IAM2593 – CEO Helps Business Professionals with an All‑In‑One Business Services and Reseller Opportunity

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Gary Engles Teaser 00:00
All of these things together, it's something that a MyGig certified reseller can step in and win by helping other business owners win.

And I wish I would have had a lot of these services during my journey and growing up through different types of businesses over the years. A lot of these would have really helped, again, increase my income or decrease my expenses or just running more efficient and more secure.

Intro 00:30 
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. Gresh 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.

Gresham Harkless 00:57
Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast, and I have an awesome guest on the show today. I have Gary Engels. Gary, excited to have you on the show.

Gary Engles 1:05

Yeah, good to see you, man.

Gresham Harkless 1:06

Yes, I'm super excited to see you as well, too, and to jump into having a phenomenal conversation.

I want to, of course, read a little bit more about Gary so you hear about some of the awesome things that he's doing before we dive into this phenomenal conversation.

So Gary is the CEO of MyGig, a professional affiliate platform designed to empower business professionals to earn recurring income by connecting companies with real-world solutions like tax credits, IT solutions, payroll support, and CRM automation.

With over two decades of entrepreneurial and leadership experience, Gary has built and consulted businesses across the industries from youth leadership education and affiliate sales to tactical training and strategic growth consulting.

He brings a rare mix of precision, passion, and performance shaped by his background as a highly trained jujitsu practitioner, a black belt, and a lifelong martial arts of 35-plus years in law enforcement-certified self-defense and firearms instructor.

His work spans coaching high-performing entrepreneurs, training kids, parents, and entrepreneurs in leadership through his legacy-missions.com, which fuse business mindset and discipline.

He's a family man that runs Leadership Academy together with his wife, Nikki, and his three children. And before we jumped into this, I did a little bit of homework and research on everything that Gary's doing.

He's doing some phenomenal things as I try to get my words together and say jiu-jitsu. I learned that he started a martial arts school when he was 22, and he actually started out with martial arts, if I heard correctly, at the age of five.

But one of the things that I always love around entrepreneurship and business is that I feel like it's very much so very infectious. So it was awesome to kind of hear that he got those seeds planted, it sounds like, from his father figures when he was a lot younger on, from a coffee business and also from a tree removal business as well, too.

So Gary, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Gary Engles 02:56
Yeah, man, there's a lot there. And it's really interesting to hear you say all that and all the journey and thinking back, man, it's been quite an adventure.

Gresham Harkless 03:03
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the beautiful and sometimes it can be not so beautiful when you're in, you know, parts of the journey of entrepreneurship.

So I know I plan to see you touched on a little bit. Let's rewind back and hear a little bit more on how you got started. What I call your CEO story.

Gary Engles 03:17
Oh man. Yeah. Yeah. Let's start with the martial arts school. I think it's a very interesting place to start and then kind of, you know, filter into where we got to my gig and what I'm, what I'm doing today.

So, you know, yeah, 20 years ago,  22 years old, right. I started a martial arts school and I called it Leadership Academy cause I recognize martial arts was a perfect vehicle for, you know, teaching, kicking and punching, but to really teach these leadership skills that I saw as the most valuable and important part of anybody, especially growing up, kids growing up, things like this.

And so I developed a leadership program built on the foundation of martial arts. You know, it's been 20 years, it's been successful for 20 years. We've done an amazing thing, you know, we've gotten thousands of students enrolled over this 20 years and we've been pretty active, you know, with 200 active members or so on the mats consistently, you know, during that time.

But what's powerful and important to me about that story and what that was is, there was a really, really interesting part of that journey that led me to, I sold that part of the company and got involved as a COO of a trading education company.

And as a COO of that company, we built it up and we ended up selling it a couple of years later to a larger company that absorbed the whole brand and the whole trading team and everything.

And I started working with a gentleman that I met, speaking on stage with him, and he helped me kind of working with, he was an M&A firm, mergers and acquisitions, and so I started working with companies and helping these companies kind of set them up for a sale, right, either increasing income or decreasing expenses, right.

Just kind of running more efficient, and so I'm doing all this, by the way, while I'm still teaching my classes in the evening, and so during my day, I'm helping companies prepare for a sale, and it was a great journey to go through.

That led to one big opportunity we call My Gig. And My Gig was developed by Ryan Leggett. And Ryan is a very, very smart person that you need to have on this call. I think you'd really enjoy that conversation with him.

He's the founder of it. And he brought together something called the Anchor Group and Anchor Accounting. They've been an accounting firm for 10 plus years and have done, you know, a billion dollars in ERC and set C, self-employed tax credits, things like that in the past. And they started going down the road and building other services that essentially all businesses need.

And so the products that we offer are stuff like an IT solution, right? I mean, all companies need to protect their cybersecurity threats and things like that.

And so we offer a PEO. And so like a gig worker, somebody, a smaller company, even like a martial arts instructor like myself, right, can, get access to powerful HR and like insurance options that maybe a big company might be able to offer.

But now, as part of the PEO, you can get those things too. So as a self-employed person or as a gig worker, right? You have access to amazing health insurance, right? And HR services.

That's an important piece, right? And so every business needs this, right? You have like a CRM. We have our buoy CRM system, right?

So every business needs a CRM. And I know there's some industry specific ones out there. This is a very clean CRM that you can jump in and you can use. So that's a service that we can get involved in.

How about financing? Every business needs financing. And we have our whole buoy finance department, right? And we actually bought a neo bank and have a whole system here where we can offer some financing options, right?

You have things like credit and credit repair and credit boosting, right? That every business needs. Every business owner, every individual needs to have credit, right? So you have a whole credit department, right?

The credit boosting service, right? So for something like $10 a month, you can step into the service and you'll see an instant boost in your credit.

By attaching things like your phone bill and your electric bill and your rent payments and things like that to it that normally don't get reported, but now they get reported through this service.

And so now you can work on your credit, including business credit too. And the business credit side of things is phenomenal. And a lot of businesses don't focus on the business credit side.

So you have a whole business lift program, business credit lift program that can help your business establish credit, which does several different things, right? You're going to get lower insurance rates, right?

You're going to get better financing options and things like that. I mean, credit is an important piece of our financial world, right?

Every entrepreneur needs to focus on it and have that stuff covered, right? Another one that we offer is our financial fitness app, right?

It's called My Gig Financial Fitness. And I like to think about this like a tracker that we use in the gym, right? You might have an Apple Watch or something like that. It tracks all your macros and your heart rate and all that kind of stuff, right?

What if you had something like that for your financial world? And so in this app, right, you can actually, you know, attach it using Plaid right to your bank accounts and your credit monitoring and things like that.

And it'll kind of give you a snapshot of financial fitness snapshot of where you're at. And also using AI gives you great tips and articles and things like that and how you can boost and increase that.

We have a stressometer on there, right? It's like, you know, what's the most stressful part of your financial life right now, right? By answering a few questions, I can show you.

It's like, oh man, I don't have three months of savings. you know, and so the system will help guide you into, well, how can you establish, you know, a savings account?

What, what my gig offers is a reseller opportunity for a lot of these services, right? So my gig is the affiliate platform for all of these, right?

So you can step in, become a certified reseller with my gig, and have access to all these different offers and all these different services that any business would need.

All of these things together, right, it is a, it's something that a MyGig certified reseller can step in and, you know, win, right, by helping other business owners win.

And I wish I would have had a lot of these services during my journey and growing up through, you know, different types of businesses over the years.

A lot of these would have really helped, you know, again, you know, increase my income or decrease my expenses or, you know, just running more efficiently and more secure.

And I think a lot of these things are missed by companies that they need to start looking at all these pieces. and start to fill in those gaps so that they can focus on what they do best in their business.

Gresham Harkless 09:53 
Yeah, absolutely. I love hearing about your journey and how it came to this solution.

Gary Engles 09:58
I didn't even mention there's a whole marketing side. We have a fractional CMO through Hydro, and that's a whole other part of the business that you can hire a marketing firm to come in and do a lot of this stuff.

All of our logos and our whole branding, our website, all that stuff is done through our marketing service that we offer too.

Gresham Harkless 10:16
Yeah, that's awesome. So would you consider that to be what I like to call the secret sauce?

It could be for you personally, the business or a combination of both, but is that ability to kind of understand all those different aspects of business and be able to kind of simplify it and not try to do all the things, but make sure that you are able to empower people to be able to help serve and help people to win?

Do you feel like being able to kind of bring those worlds together and into this product is a way that you've been able to kind of create that secret sauce?

Gary Engles 10:43
Yeah. You know, you stay within your, your area of genius, right? I mean, everybody has their one thing that they're really good at. And, you know, some people are more sales-type people, right?

Some people are more creative types of people, right. And, and, and on and on and on and on.

And when you try to do the, you know, try to be something that you're not right, you struggle and stay in your area of genius, stay and understand your strengths and your weaknesses, right.

Stay in the areas that you know, that you are really, really good at and do that part.

And bring in the team around you to be able to handle the rest of it. Leverage somebody else's experience. Leverage somebody else's genius. Bring them in to do it.

If you're worth $1,000 an hour in what you do, stop doing $20 an hour work. And that's an important thing is to understand where your time is best utilized.

Gresham Harkless 11:35
Yeah, that's such a huge thing. I wanted to draw down more and see, did you have any other what I like to call CEO hacks?

These could be like apps, books, habits, things that you lean on that you feel like make you more effective and efficient.

Gary Engles 11:47
Mastery of anything requires three things, right? And this is something I teach in the martial arts. I think something I teach in business.

And I think it's really important piece and thing to point out here is that, you know, mastery requires that you operate under correct knowledge consistently over long periods of time.

And if we were to break that down, I think, you know, every entrepreneur, every, you know, martial artist, any professional athlete, right?

They have to first start by operating in their correct knowledge. You have to get coaching, mentoring, right? You have to, I mean, you can practice something wrong a thousand times, get really good at doing it wrong, right?

Just how many, how many entrepreneurs struggle along, right? They're trying to figure out their marketing and instead of going to get help, and, you know, leverage somebody who's already done it, they just kind of go down using incorrect knowledge, right?

Operating under correct knowledge consistently over long periods of time is such an important concept.

Gresham Harkless 12:38 
Yeah, absolutely. You know what? I think it really speaks to like at the core of what entrepreneurship is.

Gary Engles 12:42
You know, I can I can tell you the stove is hot. Right.

But until you actually step it, touch it, until you actually go through those experiences yourself, until you actually go through and have those losses and have those moments of defeat and failure and whatever, you don't really know what the stove is hot. You know what I mean?

Like it's a different level of understanding. Right. I mean, you can understand something intellectually. I can read a book about buying a business and building that, right?

I can understand it intellectually, but until you've actually done it, it's a totally different experience.

Gresham Harkless 13:11
Yeah, I love those. And it's so funny. I was going to ask you the time machine question, but I feel like you hit the nail on the head and things that you would tell your younger business self.

And I wanted to ask you now one of my absolute favorite questions, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO our goal is to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show.

So Gary, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Gary Engles 13:27
I built my school, I called it Leadership Academy. I recognize that leadership is the most precious commodity in the planet. It's the most sought-after skill on earth. Everybody is looking for real leaders.

The CEO is the visionary, is the person who can bring a team together to achieve that common goal. And I think that, you know, again, everybody's looking for real leaders, right?

And that's really what it takes, what it takes to, to take a vision of whatever your business is and bring it to life and to get the result is not to do it all. And I think that's such a mistake.

And again, I fell into that trap. I fallen into that trap, is needing to do it all right. Needing to control every part of the business and needing to, you know, you know, I can do it better. You know what I mean?

And, the more that you can understand that, you know, they don't, they don't need you to do it better. They need you to lead them on how they can do it better. Right.

And sometimes it's leading by example, yes, but also sometimes it's getting out of the way and allowing them the confidence to be able to see and realize that they can do it themselves.

And I remember getting done with that graduation ceremony after tying the kids and, you know, the belts on the kids and high-fiving and all the great, you know, and I remember locking the door and sitting down in that chair and being like, man, I did it. You know, I didn't think I could do it. I did it. Right.

And that one little moment led me, you know, two years later to be able to say, I can do my own school. I can run, I can start my own business. I can, I can do it my own. You know what I mean?

And so those early years and those early moments of somebody believed in me, right, that his leadership, right, kind of led me to a point where he believed in me, I can believe in me too.

You know what I mean? And I think that as a CEO, that's a core skill set that we need to be able to hone is get out of the way and let somebody build the confidence in themselves to run, right, to be able to do the work themselves.

And you'll be surprised at what they're capable of.

Gresham Harkless 15:29
Yeah, absolutely. And Gary, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more.

So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know.

And of course, how best people can get ahold of you, find out about all the awesome things you and the team are working on.

Gary Engles 15:44
You go to joinmygig.com is the best way to learn about, you know, becoming a certified reseller with what we're doing here. But what you're getting with all of this in the whole ecosystem that we have here is a complete business in a box system that, you know, all the different services that a business might need, you can now offer it and you can profit by sharing it. And I think that's an important thing.

Gresham Harkless 16:10
Yeah, absolutely. It's such a huge thing to be able to do that. I think, of course, we're going to have the links and information in the show notes as well, too, so that everybody can follow up with you. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Gary Engles 16:19 
Awesome, man. Thank you.

Outro 16:21

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and 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.

Want to level up your business even more? Read blogs, listen to podcasts, and watch videos at CBNation.co.

Also, check out our I Am CEO Facebook group. This has been the I Am CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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