How Aaron Hageman Used Mentorship to Shorten the Path to Millions

[00:00:03] Hector: Hello and welcome to another episode of the how to scale a business podcast. My name is Hector Santi Esteban and I am your host for today. Our special guest is Mr Aaron Hageman and I was just doing some quick research before we hit record and his number one experience on LinkedIn is El Jefe for Hageman Enterprises.

[00:00:21] Hector: And I think that is fitting because he's a man of many talents and experiences. So Aaron, thanks for hanging out with us today. Appreciate you being here.

[00:00:28] Aaron: Hey, man. Good to meet you. Good to be here. I'm so excited to be on the show. Appreciate it.

[00:00:32] Hector: , I'm sure it's a challenge when people say, , what do you do or what are you into? Or, you know, what did you do even might be a challenging conversation. But if I were to throw that to you, , what makes most sense, given who are our audiences and what you've done leading up to today?

[00:00:48] Aaron: You're not wrong. That is kind of a challenging question because it's so open ended. It's like, well, how do you meet? My answer is I'm an entrepreneur. I know who our audience is and I mean that in my heart and spirit, I'm a lifelong entrepreneur. I've owned a few different types of businesses.

[00:01:06] Aaron: I've built some, sold some, had all kinds of fun, you know, experiences in my career. I, Work with other entrepreneurs these days, helping their businesses. I just, I love the puzzle of business. I think there's a way that we can, a good playbook, if you will, that an entrepreneur can run a business, no matter the business, no matter the type of business.

[00:01:28] Aaron: So, so I just love the game of entrepreneurialism. That's who I am. I have been self employed if you will, since I'm probably 20.

[00:01:37] Hector: Yeah. Learned that when I was 17 years old, I started selling Cutco knives back in the day. And I got my first, sales call and I made, I think it was like, I think I made 40 on that sale appointment. And I was like, what? The most I'd ever conceived of was making, I think minimum wage was 10, 11 back.

[00:01:52] Hector: You know, I said, wait a minute. I made four times In this one, in this 30 minutes, then, most people are making , in their shift back in the I guess it was a little while ago, but was there a moment for you where it clicked that business was a game or that it was the same kind of game, no matter what or how you were selling it?

[00:02:11] Aaron: I think so. I mean, that's a good question where you ended up taking that. , when I really learned the value of mentors and coaches. And I got some in my life in my early entrepreneurial career. I mean, I wish it had been earlier, but it's a couple of years into the game. So early twenties, started really getting pushed into professional development.

[00:02:31] Aaron: It's something I love anyways, learning and applying. And the more I look more, I realized like, wow, we don't need to necessarily reinvent the wheel. Or when you read about the wheel. Leadership, you start to see, wow, obviously these concepts, that's an easy one to understand apply, but the same thing applies in finance, right?

[00:02:50] Aaron: And how we look at our books and how we, break things down and I might offer over into marketing conceptually, strategically, yeah, the application of social media for your business. Versus mine is going to look different at the end of the day, but how we play this game, how we allocate our budgets, how we make sure we can grow a business.

[00:03:06] Aaron: I love that. , so early on, I started to realize, Oh, wow, it was, standing on the shoulders of giants became my mentality. I didn't have to, , rediscover something per se. So a lot of best practices, a lot of, Hey, this really works well. And as I started to learn. Through a big win for me was joining a lot of entrepreneurial peer groups like the entrepreneurs organization and different things like that, where I'm working with other entrepreneurs, private confidential forums, sharing the challenges of we're working on.

[00:03:43] Aaron: And when I've learned that juxtaposition is a super tool to break something down, to say, I have a problem, Hector, this is how I'm looking at it. You're like, well, Hey, I have a. Printing business has nothing to do with you, but I had that problem. Here's what I did. Here's what worked. Here's what didn't and then a friend over here who has a catering business.

[00:04:01] Aaron: She says, Hey, hey, Aaron, this is I had the same problem 2 years ago, and this worked really well for me. This idea of looking at our issue through the lenses of others is. What I do as an advisor these days, I kind of am that lens, but man, or to your question early on, this is it and leaning into just learning, learning, learning and saying, Hey, , there's an answer out there for most everything I'm working.

[00:04:25] Hector: Yeah. What's interesting is that the evolution of that moment for me , you know, I made 40 in 40 minutes or whatever it was, was then when I extrapolate that, I realized that well, then that means that I'm the only limit on my own success. I'm the limit on my own, income or how big the business grows.

[00:04:41] Hector: And that is both a I think a liberating and perhaps equally you. Scary sort of realization, , that comes with it because at least in my journey, the tactics and growing professionally has always come back to me growing personally. As much as I try and learn the tactics and read all the, business books, I end up coming back to it comes back to leadership or emotional intelligence or, getting out of my own way, dealing my own traumas, like all that sort of stuff.

[00:05:08] Hector: And so I'm curious, how your personal evolution has played a role in your professional growth and development as well.

[00:05:14] Aaron: It's everything, really. It is like one of the pillars that we're leaning on. So when we talk about professional development, I mean, the personal development is right there with it. In fact, a lot of the content has applications on it to both sides in both worlds. But self awareness is a superpower.

[00:05:33] Aaron: Working on Understanding, applying, , trying, to get better at things like high levels of EQ, emotional intelligence, but breaking down emotional intelligence. Well, there's, social awareness and there's self awareness and there's all these different versions. How do they apply? What are they really understanding?

[00:05:50] Aaron: It's very, very important. Imperative, absolutely imperative because with scale, right, for our organizations, when we succeed, when we hit that next marker, when we hit that next point, but let me push us a little further when we get into, you know, seven figures, eight figures of revenue, we start needing to bring on leaders within our organizations to start to lead.

[00:06:11] Aaron: This larger engine, these other pieces and our job, we're always at the top of , the orange chart, right? We're always at the top of the pyramid that we have to draw on the whiteboards if we're the CEO. And suddenly we have to start not just leading managers and leading people who know how to do our work.

[00:06:26] Aaron: Passion, our vision with elite leaders, we have to lead people who've been successful in their careers, who've done other things. And it's takes a different skill set, a different touch it to start really mastering communication. And , I'm inherently not a good listener, surprise. I talk a lot, right? So that's an easy example, but these are things we have to start to learn about, work on and have a battle plan for.

[00:06:47] Aaron: So. Again, another long winded answer, but just working on all aspects of personal development, on your own time, continuing to read, continuing to learn, continuing to go to therapy, having somebody to talk to and hash things out and understand it's important. answer behind this often, I'll give you an example.

[00:07:06] Aaron: Cause I ran my business for the one I sold to Walmart for over 20 years, but I hired a friend and his company to come in because they were excellent at EQ and the emotional sides of going that big, that fast. Again, what am I saying? Coaches, right? We're good at these things. But if we're recognized where we can not even, it doesn't even mean we're not good.

[00:07:28] Aaron: Use improvement. You know, you're a baseball player. You hit 325 last year. You're like, I want to hit 335 this year. Right? Go get a coach who's hit 335. Go get a coach who has that EQ level, who has a degree in psychology from, you know, the degrees they can work with you. They can challenge you on these things in the context of personal and professional environment or so.

[00:07:50] Aaron: So it is absolutely, I love the question. It's imperative.

[00:07:53] Hector: Yeah. One of the foundational books that I read early in my entrepreneurial career was Mindset by Carol Dweck. Are you familiar with the book?

[00:08:02] Aaron: Yeah. Yeah, actually,

[00:08:04] Hector: Yeah, , she's brilliant. And what it made me realize is that, so there's some listeners are going, I haven't read the book.

[00:08:09] Hector: The premise is, that there's essentially two mindsets, right? And maybe there's more, but there's a fixed and a growth mindset. And I grew up , in a Very fixed mindset environment where it was, you were either smart or you were dumb, you were good or you were bad. There was no getting out of , your sentence, if you will.

[00:08:26] Hector: You were damned into that sort of judgment. And you could probably tell. I also grew up in a very Catholic family. I went to 16 years of Catholic school. So there's a lot of that undo undoing. But in that was a very fixed sort of mindset. And in business, when you bring that to business, get slammed in the face with that sort of reality, hopefully getting you to budge right eventually.

[00:08:50] Hector: But I think a lot of people don't end up breaking and they just go, I'm not good at blank.

[00:08:54] Aaron: you're not wrong, right? Growth is the magic word on here again. I'm listening to show how to scale a business. We may as well call it how to grow a business because that's all that is continuous growth. And I think what you and I are talking about is the fundamental idea that our organization is a little bit of a weak link theory here, but it's going to go as far as our leader, right?

[00:09:18] Hector: Jim Rohn said that, right? , he's the kind of the personal development, , early before Tony Robbins sort of thing. But his thing was that your level of success will rarely outgrow your level of personal development. And I, think a lot of people have a problem with that, but I think that he's probably pretty spot on.

[00:09:35] Aaron: I completely sign off on this mentality. I have a forever mindset on this conversation, right? I have a forever mindset or, the ideology that we can always improve. And I mean, my friend, if you're the best of the world, you could improve fractionally. 0. 01%, 0. 001%. Think of the differentiation of Olympic swimmers and who's winning on here.

[00:10:01] Aaron: Anyways, we can always improve. And so with a forever mindset, , there's always something more to learn. And I also believe that fundamentally, this is where the case really easy for the audience. I hope to connect to this and not just be like, okay, Aaron, that makes sense. It's this world is changing and this world is always changing fast.

[00:10:18] Aaron: If we're talking business, let's talk marketing. How we did marketing five. 10, 20 years ago, every time I said a year, it just changed. It just changed. It just did. So the mindset of, well, I have to learn, I have to learn. I have to learn, like add the variable or the velocity of change into the equation.

[00:10:38] Aaron: And it's like, well, we have to learn. We have to keep going. We have to learn new communication skillsets as, where are we at? Gen Z comes into the workforce. No, skippity or something. No, am I off a generation of that? I don't even know what I'm saying, but

[00:10:55] Hector: I think that's it. I haven't picked up on that one

[00:10:57] Aaron: I don't know. I got a step studies 10. So it's somewhere in that age range, , but anyways, you get where I'm going with that.

[00:11:03] Aaron: So yeah, , yes, it's our limiting factor to your question and to your point, but I think we can be better at every aspect of our life.

[00:11:11] Hector: Yeah, another interesting thing when I got into this world was I became this information I don't want to use this word lightly, but it's almost what it felt , like, this information junkie. And I was actually talking to a friend the other day who says , it was actually exactly what she was doing.

[00:11:26] Hector: Information and learning became , her drug to pacify, actually wanting to deal with some of the real crap that was going on or the real feelings that she was doing. And so what I did early on, and I did it because I saw someone else do it, which is not always good thing to do.

[00:11:41] Hector: But I saw somebody and he read 50 books a year and I go, Oh, that looks really cool. He's dedicated his growth, he's learning a lot. And so I did the same thing. And then next year I read 50 books and it was great because Got a lot of knowledge. I don't know if I learned anything necessarily.

[00:11:57] Hector: , and also I didn't implement anything. And to your point, maybe I did absorb it. I'm able to lean on it and access it later. But my observation of what I do now is instead of reading 50 different books in a year, I might read Five books, 200 times collectively, , I might read that same or listen to that same book 40, 50, 60 times on repeat before I switch to a new book and that's been at least it's allowed me to integrate and it's allowed me to implement some of these things as opposed to rushing onto the new thing and feeling the new book.

[00:12:33] Hector: Like I'm learning something, but then I look up and , no better than I was, 17 books ago

[00:12:39] Aaron: there's a couple ideas that are going through my head here. One is the idea of just skipping across the surface versus the taking the time to get deep. The goal becomes not the books and the learning. It's one book a week, one book a week, it's like, I'm gonna hit my 50 I'm gonna hit this volume.

[00:12:53] Aaron: And there's power to that. You can learn a lot. You can move forward. a strategy, right? But there's another strategy I think you're describing. And , I appreciate it as well. Some value in depth to slowing down. I don't know about 50, 60 times on the same podcast, but , to each their own, I suppose.

[00:13:09] Aaron: But there's a way.

[00:13:10] Hector: with traction, not the same podcast, but an audio book specifically with traction. I had to listen to it over and over again because it just would not sink in for the first 20 times I tried.

[00:13:22] Aaron: I actually know traction. Also, if I think about it, I go to my version of what you're talking about now is a little different instead of just going super deep on it. Like I'll find that thing and we're going to go deep on it, but this is how I think about it, right?

[00:13:36] Aaron: It's, learn, try. And recycle what I mean by that is I'm going to learn it and you know, I'll read it twice. If I need to, I want to make sure I understand it because I want to go apply it as the second step. So we're going to learn it. But then I like to go apply it. So I remember taking a class, for example, an executive ed class, like I'm growing up with a multimillion dollar business, but going to classes at Wharton and learning finance stuff.

[00:13:57] Aaron: They're like, Hey, do it this way. So I went back and we tried it this way. And what I like about applying things is I am learning, right? , it's like learning how to like change, you know, your oil, like on a YouTube video. Okay, cool. Got it. I've learned it, but , go change your oil now, with maybe the YouTube video next year.

[00:14:14] Aaron: That's fine. You know, if you need to the first time, but , you're going to learn it now. Right. So get your hands dirty. It was the same after going to Wharton to come back and apply my finances. Now, what I love about that second stage and what I started to say is if it doesn't work, you can throw it out.

[00:14:27] Aaron: Right. We could try it. You can actually take this knowledge, you go, Whoa, this doesn't exactly work for me, or here's how I can apply to me. Right. You figured that out. But then the recycle part, as I took it here for this conversation of learning professional and personal development, I'm a teacher.

[00:14:44] Aaron: I've learned, that's why I love being like an entrepreneurial advisor these days with my businesses with some of my clients is that I love to take these concepts now and talk to others about, I mean, we're doing it now, or I'll work with the client one on one and we'll talk about, well, here's how I did these things because I am still learning, I am still getting a little more clarity, a little more, oh man, I got a little perspective from Hector on that conversation that we talked about, so it's, learn, try and then share it.

[00:15:12] Hector: I think that's a great framework. And when we get back from break, I'm curious about more of these frameworks. And specifically, I think that a lot of people see personal development and business development or professional development and they think of them as separate buckets. And what it seems you've been able to do a good job of is create sort of a waterfall where Pouring into one sort of flows into the other.

[00:15:33] Hector: And I'm curious about, your thoughts on that and if you've been, able to create that in your life in business. And so we're going to get into that right after this quick break. Hey, all. Today's episode is brought to you by Amplify Media and we are a podcast and content production company.

[00:15:46] Hector: Well,, we like to think of ourselves as a, media and thought leadership accelerator company because chances are, if you're listening to this, you have a product, a passion, a mission, a message, something that you're trying to get out to the world, but you might not have the time, the team or the tech skills to be able to do it.

[00:15:58] Hector: If that's the case, we can help go to amplify media. com. That's a M P L a F Y media. com. You can also check the show notes for the link. And with that, let's get back to Aaron. So Aaron, I think that, when I've been around people who are, had a level of sustained success, it seems that , their life is structured in a way that enables it, whether it's their habits or their environment or, , it's not necessarily an accident or if it was an accident, the first time they've created something to that,, sustenance doesn't happen on accident.

[00:16:31] Hector: That's an intentional thing. curious. When you look into your life, today, X amount of years down your journey, are there things that are no matter what, or there are things that you build into , your life? I like recently, like maybe even a silly example is like, I have a friend where she travels with her pillow now.

[00:16:49] Hector: She travels with her pillow. She's on the road a lot and hotels and, , different pillow every time. And she's like, I know if I take my pillow, I know I'll get a good night's sleep.

[00:16:58] Hector: And then, she can go on stage and perform she's a speaker. And so that personal habit , , has enabled, some breakthroughs in our business success. Are there things either small or big that you feel enable , that success professionally for you?

[00:17:12] Aaron: Yeah. There's one big one that comes to mind. I mean, I'm smiling cause to me, it's an easy layup of an answer and something we could do a whole other episode on. I, as an executive, as an entrepreneur, , even if I own one company at the time, and this is the project we're working on full time, this is my job and , that company could pay me, I work as a two person team. Right. I have an assistant or these days, some version of, again, there there's versions of assistants. You can have a personal assistant, an administrative assistant, an executive assistant, chief of staff. They all cost different things. They all do different things. And what you maybe need within your organization, but I know there are success habits to your question, how I'm productive, how I keep my crazy brain organized, how I'm good at things that I'm not good at.

[00:18:00] Aaron: Like I'm not great at follow through. So I have a great assistant for that. I don't schedule my own things. I don't manage the calendars because let, Brooke on my team, shout out to Brooke on the team, , go through and, manage all the inputs, manage the priorities, work with me, have those conversations so she can, , say, Oh yeah, this is important.

[00:18:20] Aaron: This is going to go on, or I can do this. Slide these things around or, Hey, Aaron, your wife is calling. We'll get you on the line. , so this is a much broader conversation, but, I love the idea, the challenging thought that we've probably heard somewhere along the way, but it's great for the audience that if you do not have an assistant, you are one. Right. And even there are minimum wage tasks and there's no disrespect to minimum wage tasks. We need them done. They're the blocking and tackling of getting things done every day, right? You know, following up and responding to emails and getting things organized, paying bills and calendar stuff. And when we're busy, we get busier.

[00:18:54] Aaron: to me, this is the idea that one plus one in this conversation equals five or equal six or equal seven. It depends how good your admin on your team is. And, truly, truly a recipe for success.

[00:19:08] Hector: Yeah. Well, I think it's a big one for a lot of, founders, a lot of listeners to hear because I think that , they can get into a few camps and I've perhaps been in all of them and maybe there's more, but one is this badge of honor camp,, I've got to do everything. I remember running my first business.

[00:19:23] Hector: And I remember thinking, , I've got to be the one to take out the trash. , , and I just remember sitting there thinking, like, why do you even think that? What a strange thing. But it was sense of pride. And then on the other side, there's also the, people who think that it's too expensive, or they can't afford it sort of thing. And it's like when you run the numbers a lot of times, it's like you really can't afford to not have these because otherwise, to your point, you're doing all these things that are not at your highest value. And so a lot of these things require some perspective shifts, right?

[00:19:51] Hector: Which I think is a big part of this personal development into professional development conversation.

[00:19:57] Aaron: This is a broader conversation for you and I today of investing into yourself. And I've just given us a tactic now, and it's actually not even a tactic. It's a whole strategy for an administrative team member, a person, your true right hand, somebody that you can work with and build things with.

[00:20:13] Aaron: On that side. So,

[00:20:15] Hector: we really unlocks a whole new level of output. And I think a lot of founders don't realize not only is it just a cost in time, but at least for me, it was Cost in mental energy, in creative energy, in spiritual energy. You know, At the end of doing all these things, I was just so worn out that , I wasn't , at the prime that I could have been.

[00:20:36] Hector: And, to put into that creative work had I had someone who was maybe more excited to do those things. And when we brought on those people and they love to do it, I'm always fascinated by operations. , we have one operations leader who were just promoted. And I'm so fascinated because she Loves doing the things that are the most boring to me,

[00:20:53] Aaron: oh yeah,

[00:20:54] Aaron: . There are people who understand, oh my gosh, if I help Hector be the best Hector Hector can be, we can raise the roof on this organization, right? Because it's an investment into you. , and it's true. something I've learned in this with all my entrepreneurial friends over the years, this is a sticky thing.

[00:21:10] Aaron: , you're right. It's scary. People on this investment. don't go less than 20 an hour. Maybe you had salary in California. You're at 60, 70 a year. You need to do to get to those levels on here. Five, 6, 000 a month. This is absolutely worth its investment in an ROI sense. It's scary to spend that money at first, but you'll find you can move faster.

[00:21:32] Aaron: You can move further. And when you're the boss, your time is absolutely valuable. If you're still early in your business and you're closing accounts on here, then you can go close an extra account or two. That's all it takes for your admin to help you close two extra accounts per year, in terms of productivity, assuming an account is worth something.

[00:21:48] Aaron: I don't know what I'm talking about right now. It's some theoretical business, but there's value

[00:21:53] Aaron: I said to an admin once in a pretty large organization, I said to her, , , if you can make me 5 percent better, you'd be worth every time that I ever pay. And she's like, all right, challenge accepted.

[00:22:03] Hector: Yeah, I think speaking to the larger conversation talked about this personal development, , and at a certain point, it becomes like personal leadership, right? When you're leading your own and ultimately in an organization , that becomes what we want for our team, right?

[00:22:15] Hector: For our team to become , this, embodiment of what we're talking about. And when they're growing, like we're growing, those are the organizations that I've seen really pumping on all cylinder. This one, the leader , is evolving and growing at their potential, and the team is following suit.

[00:22:32] Hector: And everyone's pulling not their weight, but it's like there's a synergy, a one plus one equals three sort of thing going on.

[00:22:39] Aaron: My comment to what you're saying there is that does not happen by accident. I agree with you, by the way, everything you just said, but that's not just like, Oh, man, the leader believes in that. And , , that's just how the vibe is up at the top. Especially as you grow, you're diluted, like you're 1 out of 10 people early on, then you're 1 out of, you know, 15, then you want out of 100, you're just less and less actually have a cultural day to day influence.

[00:23:01] Aaron: So that doesn't happen by accident. But it does happen when there's a plan. And there's a framework to use some of your language today. Right? Questions I'd ask an entrepreneur and I'll keep it short for time. But Do you have a budget for development? Do you have a bevy of resources for your team? Do you have a library of books?

[00:23:18] Aaron: They can learn from, a good insurance that supports mental health. So you can legitimately say, yeah, go have a therapist, go have somebody to talk to and work's driving you crazy. I don't know. It's nice to be balanced and , do you have a budget? Do you have resources?

[00:23:29] Aaron: Do you have a plan? So , if you could say that, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we have a development budget at our company and our HR team is in charge of it. You're like, well, until you can say that, , those are the answers, the pieces you would need to place. So those, , dynamics end up happening.

[00:23:44] Hector: Great stuff here. And I got one more question for you. But before I do that, I'd love for you to share with the listeners how they can get more connected with you, get deeper in your world, things like that.

[00:23:53] Aaron: Easiest, simplest way for me is LinkedIn. So last name, Aaron Hageman, easy enough. , you'll find me right away on there. Honestly, send me a message, say, Hey, heard you on Hector's show. And happy to chat, happy to talk. I actually answer my own messages on there. , so kick it through. And, absolutely the best way to get on me.

[00:24:12] Hector: Link that up in the show notes for your listeners as well. And last question here. And in your opinion, what is the secret to scaling a business?

[00:24:20] Aaron: To me, it became really leaning into the idea around servant leadership. Yep. Became the idea that a certain point of the business, we had achieved a level of success. We'd achieved a level of momentum and sales and revenue and team size that the job of leadership myself included, of course, became to make it a great place to work.

[00:24:44] Aaron: and to create successful employees, so it became supporting them, identifying roadblocks, became a very internally focused job. If you looked at my job description, as we had written it out, it is very internally focused. It's getting things out of the way, making sure we have the right tools, the efficiency systems, basically being the king that listens to everybody.

[00:25:07] Aaron: Come up and say, this is here's my roadblocks. Here's my roadblock. Here's my roadblock because we have the site often at the top to see the connective dots and to know where the resources lie to help get those roadblocks out of the way. So serving leadership becomes not to grow the business or sell the company or sell the customers, but to make our team successful, it changed everything.