Anthony Trucks: The Playbook for Turning Your Expertise Into a Profitable Speaking Career | E15

Business MVP

Anthony Trucks shares his unconventional journey from a foster care background and an NFL career cut short by injury to building a multimillion-dollar speaking and coaching empire. He

Key takeaways

• Anthony Trucks leveraged a $5K loan from his ex-wife after an Achilles tear forced him out of his gym business, which ultimately catalyzed his pivot to high-ticket speaking and consulting.
• He secured a quarter-million dollar contract with PG&E by pitching a new movement process designed to reduce lost workdays and injuries, proving that solving expensive corporate pain points drives premium revenue.

Main topics

• Foster care to Fortune 500 coaching trajectory
• Gym business failures and operational pivots

Notable quotes

"The separation is not what you know, it's who you are with what you know."

Conclusion

The episode provides a tactical blueprint for converting lived experience

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) I was like, my degree is in kinesiology. I played sports. Business should be simple, right? And then you get in and then you had nine months in, a guy rolls up in a Harley, serves me eviction letter from the landlord. because I hadn't paid rent in three months. Speaker 1 (0:11) My next guest earned a full ride to Oregon, led the Pac-10 in sacks, and made the Pittsburgh Steelers. Then a shoulder injury ended it before he ever played a single regular season game. Four months later, he was broke. Speaker 2 (0:23) That was the last straw for me. I'm like, there's no way I'm going to be this intelligent, this skilled, post-NFL, and be broke like this the rest of my life. There's no way it's happening. Speaker 1 (0:31) He's now a best-selling author, international keynote speaker, and the creator of the Identity Shift methodology. Speaker 2 (0:37) I think we have more information than we need to be successful. There's literally too much and a lot of it's free. Yes. The separation is not what you know, it's who you are with what you know. How do you wield the sword of knowledge you have? If you don't wield it and you're not prepared to go through the gamut, you don't get to sit the table with me. Speaker 1 (0:55) How does a kid from foster care become the person teaching others how to find their identity? Speaker 1 (1:02) Anthony Trucks, welcome to Business MVP. Speaker 2 (1:05) Thank you for having me. Speaker 1 (1:06) Thanks for being here. So you Speaker 2 (1:08) grew Speaker 1 (1:08) up without the foundation most kids take for granted. Now Fortune 500 executives pay you to help them figure out who they are. How does a kid from foster care become the person teaching others how to find their identity? Speaker 2 (1:23) Oh, what do they call it? The limiting snake. It's Speaker 1 (1:25) a Speaker 2 (1:25) series of unfortunate events. Yes. It's just a bunch of things. Here's what I will say. I have a story. We'll hear my story, I'm sure. But the story is not my story. It's my experience. And I could not tell you the definitive daisy chain of events that got us to here. What I do know is I had a lot of crazy happen. And I navigated the crazy past the moments where most would quit. I couldn't tell you exactly why I did, but I did. And in doing that, you get a kind of... access to different skill sets, different awareness, different knowledge. And then you find that what I navigated in certain segments of my life, tangibly, it's not something that would make sense. But the intangibles I've garnered are valuable. They can be applied in different kind of areas of life, different verticals of companies and businesses. It's more of like that life experience taught me some things that I've now brought to different walks of life to teach that benefit other people's walks of life. Speaker 1 (2:18) Yeah, totally. Kind of want to back up to the sports piece. You made the Steelers roster, which is an amazing accomplishment, right? And then a shoulder injury ended it before you ever played a regular season game. Yeah, it Speaker 2 (2:30) was fun. That's heartbreaking. Yeah, Speaker 1 (2:33) so tell us about that. And then, you know, then I think the next thing you did was you opened a gym, right, that nearly failed. And so that became kind of a rough period for you, which we'll talk about. So walk me through that period, you know, the shoulder injury and, you know, into the gym. Speaker 2 (2:48) Well, NFL stands for not for long. Most of us don't know that. It's like you get in, you get hurt, you get out. I Speaker 1 (2:53) love that. Not Speaker 2 (2:53) everybody, but my shoulder to this day still doesn't move smoothly on the left-hand side. Like, this is as high as my shoulder goes, whereas this one would go up as high as I need it to. This one's just stuck here. So it's part of the journey of the game, and you sign up for that. So, you know, it could happen. But then from that, I did come home. And the thing is, with me, I'd always had this itch for business. So when I was a kid, I want to say like 10 or 11 years old, I started doing like door-to-door washing cars and mowing lawns and doing different stuff and then eventually doing yard work. Progressed up to having a paper route at the age of 12, from 12 to 14, solo. I think I did every day for two years by myself. I maybe had one sub in the entire time. But I had this itch. I liked the idea of I could be free under my own volition. If I wanted to create something, I could do my own thing and have freedom. So when I got done with the NFL, Before I wanted to, I did not quite know who I was, what my value was, but I knew I didn't want another boss. Because while you're playing professional sports, you got bosses. Like people don't realize that. Lots of them. I am told where to be, when to be, what weight to weigh, like all these things. Like I don't have freedom. And in the off season, say it's the off season, great. You still have to, the NFL has to know where you're at 24-7. Because if they have to drug test you, which they do in the off season. You have 24 hours notice. And if you aren't in the place they expect you to be, you can get fined and get in a lot of trouble. So it's like you don't have freedom. So when I got done, I'm like, I don't want to be confined again by just a random company. So I went and did my own thing. So I started a business. Did have zero clue what I was doing. I didn't have skill sets. I never owned a gym. I never had a business acumen. I never even had a gym membership at any point in my career. But I was like, my degree is in kinesiology. I played sports. Business should be simple, right? And then you get in and then, yeah, nine months in, a guy rolls up on a Harley, serves me eviction letter from the landlord because I hadn't paid rent in three months. So, yeah, I was in a very interesting conundrum. We'll call it a precipice of like, what is the next step to do? And it ended up being a very necessary and beneficial headache. It was my crucible. Because I believe the gym for me at that time was a microcosm of the world. It was the interaction with people I'd bypass. Because again, I'm playing sports until I'm 25, 26, I come home. And now I'm like, I got people that are in my same world, the gym world, the fitness world, the business world, working world. Yeah. And I've been there since they were 18, 19. So you got people that have got seven, eight years ahead of me of doing this work. And I'm like, I got to navigate this. And so I had to catch up fast. And it was a very interesting, just a pressure cooker. And so I learned a lot about me, about people, about business in that window of time. And I was there for six years. Every two weeks, it was like, can I pay rent? Can I pay rent and payroll? It was actually payroll and then rent and payroll. It was always a cycle. So every month I'm stressed out. How am I going to pay these people what they're doing? So I paid every two weeks. So we'd pay like... Okay, two weeks I got the payment due for my team. And then next two weeks I got the rent and the payment due for the team. And I can't figure this thing out. So yeah, I had a choice at one point to go, do I dive in deeper or do I quit? And my wife and best friend both were like, just give it up, dude. Just get a job, file bankruptcy, just move on. I don't say this as like this kind of like, look at me special. I internally don't know where the switch to stop exists. I don't know where the, and I think a lot of people call it the give up, the quit. I may not be going 100 miles an hour, but I'll go 20 miles an hour endlessly. Like I'll move. I don't know how to turn it off all the way. So thankfully, I would say, I didn't Speaker 1 (6:28) know Speaker 2 (6:28) how to turn it off. I knew I was going to keep moving. I was like, if I'm going to go out, I'm going to go out giving my absolute all, swinging. And I hired a guy that I couldn't afford, that I trusted to help me. And four months after that window of time, we had... quadrupled the revenue of the company, got out of financial stress, all that kind of stuff. And it spun up positively. But that was the first step for me figuring out business, like really understanding it. And I wouldn't say I mastered it by any means, taking years to get there. But at that time, I was just like, all right, I at least have some, you know, working understanding of how business should operate in a way that I had no idea. And it allowed me to pair business acumen with my actual intangibles from sports. And that's what helped me be successful long term. Could you say how did I get in Speaker 1 (7:09) front of Speaker 2 (7:09) the Amazons? That little window there helped me. Speaker 1 (7:12) You know, when you're talking about not quitting, like, do you think your sports athletic background is what instilled all of that in you? And like, that's, you know, what kind of propelled you in the business world? Yeah. Speaker 2 (7:23) Because football, you make mistakes every game. I don't care who you are. You may be like, this guy could have scored three touchdowns. I guarantee you on Monday or Sunday or Monday after the game, they're peeking in going like, yeah, you messed this up, this up, this up. Like, there's going to be... double the amount of mistakes that were made in every given play. You get 70-something plays typically. So what happens is you have to realize that it's just a moment. It's not who you are. And so when something goes wrong, it's like, all right, just a moment. It's like, all right, it just happened. So what do we do? That play happened. I can't bring that bad negativity into the next play or the next day, we'll call it. Right. And so if I bring it to the next play, then I mess up all the success I could have in the future and the next steps I do every play beyond that. they're all going to be bad plays. So it's like, if I'm going to have a sequence of events unfold, I want to be in control of them in a way that gives me better opportunity, positive. What that means is I can't latch onto the negative of this play. I can't quit because it was hard. I can't, I just got to go, all right, that happened. Let's go to work. And Speaker 1 (8:23) you Speaker 2 (8:23) do that again and again and again. And so football, it teaches you how to navigate that window of discomfort. It happens so quickly, so many times. you're bathed in it. Like, it's just, it's normal. You don't even notice, like, it's, you have no idea it's how you function. But until other people go like, how'd you keep going past that? I'm like, you had an option? I mean, there's an option to stop? I don't, I'm confused. Like, it didn't, it didn't make sense because it's like, if that's going to happen, that's, that's the worst case, right? It's the worst case. What, what is the other option? The other option is like, try something that might work. So I saw some, recently some guy goes, You know, I want to try this business thing out and I'm doing this thing and one of my buddies has a job, comes up and goes, you know, what are you gonna do if it fails? He goes, worst case scenario, I get a job like you have. Like, Speaker 1 (9:11) that's Speaker 2 (9:12) it. He says, like, I do my thing and if it doesn't work out, worst case, you're okay, right? I'll go get a job. There's enough jobs out there. Like, that's what I'll do. Yeah, I mean, that's a great way to look Speaker 1 (9:22) at it too because then you're not really operating in like a fear mentality, you know, or like, you know, you're just. You're laid back. You're giving it your all. And, you Speaker 2 (9:31) know, Speaker 1 (9:32) what's the worst that can happen? So I think that's great advice. Speaker 2 (9:34) Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:35) Definitely. You know, so I guess, so did the gym technically fail or then eventually it didn't actually fail? So it did. I Speaker 2 (9:43) bypassed some things, didn't I? I didn't get that far. And so I got this guy who helped me out. Four months later, I was doing well. We actually ended up investing in a space to go to Speaker 1 (9:51) a Speaker 2 (9:51) bigger place. So we actually expanded the gym size into a whole new area. And then a few months into that, it became weird with the landlord wanting to charge us more rent. Because in commercial spaces, they can do what's called triple net increases. So a triple net lease means that if they do upgrades or change stuff, they can charge you more. But I had to submit my gross revenue every single month, which was part of the contract I should have never signed. So as I saw me doing well, magically, my triple net's going up. Didn't know why, but all of a sudden I'm paying more money. Eventually I couldn't afford the rent. The rent almost doubled on me after a while. I went from like $6,000 to $12,000 a month. I was barely making $1,500 a month for me to pay my rent and everything. I wasn't making much money. And so what happened was I kind of moved out of there, went to a smaller space, and eventually got this idea. And I was actually at one point broke again because it happened. I had to borrow $5,000 from my ex-wife to pay bills because I tore my Achilles and I couldn't go to work. It was crazy. But then here's Speaker 1 (10:46) what Speaker 2 (10:46) happened. After I brought money from her, and just so you know, when I say ex-wife, I don't mean amicable at the time. I mean, I hated her, Speaker 1 (10:55) but Speaker 2 (10:55) I had no other option. I had Speaker 1 (10:56) to Speaker 2 (10:56) swallow all my pride to do it. I'm now remarried to her. It's a whole different conversation we can get into. We Speaker 1 (11:02) have Speaker 2 (11:02) an amazing marriage now, 10 years deep in a remarriage. But this window of time, this little segment, broke, couldn't pay bills. Had to swallow my pride as a man and go, I need rent money. I need you to help me out. that was the last straw for me. I'm like, there's no way I'm going to be this intelligent, this skilled, post NFL and be broke like this the rest of my life. There's no way it's happening. I'm going to find a way to access revenue. And the way I could figure out how to do it was like if I, besides selling drugs, by the way, I have to go find like, hey, how can I be of value to make that? Who has money that they're trying to find a solution towards? And I started getting ideas. And so I went to this company called PG &E. in California, the power company in the Northern California area, they burned down a city. I think everybody knows about it. If you're not in California, that's what they did. And a paradise, it was like paradise city or something. So what happened was I got this opportunity to go and start speaking for them and put an idea out of like, hey, what if I create this whole new movement process to warm your people up to diminish lost work days and injuries to help you guys save money? It took me, I want to say like a year to finally get them to agree to it. And when they did, I was a quarter million dollar contract. That was probably about $220,000 of profit. Like it was, I had given a little bit out to some people that were doing the work with me, but they just got paid hourly. I got the lion's share of the contract. And so I was like, okay, now I figured out there's some ways to make money outside of this. So what I did is I closed the gym down. I had made enough money. My lease was up at the place I was at. And I paid bills off and I was like, good. Speaker 1 (12:27) And Speaker 2 (12:27) I was like, all right, I'm going to try it. At the time I'd been introduced to the speaking world. So I'm going to try my hand at the speaking stuff. So in this window of time, I actually closed the gym. I don't, I don't, it doesn't go out. I don't go bankrupt or anything. I just closed the gym down. I have money to kind of live off. The problem was I wasn't focused on how to make money in this industry. I was just like, I got money so I can play around. And so I did play it around and I burned through a good chunk of that. I wasn't in debt though, thankfully. Burned through a good chunk. I was like, all right, I probably should figure out how to