Finding Happiness And The State Of The Economy With Robert Needham
Today's guest is Robert Needham. Robert is the CEO of Spectrum Advanced Markets, Inc. and has launched fourteen shuttles into space. Robert is here to talk with your host, Chad Burmeister, about how none of that matters if you’re not happy. And for him, you can find that happiness if you find God. Furthermore, learn about economic slavery, his idea of sharing capitalism, and why giving is more important than receiving. Plus, learn a thing or two about franchising. Know how to build your own business by franchising from another company. There are a lot of things to tackle today, so come and join the conversation.
---
Listen to the podcast here:
Finding Happiness And The State Of The Economy With Robert Needham
I'm with a great guy from the East Coast Birmingham, Alabama area. Robert Needham is the CEO and Founder of Spectrum Advanced Markets and he is a franchising expert. I had a little bit of experience in the franchising world when we help entrepreneurs source and a company stand up the first virtual event more than a decade ago. Now everybody's doing virtual events. Robert, it's great to have you here on the show. Thanks for being here.
Thanks, Chad. Thank you for having me.
I'm excited to dig in because I don't know what it is about Alabama but I've had three people on the show from Alabama. I think that's probably my only three from Alabama. I don't know what it is about your part of the country.
It’s a popular state to be moving to. I know that.
I think so. There, Florida and Texas are the three tops probably. I still have not visited. I'll have to come to check it out one of these days.
They call it Alabama the beautiful for a reason.
Let's do this. I like to help everyone get to know you by rewinding the tape and asking the question where were you born. Where were you raised? What do you remember when you were younger? What was your passion? What'd you think about it? What'd you love to do? Let's get into that a little bit.
I was born in Kingsport, Tennessee and my parents left Tennessee when I was two to move to Pensacola, Florida. My dad was a contractor and it was hard to work twelve months out of the year in Tennessee. We moved to Florida where it was warmer and those types of things. Life was good until I was about six years old when my dad became the first guy to have open heart surgery, using the heart-lung machine at the age of 30. Our world really changed. We made those decisions and it was a great place to live.
That's interesting how medicine has changed over the last 30 years, 40 years, 50 years.
They did the surgery in Houston, Texas. We have this great Houston Chronicle East Paper says seventh successful surgery as six Doberman pinschers on one side and my dad on the other. He was the first human surgery. It's comical but it was great.
My dad lost his dad when he was about 21 years old. His dad had a brain tumor and so it caused my dad to go into pharmacy and into radiology. His whole purpose was, “Let's go try to figure out what you can do with that.” In nowadays’ modern medicine, you can remove a tumor from the brain and still be okay. It's really good to see where all of that's come over the last several years. Thinking about when you're a kid and you went through that with your dad, what you like to do then, does it tie into what you're doing now in the world?
I'd like to believe it does. My parents were very optimistic even though our life changed financially. My mother was a textile worker. As a result, we lived on very little money. Because of that, my parents always said to me, “You can be anything you want to be if you just choose to.” Fortunately for me, I've had such a wonderful life career and it started when I was about six years old. My imagination was wide open. My parents put no limit on my thinking. I was an only child. They gave me the freedom to think and dream to be whoever I want to be. At first, I thought I wanted to be a dentist. I wanted to be Batman. Eventually, I became a rocket scientist. I was selected for the NASA Space Shuttle Team for the first fourteen flights. That was a great thing to happen in my twenties but it was born out of that age six experience where my parents took the lid off and said, “You can be anything you want to be, son.” I was the first child in our family to ever go to college. Now I have two doctoral degrees. I overdid it.
It is amazing that statement because it's true. Sometimes it feels like I'm living in a video game because you can make the decision to be whatever it is you want to be, doctor, lawyer, heart surgeon, space shuttle astronaut. There are a couple of limitations along the way. If you’re 4’5” you might not make it in the NBA. There are some 5’10” people who've made it in the NBA just fine. It’s pretty neat that you shared. What have you loved most in your career? Fourteen space shuttle launches, that's compelling. I have to believe that was rewarding. What's the most rewarding thing you've witnessed?
Finding Happiness: If you can release abundance, God can heal your land or your business because he feeds the birds. He takes care of everything else with his abundance.
What I learned was I wanted to do two things in my life. I was pretty settled on that from an early go. I wanted to fly high-speed aircraft and I wanted to have my own business. I went to NASA to fly as a mission specialist but the policies and politics of the day made me a rocket scientist instead. Even though it was historic to be there and be a part of that, every time I watched somebody into space, I was making their dreams come true and mine weren't. For me, I knew I needed to make the transition. In the mid-'80s or 1993 to be exact, I made the transition to being in business for myself. I moved from Colorado then where I was at because I was part of Star Wars also. I came down to Birmingham where I've been ever since.
That's where I am in Colorado for the last few years. I grew up here. It’s a small world. Honeywell, I remember, was a big location out here. I drove by the white globe and I was like, “What the heck is that for? A lot of us face some challenges in life. At a young age, you faced your dad going through open-heart surgery. That's very early. What other speed bumps along the way were at the time it felt like, “I'm never going to get over this mountain,” but you did because you're here now. Tell us about a challenge you faced. How did you overcome it?
It's great that my parents took the lid off if you will. It also created an idealistic view of the world in the sense that I believed everybody told the truth. I believed everybody would do what they said they would do, that nobody had an agenda. Unfortunately, once you launch a few businesses, around a lot of that activity you realize that that's not necessarily true. I would say to you that one of the mottos that I put on all my proposals from my customers is the reason they hire me is that I've made more mistakes than anybody else. I know where the potholes are. I think life is about a journey of mistakes, not necessarily a journey of successes. As long as you learn from them, you can be successful.
I wholeheartedly agree. You never make the shot you don't take and you're going to have some misses along the way. Learn from the misses. Some of your biggest misses can be some of your best rewards because that's when God shows up is when you have a miss in a lot of ways. Let's talk a little bit about that. The difference between God's abundance plan and the world's scarcity plan. What does that mean to you? Share more with our audience?
In our country and really in the world nowadays, we're in crisis. It's because we're confused. We aren't grounded in those things which would hold us steady. For those of us who are believers, that will be Christ and the Bible. No matter what you believe in, you need to be grounded in something. If you're not, the old country song is if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for everything. That's the situation that we're in in our country, we're believing a lot of stuff that is not true. We have trusted for 250 years that the economic models created by Adam Smith and guys like that, what's called the Law of Supply and Demand or the scarcity model would drive our country to greatness and it did.
Nowadays with the giants that are out there, big tech, big business, big banking, big media, we're finding that it's being manipulated. We're living in a manipulated world. As a result, we have a thing called manipulated scarcity where things are not as bad as they say they are. For example, a few weeks back, there was a ransomware attack against the pipeline and that caused the price of gasoline in the Eastern Seaboard to go up dramatically. That was resolved within one week's time. In fact, the money was spent back. There was no loss yet. Nearly a couple of months later, the price has never gone back down. They knew people would pay that price. They left it there. The Law of Supply and Demand isn’t working anymore.
What we're finding is that the average human being is not getting what God intended. God says that each one of us is created equal at the cross. What that means is that we all have value. What we've been translated to is an expense on the balance sheet. I'm completing several years of research in this area of what we call abundance. It's based on Leviticus where we hear that there's a field and the farmer sows this field. The Bible is pretty silent on the field itself. If you think of a field as a business, an organization, a group or whatever you want to think of it. What it says is those corners and edges are to be left for those that aren't quite capable of taking care of themselves. Those edges are referred to as excess. Another word for excess is abundance. The thinking here is if we can release that abundance, God can heal our land because he feeds the birds. He takes care of everything else with his abundance. Why couldn’t he take care of us? He loves us more than he loves them, if you will.
I'm 100% on board with everything that you said. It's an interesting story. We launched this app called 77Pray. We've been working on it for a few months and the Apple Store declined it twice and our developer said, “In ten years of doing this, I haven't gotten a monthly subscription app passed because it's very difficult to meet the threshold.” I walked out on my patio, I prayed and I said, “God, the country and the world needs you. I asked you for a miracle earlier this year.” I said, “Give me a miracle that shows that you're moving in this country, something that you can't define as anything other than a miracle again.” I asked for a similar prayer in February 2021. I've never asked for a miracle in my life. In February 2021, I did get a miracle because my son was healed from a bad burn. I asked again, show me a sign. A few minutes later, I come into my computer. I look at it. It says, “Your app has been approved.” Has it been a few years?
Who knows will we have an impact on the country? Maybe or maybe. I've been following God's guidance on this. I believe there's a purpose for this. A lot of people living in life are like, “I can't really make a difference. I'm just a number out of the 300 million people.” If everybody sat back and said, “I'm just a number,” then nothing would get done. That's the purpose of the app is to help people connect to God. It's free to connect to God. You just fold your hands and you ask. I hope a lot more people will do that as a result of this day and this app that was launched into the world.
Congratulations and that's fantastic.
God is good and abundance is there if you ask. What about the intangible asset value as it relates to projects and people?
Historically one of the things that are being debated in the media is that there needs to be some reparation or whatever for this idea of slavery. They're caught up in this time when there was slavery. I don't think there's a person in our country that wouldn't say that was not a good time in our country. The times were different then. The economics was different then but it still was not the right way to deal with things even though there are more slaves in the world now than there were then. That's an interesting statistic. The last book that I've written is called Escaping Economic Slavery. What I realized is that we intellectually or as humans create more value with our brains than we do in most in any other way. I'll give you a classic example. In the name of free, we exchange our ideas and thoughts on websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and others like that. They provide us the ability to connect to other people but then they monetize our intellectual property for billions of dollars.
They don't share. The definition of slavery is that when the master provides you your house and your food, the definition of economic slavery is when the master expects you to pay for your house and your food. We are at a place where we live in a world where everything's a little topsy-turvy. It needs to be rethought through. Socialism isn't the answer. We know that leads to dictators. We need democracy or specifically republic-type thinking because that brings freedom but we know that we need to also unleash the full human potential of God's children. One of the things I'm working on is a concept called sharing capitalism. It's a double meaning. We're going to share our capitalism with other people but the other one is learning how it starts with giving first and receiving second.
Finding Happiness: Slavery is when the master provides you, your house, and your food. Economic slavery is when the master expects you to pay for your house and your food.
That idea of sharing capitalism, we're implementing in several different programs already in the country. What we're finding is it worked in the past, interesting enough is among universities because when they come together to collaborate, they don't know how to share. We're showing them how that they can work together and share. What we're finding is the normal twenty-year cycle to develop technology has been shortened to five years and that is bringing us back to competitive. That's solely on the brainpower of people coming together and making a difference. That's one example.
Talk to us about franchising. You've had a lot of experience in that area. What's going on in franchising these days? Is it a growing industry? I would expect.
Depending on who you ask between 3,500 and 4,000 concepts, brands out there, it's been that way for many years. What happens is about 500 new brands enter the market every year and about 500 brands leave the market every year. There are a lot of reasons for that. Most recently, we're seeing COVID be a great impact as it relates to brick-and-mortar businesses in general because a lot of them had to shut down for nearly a year and they weren't independently wealthy. They succumb to that pressure. In reality, it's making a better evolution. We're seeing businesses become more streamlined. It’s like after a hurricane. I lived in Northwest Florida and when a hurricane would come through, it would clear out all the brush underneath all the trees and a few trees along the way too. It would be open, fresh and new again. All that wilderness was gone, the clutter was gone and it was now clear.
Even with COVID, that's what we're seeing. We're seeing that there's been a great clearing take place. Now there's room for new ideas. For example, you'll start to see fast-food restaurants or quick-service restaurants as they're referred to be double drive-thrus now. There won't be much in-place dining because most people eat in their cars nowadays unfortunately because they don't keep their lives in balance. They're running here and yonder trying to do everything possible they can while talking on their phone and doing all those other things. It's evolving to take care of that. We've seen great significant growth in service-based franchises. Everything from mowing your yard to cutting your hair, you name it. If it's a service out there, somebody figured out how to franchise it.
Now we're seeing the new digital base franchise coming out of the digital layer and that was a little weird and complicated because there are already a lot of these done for you ideas and social media. It'll take a little while for that to evolve through. Eventually, what you get with franchising are three things. You get a brand that people trust, you get a business system that works and you get training that teaches you how to do the business. That's what people need that are not entrepreneurial enough to do it on their own and they don't want to be an employee anymore. They sit in that middle and they need a little help to get themselves going. I think that's where franchising brings strength to the business model. It's not for everybody but it's for a lot of people.
A friend of mine has one in Dallas that has maybe 5 or 6 locations. It's a specialty fitness one. It's Hot Yoga. He bought it right at the start of COVID from the prior owners. They were shut down for several months but it's all blue light and whatever that is, that ultraviolet. It ended up being good timing during COVID for that business. He's partnering up with I think it might be the Nothing But Kinks guys or they may have exited, they're doing the next big one. He may be taking that concept to a bigger level with some backing.
What I've been fortunate to do is I’ve taken over 300 concepts, approximately 10% of the industry. We've been the ones to develop them. A few of our clients have made the Holy Grail of franchising, what you call the Franchise 500. What we did was find a way to cut the cost of franchising in half so that the average person could afford to take their great idea and use franchising as a vehicle to lift their brand in the market.
There are two sides. What's the cost to the franchisee? I've heard $250,000 as a pretty normal level and then there's the cost to the franchisor who invests to build it. Talk to me about both of those.
The Franchise Disclosure Document, which describes these costs and there are 23 items in every FDD and item seven discloses this budget. There's a franchise fee, which is a license fee to buy the brand. The remainder of it is to open your location or to operate your business. It's broken up into those two parts. The average franchise fee in America is between $25,000 and $35,000. Depending upon the type of business it is, it ranges from $30,000 to open to as high as millions of dollars in the case of a hotel. Generally speaking, you're right. $250,000 for the average brick and mortar franchise and probably under $100,000 for the service-based franchise.
That makes me think about Living a Better Story because we're really thinking of rolling it out. I think the benefit is my day job outside of the foundation is that I'm an expert at outreach to people on LinkedIn, email, voicemail drops, on all of the above. I've learned like, “If I come into your town and you want to open a chapter for Living a Better Story, don't worry. We'll help you get all the guests. We'll give you the curriculum. We'll make it very simple for you like a 26.0 check at your local grease monkey. That's how it's got to be.
There are three ways to get a business, you can build it from scratch. You can buy it from somebody else who built it from scratch or you can borrow someone else's system. Franchising is that third part where you borrow somebody else's idea and you clone or copy their success.
Last couple of questions. If over the next few years you're back on the show and you say, “Chad, that was the most amazing few years I've had.” Looking back, what's happened for you? My newest mission for Living a Better Story and for the app we just launched, I'm watching this show called The Chosen, which is amazing. It's good. The picture of the gray fish going around in the circle and the blue fish flips and then it flips. If you notice on the last screen, it's thirteen not by accident. The number 13, 1 plus 12. That's my new mission in life is how do I flip more gray fish and make them blue? That's the brick. That's the scorecard for me now. Thinking a few years out, what would that look like for you?
I'm starting to acquire an existing foundation. I'm launching a foundation which I'm going to call The Center for Collaborative Sharing. It would be my hope that the 10 or 12 initiatives that we eventually hope to do there, the first one will be corners and edges. How do we find the abundance and release it into people's hands that need it? We want to be able to do that. A few years from now, my teachings, my books, my advocacy in the marketplace have inspired enough people to participate in one way or another. If that thinking got moving forward, I would have been able to bless a lot of people through the foundation and I would say my work was much better than it has been.
Finding Happiness: There are three ways to get a business. You can build it from scratch. You can buy it from somebody else who built it from scratch. And then there's franchising.
Let me know how I can be helpful because on the outreach side for people that are doing God's work, we're doing things at cost. It's 80% lower costs than the market. I’m happy to help in any way I can.
We'd love to do that. My wife's ministry is called Be the Remnant. She's training up what we believe is God's remnant in preparation for those times. We're going to use the foundation of that as well but we look forward to working with you in any way we can.
God's put me on these calls. What's most exciting to me is that I'm talking to people from all different backgrounds that have different belief systems. It doesn't matter if you're on the left side of the aisle, the right side of the aisle or the center. The common language is to be a good person and follow God. Even someone on these coasts that competed against Stacey Abrams is potentially going to be on the show. She didn't make the last recording but I think she's going to. Focusing on what's important, God's love, forgiveness and grace. That's another interesting stat. Atheists that don't believe in God at all, on a scale of 1 to 10, have a certain level of satisfaction in life, stress, anxiety, etc. What he said and I believe him because he did work with Billy Graham Foundation.
A Christian who's rooted in the Old Testament, you have to comply with all these 613 laws or you're a bad person, is slightly lower, higher anxiety than an even an Atheist. The Christian who believes that they have grace and that's where it all starts from is by far standard deviation above both of those. Nothing's wrong with Christianity from the Old Testament perspective. However, if you haven't found that you're a good person because Jesus died for you then you're living in a level that you're not realizing your full capabilities and your full level of happiness. That's what I came to the conclusion of.
I'd agree with that 100%. Those rules back in those days, most of them were societal in nature. They were about keeping things clean, keeping people healthy and helping society form in general. From what was a travel approach to things became cities, villages and such as that. We have a more perfect way now which is Christ, His way of teaching and how that should help us to be better people. We call it the seven F’s. I maybe leave you with this thought. Living a balanced life is probably something all of us who've been in business at one time or another don't do. We identified these seven F's and as what it takes now. A two-way balance is tough enough, a seven-way balance is a bit challenging.
We found that if you focus on these seven things, you learn something. If you focus on your faith and faith without works is just a dream and it's dead. You have to put your feet to your faith, family, your function, your work, your fitness, your finances, fellowship with others and have some fun. What we learned in this whole process is that if you ask most people, you put 100 people in a room and we've done this. You ask them, you'll find that they're really good at two of them. It's almost always function and finance if it's business. What you find is that you ask them what will be the score. After a little while of thinking, they all come to reality. It's better to be a three in all of them because you're in balance than seven in anything.
It reminds me of going to work out, which I did decades ago. I do from time to time now, we'll get back on it very soon. I would stand on this thing for core. To your point, at first it would knock you off this little roll ball thing. Over time as you start doing these exercises, it strengthens the core. When you're talking about the seven competing prayers, it's not just 1 or 2, it's 7. It's similar to that balance of the core or the tire is what I've seen before if you draw the spokes, if you've got a flat somewhere. To your point, most people have 5 out of 7 of a flat tire. That's not a good thing. It's not going to roll down the road.
Especially if your life is coming from those five that you don't have balanced. Sometimes if you back off the things that you're driving hard on and bring some of the others up, you'll find peace. You can then hear God tell you how good life can be.
I went from making a lot of money as a VP with software companies on the backend and on the front end. I was not very good at saving it but that's a different story. My point is I decided a few years ago to start my own business and dropped by 80% of what I make. There are way more salespeople who make a lot more money than I make. From a balanced perspective, building this app, launching Living a Better Story, I'm way more complete and satisfied in life as a result of doing that. It might start a bit 3 out of 10 and then it goes to a 4 and a 5. Before you know it, that tire’s a 20 out of a 10 and that's when you're living in God's purpose for you and in your own individual fingerprint, that's where things are going to continue to get interesting.
Absolutely, finding your purpose, that thing which God made you do, figuring out who are going to be your mentors. What are your divine assignments to teach you how to do that thing which God asked you to do? Reaching that place of convergence where you get to do that which God has asked you to do. It doesn't stop there. You got to come back and teach others what you did.
We've talked to Robert Needham, whose dad was the first person to have open heart surgery, who helped launch fourteen space shuttles into space, the very first fourteen missions. He's here sharing his testimony with us that none of those matter if you don't have God and Jesus in the center. You can be happier, more complete. What an amazing conversation, an amazing person we've just talked to. That's what Living a Better Story is all about. Robert, thank you so much for joining. This has been amazing.
Thanks, Chad, for having me. I really appreciate your message here and your mission also.
We're going to franchise God's love into eternity. I look forward to doing that with you together. Signing out. We'll catch you on the next episode.
Important Links:
About Robert Needham
SPECTRUM Advanced Markets, Inc. (SAMI) was formed in 1995 by Robert A. Needham & Associates which started in 1986. Dr. Robert A. Needham is a published author, speaker, national trainer, business advisor, strategic planner, visionary, analyst, and coach. Dr. Needham is the inventor and author of Sharing Capitalism™, the Collaborative Value Exchange System (CVES), and pioneered the Collaborative Sharing Agreement (CSA) which is referred to as the “smarter contract.”
Dr. Needham is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. He was part of the NASA Space Shuttle Power Flight and Ascent Team, Unified Space Command Operational Plans, and Requirements, and other classified space assets. Dr. Needham is a mathematician, computer scientist, Juris Doctor, has a Ph.D. in Business Administration, and is certified Instructional Systems Designer (ISD).
