From The Outhouse To The Penthouse, Part 1
Hello, everyone. This is Jerry Clark just bringing you another edition of Power Tips and am I excited about this one. I have someone here with me today who is not only a dear friend, but also a master networker. His name is Jeffery Combs and in the last 16 or 18 months, this guy has generated over $1 million in personal income. I know a lot of you are saying, whoa, that's pretty incredible. Maybe he has been doing it all of his life. Well, what you may not know is that in 1996, his income was zero. He did not make a nickel in 1996. Well, I met Jeff in 1991. He had an ad in the paper and I responded to that ad. I got started on that adventure with him. It was a network marketing company dealing with health and nutritional products and so forth. We have been friends ever since, but we have been through quite a bit together during that time.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
Jeff, it is just really my pleasure to have you with us here today.
JEFFERY COMBS:
Thank you, Jerry. I appreciate the opportunity to share with you and some of the folks that are listening.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
Awesome. Jeff, I know people are thinking, wait a second. This guy made a million bucks. Okay, great. That is some great income and so forth. But let us get a little bit about the evolution of this process, Jeff, because a lot of people think that most people are just born successful. They are born, they, you know, just come out of the womb and all of a sudden God stamps on their head "a million dollar earner," or whatever. Tell us a little bit about your background and where you came from so we can all get an idea of what you have done here.
JEFFERY COMBS:
Well thanks, Jerry. It is funny that you would mention that. I do a lot of motivational speaking and training, traveling the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean working with several direct marketing companies. People see the final result and they think, boy, this guy is really successful, but most people don't understand the price I've actually paid. In a nutshell, I will give you a little bit about my background. I was a guy who was a very good high school athlete. I played college, junior college, basketball.
I was an overachiever all my life, and I bought the recipe that most people buy, that is, go to college and get a good education, climb the corporate ladder. I found that would not work for me. At age 32, I realized that I was never going to get rich working for someone else. I was also coming off of a very tragic situation in my life.
I had found myself in my 20's, I am presently a recovering addict and alcoholic. I'm just a few days away from celebrating my 10-year sobriety anniversary. All through my 20's, I kind of kept going backward and backward until I had to take a deep look at who I was and where I was going. I had to take that leap of faith into recovery.
That was probably one of the biggest turning points in my life, because it was at that point that I finally got clean and sober, that I found direct marketing or network marketing just as I was coming out of a recovery center. The important thing about that was is that was the first point that I was introduced to self-empowerment.
I was also introduced to the fact that my self-esteem was shattered due to some unresolved issues that I had allowed to accumulate over about a 14-year period. It was a very synchronistic event.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
What do you mean by synchronistic?
JEFFERY COMBS:
Well, synchronization is like a-- what I have found through my own research and development, i.e., R&D, and I've found that synchronization is a whole different level of coincidence. It is where a coincidence really isn't a coincidence, and by the way, I don't believe there are any things called coincidences.
I thoroughly believe that everything in life happens for a reason. You are in the right place at the time but most people don't recognize it. Fortunately for me, I was in a position to recognize where I was at one moment and I took a leap of faith and jumped into a networking business solely on a leap of faith. I quit my corporate America job where I was really just treading water. I had spent several years going up the down staircases in the sales businesses and sales jobs and found that I was actually psychologically unemployable.
I was not happy doing what I was doing and the results that I was getting proved that. I was making $40,000, $50,000 a year, just one step away from poverty, virtually. I lived in northern California. I was just paying my bills, just staying alive. When I found networking, I jumped in with both feet, quit my job, and within about a four-month period I was $15,000 upside down. And once again, another synchronistic event occurred.
You actually answered my newspaper ad. When I tell people about synchronization, I'm really talking about you come to a fork in the road where you say, I go left or I go right and I'm going with my intuition and I'm not going to listen to what other people tell me. Most of my life I had been listening to the advice of people who were almost as broke as I was--the fireman, the dog catcher, the salesman, the sales manager, my parents. There were people who have loved me and given me what they felt was good advice.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
So, they mean good. I mean, they're not trying to lead you down the wrong path or anything but we all tend to buy into this system, like you were saying.
JEFFERY COMBS:
Right. Well, most people want you buy into the system that already isn't working for them. As you step out of that box, they say things to you, like, well, those things don't work. That is one of those pyramid things. That is one of those things I saw about on the news where someone died on that product.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
You've got a good education. Go get a real job.
JEFFERY COMBS:
That is correct. As a matter of fact, almost two years ago to the day, my father said, and I will never forget as long as I live, son, when are you going to get real? You are almost 40 years old, you have a great education, you have a lot of talent, but there comes a point in life where you have to stop chasing rainbows. Funny thing is that after I made my first seven-figure income, he was one of those guys that said, I knew you could do it. I'm proud of you.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
They all tend to do that after you have done something.
JEFFERY COMBS:
I have found in really what I call stepping out of the box, stepping out of your comfort zone, because your comfort zone is always your failure zone. Most people stay in their comfort zone because they are comfortably broke, myself included. You have heard the old adage of misery loves company. I was one of those guys. I used to hang around with turkeys and not eagles. I also found out that your friends aren't your friends.
Your family, who portray themselves as your strongest allies often are your strongest enemies when it comes to you breaking out of the box. Now, I'm not suggesting that your family or many of your friends, loved ones, etc., aren't necessarily in your corner. See, as you go through this thing called self-empowerment personal growth and you start to have internal change, some of the people around you notice it, and they say things to you like, what is going with you? What are you going to these seminars for? Why are you spending your money on these things? Don't you know that is crazy?
What is really happening is, what was happening for me, as I was going through the evolution of change, I started to intimidate people who were in my direct circle of influence. I realized that my friends weren't really my friends. What they were really telling me is, you know, I waiting for you to come back when you fail so I can tell you I told you so.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
Like come back to cow pastures.
JEFFERY COMBS:
That's correct.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
Moooo, come back.
JEFFERY COMBS:
That is correct.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
Get out of the jungle.
JEFFERY COMBS:
And you know, Jerry, your tapes really say it all in the Creating Magic series. I had an opportunity to work with you for about five years and we really ran the table on some failures, but our failures weren't failures weren't really failures because they were success really turned upside down. Because, see the glass was always half full, not half empty. About three years ago, a gentleman wrote me a bad check that you and I were working with.
It was a $30,000 bad check. I could have viewed that and been very negative and very-- I could have put myself in a very bad spot. I went the whole year without making one penny. I just refused to throw in the towel because I knew that I was going to arrive somewhere. I wasn't sure where I was going to land but I was determined to get to the promise land. In some of my tapes, I talk about the promise land. Your promise land isn't necessarily money or necessarily wealth.
The promise land, to me, is where you get to a point in life where you start to become completely comfortable with yourself internally. Because, it is at that point when the internal growth starts to take over, people looking for the external reasons for success, the internal growth is what starts to make people move to where they achieve what I call quantum results. I experienced that in the last couple of years. Now, in a nutshell, I started upside down $65,000 in credit card debt due to a couple of businesses and situations that I allowed myself to put myself in.
I was 39, about to turn 40, in December in 1996 and I just had too much pride to file for bankruptcy. No one had put a gun to my head and said cash advance these credit cards, roll dice on business ventures, and I just had too much pride because I had put myself in the position.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
So you took responsibility for the situation you were in.
JEFFERY COMBS:
Right.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
You didn't blame anyone else, that was their fault, such and such fault, and so forth. You said, okay, I got myself in this situation, so maybe I can get myself out of this situation, obviously.
JEFFERY COMBS:
I wasn't just looking to get myself out of the situation, because I was past the bills. I had learned a long time ago not to focus on your bills.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
And why not? Why don't you focus on your bills, for example, for the listeners?
JEFFERY COMBS:
Well, focusing on your bills is a huge, huge negative reaction. I have also learned over the years not to react to situations, people, etc., because I just won't allow myself to get drawn into that energy. If I had those stack of bills on my desk, accumulating, and at this point in life I had about 15 credit card statements coming into my door. It cost me almost $4,000 just to pay the credit card statements on the minimum payments.
I just wasn't going to allow myself to do this. Once again, another synchronistic event occurred in my life. I picked up a USA Today, right after Christmas exactly two years ago, called an ad right out of there. A gentleman called me back, took me through a very simple system, and I made an intuitional decision right then that I was going to start my enterprise. Funny thing was I didn't have the startup capital on my nightstand.
It cost $1,300 to get started. I had to get creative and I knew that through creative thought process, the money would manifest itself. It is not about having money, it is the desire to find it. True, just like I said, I found the startup capital and in 24 hours, sent it off to a stranger in the mail, and found myself in business in a new enterprise.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
And then you got rich over night?
JEFFERY COMBS:
Absolutely not. It's so funny that you would say that. So many people view entrepreneurship as a get rich quick scheme. It is funny the people that think that are usually the people who drop out the fastest.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
Especially networking, right?
JEFFERY COMBS:
Exactly, because networking takes, it takes what it takes. It takes doing whatever it takes and there is no equation for whatever it takes for a different person. Now, for me, it was a journey and it was an incredible journey that I was on. My biggest challenge was overcoming my internal obstacles.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
Such as?
JEFFERY COMBS:
Such as self-esteem. Such as getting past unsolved issues. Such as forgiving people in situations instead of blaming and just blaming period. I had to get to a position where I started to view everything from afar rather than viewing it from the center of the fire.
JERRY DRHINO CLARK:
Now how did you do that? How did you get through your unresolved issues and how did you get to the point to where you actually started forgiving people? What clicked that said, you know what? I believe I need to forgive people or that is what I'm suppose to do or whatever. Your self-esteem, for example?
Because there are people listening right now that are saying, man, I've got the same situations. You know, I have self-esteem challenges. I have unsolved issues challenges. And people who have unresolved issues don't even know they have unresolved issues, so what did you do? Maybe there could be some insight for the people that are listening.
JEFFERY COMBS:
That is a great question, because really what you are really asking me is what are the dynamics of the entire equation that moved you from 32 through a journey to where 10 years later you become a self-made millionaire? I was willing to pay the price. And the price, and I get very choked up and emotional talking about the price I paid.
See, you and I talk about it, and it is paying $10 at the door and never asking for a discount on the path. It took an incredible commitment to myself to move off the dime, because I had been sitting on the dime. I hadn't been sitting on the million dollar bill that I really deserved to have because externally I believed I deserved to have it, but internally I didn't have the self-esteem to go out and make it happen.
END OF PART 1... GO TO PART 2 TO CONTINUE THIS INTERVIEW...