08: Success Is a Journey
Behind Their Success: Ep 8 Transcript
[00:00:00] [00:01:00]
Paden Squires: So welcome back to, behind their success today, we have Jeff Price on the program. Jeff owns an audio video technology company, CAS, which is located in Houston, Texas. CAS is led by innovative leaders who have garnered years of globally recognized industry expertise. They have a team of expert technology service professionals that design, plan, and build unique solutions tailored to their clients, existing systems, and strategies.
Paden Squires: Jeff is self described as a dreamer with a streak of grit. He's a family man with three boys, aged, 10 through 14. So they have a very busy life, which I can certainly relate to.[00:02:00] and he also has a fantastic wife that supports him and more importantly, holds him accountable. Good morning, Jeff.
Jeff Price: Welcome on the program. And thanks for the intro. That was, that was pretty awesome.
Paden Squires: Give us a little more background about yourself and your journey.
Jeff Price: Yeah, so my background is, I've played music for probably the better part of 25 years, got into music really early on, when I was in high school, and that has led my journey into what we do now as far as from an audio video standpoint, things like that. the, Interesting thing about that is if you look at our industry and how it works There's a large group of people in our industry that kind of come from that background mostly I think because we all had to get real jobs at one point.
Jeff Price: That's what it amounted to but it has opened doors for me and done quite a bit over the course of my life That's really been amazing. I met my wife because of that I was playing out of town when I was in my 20s there's a whole you know Slew of things have been out of the country a couple of times playing with different groups and things like that and it [00:03:00] just really has been a consistent theme in my life, I guess as far as that goes from a music standpoint, but Technology wise I've been doing what we've been doing now for probably the better part of 15 years something like that
Jeff Price: Yeah, very
Paden Squires: Yeah, very cool. What would you describe as your superpower?
Jeff Price: For me, I would think it's seeing potential, seeing a bigger picture.
Jeff Price: and being able to see the potential, both in whether it's systems or people, and being able to try and pull those things together, pull the best out of systems, pull the best out of people. I'd say that's probably at the top of my list at this point.
Paden Squires: I know you've had some level of success, And growing, you're in a mastermind group that I'm in and a bunch of other guests, what made you interested in that mastermind?
Jeff Price: Some of it was just having, having an outside perspective, it's easy to get very. myopically focused on your industry or your team or your business or whatever. and if you're not taking in some of that outside feedback from certain things, sometimes it gets very difficult to, you get so focused on things that you need to break away from that and have a different perspective or have somebody else that's going to be able to speak to [00:04:00] you in a different way.
Jeff Price: That's for me, that's one of the things that I found the most valuable beyond any of the networking or any of the other business opportunities or any things that come out of that, like the biggest thing for me with it was just having a different perspective and being able to bounce things off people who have zero vested interest in making you think one way or the other about something.
Jeff Price: So as we have conversations, it's like, I'm not trying to sell you anything. You're not necessarily trying to sell me anything. We're just having an honest conversation about where we both are in business and what's happening and call it accountability, call it feedback is pretty amazing because it really makes you.
Jeff Price: Level up your thinking around. Hey, what do I need to do here? What do I need to think about here? for me. That was one of the main purposes You know when I ran across the ad for It really made me stop and think about I need to have some other perspective in my life Kind of speaking into some things, right?
Paden Squires: Yeah. Yeah. That's, it's important, as entrepreneurs and we're just fighting day to day. It's so hard to lift up our heads and actually take that bigger picture view.
Paden Squires: like you said, [00:05:00] totally, I don't want to say uninvolved, but not invested in what the outcome is necessarily, but, you know, just people giving.
Paden Squires: they're clear advice and just trying to help you. And here's what I think, take it for what it's worth, my experience.
Jeff Price: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. it's, I was trying to think I was having this conversation with somebody the other day and we were talking about it and it's a totally different thing to have conversations about certain topics with somebody that is completely outside of your business than it is having it.
Jeff Price: Inside your business with employees because employees have a vested interest in, doing what you need them to do You know and those kinds of things to move all those things forward So there's no you don't get any kind of biased filter of I want to make sure this sounds good I want to impress the boss I want to make sure they're happy and all these other kind of things you can throw all that out the window because You know anybody in those groups, they don't work for you And the whole point is to bring value to that situation. So if you bring value, people will intrinsically do that back to you, in one way or the other. And that's the type of unbiased feedback that is pretty amazing sometimes. And it brings a lot of [00:06:00] clarity.
Paden Squires: Yeah. And it's amazing when you get in a group like that,
Paden Squires: I think the reason, we're focusing on this topic to a degree, it's like the importance of not isolating yourself or finding a kind of tribe and people that can relate to you as you move up, as you grow bigger and bigger businesses, there's just less and less people that can necessarily provide advice.
Paden Squires: and provide that experienced advice to you. So it's real important that who you're getting advice from and measuring and thinking about, does this person actually have the experience to be giving me good advice.
Jeff Price: Yeah, correct. Absolutely. I would totally agree with that. As far as from the perspective of a mastermind and that whole thing, there's a certain amount of it. you remove anybody who's not going to bring to your point some of that perspective in the right way because there's a barrier to entry.
Jeff Price: there's a point that you have to go through to get to that place. So from that standpoint, I totally agree. I think it's, it does a lot of things for, getting you to a place with people that you can just stop and say, yep. they have no [00:07:00] vested interest in me selling them something or working for me or any of the rest of that stuff.
Jeff Price: It's legitimately just, they want to help each other and like they want perspective in the same way. So whatever perspective I bring and have conversations with people, I want that same thing in return. I want the outside perspective. I want somebody to your point outside of the jar to be able to tell me what, you know, Hey, here's what I see on the other side of the jar that you probably should look at, that kind of deal.
Paden Squires: yeah, that's, it's fantastic. you've grown a company, you've had some level of success, right? what's the best decision you've made
Jeff Price: I would say, getting to the point where I believed in the capability of the company and believed in the capability of my team, to be able to pull things together, and do the jobs that were asked to do. some backstory on our company and how it works. We've done a lot of support contracts for larger companies here in the Houston area.
Jeff Price: We've had several instances where we've created teams at client sites, right? And so there's a huge demand for that. And in those kinds of things, that's how I came into the company. So when I came into the company,[00:08:00] they didn't have the department that did what we do.
Jeff Price: they brought me in because I had a special, I had a subject matter expert, whatever, for the thing that we were doing at the time. And, I worked for the end client in a previous role. From a previous employer, right? So when they brought me in, we started to organically build this model of support for audio video equipment for some of these clients, right?
Jeff Price: And in the beginning, it's funny because I think back on some of this now. In the beginning, some of this almost happened completely organically. Like I didn't say this is what I want to do and this is where I want this thing to go. I was just head down. Taking care of the client, doing what they needed, making sure things went really well and those kinds of things.
Jeff Price: And then turn around, two years later and we've built a support team, the organization has grown. We've put a lot more emphasis on that. And so I stepped back at one point and was like, we're really doing a lot with all of this. I should really start to think through this and come to a point where [00:09:00] I understand like, Hey, here's what's happening and here's what we could do more of.
Jeff Price: As a company. and so we started making decisions in that direction. And over the last three years, it has certainly paid off.
Paden Squires: you said, it was the developing of maybe confidence right there or belief of what the future of the business
Jeff Price: was. Yeah, I think so.
Jeff Price: I think some of it to a certain degree, musicians and artists can be, in the clouds a lot, and I think I definitely have a tendency to think that way and to kind of. What could you do and how big could this be and like I think a lot of entrepreneurs think that way I think they all have that dreamer piece of looking at things and saying, you know what else could we do and where could this go?
Jeff Price: but at the same time working in an organization Like we have. It gave me the grounded roots to be able to look back and say, Hey, we can actually do some really amazing things, I've heard people say everybody overestimates what they can do in a day, but everybody far vastly underestimates what they could do in, you know, a month or, you know, two years or whatever.
Jeff Price: So it's like everybody [00:10:00] thinks that, they set these goals for a day and it's completely unattainable and you can't get there, but they won't set a goal for six months a year or whatever and you could drive towards that and you could really accomplish some amazing things, right?
Jeff Price: So just getting that perspective and to your point building confidence in not only in myself But just in the model that we were creating at the time really without even knowing it building some of the things that we've built It's just happened by focusing on making sure the client is happy and making sure they have what they need.
Jeff Price: Making sure that the systems they have in place do what they need to do and they get the most value out of them and delivering value to them, right? We didn't go in with a thing of like we're gonna do X, Y, and Z and here's what this looks like and here's our five step plan to fix all of your issues. No, it was just that let's get in there.
Jeff Price: Let's figure out what's going on. Let's figure out a plan to fix the issue or fix the problem or whatever. and it all just organically grew out of that. Now we've started to put some parameters on it now because as things grow, if you don't, it just becomes uncontrollable and chaos, right?[00:11:00]
Jeff Price: So I feel like that was a big part of, as I started to make that transition and I had the owner of the company, my business partner at this point, he came at one point and said, Hey, we're really doing some fantastic things like you should really think about.
Jeff Price: How do we develop this further? And what else do we need to work on? And, some of those kind of things. And it just made me start thinking about all that, right? And then it's like you do things from a certain standpoint, you never really think about it. And then when you stop long enough, turn around and look at it and say, Oh yeah, we did, it's like that compounding effect, right?
Jeff Price: It's basically, what it amounts to.
Paden Squires: yeah. And I love that, you say people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate because they, human mind really doesn't naturally understand compounding, right?
Paden Squires: Like skills and accomplishments and different things. They don't add up, they stack on top of each other. and it's such a foreign concept. We think of such a linear step by step, but the thing with success and entrepreneurship and, talking to so many people doing these types of interviews and talks, it's people that just kept [00:12:00] making the steps and the general direction they wanted to go.
Paden Squires: And, you can't ever see, you know, pass really like the next two steps. Even if you think you can, once you get there, something will have changed anyway. and you'll have to make a different pivot or what have you, but it's the people I have on here that have reached significant levels of success, it's the people that just take the step, figure out what the next step is after that, and just keep moving towards some.
Jeff Price: Yeah, it's the whole thing of like setting your destination, but not being so tied to the road to get there. So from Houston, you could go to Dallas on 45 or you could go over to 35 and go up through Waco. And, there's different paths that you could take to get to places. it's not necessarily.
Jeff Price: The path that you take, journey is part of that whole thing, right? I guess what I'm trying to say is you need to have to your point, that North star that you're looking at, right? But there's going to be all these different, various turns [00:13:00] and bobs and weaves and everything that you're going to do to get to that place.
Jeff Price: And so it's not as much about, prioritizing, you know, you're going to get to that place eventually. Like it's eventually going to happen. If you continue to take the step, if you get up every morning and you take a step, you're eventually going to get to that place.
Jeff Price: But there's just so many pieces to that. It's very interesting, but yeah.
Paden Squires: Yeah. It's really tough for people that are highly analytical because they want to plan out all these things. and for me that, as a, finance type guy, I am somewhat analytical, but I've also just through experience realized that, yes, I can make plans for three, six months down the road, but
Paden Squires: Like I said, those steps, in four weeks from now, I'm like, wow, everything I thought was going to be happening is something totally different. I got to do something totally different at this point.
Jeff Price: Yeah, but it's important to be willing to pivot, right? Yeah, I think it's, to a certain extent, I would equate it more to people equate. Driving through the steps as if you were driving a car like it's a very precise machine if [00:14:00] you turn it this way it's gonna turn that way but in reality it's really more like riding a horse there's almost a symbiotic thing happening there where whatever the course is that you're going on yeah you have control because you have the reins but it's not like a direct link It's Mechanical link like a car is right?
Jeff Price: So like when you turn the wheel it turns a certain degrees and it's all of that is engineered and figured out And if you know, you know the turning radius of your car in a horse There's some give and take to that. So it's a little more loose.
Jeff Price: but I feel like everybody wants the fast track to success. But nobody really fully understands what it takes to get there. I don't know if you've ever heard the principle of 10, 000 hours, principle as far as it takes 10, 000 hours to master something.
Jeff Price: yeah. So it's just interesting how much time people will put into things, so if you put that into perspective of your job, if you're working a particular job, truly to master it, you'd be working at it for five years, and people just don't think about that perspective of it's like steady plotting basically, right?
Jeff Price: It's I may not be able to get there tomorrow, I may not be able to get there a [00:15:00] year from now, but as long as I continue moving, I'm eventually going to get to that place.
Paden Squires: Alex Hormoza uses this kind of analogy: don't ever go deep enough or entrepreneurs that jump from thing to thing and never get to that 10, 000 hours. But they see this new shiny thing out there and they're like, Oh man, I'm going to do that.
Paden Squires: My buddy's having success flipping houses, I'm going to jump into that. And so they have this optimism, Oh man, I'm going to make a million dollars in a month or whatever. And then they actually get into it and start doing the work. And then they realized, Oh man, there's a whole lot more to this than I thought
Paden Squires: but that's where people get to that point and they hit despair and kind of quit.
Jeff Price: But if you set in that
Paden Squires: point and push through it, as you say, and get those 10, 000 hours, that's when you get to mastery.
Jeff Price: And it's interesting because I think I was listening to yours and Matt's conversation around the school systems and how the school systems work. and so I can very much relate with that. In my history in high school and those kinds of things, I actually got out of high school [00:16:00] and ended up getting my GED because I just ran into issues right not because I wasn't capable or any of those kinds of things It was just being confined in some of those systems just doesn't always work, right? It's not always going to take you to the place where you want to go. I saw an interview Mike Rowe was doing with a professor from Harvard and the professor from Harvard his last year of high school, I think he had a 0.9 GPA and he was talking about that same thing about how crazy it is that we think that a mass produced box of, here's the things that you have to do is going to produce people who will think through issues. With an open mind or any of those kinds of things, it's like at some point, you've got to be able to go through and focus on those principles to the 10, 000 hour thing.
Jeff Price: I think most of us would do well to focus on principles for that amount of time and really drive those principles home because at that point, any of the rest of the things that [00:17:00] you do. In business or in life or any of those kinds of things, they all drive from those principles. And if you've gotten to a point where you master those principles, it's going to affect everything else instead of just focusing on my job.
Jeff Price: If I'm an app developer or if I'm, something else and do that for 10 hours like, yeah, that informs a lot of your life decisions because of your work. But at the same time, if you're working on those principles and how to make decisions through those paradigms and how to. One of the things that I do a lot of the time is I'll try to step back and look at something from a completely different angle.
Jeff Price: Like I'll just stop and just say, okay, am I looking at this in a biased way? Because I feel I feel like this is the right solution. Or I feel like this is the problem or whatever, being able to stop long enough to pull back from that and look at it from a different perspective and say, okay, if I'm in their shoes, what am I seeing?
Jeff Price: If I'm this employee, what am I seeing? If I'm this customer, what am I seeing and how do I, how do I navigate that? That's more of a principle based piece of work than it is [00:18:00] I'm designing this system and it needs these parts and like all that kind of stuff. Right?
Paden Squires: what you were describing there is being able to pull yourself out of a situation and. in your head, become the other party of that situation and be empathetic
and try to understand, yeah, I have my perspective and my point of view, but it is a tiny sliver of everybody's perspectives, right?
Paden Squires: Yeah. it's just being able to realize, a lot of times you shouldn't trust yourself and your feelings. and I know yes, you need to trust yourself, but like. Your feelings are often leading you down the wrong path. To be able to question that is, is huge.
Jeff Price: It's the whole thing of taking a long enough pause to look in the mirror and ask yourself the hard questions.
Jeff Price: Am I making this decision because I feel a certain way or because I'm trying to drive a certain point or sell a certain product? Or do a certain thing or whatever the thing is, but you gotta be able to stop long enough, look in the mirror and say, am I doing this because of my own ego or because of my own [00:19:00] belief that I'm right?
Jeff Price: like you've got to be able to question like your, for lack of a better term, your rightness, you may be an expert in your field, but if you get so focused on that and you can't break away from that for two minutes to say, maybe I should look at this differently. That's how you can run into crazy issues, right?
Jeff Price: if you look at safety issues throughout a lot of industries, right? It's because people got myopically focused on their deal and they just kept doing it. we've always done it that way, right? This is what we always do. This is how we make these decisions. This is how we do the thing, whatever it is, right?
Jeff Price: And at the end of the day, it causes some catastrophic failure and some huge issue because they didn't stop long enough to say, Hey, we should probably think differently about this.
Paden Squires: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. ego is a success inhibitor, for sure. I say this is one of the worst things you ever hear in business.
Paden Squires: It's how we've always done it congrats. but the world changes and people change. So you gotta be able to drop that ego and
Paden Squires: having an anti fragile identity.
Paden Squires: So [00:20:00] meaning like
Jeff Price: personally,
Paden Squires: my identity is to be a lifelong learner, right? A continuous,
Jeff Price: continuous
Paden Squires: developer. it's not right. I'm always looking for the truth regardless of what that is. At least that's what I try to practice. there's no way I'm perfect at that.
Paden Squires: But. Not having your identity tied up and being right allows you to take that
Jeff Price: bigger. completely understand and relate to lifelong learner pieces. That's such a critical piece, I think, of anybody's growth and success. Because if you're not constantly learning something new you're not in yourself being able to start to look at things from different perspectives.
Jeff Price: If you're not having some of those conversations, if you're not learning a new skill, if you're not, driving towards something different, you're so locked into what's going on that you can just coast, right? And
Jeff Price: how much of your life you spend on autopilot. Because your brain has made these connections to say, you do this way, all the time. I'm going to put that as a program in your brain. And [00:21:00] when you get up, it's like, when you get up in the morning, you fix your coffee a certain way, you drive to work a certain way, like whatever the deal is.
Jeff Price: But those are all things that your brain is making those connections to save energy and save time and save whatever. So you get to a point where you don't really fully realize how many things are you actually doing on autopilot.
Jeff Price: Like, when I make a decision, what paradigm am I looking through, because this is the paradigm I always look through, right? Your brain is trying to conserve as much energy and calories as possible, so that you'll survive as a human being and be able to live, right?
Jeff Price: But, I don't think anybody fully understands how much you can end up on autopilot, with some of those things, even with, The perspectives that you're looking through, right? So you've gotta be willing to stop long enough and zoom outta that for a minute, and be able to focus on those things and look at something differently.
Paden Squires: I would tell you is, all the listeners here, go and Google, what percentage of your decisions you make daily are conscious. And you go to Google and Google it, and [00:22:00] it'll tell you 95 percent of your life is totally subconscious habits built that you have no idea. And the ability to be able to figure out, okay, now we know that we have this program kind of running in our brain and why, our brain's trying to optimize our life and save calories so we survive and all
Jeff Price: evolutionary type thing there, but
Paden Squires: being able to.
Paden Squires: Realize that and figure out there are ways to tinker with that and change that. And it's not necessarily an overnight thing, but like through autosuggestion and figuring out these tactics
Jeff Price: for habit development, you can change it. We talked earlier about, everybody underestimates what they can do in a long period of time, but they overestimate what they can do in a day.
Jeff Price: Same thing with habits. Everybody thinks, Oh, I'm going to do this today. And then I'm just going to do it every day. there's a building process to that like you've got to build up to some of those things and it takes time But that's the thing to your point You were talking about earlier people can't fathom or can't calculate in their brain the compounding effect of [00:23:00] some of those decisions, right?
Jeff Price: you're the Sum total of the decisions that you've made in your life, to the point of habit Like that's the reason that People make decisions the way they make them, whether it was from their own experience, or what happened to them, or their brain basically making the connection and saying, Hey, I need to do this to survive, from a mental health standpoint, from a, all of these kinds of things, the way that we respond, I don't think, I don't think anybody really truly realizes how automated some of those responses are because of the experiences you had in the past, like 95 percent of probably what we do on a daily basis, we don't really think about, and what's really interesting is in the book, of Habit by Charles Duhigg. he talks about a gentleman that they studied about habit formation because he had some form of a traumatic brain injury and like basically the center cortex of his brain was affected by some crazy infection.
Jeff Price: He couldn't create memory. He couldn't remember anything. He could remember his life to a certain point, but he [00:24:00] couldn't create new memory after that. But the reason they studied him so specifically was because he would go home and you could ask him at his house where his bathroom was and he couldn't tell you where the bathroom was.
Jeff Price: They would draw a map of his house and say, where is the bathroom? And he couldn't tell you where the bathroom was on the map of his house. But the minute that he needed to go to the bathroom, he got up and walked straight to the bathroom, right? And eventually got to the point where he'd go on walks around his neighborhood.
Jeff Price: He didn't know his address. He didn't know where he lived. He couldn't tell you where he lived. He couldn't do any of those things. But he would go on walks with his wife around his neighborhood. And finally, one day, his wife came into the living room and he was gone. He had done a whole walk by himself solely for the fact that deep within the recess of his brain, it built the habit of, I walk around this thing and I stop here, right?
Jeff Price: If I want to do this, if I get hungry, I walk from here to the refrigerator, but he could not create those memories or thoughts. He couldn't tell you where the kitchen was [00:25:00] like, it's just amazing how deep some of that goes. And I don't think anybody who hasn't stopped long enough to look at any of that or.
Jeff Price: Those kinds of things. I don't think people understand. the thing with that, you talk about advertising, like advertising. That's what advertising is. It's creating a loop of auto suggestions every time you see this thing, you want to do X, right? and it's amazing what can happen if you, to your point, if you know how to tinker with those things and alter those things, it's pretty impressive.
Jeff Price: So
Paden Squires: yeah, when you talk about marketing those pieces, yeah, that's all brand building. It's just making associations. What's every beer commercial that exists, right? it's not like a guy sitting at a bar by himself having a beer, right?
Jeff Price: it's
Paden Squires: all these friends and parties and everybody's having a great time.
Paden Squires: and beer like, Hey, I want to be associated with football. So like they advertise football. So every time I think of football, I get beer. And it's just all buildings, yeah, associations like that. And that gets so deep in our brains. And [00:26:00] once we do that, man, you're hooked.
Paden Squires: and there's people that take this to the extreme or different scientists or whatever, where they'll argue like, humans don't even have
Jeff Price: any level of free will. Right.
Paden Squires: think we do, but, so much of it really is, you know, we are a product of, our genetics and our experiences it's interesting. There are reasons that we make decisions that were basically developed in us as we were children or as we were growing up or whatever the deal was.
Jeff Price: you're talking about, to make the argument that, you don't have, a determining factor in those outcomes. But The key factor there is, you do have a determining factor in it. It's just that you have to use it.
Jeff Price: And you have to make a conscious decision. And that's the hard part, is you have to make a conscious decision, be intentional, put the effort into that thing, to see the result and to see the change. But it takes, it takes a long period of time. a good example of that, I come from a faith background, and one of the main things with that is, in scripture it talks about renewing your mind.
Jeff Price: and if you go [00:27:00] through, like having gone through some of the things now from a scientific standpoint and understanding how habits are formed and what happens with all of that, it's amazing to me that if you go back to some of those things, it gives you like a guided plan for all of that. Think about these things, right?
Jeff Price: Renew your mind. Write your vision down so that you can run with it. All of the things that we do on an entrepreneurial journey or a life journey of creating goals and all of these other things. There is so much of that. It's amazing how many parallels there are between some of those things. Fundamental principles and fundamental laws work
Paden Squires: regardless, even if you don't come from a faith background, it's like viewing scriptures as Man, that is a collection of human history and human wisdom and experiences there, right? Regardless if you, you know, you don't believe
Jeff Price: the whole thing.
Paden Squires: that is written down wisdom, right?
Paden Squires: And those things don't change because, in a lot of ways, human nature doesn't change.[00:28:00] yeah. Great guidance of just how do humans flourish, even if you don't have the whole
Jeff Price: faith background. Absolutely.
Paden Squires: So Jeff, this has been a great conversation, man. I appreciate it. what's the best way people can connect with you or, get to know a little bit about your business
Jeff Price: Yeah. Best way is via their website right now. we're working on some social media stuff in the background, but the websites, at c a s usa.
Jeff Price: com. that'd be the best way, you can reach out to us from there.
Jeff Price: Alright
Paden Squires: guys, that's the end of the episode. check out Jeff.
Paden Squires: he's down in Houston, Texas. Jeff Price. got a great company down there. And, we'll see you in the next episode.
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you found it valuable, please rate, review, and share it. That is the best way to help us build this and reach more people, as we're trying to accomplish our goal of help create more healthy, wealthy, and wise entrepreneurs. You can follow us on social media by searching for me, @padensquires, or going to www.paydensquires.com
com. On the website and social media, we're always sharing tips of personal growth, [00:29:00] and there we can actually interact. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks guys.
