31 Jan January 31, 2020 – Super Bowl Show – NFLer Marques Ogden, 2xChopped Winner James Briscione and RollSocial Tyler Kemp
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Marques Ogden – Former NFL Athlete – Business Leader – Personality Keynote Speaker – Best Selling Author – Read interview highlights here
If you don’t have accountability in your life, I don’t care what you
do, it wont matter. If you don’t take ownership of your life, people
will get to know you as the individual that never accepts things
that go wrong.
Marques Ogden is a master storyteller who played in the NFL for six seasons. Marques enjoys helping and influencing others to achieve greatness with his unique story. He enjoys talking about topics like Leadership, Transition, Business Growth, Improving Sales, and more. He has worked for clients like JP Morgan, Home Depot, AXA Advisors, NFL Player Engagement, and others. He is an executive coach who guides clients in how to tell their stories to help build their brand or enhance the mission of the company their current company.
James Briscione – Host at Food Network – Executive Chef at Angelena’s
My team is closer to the top of the draft board than they are to
the Super Bowl, so this is all about the food for me!
James Briscione grew up amidst the stocked pantry of Southern cuisine. And working early on with James Beard Award-winner Frank Stitt in Birmingham sealed the deal for a future in cooking. After three years as chef de cuisine at Stitt’s Highlands Bar and Grill, Briscione traded polished Southern comforts for the refinements of modern haute French cuisine at Daniel in New York, working in the private dining room. Moving out from behind the line, Briscione transitioned to culinary education, taking a post as chef-instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education. Now Director of Culinary Research, Briscione’s accomplishments go far beyond the classroom. He walked away champion of the first season of Food Network’s “Chopped,” and also became the shows first-ever two-time champion after winning the “Chopped Champions Tournament.” Briscione was selected as one of People Magazine’s “Sexiest Chefs Alive” in 2016 and has been featured in cooking segments for ABC News Now, Delish.com, Condé Nast, and Martha Stewart Radio. In 2011, Briscione published his first cookbook, Just Married and Cooking, with his wife Brooke Parkhurst. Their most recent endeavor is Angelena’s, an Italian restaurant in Pensacola, Florida, where Briscione is executive chef and Parkhurst is wine director.
Tyler Kemp – CEO and Co-Founder of RollSocial and LeadRoll
Tyler Kemp is the Co-founder and CEO of RollSocial.co and LeadRoll.co. He works with small businesses, influencers, and sales/service professionals to develop powerful, effective, and efficient digital marketing. He helps sales professionals scale their marketing using the principles in their unique F.I.R.E. Formula (Frequency, Intimacy, Relevancy, Efficiency).
Highlights from Marques’s Interview
I’m a food guy! I love to eat. I have lost weight for the NFL, but the food’s great. The ads are okay, the ads are not what they used to be. And of course, I love watching some good old fashioned smashmouth football.
The Baltimore Ravens are my team. It could be worse.
I don’t know what happened to y’all. Lately these guys were in good, and then all of a sudden, they’re just not doing so well. Very interesting to me, but oh well.
Tom Brady next season, it seems like, from what I’m hearing, it’s the San Diego Chargers. And it’s funny how I saw an article a few weeks ago that he had sold his house not too long after the game where they lost the title. So, you’re telling me that he that he didn’t know he was moving on? I find that very hard to believe. I think it could be the Patriots but, I’m feeling it’s probably going to be like the Chargers, somewhere like that. That’s just my opinion. Some people do better on their second team; the first name that comes to mind is Peyton Manning.
The construction company was started after my NFL career. I started in 2008. I went to an event in Baltimore City and got a chance to hear Congressman Elijah Cummings speak about how the next big contractor could be someone in this room that’s a minority certified contractor to go have a good seat at the table and do well in business.
And I took the attitude, why not me? I ended up starting the business with my partner. We started out small in construction, some concrete work, a little bit of demolition, all that kind of stuff. In 2009 one of my mentors who was a big site work dirt contractor, utility contractor went out of business. And we had that ability with our staff and our team to transition into site work and concrete. So we did it, and we just had explosive growth because we were one of the only contractors in the city and the state that was qualified, certified, and we got a great reputation for our ability to execute our work.
Unfortunately, as the company grew from four million to ten million a year. This year was close to fifteen before we were out of business. Prior to our last year, my attitude became more of a boss, not a leader, I stopped taking inclusion, I stopped taking advice from people, I stopped allowing healthy dialogue. And eventually my best staff started to leave the organization.
And when that transpired, not too long after that, I was working on a big job for one of my existing clients for about four and a half million dollar total buyout. And I ended up having an issue where the job site would not dry. So I had to spend between two and two and a half million dollars of my money in less than 90 days to dry the job site. The contract that I hired to do that work did it, and when we were having an issue, they refused to come back. And we had bought that package, so we weren’t able to get anybody else to come on and do the work. We had to man up and take it on ourselves on a wage scale job, which we did. I mean, it cost us close to $100,000 a week in payroll, all these different things, manpower, you name it. And we did it. When we got our work completed, we took our change order—or what we thought was our approved change order—to our client developer. They reviewed it, and they determined that the extra work we did was not change order sufficient. It was part of our original buyout contract, which I thought was ridiculous. We went back and forth for weeks, and they eventually denied the change order and said, “If you want to get your money, we’ll see you in court.” And literally, I had nothing left to fight because all the money went into the job paying my employees and everything you can think of. My money, my financials, my credit card, the equity line on my home, took out money from a hard money lender over $300,000 exhausted our $1,500,000 credit line, and we did a reverse mortgage. I mean, I did everything I could think of. Get it all, and nothing was left. So when I had to file a bankruptcy in April 2013. I moved from Baltimore to Raleigh. I had only about $400 or $500 left in the bank ,total, to my name. That’s all I had left.
When I was having massive success, making millions of dollars, lots of money coming in, my ego and bravado grew to match the bank account. And that’s a horrible place to be when you need to be a good, strong leader. I turned into an arrogant, egotistical prick boss.
In football, I had been playing football my entire life from 14 untill I retired. So having success in football, being stroked like that I was used to, but business success is different. I was not prepared for that type of explosive growth and success, and I didn’t have a mentor or coach to ground me. That was fine because I had a coach in football to ground me when I was getting out, and I was having a good day and I was feeling a little higher by saying, “Hey Marques, good job, but work on this.” I believe that’s why coaches get paid in all sports. But in business, I didn’t have a coach. And when my employees tried to speak to me, I was like, “Well, I’m paying your salary! What I say is law!” And that’s a horrible way to be, but that’s what I did, because I was trying to have my ego match my business success, and it did. But unfortunately, everybody else around me, didn’t want to be around me and my best employees started to jump ship, because I stopped listening. But again, you’re so high on yourself that nothing’s ever your fault. It’s always somebody else’s.
It was a pivotal moment when I lost everything. I moved to Raleigh. I was working at Merrill Lynch, got let go. I ended up transitioning and going into construction. The next day, got fired. Five days later, I started a business coaching kids’ football, how to play the game. And then when all my kids started moving into the season, I didn’t have enough clients to continue to work the fall season. As a result of that, I had to get a second job which was a custodian making $8.25 an hour. For me, when I was the custodian, that was that low point. But my pivotal point was when someone’s trash got on my bare skin at about 4:30 in the morning, as I was finishing up my shift before I was to go home. That was the moment where I said, What is going on in my life? I was an NFL athlete, I made great money in construction, what in the world has transpired? and I realized that it was all me. I was the one who had changed. I was the one who did not present and show accountability. I was the one who always found other people to blame.
That’s when I came home, that day, and decided to become a speaker and try to turn my life around. And I wanted to start by trying to connect and talk to athletes, so they wouldn’t make the same mistakes that I did. But that was the moment that the pivotal lightbulb turned on for me, was when someone’s spoiled milk got on my bare skin on my shift as a custodian in downtown Raleigh.
I came home, I wrote down my goals, and I set out a strategic plan. And the first day, you’re right, I had no money to market. I thought I’d try to use social media a little bit. LinkedIn, I didn’t know much about. LinkedIn, a little Facebook, all this stuff. But what I really did was an instinct, and I tell people all the time, I started leaning on my inner circle. I started telling people I wanted to be a speaker. I started telling high school teams in the area a new speaker wants to talk to your football team or your kids. Let me know, I’ll do it for free. I literally hustled and bustled for 30 straight months without a paid job, was speaking to try to build credibility and build out my platform, and that’s how it all started. It started with me going to my inner circle and letting them know what I was trying to do. I tell people all the time, if you’re in a circle that knows what you’re doing, and they believe in you, and you can show them that you have the skill set to at least let them give you an attempt to do what you’re trying to do, that’s the best place to start.
The number one key in The Success Cycle is what are your goals? What is your roadmap? What is your vision? So many people go through life without a vision, which means you’re going through life without a purpose. In the book, we talk about trying to help you find your roadmap or find your goals or create an initiative or initiatives to get you going towards some type of a goal.
Then number two is drive, talking about things like inspiration over motivation. Motivation is for the short term. You’re doing something for two days a week, a month max, because you have a motivation, or someone else’s motivation is to have you be rah rah for a couple of days. But if you’re inspired, you’re going to make a real, life-long, systemic change. So that’s what we talked about in the drive section is having that inner force to push through when others are telling you you’re making a mistake. Again, inspiration over motivation.
Then the third one is hard work. Focus on you, not the competition. Like me, for my book coming out, talking to great people like yourself, spreading the word, marketing, doing all the kinds of stuff that I’ve been doing, focusing on me and what I need to do, not what others are doing, who might want to do what I’m doing, because I wish them the best, but they’re not me. So many people, I feel, focus on other people’s successes. I call it the social media, or the social media depression syndrome, where you’re looking at people’s social media, what they’re doing, or you’re thinking of them in this great way, but you don’t see what’s behind the curtain. So again, The Success Cycle talks about ambition, drive, and hard work with the underlying foundation of knowing what you want to do or where you want to go in life. If you can do that, along with those three things, you can have any type of success that you desire for yourself and your family.
If you don’t have accountability in your life, I don’t care what you do, it won’t matter. Because if you don’t know how to take ownership of your life, especially when things go wrong, all people are gonna do is they’re going to get to know you as the individual that always, never ever accepts things that go wrong, that they are the cause of. And if people get that stigma, or that thought process of you—which is exactly what happened to me with my construction business—it’s just a matter of time before it’s the beginning of the end. That’s exactly why I went bankrupt, because I had no accountability when things went wrong, and my staff picked up on that. And that was truly my downfall as an entrepreneur.
What I tell people is identify your strengths. Start there, you can identify your strengths, what you’re good at. What do you want to do with your life? That’s the best way to get going off the couch. It’s all about controlling your mental focus and being very fortunate and very appreciative of what you do have and stop focusing on what you don’t have. Like me, when I became a speaker I was good at communicating, I was good at talking, I was good with people. And I knew that, so that’s what got me going. If I would have focused on what I didn’t have, no money, no marketing strategy, no support. If I were to have focused on that all the time, I would have never got off the couch, ever, because I was already creating self-doubt in my head. And that would have made me my own worst enemy. What people have to do is start by creating their strengths, writing them out, and giving themself that spark to get off the couch.
All you have to do is go to my website, which is https://marquesogden.com or I’m on LinkedIn MarquesOgden. Twitter is at OgdenElite, on Instagram is at MarquesOgdenSpeaker, Facebook is MarquesOgdenSpeaker. You can also purchase the book right now on preorder on Amazon.com. Type in The Success Cycle and my picture’s on the front cover, and it’s at Barnes and Noble as well.