Shownotes
What if the fastest way to scale isn’t doing more, but touching less. In this episode of the Leading Visionaries, host Anjel B. Hartwell sits down with Max Lewis, author of Who Is Max Lewis? Max went from selling mangoes as a kid to building a propane tank exchange business that ultimately sold for $37 million.
This episode is a masterclass for founders, CEOs, and visionaries who feel capped by their own effort and are ready to step into the next version of leadership.
What You Will Learn:
Why vision is often developed through experience and small wins rather than arriving fully formed at the beginning.
How staying the “single point of failure” quietly limits growth no matter how hard you work.
Why the transition from operator to owner requires a complete identity shift, not just better systems.
How learning to “not touch anything” becomes the most uncomfortable and necessary leadership upgrade.
Why hiring friends may feel supportive early on but can cap the long-term potential of a business.
How intentional thinking time becomes a strategic advantage for solving bigger problems and scaling faster.
Why asking questions like what a $25M business owner knows clarifies exactly what you need to learn next.
How learning just enough about a subject allows you to hire the right experts without becoming one yourself.
How role playing reveals what your team does when you are not present and gives you the power to coach proactively.
Why investing in education compounds forever because knowledge is something you never lose.
How designing your physical environment can keep your vision, focus, and priorities aligned daily.
What it looks like to scale through coaching, training, and trust instead of effort and exhaustion.
Resource:
Max Lewis
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Transcripts
LVP 115 Max
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Ad: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Leading Visionaries podcast, featuring stellar conversations with emerging and established leading visionaries. Thanks for joining us today as we celebrate and spotlight the leading visionaries who are thinking differently, seeing new possibilities, have the courage to dream big, take inspired action, and create conscious change all around the world.
Now here's your host, Anjel b Hardwell.
Anjel: Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries Podcast, where we celebrate the ingenious, insightful, innovative, and inspired leading visionaries of our time, and provide our listeners with world class examples of the kind of courage. Clarity and confidence it takes to bring visions into reality.
This is your host Anjel b Hartwell, and today we welcome our special guest, max Lewis, author of Who is [00:01:00] Max Lewis, 37 chapters 37 lessons 37 million. From selling mangoes as a child to amassing millions by exchanging propane tanks. Max Lewis. Beat the odds and became one of America's ultra high net worth individuals by 35 years old.
Through persistence, hard work, and a willingness to learn from mistakes, he tactfully planned for nothing less than success and mentoring others to do the same. I had the pleasure of meeting Max at a recent event in Boston, Massachusetts that was hosted by Nick Hutchinson and. Book thinkers and we had an immediate connection and I was so excited to bring him to our listening audience.
Welcome to the show, max.
Max: Thank you so much for having me, Anjel.
Anjel: Well, our show is called Leading Visionaries, and so I always love to start by asking, were you visionary as a child? I mean, you were selling mangoes as a child. Was that [00:02:00] something that was your vision or did your vision, uh, capacity begin to come online further down the road?
Max: I think it's something that was developed over time. You know, it's something that you kind of grow, grow into. You know, I started with the selling of the mangoes and you kind of see what's possible with that. And then later on I sold candy and you know, you brought in your horizons a little bit and you know, ultimately you start using and applying those skills to, you know, adult life and uh, you know, falling back on your experience of what you have previously done.
You say, okay, well. If I did, you know, if I sold mangoes and candy, why can't I sell, you know, a car or propane or houses, whatever it is that you might be, uh, interested in selling.
Anjel: Yeah. Beautiful. So, um, I actually told you before we went into, uh, recording here that you are the first person out of almost a thousand interviews that I've done, that I actually read the entire book before the interview, and so I have a lot of background [00:03:00] detail here.
What I'm curious about, you know, what I love best about your story is you literally started pretty much from zero. Mm-hmm. You know, you had a vision, you had a vision for your, um, propane business, but it started from pretty much zero, and you went from zero to 37 million in such a fast trajectory. So I'd love to have you speak about the, maybe the stages of your.
Vision and how it started to show itself to you, because we have a lot of listeners who are founders and CEOs and innovators themselves, and I think it's really helpful for them to hear from somebody like you who has, you know, really wildly succeeded in that area.
Max: Thank you. So, yeah, I think, you know, when I think about that, uh, early on I had a vision, right when I started my business, when I had the idea, I had a vision.
I was like, man, you know, people could use [00:04:00] this service. Why wouldn't someone wanna, you know, buy this from me. I'm sure that, uh, this is a product or service that people might be in need of. And you know, it started off very, um, you know, very humble, very simple, you know, A to B kind of transaction, kind of thought.
I didn't know if I could really do it until one day. My girlfriend, as you read in the book, kind of. Nudged me and said like, why don't you just make a business card? And that was like the first big step into okay, achieving something. Now, once I accomplished that, I guess that simple version of my business, which was, you know, buy and sell really and deliver, show up, you know, basically, um, I was successful for a very long time operating in that.
Way. 'cause I was controlling everything. I was, you know, the, the delivery driver, the salesman, the phone operator. I did everything. So I could touch everything. I can control everything. But I was also a [00:05:00] single point of failure. And there's only so much success you can achieve as one person. Mm-hmm. And what I learned the very hard way was over time, I'm not gonna be able to grow unless I can learn to trust people.
Also learn how to hire people correctly. And those people, more often than not, are not going to be your friends, even though that's who I hired in the beginning. 'cause that's who was available and for cheap labor. So over time, um, you know, I, I realized that I hit a ceiling, you know, I was successful in my own right.
I was probably worth a couple million bucks, but I realized I was never going to be worth more than a couple million dollars if I didn't. Get outside of my comfort zone and begin to learn things that I didn't know, you know, from people who were smarter than me and had experienced, uh, much greater success than I had.
Anjel: Yeah. Beautiful. [00:06:00] Uh, yeah. And so phase one was really like getting to that ceiling. So when you hit that ceiling, and because you're very unique, max, you are somebody who. Ended up actually going from zero to selling your business. Mm-hmm. And many people don't, you know, certainly not at the beginning. They don't think about selling the business.
So phase one, you hit your ceiling. So when you hit your ceiling, what was the next vision?
Max: So the next vision I had is actually funny enough. Um. I had ta, I had gotten like, fed up with work, and I don't write about this in the book, but the first, the first step, the first step from I do everything myself to, I don't want to be the truck driver anymore, was, you know, I'm had a meltdown.
You know, I was like, I'm tired. I took a week off of work, like a forced break, you know, I hit my rev limiter and while I was home feeling sorry for myself because I couldn't figure it out. My, uh, my girlfriend, same girlfriend I [00:07:00] read in the book. She says to me, why don't you watch this movie called The Secret?
Okay, so not a lot of people know this story, so you're getting like some pretty, uh, exclusive content. So I watched it and I was like, man, this is, this is cool. So I started envisioning myself, if you gotta remember at this time, I'm dressed like a truck driver, dirty. I'm doing all these deliveries myself.
I'm making lots of money. There was days I made $3,000 a day, um, quite often, which is a lot of money to make, especially at my age, 22, 23 years old. But that's all I could do. So I started to envision myself as, you know, I'm gonna go into work and I'm gonna be in a button down, you know, shirt tucked in. I'm not gonna pick up any tanks.
I'm not gonna drive any trucks. I'm gonna be an owner, a boss. Mm-hmm. You know, someone who is clean all day long and makes decisions and doesn't have to necessarily get his hands [00:08:00] dirty. And that was a really, uh, interesting transition. It, you, you almost have to completely abandon the skill that got you where you, you know, to where I was.
You have to completely change yourself. It's a 180. You know, because you have to train yourself. And I train this, I have several businesses now, and I'm always training this to my managers and I'm like, listen, you know, when you are the, when you're the owner operator, you want to do everything yourself.
But when you're the owner and not the operator, you shouldn't touch anything. Like I tell 'em, don't touch anything. Teach people how to do it so that when you're not here, it'll get done. So I had to become a teacher. Right. Essentially. And I had to start hiring people and training them how I wanted things done so I wouldn't have to do it.
And then the hardest part was trusting them. Trusting them with my baby, you know? Mm-hmm. This is my baby. Mm-hmm. Hey, I wanna make sure they do this. And they don't screw it up. And it, there was a lot of turbulence there, I'll tell [00:09:00] you, but I knew that the only way I could grow is if I, A, hired people and B, trusted them too, you know?
To run with, with the ball, so to speak. Yeah.
Anjel: Beautiful. Well, so there's lots oft words there. Don't touch, teach, train, trust and turbulence. And you know, I think for many people it's not just trusting the team members, right? There's another t. It's not just trusting the team members, it's trusting life. It's trusting yourself.
Sometimes I know for me in my business when I, I remember a long time ago when I first hit six figures, I realized that everything just about everything I had done to get to six figures past the six figure mark. I needed to get rid of like 80% of those things that I had been doing. And I have found that to be the case at every stage of like the next level of, you know, whether it's six figures to mid six and [00:10:00] so on and so forth.
With, also with my clients, I've seen that happen at every stage there's a bigger trust fall. Right? And it's really trusting life and trusting yourself to know that even if there's turbulence, you're gonna be able to fly through. So I wanna. Um, like for our listeners here, just take a little side tangent and ask you what are some of the things that you've done internally or the support systems that you've put around you kind of outside the business that has allowed you to travel through the turbulence.
Max: Well, as far as support systems, um, it's really all always been about educating myself in a way that I can receive. So, you know, you might learn by reading a book, I might learn by watching someone do something or watching a movie, or watching a YouTube clip, something of that nature. Um, for me, [00:11:00] early on, I, I really struggled with actually reading whole books, you know, like mm-hmm.
I have a short attention span. So, you know, people say, Hey, read this, read that, and you'll figure out the answer. And I'm like, shit, I can't read this whole book because I don't have the time or the attention span to do so. So I needed a faster way. Um, so a couple of things that really helped me were obviously YouTube, as you heard me mention in, in the event, YouTube is a huge one 'cause you can learn just about anything in like three minutes.
Um, but also, you know, Tony Robbins. I spent a lot of time with Tony Robbins and, uh, Keith Cunningham, who is, uh, the rich. He's the real rich dad that Robert Kiyosaki writes about in, uh, rich Dad, poor Dad. And those gentlemen helped me really. Transform my mind in a way to think on that next level, you know?
Mm-hmm. Don't think as just an operator, think as an owner and, and create a future instead of responding or reacting to you, your present situation. Okay. You have to think forward, [00:12:00] you know? Mm-hmm. Um, but yeah, so those, those things. And then also as far as my environment's concerned. I've actually done some pretty unique things, which I know you've read about, um, in my personal space.
So for one, um, when I was achieving the goal of, of, you know, who is Max Lewis? I had a six foot whiteboard in my bedroom. Mm-hmm. That maybe to everyone else looked absolutely ridiculous, but every morning and every night that six foot beauty was there. With all my goals, things I needed to do, you know, how I thought I might need to achieve these goals, the roadmaps that I'd write out for myself.
And I would read every word on that whiteboard every morning, every single morning, and every night before I went to bed. And it really kept me aligned and focused on, you know, my intentions. Yeah, beautiful. That's probably one of the most powerful things that I have ever done for myself. And I do it. I still do it now.
I mean, I don't have the. [00:13:00] Whiteboard in my room, but I, I swear to you, last week I was thinking about putting it back up because I have some big rules. Well, the magic
Anjel: works, right? You know, it works. It works. You
Max: know, the magic works. I have it in my office and it's just not the, it's just not the same. Not the
Anjel: same.
It's not the same. It's not the same.
Max: Not the same.
Anjel: Yeah. So, um, for our listeners here, a couple things I really want you to hear, listeners that Max educated himself. And the key here is in any way that I can receive. In any way that I can receive. And I think so many people are stuck in the belief system and the conditioning that they have to sit in a chair, they have to intake in a certain way.
And if it, if, if they're not doing it that way, there's something wrong with them that they got trained in the educational system. And so just breaking that mindset that. I will learn in any way that I can receive is gonna be huge for you. We're gonna take a short break. When we come back, we're gonna let you know where [00:14:00] you can find out more about Max and maybe receive from him.
But right now, listeners, are you a leading visionary or in the role of leading other visionaries? Consider joining our community and sharing your feedback and takeaways from each episode. We invite you to join us and support this podcast by making a donation at Leading Visionaries Podcast. Dot com if you're interested in finding out more about how you can receive support for getting your vision out of the air and onto the ground in a way that is both impact and income producing the best support is found in collaboration with other leading visionaries, which is why we've created the Creative Age Leader Lab.
Discover more about this [email protected]. Slash Creative Age Leader Lab, or click the Connect with Anjel button on the website to apply and qualify for a consultation for more personalized access and support, please be sure to share this show in your own spirals of influence with the people who you think might benefit [00:15:00] from our content.
I wanna say a huge thank you to all of our listeners who are downloading, rating and reviewing. We're welcoming thousands and thousands of downloads from all over the world. Wanna shout out this week to our listeners in Italy, Iceland. Ireland. We'll do all the eyes and we'll be right back with Max Lewis.
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Anjel: And we are back with Max Lewis. You can find out more about Max via. Instagram at, who is Max Lewis? We'll put that link for you in the show notes. So before we went to the break, we were talking about your vision and how you went from, uh, [00:17:00] operator to owner and how education was a key part of that. But you also said, you know, thinking.
Your thinking. You were talking about your thinking, and so I'd love to hear what changed about your thinking or your vision once you firmly established yourself as a hands off owner that then led you to think about selling your business.
Max: Well, I'll tell you, thinking is really the superpower. Uh, I tell people all the time, I was a business owner.
I owned my, my business for, I think it was, uh, about 13 years, maybe 15, I can't remember right now, but all the success, what I call the success, the value was created in the last three, because in the last three, it's when I started thinking about problem solving and how I can grow and how I can. You know, achieve [00:18:00] my goals instead of just using my back, you know, and my muscles mm-hmm.
And my physical presence. So, you know, when I started to, to use my brain and, and really work through, you know, questions as you know, thinking time, which I, I heavily promote to everyone, which is finding quality questions and trying to answer them. So one of the ones that really helped me get. Further down the road was like, you know, what does the owner of a business that is worth $25 million look like?
What does he know? Okay, what is, what's important to him? How, what kind of training does he have? What kind of skills does he possess? And when I wrote that out. It became pretty clear to me what I needed to learn. I said, well, I need to know accounting. I need to know how to coach people and train people.
And you know, there's all these things that came up for me. And when I wrote it out, I said, okay, this is what I gotta do. I had an action items list [00:19:00] and I said, okay, I need to figure it out. And it was, I'll tell you, pretty intimidating and beginning, 'cause I was a layman, I didn't know any better. Mm-hmm I just looking at this list, well shit, I don't know anything about accounting.
What am I, what am I gonna do? But you know, it's a journey of a thousand steps. Start with one. And, and the first couple attempts were not successful for me, but they led me to ultimately become successful. Mm-hmm. And, you know, there's, there's a saying, do do what you do best and hire the rest. Well, what I, what I also learned is I don't have to be an expert in accounting.
I need an expert in accounting. So when I first started, like for example, that journey, I was trying to learn as much of accounting as possible. I ended up taking a course which was extremely helpful before the MBA with Keith Cunningham. But ultimately what I discovered was, I don't need to be an accountant.
I need to hire a really good accountant, but I needed awareness around what is a really good accountant mm-hmm. Know and do and things [00:20:00] like that. Mm-hmm. So that really helped me put together a team. It's like being a coach of a baseball team. The coach isn't out there playing first, second, and third base himself.
He puts people in those positions. Mm-hmm. And when I learned how to do that, everything changed for me. The company skyrocketed. 'cause I didn't have to do that anymore. They were doing it. Mm-hmm. And I was coaching, watching, monitoring. Right. Mm-hmm. And, uh, that, that's really where it's at. That's where the.
The success came
Anjel: beautiful. And within three years of making those decisions, you actually sold the company for $37 million, which is so amazing. From like baked basically zero to $37 million in 13 years is is pretty amazing. So one of the things that I noticed is. You also take action, right? Because people can think until they're, the cows come home.
But if they're not taking action, and, and I see this so [00:21:00] often where, like your example with the accountant, you went to learn accounting and people will get like stuck and immersed in the accounting, right? And then they're, they're down here stuck in the accounting and it's really off track from the bigger vision, right?
And so. What I hear from you is you learn what you need to know, like the essence of what you need to know, and then you take action to surround yourself with people who know that better than you. Correct? Um, so for me, I got like three letters stood out for me. For you, e, t, and a. Right? Educate yourself.
Think and then action, right? Those, those are the three core things, but underneath all of that is investing. So let's talk about investing because you've invested an enormous amount of time, energy, bandwidth, brain width, attention, et cetera, money to [00:22:00] make your business be worth $37 million and right and sell.
I'd love to have you speak about your investment mindset.
Max: Investment as far as people, education, things like that?
Anjel: Well, money, all of it. Okay. All of it. Like, 'cause it's a bigger mindset.
Max: So, yeah. So this is actually, that's a great question. So I coach, as you know, a lot of people all the time. Mm-hmm. And I tell them, listen, you know what, the beautiful thing about investing in educating yourself is that once you learn something, you have it forever.
You know, when people. I live in Miami. People always try to either learn Spanish or learn English, and uh, I tell 'em, listen, if you learn one word today, if you learn how to say, you know, awa, which is water, you just have to learn it once and now it's with you for the rest of your life. So let's think about how powerful that could actually be.
So let's say we're on a boat and I [00:23:00] teach you. Hey Anjel, the life jackets are under that chair under there, right? And we go out to sea and we're 30 miles off shore and the boat starts to sink and you don't know where the life jackets are. How important was that one thing to learn? Mm-hmm. Very. That was a life saving thing to learn.
Now, here's the thing. In business and in life, you don't know when that information's gonna necessarily come into, in handy. So you can't really quantify how important things that you're going to learn are, but you should learn them. You should be proactive and learn them because you don't know when you're gonna be 30, 30 miles offshore and need a life jacket.
But I'll tell you what, the people who don't know where the life jacket are, they're done. Mm. But if you know you can save your own life. Mm-hmm. And it's the same thing in business. I try to get awareness around. Anything that I don't know. Again, I'm not trying to be [00:24:00] an expert, but I always invest the time to, to educate myself.
So I'll tell you a, a quick little story in, in relation to this. So I remember I had a meeting with a lady one time, uh, about tax deeds. You know, I didn't know, like buying real estate tax deeds. I didn't know what I was talking about. I just had a meeting. I was interested in investing. So the night before I set aside one hour.
And I just YouTubed and YouTube. Then YouTube, then notes and notes and notes and notes and notes and notes. I invested that time in myself. I invested that time in learning about it. When I tell you that the next day during that meeting, I knew more about tax deeds than her. I am not fooling you. One hour, but one hour of intense focus.
Every question, every insight, oh, how does this work? How does that work? And I just took pages and pages and pages of notes, and those are things that I know forever now. Right? And when I interviewed her, I said, well, I'm talking to the wrong lady because, uh, I, how do I know more than you in one hour of YouTubing stuff, [00:25:00] right?
So that's one part of it. Educating yourself now, investing into people. Something that I'm huge on. Huge. Absolutely huge is role playing. Mm-hmm. I love role playing. I think role playing is one of the most powerful tools that you can ever deploy in a business setting and. The reason being is you get an insight to how people are going to respond, react, fold, uh, curse.
I mean, you never know what exactly they're gonna say or do when you're not around because you're not around. But if we create that environment, and I do this now, I have a, I have 170 employees with some restaurant chain that I have. We just did it last weekend, um, where I say, Hey, look, this is the scene.
You know, I'm gonna be the customer, you're gonna be the manager. I'm gonna be upset and you're gonna handle me. Like if, like, you know, and I'll be rude and I'll say things and, and I want to see what they say. And, and every single scene, you know what it leads, it is like, time out. You can't say that. [00:26:00] That's not what you wanna say.
Let's try again. You know? Mm-hmm. So it's great because I can see what's happening when I'm not there. Mm-hmm. And then I can. Mold them and teach 'em, Hey, how about you use a better word. How about your little nicer? How about you put yourself in the customer's shoes? What do you think they're feeling right now?
If their food came cold? Mm. Let me ask you a question. How would you feel if your food came cold and you just paid $25 for, and you're in a rush and trying to get back to work, but like, hold on. Really think about that. You're in a rush. You're going back to work, and they serve you a cold plate of food.
What do you, what are you gonna feel? Oh, I'm gonna be pissed off. I'm gonna be okay. Great. Now respond to them with coming from that place. Mm-hmm. Right. It's different because everybody wants to be, they, they, they, they initially get combative or offensive. Mm-hmm. And teaching them that skill of being in the other person's shoes and being able to watch them and to, to mold them in a way that represents me, my values and our company values, [00:27:00] unbelievably beneficial,
Anjel: you
Max: know?
Anjel: Beautiful. Probably the
Max: one of the best tools I have.
Anjel: Beautiful. We only got about a minute left, max, so I, what I wanna do now is just talk about your vision moving ahead, because you've written this book. Who is Max Lewis? What's your intention with this?
Max: Just to help as many people as possible. You know, I, I, um, I give the book out often.
I just wrote a children's book as well with the sole intention of giving it to, uh, children in third world countries, which teaches like a fundamental, fundamental, um, financial literacy, if you will. How to think, how to start a business, how to have ideas, how to save money. How to earn money. I just wanna help people.
Honestly, that's, that's what it's all about. Beautiful.
Anjel: Well, I hope you know that you have helped our listeners in 63 countries around the world. We're gonna encourage you all to go to the Instagram, who is Max Lewis? And um, they can get the book there, right?
Max: Um, yeah, they can get the book on [00:28:00] Amazon or Bon.
Yeah, Amazon's probably the best place to get it. Great.
Anjel: Excellent. They can get the book on Amazon and they can get more of your great teachings on Instagram. All right, beautiful. Well, thank you so much for being with me today. Listeners, we love feedback. Please let us know what you thought of today's show by joining our community, sharing your takeaways, asking questions, or submitting guest suggestions.
You can weave your visionary thread into our fabric. By opting in on our [email protected] or by interacting with us on socials, look for the handle at Leading Visionaries podcast across all the major platforms. Thanks for tuning in. Keep your eyes, ears, and hearts open. And remember, you are here to create conscious change.
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