations with other people. And before you know it, you’re able to say the right things, you’re able to ask the right questions, you’re able to dig in and really pull out what is necessary and mandatary. And that all came from you, Clayton, having the willingness to have those conversations.

Clayton Morris: It is a game changer. Because something you always talked about on this show over the years is, learning from your guests on your show, the moments that they took in their entrepreneurial journey came down, most oftentimes, to them having a baby, and they felt the pull to do that.

John Lee Dumas: The Baby Effect.

Clayton Morris: The Baby Effect. I learned the very same thing from my calls. And you’re right, it’s not scalable yet, but I have now put in place in my business where I’ve hired other elements, my administrative role, my acquisitions manager; and yet, that piece I haven’t replaced yet, or I haven’t at least added to it yet, of being on the phone and listening to my investors and hearing them.

But one common thing that they say to me is that, “We just had a baby,” and now they’re really thinking about passive income. But I wouldn’t know that had I not scheduled on my calendar every day, 30-minute chunks, back to back to back to back, from 11:00 A.M. to 5:00 at night, every day, non-stop, talking to investors. And I hear these same things. I don’t wanna be in the car for two hours on a commute anymore. I just had a baby, and I’m really starting to think about legacy wealth for my family. I wouldn’t know that had I not talked to these people.

John Lee Dumas: And the thing about this, then, three conversations down the road, you’re starting to piece together a person just from the first few sentences, and you can say, “Have you ever thought about building legacy wealth for your children?” They’re like, oh my God, Clayton, he’s in my head, he knows! And this is the thing. If you can identify the person’s problem that you’re talking to better than they can, if you can define that better than they can, they’re going to assume, Fire Nation, you have the answer. And guess what? You probably do if you’ve done what Clayton’s done and had these conversations.

So Fire Nation, I’m not even gonna ask Clayton what he’s most fired up about because I can tell you right now, it’s ClaytonMorris.com/fire. You need to get over there, you need to find your freedom number and get this process going because it’s very freeing on so many levels.

So Clayton, don’t you go anywhere because we’re about to hit the Lightning Round. But take a quick minute first to thank our sponsors.

Clayton, are you prepared for the Lightning Round?

Clayton Morris: I was born ready?

John Lee Dumas: What was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?

Clayton Morris: Feelings of unworthiness that, somehow, other people are more deserving of success than me. When I started to have success, I started to really self-sabotage myself, and I would basically try to stop the success, like a train, as if I didn’t feel worthy of it, or I’d find ways to sort of hide my success. I remember when I first really exploded and became a network news anchor, and I was lucky enough to – which I currently do – anchor the No. 1 cable news show in the world. But I would walk through the hallways with my shoulders hunched. And a friend told another friend one time, “You know, Clayton walks through the halls here as if he doesn’t deserve this show.”

And it took him saying that for me to realize, wait a second, I’ve lived all over the country. I’ve lived in Montana, in West Virginia – in Bluefield, Virginia – and I was a news anchor in all these little spots. I worked my butt off, I lived on Raman Noodles, and I’m still paying for Chinese food ten years later on my credit card to make it happen. I did deserve it, it’s okay to stand up tall and realize that you’re deserved of your success. So that was holding me back, my own unworthiness.

John Lee Dumas: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Clayton Morris: A few years ago, I did a one-on-one training with Jay Abraham, the greatest marketer to ever liv, and he told me something, he said, “Clayton, nothing happens until something moves. Nothing.” So I am totally willing to make progress, not perfection, and that’s what I tell the people that I’ve now hired in my business. It’s one of our core mantras: Progress, not perfection. Take action.

John Lee Dumas: What’s a personal habit that contributes to your success?

Clayton Morris: I’m totally willing to do what other people aren’t willing to do. When I first wanted to go into television in high school and I was graduating college, I looked at my best friend – Andy, at the time – and I said, “I’m gonna move to Los Angeles to make a go of it.” And he said, “I will too!”

So the day came, we worked a few weeks trying to find an apartment, get everything, and he just bailed at the last minute. He said, “I’m not gonna do it, I can’t. I can’t leave home.” And he’s still living at home in Reading, Pennsylvania. And I said, “I’m going.” I packed up my U-Haul truck, put my ’89 Ford Escort on the back, I drove across the country, slept in crappy motels, and started working at 2:30 in the morning at a Fox Affiliate in Los Angeles in 1999, and the rest was sort of history from there.

John Lee Dumas: Share an internet resource, like Evernote, with Fire Nation.

Clayton Morris: I love the software because I get on the phone every day, it totally changed my business. It’s called Calendly, and it’s like ScheduleOnce or another calendaring service that integrates with your calendar, and I use Fantastical on my Mac. But what it enables you to do is set up structures. So I’ve set up 30-minute phone call times with potential investors and 15-minute calls, depending on what they want, and that goes out on my website and kind of goes out with my Freedom Number Cheat Sheet and other things, and people can literally click on that calendar and pick a time that works for them to jump on the phone. And you can ask a series of questions in the calendar before the call. So I can say things like, “Are you ready to take action to create passive income today, or do you still need a few years?” “What kind of goals in real estate do you have?” Those sorts of things. So you can really customize it for your audience and really gets everyone on the same page. I mean, I don’t know what I would do without it because, before, I was just going back and forth five times via email with someone to kind of pick a calendar time. It’s the worst. So, Calendly, some great guys who created it. Very clean, neat, easy to use software that integrates with all of your major calendars.

John Lee Dumas: If you could recommend one book, what would it be and why?

Clayton Morris: Well, I’d have to start foundationally. I kind of have two because they build on each other. But Rich Dad, Poor Dad is the book that, if you haven’t read it, you must, because it will totally shift your perspective and paradigm about what it’s like to work for a paycheck as opposed to creating passive income and having your money work for you. His analogy of the golden goose creating the eggs, you want the golden goose, you don’t want the eggs.

But his tax advisor, Tom Wheelwright, has written a separate book. So Robert Kiyosaki’s tax advisor’s name is Tom Wheelwright. He wrote a book a few years ago called Tax-Free Wealth. It’s the foundation of how I’ve structured my investing. Every law in this country was written by a member of Congress, and they’re all real estate investors, so every tax law in this country benefits real estate investors. There are more benefits for real estate investors and structure in your business to have tax-free wealth the right way: not tax evasion, but tax avoidance.

Tom Wheelwright is a tax genius, and this book is a game changer. You can implement five things right away in your life, in your business; it doesn’t have to be real estate. Entrepreneurs need to read this book to start saving money on their taxes year after year after year. So Tom Wheelwright’s book Tax-Free Wealth.

John Lee Dumas: Clayton, I want to end today on fire – which is how we started – with a parting piece of guidance, the best way that we can connect with you, and then we’ll say goodbye.

Clayton Morris: The best way to connect with me is just to go to my website. Go to ClaytonMorris.com. It’s so easy to get a hold of me. I always say that anyone who wants to reach me on Twitter – even on Fox News, when I’m on the show, during the show, I say, anyone who wants to reach out to me, I respond all the time. Just @ClaytonMorris on Twitter or you can go to my website, ClatyonMorris.com, and I will be happy to jump on the phone with you, talk with you, help you with real estate, help you to overcome these fears that are holding you back.

John Lee Dumas: Parting piece of guidance.

Clayton Morris: My parting piece of guidance is: don’t let fear hold you back from taking action. There are always gonna be hurdles, but there are always people who have the answer if you simply ask for it. Don’t be ashamed. You know, they always make the joke that men don’t ask for directions. You’re never going to find out the answers unless you ask and you take action. So many people want to read their way into success, and they want to listen for years and years and years to audiobooks before they ever find out, through their own experience, their success. That’s how you have to do it. Take action; learn from your own experience. It’s the only way you’ll improve.

John Lee Dumas: Fire Nation, you’re the average of the five people that you spend the most time with, and you’ve been hanging out with CM and JLD today. So keep up the heat, and head over to EOFire.com. Just type “Clayton” in the search bar. His show notes page will pop up with everything that we’ve been talking about today. Of course, go directly to ClaytonMorris.com/fire. There’s a gift waiting for you, you’re Freedom Number is waiting for you. Take action.

And Clayton, I wanna say thank you for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today, and for that, we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.

Clayton Morris: Thanks, so much.