Kevin Tetz’s “Runaway Rockstar” Origin Story: From Wannabe to Paintucation Part 1

It’s cool to be here, Dwight, finally. And we’ve been circling this for quite a while.

Yeah. For the listeners and people watching, Kevin and I met. I was blessed to have Kevin come into my life and become my friend in the fall of now I’m going to think about it.

He was 21.

Yes, 21. Fall of 2021 in Tucson. And Kevin was one of the speakers and I was enamored by him mostly because he’s a fellow canuck, he’s a distant cousin. I could still remember that Nate at the party coming over to and tapping you and saying, hey, I got to beef with you. I don’t know if you remember that I live in Canada. I don’t know some people, my sense of humor doesn’t really connect well.

You know what, I was just doing.

It because I liked you. Right.

No, I appreciate that, man. But one of the things that endears me to you right away is that you are just you. There’s no pretense, there’s no bullshit, you just set it up here. This is what I think and this is what I am so many times. I mean, I’ve been in the music industry, I’m in the television industry so many times people are unclear what their intentions are and their communication is veiled and that is not the case with you. So it was very refreshing to meet you and say, holy crap, I know exactly, precisely where this guy is coming from. So thanks for all of that, man. And I believe we’re good friends.

You know what to expect. We’ve also ran into each other a year later. She’s now have to think where we were at.

Scottsdale?

Yes, Scottsdale. Sorry. Both back in Arizona again, right? Yeah. It’s been great getting to know you and following you. Like I said, I was prepping for the show last night. I look up stuff, I spend a lot of time. I’m not saying other podcasters don’t, but for me this is my baby and I designed this podcast to serve others and if I don’t put the effort into ensure that I serve the guests the best way possible, then I’m just like every other person, just putting it on and they’re not really getting value. And my whole goal as I mentioned to you and my long time listeners and viewers know that my whole goal is to make sure that people know you and they can like you and trust you. And barring that, the reason I talk about that is I mentioned to you I focus on a person’s origin story because I do get new listeners, the people that are new to listening. Why do I focus so much on the origin story? Well, because Kevin, in his earliest recollections up to where he is now today, helped mold him. There were patterns that he either adopted because he felt they were still good as an adult, or he broke those patterns, or he manipulated him to what he needed it to be. But we are a combination of all our memories. I’ve even had people on the show that have told me memories from when they were three, four years old that stuck with them all the way into adulthood. And it’s amazing what our lives have entailed. And you deserve to serve that up to people. And that’s what I’m giving you, that platform. So could you please tell me your origin story and your key things from your childhood to adulthood that led you to where you are now?

Brother, this is so interesting that you ask this because it’s not a common question. People meet each other where they are and that’s the best thing in business. But it’s interesting and awesome that you ask about people’s back story or your origin story. So I grew up in western Canada and people that don’t know Canada, each province in Canada is in and around the size of Texas. Massive land area, lots of rural travel, big cities combined with just beautiful farmland or just flat out wilderness. So I will always remain endeared and I will always remain Canadian, even though I’m an American citizen. But my growing up in Canada, and we haven’t talked about this and I don’t think and when I spoke, I talked about these details particularly, but we moved before I was a teenager, we moved 13 times. So you talk about going to school and my school friends and all that type of stuff. Boy, we bounced around a lot. So as a kid, you don’t really and I had great friends in school, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I didn’t know anybody. I was a lone wolf, I was not because the survival mechanism is to have friends. But there was a lot of moving around when we were kids. When we finally settled in to a place in the Okanagan Valley, south central British Columbia, we had moved that many times and I was in junior high and my parents did what a lot of people do. You know, marriages don’t survive. I don’t know what the percentages are, but my parents split up, I was eleven years old, my brother was twelve. And then those dynamics take over and I’m not going to get crazy personal, but it’s rough on the parents. It’s rough on kids. And I just saw this mean Dwight, my wife, showed me this, and I want to be accurate because it’s just pure wisdom, and I want to share this with everybody. So I’m reading this off of a photo that my wife sent me. So the note at the top says, I never realized this as a kid, but here’s the quote. When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your parents grow up.

Wow.

Let that sink in.

Yeah.

How true is that?

My brain just went boom.

I know for sure. And we never do that because we look at memories analytically in the person that we were when they occurred. So when we think about something that was a pivotal thing or a traumatic thing when we were four or five years old, we look at that. That’s because of how the brain works. We look at that from the eyes of a four year old or from a six year old. So we look at those emotionally, sometimes irrationally. So when we look at our parents, our parents were omniscient, it was because I said so, right? So we look at them as these people that have all the freaking answers they did not. Because I know in my adult state, we don’t have children. It never happened for me and Judy. But if I were to have kids, I’m struggling and scrambling and hoping and praying that we’re doing the right things and making the right decisions. So it’s really a gift to give your parents the knowledge that you might now realize that they didn’t have all the answers they were growing up, too. That parlays into my childhood because I carried a lot of stuff with me into my adult life. There was painful memories and all that type of stuff, and I don’t want to have a pity party or anything like that. Everybody has their traumas, everybody has their trouble. Everybody has their stuff that they carry within their pathology of being children, and they carry that into their adult life while we’re trying to figure this thing out. So when I graduated high school, I graduated when I was 17 years old. I was one of those kids born in November. So it’s like, you graduate high school now, you’re an adult, now you’re out in the world. I was a kid. I was a little kid when I think about it, and I meet 17 year olds these days when I’m the age that I am, oh, my God, you’re going to unleash me. Oh, no. This is bound to turn out horribly. When I finished high school, then I’m meandered, in high school as well. I firmly believe I have undiagnosed attention deficit syndrome or something to that effect. And I couldn’t focus scholastically. I know that I’m well read. I love literature. I love reading. Had I been taught how to train and focus on math skills and things like this. I think I would have done way better scholastically. But I navigated in my high school days towards a visual and performing arts program, into industrial arts, industrial math shop classes, electronics classes, metal shaping classes, things like that, that my high school had because I could excel in there, because it was a creative expression and I could do well. And I didn’t know how to study. Nobody ever taught me that. Nobody ever sat me down or counselors. I just fell through the cracks on that level. I’m an intelligent person, as we all are, but I feel like, I don’t know. Long story short, I ended up in graduating from a visual and performing arts program. It’s kind of also after all those years of bouncing around, I found my tribe. I found other kids that were weird. I found other kids that were smart but misunderstood. I found other people that were able to, through those programs, find out a way to express ourselves. And when I think about that now and I’m spitballing all of this stuff because nobody’s ever asked me to really peel back the layers.

You’re doing great, brother.

I appreciate that too, Dwight. But I found that I was able to figure out how to express myself through portraying other characters, through trying to be an actor. And my dad was a musician. My mother has a musical side as well. My grandmother, after her husband died, my grandfather that I never knew, he died when I was a baby. She raised her family teaching piano lessons. She had seven children and she was in Alberta on the Prairies, and that’s how she made her living. So these really strong, matriarchal people in my life, the strongest women I’ve ever known in my life are my mom and her sisters and her mom, my grandmother. So the musical thing is in my DNA. It’s in my blood. My grandfather and grandfather on my dad’s side. I’ve got these wonderful memories of them singing songs from the old country. My grandfather was a Russian immigrant and my grandmother was a Swedish immigrant, and they both had the accents. Having them sing traditional folk songs, wonderful memories where he played the violin and she played the guitar. So those things have always carried with me. And I used to watch my dad’s bands practice in the basement. So we all want to be our dad. He’s an auto body technician and a mechanic, and he was a musician. So when it was time for me, at 17 years old to go out and be an adult and do what I wanted to do, a couple of things converged in those decisions. I wanted to run away from all those weird experiences and all that trauma and all that stuff in my childhood. I wanted to get away from it, and I wanted to get away from the small town that I grew up in, which is Oliver BC. Nothing to do with friends. I have good friends at high school, buddies that I still keep in touch with and family and all that type of stuff. I wanted to run away. In retrospect, knowing it now, I wanted to run away from me. So I wanted out. I didn’t care how I got out. I wanted out. And it didn’t matter the way that I found to get out because college and university were not in the stars for me. I didn’t get scholarships because I wasn’t even guided down that road. So it was either get a job in a construction company or do something else. And the path that I found again through this visual and performing arts program, which empowered me to self expression, to be comfortable on a stage. Combined with the fact that I started playing live music when I was 13 years old and paid gigs all the way through high school, it was like, okay, this is how I can get out. This is how I run away from all of this stuff. And I didn’t look at it like running away. It was like running towards a career. The truth was, and I say this when I’m Aquino, when I said it at Tony’s, my perfect solution to all of this stuff is I’m going to become Van Halen. Period. It’s over. I’ve got unlimited wealth, I never have to worry about anything else again. And I’m a happy guy because I’m able to express myself artistically. Perfect. Let’s go. Be Van Halen. The reality of that, holy cow. So that got me to the point where I traveled all over Canada playing live music, playing garbage rooms, garbage bars in northern BC and Alberta, and we played the worst gates until, like, every craft that you have, you get better at it, right? Somebody starts out as an apprentice electrician, they’re going to arc a screwdriver off on a positive lug, and weld the screwdriver to the panel. It happens. So until you realize not to do that. So like every vocation, you get better at it. Nobody’s born with the blessing of knowing everything. Nobody ever is. We all have to learn this. And when we talk about down the road, me being a teacher now with industrial arts and trades, that’s one of the things that we have to constantly reinforce people. We didn’t know that. But anyway, long story short, we got better. We slugged it out in the club circuit. We got better at being what we were trying to be. You emulate your heroes. So we did that. We learned that was the burgeoning age of MTV and music videos. I was like, oh my gosh, look at those guys. Look at the hair that they’ve got. We got to get that hair. Oh, they’re wearing eyeliner. So we called it guyliner, but we’re going to wear makeup and we’re going to tease their hair up and get an Aquin Ed endorsement. We did all of that because those were our heroes. So we did that trying to be what the industry told us that it needed. And then you come to a realization that you worked for a while and you’re not getting anywhere. And I wasn’t a rock star. We were getting paid okay. We had a giant truck full of equipment. We were getting into the B rooms in Calgary and into Ontario and Edmonton and BC. We were playing good gigs and making okay money, but we were still slugging it out in the club circuit. So this story, I love this story. We were at this club in Calgary with this group called Section Eight, and we had it down, and we were getting booked into good Room. So this concert tour was happening. We use international artists. It was Iron Maiden and Twisted and a group called Wasp. Wasp was this shock rock group with all the fire and all that kind of stuff. The lead singer, Black Elois, had this codpiece that would shoot flares out from between his legs. It was ridiculous, but it was what was happening. It was a great concert to go to. Anyway, these guys were playing a live gig in Calgary and we were playing a club in Calgary. And lo and behold, after they did their show, parts of the band came in and they sat in our club. They came to the club that we were doing four sets a night, and this was like a Tuesday or Wednesday night. So they come into this club and they sit at the back of the room. So we go on break and it’s like, I got the balls up to go and talk to these guys. Because it’s like, okay, these guys are I just watched their video on MTV. I’m going to go talk to these guys. I was fanboying like crazy. But I’m also smart enough to know that if you listen to advice, if somebody was able to give it to you. So I walk up to the lead singer, his name is Black, and I tap him on the shoulder and I said, I’m so sorry to bug you. I love to you know what you guys do? You guys are doing you’re doing what we want to do here. Would you mind if I ask you some advice? And he looked at me and interrupted his thing. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to knucklehead like me. And he looked at me and he said, what in the f are you doing here? And it shocked me. It sent me back. And I said, what do you mean? He said, what in the f are you doing here? And he was like, really impatient and raised his voice at me, looked me right in the eyes, and I said, we’re doing the band and we’re getting our sound and we’re starting to write songs. And we’re trying to do. And he looked at me, he said, listen, if you’re going to be in the music business, you got to be where the business is done. Now, f off. And he turned his back to and that was harsh. But instantly, Dwight, I can remember it makes the hair stand up on my arms when I think about it. The light bulb went off and I went, oh, my God. The center of the music industry is not a nightclub in Calgary, Alberta. It’s just not. Because I’d watched groups like Trooper and like April Wine and all these 70s rock groups that I just loved, and they were worthy of international careers, but they never really popped and they never had. They became stars in Canada. But to break into the States, into a global exposure, you got to start all over again in the States. So the light bulb went off like, oh my God, I got to get out of here. And here I am running again. So now my goal is I don’t want to be a club band. I want to go to La. I want to go to New York. I want to go to Nashville or something like that. So now I’m on the run again. So within a couple of months, I had found a situation that had a management deal, a band that had a management deal in Orlando, Florida. Then with CBS Records, they represented Pat Travers band, Molly Hatchett, a couple of other really up and coming big south central Florida or southeastern United States bands, bands that I had the records of. So it’s like, holy crap, here we go. So I joined this band. We worked away across Canada. There’s a lot of really good stories involved across Canada. We staged in London, Ontario, and waited for our work visas to come through. And then we moved down to Orlando. And this was late 1984, early 1985. So one of my favorite things to say about the music industry was that I got to starve nearly to death in a whole bunch of different really great cities. So we moved to Orlando and again with this new group called Nova Rex. We slugged it out in the club circuit in South Central Florida, wrote some really great songs, did some recording, and tried to do what it is that we could do. And timing couldn’t have been any better. If we were in Los Angeles, we were in Orlando. Anyway, long story short, timing is everything. So the way I put the music industry is this. The music industry is on a cycle. It’s on about a five year cycle that spins around, and there is a fulcrum. It’s a point of momentum that you reach, and then the swing starts. So if you’re on the front end of that fulcrum in the music industry, you’re on the momentum, you’re on the front side. You’re not being copycat now. You’re original artist, and everybody else copies. So if you’re on the front end of that with the timing is right, you’re ready for the industry. When the industry is seeking you out now, you’ve got a shot. Now. Talent comes in now, exposure comes in now, connections come in, but if you’re not doing what the industry is actually anticipating, you’re never going to have a shot. Even when that happens, the perfect storm happens and you get signed as an artist and all that type of stuff. If you’re not under the front end of that five years, you’ve got even less time, and at the best possible scenario, you got a five year window of having that start them. I didn’t know all of this stuff. I know this now. In retrospect, I thought that as soon as I got a record deal and I would have sold my soul for a record deal, but as soon as I got a record deal, all my worries are over. And that’s not the case in the music industry, so we were just too little too late. The music that I grew up loving was out of vogue by the time I was ready to be. That when I was at the top of my game. The last touring band that I was with was a group called Sin City. It was a heavily financed group of Swedish guys that needed an English speaking singer, and that all worked. And I was struggling with a vocal injury as well. I was in and out. And when you’re a lead singer, they can’t sing. You got to find a different job. So I was fighting that at the same time as music changed, melodic hard rock, which is what we were doing, got completely wiped off the map by Grunge. I love Grunge music now, but, boy, I hated those guys. Those flat jackets and army boots and unwashed hair. I wanted to punch all of them right in the face. They ruined my career. Right. How do you think about things, of course, when we’re hurt and damaged. But anyway, so I was married at the time and I came to the realization that I’m 30 years old. My priorities are different because I’ve got this other person in my life that I never thought I would have. Because I look back at my parents breaking up and I have promised myself many times, I am never going down that road, I’m never going to get married, because that’s what marriage meant to me. It was pure freaking sadness. So when I finally met this person that I really wanted to share my life with, it was like it was a whole different dynamic of serious. Right. So I’m 30 years old, my voice doesn’t work anymore. I don’t have the time that it’s going to take for me to become a Nashville artist and a songwriter, which I was in Tennessee at the time. I’m out, I can’t sing, my career is done. I have clothes that I probably can’t really wear in public. I’ve got long black hair down to the middle of my back. And now what are we doing? We’re starting over. So the ten years of my life that I spent pursuing really seriously this music career, it was in slow motion, yanked out from under me. So I’m at this rock bottom now. People talk about rock bottom in different ways. In the sense of substance abuse, you reach a rock bottom, which gives you a foundation in which to rebuild in every sense of the word. Even though I’ve never had substance abuse issues, my rock bottom was from career. When I reached that point, it was sobering, it broke my heart, it broke my spirit, it made me question everything that I thought I knew. It made me have enormous self doubt. And it humbled me to the point to where I was broken. Dwight I was a broken person. And my wife saw, for whatever reason, the potential in me and the fact that I was a hard worker. And I promised her that in the first place, when music was done, I would not be that guy that was still 55 years old trying, because I know people like that, that were my contemporaries when I was in my twenty s. And I promised myself I would never be that. So she believed me, and I promised her that as well. So when it came time to rebuild, we go back to, I’m going to get a jov, I’m going to get a job. So I wasn’t thinking career, I wasn’t thinking TV, authoring books, all those things that have happened now. I was thinking, how do I make money from my household? How can I step up to the plate, to where I can even match the income of my wife? I want to talk a little bit about Judy. If I’m running on, please let me know.

But keep on going, brother. I love it.

So Judy is a strong person, and for whatever reason, I just have this immense respect for for strong, intelligent women. On top of the fact that she is beautiful. She wouldn’t put up with my horseshit from the music industry, so I had to up my game even to be next to her. And we became friends, and that’s how our relationship started. She’s also an entrepreneur. She’s a small business owner. She’s recently retired, but she got her degree in dance arts with a minor in English, and while we were married, went back through school, got her k through six education degree. She’s a teacher, but she was also an entrepreneur. She had a dance school for 30 years, and she grew it from nothing to where she had hundreds of students, third generation students, coming back to Ms. Judy. So I watched all of this unfold, and that was the benchmark in my household. So when I say I had to step up I had to step up and I want to be a productive member of my household. It was a tall benchmark that I had to reach, so now it’s time for me to go to work. I knew how to work on cars. We were so poor, when I wanted a car I had to build one that was fine. It taught me resourcefulness and all those types of things and also gave me cross training in the vocation of automotive repair. My dad is a body guy, so I like to think I learned a little bit of that through Osmosis. But the truth is I never worked with him in his shop. He was somewhere else. But we want to be our dad, right? So anyway, long story short that came in so I went with what I knew. So I got a job in a local body shop and started sweeping the floor and I got to know the Tennessee shop here, which is a long handled really wide broom and when you can manage the north end of a south mound push broom, you understand work ethic. And I always had work ethic in my summer jobs between in high school years I would work in the orchards, in the agricultural industry, picking fruit, all that type of stuff. And the harder you worked with that, the more money you made. So it was a really great life lesson that I didn’t even realize until later on in life that those pivotal lessons for me in the fall of the year on spring break in school, I’m out there tying grapevines in the Okinaga when my hands are too cold to to feel. But the more rows of grapevines that I tied, I was like a dollar 20 an hour, I think. Anyway, so that taught me work ethic. So now coming in when I have to rebuild my career, my whole sense of who I am, my whole ego work ethic is one of the ways that I did that. You don’t appreciate that in the moment, you just know that it has to happen. So when I look back on that, I think that was some of the most important learning things, learning moments in my life, were those moments that taught me those not even life skills, just attitude skills. So working in body shops, the thing happened to me working on cars in an automotive repair shop, that never happened in the music industry. And this was this I talked about before the cycle and the cyclic nature of the music industry and not even luck, but timing being more of a factor in success than anything else. And that was my experience with the music industry. The harder I worked, it didn’t matter to me I could put so much time and energy into it. I studied voice, I didn’t a drug, I didn’t drink while I was singing on stage. We were six nights a week for ten years of. My life. I was not a substance guy. I was vegetarian. I was £130 soaking wet. I ran 2 miles every two days to keep my aerobic strength up. I was in the best shape of my life. I took music very seriously. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how much energy I put into it. It was going to pay me back in timing and when those things coincided, but with a vocation, with a trade, the harder I work in that trade, the more it paid me back. And those dividends started showing me right away. And it was like again, bam. Light bulb goes up. Holy cow, man. I can get a certification. I remember when vehicles in the being made by plastics more so than sheet metal. There was Chevy vans that were it’s SMC. It’s sheet molded composite. It’s a version of fiberglass that’s press molded. Corvettes are made of this. So people know that Corvettes are fiberglass cars. Anyway, SMC was starting to come in as a vehicle construction. I went got a certification on how to repair SMC panels. I got a raise when I was a painter. I would go and get a color matte certification with the brand of paint that we’re using. I got a raise because now I was color matt certified. I was three stage paint certified. The harder I worked, the more I poured myself into this industry, the more it paid me back. When you’re a flat rate technician, if you get paid 3 hours to paint the fender of a car and you can do it perfectly and professionally, and the first time is the last time in an hour and a half, you still get paid 3 hours for that. So you can compound labor hours. So when you’re a working technician, you work a 60 hours week and you pull in 140 hours worth of pay, that is an incentive that’s the industry paying me back for the harder I work. So those were huge epiphanies in my life at that time. And it was so affirming and so reinforcing and so so important in rebuilding my sense of self and rebuilding my self confidence. Then that you talk about my origin story. There’s two of them. There’s my story from childhood to the failing, the gross ridiculous failing of my first career to the foundation and the beginnings of my second career, which is my best life. It’s my best career which has led to multiple other facets of that. To rebuild myself with humility, with having been absolutely smacked down. It’s the most important thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. My abject failure in the music industry was the most important failure I’ve ever had. And when I get the opportunity to speak in front of people, I talk about the importance of failure. We repel from it, don’t we? We repulse from it. We want to reject failure. Failure hurts in the moment. It’s painful to fail it’s embarrassing. It scars our psyche. Failure sucks because everybody’s watches somebody’s watching us screw up and fail. It is so important to learn the value of failure and to grow from failure. Not that we ever want to not.

Let pride get in the way and.

Not let pride get in the way. Nobody wants to run into the wall and realize, oh boy, I can’t run through that wall now my head is bleeding. And that’s not the type of failure I’m talking about, recognizing that’s stupidity. But exactly. It’s so important. And I’ve learned this later in years, to embrace and recognize failure on an emotional and intellectual level, mostly an intellectual level. So those are the lessons that my second career taught me. And by the time I was ready to have another performance career, the things kind of coincided. So I’m a collision repair technician. I started my own shop. I failed. I got recruited to run somebody else’s shop. They put me through a management training, which was huge. It was very important. And that led to software training for Estimating. And then I was a more well rounded technician. I could always do the work, but now I could do the work on the business behind the work. So that taught me really important managerial skills. And peopleing a part of your industry, Dwight, doesn’t involve working face to face with people. Is there any of it?

Well, the only thing that would be not working with people is having to call the companies that I deal with for my clients and I’m on the phone with them. You never really have that connection. But otherwise, besides that, 90% of my business is connection, relationship building. And you never successful without relationships, right? Without having that chemistry.

But let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about that. An anonymous person on the other end of the phone. How important is it to have concise communication with that person? I learned that when I’m fighting for my clients in the body shop to get the labor hours that we need to fix that vehicle and this insurance suggestor that gets paid to say no. I’ve got to talk him into a yes in a way that I can deal with him in three days.

Kill him with kindness through the door. That’s what I learned. Kill him with kindness and being relatable with them. So having a conversation and I can hear, and I had to become very good at tonality listening to people’s tones and where are you at? Because you never know where they’re going to be in Canada, and especially over the Pandemic, it was really interesting. And I just have conversations and I go, oh yeah, we got this going on. And I’ll say to them, so I might be on my computer and I’ll type where they are and go, oh, you guys have had some bad weather, I hear, right? Or I read, oh yeah, it’s just being relatable killing them with kindness. I get stuff accomplished that other agents or even people that were trying to help me at our brokerage house would try to do stuff for me. I’d say, you know, let me deal with that. And I’d come out and say, it’s done. What? How did you do that? Tell them what kind of be relatable relationship build. And you can do it over a phone. You’re right 100%.

You just prove my point in that peopleing is so important and even if it’s anonymous or over the phone. And the music industry taught me that a little bit because you’re managing yourself, you are your own product. But also the automotive industry really reinforced it. So here we are. So we talk about origin story and we can go down the different rabbit holes with different things. And maybe one of these days we can we can have more than one episode.

Brother, I’ve had people on more than once.

Very cool. There’s lots to tell. So that’s kind of my origin story that gets me to the point and I’ll stop talking here, but to the point where now I’ve got an established trade. I have a trade that I’m confident in. I’m a really good technician and that paid me dividends. It made me a good living. So now I’m proud of myself, I’m proud of my position, I’m proud of my contribution to my family. And I can keep up. I’m keeping up with the person that means the most in the world to me, which is my wife, Judy. And by the way, we celebrated 32 years of marriage last November.

Congratulations. That’s amazing.

It is amazing. And I love it, and I love her. And I found the right one. I’m very proud of that. And we’re still each other’s best friends, so it’s one of the best things to happen to me in my adult life, without a doubt.

Well, the joy on your face, people that are listening, watching, you’ll know, the people listening. The joy on his face when he talks about Judy is just amazing. Throughout any part of this conversation. When she comes up, you can see his energy change. You may not hear it in his tonality, but I do, and I see it in his face. So that’s amazing. Good for you. I want to congratulate you on that. No problem.

Thanks. So with the trade, what led me into a television career is I’m a good technician and I’m unafraid of microphones and my own image and all that type of stuff. I started a barter deal with a friend. He was the guy that would do video, actually VHS tapes of Judy’s dance recitals. And his business was to market the tapes to the parents and all that type of stuff. So he was a videographer. He was a really good shooter and he was a good editor, and he had all the gear and he had a car that needed a paint job. So I said, you know, we got the wild hair, and this is actually Judy’s idea that I do video on how to paint a car. But I approached Mike and I said, listen man, I don’t have the money to pay you. I priced it out. It was thousands and thousands of dollars that I didn’t have to create an instructional video. But I saw a niche in the industry to where there was lacking fundamental training. So I made a deal with Mike. I painted his car for free. I borrowed the body shop that I was working in for the weekend for over the course of probably three weekends. And I videotaped the process with Mike’s help of painting his car. And then you do the voiceovers and the narration, and that became the title was self descriptive. It’s called paint your own car. Is that clever?

Yeah, rocket science.

We’re talking about 100%. But branding and marketing is pivotal. So what’s the video about? It’s how to paint your own car. So, you know, from there I went to school on how to do marketing, and I was trying to sell this video to professionals. That’s a no bueno. It doesn’t work. Because you get a working professional in a busy shop trying to sell fundamentals video. No, he’s not going to buy that. So I pecked around for about a year trying to figure out a marketing angle. And I would go to car shows with a, you know, the combination TV and VCR players. I would have a twelve volt inverter hooked up to my car battery and a VHS player on the hood of the car and a banner in the background saying, let me teach you how to paint your own car. And with this video running in this loop that we created on the video, and just literally flagging people down, walking past going, hey, have you ever wanted to paint your own car? Doing the ShamWow thing, doing the carnival barking thing. But I got my first customer base there, and I realized that I don’t need to be in professional sector. I need to be in the hobby sector. I need to focus on the guys that have spent the money on the paint, that have spent the 100 hours on trying and failed in a paint job. I needed to be the solution to their failure. And so that was a life changing thing for me. It was like, there’s my wheelhouse, there’s my lane. So I started marketing or trying to get involved and into distribution arrangements with companies that catered to the hobby sector to not the professional tools, but the hobby based tools that were less expensive. Companies like Eastwood and Summit Racing. And if you don’t know these marks or these, I’m familiar with them. Both businesses. Yeah, for sure. So they catered to the people that do their own work. So once I figured out that it took a long time and it took a lot of hard work. Then I knew where my sales were and then things started to accumulate. So we don’t get there without having failure. The benefit and the blessing that I had was in the first place, I was a busy collision repair technician and this was the side hustle for me. My wife also had a really good income, so we had the luxury of me taking chances on a small level instead of all eggs in, and failure would have devastated me. I learned that lesson once already. So it took more work to do it on the side and it took more work to still be present in my household and to help her with her business and do what I needed to do to maintain my status and my training and all that type of stuff. We were putting in a lot of hours, pal.

But all this stuff you’re talking about though, it also tells me that you’re always working on yourself. Not just your craft, your skills, but you’re working on you and being present. Like, you just mentioned that you’re always trying to make sure you’re present with your work, you’re present with your wife. And so many people don’t realize that that epiphany of realizing that life cannot always be about one thing in your life because then you miss the journey of everything else. I have people that are so focused on work, they miss their family. All of a sudden they’re older, they miss their kids growing up, right? You know what I mean? They can be too much family and not enough work and they’re always struggling because nobody teaches us in school in North America or probably anywhere in the world how to live a life that is intentional, right? Because life is in session. I always say this, people get laugh at me, but life is in session. This is not a dress rehearsal is the way I live. So kudos to you. Throughout this whole thing that you’ve been sharing, like failure was just a stepping stone for you to try something else out. You didn’t sit and suck your thumb and have a pity party, which is admirable, brother.

There were pity parties, dude. But what do we do? And I talk about this when I speak, all we have to do is get up one more time than we fall.

It was a stepping stone, kept on getting up. So, yeah, you’re right, we all have. I guess you didn’t sit and wallow in your pity party though, right? No. So you could have pity parties, right? Correction on that. But you didn’t stay stuck forever.

No.

You eventually pivoted whether it was days, weeks, months, but you used it as a stepping stone to be where you are today, brother.

Yeah. So here are some things. You and I are both avid readers. We read a lot of books. I’m sure you read fiction as well. As stuff that’s self help and business guided, all that kind of stuff. My mother taught me the love of literature and I’ve been a reader ever since. Books are important to me and books have been important to me. So things happen to us and we read books that are important to us and also we have mentors in life. So I’m going to go back in my tale about the music industry and talk about a pivotal moment for me later in life. I’ve read really important books that are life changing. There’s a book called The Miracle of Mindfulness. It’s by a Vietnamese monk named Ticknot Han. Really important book. I learned about that book four years ago, but when I was in my twenty s and I told you that I joined a band that worked away across Canada that eventually had the almost record deal in Florida. So the guitar player of that band, his name is J. P. Cervoni, italian immigrant, played guitar upside down and backwards, like Hendrix centric dude. And he stopped by my hotel room one day. We were just doing rehearsals, getting our act together before we played. And he said, hey man, we’ll see where your head is at. And he threw two books down on my hotel room bed. He said, let me know when you read those. So it’s like, okay, nobody ever challenged me like that before. This is rock and roll. This is the music industry. And he used to do yoga. And he was talking about mindset back when I didn’t even understand what mindset was. So here I am and I’m afraid of my own freaking shadow. And covering it all up by being on stage in a performance career to disguise the fact that I’m scared of life. So he throws these books on and the titles of the two books were and I just looked it up. The Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Robertson and a book called The Power of Creative Visualization by Shock Tgawain. So the creative visualization book was a little bit of woo woo in it. And at the time it was the 70s subculture, self help type of a thing, type of a book. But it’s literally the same creative visualization techniques that Michael Jordan, Damon Johns, Tony Roberts, all of these guys that really know we talk about visualization now. Like it’s just this important tool. Back then it was woo woo crap, man. It was stuff that if you’re reading this, you’re smoking a lot of weed. It was stuff that was unfamiliar. But that book changed my life. It really resonated with me. So I learned visualization techniques, how important it is to map out, process and set goals and say, you know, if the the power of dreaming big, then you just got to put the work in behind it and make it happen, right? That’s visualization. Michael Jordan would visualize walking up to grab the basketball, never mind the shot, and making the shot, he would visualize tying his freaking shoes the best and most efficient way and then execute, then put the physical work and the work ethic in for his reality to match his visualization. And that’s why he was enormously successful. That combination and watching The Last Dance will tell you that super important. The nature of personal reality was.

That’s a good movie, by the way.

Oh, it’s fantastic.

I’ve seen it about a dozen times.

By JP throwing those books in my hotel room that day. It changed my world, man. It really did. So I’ll always be grateful for that mentor in my life. He knows he was a knuckleheaded guitar player and all that kind of stuff, and I say that in Jess. I talk to him almost every couple of months. We still keep in touch. He’s in La. He’s a music producer now. But those things are important to me, and I want to say this as well. Yes, I had the benefit of learning those types of techniques, literally, and that mindset and that epiphany when I was in my 20s. It’s never too late to read those books. It’s never too late to realize now, maybe we’re in our 40s, maybe we’re in the 50s, maybe we’re older than that. It’s never too late to figure out that there’s a way to position your thought processes in order to achieve goals, right?

At any age, though, at any age, absolutely. Given a heck never stops. You should always give a heck, right? You should always want to move forward and pivot again. Life is a journey. I love how you talk about through your origin and sharing, though. And watching you obviously, is even better than just those that are listening the different places in your life. And you moved on to the next thing, but you also didn’t disparage the old thing. There was a lesson there. There was something that helped you into the next place of your life, the next evolution. And so many people in life sit back and they have depression about the past, instead of having gratefulness about some of the things that have gone on in life. Obviously there’s traumas that happen to people that they just can’t do that. But most people I know that have that word potential air quote that. And people say, well, they had so much potential. Well, they didn’t have somebody like you that threw down a couple of books to help you. They didn’t have other things that you’ve mentioned as well that were a catalyst. But at the end of the day, I still give you onus the most for it, because you had to read those books. You had to take advice from people. You had to look and analyze the fact that, hey, I’m in a pity party. What am I going to do? What am I going to do to keep up to Judy, right?

Yeah.

What am I going to do? Where am I going to play my role in life? Where is my time to shine? Well, I got to make that time if I want to shine. I got to do what I need to do to shine. I need to do whatever it takes, go through that hard knock stuff, be broke. Like you said, you were poor in Florida, right? NLA, wherever, right? Yeah, but it’s awesome, right? But your origin starts out, you weren’t afraid to do things, you weren’t afraid to work hard, you weren’t afraid to live in BC. We’ll work out, work at a winery or whatever. Work, but did whatever it needed to just to move forward and take risks and challenges, because you said it right there, move forward.

Right? So we can be stuck in our miring garbage or we can move forward. We have a choice. We always have a choice. I mean, the brilliant words of our friends in Rush, if you choose not to decide, you’ve still made a choice.

Absolutely. Famous band, love band.

Absolutely, man.

Everything is I’m still grieving over Neil, but we won’t get into that 100%.

And he wrote that lyric as well.

Yeah, he did.

Those things, the examples I had in my life, I believe Subliminally taught me those things. My grandmother, what is she going to do? Her husband’s gone, she’s got to raise her family. And her skill was piano and piano?

Yeah. That’s awesome.

And with my mom, she was devastated with the marriage. Her role in the household was a housewife and a stay at home mom, and that all of a sudden, so she gave up her career, which was in the medical industry, and by the time she was faced with that reality, she had no more skills. She had to re educate herself. She had to retrain herself with two kids to raise by herself those things. I watched my mom survive and rise up, so that had to have an effect on me. So I give her credit for that, you know, and I tell her when I see her that every good thing that has come in my life comes from her. It comes from her example. And, yeah, it makes me emotional thinking about it right now, but, yeah. So we all have our mentors and we all have our things. So thank you, by the way, for saying out loud that I’m able to navigate things and rise up out of things. And I suppose I need to take the compliment and say that it does take some resilience to do that. And I appreciate it, man. Thanks for saying.

You’re welcome. The biggest thing, though, I find in life is that people aren’t willing to articulate or even attempt to say something that they think about somebody. My favorite book still to this day and shocks a lot of people. I might even told you, this is still The Five Love Languages, and it’s not the fact that I’ve been in a great relationship with a significant other. I’ve been divorced for a long time. What it is, though, is The Five Love Languages teaches you how to realize what a person’s love language is and then play on that love language for them to be that kind person. I guess maybe it is because you talked about being Canadian, but I like giving people what they need to elevate them, but do it in a genuine way. So that book I’ve read twice and I’ve listened to three times on Audible, the Five Love Languages, I recommend that my readers pardon me, listeners and watchers have heard me talk about that again. Tony asked here recently on a call, what’s your favorite book? Right? At the end of the year, he asked us, and I mentioned that. And people on the call, there’s eight of us in that Mastermind, they were like, dumbfounded. Why? And when I was done explaining why, they got it because in life, I need to take care of myself, my inner self. Well, sometimes I need people to help me take care of my inner self. But in order to do that, I need to help heal them. I need to give them words of affirmation or acts of service or maybe their Love Language is gifts, right? There’s five things. It’s one of the most profound, simple books, but most profound books I have ever read in my life. And literally, I’ve read a ton, like you said, right? So I still use that as my guiding post. Because if I give Kevin what he wants, Kevin, indirectly, without even realizing it, feels better. And he gives me back things without even trying. He doesn’t know what my love Language is. He doesn’t know what’s going on. He just feels glad. He’s looking to live life better with me in the sense that he appreciates me, wants a better relationship with me. Based on that Five Level Languages book, I developed a process called 70 30. And I won’t get into that because this is about you, but I developed a 70 30 process of how I gauge and how people stay in my associations of my life. And it’s not just people. It’s what I watch, it’s what I listen, it’s how I perform in life follows that 70 30 principle. And it all started with that book. And that book was given to me by a mentor in 1993. He gave me a few books, think and Grow Rich, right? How to win friends and influence people five love languages and the magic of thinking big. Those are my four first books. The guy said to me, and he’s still my friend today. He’s mentored me through getting into electronics engineering, to getting into finance. He’s been supportive of me. He’s been a friend of mine over 30 years. He gave me those four books, and he said, here’s these four books. Then he started giving me more books. And he says, Here we have this book club. Pay this fee, and every month you’re going to get a book, and we all read it, we’re going to discuss it. Right?

Yeah.

The Greatest Salesman in the World, augmentino, the list goes on. The seven habits of highly affected people.

That’s one of my favorites. Yeah.

These people were giving me these books, and I’m just going like, boom. I was a small town little guy growing up in cameras. Dad owned a farm, equipment dealership. We’re picking our teeth with straw or whatever. I’m exaggerating, but you know what I mean.

Yeah.

All it takes is one person giving you one shot to believe in you. And that book did it for me, to help others grow so that I get back what I want, a good association.

And if everything happens just right and the universe drops this honest at the right time, we’re receptive and open to it when we receive that knowledge. And that happened with you, and it happened with me with those visualization books and those reality check books for me. And also I’ve got a big Asterisk here, so thank you for the gift of the five love languages, because I’m going to act on that.

Oh, man, the Audible is so good. The person that it is just so good. I recommend it to people all the time. Do you know at one point in time when I first got introduced to that book, I buy them amazon didn’t exist back in the go to people’s weddings, and I’d give it to him as a present.

Yeah, I’m serious. People are very cool.

I give it away as gifts to people and they go, Why would you do that? Because it touched me in a way that even if I give out ten copies and only one person takes it serious, I’ve now gifted and served. Right. And that’s when my earliest levels of service were starting to serve others. I didn’t even know back then that I’d be where I am with my brand is only a couple of years old, but my combination of my memories and my travels and my journeys, just like you, have got to me where I am today, my origin. And it was so important that we don’t sit back and let that music die in us and people laugh. What do you mean, music? Well, we all have a song in our hearts. We all have a song between our six inches. Our heart, body, and mind and soul have a song. And I don’t want that music to die in me. I want my legacy not to happen by fake or not naturally fake, by just accident. I don’t want to work on my legacy, and I’m working on that now for 20 years. Right. To make sure my living legacy is in play. So that if I die tomorrow, people will know that I served and was a person that. Wanted to serve, man, like humankind, right?

So legacy is something that I wanted to know. It’s all good, and I’m glad you brought it up. And I’ve got some notes here, stuff that I wanted to bring up with you and ask you as well. But, you know, as I learn more about you, and especially our conversations together, maybe with or without adult beverages, a.

Little bit of libations or whatever, that’s.

Okay, then loosens the lips sometimes. But legacy is important to you, and you understand what it is. And I understand what it is now, too. In the second version of my life before the music industry. My legacy was to be the songs that I wrote because I knew, and I still know how important music was to me and how it spoke to me, how someone else’s lyric can be interpreted in my psyche and mean something individual to me even though they didn’t know me. James Taylor didn’t know me, carol King doesn’t know me. Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin. They don’t know me. But their songs spoke to me through me.

All those three artists are amazing.

Oh, my gosh, man. So my legacy was to be my contribution to the music industry and how I could pass that forward. Well, that ship sailed. That doesn’t exist anymore. So now, these days, fast forward from me being a technician that had an idea with the video. Now, my legacy is formal training. My service is passing forward a trade that has been exceptionally profitable, exceptionally good for me on all levels, mental, spiritual, financial, my job. Now, my legacy is to pass this on, not only for the self empowerment of individuals that benefit from my training, but it’s also for the people that their mindset changes based off of a cumulative knowledge that has a foundation in a trade, in a skill. And how that trade the empowerment that the trade has given me and is not a limitation. So now my legacy is to empower and educate people not only in the trade, but also in the fact that that trade is now a foundation for creating any reality that you want from that based off of that. Once you master that skill, it can take you anywhere you want to go. And I don’t care if you’re talking about fixing lawn mowers. If you get proficient and good enough at that, you can branch off of that and do whatever you want to. It will give you the tools and the foundation to have a career that you could never have dreamt about. Look at me. I got a high school diploma. I was thrust out into the world at 17 years old. I’ve failed so many times. I fell so many times forward on my face that my nose was flat at one point. I’ve been able to have a course.

I hear you.

I couldn’t have invented. You know what I mean? I’m a technical writer. I’ve been on television for 18 years now. I’m a producer. I do product videos for big important manufacturers. And all of this type of stuff is all based off of the fact that I was humble enough to work hard and get the trade. And I’m not bragging about my accomplishments. We all have our I am, and I am. My accomplishments are accumulated over a lot of years and through a lot of hard work, and I’m very proud of them. But I never thump my chest. I do give examples of successes that I’ve had because it’s important.

You have to though where it comes from. No, storytelling is important. Storytelling is important. It doesn’t mean you’re bragged. You’re sharing.

We have to acknowledge it, and in order to empower somebody else, we have to recognize it within ourselves. You’re an author. You’re a financial advisor. Holy cow. You’re talking about generational wealth, creating those types of things, changing that statistic from 60% of people. I watched your video, and when you’re on stage, you’re talking about, look to your left, look to your right. 62% of the people in this room are going to fail or be dead financially or actually. That’s scary shit. And your power, your superpowered white is is to to shake people up and make them realize that you can change that, and you can change your mindset on finances and grow 20 years ago. 20 years ago. You can start right now and change your life. So I want to say thank you for that and congratulations on you realizing your power and your legacy and your vocation, your skill, and the fact that you’re really good at it, man.

I appreciate that. I appreciate that.

It’s how I see you. It’s how I see you. And I’m proud to know you for that. I’m proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with you saying, this guy helps people, man. It’s important because not everybody steps up to that, do they?

No, absolutely not. But the biggest problem is that people use they let fear stop them, right? And I always tell people’s definition of fear is face false evidence appearing real. Whereas I learned years ago and I’ve been propagating and presenting this to people for 15, maybe close to the whole 20 years of my finance business, that fear stands for face everything and rise. It’s what you tell yourself in the moment. Right? And I have to correct myself all the time. I’m my biggest own copilot because I’ve taught myself. I’ve trained myself to be a critical thinker on the fly and realize, oh, my gosh, why am I feeling this way? Oh, face everything and rise. Don’t let that trip you. This stuff happens in life, and you need to just carpe them.

Yeah. I don’t know whose quote this is, but courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is action despite fear.

Oh, man. You know what? I’m trying to think who that is.

That is that. I know we’ve both heard that person, but boy, that resonates with absolutely relate to that. And I see that in people that are close and dear to me. And I see that in people that are successful. There’s no such thing as absence of fear. That’s ignorance. And we don’t want to suffer that. We can self educate. We can become educated and trained and smart. Nobody ever gets by without fear. And you know what the other truth? Nobody ever gets by without pain. If we want to live a bubble wrapped world where we never skin our knees, metaphorically speaking, we’re going to have an empty soulless existence. One of the things I learned a long time ago is the difference between pain and suffering. And this took me a lot of work and it took me the help of somebody to help me see it. And seeking out help and training in mindset and getting past things. So for me, when I talk to myself about this, there’s no escaping pain. We can’t escape. Pain is going to happen. Not that we run screaming towards it, but we have to know that it’s an eventuality. Suffering is reliving the pain over and over again for no reason. It’s not learning from the pain. It’s not growing from the failure. So suffering is ruminating. It’s ruminating in experience. And just washing it around never circumventing it, never getting past it. So the most powerful thing, I think in my adult life is realizing the difference and the delta between the two, the difference between pain and suffering. And once you understand that pain is unavoidable but suffering can be corrected, right?

No, absolutely.

It’s the essence of self help. It’s the essence of us rising up, like you said, rising up out of the situation. And it doesn’t matter what you do or where you are or how what age you are. We can all do that. So I don’t know if I can pass on anything to anybody listening. Just don’t be afraid to sit in what it is that you’ve made for yourself because I’m a firm believer that we make our own reality.

So, Kevin, this has been an absolutely fabulous episode. We’ve already recorded over an hour. I would love to do a part two with you because we haven’t even scratched the surface of the knowledge that you have shared with individuals. The knowledge you have is amazing. I hope the people that are listening to this or watching have been taking notes. And if you’re driving, obviously not. But when you get home, put this on YouTube. Go to my YouTube channel. Watch Kevin’s face and his passion, or just listen to it again on your favorite podcast platform. Take notes. Reach out to Kevin. But we’re going to have a part two because it would be a disservice to all of you and to me because I want to learn more from this amazing gentleman. So we’re going to wrap up and we’re not going to do what I normally do on the episodes. We’ll leave that part two, where I asked Kevin if he was to tell you one last word about giving a heck. We’ll leave that to part two, and we’re going to wrap this up and we’ll see you and talk to you in part two. And that’s fine with you, Kevin?

It sounds great because I’ve got a couple of questions. I want to find out where you’re ticking as well. So let’s do it.

Okay, right on. So, everybody, catch you in part two.