#156: My 9-Figure Blue Collar Journey Part 1 // Chris Lee // Next Level Pros Podcast

Real quick, before we dive in, I want to give you some context on this episode. This conversation was originally courted back when I was running my first podcast, the Founder Podcast. It was before Next Level Pros even existed. I sat down with some serious heavy hitters, entrepreneurs, operators, leaders, and we unpacked real tactical stuff that still holds up today. So instead of letting these episodes collect dust, we're bringing them back here on the Next Level Pros channel. You'll notice the branding is a little different, maybe the style too, but the lessons? Still gold. Especially if you're in the trades or home service space and trying to build something real. Let's get into it. Today, I'm going to be sharing my story. I am 39 years old and unofficially retired. When I say unofficially, it's because I'm still very active in investments, in consulting, as a chairman of the board for my business, SoulGen Power. Over the years, I have been involved in founding many different businesses. Now, only two of them have had rapid, wild success. Outside of that, there was some modern successes. There were some failures. There was a variety of different things. But before we get into the business talk, I want you to know a little bit about me and who I am, what made me who I am today. Why in the world do I have a paddle board back here? Check it out. Take a look at that thing, though. Man, that thing is beautiful. So if you guys are listening to this, go ahead and look on YouTube. You're going to be able to see this really cool paddle board. This was actually made for me, handmade by a wood shop, a high school wood shop. Pretty amazing. I'm also an avid collector of shoes, of sports apparel. You can see up here, I'm a big gun guy, fairly conservative. I have some left-leaning opinions about certain things, social things, but for the most part, very conservative and right-leaning. But don't let that scare you. I am open to all kinds of ideas. And so we're going to be talking about all kinds of cool things with so many different founders. But once again, what made Chris Lee the person I am today? So I am a, I grew up in a household where my father was the only one that worked. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. There were six kids. There was actually seven kids, six siblings, and we also raised my cousin, who's a year younger than me. And so growing up in a small town of Connell, Washington, it was the perfect place for a kid to grow up. You know, summers were spent playing backyard baseball. We were big sports people because my dad was a high school teacher, also a head football and wrestling coach. And so since we didn't have a lot of money, all of our time and effort went into things like sports that didn't cost a lot of money. And sports back then were completely different. You didn't have these club sports. We weren't paying all this money to travel. I mean, we were out hustling on the gridiron. We were playing on the sandlot, right? Like it was, it was completely, completely different day and age. This small town that I grew up in, 2600 people. And later the population doubled only because a prison was put into the town and accounted the prisoners as citizens of the town. So anyways, that was a little bit about, you know, life growing up for me. It was very simple, very basic. Many of you guys remember what the 80s and 90s were like. Lots of nostalgia. It's funny because there's a lot of things actually coming back from the 90s right now as far as styles, which just makes it laughable all together. So love sports. I loved math actually. So in second grade, I was taken and identified as someone that was pretty good at math and I was put on a math team in second grade. And I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was held back. I started school year later than most. In fact, when I graduated from high school, I was 19 years old. But it put me ahead. If any of you guys have ever read the Outliers, it talks about the advantage of age and hockey and different things. And I think there was definitely an advantage for me in school. And so I was treated a little bit different because I was advanced in math. And that's one thing that I've always loved is numbers. And that's one thing that has appealed to me about business is, you know, just the language of numbers. I just get nerdy when it comes to that. In fact, one of the things I always liked to tout, because I was an athlete, it was strange, but I competed in math. Eighth grade math team state champions, me and three of my other peers who are the state champs. But so growing up, it was a lot of fun. But because we didn't have a lot of money, we were required to work at a very young age. In fact, I got my very first job when I was nine years old delivering papers every single day, 365 days a year. Unless we left on a little family vacation in which we got a sub. And so that was me waking up between five and five thirty every single day from age nine till sixteen. And then later at sixteen, I got what was called the route manager job. And I was supposed to be able to get my driver's license, but I didn't have my Eagle Scout yet. And so my mom wasn't going to let me get my license. But later realized that I needed it for this job. And so I got my driver's license. But me and my younger brother, Tony, we ended up running. We were the paper route managers, and we would wake up at four thirty every single day. And this set a foundation for the rest of my life of becoming an early riser, even though naturally I am a night owl. And I love love those times. But so learned work at a very young age. In fact, the rule in our house was that the age of 12 you had to provide for everything, but underwear and food on the table. So if you wanted food outside of the house, if you want to close shoes, you want to do any activities, guess what? That was coming from your pocket. And so because of it, I learned the value of work early on. Now, I only I didn't know how to work smart. It was literally just work hard. And I was picking up any side job that I could. I was driving tractors during the summer, raking hay for local farmers. I worked at an oil place delivering oil only for, in fact, that was one. The only job that I was actually fired from because I was just unreliable. I had worked at a little restaurant called the pizza station. Just anything, any odds and ends way to make money, but it wasn't ever smart. And, you know, my dad, he was a disciplined investor, which is which is interesting. He only made about sixty five seventy thousand dollars a year growing up. But over half of his paycheck went towards his 401k. Now, he wasn't really like robust in it. It wasn't super creative, but he was disciplined. And so that's one thing that my parents taught me from a very young age was the value of discipline, the value of work. And so early on, it was just me working discipline. It wasn't it wasn't anything that was super smart. And I first was introduced to working a little bit smart when I was at the age of 18. I was between my junior year, my senior year in high school. And I saw this little tab, little post. It was I was at that moment attending what's called a running start. So I was attending college while in high school at Columbia Basin College, a little local to your school, a little community college. And I saw this tab posting and said, make a guaranteed thirteen dollars an hour. I couldn't believe I think minimum wage at that point was like six fifty. I was like thirteen dollars. That is twice what I can make it doing anything else. And so I gave it a call and come to find out it was cutco and selling selling knives. And you know, you got paid thirteen dollars for every presentation, whether you made a sale or not. Now, this is where I realized I had a gift, a gift for connecting with people, a gift for identifying needs and pain of people and being able to provide a solution with product. And so this was the very first product that I actually got to sell and was paid for the value that I created during an hour rather than just paid for an hour, no matter how much value I was creating. And so this is where like my my mind went off. And I can make sales. I can literally go into any old farm lady's house, the farm wife's house and walk out with a twelve to fifteen hundred dollar check for a full set of knives. And I fell in love with those knives, too. You know, in fact, today still have a big set of cutco. One thing I've always preached is never sell a product that you do not absolutely believe in and that you don't use. In fact, every single product that I have ever, ever sold in my life, I have and I use. And so that's a big thing. But that's where I was introduced to sales. And I think sales for anyone that's listening to this is really the basis of any entrepreneurial journey. If you want to have a successful business, I don't care who you are. If you're a doctor, a lawyer or anything, if you want to run a successful business, you have to have a background in sales. You got to you have to master this craft. And it was it was while selling cutco that I was introduced and began to fall in love with the world of sales. Now, at this point in my life, I thought the only thing I wanted to be was a doctor. And the reason I wanted to be a doctor is one, I wanted to help people. I love the idea of helping. But two, my grandpa, my mom's dad was a doctor. And and he was the only person in my life that had some level of wealth. And I thought, well, and I always knew from the age of like five or six, I want to be rich. I want to be wealthy. I want to be successful. I was driven. I just have that deep personality for anybody that's ever taken the disc assessment that is like extremely dedicated, driven, dominant and. And so so because of that, I was very goal centric as a young boy knew I had goals. In fact, I wrote them. They were up on my wall. One was to be a state champ. The other was to marry my sweetheart in what we refer to as the an LDS temple in my religion. And so, you know, all these things I was driven, I knew I wanted to be rich. And I thought the only way to be rich was to be a doctor and helping people seem pretty cool. So literally, my whole life was mapped out. There's the reason I was going to college in high school was to all become a doctor. And so so this was this is where I was at the age of 18, working in sales, trying to save up for medical school, realizing that after I graduated from high school, I was planning on going on a two year mission. And so, you know, during let's let's back up a little bit and tell you a little bit about how sports shaped my life. Sports was so important to us. Like I said, it was it was really all that we had. And it was our way that we connected with our father. And my mom was funny. She didn't really like sports. She grew up in a household like I said, the doctor and talk about clash of titans. So you got my mom who was raised on the East Coast in Washington, DC, super wealthy with my dad, who was raised by a ditch rider, which is like one of the poorest jobs that you could have. In fact, my grandpa, he he was a wonderful man, but you know, loved the bottle too much. My dad has early memories of driving him home from the bar at age 12. So these completely different backgrounds, they come together. You got my mom, the dreamer, my dad, the work, workhorse. And they came together to to formulate this, this wonderful family. And so this, this is what these are the people that raised me. And once again, going, going into sports, sports, sports was everything. And I had a had a battle. Like for me, I always wanted, like I said, I had that leader characteristic. I wanted to be the one recognized. I wanted to be out there and doing amazing things. Of course, I want to be a quarterback in football. In fact, the but the one thing that didn't line up is I wasn't super fast. But, you know, worked hard and I had some heartbreaking moments where, you know, as a sophomore, I was a backup quarterback through seven touchdowns on varsity, had a pretty awesome sophomore year as a junior. I ended up getting beat out by the sophomore that was younger than me. And it was heartbreaking. And one of the turning points of my life where like a dream I felt was just ripped from my chest because I wanted to be a state champion. And like, I thought that the way to be a state champion was to be that leader, be that quarterback and had a terrible junior year. I was, I was injured more mentally than physically. And it was then I made a decision that, hey, look, sometimes you don't hit your goals. The route that you think that you're going to go. And sometimes it takes an alternative route to get to the same result. And so after my junior year, decided to pack on a bunch of weight, hit the weight room, creatine, all the, all the good legal stuff, protein. And ended up packing on a bunch of pounds and I moved from quarterback to the line my senior year. And I, and I started as the right guard. I was a good pulling guard and then middle linebacker. And eventually we ended up winning a state champion and the championship. It was the very first state championship in our school history. But that thing taught me a lesson that it doesn't matter what the path is. If you have a goal and you're not willing to quit and you, and you bounce back, even though others may, you know, dictate what the future is, you know, this, this kid that beat me out or the coaches or whatever the reason that I could have been just an excuse maker, right? Like, like this is where I, I, I learned the lesson. The E plus R equals O. I love the book above the line by Urban Meyer and what she uses the equation. E plus R equals O event plus response equals the outcome. Whatever the outcome that we want, that ultimate goal, it doesn't matter what the event is as long as we control the response. And luckily I controlled the response as a junior in high school. And, you know, that taught me many lessons for the rest of my life. And I drew on that experience for the rest of my life. Um, during, during high school, I started dating, uh, my high school sweetheart as a sophomore. She moved into, um, our little town. She had transferred. So she didn't move, but she had transferred in. And if anybody ever grew up in a small town, you realize not a lot of people move in. And so when she showed up, our sophomore year was like, I'm fresh. Me, every guy in the world wanted this woman. And man, I was smitten the very first time that I, that I saw her and I begged her to be my boy, uh, my girlfriend. And, uh, and we started, we started dating, um, almost immediately after she had transferred in. And, um, that wasn't always, uh, you know, growing up as a member of the church of Jesus Christ, the latter day saints, LDS or Mormon. Um, you know, it, it wasn't always encouraged to have a steady girlfriend. And so my mom was always like trying to get me to date other girls, but man, I was just smitten over this woman. And, uh, you know, just, just loved her from the very first day. And so one other really shaping thing of my childhood, not only the work, not only the sports and my relationship with my now wife, Andrea, um, was diabetes. So in fourth grade at the age of 10 years old, um, I began to lose weight. I weighed about 80 pounds and I dropped 10 pounds, like literally 12 and a half percent of my body, body weight gone. And, uh, I just became this skeleton and nobody knew exactly why. And I remember running on the playground and peeing out of breath and I go and drink, um, a glass of water and then have to pee five minutes later and like just had no idea what it was. Till one day, my mom was talking to a good friend of her who was a type one diabetic and she began sharing with her, uh, Susan, uh, my, my mom, Carol, she was sharing with her friend Susan what was going on with me. And she's like, Carol, I think, I think he has diabetes. Like you need to go get this checked. So we go down to the local little, uh, Dr. Ring, you know, local community doctor's office. They stabbed my finger and I'm just bleeding and it hurts so bad. They didn't even have like one of those like nice, easy ones. He just literally pulls off this needle and just stabs my finger and, uh, they've test my blood sugar and it's 350. Anybody that knows anything about blood sugar, you're supposed to be between 80 and 120, 350 was extremely high. So immediately they knew I had type one diabetes. And so they call up the hospital, they sent me to the hospital, but in the meantime, I had been fasting for 24 hours and, and my parents are like, Hey, can we go and get him something to eat? And they're like, Oh yeah, feed him. So of course my parents don't know anything about health at this point. We go to Burger King and I think I got like a whopper and fries and just all this garbage, fat and carbs. By the time that they admit me to the hospital, my blood sugar 650 and 650 is like crazy. I mean, you're, you're about a hundred, maybe 200 away from going into coma. And so they immediately started pumping me full of insulin and everything, but I spent the next week learning how to control and manage my diabetes. And there was a pivotal moment that forever changed my life. When I was at the hospital and they, they played this, I don't know why I'm tearing up right now, but because this meant this means so much to me. But there was this pivotal moment in which they played this Lucas set movie and there was a, there was an NFL player and he was talking about, he's like, guess what? I'm type one diabetic and type one diabetes doesn't have to define your life. No matter, no matter what you can go and accomplish whatever your goals. And like, this was such a message of hope for a little 10 year old boy that literally I thought my life was over. I didn't, I thought I would never be able to eat sugar again. I thought I was going to die at a young age. I was being told that I was going to have to take shots every single day and I was definitely scared of needles. And I just thought, man, this is going to dictate how the rest of my life goes. And I'm just going to be a victim, a victim of my circumstance. And as I'm watching this video, it brought me so much hope that, man, I don't have to be a victim. I can go and do anything I want. I could be a professional football player if I wanted to be. And it was then that I made the decision in my life that I was never going to identify as a diabetic. I just had diabetes, but I was not a diabetic. And I know that doesn't sound like a huge difference, but for me, it was a big identity shift that diabetes was not going to determine my success. And from that moment on, I made a resolution that not a lot of people would know that I had diabetes. You know, in fact, I would hide it for most people because I didn't want it to be my crotch. I didn't want to wear it on my sleeve like, hey, guess what? I'm diabetic. Take care of me. No, I wanted to be self-reliant, self-dependent. And like I said, that video changed my life. And so from age 10 to 19, when I ended up leaving the house, I had nine years of discipline that I was able to be taught. And I've always looked at my diabetes as a blessing. It's something that has taught me to just be dedicated and disciplined and take care of my health and not be a victim. And so I spent the next nine years taking eight to 10 shots a day, testing my blood sugar on a regular basis, counting carbs. In fact, like I'm a count, I'm a human calculator when it comes to counting carbs. I can literally look at any food and tell you exactly how many carbs, how much fat, how much insulin I need for it. It's kind of one of those just crazy things that you develop. In fact, diabetes has just become a part of me. And like I said, I was definitely afraid of needles forever. And I found weird ways to get around that. But yeah, just was an amazing experience. And my junior year, I ended up getting put on a pump. Let me, for those that are watching here on YouTube, this thing is attached to me in my stomach, keeping it in my pocket. Really, nobody knows what's going on. And then on top of that, I have this really cool device that literally I just scanned my, you can scan my arm and it'll tell me exactly what my blood sugar is. So I no longer have to stab my fingers, which is really cool. So diabetes is coming real, real long ways. But for the rest of my life, like I said, I've decided that diabetes would not be a crutch. And the interesting thing enough is two years ago, my then nine year old daughter, my now 11 year old daughter was diagnosed with type one diabetes. I'm a father, I'm a father of five. And so as a father and a father of a diabetic, I got a teacher that valuable lesson. I said, Jocelyn, we are not diabetics. We have diabetes, but we aren't diabetics. This is not, we cannot let this determine who you are. And so I tried to share that blessing and that lesson with her. But these are just a few of the things that just really shaped me as an adult, as a child to later become an adult and have the different variety of successes that I've had. So at the age of 19, I graduated high school. Once again, I was held back. I had finished two years in college. I had this plan to go on, finish, and then go to medical school. But after I served a mission. And for those that aren't familiar with missions in the LDS church, in the Church of Jesus Christ, the Latter-day Saints, we submit paperwork. So you write a little background about you. You go and you get your health work done and all these different things. And then you send it into what we call our profit. So we believe in a living profit. Send in the paperwork. And for any of you guys that know anyone that ever served a mission or ever seen those guys walking around in white shirt and ties, like this is what happens. They submit the paperwork and say, Hey, guess what? For the next two years, I'm actually going to pay to be on a mission. I'm not going to get paid. I'm going to pay. I'm going to sacrifice time when everybody else is going to college, doing all kinds of other things with their life. I'm going to give two years up to the Lord. And so you send in this paperwork. A few weeks later, you receive this big white packet. Well, this is how they used to do it. Now they text it to you and you have a little link that you go to. But you get this white packet and you open it up. And in that white packet tells you where you're going to be spending the next two years of your life with perfect strangers that you have never met before going and doing the Lord's work. And you could go to anywhere in the world. In fact, my dad went to New York. My older brother, Dave, went to Chile. And my younger brother, Tony, went to Honduras. And I've had many presidents that have been all over the world. So I opened up that paper and inside it says, you're hereby called to serve in Oklahoma City. And I was so excited. I knew I was probably going to end up being in the United States since I had type 1 diabetes, as they tend to not send diabetics outside of the US. So I was excited. But more importantly, even cooler, was I was called to serve as a Spanish-speaking missionary. And so you go to this place for nine weeks. It's called the MTC Missionary Training Center. You learn a language, well, at least you think you do. And then you go out and you're required to serve in that language. And so over the next two years, I spent sacrificing knocking doors, selling the gospel of Jesus Christ, following the Spirit, being with companions and people that I had never met before in my life, sacrificing, only calling home twice a year, writing weekly handwritten letters to both my wife and my now wife and my parents. And, you know, there when I learned reliance on God, I learned reliance on myself. I learned how to develop greater sales skills, greater spiritual consciousness, how things impact me. I took care of my health and all these different things. And I also learned how to speak Spanish. And I also got to serve among a group of people called Marshallese. They're from the Marshall Islands, Southwest Pacific. And I spoke a little Marshallese. And so I learned so many incredible things and really learned how to be disciplined at an even greater level, you know, and live away from home for the first time. And so from age 19 to 21, that's where I spent my life. Age 21, I returned home from my mission on July 4th, come home to the airport. There's my, there's my bride to be, you know, we had broken up right before I left on my mission. So I wasn't even sure if this was going to work out. And we wrote periodically our first, my first year and then every week after, after the first, for the second year of my mission. And, you know, immediately I knew that that was the woman I wanted to marry three weeks later. We were engaged and two months after that. So two weeks, two months and three weeks after my mission, we were married on September 24th in 2005. And so my wife has been beside me my whole career. And the beauty is, is I didn't wait for success. And I knew that I wanted to be a family man from a very young age, just because my parents made it so appealing, having a family, having kids, putting God first, putting family first and everything else. And, and I knew that I wanted to establish a family. I wanted to have kids and I wanted to have that my, my priority. And then anything I chose to do after that was being the doctor or building a business, that that would come secondary to this, to this unit. And so me and my wife got young, married young, I was 21, she was just barely had turned 20. And, you know, the crazy thing is at $1,000 in my bank account, a guy had given me a 1991 4th Thunderbird and said, pay me $1,000 when you can. So I was at $1,000 car with $1,000 in debt and literally no real plan. Besides, hey, I'm going to go to college and I'm going to become a doctor. And so I didn't wait for success. We just would chose each other first. And me and my wife got married, didn't put a seven kids, six months later, we were pregnant with my oldest who's now 16. And we have two beautiful daughters, Addison and Jocelyn and three amazing sons, Caden, Dylan and Bruin. They range from age 16 all the way down to Bruin. He just turned five. They're my pride and joy and really where I've been able to go and build. So with the plan to become a doctor, I went to Brigham Young University, LDS college and planned on finishing my last two years, applying to medical school, just that whole thing. While there, I wanted to treat college like a job. I wanted to be there full time and I didn't want to have to work a job while going to school. Now, obviously, I was now a husband and a future father and I had all these things I had to take care of. So I got recruited into sales and not just any sales. Door to door sales, knocking on doors. And I was told these crazy stories that, hey, dude, you can go and make enough money to live on in just three and a half months. And I thought, man, that sounds wild and amazing. And I knew I had been pretty decent at sales from selling cut code before my mission. And then also selling the gospel on my mission. And so I thought, heck, why not? Let's do it. And so originally I was recruited by my now business partner, Darrell Kelly, you have to come work with him selling pest control. And so if anybody ever heard like we go door to door, we sell pest control contracts, your contracts will come out, we'll service, we'll spray around your house, we'll do all this and the other. I did for work and pest control. And the very first time that I ever did it, I went out and this was in summer of 2006. And I sold, I was the top guy in my office. I'd never done this before. I went out, worked hard, used my brain, used everything, worked hard, worked smart, did everything I possibly could. And in a period of three months and one week, I need $65,000. And for a 22 year old boy that had never made more than $12 an hour, this was life changing money. In fact, I was making as much as my dad at the point. At that point, I was like, man, this guy has worked his whole career, worked his whole butt off to be able to make $65,000 a year. I did it in three months and one week. And I thought it was a bazillionaire. Like this was crazy money. Like most of my cohorts or people that I was going to school with or whatnot, they were making $3,000 to $6,000 in the summer. I made $65,000. And I really learned, man, I'm pretty dang good at this whole sales thing. And so from that, I was able to not work as I went to school, went and got a 3.96 GPA at BYU, just with the intention to continue to go to medical school. So then I was into my senior year. No, not quite in my senior year. And then the next summer I go out, so I finished my junior year. Next summer I go out, I manage an office, and I make six figures. I make $105,000. What? How did this little farm town boy go from making $12 an hour in two years to be making $105,000 in three and a half months? It was mind boggling. My little mind could not comprehend it. It was such an amazing experience and life changing that I started my senior year. I was contemplating, okay, I'm going to take the MCAT. I'm going to be going into medical school or whatnot. And I started wondering, I'm like, man, I want to be able to help people. And I want to be able to make a lot of money. Is it possible that I can make a lot of money doing something else that's been coming to doctor and help people in a way that isn't just in the medical field? So this little idea started creeping in my mind. And then I started just getting a little fearful around socialized medicine. I had a teacher who was like, hey, look, you're going to go and get all this debt. You might only make $80,000 a year under socialized medicine regime. I'm like, oh, you know, and me being raised a conservative, of course, I got a little bit of fear around that. And so, you know, I got, I have, I have this, this happening and starts creeping in my mind. And I'm like, oh my goodness, do I want to spend the next 10 years of my life going to med school, doing residencies, fellowships and all these stuff and not making money until I'm into my mid-30s? Or is there potentially another way? During this time, I had a professor that said, Chris, and it wasn't just to me, he was saying to the class, but it felt like he was just saying it right to me. He said, he said, you can save more lives running a successful business than any medical doctor could ever do. And that, right there, ladies and gentlemen, is where I began to like, it really began to blossom in my mind that maybe the medical world isn't for me, that if I have the ability to save lives, to change lives, to impact other lives, outside of being a medical professional, I was interested in that. And so that's where it began to go. And I got, you know, through middle of my senior year, and I said, man, I'm just not sure this is, this is what I was meant to do. So what I ended up doing, I ended up dropping out of my science, my science major, I went to all the prereqs to be able to get into what's called the Marriott Marriott Business School of Management, there at BYU, took all the prereqs, tested, you have to take a test, you have to submit, got accepted, ended up going into the Marriott School of Management and did a one semester, felt like I learned everything I needed to know, and I ended up dropping out to start my very first business. This was at the age of 24 in the beautiful year 2008. Of course, everybody knows what 2008 has to offer, but this is where I took the entrepreneurial leap, and no longer was I a boy pursuing my boyish dreams, no longer was I learning as a child that was, you know, working this summer job, I was ready to spread my wings. And we are going to jump in those details and exactly what happened with my very first business on the next episode. So I'm doing two episodes of my story. So this is episode number one. Feel free to jump ahead and get into some amazing stories of these other founders. Hopefully I've been able to keep you engaged until this moment. If you are liking what you're hearing, if you like the story, if you love this podcast, please leave a review. Reviews definitely help me. This is a passion project of mine. It is something that I just absolutely love telling stories, telling the stories of others, engaging, sharing little bits and pieces and nuggets along the way. So if you're liking what you're hearing, please leave me a review. I greatly appreciate it. I read and respond to all these different reviews. Make sure you're doing on Apple podcasts, on YouTube, all the good stuff. But anyways, until next time.