Scaling Businesses, AI, and Work-Life Balance with Grayson Lancer Cross

with Grayson Lancer Cross

May 9, 2025 · 00:32:13

Today's guest is Grayson Cross. Grayson is a digital marketing growth engineer, an AI automation expert, a digital asset angel investor, growth agency owner, commercial real estate investor, car enthusiast, and recovering workaholic. Welcome to The Total Entrepreneur Mind Body Spirit, where we turn cutting-edge science into practical strategies for entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Dr. John Torrance, Entrepreneur Inc. 5000 honoree and professor of entrepreneurial practice at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management. Each episode, we dive into mental, physical, and spiritual health with expert guests offering actionable insights to help you thrive and perform at your highest level. Let's get started. Grayson, welcome. How are you?

I'm— dude, I'm blessed. So excited to be here and really grateful. I haven't seen you in a while, so it's good to catch up, man.

Yeah, for sure. It's really good to see you. So yeah, I was really excited to talk to you because to me you kind of embody this spirit of what an entrepreneur is, and you've got a lot going on. I'm kind of excited to dive into it.

Thanks, man. I appreciate that. It's the embodiment of entrepreneur. No pressure, right? No pressure.

Not at all. All good. Well, so, so why don't we just first start by kind of giving us the landscape of everything you have going on right now in your business life? Because I know there's a lot. So just kind of paint the picture. picture for us and tell us what you've got going on.

Yeah, absolutely. Wow. That's a broad question. Definitely. I'd call myself like a serial entrepreneur, like serial killer, but serial entrepreneur in the sense where I've gotten a lot better, but I was at the point where I was like popping up a business every like 2 months way back in the day. But, you know, if I had to define myself in like areas of focus, I think the number one thing is still on the e-commerce side. So, you know, when we'd met each other, I was just, I had just made a pretty big transition in my life going from one of the biggest agencies in the world to becoming a partner in another agency. Focusing really, you know, super high def on e-commerce content and specifically on acquiring e-commerce companies. So the biggest thing I currently am doing and like spending the most time on is I call myself a growth engineer, right? Which means I go to these companies, they work with me in my business, Weekend Digital, Weekend Investments, where we try to take a business that's an e-commerce company, try to get it from like that $1 to $5 million a year up to $50 to $100 million valuation. I like to say I'm a freak in the sheets, right? Because I spend probably 2, 2+ hours a day in spreadsheets on Google Sheets. But it's probably like one of the areas of big focus for me. That's what eats up probably the majority of my time. But I've kind of said this before. I also still love the brand side of it. I got started like way, way back when I was just like a paid media buyer. I bought for like Google and Facebook ads. And I expanded from there. One of my first roles, I grew one of the largest firearm accessory companies in the world from basically little to nothing to up to, you know, million plus a week, which was really exciting at the time. But now that's, this is what's eating up a lot of my time. So that's the primary. And then I'm got, I've kind of been moving more and more into this AI field. I think everyone with shiny object disease has been going towards AI because it's just, it's limitless in the potential it can do, both from like a job creation and a job replacement, to be honest with you. And a lot of these companies kind of look like a, you know, I look at it as a spreadsheet from overhead to profit to our revenue in. And most of the time there's a lot of roles that are either redundant or can be replaced with AI. Myself is like, I have gotten to the point where like, here's even a product right here. I can't live without it. This little thing records everything I say 24/7, 365, and it does like speaker identification. So it can, I don't have to have a super brain anymore. I can rely on AI for it.

Turn it into a Word doc for you or something, or is it just kind of—

Yeah. So it's called a life journal is like the best way of saying it. So at the end of the day, it tracks the entire transcript of everything, but it breaks it into important moments. So it can say at this time you had a meeting with this person because it does speaker identification. All of this obviously just runs through ChatGPT or, you know, DeepSeek, but it allows me to say, hey, who was I talking to 2 weeks ago about this product? And then you say, oh, you were talking to John about that 2 weeks ago. You were also supposed to send an email about it and you never did. And that's, yeah, super for somebody who has, you know, like yourself has a lot of conversations. It's really helpful. And since it's a wearable, you can take it with you. But yeah, so agency side of it, I'm super into AI. I mean, like even right now, this is going to kind of— I don't want to reveal this secret to a lot of people, but in the digital space, we've lost a lot of the connection that people like intimately have. So I'm always challenging myself. And when I show you this, you'll never be able to unsee it, but I'm always challenging myself to be able to build that connection with people again. So like even now, watch this, watch my finger. in this call, I've actually replaced my eyes in all of my calls to build that rapport that we're like looking at each other. Like AI is like literally limitless. I could be on the beach right now and you wouldn't even know. This could be an AI clone of myself, you know?

Yeah. So, I mean, that's like the business side, but you also have a very entrepreneurial spirit when it comes to cars and real estate. Yeah, break that down for us a little bit 'cause I think that's—

Yeah, I mean, I think that, I kind of told you this before, I'm a recovering workaholic, a recovering workaholic, which means that I used to, I would work like 12, 14 hours a day, which is probably why people think of me as the entrepreneurial spirit. And I've gotten to the point where taking maybe 2 to 4 hours of that, where now I'm only working 10, maybe 8 hours a day, where I've been able to refocus that into stuff that would, some people would consider still work, but for me it's just super rewarding and really fun. So I've gotten really into real estate investing over the last 3 or 4 years. Specifically, I made one of my largest purchases semi-recently. I bought a, you know, I bought a pretty large, I would call it a school, but it was just a huge brick building from 1903 that I'm turning into luxury apartments. And I've been reading a lot like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, and they talk about how the leisure time back in this time was a lot of working with your hands type of time. So I've kind of rechanneled my productivity into things that are both fulfilling and can still have a positive cash generation. The real estate is one of them because I'm doing a lot of that work myself, not because it's like not, it's definitely not more profitable for me to do it myself. It would make way more sense to hire a ton of experts, but it's also incredibly fulfilling to throw on a book, throw on a podcast, and then just work with your hands for 2 or 3 hours a weekend. And then the car side of it, oh my gosh, man, I've got this crazy project. I love cars. They're like, that's my drug. Everybody's got their drug and my drug is cars probably more than anything. I bought one of these Tesla Plaid and I stripped it down and I went and got like a classic Ferrari body and I'm slapping it on top of it, which is just like total heresy, just like absolutely just the worst thing you could possibly do. But in the interior, it's going to be completely like a Tesla. My goal is to have one of the first classic cars that is capable of full self-driving because I was able to retain all of the sensors, all of the cameras, all of the software connection to Tesla. As long as Tesla never finds this and cuts my connection to them, I should have one of the first self-driving classic cars in about like 3 to 6 months.

Wow. That— now, did you take classes in like car restoration or is this just something you did? Did you tinker around and just start ripping stuff apart and putting it back?

That's a good question. You know, I was homeschooled, you know, up to college. I think what that taught me is like a very unconventional way of learning. I would call it un— And some people call this min-maxing. And what min-maxing is, is that I have incredibly, totally dark areas of my knowledge where I know absolutely nothing about it. School, like traditional grade school, even through somewhat in college, where college you finally get to start picking very specific areas you want to focus on. But most of school is we're going to make you super level. So, you know, a little bit about everything, but you're not really great at anything specific. Where I learned very quickly that if you've got the ability just to focus on stuff you're really interested in, you can learn really quickly. Turns out things are not that complicated if you've got the time and energy to learn into them. And if you take like a normal college education, as someone who did go to school, you really break it down and it's okay, well, there's maybe 30 or 40 hours of lectures and then there's 2 or 3 hours of testing per semester. And that's being super generous, which means that you could take an entire class in like a week if you just like actually focused on it. So a lot of the knowledge that I've gained has came through mentorship. I've found that it's a lot more valuable just to find somebody who's been doing it for 10, 20 years and then figure out how you can bring value to them. So with the car stuff, I just went and found guys who were really, really good at cars and I said, hey, what's it going to take for me to like just learn from you? Right? Most of that felt into like the engineering, the 3D printing, where it's like a lot of trial and error, but there's, you can literally learn whatever you want. MasterClass is like a great one of them. Udemy codes online. There's so many resources that are available. I think if you took the time that the average American, which is like 4 to 6 hours a day of media consumption, and even took 20 or 30% of that and put it towards learning something, it would blow you away how fast you can learn. You know?

Yeah. So true. You know, I often think of that when I'm scrolling through something, I, and that's usually what gets me to stop is thinking, well, this is completely unproductive. I could have You learned a whole new verb in Spanish or something, right?

Like, you get that little serotonin, you get that little boost in your dopamine from an app designed to, designed to keep you on it.

Yeah, for sure. Well, so let me back up to the acquisitions you were doing with the media company. So what did you look for? So when you were out there doing this, what are some of the things that you looked for? What were the things that made you greenlight, you know, going for an acquisition?

I don't want to say it's all math, but it's like everything is math. I heard this the other day and it was very interesting to realize that I worked at this company called Common Thread Collective. Taylor Holiday, if you ever listen to this, you're my angel. Thank you so much for everything you did for me. It was the first marketing company that I would say that actually looked at businesses like a CFO would. And in companies, CMOs and CFOs, chief marketing officers and chief financial officers hate each other because the CMO says, if we spend more, we'll get more revenue. And the CFO says, if we spend less, we'll have less overhead. So usually it's just like these people go at each other's throats. And Common Thread Collective or CTC was the first company, in my opinion, that really mastered something called 4-quarter accounting for online businesses, which basically said you want to have this much EBITDA, you want to have this much overhead, this much cost of goods, and then this much to spend to acquire a customer. So over the last, I'd say, 6, 7 years, I've really focused on just understanding how I can take an unknown, which is what is really scary about running a business and turn it into an unknown known. So you just know what you're looking for. And it comes down to acquiring a business. It comes down to how much are you paying to acquire a net new customer, which you take your total advertising spend in a given month divided by about the new customers in the business, and that's your customer acquisition cost, and then the lifetime value of that customer. And LTV or lifetime value used to be really reserved for like the Procter Gamble style companies in the world because it was just so very difficult to understand. But now with tools like Shopify and Lifetimely, which is an app inside of Shopify, you can realistically, like the average person, the average Joe with a $100 media budget could figure out what their customers are worth indefinitely, which is crazy. So it just comes down to this math component that says, well, if I put more gas on this, will it get better or will it get worse from a media spend specifically using channels like Facebook, Google, and TikTok? And I think that the biggest problem that most entrepreneurs run into, most business owners, is that they spend more time not knowing what's working. It's like the rain dance, you know, they're like, it's working, put more on it without actually understanding why, which is why when it stops working, a lot of them get really frustrated and say, well, it was working. What do we got to do to replicate it? But they don't quite understand what caused that in the first place. Long answer to a short question. I apologize for that.

No, that was super useful actually. So I was wondering, do you take the same approach or maybe you don't, but like when you're working with a new product, trying to get it from $1 to $4 million, you know, up to $100 million, how do you approach that?

So there's different stages of growth. I've done this a couple of times. There's this one brand that was a women's athlete outwear brand. It was actually just a unisex athletic brand and they wanted to grow by 50% every year, right? And going from $1 million to $1.5 million is totally doable, but going from $10 million to $15 million in the same timeframe is considerably more difficult. So when we look at a business that's at, let's say it's at the $1 million mark and I want to get it to, let's say, $2 or $3 million, That's a very, I would say, easier ballgame than trying to take a business that's $10 million and getting them to even $13 or $15 million just because of the total addressable market for said product. Now, I would also make the argument that the hardest part of the business is actually just the getting it going part in the first place. I could take a business from, you know, $10 million to $12 million, $2 million extra dollars in revenue, much easier than I could take a business from $100,000 to $500,000. Because there's so many limitations in the data that you, it's hard to get accurate sample sizes. And I explain this a lot with paid media, like Facebook ads and Google ads. But if I've got a media budget, let's say of $100,000 this month, and it costs me, let's say $100 to get a customer, I now have 1,000 people that I can look through this dataset of what worked and what didn't work. The smaller that media budget, the much harder it becomes, or at least the more time it takes to get that kind of statistically relevant data because 99% of the time it comes from successful creative. When I say creative, I'm talking ads, right? A really good ad. And that comes from an iterative process. It doesn't come from, let's try something really crazy and then let's put all of our money in this. It's more like, let's try 200 ads that all have a very slightly different headline. And then this is the one that worked. But to show 200 ads to people takes a lot more time than to show one big ad to 200 people.

Yeah, for sure. No, that's super useful too. Yeah. So before we get to like the pace of your work and the fact that you're trying to slow down a little bit, I wanted to talk a little bit about this cool project you did to help with human trafficking. That's another example of, you know, just like a high-performing person doing cool stuff no matter what. So yeah, I'd love to hear more about that.

Yeah, let me talk a little bit about that. So, oh my gosh. So partner over there, Nate. Nate, I hope you listen to this. I'll make sure everyone goes. I'd love if everyone wants to check this out. It's called theinnocent.org. As some people might remember, Dateline NBC, Chris Hansen way back in the day, which basically he would lure in child predators and arrest them, was basically the story of the show. It was like the best thing ever. You got to watch these total scumbags get absolutely annihilated. They get tackled by cops. It was amazing. Now, as time flashed forward, people aren't hanging out in like these chat rooms they used to in like the early 2000s and '90s. They're on social media, like they're on Instagram, they're on Snapchat, they're on TikTok, the places where like your kids are. We need to figure out, hey, we've got AI. We've got, you know, we've got this amazing technology. What do we want to be able to do to help prevent this? And I can't get like super into this, but this, because it's an active thing going on as we talk. But the short version is that we've been able to basically create fake people with AI, not like from legitimately fake messaging, fake talking, fake imagery, to the point where we can lure these predators into the hands of police, into law enforcement really easily. And it's working. It's working like really well. More than that, we also do a lot of training for how to even do this. Most police departments, these are the type of crimes that don't— that are crime is like after the fact, right? And this is like a type of crime that you don't want an after the fact, right? You want a before the fact. So I'd say most police departments just aren't equipped because it's a technology and they don't deal with preventative maintenance, so to speak, for crime. They get a call, they get involved, it's law enforcement. They say, hey, This happened, this is how we solve it. But there's not as many, you know, people out there that are able to dedicate resources, especially with the police that are already stretched fairly thin, to be able to go and do preventative type stuff. So we've partnered with, you know, many law enforcement agencies to be able to have this. And we're actually, you know, we're in the process of setting the precedent in law for how these people get, you know, how these people get actually arrested and prosecuted. and sent to jail and sent to prison, which is awesome.

That's really cool. And it's, you know, it's just like such a highly impactful thing that you've done in, you know, in the whole range of other really cool things you've got going on. So I think it's a really interesting part of your story. So do you know the impact of it? Like how many people have been apprehended or arrested?

So I can tell you it's a lot. I obviously can't get, 'cause a lot of these are like active cases, right? That are either going through some sort of litigation currently, you know, with the legal process, Or they're like happening right now. But I mean, you can search it up in the search mission. There's lots of, a lot. The short version is a lot more, every single, not to say that like one wouldn't be enough for us to make, to do it, but it would, we put out one, I think we had 30 or so arrests. Don't quote me on that in a single weekend on one of the operations because we set up this entire thing and then we go through it. But, you know, obviously partnering with local law enforcement, making sure, because we don't, I'm not a police officer. I can't arrest people.

Right.

But yeah, it's definitely much larger number than you'd expect.

Yeah, I know. That's incredible. And the project is called The Innocent?

It's called theinnocent.org if anyone wants to go check it out. We've got a lot of case studies on there. We got a lot of history on there and how the process actually works. I'm, you know, I'm a tech guy. I'm not a spokesperson, so I'm like the worst. I'm going to butcher everything, you know, but Nate over there, Nate is the founder and he is the absolute coolest guy. You can work with him, talk with him, and he's more than happy to just to talk to people, to talk about the mission. He's so passionate about it.

Yeah, that's really cool and really valuable. So we've covered a lot of areas of your professional life and you've got a lot going on. And you were telling me earlier that you had a little health scare last year. Just sort of describe that for us and explain what was going on.

Yeah, I'll try not to get, try not to get emotional about it, but yeah, man, you know, I think that I believed in the philosophy for a long time that when you're super young, You want to just go as hard as you can because the energy that you have when you're a young person just will not exist at 40 plus unless you, you know, unless you're getting on like some testosterone and some of those boosters, which, you know, help for sure. But especially for men, it's like you don't have that kind of energy. You peak between like your 20s and I'd say 35 to 40 from an energy level, right? So for a long time, I believed that it was incredibly important to work the 4, you know, the 12 to 14 hours a day. And that was totally fine. Like I actually found so much, I don't want to say grind culture, but I was really into this grind culture where it'd be like, wake up at 5:00 AM, work till like midnight, you know, get 5 hours of sleep. Don't take super great care of your body. Like, I mean, I'd go to the gym, but it was just like fitting way too much mental stress and productivity in there. I'd say that at one point I actually just hit a wall right after. I mean, I was doing that since I was like 15 years old. My first business was when I was 14, I opened up a bouncy castle rental business. I cut lawns until I had enough money to go go buy a bouncy castle. And I remember like putting it up on Facebook and in all these groups and be like, hey, can I rent this out? And obviously I wasn't licensed, I wasn't bonded, insured. I was 14 years old just showing up at these people's houses. And I'd been doing this hustle and this grind until super recently, until December of last year when I was out working at one of my investment properties and they'd be like working on the property on this weekend. And then I'd go into my office there and I would take these calls and I got off like a super stressful call and I just felt like the left side of my face Just, you know, start like not functioning. And I like, I felt like my heart beating on my chest and like the left side of my body felt incredibly— I'm trying to even think of the right word because if that's— you've experienced it, you know what it is. It's just like total numbness. And, you know, it lasted for, you know, 30, 45 minutes, like next day, like totally gone by the next day. At the time, I didn't really realize what happened. I thought I'd maybe hit something or I hit my head and I didn't really realize it. So I went to the emergency room and they're like, dude, you had a stroke. I'm like, I don't really think so. They're like, well, you know, they check my blood pressure and obviously it's through the roof because I'm on like Adderall. I'm drinking like 4 or 5 Red Bulls a day. I got a stack of Diet Cokes by my desk. And you just don't think about this stuff because it's, you're like, I'm invincible, right? I'm young. I've got unlimited energy, unlimited potential. Nothing can touch me. My health is perfect. Nothing can stop me. Until you have something like that happen and then you realize, oh shit, like that can really happen here. And that was like a big wake-up call for me paired with, this is like something else happened last year. Unfortunately, my sister passed away super abruptly out of, not unexpected. And it was, I never had a, like a close family member die. And then to have these 2 things happen side by side, it really made me realize it's like we could be gone like tomorrow, right? I'm great. I've always had the 3, the 5, the 10-year vision, which is a good thing to have. But when I'm like, wow, you know, if I'm working 12 or 14 hours a day and I'm like, if I would've taken 2 hours of that and then dedicated that more towards like family or something like that in that time period, what would've actually been more fulfilling? It's just a weird situation to suddenly be in, you know?

Yeah. You know, it strikes me that you are exactly the type of entrepreneur that I started this podcast for, for that very reason. You know, because you know you see it a lot, right? And you're right, there are seasons to entrepreneurship and new venture creation, right? Like when you're young, when you're early and starting out, you got to bust it. You got to work hard while you can. But it's also really important to recognize that you've got to preserve your body. It's really important to keep you know keep yourself healthy because you're going to be creating wealth, you know, for the next couple decades, and you don't want to. you know, not be able to enjoy it when you're older. You know, so given that experience and all of the amazing things you have going on, what— how do you manage this? What did you learn from that? How do you rebound from that experience?

Yeah, I think, um, I'm a perpetual— yeah, a lot for sure, a lot of reflecting. Hey, you know, men listening to this, go to therapy. I'm just going to tell you in general, every single man listening to this, go to therapy. I was, you know, I was raised in a fairly conservative Christian semi-upbringing. And I would say that it's, you know, we are afraid to go and just ask ourselves the hard questions about why do we struggle with the things we do. So that was the first thing, go to therapy. Like I went to it a few years ago, changed my life, and then I stopped. And then I went, you know, beginning of the end of last year, beginning of middle of last year. And it brought this back to me to really think about like, why am I doing this? I forget the name. You may remember this, John. What's the name of the one Greek guy who's pushing up the boulder, up the mountain the entire time. And that's like his punishment. I forget what it is. What's his name?

Sisyphus.

Sisyphus. Thank you. Like Sisyphus is like a great example of this. I think that when I was much younger, you know, I found so much pleasure in the doing of the thing, right? And it's so interesting because like when I thought back to it, it was like I would pop open a business and run it, scale it, and then power it down because the reality was, is I just enjoyed doing that period, right? That was like the most exciting thing at the time because I'd done it before. And it was conquering new things that have never been conquered. And then when I got to this point, I'm like, I've done a lot of this stuff anymore. It's math to me now. It's like legitimately, it's math. Just check the right boxes of the formulas. And it's like, why do I enjoy this? And now I realize that most of the time that I find the most enjoyment is when I'm working with these founders of these companies. It's because of the direct impact it has on their life, right? When you're going to somebody who's never had a business and never scaled it up before, you're able to bring them to a level they've never been. It's like the same way that parents feel when their kids accomplish something. You feel like super impressed by them, but also super happy for them. So when I reflected on this is, well, why am I working like 10 or 12 hours a day? Like actually realistically, like 14, if we, if we like boiled it, like, why am I doing that? And it really came down to is that I don't know. Like I was doing it because that's what was semi-familiar to me. And it was something that I Enjoy— I thought that I enjoy doing. And what I've realized that it's, I enjoy the challenge more than anything else. And most people do enjoy the challenge and the dopamine reward from completing the challenge, but it's the keeping up with the constant challenge piece. So the things I've really done to orient my life in the right direction is putting hard brakes on it. And I mean like hard brakes. So I wake up at about 5:00 AM every morning, go to the gym, and I usually start my workday about 6:00, 6:30. And now I have like a super hard cut that like, no matter what, 6:30 PM, 6:00 PM, unless I have somebody in China that I need to talk to at like more on their time, it's over. I can't do anything after that. And just those 2 to 4 hours between, you know, 6 to midnight, if that's 100% guided on me and not having to do anything specific, it's changed a lot for me. It's like really changed a lot, you know?

Now, have you found it hard to maintain discipline with that time period? Because, you know, when you've got so much going on and you're as driven as you are, I imagine it's hard to just leave that time for what it's supposed to be. So how are you able to do that?

Yeah, so my family owns a construction company, and this was like the weirdest way of thinking about it because in this digital world, I started comparing it towards more blue-collar style work, and I said, Well, when you're building a house, when do you know you're done? That's the question. Like, when do you know you're done? When it's like, when the house is done, right? When you're doing a project, how do you know you're done? When it is done. When we're inside of businesses, well, when are you done with the business? The answer is never. It is absolutely, you are never done. And what I had to really grapple with is that there will always be more work to be done. Like no matter what. There are certain ways of breaking that down that I learned that understanding like, okay, Milestones, like KPIs for myself, the same way we build KPI for business, KPIs for a year, KPIs for a month, KPIs for a week, KPIs for a day. And I've found myself, and this was probably the craziest thing ever, is that work is a vacuum. If you, and I say this as if you give yourself, if you have a 3-hour task and you give yourself 6 hours to do it, it's going to take 6 hours to do it. Maybe you'll get a little bit better at hour 5, a little bit like diminishing returns. If you give yourself 2 hours to do a 3-hour task, you will get it done in 3 hours. Will it be done to the same quality of 3 hours? Potentially. But this is where like the AI component starts to come in where it's like, well, how could I get this done in significantly less time? Where now I've had experiences firsthand that I'm getting more done in a shorter time period by just being very clear with what needs to be accomplished in this time period. By, you know, if anybody who's listening has read The Morning Miracle, Or Morning Miracle. It's one of my new favorite books of all time. Because if you take those 15, 30 minutes at the beginning of the day and actually say, this is everything I need to get done today. And then after that, it's my playtime. It's my free time. It's the time that you can enjoy and relax. Then it removes the anxiety that is caused by saying, what do I need to do next? What do I need to do next? So I would say just getting super, super specific with me as an entrepreneur, what I actually need to action on that day, you know?

Yeah, no, I think it was a good point when you said you never really get it all done, right? So you have to choose what you can do. And, you know, there's probably an effect of, you know, you're— because you are giving yourself that time to reset, that is probably making you more productive when you are on. I don't know if you feel that or not.

Yeah, I think, you know, yeah, that's a really good way of saying— I said this earlier today. Have you ever heard of like life in moderation? Like that's a very, it's a very true fact. I've moved to excess in moderation, which is kind of sounds weird. Right. And I think what I mean by that is that a lot of people will, I use drinking as a great example. I don't drink very much, but when I do, I go all out and I'll explain that in a second. But a lot of people will end their day and they'll have 3 or 4 beers and that'll be it. Right. That's like the American thing. They get home, they turn on the TV, they have 3 or 4 beers. And then what I found is it's much harder to get into the flow, but once you're in it, it's easy to stay in it. So instead of like, you know, drinking, you know, every weekend, it makes way more sense for me to say, okay, well, one Friday a month, I'm going to go out with my friends and enjoy myself. And I'm going to get way more in entertainment out of that one weekend and way more productivity out of that one Friday night, that one Saturday morning, than having to fall back in this loop every weekend. Like, doing it is just an example. It can be brought with travel. It can be brought with anything. I love traveling, but I know for a fact that I am not nearly as productive when I'm traveling versus when I'm, you know, in a certain desk, a certain place, just focused on that. So long answer, I guess, again.

Yeah, no, that was a good answer. Absolutely. Well, Grayson, this has been, I think, a really great enlightening conversation, and I really hope that especially for the entrepreneurs on the younger end of the spectrum that listen and get something from it. You're just a great example of what a lot of them want to be. So thank you for being here.

Yeah, well, thanks, man. I really appreciate it. And those for, you know, whoever is listening or watching this, you know, is an entrepreneur, a younger entrepreneur that has seen some shit, for lack of words. The one thing you got to remember is just don't get stuck on one thing. One thing I see with so many entrepreneurs is decision fatigue or decision paralysis. You just got to remember it probably doesn't matter in the big grand scheme of things. Any decision you make right now, you're probably going to be wrong in, and that's totally fine. It's called the no tax. It means you got to do 500 things wrong and get 500 nos before you get a yes. So as you're, whether it be something that's an e-commerce product, which is what I work with specifically, or whether it be a lawn care and HVAC business, whatever you're listening to, whatever you want to do, just understand that whatever you do, you're probably going to be wrong in. So just go into it understanding that being wrong is just getting you one step closer to being right. And that the best entrepreneurs are the ones that fail fast and then recover quickly. It's not the ones that are going to say, I'm right 100% of the time because that is luck. But you can manufacture luck by giving yourself more spins. And as much as I like, I don't like using gambling as an example of this, but if you've had a roulette table and I said on this roulette table, there's a chance that you will win ultimate life success. You say, well, how much does it cost to spin? And I say, just your time. Well, how many times can I spin it? And I say, as many times as you want. You would go to that table and spin it until you hit that ball in the right area that gave you unlimited success in life. And that's the only thing when it comes to testing in your business. So hope that helps.

No, that's amazing. So if people are interested in learning a little bit more about you and the work you do, how can they find you?

I am a total, you know, I am awful at this. So I've got a website, graysoncross.com, but I'm most active on Instagram. So if you're younger, that's probably where you're at too, graysoncross.official. I'm also in a lot of publications. So if you just Google my name, there'll be 50 things that come up about me. But if you want to talk to me, like I legitimately message me on Instagram, I'll set up 15 minutes more than likely. Like I'm not here. We're all going to be on this earth for a very short period of time. And if I can walk out of it with helping the most amount of people possible, I'd be pretty happy with that. So if you've got a problem, if you say, hey, this is what's going on in my business, I don't even know what to do. Just shoot me a message and I'll help you out. For real.

Wow. That's quite the offer. Well, thanks, Grayson. Amazing. Thank you so much for listening to the Total Entrepreneur Mind Body Spirit Podcast. If you liked what you heard or heard something interesting today, please give us a like, share a comment, or better yet, subscribe to the podcast. Thank you.