Aaron Walker is the Founder of View from the Top, where he offers professional life and business coaching services. He also moderates and facilitates twenty weekly mastermind groups, including Iron Sharpens Iron. Aaron coaches both existing entrepreneurs and those aspiring to become successful entrepreneurs to grow their success and significance.
Aaron has been an entrepreneur for the past 42 years. He built eight successful businesses, including Broadway Pawn Shop, which he started when he was 18 years old and later sold to a Fortune 500 company for seven figures. He also created and ran American Diamond Exchange, a multimillion-dollar construction company, among many others.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Aaron Walker talks about how he and his grandkids turned Black Friday into Gratitude Day
- Why anonymous random acts of kindness are priceless
- How to pay it forward even when you don’t have money
- Starting a circle of gratitude
- The impact of giving back
- How to start random acts of kindness
In this episode…
What are you grateful for? We’ve all been asked that question at some point, and we often come up with a list of things we are thankful for, which is excellent. But what if we could do more than just say it? What if we could show someone else how grateful we are through random acts of kindness?
Anyone can take part in random acts of kindness — because you don’t need to have a ton of money to start a cycle of gratitude and generosity. Sadly, not many people remember to do it, and when they do, they are not sure how best to go about it. But don’t worry, this episode has you covered.
Listen to this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast with Dr. Jeremy Weisz featuring Aaron Walker, the Founder of View from the Top. They discuss why Black Friday means Gratitude Day for Aaron and his grandkids, why it matters, and how you too can start doing random acts of kindness.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- View from the Top
- Aaron Walker on LinkedIn
- Aaron Walker’s Email: [email protected]
- 101 Random Acts of Kindness
Special Mentions:
Related Episode(s):
- “Terracycle.com: How to Make Money from 1.5 million Cigarette Butts & Save The World with Tom Szaky”
- “Developing Sustainable Solutions from Beer Waste with Dan Kurzrock Co-Founder of ReGrained”
Sponsor for this episode
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Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
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Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.
Insider Stories from Top Leaders & Entrepreneurs…
Episode Transcript
Jeremy Weisz 0:19
Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of InspiredInsider.com, I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders and how they build their businesses, the challenges everything in between. I always encourage people to check out more episodes, I’m gonna introduce Aaron Walker in a second. Aaron I always like to point people towards other episodes of the podcast. And since we’re gonna be talking right now we’re talking what is Aaron Walker’s typical Black Friday, it’s me, probably not what you think. I like the TerraCycle i The Founder of TerraCycle on there, and I look at giving back giving back to the environment to you know, the social economy. righe, the Founder of rig ReGrained Daniel Kurzrock. And they take waste from brewery brewing companies, the spent grain and create stuff out of them. So check out that many more and the episode is brought to you by Rise25 at Rise25 We help b2b businesses launch and run podcasts really what we ultimately do errands we help people give to and connect to their best relationships. I look at podcasting as a way to give to my best relationships, profile them the companies that they work with what they do their thought leadership and tell the world what they do. So if you’ve thought about doing a podcast thing, Aaron’s been on more podcasts than anyone I’ve known, but if you thought about doing one, you can go to Rise25.com Email us we’ve been doing it for over a decade. And so ask us any questions that you choose that you like, and Aaron Walker is a Founder of View from the Top, you can go Viewfromthetop.com check out Iron Sharpens Iron Mastermind, he coaches business leaders with with his over 35 plus years of entrepreneurship experience, eight successful businesses. His companies include Pawn Shops, they started when he was 18 sold the fortune 500 company called Cash America, USA 27 For seven figures, and he also started a multimillion dollar construction company that and much more. Aaron, thanks for joining me.
Aaron Walker 2:22
Jeremy, Listen, man, when I found that you wanted me to do this, went in and told my wife because I’ve been on a two month sabbatical and she hit the ceiling. She goes, Man, I thought you wouldn’t work. And I said, anytime I get a chance to talk to Dr. Jeremy, I’m going to talk to Dr. Jeremy because I so love being on your show. You just always bring so much energy. You’ve always meant so much to me over the years. And when we started talking about the topic that we’re going to talk about today. I said, You know what, that’s not working. And so I want to go and do the interview. So thank you for having me.
Jeremy Weisz 2:55
Awesome. Yeah. So this is we’re on Black Friday, right now. And so I want Aaron just to walk us through, and we are texting back and forth. I go, we need to do an episode, we need to episode today on this. So walk me through your Black Friday,
Aaron Walker 3:14
there. Let me give you a little backstory first about eight years ago, my two daughters came to me, Brooke and Holly have got a daughter 38 months 36. And at the time, obviously, you know they were 28 and 30. And they said, Hey dad, would you mind watching the grandkids? While you know robbing my wife, their mother takes them shopping? And I said listen, I’ll do anything to keep from going shopping like I’ll do anything you David, I’ll do it. She said, Well, I think watching your grandkids is something you would enjoy doing anyway. So at the time, there were four grandchildren now we have five. But they brought the children over early in the morning. It was like six in the morning. And they all call me big A and they said big A What are we gonna do today? And I sit there and I thought a minute I thought Man, it’s cold outside, we can’t go outside. And I said, Hey, you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna go today and do random acts of kindness. And they went, what is that? And I said, we’ll come on. And I’ll show you Jeremy, I have to admit on this show, I was making it up on the fly. I was like, hey, we’ll figure it out. So that’s morphed into what we call gratitude day. And we do it every Black Friday. And we’ve been doing it for eight years now. So I’ll share with you what that looks like. And I’ll tell you a little bit more about how it started in a few minutes. So what we do, Jeremy is we think about other people, something that we should be doing every day anyway. Right? But it’s very intentional. What we do. And what we started doing in the earlier days is that we would go to a restaurant, a local restaurant, it’s a waffle house, many of you’ve eaten at the waffle houses down the interstate. So we went in and we sat there and we said, hey, you know, we want to anonymously pick up you know, the other checks here and there. Restaurant and the waitress said all of them, I said, well just give us that table that table starway. That’s what we started doing. So we did that. And then they said Big A, what are we going to do now? And so we would go to the nursing home, we went by Walmart, we have a quick question. Yes, you stick around to see the reaction at all, you know,