This transcript is auto-generated and may contain spelling and grammatical errors

 

Tyler Jorgenson (00:00)

Welcome out to Biz Ninja Entrepreneur Radio. Today I have a guest who has, who first reached out to Biz Ninja back in 2017. He’s got a very persistent team, which I love. And they reached out and here’s why I love that. So many times seven years go by and people have completely changed what they’re focusing on. But Dre Baldwin is still focusing on Work on Your Game and Work on Your Game University. He’s helping people with

 

mental toughness, confidence, and discipline. And man, he’s got a story that I’m really excited to learn more about. So welcome out to the show, Dre Baldwin.

 

Dre Baldwin (00:35)

Well, Tyler, thank you for having me on. don’t even remember what I said in 2017, but I’m we stayed on top of it.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (00:39)

That’s a lifetime ago. That’s like two lifetimes ago. So, but I mean, you’ve, you’ve been doing this a long time, right? You first started blogging in 20, in 2005. So this isn’t new to you to be talking and doing and preaching mental toughness.

 

Dre Baldwin (00:44)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, well, I didn’t even start talking about mindset till about 2010 because I started out just talking about basketball. So it grew from the basketball experience.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (01:00)

Okay.

 

Well, let’s cover that a little bit. you played basketball. Give us kind of the basketball story and you made it into pro level and give it, us a little background there.

 

Dre Baldwin (01:13)

Always played sports growing up, come from the city of Philadelphia, PA. Played a little bit of all the sports that were available to me, a little bit of baseball, a little bit of football, weren’t really good at those. Got into basketball around age 14, which is pretty late if you’re trying to go somewhere, like playing in college, let alone pros. Barely played in high school, sat at bench, but one year I was on the team as a senior. Walked on to play division three college ball, so people who don’t know sports, that’s the third tier of sports. Most of your pro players come division one, come from division one. Those are the guys you see on TV. We were division three down in the basement, so.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (01:27)

yeah.

 

Yep.

 

Dre Baldwin (01:43)

Nobody was checking for me after I finished playing in college, even though I played, I was still developing. I still feel I was still getting better. But again, I didn’t have any opportunities to play. So graduating college 2004, my first year out of school, I worked a couple of quote unquote regular jobs. I worked at Foot Locker as a manager. I worked at a gym called Valley Total Fitness selling memberships. They’re out of business now, not because of Mito. I made a lot of sales for Valley Total Fitness. And then I just wanted to get into playing pro. So I went to this event called an exposure camp. For those who don’t know what that is, like a job fair.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (01:46)

Right.

 

Dre Baldwin (02:13)

for athletes and it’s not free. You pay to go to it and it’s a destination event. So all the players who want to get a job playing a sport professionally, they go and all the people who can hire someone to play that sport, they go. So it is a big thing. It’s like a convention and you go there and you try to play your way into an opportunity, which I was able to do. And I started playing professionally overseas in Lithuania in 2005. That same year I took the footage from that exposure camp, which was on this thing called a VHS tape. You remember those entire? Yeah.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (02:41)

yeah, absolutely.

 

Dre Baldwin (02:42)

I took that VHS tape to an audio visual store. They put it onto a data CD and I put that CD into a desktop computer and uploaded that footage to this brand new website called YouTube. So that’s how I started basically two careers at the same time in 2005.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (02:57)

That’s amazing. that that’s not, I mean, that’s not your normal journey into professional sports, right? Statistically, if you are not, if you don’t already have eyes on you coming out of high school, your odds of, of, of ever playing any level of pro is, is really, really low. And so not only that, but you made, made it through college. and then still weren’t being picked up and that that’s pretty cool. So after Lithuania, what’d you do?

 

Dre Baldwin (03:09)

So.

 

Yes.

 

So after I played in Lithuania, I came home to the USA, hadn’t made enough money to where could just be retiring, like screws me duck, know, swimming in the money. So I went and got a job actually. I got a job at a supermarket and I was working overnight stocking the shelves. So any of you been to a supermarket, you know all the stuff that gets bought off the shelf at night, somebody has to put that back. So that was me. That’s what I was doing overnight. And that was the worst, that was probably the worst job I ever had in my life. I had a lot of jobs, but that was the worst one.

 

Luckily that job only lasted for about two weeks. I didn’t even make it to a paycheck period because my agent called me he got me on another team. So I went to this traveling team in the United States called the Harlem Ambassadors. So most people have never heard of them. So you heard of Harlem Globetrotters, right? Everybody knows them. Okay. So the Ambassadors is like the Costco version of the Harlem Globetrotters. So I got on that team. They’re based out in Colorado. So we travel, we had two groups.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (04:04)

Okay.

 

Yep.

 

Dre Baldwin (04:19)

and we would travel through these smaller towns throughout the United States in a 15 passenger van. And we would basically provide entertainment to towns and places that otherwise couldn’t see an NBA game. So we didn’t go to Dallas, Texas. We went to some really small town in Texas where you couldn’t go to the Mavericks game or the Spurs game. We wouldn’t go to the Miami Heat. We would go to some town in the middle of Florida where they can’t go to an NBA game. we were basically the closest they can get to seeing pro basketball. So we would go to those games. And it was like show basketball.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (04:33)

Right.

 

Dre Baldwin (04:48)

A lot of it was scripted, doing dunks and dances and stuff like that. So that’s the thing I did next. That lasted for about half a year. Then one of my teammates, happened to have a connection to play basketball in Mexico because on our off days, when we’re traveling on his team, we would go and find a gym and play regular basketball, not to show scripted stuff. And one of my teammates, happened to already have a career playing in Mexico. He was just in between jobs. So he came and joined that team. And so when he saw me play,

 

Regular basketball, said, Dre, you can actually play. So he said, when I go back to Mexico, I’m going to tell my connects down there that you’re a guy who should come down here. he, true to his word, he did what he said he was going to do. And he got me a connection down in Mexico. So the next thing I did is I went to Mexico. That was in, by this point, we’re in the middle of 2006. This is summer 2006. And played in Mexico. I was there throughout the summer because Mexico, their leagues are sometimes opposite.

 

So when NBA is in off season, they’re playing and they have a bunch of different leagues. most countries don’t have just NBA has the NBA and they have the G -League, but most countries have several leagues that most people don’t even know about. So Mexico has several leagues played there, came back home, phones not ringing. So this happened a lot in my career. So people who understand entertainment or sports business notice that most athletes are not Tom Brady or Kobe Bryant. It’s not just a steady stream of

 

hits it’s sometimes you don’t know if the phone’s gonna ring again. So you may remember a guy named Kurt Warner played quarterback for the Rams back in the day. Right. So his story was his rags. The richest story was that he was bagging groceries at a supermarket when he got the call to come play for the Rams. And then he became like super bowl champion guy. And that’s a real thing that happens. And if you know anything, the entertainment business, a singer or an actress,

 

Tyler Jorgenson (06:12)

Yep.

 

-huh. Yep.

 

Dre Baldwin (06:32)

They’re waiting tables in between jobs because they don’t know when that next call is coming. So it’s not like a normal. This is not a normal work life. It’s also a reason why a lot of people watch out of it because the opportunities just stop coming and they can’t sustain themselves. So my phone was not ringing. This is 2006. I finally move out of my parents’ house. All right. So I’m 24 years of age at this point. I went got me a studio apartment that was $700 a month and I’m living on my own. get a job working at a different gym called a Philadelphia sports club. They still exist.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (06:36)

Yep.

 

Yeah.

 

Dre Baldwin (07:00)

And I worked there for maybe seven, eight months. Then I moved at that point, I moved to Florida because I knew I always wanted to live in Miami before I had even seen it. I met a girl. Yeah, I met a girl. I was dating. She was from Florida and she was moving back to Florida. So I went with her. We went together to Florida. So I moved to Florida. Now it’s 2007. Phone’s still not ringing. I think I didn’t get a whole year 2007 and not play. I played pro ball maybe for about a week because I didn’t sign my next contract till December.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (07:08)

Okay.

 

Dre Baldwin (07:28)

So I’m a next contract right, like the day after Christmas, I signed a contract to go play in Montenegro. And the way that that happened is I just did a whole lot of cold pitching and I’m trying to reach teams overseas. So it’s not like you can call them. It might not be even be able to speak to them, but I was sending emails. So I sent between September and December, 2007, I sent about 10 ,000 emails to basketball teams that I was trying to play with. Now somebody who knows the game may say, well, Dre, how could you send 10 ,000 emails? There are not 10 ,000 teams.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (07:28)

Okay.

 

Right.

 

Dre Baldwin (07:58)

in the world. Well, same thing that you mentioned is I emailed the same teams more than once that you mentioned at the top of this recording. So I reached out the same team more than once and I was just trying different headlines. I was basically a split testing before I knew what split testing was. Yeah, that’s what I was doing. I didn’t know what it was, but that’s what I was doing. I was just changed the subject lines, changed the information, put in different little links because by this time I had some YouTube videos and I finally got somebody to respond and I made that contract happen on my own, not even through an agent. So

 

Tyler Jorgenson (08:05)

Thank

 

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Dre Baldwin (08:27)

That’s the end of 2007 and going in early 2008, I’m in Montenegro. So should I keep going?

 

Tyler Jorgenson (08:33)

Man, let’s, yeah, absolutely. so in the, wanna, I like to jump, that’s a man, I’m jumping all over the place in this, but I like to jump forward and backward, right? So we’re getting your origin story, we’re figuring out what’s happening there. And so we’re gonna come back and close some of those gaps, but I wanna gather a little bit of what you’re doing now. So you run Work on Your Game University, what’s the mission there?

 

Dre Baldwin (08:40)

Yeah.

 

Mission is to help people perform at their highest level, do so consistently and produce results. So what I tell people is that we’re in a results -based business. That means everything we do needs to be measured against the desired outcome. So that’s the main focus of the university.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (09:09)

What would you say is the number one thing holding people back from getting the results they want in life?

 

Dre Baldwin (09:15)

Asking the wrong question. they all know not you. saying that the biggest challenge many people have is that they it’s always mental. It always comes back to the mindset, whether it’s whether they know it or not about half the people who come to me say mindset is my biggest challenge or they’ll mention it as a challenge that they have, or they think that their problem is ABC when their problem is actually D E F and they don’t even realize it.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (09:17)

Did I just ask the wrong question or was that okay? Okay, no, I’m just teasing you.

 

Dre Baldwin (09:41)

So therefore, no matter how hard they work and how many answers they get, they get an answer to the wrong question and they’re working on the wrong thing. So my job as a coach is really to use my superpower, which is really my ability to be insightful. And when I say insight, what I mean is my ability to discern what the actual issue is from what people think the issue is. And that often comes from just asking the right questions and observing, not because I’m some genie who just has all the answers. right, because chat GPT probably has me beat.

 

So it’s really just about asking the right questions. And that’s the main way that I help people when we change the mindset, then we can change the actions, we change the actions, we can change the outcomes.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (10:15)

Give me an example of that, maybe a client you’ve worked with where they were asking the wrong question, you helped them to start asking the right question.

 

Dre Baldwin (10:21)

Man, that’s a great question. So I would say about 30 % of the people we work with are people who are transitioning into starting some new business venture, whether transitioning out of corporate or the government or to just start in something new as an entrepreneur. And I’m trying to think of what’s one of the good ones. So one guy, he’s a former athlete himself and he didn’t play pro, but he played in college and he was just coming to me because he had a certain venture that he was trying to do. He was trying to help.

 

connect students and their parents who were athletes. He was trying to connect them to possible sponsors. And he came to me to help him figure out how to best do this. Here’s the platform that I have is called ABC. And I’m trying to connect the parents to the sponsors so that the kids have enough money so that they can go and pay for the AAUs and the trainers, et cetera, et cetera. And I looked at what he had and this was over the course of a couple of conversations. Finally, I said to him, well, this is just a garbage idea. The problem is that

 

It doesn’t matter how hard you work at this. This is just not a good idea. It’s not a good market for it. It doesn’t quite make sense when you explain it. It’s there too many moving pieces. Most people will not understand this and you can’t really draw a clear line between what the sponsors would get for their money and how the parents would even connect to them. So you need to just take this idea kind of like you’ve seen Shark Tank before I’m sure. So you know how Kevin O ‘Leary tells people take this idea in the backyard and shoot it. I told him that’s what he needed to do. Take this out in the back and shoot it. And we need to come up with a better idea.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (11:28)

Hmm.

 

Yeah.

 

Dre Baldwin (11:49)

Luckily he was culture -able enough that he listened and then we were able to get him into something better.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (11:51)

That’s good.

 

Yeah, you know, it’s fascinating. That’s really similar to something that Seth Godin once said. You know, I was at an event where he was at, this was probably back when we were first emailing, and someone said, asked him about like how to be successful in a line of work or in a new business. And he was like, too many people ask, they say, you know, how do I be successful at this? Instead of saying, I want to be successful, what should I do?

 

because asking the question one step earlier might change the business or the opportunity or whatever you’re going at. And I think, you know, an entrepreneur, you’ve got to be willing to take those ideas in the backyard, right? Because not every opportunity is equal in how big they can get and what’s really sitting in front. And some opportunities are way too complex. what’s with the university? You know, you do coaching, you’ve written how many books now?

 

Officially 35, unofficially a million. But so, I mean, you’re writing books, you’re doing all this. It’s clear that you have a passion for what you’re doing about helping people have greater strength and greater health in their mindset. What are some of the biggest obstacles people are facing right now in today’s economy and in today’s work climate or entrepreneurial climate?

 

Dre Baldwin (13:14)

The biggest challenge a lot of entrepreneurs have is that they try to make decisions for their market as if they are the customer. And this is something I had somebody tell me a long time ago. said, Dre, you’re not the customer. So you can’t design your products and services or your pricing based on what you would buy or what you need because you’re not the customer for this. You already know it. So you wouldn’t buy it. So you have to think about who your ideal customer is and design it around what they want. And that sounds very simple.

 

But it’s hard for people to do because you have to take yourself out in your own shoes and put yourself in the shoes of your ideal person and what they would want, what they care about and design everything about around their mentality. And the best way to do that is actually talk to people like that and let them tell you in their own words what they want. So that is easy for you to put it together. So this is what a good copywriter is really great at that. They can basically put themselves in the mind of another person and write for that person. And that is a skill. It doesn’t seem like much of a skill, but it’s a huge skill.

 

Because the better you are speaking to the mind of the person you’re selling to, the better you’ll be able to sell. So to answer your question, biggest challenge is a lot of entrepreneurs that I work with, they, and this is even seasoned entrepreneurs, not even just starting ones, but seasoned ones, they think in terms of what would I buy? What would I want? Does that make sense? Is this too much? Is this too little, et cetera? And I am often reminding people you’re not the buyer. So you shouldn’t ask yourself that question. That’s the wrong question. The question should be,

 

Who’s your ideal client, especially people who already have businesses? I say, all right, tell me about three of your ideal clients, like your best customers, your best clients that you, if you had a hundred of them, you’d be happy. And they tell me about them. said, okay, design everything around what that person wants, not around what you would do because again, you’re not the buyer. You never sold anything to yourself. At least I’m not out of your business. So that’s the biggest thing.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (14:56)

Yep.

 

Yeah, I love that. I think that’s very good advice in just understanding the business. It’s a bias that a lot of people have, right? Where they think, because I see things this way, others must also see it this way. And to be a great marketer, you’ve got to have that empathy, the ability to think like the other person and experience that. really good stuff. And yeah, it helps you write better, helps you create all your marketing.

 

And speaking of marketing, see that you, you’re a two comma club winner there from ClickFunnels. see you walking across this stage. I was at that event. yeah, this is, this is the first year I missed actually of the, yeah. Yeah. And the, yeah. And then the one before that. So, yeah, the virtual one, a bunch of my buddies were at unfortunate, you know, I just got to watch it a little bit, but

 

Dre Baldwin (15:40)

Well, this here was virtual.

 

It doesn’t count now and count virtual events and if it’s in person that are you going to Vegas next one?

 

Tyler Jorgenson (15:53)

Nah, huh.

 

Most likely that’s close enough. It’s easy for me to get up there and go. I used to be there the whole time and it just started shrinking down. I’d go for a day or I’d go for two days and that sort of thing. But I just, I love the networking of, of events. The speakers are yeah, speakers are great. but a lot of the speakers I’ve seen before or things like that. So I just, I just love connecting with real people in real life and yeah, yeah, yeah. Walking through lobby con, right. And just talking with everyone and yeah.

 

Dre Baldwin (16:00)

Yeah, I’ll go.

 

Okay.

 

Me too, that’s why I grow.

 

I’ve heard everything they had to say.

 

Yes, that’s all I do. So if you’re there, you’ll notice me. I’ll just be standing around.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (16:26)

That’s it.

 

I love it. What, you know, I think events are a great thing, a great place to connect with people. But when you’re working with somebody who has, is struggling, maybe they’re struggling with momentum and they’re just feeling like, you know, they don’t know where to start when it comes to mindset. You know, what are some of the early building blocks that you teach as you start coaching people?

 

Dre Baldwin (16:53)

Great question. the challenge is, first of all, we have to help people unlearn the nonsense that they’ve accepted and conditioned themselves for, which is this activity outcome loop that a lot of people live their lives in. So most people understand the concept of setting goals and even if they don’t write down their goals or have clearly stated goals, people understand the concept of wanting something. I want to make more money. I want to have more customers. I want to buy a new car. I want to take care of my family. Whatever. Most people have the idea. They understand the concept of wanting. Most people don’t do anything. They don’t want something.

 

And once they are clear on what they want or at least vague on what they want, what do most people do next? Well, all you gotta do is look around at Western society. They go to work. That’s all people do. People live their lives to work. So they go do some work and they check, okay, has this work produced the outcome that I want? Not yet. Okay, let me go work some more. Did it work? Not yet. Okay, let me do some different work. Did that work? Not yet. Let me work harder. Did that work? Not yet. Or maybe I’m just not working hard enough because this successful person just told me that I must not be working hard enough. So let me triple down on my work.

 

This is what people spend their entire lives doing working working working trying to get to an outcome and literally working themselves to death because no matter how hard they work and how much they work they still are not getting even close to the goals that they have the problem with this is not that You want the wrong things you can want whatever you want and it’s not that you are not working hard enough I mean there are some people who don’t work hard enough Maybe all of us could find a little bit extra that we can give but there’s only so hard so much hard work you can give there’s only a hundred percent you can give so

 

If you’re already at 80%, you only got 20 % left. It’s not hard work, that’s not the problem because you’re not 80 % away to your goal. So clearly 20 % more effort is not really the thing that you need. What most people never ask themselves is the key third question. So it’s what do want, what do have to do? Everybody asks that. Key third question is who do need to be? And this is a question that I was just talking to a guy, I believe he’s over the age of 50. And when I shared it with him, he said, I’ve never heard anybody say that before.

 

has never occurred to me before. People go through their entire lives, professional careers, never ask themselves this question. Who do I need to be? And it’s hard for people to even answer the question because most people, if you ask them that question, they start doing what? Naming actions. They say, I need to be a hard worker. I need to get up early in the morning. I need to go to the gym because I want to lose weight. They start naming actions because that’s the way their brain is conditioned. Everything’s based on action. So anytime someone’s facing a problem, their default is, let me put some effort.

 

towards this problem to solve the issue, but clearly that’s not the problem. That’s not the solution rather. So who do I need to be is not about actions. It’s about your energy, it’s about your aura, it’s about the way you show up, it’s about your posture, internal and external, and it’s about who you see when you look in the mirror. That’s what who I need to be is about. It is a very difficult question for people to answer if they never considered it before. They gotta think about it for a while to even start coming up with ideas as to how to even answer that question. And the reason this is so important is because when someone is able to answer it,

 

and step into the person they need to be the idealized version of themselves energetically not action, but just energetically the actions take care of themselves because if I say I’m a person who’s in great shape well what does a person who’s in great shape do? They go to the gym every day. All right, they drink water instead of beer, right? They are not watching Netflix. They are getting themselves in shape. Whatever it is that you do. You say I’m a person who owns a very successful business. Well, you’re not scrolling on TikTok all day.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (20:06)

you

 

Dre Baldwin (20:16)

What are you doing? You’re talking to your clients and your customers and following up with prospects. You’re putting together your sales funnels. You’re doing the things that a successful business person does. So when you ask yourself who I need to be, you step into a different energy. You get a whole new set of actions and even some of your past actions, they’re done with a different approach. And that leads to you starting to get towards your outcomes. But the being part comes first. That leads to doing and that leads to having. The biggest challenge with this Tyler is that you can measure and count actions.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (20:40)

you

 

Dre Baldwin (20:45)

you can measure and count outcomes. You cannot measure and count mentality. And it’s the reason why most people understand that mindset is important, but they don’t value it as much as they should simply because you can’t hold it in your hand. You can’t count it. You can’t measure it like you can the other two. And this is why most people default to the things that they can see, but they don’t default to the things that are existing up here in the mind.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (21:05)

Yeah, that’s really thought provoking stuff. I, you it’s interesting that a lot of the early philosophers teach about this kind of stuff, right? As men thinketh all these kinds of things. And yet these things have been taught forever and yet forgotten daily. And I think that that’s such a fascinating thing where eternal principles are the hardest to remember because you know, there’s the noise is around the easier stuff and the louder stuff. so

 

really really powerful stuff. What are you working on and what are you building right now?

 

Dre Baldwin (21:37)

The biggest focus right now, a couple of things, of course, the university, which you already mentioned, but also as a as an entrepreneur, I’m the boss of my company and I had to be smart enough. No one fired myself. So I’m just trying to fire myself from as many jobs as possible other than things that I’m great at. So what I’m great at is having conversations like this, talking to audiences, talking to one person and writing. Those are only things I should be doing. So any time I spend doing something other than that, I’m like, all who can do this? Who can take my spot?

 

and where can I find someone who’s really good at that so I don’t have to do it anymore. I don’t want to do anymore. I’m not running anymore ad campaigns. I’m never building another funnel in my life. And I just want to do what I do best and then put the right, as they say, put the right who’s in place instead of figuring out the hows. So that’s what I’m focused on.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (22:23)

And it’s good that you learned those things at the beginning, right? Some people skip the learning stage and then they can never really manage a team because they didn’t ever have to do it. But it is an important discipline to be able to start delegating, hiring, training. You know, you’ll never move from being self -employed into a business owner if you don’t do that. so powerful stuff, yeah.

 

Dre Baldwin (22:45)

Yes, exactly.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (22:48)

What, so I want to zoom backwards, okay? It’s what 2008, 2009, we’re leaving Montenegro. Where did your basketball game culminate and how did it sadly end?

 

Dre Baldwin (23:00)

So I kept playing through 2015. So my ending was not sad because I walked away. So I could have kept playing. I walked away from the game because I didn’t want to be the old guy. I never wanted to be the old guy on the court with some 19 -year -old who works at Taco Bell dunking on me just because he’s younger and I can’t move anymore. So I knew I wanted to walk away from the game while I still could. And I stopped playing because by that point, again, my career, a lot of times it was

 

Tyler Jorgenson (23:03)

Okay.

 

Okay.

 

Dre Baldwin (23:27)

Employed not employed employed not employed. It wasn’t just a steady stream of no me choosing amongst which team I want to go play for it was me Trying to find a team that wanted me I had to do that over and over again over the course of my career just because of my background and where I came from so by 2014 2015 I was already looking at the end of the tunnel. What am I gonna do next? And by this point I started putting out a mindset videos on YouTube

 

Tyler Jorgenson (23:29)

Mm

 

Dre Baldwin (23:51)

So I had all this basketball stuff for about the first five years. And then the players started asking about mindset. I started talking about it and people who didn’t play sports started finding me on YouTube and saying, Hey Dre, the way you talk about this stuff is valuable to me too. And I don’t play sports. So I knew my next move was going to be just taking the mindset piece that I had learned in sports and giving it to non athletes. Cause Tyler always knew I wanted to evolve past just being a basketball guy. I didn’t want to be a trainer or a coach. wanted to be in business, but not just basketball. So

 

My first thought was I’m going to be a professional speaker because I found out that that was a job. didn’t even know that was a thing that someone would pay you to give a speech. So when I found out, I went to a toast master’s meeting. You familiar with toast masters? Right. Yeah. And I met a football player who was also getting out of football. And he said, I’m going go to this conference that is all people who speak for a living and anybody I meet, I’ll just pass you the information. It turns out it was the NSA national speakers association conference in San Diego. He was going and he came back and passed me someone’s information and I

 

Tyler Jorgenson (24:26)

Right.

 

Dre Baldwin (24:49)

cold -called this woman and she said, yeah, such -and -such did mention you. And I went and met with her and she basically ended up becoming a mentor. She gave me the game and told me all the things that I could do and such. And when I saw that I had that opportunity, I said, okay, this is the perfect time to move away from basketball. So that’s when I stopped playing. And that’s also when I started doing like a speaking Ted talks. And I did a whole lot of cold calls and a whole lot of free gigs before I started getting paid. So this was not some yellow brick road, but that’s how I transitioned.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (25:16)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, it’s a bit so I mean, like that while you were working on one career, you were also building and laying a foundation for something else. And so if if you were going to start all over today and launch Work on Your Game University won’t launch your current business. What would you do differently?

 

Dre Baldwin (25:36)

I would start out selling high ticket offerings and the ability to sell a high ticket offering, say high ticket is, what would you say is high ticket, Tiger, was high ticket to you.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (25:37)

Yeah.

 

For us, I always think high ticket starts over 5k.

 

Dre Baldwin (25:54)

Yeah, okay. 5k. So I would start by selling something that’s 5k and up. And the key to that is mindset. It has nothing to do with anything else. It’s just the confidence of the person who is selling it to even ask for that much money and expect to get it. And once I’ve developed that and I knew I had it, then it would be, it was easy for me. So I would start by raising my prices, making sure that I had a high ticket offer and really think more strategically about who I want to sell to rather than just letting

 

it happened organically. my audience built very organically. I wasn’t doing it as a strategy. It just happened. But I would do it much more intentionally if I was starting out again.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (26:29)

Yeah.

 

I like the idea of intentionality. mean, obviously for someone like you, confidence and mindset are going to go hand in hand. And we’re going to talk more of this. Actually, I’ve got a special question for you after the show that we’re about to wrap up. But if somebody is struggling just with getting into that confidence, right? What’s one tip for somebody just trying to build that confidence in order to go after and be more aggressive on their pricing?

 

Dre Baldwin (26:59)

That’s a great question. the first thing is, you mean specifically on pricing? Okay, so when it comes to the pricing and being more aggressive and confident in it is that you have to have the willingness to actually say the number out loud with a straight face. I mean, that’s really what it comes down to is you want to sell something for $10 ,000 and somebody says, okay, well, what’s the price? You have to be able to look them in their eyes and say $10 ,000 and don’t say anything till they respond. And lot of people can’t do that. So that’s the most important thing in selling is asking for the money.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (27:24)

Yeah.

 

Dre Baldwin (27:27)

Now, you don’t ask for the money, the whole conversation doesn’t matter. So where confidence comes from is discipline. Discipline creates confidence. So if you can create a practice of just literally standing in a mirror and saying that number out loud without breaking eye contact and without conveying that you don’t believe it, like laughing at yourself or something like that, just be able to say it. That’s the first step. And as long as you can say it, then somebody might say yes, but you got to be willing to ask.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (27:27)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah, I had a early mentor once say, it’s okay to fake it till you make it if you’re talking about confidence, not your skills, right? You don’t sell something you can’t deliver or where you don’t basically misrepresent yourself, but sometimes confidence, gotta just wear the bravado, right? Be the person that you think you wanna be, that you’re trying to be, kinda like what you were saying. But Dre, I really appreciate this. If people wanna learn more about you, what’s your…

 

where your like top places. I know you’re on Instagram at Dre Baldwin, but where else can they find you?

 

Dre Baldwin (28:25)

Yes. Well, if you can go to workonyourgameuniversity.com, that’s the name of the website where you can find us and I’m on all the other socials. whichever ones you like, LinkedIn, TikTok X, YouTube, Facebook, I’m on everything. Everything’s public and we publish everywhere every day. So I’m very easy to find.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (28:43)

Awesome. Really great having you out and to all my biz ninjas, wherever you’re listening, watching or tuning in, it’s your turn to go out and do something.