Landon Buford
Andy Audate is a published author, motivational speaker, and entrepreneur. Like many of us in this day in age, and opted to go to the entrepreneur route, which comes with a lot of self -education. Audate is a college dropout but was able to join the fraternity of success dropout stories such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison, to name a few. During this process, he was able to change his prior circumstances and also allowed him to communicate to others that he wanted to be great.
He grew up having to rack his neighbor’s lawns to purchase things such as Nike Air Force 1’s and able to convenience 16 out 24 of his neighbors to let yard work to raise enough money. He homed his skills as a salesman at a young age and discovered his passion for business. Audate made the decision to drop out of school at the age of 19 and never looked back. Now, Audate focuses on helping entrepreneurs from less fortunate backgrounds reach their full potential by using three F’s finances, family, and freedom. Through his company Progression Marketing Group, they focus on creating marking campaigns for clients’ personal brands.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Andy Audate about how he was able to build his business after dropping out of college.
I understand that you are a college dropout looking back on it. How were you able to use that weakness and turn it into motivation to self-educate yourself?
When I was 19 years old, I was sitting in the parking lot of my college thinking: should I enter in a full way or should I leave and should I open my own business? And looking back on it, at that moment, I was making a tough decision to go down the road of commonality, where people think I should go or to go down the road of uncommonality, that is the road of being an entrepreneur. I decided to go down the road of being an entrepreneur and start my own business, so I invested in myself, and I by investing in myself, I generated my first hundred grant within six months, a year later I made a million. And it was at that moment when I realized, Andy, you had made the right choice. So I never looked at that as a weakness, I look at it as that is the road that I choose. Self-education was the road that I needed to succeed.
How has it allowed you to map out the way you built your business?
Dropping out of college taught me that I needed to be self-reliant, I needed to create my own challenges and fix solutions to the challenges that I have created. One of the things that we say at our company is that we need problems and the type of problems that we need are growing problems. That is when we have problems because of growth. So I create my own challenges, and I create the solutions, that is called progression. So I am continually progressing at a rapid pace because I realize that I am in complete control of my destiny. I am not waiting for someone to give me a job; I am not waiting for someone to grade my papers; I am not waiting for anyone. I am only waiting on myself, and I am in 100% control of myself.
What advice would you give someone that is looking to follow possibly in your footsteps?
Take action and take action fast, stop thinking, stop procrastinating, take action, and take action quickly. And get around the right type of people, you got to get a mentor, you got to get around someone who has already done it. This is why I have created Brandmarketingsummit.net to teach people how to experience life at a fast pace and go to the next level at a quicker pace.
Charlie Cina, who is the Vice President of sales at LIGHT SPEEDVT, speaks highly of you. When individuals such as he speaks highly about you in that matter, what does that mean to you?
When people speak highly of me, I recognize I am going in the right direction. I was actually at an event in Texas, it was my event, I had a VIP dinner, and I had a lot of people from my events to join me, and it was at that event where I asked somebody: where do you get your personal development from? He mentioned: from you, and I said yes but besides me. Do you look at Tony Robbins, Eric Thomas, some of the big names? And he said no, just you. And recognizing that I just realized that there is a group of people who are depending on me. So in this day and age, you have to go to the next level and recognize that there is a group of people who are depending on you.
You are a host of the Progression Show. Can you share what the inspiration behind the show was?
What inspired me is that I recognized that in order for you to succeed at a fast pace, you need to learn from other people’s mistakes. So I created this show to interview some of the highest successful people on my network, to be able to reveal the information that it took for them to really be successful and how to get it out so that way the audience can skip the trial and error and pain and go straight to success.
What are some of the characteristics you look for in your guests?
What I look for in my guests are people who have done the work they said they have done, and can also add a ton of value to the audience and support the audience. When I recognize that there are people who depend on you, what that means is that there are people who need you to be successful, and by being successful, you have information for them. So I want to find people who are successful and take the information they have in their brain through their experiences and give it to my audience.
When can we expect your next speaking engagement?
Well, the speaking engagement that I am primarily focusing on is The Progression Conference, we are currently on a national tour, and you can learn more at progressionticket.com. It is a one-day business event where I will break down the mass awareness marketing system. This marketing system will get people known in a short period of time by a large audience. And I also teach how virtual assistants can actually do the work for you.
Do you have any plans to write another book anytime soon?
I am so excited to write this new book, I am trying to figure out the name for it, but the book overall is going to be about how to excel at a fast pace in this new economy that we are now living in, stay tuned and learn more about the book at andyaudate.com.
Originally posted on The Hype Magazine.
