Part 4: Transcript of Jeff Dedrick's In Search Of Heroes Interview" by Ralph Zuranski
Ralph Zuranski: What did you get?
Jeff Dedrick: I ended up getting a Lexus. Man is that a lot better than my Jimmy. (laughter) I wish that I would have been dreaming a couple of years ago and bought a better car. Now, after I’m driving it this thing is sweet!
With me I looked it up. I found out my neighbor had a sister-in-law that sold Lexus’s. I got her on the phone and she showed me models that are available. Three days later she drove it up to me from Iowa. I had never even test driven it.
I jumped in it five minutes before I signed the paperwork and it was done. Usually I don’t dream, but when I do want something I react pretty quickly to it.
Ralph Zuranski: Do you feel it is important to make positive statements about yourself and the type of person you are and your goals?
Jeff Dedrick: Here is another one that I’m weird at. I’ve never done that. I’ve heard that it is so powerful to write down your goals. I need to start doing that because even opening up those businesses myself and a business partner we never wrote down goals. We never even came up with business plans.
The only time we ever had to kind of do something financial was when we would go in for a loan from the bank. We would have our account and we would throw together our financial figures and present it to them. We never do business plans or goals in business or even in personal life just because we would be taking action. We would be too busy taking action to maybe write them down.
Maybe I could have achieved a whole lot more. I have been just recently writing down more personal goals. This is what we want to do with the family. This is vacations we want to take. I want to do this and that and this just because before you know it you can blow off a whole summer and you didn’t even go anywhere.
Some of the things I’m writing down now are more personal. Up to this point I’ve either been lazy or stupid or I just never did it. (laughter)
Ralph Zuranski: Do you take time out of your day to feed your subconscious positive thoughts about you, your goals and your dreams.
Jeff Dedrick: There again, maybe I’m just weird. I just don’t do that. I just take action. My business partner is really good at taking action. If he had an idea we would talk about it on the phone and we would be kind of lazy. We had offices in our fitness club and we’d call each other even though it was like a 30-second walk to the other office.
He would call me about an idea and we would hang up. When I would see him an hour later he had already made like five phone calls and made three connections and already had an idea about what we should do. He was really good at that.
Ralph Zuranski: You know, I think that is probably true. A lot of people are so busy having positive thoughts and dreams that they never do take action.
Jeff Dedrick: Yeah, yeah. That might be true.
Ralph Zuranski: Do you have the courage to pursue new ideas? I know for a lot of people it is hard to change their lifestyles and receive the amount of fear and abuse that their family and friends will put on them when they change where they are at. Do you think it takes courage to pursue new ideas?
Jeff Dedrick: It definitely would. If you are surrounded with negative people or if you’ve grown up around negative people, it would be kind of tough breaking out of that.
Even though my dad was just hardworking blue collar type guy, working at the General Motors plant here in town, I did see him doing side businesses. It was always in my mind that, "Hey you don’t always have to work. You can do other stuff."
So, he had a gardening service, rotor-tilling, and lawn thatching and he did little stuff like that. I think seeing that, it just became second nature for me to pursue a new idea at the drop of the hat. It doesn’t seem strange to me at all because I’ve always been around that.
Ralph Zuranski: Were you willing to experience discomfort in the pursuit of your dreams? It doesn’t sound like you’ve had much discomfort. Do you think it’s a good idea?
Jeff Dedrick: I’m sorry, what?
Ralph Zuranski: Do you think it’s a good idea to be willing to experience discomfort?
Jeff Dedrick: Oh, definitely. I guess it is different levels. When me and my buddy took off we could have definitely easily gotten jobs right out of college and started making money right away. Instead we jumped in a car and literally we drove out, we already had the city of Corvallis, Oregon. That was already our city to put a store in.
It was just a matter of going out there, finding a space and getting the store built. Here we are driving across the country. We get there. We’ve got to stay in a hotel room before we find a place to stay and all we’ve got is we brought a chair. We brought a little TV to put the TV on top of the chair. We both had pillows and maybe a sheet and that’s all we had.
Then also, just the process of living off of nothing literally until we could get that first store up, looking back at it, it was a discomfort. It could have been a lot easier staying at home and looking for a job and then moving out and making money first but because you are in the middle of it it’s so exciting that you don’t even think about it. I’m definitely willing to experience the discomfort of leaving maybe that job.
I mean, selling my fitness clubs, we were bringing in over two million a year. Obviously that’s not all profit. You’ve got high costs in a gym but it’s pretty steady. It would have been real easy to just stay on but I was getting bored, plus I was tied down having 100-plus employees and that was causing me some discomfort.
In a way I move from the discomfort even though it is short term. Long term now I can set my own hours, I can do anything I want. It’s kind of nice.
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"Jeff Dedrick Is an Amazing Person Who Has Been Successful In Most Of His Business Adventures Thanks To His Own Hard Work and the Self-Confidence Instilled In Him While Growing Up By Dedicated Parents Who Created A Nurturing Family Environment Based On Honesty, Integrity, Trust and the Belief That Actions Must Be Consistent With Your Words"
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Less than a year later Jeff has a successful and growing online business and has quickly made his mark on the internet scene. The launch of his first site at http://www.SecretArticleConverter.com was an instant success. We actually reached my one month goals in the first 6 hours, Jeff stated.