IAM985- Bestselling Author Helps The Youth Lead Fulfilling Lives

Derrich Phillips is a bestselling author, combat veteran, husband, and proud father on a mission to help youth achieve their dreams and lead fulfilling lives. He’s dedicated to helping youth break the cycle of generational poverty and empowering people of all backgrounds to improve their lives and escape the poverty mindset. When not writing, Derrich enjoys traveling, competing in Ironman races, volunteering, and spending time with his loving family, and dog in Dallas, Texas.

• CEO Hack: Learning and researching
• CEO Nugget: Delivering what you have a vision for and how you're delivering it too
• CEO Defined: Being a leader, having a high level of integrity, compassion and having a desire to serve others

Website: http://www.derrichphillips.com/

www.mentorselect.com

Book on Amazon: Poverty Powerball: Turn Adversity Into Your Winning Ticket

Full Interview:

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Transcription

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[00:00:14.09] – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. GRESTS values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

[00:00:43.20] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Derrich Phillips of MidSource Select. Derrich, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:52.20] – Derrich Phillips

Hey. A pleasure to be here, Gresham. Appreciate you having me.

[00:00:55.00] – Gresham Harkless

Definitely. Super excited to have you on, and you're doing so many phenomenal things. Before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Derrich, so you can hear about some of those awesome things. And Darij is a best-selling author, combat veteran, husband, and proud father on a mission to help youth achieve their dreams and lead fulfilling lives. He's dedicated to helping youth break the cycle of generational poverty and empowering people of all backgrounds to improve their lives and escape the poverty mindset. When not riding, Darich enjoys traveling, competing in Ironman races, volunteering, and spending time with his loving family and dog in Dallas, Texas. Derrich, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:31.20] – Derrich Phillips

Let's do it.

[00:01:32.09] – Gresham Harkless

Alright. Let's do it then. So to kick everything off, I wanted to just rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more about how you got started, and take us through your CEO story.

[00:01:41.09] – Derrich Phillips

Oh, great. So pretty much for me, I had always been involved in mentoring youth. That's something I've always been passionate about. But I started looking at it in terms of making a living from doing it was in twenty eighteen. I unexpectedly got laid off from my job. I was working, in IT security, just got comfortable. Hell, yeah. It's got never get laid off. That that didn't even cross my mind. And once I got laid off, I'm like, okay. What do I do now? I really wanna be in this position again where I'm just a hundred percent dependent on a job to provide for me.

At that time, I was I was married already, and my wife and I were going through IVF. We're getting ready to start a family. So things are real. I was like, oh, man, I don't wanna put my family through this. It's just having that single point of failure. So since then, I started looking at becoming an entrepreneur and seeing how I can serve people and and have control over that and how I'm serving people and what value I'm bringing through as an entrepreneur.

[00:02:42.40] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Well, I appreciate you for sharing that. I have been laid off as well, and I got a job, like, not too long after I got laid off. And I was gonna get laid off again, so that was not, a great experience. That's something you wanna kinda go through, but I think it starts to switch your mindset and how you look at things and different steps that sometimes you wanna take in your life. And you used a phrase I wanted to hear a little bit more about it. You said the single point of failure. Could you take us through a little bit more on what that means?

[00:03:09.50] – Derrich Phillips

Yeah. So single point of failure, I probably first really, learned about that concept when I was serving in the army military. We always had planned a, b, c, d, e, f, g because they say what can go wrong will go wrong. Right. As I mentioned, I was getting comfortable and I had that single point of failure which meant that I was dependent on my job to pay my mortgage, all of my bills, and provide for my family to live, and once that job was taken away from me, I had no say so, that my name ended up on the list and, hey, we don't need your services anymore. Now what?

So at the time, I didn't have a plan b or c. Unfortunately, I was blessed. I had, you know, I had skill, a skill set that I could monetize, but it certainly helps not to just be full putting all the eggs in one basket essentially really prepared for the unexpected. And when it comes to income and financial security, make sure that you have multiple streams of income.

[00:04:06.40] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That's huge. I appreciate you for your service, and all the the work that you did there, but I appreciate you for drilling down more on that because I imagine, that phrase, which I was hoping that's what it was about. I haven't served in the military, but it made sense in, you know, about what you were talking about and how so many times we don't realize that we are creating and have that single point of error where if something does go wrong, then we don't have a plan a, plan b, or anything along the lines. And it sounds like that's what you do to help, I guess, educate and empower people on maybe creating more ways to generate revenue and opportunities.

[00:04:43.80] – Derrich Phillips

Yeah. Absolutely. When I was mentoring you, I certainly helped them first identify what their special gifts are. I feel like everyone has gifts and talents, helping them to really develop those, and then also think outside the box and not be limited to, hey. I'm just gonna play basketball, or, hey. I'm just gonna be an engineer or a doctor or just whatever they were told they're supposed to be or they desire at that time realizing, hey. It's gonna evolve.

Think your desires are gonna change, but you wanna always be trying to plan two, or three steps keeping your options open making yourself as marketable as you can be, and learning all you can so that you are prepared for any shifts in the economy or a global pandemic happens, whatever the case may be, and just have that mindset where, hey, I'll prepare for whatever happens. I can handle it. I have the resilience and the mental toughness. I'm ready.

[00:05:38.10] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And that's necessary as you said. You know, we're going through one of those, life-altering and world-altering times. You know, right now, I'm just trying to figure out, like, what to do, what not to do. And it sounds like, it sounds like a lot of the work that you do, and correct if I'm wrong, is also, like, empowering people to recognize those things, but also sounds like develop those things so that they can kinda lean on their skills and pivot and change whenever that time might be needed.

[00:06:03.80] – Derrich Phillips

Certainly. And it starts with me with mentor selection and focusing on youth. And I just recently, today I launched my YouTube channel, Healthier and Wealthier, and that's for people of all ages where they not only focus on living a healthier lifestyle with fitness, nutrition, just being healthier overall, but also ways they can be wealthier, saving money, investing money, making money, and going back to those streams of income we're just talking about, they're prepared and they can pivot just whenever they need to. So my channel focuses on providing them with tips to live healthier and wealthier.

[00:06:40.10] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And we'll have that information in the show notes so that everybody can follow up and subscribe and and check out all that value, that you're providing. And so I know you have, like, a podcast and loads of kind of other things you're doing as far as speaking. Could you take us through a little bit more of the ways that you help kinda support clients through your books and all the awesome, content that you're creating?

[00:06:59.19] – Derrich Phillips

Sure. So first start with the first thing I did, once I got laid off and had a little extra time, I didn't and then go right back to the workforce, I'm like, okay, I want to write a book. And I started time blocking every morning, time blocking an hour or two working on my book. And that was Poverty Cowboys, my first book. I have to turn it first into your winning ticket. Essentially, it was the story of my childhood growing up in extreme poverty in Gary, Indiana, one of the most dangerous cities, especially in the nineties in the world.

But I wanted to identify how I was able to overcome that adversity and how I felt it made me stronger as a man, and as a person and prepared me to excel in in my later years as an adult. I wanted to help kids, especially going from that environment, to see if it was well, my grandma used to always say a blessing in disguise. Like no matter what you're going through, that adversity, those hardships, it's building that toughness. You definitely will be a lot stronger as a result if you get through it.

So it led me to the first book and my wife and I ended up publishing two children's books. It was a series, Father Figures, I just know how important it is for, kids growing up without fathers to at least have father figures in their life to provide that positive, male role model for them to see just what it is. So we did that and then, as I said, the podcast, I have, start interviewing people who, like entrepreneurs, people that are just successful and have them come on and share tips on how other people can model that, that success.

That's definitely what I attribute to my success just having those mentors and modeling what other successful people do. You don't have to recreate the wheel. So that's one thing that the podcast focuses a lot on. And, yeah, so I was just trying to try to get the message out there, whether it's through the books, the podcast, or our YouTube. And, also, I have a course as well. So I'm just trying to help people out how however I can.

[00:09:02.89] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And so, I was gonna ask you for what I call your secret sauce, and this could be for yourself or your business or a combination of both. But do you feel it's that ability to turn and see poverty into a potential opportunity? Did that ability for you to kind of, I guess, flip that switch, so to speak, do you feel like that's something that makes you unique and successful?

[00:09:22.39] – Derrich Phillips

Yeah. Absolutely. I would say that's my biggest competitive advantage. And I think for me, when I was eleven years old, my mom and I were homeless for some time about three months. And at that point, it was simply rock bottom. Didn't have a roof over our heads. And even throughout that, my mommy always asked me like, Hey, what house you're gonna have when you grow up? What kind of car are you gonna have? And just starting to think about that took me out of that, that mindset of being depressed and feeling helpless. Like, Hey, I'm looking towards the future now.

And then going through something like that prepared me, like, all right, I've been homeless before. That's gonna hit the worst of the worst though. Anything else is gonna be easy. So certainly I would say that's my competitive advantage throughout life where there's nothing where I feel like, okay, I can't overcome this or this is gonna break me. You know, I can always look at it and say, okay, this is, this is an opportunity. This is building me a stroller. This is something that, that, hey, this is a blessing in disguise. I know a lot of people don't have that. They can't look at things that way, but it is a mindset where you reframe it.

Anything that you would view as negative, you reframe it to something positive and you're seeing it, hey, this is an opportunity. This is forcing me to step outside my comfort zone, forcing me to do something I normally wouldn't do. Now it's okay, it has a positive spin on it. Like with COVID-19, being at home, and on lockdown. Okay. Now this opportunity to spend more time with my family, this an opportunity for me to rethink my business structure. This is this, all the different things you look at it positively. And that just changes everything and energizes you versus, oh, poor me. Why this happened to me? That doesn't zap your energy and spirit.

[00:10:59.89] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And so I wanted to, switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack, which can be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. But was it just what you mentioned? Is it that ability to embrace the process and to to kinda, I guess, center oneself into, like, these are the things that I need to do? Do you feel like that is something that, you know, makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:11:20.50] – Derrich Phillips

Yeah. It it is. And for me, I love learning and I love researching, especially researching other successful people, but that's something I do a lot. And as I mentioned earlier, I don't, I don't ever want to recreate the wheel. I just want to follow that formula, but then of course add my own, my own, uniqueness to it. But, yeah, I just do a lot of research and I'm always looking at, okay, if I'm struggling with something, okay, how does someone else get past this? And what what is there are is there are shortcuts? So when I say shortcut, not just trying to avoid doing something, but how can I do something better? How can I optimize? I'm always looking for that, at least to improve.

[00:11:57.60] – Gresham Harkless

So, I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So that could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or somebody you're talking to, or it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine you might tell your younger business self.

[00:12:11.79] – Derrich Phillips

I love that question. And for me, something as far as pursuing this entrepreneurship journey for about two years now, if I can rewind two years and tell me that that new entrepreneur or something, I would say something I recently learned is about the importance of not only, like, trying to deliver what you have a vision for, but also just keeping in mind, like, you have to put it in a format that that's I'm gonna make, I'm gonna deliver I'm gonna make, I'm gonna deliver this, this product to sell over it and people are gonna love it.

But you're not thinking about, okay, looking at it from their perspective, your customer's perspective, the end user's perspective. And so now I play, how do I make sure that I put it in the format that they're gonna love? So for me, with my educational podcast and things like that, I was just looking at it from the education side. Hey, this is knowledge.

This is priceless to my listeners, but also I just realized that now, okay, I need to make it entertaining as well. So they said edutainment. So that's something that it took it entertaining as well. And they said edutainment. So that's something that it took me a while to get to that point. And things are starting to click more now that I'll put those two and two together.

[00:13:22.20] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. And so I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping that different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So, Darris, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:13:32.10] – Derrich Phillips

So to me, being a CEO is being a leader, someone who has a high level of integrity, compassion, and just a desire to serve others. It's not necessarily somebody who's just a boss who barks out orders and just gets to sit back and relax and make money. No. I have a tattoo, on me by verse too much is given, and much is expected. So as a CEO, certainly, you're giving a lot because you're able to lead people, but it's a lot of perspective for you. And I'm a big believer in leading from the front. So you certainly have to just have that high level of integrity, make sure you're doing it for the right reason, and just have that service-serving leader mindset.

[00:14:12.50] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That's absolutely huge. And I love, you know, that that that, that verse. And then just too, it reminds me of, like, the parable of the quotes parable of the talents because so many times, you know, you're giving certain gifts for you to kinda help support people, for you to be of service to the world and the people within the world. And I think when we start to understand that and step into that and have our actions in alignment with that, that's again when you start to, of course, you know, make a huge impact and start to really see the fruits of our labor, so to speak.

[00:14:42.89] – Derrich Phillips

Yeah. Absolutely. No doubt.

[00:14:45.29] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Darius, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you, find out about the books, podcasts, YouTube, and all the awesome things you're working on.

[00:15:01.20] – Derrich Phillips

Again, I appreciate you having me on I am CEO. I love what you're doing and, yeah, this is why it's so important. No pickups to you. Keep doing what you're doing. As far as my products, my books, they're on Amazon. Again, it's poverty powerball. I have, a Father Figures children book series and then also The Shortest Distance, and that one's all about goal setting. And, make sure to subscribe. Check out my channel, Healthy and Wealthy, on YouTube. That's something I'm excited about and making sure that I'm adding that entertainment side to the education.

[00:15:36.89] – Gresham Harkless

Again, appreciate it. Awesome. Awesome. Appreciate you too. We will have the links and information in the show notes, and I appreciate you for creating that edutainment for all of us to not just get the knowledge but also get the enjoyment in terms of, listening and taking in that content. So thank you for, you know, being the change and reminding us of the change that we wanna see in the world and all the inspirational stuff that you're doing. So I truly appreciate you, Darje. I hope you have a great rest of the day.

[00:15:57.89] – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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