David Frey’s In Search Of Entrepreneur Heroes Interview
Ralph Zuranski: What is your perspective on goodness, ethics and moral behavior?
David Frey: I have a personal and private philosophy on ethics and moral behavior. I have a business philosophy on that as well, so number one is that if you are honest with people, people will be honest with you. Number two is that people are attracted to honest people.
David Frey: When you are honest in all of your dealings, that will build trust and confidence in all your relationships which in turn is going to build your reputation and other people are going to want to do business with you. When you are completely honest with somebody than that person knows that you are going to be completely honest with somebody else that they refer you to, and that is very important.
David Frey: My wife was talking the other day about when she was with this lady in the car and this lady was complaining on and on about this one family. Once they stopped at this same family’s home to visit, this lady started kissing and hugging on them. My wife says to me “You know, I wonder what she says about me when I get out of the car.”
David Frey: So, complete honesty is extremely important, especially if you’re a marketer because as marketers, especially direct response marketers, we have a tendency to stretch the truth sometimes and that is dangerous. In fact, one of my personal role models in this area, Marlin Sanders, who is a very well known internet marketer, is just honest to the bone. He is truthful to the bone.
David Frey: On many occasions we have had several conversations about writing copy and making promises and guarantees and things and he is very careful to always tell the truth, not hype things up so that people have above average expectations on what you are trying to sell to them and things like that. That is my business philosophy on ethics and moral behavior.
David Frey: Now, my personal and private philosophy on ethics and moral behavior is that these are Gods requirements. I believe in a God and one of his requirements here on earth is to act ethically, to be moral and to be good. So as a requirement that He has given to me, I have in my own private life an obligation to be ethical and moral and if not that is sin and I, of course, want to go to Heaven.
David Frey: Besides that, just how much are you willing to give up for your own personal integrity? How much are you willing to sell your integrity for? To me there is no price here on this earth that I am willing to sell that for
Ralph Zuranski: Do you have a dream or vision that sets the course of your life?
David Frey: First of all, I want to be with my family forever. I have a wife whose name is Ingrid and I have got two children. My son Sterling is eight years old now and my daughter Elena is three years old and they are everything to me. I not only want to be with them in this life but the life hereafter as well.
David Frey: I consider myself a spiritual person and I believe in Heaven and Hell. Heaven is where I would like to be and I believe it is a real place. Second, I would like to be able to make a difference in the lives of others so I try to find a lot of different ways to do that. I guess my third dream or vision is after this life to be able to live in that type of place.
David Frey: When I die there are four things I want my tombstone to say, number one being, “I love God” number two “I love my wife with all of my heart” number three “I love my kids and showed it” and number four “That I loved other people.” So that is kind of the driving force in my life, my family and my relationship with my heavenly Father and my relationship with other people and how I am trying to make a difference in their lives.
Ralph Zuranski: Do you take a positive view of setbacks, misfortunes and mistakes?
David Frey: I believe sometimes God puts them in our place and sometimes we put them in our place and sometimes they just come as a result in life so I think the first thing you need to know is setbacks are an integral part of the success formula. There isn’t a successful person that has not had a setback or a failure.
David Frey: It is an integral part of being a successful person and having a successful business. It’s like cold calling, out of one hundred calls you make your are probably going to have ninety or ninety-five people say no to you, but five are going to say yes.
David Frey: Now if you knew that statistic right up front than you welcome the no’s because you are getting to the yes’s a whole lot faster. Some people say that you have to have seven failures before you get your first success so if you just understand that, then it will help you approach it a lot better. Setbacks and misfortunes build experience and experience is what causes success and so without setbacks and misfortunes you would not have the experience that builds success. I have always said fail fast, fail cheap, that is the name of the game. Then you cut your loses and move forward with that experience.
David Frey: At one time, I had too much money for my good and I went in to the mobile home business. I bought a bunch of mobile homes that had been repossessed and I got them for maybe forty cents on the dollar. I took those mobile homes and cleaned them up and when I went to resale them it was much harder than I ever thought.
David Frey: I made the mistake of not checking to make sure all the taxes were paid when it was sold to me so I ended up with a massive tax bill because most of these guys, who owned these mobile homes had never paid their taxes. With me now being the rightful owner, I had to go pay the taxes. I even had one guy pick up his mobile home and just haul it off.
David Frey: So, I lost a ton of money in that business and I learned a lesson that that was not the business for me and that I need to be very careful when I make accusations and check the backgrounds. That is my approach to setbacks and mistakes. I have made a lot of them and I am grateful for each one of them.
Ralph Zuranski: How were you able to overcome your doubts and fears?
David Frey: My philosophy is that the way you overcome doubts and fears is by just going out and doing it. When you do it you gain experience and when you gain experience that leads to success and when you gain success that breeds confidence and confidence is the opposite of fear and doubt.
David Frey: For many years I was a missionary and as a missionary we use to go knock on a lot of doors and the first five doors were always very scary. You knew you were going to get rejected but still just going and knocking on those doors was a scary thing but, after the fifth door, it became kind of mechanical and the experience kicked in and you were able to face rejection a lot more easily.
David Frey: If someone slammed the door on you, you just went to the next one. I was in Bolivia while doing that and it was very difficult. Trying to sell something that no one wants to hear about is a very difficult thing. No one wants to hear about religion, especially by getting stopped in the street.
Ralph Zuranski: Do you experience service to others as a source of joy?
David Frey: I think service is the purpose of our existence. I believe that with all my heart because service to others is the exact opposite of pride and pride is the downfall of mankind. If you look at every problem of what exists in the world today it is because of some source of pride.
David Frey: A lot of people say, “Money is the root of all evil”. No, the love of money is the root of all evil. The love of money is the manifestation of pride. Look at all the problems we are having politically in the world. It is all a manifestation of pride and when you serve other people it humbles you which is the opposite of pride. I would say number one you need to serve your family first.
David Frey: I really believe Gods great test for a person, one of the reasons they are here on this earth, is to see if they will choose good over evil and I believe the greatest test we have is how well we serve our family. I really believe that one of the very first questions the Lord is going to ask us on the Day of Judgment is how we treated our spouses. The second question I think he will ask is how we treated our children.
David Frey: So, that is very important. There is a saying in the scriptures that says, “When ye are in the service of your fellow beings you are only in the service of your God.” That comes from the book of Mormon. I happen to be a Mormon and we consider that to be a body of scripture.
David Frey: So, when you are serving others you are serving Jesus Christ. In fact there is a scripture in the bible that says something like this and don’t quote me exactly but, “And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40) and that was Jesus talking to his disciple.
Meaning… You know its easy for us to do favors for famous, rich and wealthy people because we think we are going to get something in return but sometimes it is difficult to do favors for people we know who are not going to give us anything back in return. We are just doing it out of the sheer goodness of our hearts.
David Frey: It reminds me of when hurricane Katrina came around. For me that was a wonderful time in my life because every Saturday here in Houston a group of us men would get in our cars and we would drive over to Louisiana and east Texas to the towns that were hit the worst and we would cut trees all day or we would pull carpet out of flooded homes or we would gut the walls out to get the mold out. Every week we did this for several months.
David Frey: It was one of the most fulfilling and wonderful times in my life in though I worked so hard. It made me thankful to be working on the computer on the internet. I have an appreciation for people who actually have to go out there and swing a hammer. It was tough work but it was one of the best times of my life because the people that we were helping, they had no words for their gratitude, it was just a wonderful feeling.
David Frey: If you think in your mind about a continuum, in your minds eye, try and think of a continuum or a line I guess you could say and that represents the amount of service you do for other people. Let’s call that the service continuum. I really believe that those people that are heroes in this world are the ones that fall up in the seven or eight or nine area then I would say you are serving the purpose you were put here on earth for.‘
Ralph Zuranski: Who are the HEROES in your life? The first hero is my wife because she is just awesome. Her name is Ingrid and I really do respect her and look up to her for a number of reasons. Number one, she loves the Lord just as much or more than I do.
David Frey: She really has her priorities in order. She cares about other people. Most of the money she gets she spends doing things for other people. She is a wonderful mother, she dedicates so much time of her life to her children and sometimes it is not easy. Being a parent is not easy and she does a magnificent job of working with our children.
David Frey: She is also a marathon runner so she gets up at four o’clock in the morning and goes running until six o’clock in the morning every single morning. She does it that early so it doesn’t disrupt any part of her families’ day, getting the children off to school and having me get off to the office so she will go run very very early in the morning when we are all sleeping.
David Frey: She keeps herself so physically fit, she is so attractive. She is just a wonderful woman and everybody that knows her just loves her. She does not have an enemy in the world. I have two men in my life who I have felt are also heroes of mine. They probably don’t know but they are real mentors to me. One of them is Rick Qwuavous, he lives here in Houston and Mark Anderson, he lives up in Provo, Utah.
David Frey: Both of these men I have admired since I have known them. I have watched them from afar and the reason I admire them so much is because they have attributes that I want to have. One of their attributes is that I have never heard them say an unkind thing about a person.
David Frey: The number two attribute is that they don’t get all emotional about things meaning they don’t fly off the handle and I have never heard them raise their voice for anything. They are just your mild mannered soft voiced men. Number three, they are humble. They would never call attention to themselves for any reason. In fact they are always praising other people. These two men are very accomplished men.
David Frey: They have always been kind and understanding of me. I can remember one experience with Rick Qwauvous where I was asked to help him work with some youth. I made a commitment to him and it turns out that I had to go out of town and I felt so guilty for that I had to call him up and say “Rick I am so sorry.
David Frey: I know I committed to this thing but I just can not make it” and he had the most loving response to me. He didn’t hem or haw or anything he just said “David that’s okay, you just go do whatever you need to do, take care of your business and I will make sure that everything is taken care of back here.” It made me cry. These two guys are just giants in my life and the world doesn’t know who they are.
David Frey: They are not famous in their local community. They are not celebrities, just two humbled mild mannered men and in my opinion in the next life they are going to be celebrities, those guys are going to be superstars. There is another man named Tom Spinks, he is the business partner of mine, just a wonderful man, very mild mannered. He always makes sure he gets the bad end of the deal. He is extremely successful and very wealthy.
David Frey: I say “Why don’t you go do this or this with your money?” And he says “Dave, I make enough money.” He lives right next to his grown children and they have breakfast every morning. Most kids don’t want to live near to their parents but these children want to be next to this man. He is so wonderful. So those are some of the heroes in my life.
Ralph Zuranski: Who do you think are the HEROES today that are not getting the recognition they deserve?
David Frey: Like I mentioned, Rick Qwauvous and Mark Anderson, no one knows who they are but they are the real heroes. Teachers in our society and I will tell you why teachers are real heroes… Number one, they make a real significant and long lasting impact on peoples lives and number two, they don’t do it for the money because very few teachers get paid a lot of money. They are doing it for all the right reasons.
David Frey: Teachers in our society, social workers, and those people have jobs that are dedicated to helping other people. I think those people don’t get a lot of recognition while you see celebrities getting a lot of recognition and those are the people you don’t want to emulate.
David Frey: I will tell you someone that is a real hero and that is someone who uses his celebrity status to benefit other people, like Bono of U2. That guy spends an awful lot of time and his own money to help people rise out of poverty; he uses his celebrity status to help underprivileged people.
David Frey: Those are the guys I really like because they could get caught up in their own celebrity status and put themselves above others. They use their status as a tool to help other people.
Ralph Zuranski: How do people become heroes? I believe people are put here for a purpose. God put here to serve other people. There are only two things you take with you, your relationships and the service you did for other people.
David Frey: So if they want to become heroes they need to waste and wear out their lives in the service for others. I think it is important to pick out people and emulate them, as long as your picking out the right people to emulate. Heroes don’t even have to make a lot of money, a lot of mine don’t but I would give up my left arm to be one of them. I would give up all the money I had to become one of those men.
Ralph Zuranski: How do you find a balance of being of total service and providing for your family?
David Frey: I think you need to schedule. Schedule opportunities for service and schedule activities with your family. You need to proactively put those things in your life. People are creatures of habit so if we don’t proactively make changes in our lives then changes will never come.
David Frey: So how do you find a balance? You have to physically put that balance in place by scheduling. It is important to join some type of organization that you truly believe in to volunteer for service. We have many opportunities at our church for volunteers that I am very grateful for
David Frey: I don’t mean that you have to spend your entire day doing that what I mean is just getting away from your selfish life and making time for your unselfish life. Put the most important things in your life first which should be giving service to others and your family. Every Friday night me and my wife go on a date. Every Friday night, it is just an appointment we have made.
Ralph Zuranski: What are the things parents can do that will help their children realize they too can be HEROES and make a positive impact on the lives of others?
David Frey: That is an important question because I do believe that all of life’s problems start in the home. It is how children are brought up and I believe mothers hold the key. Mothers and fathers hold the key to the future of mankind. Number one, if you are husband or wife you need to be a great husband or wife.
David Frey: Kids look up to the relationship their parents have with each other and they emulate that relationship in their lives. You will notice that the parents that fight with each other, their children fight. They fight at school; they fight with their boyfriends or girlfriends, with their spouses or with their business associates. They saw their mother and father fight, so what can you do as a mother and father so children can overcome that?
David Frey: You be the best husband or wife you can be, get conflict out of your home. My kids, Sterling and Elena, they just love to see me and my wife kiss and hug. They just love to see that because somehow a sense of security and love is transmitted to them when parents love each other.
David Frey: That’s why the divorce rate is so alarming. In fact I started a website called marriageadvice.com just to try and combat in my little own way relationships between husbands and wives. The second thing is, if you are a father or mother you have got to be the best father or mother. I hear a lot of people say “I don’t spend a lot of time with my kids but I spend quality time.”
David Frey: I think that is bunk. I don’t think there is such thing as “quality time”. You need to spend quantity time with your child, that’s what they require. There is no such thing as quality time. That’s one of the reason I put my picture up next to me that says “No success can compensate for failure in the home” because it doesn’t matter how wealthy I get or how much money I get even if I use that money for mankind.
David Frey: If I failed in the home, I am a failure. A lot of people say “Its my husbands fault we got divorced.” Well that might be true but I am going to tell you, I have been married for sixteen years and our marriage has not always been easy but we have really taken the time to work through any of the difficulties we have had in our marriage and we have stayed faithful and overcome a lot of things through communication.
David Frey: You can do it as a couple, it can be done and if you are having problems you need to go see a marriage counselor. I do believe that couples have habits that are so ingrained that they need a third party person to help them overcome their habits. Number three, and remember this is my own opinion, you need to be a good example.
David Frey: If you don’t want your kids to cuss, stop cussing. If you don’t want your child to smoke, stop smoking. If you want your child to make his bed make your bed, if you don’t want your child to go watch R rated movies then what are you doing going and watching R rated movies?
David Frey: If you don’t want your children to lie don’t lie. Children will do as you do, not as you say. Every parent knows that. Be a great example. They need to see you, for example if you want them to give service and be a real hero because I believe real heroes give service then they need to see you giving service.
David Frey: When I went out to hurricane Katrina I put on a yellow shirt because that was my service shirt and I wore that every weekend, when my son saw me put on that yellow shirt and go Saturday he knew I wasn’t going to play with him, but he knew I was going out to give service, that got imbedded in his mind and now he understands that.
David Frey: When he sees that he emulates that. What is important to you will be important to them. Have you ever noticed how many athletes have parents that were athletes? Now why is that, because athletics were important to their parents and because it was important to their parents it was important to them. Things that are important to your children are things you show them that are important.
Ralph Zuranski: How important is it to stay focused on your primary goal and how do you do that?
David Frey: In my opinion, the only thing you take with you when you die is what you have done for other people and the relationships you have in your life. You know, you cant take your house with you or your car with you when you go You cant take your boat with you, so if that is really the case, how important is it to stay focused on your goal?
David Frey: It’s everything. I don’t want to be in my death bed and have all kinds of regrets. Unfortunately, and I hate to say this but just last week my next door neighbor committed suicide. He had two little children as well, two little boys and a wife. I went to his funeral and at his funeral one of his brothers read a letter that his dad had written to him (my next door neighbor) and it was to be read when their father had past away.
David Frey: Well their father was still alive but since the son past the brother thought it would be a good time to read the letter. The father in the letter was saying “I wish I would have done this and I wish I would have done that. Pursue your passion and dreams, I didn’t ever do that.”
David Frey: It made me sad to hear that, it made me sad to hear that this man had dreams and goals but yet he never stepped out of his humdrum life and taken risks to pursue those goals. I don’t want to be on my death bed and have regrets. I don’t want to me on my death bed saying to myself that I wish I would have spent more time with my son or that I should have put that project down and went to my daughters activity.
David Frey: This morning right now I have several deadlines hitting at me and I am just running all over the place and this morning my daughter had an activity over at her preschool outside and the parents were invited, well, I decided to set things a side and go over there, my wife met me over there, there but hardly any fathers. It was just a joyful time. David Frey: As soon as I walked up my daughter was about twenty-five feet away from me and she looked up and started yelling “Daddy Daddy”. That, my friend, makes it worth while. So, you have got to stay focused on what’s more important in life and the only way to do that is to have a more internal perspective on life.
David Frey: Some times we get caught up in the moment of the day or our goals for the day or the fires going on in that day and we don’t step back and look at the more broad perspective of our lives. If you do that then you are going to focus on those things that are more important in your life.
Ralph Zuranski: What is the philosophy or what philosophies guide your life and your decisions?
David Frey: Well, I am sitting in my chair, I have several offices that are like three minutes from my home and I am sitting in my chair in front of my computer and on the right side I am looking at picture that I have that sits on top of my printer of me and my wife and my two kids that looks at me everyday and on top of the picture there is a quote that says “No success can compensate for failure in the home.”
David Frey: That was a quote given by a man named David Owen Mckay. “No success can compensate for failure in the home.” That is a guiding philosophy I have had for a long time and one of my new years resolution was to make sure that I find more balance in my life and that I put my most important objectives in my life first.
David Frey: That was one the reason I created this picture of my family and this quote. It reminds me, right about six o’clock everyday I look up at that quote and I ask myself, it forces me to ask myself, “Is what I’m going to do in the next three hours worth more than going home to my children and my wife and spending time with my family?”
David Frey: I ask myself that same question everyday to myself at six o’clock and I always get the same answer. “Go home and spend time with your family.” Now, there are a few times where I am under the gun and I have got to complete commitments that I have to other people that have actually paid me so sometimes, very rarely now, but I have to stay sometimes.
David Frey: I do have that picture with the quote right in front of me though and I always look at it, so that is my first guiding philosophy. My second guiding philosophy is basically “What you give is what you’ll get.” I believe, I think it is a Zig Ziegler saying “To get what you want in your life you simply have to help other people get what they want in life” and I am a very true believer of that.
David Frey: Just recently I entered into a business partnership with a fellow and it is a very significant partnership. It was all a result of me giving to him without asking anything in return, so when you give you are going to get. Those two philosophies have really served me well.
Ralph Zuranski: How important is it to make decisions quickly?
David Frey: I have this philosophy, make methodical decisions but act very fast. Once you have made the decision make sure you move fast with massive action but I am not going to say you should do them fast or slow but they need to be somewhat methodical. You need to have thought them out.
David Frey: I rarely make decisions off the cuff anymore. Usually I will sleep on something and let it stew in my mind for a little while. It helps me to have a better approach to the decisions. A lot of times I have not done something I wanted to do, that I was very excited about doing because I have thought about it, I have thought about the consequences and I decided against it.
David Frey: So, if you are listening to this recording, make decisions but make them methodical decisions, try and think them through and them simmer on it over night and I would say beware of going to a lot of people and asking them things.
David Frey: I would say most people out there are risk takers and to be successful you have to take on risks so most people just by that near nature of being an entrepreneur are going to poo poo on your ideas or your thoughts or actions and you can not have that type of negative influence in you life if you are trying to be successful. You have got to be able to take calculated risks, make methodical decisions and move quickly on those decisions and, if you are going to fail make sure you fail very fast and very cheap.
Ralph Zuranski: How important is it to have trusted friends or a mastermind group of friends to bounce your ideas off?
David Frey: To me it is very important. The more I think I know stuff, the more stuff I find out I don’t know. I do not know everything. Sometimes when I am in a conversation with one of my friends and I will say “That is a fact”, my friends will dig stuff up and show me five examples that I was wrong.
David Frey: So, you don’t know everything and the more you know the more you find out you don’t know and I will tell you that the internet has accelerated information that is shared. So having close friends and friends that you can go to to share ideas with you has gotten infinitely easier.
David Frey: Now If I have something I want to get feedback on I can just go to one of the many discussion boards about marketing and just post my thoughts or my idea and I get a host people coming on and telling me what their opinions are which some of them aren’t experienced and some of them are very experienced so not only do you need a mastermind group but the internet has accelerated just how you can get out there and share ideas and get feedback and things.
David Frey: On my website Marketingbestpractices.com I have a form and when I have something new coming out or something experimental I go to my form and ask the members of my form them what they think or their thoughts on whatever it is and I get a wealth of feedback from them, all for free and all from people I respect.
David Frey: Let me just give you an example, I was in the process of placing a very expensive add in a very expensive magazine that was going to cost an awful lot of money and I didn’t want to make a mistake and so I went over to thecopywritersboard.com.
David Frey: This is Michael Fortin’s board where a lot of copywriters hang out and posted my ad there and asked the members what they thought of it. I had some of the highest paid copywriters giving me feedback on it and sharing their ideas about it and because of doing that I changed a lot of the copy and the layout to make it ten times better than it was before I started out.
Ralph Zuranski: Do you have a life goal that you want to achieve?
David Frey: When I was working in Bolivia I saw a school down there and this school produced milk and bread. It actually turned into a University later. I went back to Bolivia a few years later and the high school had turned into a University.
David Frey: The students who came to this school worked in their off time producing bread and milk that they would sell out to the city which in turn paid for their tuition so it was a self funding school.
David Frey: The kids that came out of that school learned the value of hard work and they learned the value of responsibility of accountability and they are also well prepared academically. It has been my goal in life to build a school probably over seas somewhere where your dollar can go farther.
David Frey: That might be South America, both me and my wife speak Spanish so we love South America and Central America and Mexico so either a school down there or somewhere else.
David Frey: That has been my life goal. If anyone is listening to this recording that is interested in that life goal too send me an email because I want to make a list of people and one of these days I am going to go down to one of those countries and set up a project where I can get a lot of people who are maybe in the internet marketing program that I am in to go down there and build a school for the local people.
David Frey: That is something that will get us out of our money making jobs and out of our normal lives and go help some other people. Sometimes I wish the big seminar was the big service project and we would take the five hundred people and take the two thousand dollars we spend and go down to a country and use that money towards building something to help other people. Marketing Best Practices Inc., was founded in 2001 by David Frey in Friendswood (a suburb of Houston), Texas and is a top small business marketing web resource.
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