Daniel Alonso:“People don’t like to hear it. People think you have to ride the financial roller coaster if you’ve got entrepreneurial energy. But I’ve never been broke. I got into business at 21, looked at a bunch of millionaire guys, and said to myself, ‘I want my life to be like theirs. I want to have freedom. I want a lot of money. I want to do something great.’ I looked at them, and said, ‘And I'm going to do it now.’”
This is the kind of focus and determination that raised Daniel Alonzo from being an outsider with no connections into becoming a multi-millionaire. Now, as he envisioned, he lives on beaches and around the world, and trains people on how they can do the same.
The author of “Wealth on the Beach” identifies four keys that can help lift anyone to a life of similar financial independence.
“Most 21-year-olds are not disciplined. They're not hungry enough. They won't grind it. Did I grind? Hell yeah! For my first ten years I grinded like there ain't no tomorrow. But it was always a means to an end, because I wanted freedom. I was f-cking coachable. I did everything that they asked me to do. I built a business and was able to build other leaders beneath me that allowed me unlimited amounts of freedom.”
The result is that “for all intents and purposes I've been retired for 20 years.”
Alonzo still works. He speaks publicly. He mentors. He oversees the contractors beneath him. But, financially independent since 28, he’s proud that “I literally have not had to answer to anybody for decades.”
Unsurprisingly, he says, success starts in the mind.
Wealth on the Beach Key #1: MINDSET
“If you focus on the negative and mull over problems and challenges all the time, life's gonna be hard. My mentors taught me to develop discipline and mental toughness and daily habits. I literally wrote down 150 goals for my lifetime. I wrote down every country that I wanted to visit. I wrote down where I wanted to have properties, and I wrote down how much money I wanted to make and how much passive income I would need.”
He adds that specificity was essential. As was discipline. Because he had no external credibility, no college degree, no family connections.
“I had to be really mentally tough because who wants to listen to some punk 21-year-old kid when I'm talking about becoming financially independent, investing for retirement, or your future college funds, or life insurance or mortgages?”
Toughness began with his personal mantra: “I’m not going to quit, because if I quit, where am I quitting to? It meant that I never missed a single meeting or training with my mentors or my teams for over 20 years. Every single Saturday morning for 20 years now, I was with my guys, helping them build, helping them grow, helping them achieve their goals.”
For Alonzo, success mindset means there is no Plan B.
“I made it very clear in my mind that if I didn't make it here I wouldn't make it anywhere else. I gave myself an ultimatum: if it didn't happen here, my life would suck, my life would be terrible. I'd never achieve my goals and dreams. That was one of the things that kept me in the game over the first couple of years, because I didn't know what I was doing. I had a lot of limiting beliefs, man. I got my ass kicked out there and that hurts. You start to not believe in yourself. But I knew I had to make the switch. You gotta decide that you're gonna start believing in yourself again and stop giving a shit about what anybody says about you.”
Alonzo dreamed of becoming a pro baseball player and even though he saw early that he wouldn’t break through to the big leagues, his athletic discipline paid off.
“My twenties were a blur. I didn't see my twenties. People talk about living a perfect balance, Zen stuff. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying for me personally? Not for me. I wanted to get it done. And so I said to myself, I said, ‘I'm willing to sacrifice the next 10 years of my life so I could have the next 70 years of freedom.’ I want to live my life like I'm on vacation, and that's how I live my life now.”
His early two rules:
Wealth on the Beach Key #2: SELL WITH YESSES
Alonzo rose through the Primerica ladder, selling investments, insurances, mortgages – and training an army of salesmen beneath him.
Today, he has 57 locations and is opening or expanding new locations under him every three to six months.
He’s got 1,500 licensed agents beneath him who are independent contractors, which gives him his extraordinary financial freedom.
“I teach my people that sales is the lifeblood of your business. Sure, we all want self improvement. We all want a lot of things in our life, but if we don't have sales, if we're not closing, then we're not creating income, we’re not creating results. People waste a lot of time on sh*t that doesn't matter. There is one overriding thought they need to stay focused on: “How am I gonna get a sale today? How am I gonna close somebody?”
His success was founded on the two rungs of inner mindset and fierce discipline. He credits mastering the psychology of people as the third.
“You have to focus on solving people’s problems by asking questions. You’ve gotta ask great questions to get them over into your way of thinking. To me, I stay away from slimy sales tactics. I always considered myself an educator instead. So I would sit down with a client and just ask them questions. My closing ratio was 80-90% with my clients. I would ask questions and they would agree with me when I reflected back their answers so I got a lot of little yesses.”
Alonzo says this process meant that, at the end, when he asked for the check, it was easy because they had already said “yes” so many times, they felt trust and rapport with him and saw him as an educator.
“I wanted to teach people, to make sure they were clear on the different kinds of insurances and investments that were out there, instead of just saying, ‘Just listen to me. I'll tell you what to do.’ I wanted to make sure they were very informed and I think people appreciated that. They wanted to do business with me.”
He advises his contractors to “educate yourself. Educate prospects and clients. Start making content. Start talking to people, building relationships, and start selling. Today.”
Wealth on the Beach Key #3: SET UP MULTIPLE STREAMS OF PASSIVE INCOME
“Real wealth,” says Alonzo, is built in your sleep.
“Set up passive income streams – real estate, dividend stocks, online courses, books, and most of all, a business that grows without you. And let me be clear here: the best passive income stream I have is my business. I have 1,500 licensed agents under me and every single time that somebody I trained – or somebody trained by a leader I trained – writes a sale, I earn income.”
He is quick to point out that the intensity of the sweat equity in training his leaders has paid off for decades.
When he began and trained a salesperson, every sale they made would make Alonzo anywhere from $500 to $1,000. “So I didn't treat people like property or employees. I treated them with love. I cared about them. They became my family, my best friends. I was building an empire with these people, and we were going to build it together. I created systems for my business so my business doesn't need me anymore.”
Alonzo also started buying real estate in his thirties. He invests in dividend-heavy stocks and trades covered puts and calls so avoids the worry of losing money. With covered options, you sit on the computer for five minutes, and you make a couple of thousand dollars. Why not?”
Wealth on the Beach Key #4: Cultivate Leaders
“Let’s get real,” Alonzo says. “I know everybody wants to be humble, but if you're successful, you are a leader, because you had to lead from the front at some point. You had to take the risk. You had to do it first. You had to take the pain. Take the rejection. To me, that describes leadership.”
The part of leadership that he credits changed his life was being able to replicate what he did for others.
“I built systems and processes. I scaled what worked by creating systems that could be easily duplicated by others. These days, I run my Wealth on the Beach Club every Wednesday morning, wherever I am. An hour training with my guys. I record it and now have almost three hundred videos where my people can go back and learn my sales process, my recruiting process – all the training. They can learn leadership, learn the market, learn investing. They can learn every subject they need to know. I’m able to effectively raise an army of highly trained leaders while I’m sitting here… where am I today? – in Bratislava.”
FREEDOM ON THE BEACH
Alonzo has no debt, plenty of streams of income, is living his life like a vacation, and works now to teach others to do the same.
But only if they are willing to put in the effort.
“No one is going to succeed with me if they are not going to bring the badass mindset. You're going to overcome your fears. You're gonna decide to go all-in or get out. You’ve got to visualize the goal, the success. See it in your mind's eye. And you have to really internalize it and believe it. I'm a big believer of the law of attraction – that whatever you're focusing on is going to become your reality.”
Once you see it, he says, then you’ve got to “take massive action” to make it real.
After that…
The beach awaits.
Written by Adam Gilad
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