Codie Sanchez: They're Lying To You About How To Get Rich! How To Turn $1,000 Into $1M! Hard Work Doesn't Build Wealth!

Can I Get Rich If I Just Have A Sonner? Yeah, if you want to make a couple million dollars? 100% And can everybody do that? Yes. It's only not accessible to you. Here are lazy pieces of f***ing to nothing. None of us is rocket science. What'd you do? So start with Codie Sanchez has taken her experience from Wall Street to become a multi-millionaire investor and business owner. And now it teaches millions of people how to make money and be financially free. Codie, if I'd set you the challenge of building your wealth from scratch, what'd you do? Okay, step one. You get with the biggest bad

guy or guy you can find who's already successful and you do everything possible to provide value to them. And by the way, it sucks. But the best advice for a 20-year-old is to realize that your 20s do suck. But everybody focuses on how much money you make and start doing entrepreneurship too early. Now, you can be a 20-year-old and drive a Bugatti and play around with crypto. Huge mistake. Focus on learning. And you're gonna have no time for anything except what your boss asks of you. But if you want to win and be successful in life, up front pain always leads to long-term gain.

What could I manipulate and motivate you into giving me a shot? If you want to get in front of a rich, powerful person, start with where'd you go from there? The make as much money as humanly possible from your salary and invest in other side deals, such as what I call gateway drug businesses. The business so simple that you can run it even if you've never run a business before. But how can I buy a business? I'm gonna have to wait till I'm rich. Well, there's actually way more opportunity than anybody realizes because there's three ways to buy a business. One is... This is a sentence.

I thought I'd say in my life, we've just hit seven million subscribers on YouTube. And I want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations from the bottom of my heart, but also on behalf of my team who you don't always get to meet. There's almost 50 people now behind the diorama CEO that work to put this together. So from all of us, thank you so much. We did a raffle last month and we gave away prizes for people that subscribe to the show up until seven million subscribers. And you guys love that raffle so much that we're gonna continue it.

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Okay, if you couldn't encapsulate your message into a sentence, what would that sentence be? But also, who exactly would that sentence be for? It would be the only way to have freedom is through ownership and the world doesn't want to give it to you. And that message is for every human who's felt disenfranchised and is a little bit of tired of other people directing their lives and wishes that they had their hand on the helm instead.

And I think in today's day and age ownership is something that people on high say is bad, you know, fuck the big guys, the rich people, the owners. And in reality, that's just them saying they want to be in charge and said to you. Who isn't your message for? Who will it just not resonate with and work for?

Black rock, black stone, most billionaires who already know this. I mean, I think that is the answer, though, the message will not resonate with people who think that they should own everything and other people should ask for permission.

It won't resonate with people who don't want to work kind of hard, sucks to be an owner, anybody who's ever run a business has felt inside that horrible feeling on Friday when you don't have enough cash and payrolls coming in and you've got to figure out what to sell or what to give up in order to pay your employees. That's an awful feeling. So it's not for people that aren't willing to do the hard thing, but you know, it kind of goes back to what we know to be true. It sucks being broke.

Just as much as it sucks work in hard and so choose your heart. Your message has resonated really profoundly with millions and millions and millions and millions of people you've got an audience of millions of people across all of your social media channels. It appears that you've hit culture and the zeitgeist with a particular message in a particular time. Do you spend much time reflecting on why your message is so resonant right now?

That's interesting. It's hard right now to not think about politics in some way, shape or form. And so I think when I think about politics today, what I really think about is who's in charge, right? And so I do think about why does one politician hit a chord? Why does one not? And I think when I think about my message, what hits me closest to home is that for some reason, a message right now is feeling true for many people in the world that there's a lack of trust.

Like trust in institutions, trust in governments and corporations in the media. You know, I saw yesterday an article about CNN. This is fascinating. How many views do you think CNN got in prime time for one week, three hour segments every day, prime time for one week in May? What do you think? One show. One show, three hours for a week. The cumulative of three hour show. Correct. Five million maybe other day. 83,000. That's crazy. Lowest level of all time. Fox at the highest was 186,000.

Think about what is happening right in front of us. The media is no longer actually reaching the masses because they've lost complete trust with them. In fact, 30 year olds right now for the first time ever. 30 year olds have more trust in you, social media influencers than they do the mainstream media. It's not the same for all age groups. But that is what I am seeing right in front of us is we're like, show me what's real because I do not trust puppets who parrot things from teleprompters.

They know that you and I are having a real conversation. There's no teleprompter in sight. When you look at your notes, you look at your notes. It's real. And I think that is what I'm realizing with our message. We have to be honest because nobody trusts anybody right now. So if someone's just clicked on to this conversation for whatever reason, maybe they don't know who you are. Maybe they, you know, they're just clicking because they it's the routine that they have.

By the end of this conversation, what do you hope they come away with? What do you hope they're going to be able to implement into their lives following this conversation? How to make more money and why it matters that you make more money. That's really it. Because I think money is just a tool. It's a tool in your toolbox for you to be able to have more freedom to do more things and to say no more often.

To say, actually, I don't want to do that at all. And because I don't want to do that, I need money to push back. And so by the end of this conversation, I think you should have a few ideas to be a little bit richer and a little bit more free. And can everybody do that? Do you genuinely believe that every think about everybody you've ever, you know, and everybody that you've ever met? Does the advice that you offer fit all of them? Is it accessible and actionable for all of them?

I got says yes. It's only not accessible to you. If you're a lazy piece of shit that wants to do nothing, you know, if you really want only to be given things, you want to ask permission all the time. And you aren't willing to work a little bit earlier in the morning and work a little bit later in the evening, then you should turn this off.

Just like, I don't know what they're probably not watching you anyway. If that's this type of human, that's not you guys. But for that type of human, this isn't going to work because nothing that I offer is. Get rich quick or go go buy this stock. That's not work. But it is things that I think we knew early on somehow we got maybe lucky with a few mentors, but none of this is rocket science, which should be really free and for people to listen to. And who you. existential question.

You know, I'm a former finance investor for 15 plus years, investment banking asset management, who finally because COVID happened took a little breather realize that I didn't want to be like the managing directors that I saw all around me. And started writing stuff online because I wasn't doing road shows selling investments and investing people's money for a year, whatever that was. And because of that started writing about the things that I do.

And I kind of thought nobody liked the idea of owning laundromats and car washes and all of that. And it turns out a lot of people thought that was interesting. And I do think we kind of hit this site guy's of, you know, you saw it during COVID people left big cities, right there they bought houses in Cape Town or somewhere out in rural areas, right. They got away from the corporate job in office in suits and realized, God, I don't want a 75 minute commute.

I maybe want a little bit of fresh air into chicken coops, a lot of chicken coops these days. And so because of that, they got interested in these small businesses, these community businesses. And so I think I got a little bit lucky in the fact that that was interesting to me. I've done it for years. I've invested in those things forever. I started writing about on the internet. And then we got a lot of views.

And now, of sudden, there are millions of people that talk about buying these small businesses or what we call boring businesses. I want to get into that. But I want to start with something that I saw the other day on your Instagram, you wrote a post about your 20s and your earlier life. You said you think that your 20s suck. And that no one tells you that when you hit 30, you become happier. And you offered sort of 32 pieces of advice for people that are in that phase of life.

And focusing on in on your 20s with the benefit of hindsight now, when you think about how you played your 20s and how you suggest that maybe a child you have someday or a friend that is 20 years old should play their 20s. What is the best advice for a 20 year old.

The best advice for 20 or your old is to realize that your 20s do suck that you are probably drinking too much. You're hanging out with people that aren't the best versions of themselves. Neither are you. You've got crazy hormones going on. You're going to bars and hanging out with people having a few two or many drinks and then go into a job you kind of hate because you're brand new into the workforce.

And you're doing the worst thing humanly possible. And that's going to continue for like five to 10 years. Like you are going to do a $65,000 a year job for two or three years. And it sucks. And you're going to have no time for anything except what your boss asks of you. And I wish people had told me that because if you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you're like, Oh, okay, like I can do this for two or three years. I can learn. I can grow and I can suck it up for two to three years.

And after that, I get a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better. And so the advice would be when you have a foot in your nail, which is what it's like when you start your first job in 20.

Don't try to ignore the fact that it's painful. It's there. Like it's there. It's real. It sucks. And I wish somebody had told me that because these days, everybody's like, Oh, you can be a 20 year old and drive a Bugatti and, you know, I don't know, play around with crypto. Not real. Not real. And then once I learned like, Okay, this sucks. And I can deal with it. Then the next thing would be everybody focuses on how much money you make when you're in your 20s. Huge mistake.

The only thing you should focus on is learning. How can I think about my salary, like putting pieces of cash into my brain. How can I learn as much as possible? How can I come and work in a practice for somebody that I think I might want their life one day.

I'm going to take the minimum amount of cash that I need in order to fill my brain so that my next step can be to make more money. But in the beginning, too many people obsessed on money. And I wish I hadn't thought that way. I'd rather learn than earn when I'm young. Do you think there's a different amount of work and work ethic required in different seasons of life. So in your 20s, should you be working harder than when you're say 30, 40, 50.

You can't have the same stab stamina. I mean, I, you know, I was weightlifting the other day. And I was showing my less strong friend next to me, like, this is how you do a deadlift. And here's when I put another plate on there and the, you know, blew up my hip.

Now I'm in like back pain. And you know, on 37, I do not have the same stamina I had when I was 25 physically you decline mentally to you decline. And I think your work ethic declines too. And so, you know, you, it's really hard to keep going for 20 years at 12 hour long days.

You can do it, but it's much easier when you're 20. And so if you know that, then no, let's front load the pain so that in my 30s, we can have a lot of fun. You know, my husband, who you met is former Navy seal. And we always talk about how I think the only reason we're kind of successful is we just said, what are the worst jobs we can take when we're young where we can learn the most.

We can hopefully I think have something that's a resume builder. And then once we're in our mid 20s to late 20s, we can start reaping the fruits of our labor. But, you know, being a Navy seal sucks. You do it when you're young, you do all the worst things when you're young, but then for the rest of your life, you're a fucking former Navy seal.

You're set because you front load of the pain when you look back at your career, do you can you identify any sort of light bulb moments where you were exposed to information that caused a bit of a paradigm shift as it relates to how you think about wealth.

Because I had I've had a couple of moments and you know, to varying degrees, but some real standout moments where I saw someone operate I was exposed to how they made their money and how they built their wealth. I thought, fuck, nobody told me this. And I had the game wrong.

Yeah, has that been those moments in your life, for sure. I think the well, there's there's actually studies showing something called economic interconnectedness, which basically shows that say you have a poor neighborhood to the left, and a poor neighborhood to the right.

And the same socioeconomic status, so they both make them on the same amount of money. If this neighborhood just has a few rich people in it, even though on average, the neighborhoods are the same, and people in the poor neighborhood interact with rich people a little bit more on the left than they do on the right.

If you go 30 years down the line, the kids that just had a few more interactions with rich people are going to be richer on average by 35% than the people in the same neighborhood to the right, except with less economic interconnectedness. And so what that tells me is, as often as possible, you want to be around people who are richer than you.

And obviously, you don't have to be around them because it is contagious in some ways. Ideas are contagious. And this ability to see into the future, I think, is contagious.

And I think about it like you're driving in a car, the faster the car is going, the farther the headlights have to be able to peer into the future, otherwise you're going to blow off a cliff. And so I think when people are moving really fast, they have a lot of money, and they have big risk to the things they do, their headlights are just a little bit farther than the rest of us.

And so I got really lucky because I chose finance. Finance is full of people who are obsessed with money. I think there's a lot of ethical issues in that industry, but all around me were rich people. So I remember one instance really, really well. And that was, I was in Chicago at the time, I was working at Goldman Sachs and the head of the Chicago office was a guy, my name, Bruce.

And Bruce was a good guy. He ran the fixed income division. And after I left Goldman Sachs, I kind of stay in touch with a few people there, including Bruce. Well, one day I find out Bruce becomes the ambassador to Canada. I was like, Canada, I don't even know if Bruce had been to Canada. Like, he's not a, how did that happen? And so I started talking to a few other people and I realized, oh, you buy ambassadorships in the US.

And so you could Google right now and see what the average ambassador ship in the US costs the answer is about a million dollars directly donated to a president plus a couple million dollars donated in a pack. So Bruce bought the ambassador ship, which I thought was fascinating. And I was like, shit, I didn't realize that I was for sale. Like, that's it. You just buy those things. That's so bizarre. And with that flipped my perspective entirely to realize, oh, man, money really just is power.

And can you imagine how wide open your ability must be for abundance? If you're like, oh, yeah, I'm going to buy a position of authority in the world. Never even would enter my equation. When a lot of people think about money and they hear conversations about wealth, I think some people kind of cringe because they think of money as being quite an ugly thing.

And some people think it's quite an evil thing. The desire to accumulate more of it. They see as being, I don't know, selfish or some maybe manipulative or I don't know. So how do you square that for those people? I mean, first of all, I would just say you're never going to attract it if you don't like it. If you think it's evil, you're certainly not going to make much of it.

And that sounds touchy feeling. I'm from Austin and I kind of like crystals. So maybe that is a little touchy feeling, but it's the truth of the matter. It's just like women these days who say, all men are bad. I can't find a man. I don't like men anywhere. Do you think you're going to find one that way? You know, if you say things like that, are you going to be in partnership? Of course not. You're going to repel them because you don't even like them. It's the same thing with money.

It's very common sense when you think about it. So I always like to think about money as it's just that it's that tool in your toolbox. It's like, so do I want somebody else to have the chains are do I want it. Well, I'd rather have it because I think I'm a good person and I think that I could help more people with it. And so people really need to lose the emotional attachment to money, especially if it's negative.

I think there's a lot bigger issue with too many people thinking money is bad and too many people thinking money is good. And that's weird if you think about it because the opposite is usually what we're told, right? And in that analogy of it being like a woman looking for a man, but saying that men are bad, et cetera. And in that analogy, but also the analogy of money also need to feel like she's deserving of a good man. I do need to feel like you're deserving of money in order to attract it.

I mean, this may be strazen to things like manifestation and whatever else, but you know, do you have to feel like you deserve to be rich? Do you think in order to attract more money into your life? Does it change how you make your decisions? How you should negotiate? I think the truth of the matter is that if you want to attract things, the best way to get them is to be great yourself.

So if you want a great partner, be a great partner. You know, if you want to be rich, you need to start doing things where you're acting rich. And I don't mean by spending, but like what would a rich person do if they wanted to achieve X, Y and Z? Well, they probably work harder. They surround themselves with different types of people.

And, but that I realize there's so many people that do not believe in themselves and do have negative stories that have to break before they can take one tactic and do anything.

So I think you're right. First, you got to believe it. It is. It does feel like it's really the crux of all of this stuff because the evidence you have or don't have it, I guess forms what we call self belief in some people who, you know, with all the will in the world, they just can't believe in themselves because they have deeper systemic sort of self-esteem issues.

And then it ties into the conversation around like feeling like an imposter. And the reason I reference this is because I remember many years ago, as you were talking, a friend of mine saying that when he finally got some money, he just had a huge sense of guilt because his father had worked really, really, really, really hard and been paid a fraction of what he had the money he had made.

So he always had the sense of sort of guilt with his money like he didn't deserve it. Like he was an imposter potentially. And a lot of people struggle with that. I think it's for other people. Yeah, I mean, I do think like where your body goes, your belief follows. And so I was at this event for women. And it was pretty high up people in finance and only females in the crowd.

And it was the first time that I realized that a lot of people have a negative relationship with women because the facilitator asked everybody close our eyes with money with money. Okay. So the facilitator said, I want you to picture money. Put your eyes closed picture money and then have a visual representation with your body of how you feel when you hear the word money. Right.

So in my mind, I hear the word money. I go money like, yeah, give me more that like it big V, right. And yet when I looked at this, she said, freeze, open your eyes. And so let me open our eyes and we looked around. Could you imagine what most of these high power women looked like? It was like fetal position or like like money or like money or like money, just very small.

And that's when I realized, oh, of course they're not going to get a ton of it because that's their feeling with money. And so what she recommended that I have since done with a lot of the women that I've engaged with is say, when you think about money, all I want you to do.

Just make a big expressive movement with your body. Like, am I going to get that salary? Yes, I am. You know, do I want more of it? Give it to me. And I do think your body ends up really determining how your brain functions and Tony has talked about this and a lot of other people that have.

So maybe if you don't think you deserve money, I don't know how to fix your brain right away, but I do know how to fix your body, which is just make a big movement that tells your body that money is good for you. Don't make a protective small movement that makes you in fear. Make a big movement that gives you into abundance. And so I that stuck with me for a long time.

I find it interesting as well, thinking about who talks about money because men talk about money a lot. And I don't know, I don't know if women talk about money in private, but I know my my male friends are all talking about their money, their investments, et cetera. And I wondered if there's any sort of gender difference you've observed because you speak to so many people about gender differences as relates to money. Well, perfect example is our audience across socials is about 60 to 65% men.

And I'm a woman. And yet it's actually quite hard to get women interested and engaged on these issues. Interesting. And so, you know, I think a lot of women, first of all, they think it's a little a little cringed. And so, you know, there's not normalization of it. So, you know, you're there's never a group where women are getting together on the 19th whole of the golf course and talking about the deals that they did that week. It's very normal for men, right?

Where would women all get together to talk about their business aspects? I don't think there exists a container for that. I'm big on this belief that everybody should learn how to get money, especially if you're a woman. You don't have to go be a girl boss. And if you want to stay home and take care of the kids and be a tradwife, that's amazing. But understand where your money is located, understand how it's made and your family, understand how much things cost, what you spend.

And it is there's nothing more fun than making your first dollar on your own. It's very liberating. Do you think money seen as a masculine thing? Investing wealth creation. Do you think those are all seen as masculine? I mean, investment being in is 87.6% male. Oh, really? Yeah. The finance industry in general is 65% plus male. So, that would tell me, yes. It feels like a real inequality in society that the people that are working in finance are heavily male, but also finance and money is power.

Right. Well, I mean, time in career, right? I mean, they just have had longer to have access to that industry. And so I don't think there's some big conspiracy theory happening. I think what happened is women haven't had the right to work for as long. And finance is the highest paid industry of all industries that you could go into. It's also one of the most competitive. It also has one of the highest barriers to entry and number of licensing, graduate degrees, etc.

It's also one of the most competitive to get into those positions. And so of course, it's going to be dominated by those who have, you know, an unfair advantage from more time attempting to do this. I think if history shows us anything recently, there's going to be more women in it going forward.

So if I took you back then, if I took you back to your first dollar and I took away everything that you have, but also I take away all of your contacts, you can keep your brain, but you can't keep your contacts. And I set you the challenge in 2024 of building your wealth from scratch. What's what are the first things that come to mind to get you going? So you're in a studio apartment, you are broke, you have all the information you have, you have no contacts. What do you do?

I can or do I have to be funny. Okay. If I'm if I'm young, what do you ask that? Well, I think it's easier when you're young, if we're honest, when you're young, people who have money, they see themselves in you at an earlier date. If you got that hunger, I mean, one of our rules in hiring is hire people so hungry you're scared they might bite you. And so when you're young, you know, you you've had this happen, you meet a young man who's just got that fire, right?

He doesn't know anything, but you can just see in him that he will do whatever it takes. He's here before you, he's here after you, he's coming up with ideas, he's doing jobs to the point where you're like chill, bro, like that's not even your job, right? Couple of them in here. Right.

And what do you do with those guys? You're like, I'm going to help you. Why? Because actually you see yourself in them. It's like a weird selfish father and mother thing we have. Like I see you, I remember being you, I'm going to help you. And so if you're young, what I think you do is you get with the biggest baddest guy you can find or gal you can find. And who's already successful, who you think has the life that you want.

And you do everything possible to provide value to them. And that's probably a bunch of sweat equity stuff that's probably a bunch of bullshit in the beginning. But it's so rare. Like intense competence is so rare. And when you're young, I think you throw it away with these ideas of like quiet quitting and not engaging.

And then you notice your moment to show that fire. And then what happens is you're only going to need to do that for like a year or two with a few players. And you're going to move quickly. Because if you are with people who have a ton of resources, what is your biggest constraint in your business right now? Is it money? Do you not have enough money? Could you raise more if you needed it? Of course, do you need more attention? No, you get hundreds of millions of views.

Do you need more ideas? Probably not. You got a lot of them. What do you need? You need people. You need hungry little ankle biters that are willing to do whatever it takes. And so people don't like this answer. But it's not like I would do real estate. I would do poll it podcasting. It's go find a person who is so rich, but willing to give you a shot for as long as you can.

Okay, so let's zoom in on that then because someone's going to hear that now they're going to go call got it Cody and they're going to go on LinkedIn. They're just going to start peppering gold gates and Elon Musk, etc. You know what I mean? I just didn't work. Yeah. So what I'm thinking about reaching out to these individuals that are powerful.

And I guess we could frame it in the context of you. You're a very powerful woman. You've got lots of opportunities and probably less time than opportunities. So how would I get to Cody? Yeah. How could I manipulate you will motivate you into giving me a shot? Yeah, let's talk about two things. One, if you want to get in front of a rich, powerful person, start with concentric circles. So start with what's closest to you. So for instance, who's the richest guy on your block?

Who's the richest guy in your community? Who's the richest guy that you can get to or gal you can get to start there. There's no one there. There's no way. First of all, you're like seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. Right. So what I would say is it's just a number of this game. There's somebody. Maybe they're only making a couple hundred K a year, but that's like way more than you could ever imagine start there.

So that would be my first point. And I think about that like, you know, for instance, you go to school. So everybody goes to school in some way, shape, or form. Who do you know who also goes to your school? Who is the richest kid at your school? Can you get to their dad or their mom? Right. So try to get to who's closest to you that you can physically touch and you can actually engage with that human.

I would start there because it's lower stakes. So one, if the richest guy on your block or in your college that's a friend of your, you know, that's a dad of one of your friends owns a big sprinkler company that makes a couple million dollars a year. Start working with that. And while you're there, give yourself a deadline six months or a year learning at this level and then level up. Who's now the richest person times two X you can get to.

I think the biggest problem is people confuse fame with with being rich. They go after you and I were not the richest people. I mean, we do pretty good. But like we're not the richest. And by the way, who has more competition. Everybody's in your and my email inbox is just because we have a lot of followers. I would never go to an influencer and try to play this game.

I would go to the guy who runs a sprinkler company that nobody is talking to at all, but he makes a ton of money. And then you cozy up to this guy and you go, this is incredible. What do you do? You did this with sprinklers. How much does your company make?

Whoa, I want to be like you one day. Can I intern for you or apprentice for you? I'll do whatever you want. Do you know what that is going to feel like to a guy like that as opposed to me or you were going to be like, I don't have time. I have too many interns.

People where the water is the shallowest is what I would start with. It's so true because I am sure both of us get just hundreds and thousands of messages a year of people literally will stop me outside my office and say, remember this kid the other day with a week ago, stop me outside of our new office and said, he was

going to get outside there and he had his like, see being a little binder. And he was like, I will come in and I will just clean the floor. And I'm sorry, that's not a great pitch. Because I obviously I can't do that. I can't have someone come into my company unpaid, which is going to cause a whole PR disaster when that leaks out to the press, etc.

And you're I don't know what it was about that, but that doesn't necessarily make me think that you are tremendously valuable. If you're coming in and offering to make the team clean the floor personally. So I'm so compelled by what it is in that initial message that sometimes in your case will just get you to pause a second and maybe reply to the person in a C of DMs and messages. Is there something in particular that spikes you.

The only thing that spikes is some sort of expertise you and I are only interested really in one thing we are interested in somebody who has a understanding of the world that we don't that can take us one step further. Right. You don't need another floor cleaner. You don't need another driver. But if a young kid reached out to you and they said, hey, I've analyzed 542 YouTube videos of yours. Here are the thumbnails that actually work the best.

Here's a bunch that you have lately that I don't actually think work. Here's the data driven behind this. I actually put together a few mockups of it for you. And and I reached out to these three people that I think would be great to have on your podcast. Here's why and they've already agreed to it. If this is interesting, I just wanted to forward along this packet to you. You might be like, that's interesting. Okay.

What about last line you use that I just wanted to forward this on to you. Why is. Oh, yeah. You never want to expect something for a gift given. I call it the 10X rule. So I try to never ask for something unless I have given 10X 10X to a person. And we have that across our business too. I think you should do that with with young people. So when I was younger, I have a lot of people that I thought of as mentors.

They would never know they were a mentor of mine. And all I would do is I would ask them one question. So I wouldn't go to famous people, but I might go to a normal, you know, kind of high powered exact and finance or something. And say like, Hey, I was wondering, I saw you did this deal over here. I was wondering why you chose to invest in that company versus this company.

If you had time for a one sentence reply, that'd be amazing. And they might reply me one sentence, maybe one out of 10 people would. And then I would say, thank you. No need to respond further. This was really helpful. I'm going to go implement this in some way.

And then I would reach out to them in a couple of weeks. And I'd be like, Hey, that piece of information you gave me. I just did X, Y and Z with it. Really helpful. Thank you. No need to reply. Just letting you know that you made an impact. And that no need to reply. And me following up is so rare. I wish people realized that today that if you want something follow through is worth its weight in gold.

I mean, one of the other things that we do is when people reach out to us and say stuff like we'd like to do X, Y, Z for you, I say, read this book and I'll give them a random book. And I say, come back to me with a few X, Y, Z questions or things. How many people do you think actually come back? I mean, I think I've had five maybe. And so follow through is so rare. And what would happen with these people. And I still do it to this day. I had one guy who was, what was his role?

He was quite high up at a company called state street. And I can't remember what his role was. But he said to me one day I was in New York. I had played that game with him for probably years like, Hey, tiny little thing. One sentence of advice. Great. Thank you. Here's how I implemented it again and again and again. Maybe 20 times over the course of two years.

And finally I was in New York and he was in New York. And I pinged him and said I'd love to take you to dinner. I want to talk to you about a few things. It was so funny because as we sat down, he goes, this is the weirdest thing. And I thought, I don't know what.

And he said, I don't really know you, but I feel invested in your success. I was like, I know you do because I'm dripping on you for two years showing you that a tiny little action, which felt like nothing to you actually made a material impact on my life. And most people don't get to feel that way.

So I'm a young person. I'm Cody Sanchez without anything you've managed to get yourself nice and cozy with someone rich and powerful. You know, in their inner circle, you're learning from them. What way do you go from there? Yeah. Well, the first thing that I would do is you, if you look back at my resume, I think I stayed at most jobs for like a year and a half, two years max until I was at one called first trust where I was there for five years because I had ownership in the business.

And I felt like I had skin in the game. I had control of my outcome. But before then, I really only stayed in jobs about a year and a half. The second that they told me I couldn't progress anymore, or I couldn't have an option to make more money I left. And so in my opinion, the young generation does have it right that you should not stay at a job for 20 years, unless that job continues to allow you to earn more and to learn more.

And the second I wasn't earning more and the second I didn't feel like I could learn more exponentially, I left. So that's what I think they should do. And you basically are, you're kind of monkey bar in both how much you earn and what you can learn to your next position.

And I think that people too many people start doing entrepreneurship too early in my opinion, because you can learn on somebody else's dime as opposed to going out and doing the brutal awful thing that could put you 10 years behind because you lose all your money and you don't actually have enough knowledge to do the job right.

And then I work for a bunch of entrepreneurs for five or seven years. And then once you've been sure that you really want to be in the game and be an entrepreneur, then go do it. But that's what I do. I would leapfrog to positions of higher power. And then eventually I might become an entrepreneur and in finance, they have a really cool thing that I think more company should do.

And then you should leave your company you should try and we should play it with you. So when I left first trust, the first person who wanted to give me a check was my CEO. So I was like, I'm going to go do something else. I'm going to build something else. And he he wanted me out of the firm. He was like, I don't want you running the business how you're running it now.

But we left amicably and he said, I want to be your first investment. Like when you go looking for investors, I want to be it. And I think that is what employees should strive for try to get your boss to give you your first capital. And if you're a great employee, they're going to be happy to.

In order to leapfrog, you're going to have to do a lot of interview. So I just wanted to pause there and ask, you know, when you're interviewing people, what are the red flags. And if I was interviewing to join Cody Sanchez's business empire. What's the best things that I could say and do and what's the best behavior that I could exhibit in that moment.

Yeah, people will give you things when they think you know them more than they know you. And so what do I mean by that. I mean, nobody. I mean, our favorite word is our name, right. For every single one of us. And we all like to talk about ourselves more than we like to ask questions. It's just kind of true for most humans.

So if we know that to be true, what do you want to do in an interview. You want to go in and say, here's all the things I think I know about your company. I'm not sure because I'm not you. I'm on the outside. But this is what I think I know about it.

Really impressed by this. I think this is great over here. I'm curious about this. Can you tell me why you guys made this decision. The interview should be showing the interviewer that you know almost everything that there is to know about their company.

And it should be done with a lot of humility. Like I think that even if you're certain, I think is important. And the second that happens are ego gets to us. And I go, this guy's pretty smart. You're right. That was a good move that we did over there. And so that's what I think a lot of people don't do too many people do. Shotgun rounds, which is really wide going after a ton of different jobs as opposed to sniper shots.

Go after the three positions you want aggressively knowing everything about that company and that boss. You're much more likely to get it than just to apply on indeed. Is there anything else that is an immediate tunnel for you in an interview like an immediate red flag. If someone says something or does something. Oh, yeah. There's so many immediate not going to hire you if you talk badly about your last boss.

Because the way you treated your last person's probably going to be the way you treat me. Immediately not going to hire you. Second immediate not going to hire you is if you talk about all the reasons why something didn't work and it's not your fault. So if you're victim mentality at all. Well, this didn't work because of this. This didn't work because of this. Third in the interview is if you at all start talking about.

This one's a little inappropriate, but if you come into my companies and you say talk to me about work life balance. I'm not the place for you. Our companies are hardcore. There's not a lot of work life balance. We work hard. So I'm not going to hire you if you talk about how much time off are you texting on the weekends. The answer is yes.

The second point to that is I always make the job seem worse than it is. And so and a lot of people who hire try to sell the person. This is why it's so great. You should come here. My interview usually goes like this. Hey, I want to ask you a bunch of questions about your background. Then I'm going to tell you all the things that are really tough about this job. So you get the honest truth about it one way or the other.

So I'm going to wrap up with you with you asking any questions you want. Does that sound good? They go, yep. I kind of pepper them with questions about them. And they go, here's all the things that talk about this job. Here's all the things that are hard. Here's all the reasons why it hasn't worked to date. Any questions on that.

And the reason why is because I don't want anybody coming into my company and going, God, I thought it was going to be better than this. I want them coming in and going. Oh, okay. This actually isn't miserable. And at some point from leapfrog from one place to another and eventually you have enough, I guess intelligence to start by thinking about becoming an owner at some point.

How do I make that transition from being a team member or an employee to becoming an owner? If I only have a couple of thousand dollars, let's say, I mean, can I at that point? Do I need to become rich to become an owner?

First, I think, becoming an owner inside of a business is totally possible. And so you should ask your boss this question, which is in this business, if I am one of your top performers consistently and make myself materially important to the business, can I get some ownership in either this business or anything else that we do.

And I am willing to earn it or invest in it to do that. And so, for instance, at my companies, if you're one of the top performers, you can invest alongside me in some of our other companies. That's a finance model that I stole. So in private equity, the reason why people in private equity are so rich is because all the managers of the company have an opportunity to invest in the best deals so they can put some money in.

And there's allowances for people who aren't accredited investors, but our employees to actually invest, even though they're not accredited in the US, which is a really unfair advantage. And so I would ask your employer that question.

And then the second thing that I would do is I would try to see if you can earn still so you can W to earn. You can make as much money as humanly possible from your salary and then take the money from your salary and invest in other side deals. And I would do that before I ever jumped into my own business overall.

The problem, I think that came straight to mind when I think about that is when you start investing inside deals, you're going to make a lot of mistakes and you're going to lose a lot of money because seed investing is tough anyway. But especially if you have poor deal flow, are you you're not getting a lot of deals. It's just your mate Kevin who has this idea for an app. And he asked for 25k.

So you know, I say this because I had a fairly famous actor come up to me the other day who's very young in his career, made a lot of money. And he said, Steve, I don't know what to do with my money, etc. I don't know where to invest it because my mate has this app idea. And I go, oh, you know, that's the only deal he has on his plate. So he's giving his friend 25 or 50k for an app idea. So is that smart to do or.

Yeah, that's a great question. No, I think until you're rich and let's define rich as until you're a millionaire, I would do zero startup investing. I mean zero because it's a 90% failure rate. You only invest in startups when you want to get pretty rich because you can burn some capital in order to have a few home runs.

So instead I might go to something like we're an investor in this company, so full disclosure, but there's a company called percent where they allow you to invest in bond deals that cash flow for small businesses. You could also do equity deals in businesses that cash flow. So I would stay away from anything that isn't already profitable that doesn't already make money.

And I think once you have your first million, you can play that game. But until then you only want to do deals where you're cash flow. And so that's where I would start. You can start with something like percent. You could also start by talking to your employer, like I was talking about and say, hey, in this business that we have now, how could I earn some equity?

And the answer might be you can't like I don't give equity and contrarian thinking my media company because I want to own my name forever. I don't ever think I'm going to sell this thing. But if we have cash flowing laundromats and car washes. Yeah, you guys can invest in that.

If you're seeing as a marquee member of the team. So maybe find companies where that's allowed to just on that point, just curious. This is kind of a bit of a tangent. But if I'm a team member of yours. And because you said if you're a marquee member of the team. So what if I come to say, Cody, can I get a piece of that laundry mat? Yeah, you tend to me and go, no, you're not a marquee member of this team. Oh, yeah, for sure.

Well, that's what you say to me. Yeah, I would, yeah, I would say at this point, people who are allowed to have equity in the company are people that I think we're going to travel through time together. That means years or decades. So you don't think I'm going to travel in time with you. I'm not sure yet. I don't know you well enough yet. You've been here for a year.

You know, you run our social media accounts. You've hit goals, but you haven't absolutely blown them out of the park yet. You know, do you think that if you left the company right now, we would be unable to function without you. And the answer is usually like, no, probably not. Okay. So at this point, you're not a partner in the business yet. You're still an employee status.

But if you keep taking on more responsibility and you keep beating goals overall and you show me that the business is better and would lose steam without you, then absolutely you can invest. But I learned this from Jim Bowen at first trust. He did this beautifully. You had to pay into the partnership to become a partner.

You and that kind of sucked because you also have to pay taxes on partnership. And so not only do you not get money right away, but you have to spend money every year because your partnership value goes up and you have to pay taxes on it. But Jim made this big, this big feeling at the company about the chance when he offers somebody partnership. It was like a celebration.

And that is, I think, what we want to do in our companies. Same thing Warren Buffett does. You know, he allows his employees to have equity in his companies. But only those that he thinks he's going to travel through time with and Warren Buffett has had the same 37 employees. I think for like 20 years, it's fat. You can go look at their Christmas cards and nobody changes year after year after year. Can I get rich if I just have a salary? Do you think? Yeah.

You can't get on the Forbes 100 list if you just have a salary. But if you want to make a couple million dollars, 100%. I mean, Bruce, Bruce Bruce back at Goldman Sachs bought an ambassador ship and he was only ever a salaried employee got bonus to, of course, climbed the corporate ladder and is probably worth 100 million plus now. So what do I need to buy a boring business?

You don't, you don't need to. The problem is what if Bruce gets fired? What if your job doesn't exist? What if you're an attorney now and you make great wages or hours, but AI does take your jobs? What's your backup plan? So my backup plan might just be, I don't know, I own some at the MBS and I rent them out or something.

I could do that too. Airbnb is pretty volatile market. We've seen that now. And I think I like, I don't like risk. And so I think if you want to get rich, how do you get rich? You try to not lose money over time. And you try to have enough bets where you can have an outsized return at some point. So you could just own Airbnb's. You could just do real estate. I don't really care how people do it.

I don't think everybody should own a laundromat or a car wash, but I do think you should have a backup plan. So one day when you want to retire too, you got some extra income coming in. So if I've got tens of thousands of dollars or pounds, do you think, what do you think? What would you do with it? I was playing this game yesterday. There's three businesses I really like right now. I really like senior care centers.

Senior care centers, okay, which is interesting because you go Cody. I said tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but senior care centers are interesting because there's all these government grants and allowances for the fact that we do not have enough of them in the US. And you can turn a house with the right licensing and zoning into a senior care center. And so I won't get too technical on it, but demographics show we have a huge aging population.

We need more areas to take care of them. And you can start smaller by having an independent living house that has a rotating nurse. You make three to five X the rent on that as you do a regular midterm or long term rental. So I like the demographics of that one. Plus it's not super capital intensive because you could rent the house out from somebody else and then just layer this assisted living center on top of it.

We had we had to put my grandparents in one of these at one point because they need 24 seven care. Did you buy what I should have? I should have. I think my my family. Their families are already like crazy. I could only imagine if I said the thing is I'd like to cash for all the things. Like Cody. I also really like. I like businesses today that are service based, but don't require a ton of upfront capital. So for instance, window cleaning businesses.

I just bought one of these. It's called pinks with this company called resi brands, but I love it because I did it. We have a YouTube video that's going to come out. And I was like, am I full of shit. Let's try this and see if I could actually do it. So you need to make $384 a day in order to have a business that does $100,000 a year if you only work five days a week. So I was like, can we make $384 pre selling window cleaning services to somebody in order to start this business.

And we tried it and we did it. And so. So I might start like a window cleaning business, a pressure washing business, a painting business. You could also buy one of those. Those are trade services businesses. And then the third type of business that I always talk about are what I call gateway drug businesses or semi semi autonomous businesses like laundromats or car washes. The problem with those are they're slightly more expensive.

So take a portion and just sort of get perspective on what you're talking about for someone that has no understanding of business. So my name is Nigel. And I am 37. I've never ran a business before. I don't know anything about businesses or invest or anything like that. What is it you're telling me to do. And Nigel wants to make more money. Nigel wants to make more money. He wants to be an owner. It wants to be a millionaire in 10 years time.

And Nigel is willing to work hard. He's willing to work the hardest. He just doesn't really know what to do because there's so many options and so many conflicting things. He gets all these words, words, words, words, he brands, he's hearing like window cleaning power. He's like, what's she doing with a power washer?

So if I was Nigel, here's the question I would be asking myself. I would be saying, one, do I want to keep my job that I have currently or do I want to not keep my job. That's really important because it's like, am I going to go work on something 24 7 or not? I'm not making enough money to completely walk away from my job. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. So that means you kind of you want a little side hustle that you think could be your full time.

Yes. Right. So in that case, what I would start doing is asking myself, we have something called your unfair advantage van diagram. And what your unfair advantage van diagram is is your skill set. So what is Nigel good at. And that that's as simple as like maybe Nigel's in marketing. So he's actually pretty good at marketing, maybe Nigel drives a, you know, an Uber or a car service. So he's really good at working super long hours. He's just got the work or sent him.

Then I add my network. Who does Nigel know that could help him. So that might be like Nigel's brother is actually a plumber. He works inside of a plumbing business. So if Nigel figured out how to buy a business, he could partner with his plumber brother and law or whatever. And they could do it together. And then finally, it's like, what gets you excited. And by what gets you excited, I don't mean an industry. I mean Nigel loves sales. Nigel loves it. He wants to sell people stuff. Okay.

And the reason I talk about this van diagram like this is this is a little bit more complex than saying you should go buy a franchise. You should go buy a window cleaning business or start those is because I think the biggest reason why people struggle with what to do next is they don't actually know themselves.

And so if I was Nigel, I would say to you, find what your van diagram is of the things that you think you're good at your network is good at that you could actually go either start or buy a business on because the fastest path to wealth is having some type of ownership. So I would start there.

I knew what I know now about business. If I had heard you say when I was 18 years old, just go buy a business, I could carry listen, I've got $700 left from my call center job a month. How can I buy a business that's making millions or hundreds of thousands. I'm going to have to wait till I'm rich. Yeah.

Well, yeah, you can't buy it with your 700 extra bucks, but you could buy it with your sweat and your time. So there's three ways to buy a business. You can use cash, you can use expertise or you can use time or what I call sweat equity. So think about it right now. I buy a bunch of businesses. I have a ton of cash. You know what I don't have a lot of operators. I don't have a lot of people who can go actually run the business that I want them to run.

But if I had a young guy who was super hungry, and I could give him $100,000 to go operate the business that I was going to go run, I would probably do that. People do that every day in our community. And so for this young gun, you're not going to go buy the business outright yourself with your own capital. You're going to say, I'm working 12 hours in a call center right now.

I am relentless. If you pair me with somebody that knows how to run a plumbing company, and I just have to learn and do a bunch of the bullshit to start the company and grow the company or continue the company. Would you partner with me? And they're not going to be able to partner with a Stephen or a Cody probably at first, but they might be able to partner with, you know, somebody, somebody's dad that they know.

And so like, for instance, we had a young guy in our group, I'll change his names to Adam since I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it or not, but let's say, so Adam was 19 years old. Adam worked inside of a marketing company. And he had never run a business before didn't have a lot of cash. Adam went to the senior partner of his marketing company that he worked for and said, like, we have this vendor over here that we do some stuff with. They do all of our graphic design work.

They're really good. The guy's kind of done with running this business. Like, I don't think he wants to keep doing it. I was talking to him about the other day, what if we bought this business and I ran it. Like, I'll integrate it for us. I'll bring it into this company. And I think we can buy it with just the percentage of future profits we bring in, which is called seller financing.

And the marketing head was like, if you think you can get that deal done, yeah, sure. And the guy was like, OK, Adam says, well, if I do that, can I have part of the company for bringing it over. And he said, well, yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't have to put in capital to the deal or I have to put it in very small amount of capital. You're going to run it.

And we basically have like a risk free trade because we just have to pay them a percentage of future revenue or future profit. Sure. And so now Adam owns a business that he's about to sell because he basically partnered with his owner. And so I mean, you can even think about that with your business today. If you're, if you're a young person working with Stephen and you're like, hey, Stephen, we're in the studio right now.

I saw like a sign out front that says that they're actually they want to sell this studio space. I thought we could rent out this whole thing. And we could probably cash flow and make this a profit center instead of a loss center for us. If I could like a negotiated deal that was basically a seller finance real estate deal for us.

Would we would you want to do something like that? I could help us run the rental of it. Now you might say no to that first deal, but you're probably going to look different at that employee. 100% and also I just want to explain what seller financing is for someone that doesn't know seller financing is how 60% of all businesses get sold when they're small businesses. So it's very normal.

seller financing just means this that the seller uses a percentage of future profits to let somebody else buy the business. And instead of you having a loan or a mortgage for a house, they're basically saying, hey, my business right now makes $100,000 a year profit. I want to sell it to you for $300,000. You go, sounds good. I don't have $300,000 and they go, okay, well, why don't I sell it to you for $300,000 over five years and you pay me each year from that $100,000 profit that we have.

Could we do a deal that way? You might be like, yeah, we could do that. So I'm just going to believe that you're going to be able to grow the business. Yeah, or not royally fuck it up. Yeah, 100%, which is, you know, selling anything is a trust trade. Right.

So these days we have to do less trust when we sell something because we have a immediate trust in like a credit card or money. This is almost going back to bartering days where it's like, I'm going to sell you this with the idea that you're going to give me that. It's a harder trade, but it's totally doable. It's funny because it's hard to have all of your messages. Cody is this sort of deep optimism and belief that one can just kind of bend the world.

And I say this because whenever we're talking about this hypothetical young person, everything is kind of just, yeah, just go ask this person to do this and do it. And I was just as you're saying that I was thinking, I resonate with that because I was that 18 year old kid that was just sending off the emails and asking people to help me and whatever else. But I don't think the vast majority of people have a deep internal belief that they can kind of just mold the world.

Yeah, it's so true. You don't mean just like bend it in this direction. They think it is how it is. And you play a role within it. Not that you can just like, yeah, just go to a guy and knock on his door and offer him this. And she's actually so right. Yeah, it's true. It's a bias that I think you and me have because we've been exposed to the fact that you can actually just bend the world around.

Yeah, you just got to watch one person do it. And then you go, oh, I'm a wizard too. You know, we're all wizards. Is this your banister effect idea that I. Yeah, that's right. So well, there's two things I want to talk about. One is you've heard of Steve Jobs reality distortion field. So, yeah, so Steve Jobs was known for having this energy that basically made other people around him believe that they could change the world.

That they were unstoppable. And so he would talk people would talk afterwards after he died about how he'd come into their office and he'd be like, we're going to ship this product in 24 hours. I know we're going to do it in three weeks. We're going to do it in 24 hours. He would get them all riled up.

And then they would ship it in 24 hours. And after the 24 hours were done, they would kind of be like, you know, coming out from a blackout like what just happened. How did he talk me into that? That's his reality distortion field. Which I think is fascinating because we all actually have that ability. His was really strong. But for nerds, Star Wars nerds like I am out there. It's like the force. You know, it's if you actually believe that you are capable of something it's weird.

What you can accomplish. I think so. Amen. Yeah, you know. So I like to read, you know, if you want to get a reality distortion field reading the biographies of billionaires is really powerful. I'd rather read 10 billionaires biographies than 200 self health books because they've actually done it. And so I think it's who's the guy that wrote Steve Jobs book. Is it Abramoff? Walter Isaacson. Walter Isaacson. Yeah, incredible book to even listen to to see that reality distortion field.

Elon Musk is the same. I mean, I spoke to Walter and he he told me that Elon has this just in obsessive ability to just assume that everything. He's being told is basically not true. I if someone says something takes eight months or something. He seems to just reject that idea on site. And he immediately asks about the core components of the challenge. So he'll immediately go right down to the roots of the problem. And from there, he'll figure out that in fact, it can get done in eight days.

And I just don't think people understand the advantage of saving that amount of time on on big on any challenge you have in your life on figuring out a way to make it happen faster. Because one of the great currencies of all of our lives is just the time that we have. And some people are like some people will take three to four years to start a business that with your information and that you're understanding and your bias would probably take you 90 days.

Yeah, that's a three like a three year nine months saving on life. Just because you have this sort of urgent bias. You have this bias towards believing that all these deadlines are actually just. I don't know, I bullshit. Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite mentors told me a line that changed my life, which was it was Bill Perkins. I asked him why he's so successful in so many aspects of his life.

Damn near a billionaire. And, and he said, the only reason that I am successful is I'm faster than everybody else by the time they have thought about an idea, taking it to a meeting and started to move. I have already made three mistakes and found a faster way. And so his bias on speed is fascinating. If you ever hang out with the guy, it's wild. You know, I'll be like, can we schedule a meeting is like I'm calling you right now.

And so he just moves quicker. So in our companies, we implemented something called the 24 hour rule, which was this is idea that if we want to win, we have to have a bias towards action. We have to decrease our time between thinking about a thing and doing the thing. And so most people say, well, get back to you on that next week, right? Get back to you on that next week. Hate that line. That is where dreams and money goes to die. Instead, I say, can you get it to me tomorrow?

If all we do different than our competitors, is they take a week to do things and we get it done in a day. I don't have to be richer, smarter or better. I'm just faster. And it drives my team crazy many times, but I'm not smarter. I'm really not. I'm just very fast at a few things and I ignore a shit ton of stuff that I don't think is going to move us forward.

You're the same. I've seen it with your team. You know, we've gone back and forth with your team. And then you'll be like, let's just do this one thing right now instead. I'm like, oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense. And so I think speed is the consistency. It's Chris and I were just talking about this. I got to know it the other day because I was.

You know, what happens is people overthink things. And in this day and age, it happens more and more. They think about the thing and they confuse thinking with work. And more often than not, thinking is not working. And this is where people will yell at me on the internet and go, well, if I just don't think about anything and I move really fast, I could move fast in the wrong direction. Yeah, you could, but just iterate move fast and iterate.

And that's what most people don't do. And so I'll tell my team all the time, you're thinking about this way too much, make a decision 30 seconds. What's the decision? I'll tell you if I like it. Yes or no. I like the decision. Move forward. And so ask yourself that in life. It's like Mel Robbins 1 2 3 4 5. Get out of bed. Yeah, mine is 30 seconds to decision.

I was it reminds me of a, I think it was an S a S former S a S soldier that I speaking to and he said his friend was going through a lot of problems in his life going through a divorce, et cetera, et cetera. And he asked, he called him and asked him for advice. You're an S a S, you know, soldier, what should I do. And he said, when you're in the middle of the woods and you're feeling lost. Start walking.

And it's a nice metaphor for life, which is you could you you'll die of starvation just stood there overthinking about your problems lost in the middle of the woods. But if you start walking, you'll gain some information, you'll gain your bearings. And I think especially in my earlier career, I was certainly a victim of like procrastinating myself into a hole with with a with a big business problem.

But even this morning I had something this morning, my team in the UK was speaking to me about quite quite a critical business decision that I had to make. And it's now in my old age that I realized I realized I almost said I cook a flat. An older version of me would would spend three months trying to get this decision right. But a more mature version of me knows that there is no perfect outcome. There's pain on all sides of this decision.

So I have to write this long ass like essay memo this morning and sent it into a person in my one of my offices in Europe. And it's so crazy that they responded this person responded within because I was so like I was so concerned about what they might say and help my end. And they responded within four and a half minutes and I like yeah, call got it actually agree. And no need to call me because I completely understand.

And I thought fucking hell that could have taken three months of us all in a boardroom deliberating how to break this news. It's interesting. It's funny because the people that are most experienced in business seem to be the most intense. I think this kind of gives the clear as to why. Yeah, you know one thing I've also realized if you want to if you want to get higher level positions. One of the other things you can do to get there faster. I think is your speed of communication.

It's not even your speed of action. So if you're in an interview, don't bumble fuck your way through the interview. Think about exactly what you want to say with as few words as possible and be as direct as possible. And I've realized there's a huge correlation in our executives we hire between those who are good. They speak fast. They are clear and they don't waste other people's times.

You know, there are a couple of executives. I still have it some of my companies and there are two that I know I have to move on because they're not fast enough. And they're not fast enough in their communication. I should have seen that up front. And I think the way that you communicate is often the way you work. And it doesn't mean that you have for instance, I don't respond to all text messages. You know, I don't think that every single thing that comes in front of me needs to be handled.

I probably let 40% of things go unanswered. And 20% of things I am on top of it like Sauron's eye and Lord of the rings. I'm just watching. If I was to look at your business, do you think that your highest performance is there sort of a correlation between how much they talk and how much they don't. There is a correlation between having no patience for wasted time.

Interesting. Tell me. So for instance, one of my guys here at Tanner, he's like, oh, man, I can't engage with this human because they're always talking to me and I don't really have time to do that. And that is what I have found with high performers. They do not like when you waste their time. And so, you know, if you think about the typical office life, why do we not like typical office life because people come in and it's like water cooler bullshit talk where nobody really says anything.

You ask about the kids. You don't know the kids names. What happened this weekend. You don't really care. High performers are not interested in that. Why? Because you want to perform. You want to talk about interesting things that move you forward. And then you want to go live your life. You want out of the office. I found low level performers. They actually want to waste time during the day because they're not trying to execute. They're trying to just show that they are there.

And there's a big difference between the two. And every time I hire a low performer is because I ignore that part. Which point the urgency, the lack of urgency in time. Yes, yes, I forget about it in the interview. You know, and it's really important to pay attention to those types of people in your life. Who are the people that just are okay wasting your time? Because what does that mean if they're okay wasting your time, they're definitely wasting their time.

There was a phrase that I read in your work where you use the phrase obsessed not interested. I really love to actually screenshot it on the way over here today. And I sent it to some of my team members that I talk about this a lot to about this idea of obsession. And specifically the team members that are on the forefront of really hiring people because there is a big correlation between the outcome of someone who is obsessed versus someone who isn't.

Yeah, and they obsessed people are just always the best they win. You know, I was with Carl Roe of again, who's like not a popular figure, but he was chief of the chief of staff deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush. And it's like one of they call him the architect because he architects most of the Republican races in this country. And so whether you like it or not, I'm I don't really care. I don't need to like somebody to learn from them. Doesn't matter to me.

And so I had him on the podcast to hear like, what does it mean to like architect the centers of power that's fascinating. And when I was talking to him, what stood out to me, I'd been in meetings with him multiple times and at his house a few times for fundraising events.

And I would watch him and somebody would ask a question that was like, Hey, why did Bob Sanders and Pennsylvania lose this senatorial race. And his response would be like, well, we lost it by, you know, 1200 votes on the third Friday, on like December 4, 2012.

And the reason is because we didn't have this segment of the population come out. And then he would do that for like five locations across the country. And I remember I asked him, I was like, do you have a photographic memory. And he's like, absolutely not. I only have one about the things I'm obsessed with.

And I think we all actually have that. Like you've met friends were like, they know every score of a football game for Manchester United ever. Do they have a photographic memory? No, they're obsessed. And so if you can find people who are obsessed with the thing that you're doing, it just means they don't work hard. They're just like, they think of it as hardly working because they're so intense on it and they can't help themselves.

Well, I was thinking of that as well as career advice as you're saying it because if I'm trying to figure out where to place myself to end up in the best place in 10 years from now, I should be placing myself against my, my, my trip sessions. And you can't have fake obsessions. Yeah, it's true. You can't have a fake obsession. You can't be obsessed about something. You're not because it's like, what are you doing it? What video you watch when YouTube at 3 am? That's keeping you from sleeping.

Is my like sense check of what I'm actually obsessed about. That's a great point. And presumably that's what's going to take me the furthest in my career. Or is that would you? I think that's right. And how do you teach yourself to become obsessed with the aspects of your business or whatever that you need to?

Yeah, like for instance, I think a lot of people think of obsession like passion and hobbies. You know, I'm obsessed with Manchester United. And you know, that's my, that's where my obsession goes. Well, are you obsessed with it? You know, or could you figure out that you're obsessed with? You're obsessed with the way that you feel when you're in an environment that is kinetic.

Like, you know, you love that feeling of the crazy song as you guys sing at the match. So like, where else could you be where there's a kinetic energy like that all the time? Well, maybe actually you like live events, maybe you like live events and conferences. You know, maybe you actually just want to have a crazy team almost cult like environment. Can you become obsessed with that? And then I do think that you can, you can catch being obsessed with winning.

You can catch that because if you get a few little tastes of winning in something, it's really easy to go, I want, I want to go more of that. And that's definitely my addiction. Speaking of addictions, Gateway Drug businesses. Oh, yeah, you mentioned the town earlier. What does that mean? Gateway Drug Business is a business that is so simple that you can explain it to your grandmother.

And also, you can probably run it even if you've never run a business before. And those are things like laundromats, car washes. I talk about those two in particular because if you can't understand cleaning clothes. And if you can't understand cleaning cars, probably don't do any business. There's the 1% that just like, you know, go work for somebody else's story about it.

But most people can understand how those businesses work and why I like simple businesses like that. Not a lot of employees, not a lot of moving parts, not a lot of change is because then you can get a little taste of winning. You can get addicted to the game of business. And then your next business can be something better than a laundromat, better than a car wash, but you can learn on a smaller playing field. But you presumably not going to make much money if everybody can do it.

No, you're not going to make much money. But I don't think your first deal is never going to be your last deal, which is I think important for people to realize and buy in businesses and life, just like your first job isn't either. But man, if you are working on it in a W2 right now, let's say, and on the side you go buy an Airbnb business or you buy a laundromat or a car wash that are not very intense on the number of people that you have to have run them, not that expensive for you to do.

You're going to learn how to run a PNL. You're going to learn how to market. You're going to learn how to make money. Every single business has these same characteristics. And so you learn in this small one, and then you sell the business because that's the beautiful part about a business as you can sell it to somebody else. And then you're like, oh, I may, you know, I always think about it as in private equity. We say level one to 10 games, level one to 10 operators.

So 10 be in the best game you could play, 10 be in the best operator you could have the best operator in the world, Elon Musk with, you know, probably some SaaS companies like he has a rocket ship company, a marketplace. He's playing his level 10 operator playing a level 10 game. But in the beginning, you know, he didn't do that. He was like trying to figure it out, just like the rest of us.

So you'll start with your level one business, and then you'll scale up to better and better and better games. Is there a, is there any age group that I should be thinking about buying these boring businesses off? Oh, yeah. Baby boomers right now are retiring across this country in levels that we have never seen. This is a generational wealth creation event really across the world. Post baby boom generation, which happened after World War II.

And, and so one thing that's fascinating about baby boomer generation is they own most of the businesses. So more than 50% of small businesses are owned by baby boomers. They are reaching retirement are already there. And they 65% of them do not have a transition plan. So their plan is I'm going to live forever. No, you're not.

They need to do something with that business. Most of them will just shut down the business. There's something like 11 million small businesses right now for sale in the US. Most of those small businesses, something like 70% of them will never sell. Whether because they aren't good enough businesses, quote unquote, traditionally sell or because they never find a buyer. And this phenomenon is going to happen all over the US. Here's the problem.

If we don't buy these businesses, they say that there are trillions of dollars in the baby boomer generation that are going to be transferred to the next generation. We've all heard those numbers. The problem is people are thinking bank accounts money being handed down all the monies in business. When you are a small business owner, 90% of your net worth is wrapped up in your business. That's the average. So that means 90% of the trillions is in small businesses.

And if we don't buy those businesses and take them over, that wealth evaporates. And what happens then black rock and black stone go in, they buy all those businesses, they get richer, they own our communities and we don't. So you should be targeting people who are 65 plus looking for the next move, probably open to sell or financing, probably have a business that's a little hairy.

Might even be more like a job than a business, but you have an opportunity to buy that business or be an apprentice into the business and take it over. And when I'm thinking about which business to buy, do I have to reflect on what I'm good at or where my sort of leverages in terms of being able to take that laundry mat and make it 5x in revenue over the next couple of years is, you know, there's certain businesses that are right for certain people based on their experience. For sure. I think.

So one, yes, if you want to play a bigger game, if you want to be a top performer, if you want to be one of those level 10 operators, you should find a business that is uniquely suited for you. The problem is, I think a lot of people don't know how to do that.

We have something called the deal clarity worksheet, where we basically take people through where do you want the business to be located, what are you good at uniquely, you know, what, how much money does the business need to make for you, how much money can you put into the business. What type of businesses do you absolutely not want to do, you know, what seem interesting to you.

But I think the bigger issue for people is trying to take the first move as opposed to obsess on what industry or sector and think about it in three to five year increments, just like you would a job, you get a job, you think I'm going to do this thing for two to three years.

I think the same thing with the business and the only rule and buying businesses in my opinion is that you never want to do a bad first deal because then you won't do another one. So you want to do one where you can decrease your risk to bankruptcy. What do you mean by that? How do I start myself doing a bad fest deal? Yeah, lots of one you should spend more time learning how to do a deal than actually doing the deal.

I always get nervous talking about this publicly because people like sweet I'm going to go buy laundromat and talk to Cody, you know, she seems like she tells me that everybody should own laundromats. I'm like, no, take a minute, you know, we teach it, contrary and thinking we teach basically a 90 day period where for somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes a day, you're learning about how to buy businesses.

You're like your little 90 day at M and A MBA, right? And I want you to learn how to do a deal first one because you'll be able to negotiate anything you want for the rest of your life, you'll speak the language of money, which is equity and ownership. And two, because if you just go buy a business, you're not going to know, how do I negotiate it correctly? What is the valuation of the business? How do I determine this guy's not lying to me? Those are called due diligence.

And so I like people to learn that part. And then once you've learned that part, you can go out and you start to date, just like you would on Tinder or anywhere else. Let me look at this business. Let me look at that business called the 100 to one.

So typically you want to kind of kind of like you're on Zillow, you're probably going to look at 100 houses on Zillow, right? Kind of like, I like this. I don't like this. You figure out exactly what is important to you. And then you filter it down to your one. The one that looks right for you at this moment that you're going to stand for the next two to three years. And where do you find these businesses to buy? Is there a website?

Yeah, there's lots. We have we have one that's coming out that will be really cool, but I don't think it'll be out by the time this podcast is there. So basically, the problem right now and buying small businesses is there's no good way to find them online. There's no Zillow. There's no end the last. There's something called biz by cell, but it's shitty. It's got this trash on it.

So we basically are building something that's the opposite of that because the biggest two biggest questions I get are what type of business I should buy? Where is it? Where do I find it? Can you give me the business? So we're building something to that regard. But right now you could go to biz by cell. You could go to biz scout.com. That's the one that we own. It'll be a waiting page. You won't be able to see anything on it yet.

You could go to ecommerce flippers. You could go to flippa. Those are online business sites. Promoting will you competition? Well, the truth of matter is we're so good at this. Like there's nowhere better to learn MNA than us, which is cool. I'm really, you know, I want to invest in this biz scout thing. Oh, actually, you should. I can't believe I didn't ask you for that.

Actually, raising investment. We raised a couple million dollars for biz scout. And in it is Sean rad. So the founder of Tinder bill perkins. Bology. CTO Coinbase. Me, Andrew Wilkinson. From tiny capital. And three guys, what's called Carmen ventures. They're former founders fund and Uber paypal guys. And so we did a really small round because I think we can run it profitably. So I don't want this to be like a, you know, we need to raise 200 million dollars. I don't think we need to do that.

I think with my audience, because we'll already have distribution on lock. We basically can funnel all the buyers and sellers to this site and then create a better mouse trap. So I hired the former head of marketplace at SeatGeek, who took it from 5% market share to 40%. He's an animal. And, and that's my billion dollar bet. What's the, how do you monetize that? I guess you get, do you take a cut on the deal?

Lots of different ways. So we're going to try to not get too tied to one individual way to monetize. But the idea is, there's really like three things that suck about finding a business to buy. One is if you're the seller, you get all these, this like all these novices reaching out to you don't really want to buy your business and they're super distracting. Like they're not capable. They're not able.

So we're going to create all these mechanisms to screen who's reaching out to you. You're going to be able to see, do they have funds cleared already. What's their linked in, you know, do they have credit history are the SBA pre approved. Like all this stuff that should be common sense doesn't exist. We're going to have that screening. Then we also have four buyers will have businesses that are seller financing open.

So we'll have a whole screening of businesses where it's like, hey, you don't have financing. Well, these people are open to seller financing.

We're also going to have we're using AI to basically curate the selection right now. There's all these like fake franchises and stuff on these sites. And it would be like if you went to Zillow and they're like, you like this house by this house. It doesn't exist. But you could build it. You'd be very annoyed. Right. And that's what it is in business by and land right now. So we're going to charge for all series of that. The probably charge brokers for leads to.

But if I don't have that right now. Yeah. Then you got to go to biz by sell. Okay. And what about just like knocking on my local laundry mat door. And the best way to find deals. We have something at BizCount. That's called an off market deal searcher.

And so there's two ways to buy deals by businesses just like real estate, right. On market would be Zillow or BizCount off market would be door knocking. Right. You're going around door knocking. People don't do that in real estate. Really anymore. But in small business land. I have we teach 12 different strategies. But one of the best strategies, I think, is called your personal P and L review. So if you're a business owner, this is a no brainer.

If you're a business owner right now, you should look at all the places that you spend money or you can actually get to the owner. So not Amazon. Right. And you're going to look at all your expenses on your credit card statement and figure out are any of my vendors small enough and good enough that I might be able to own part of that business or the whole business.

And so, you know, you would just go down the list and go, we spend all this money with these people. What on our own part of this business. And individual, you can do the same thing a fun one that we teach people who've never bought businesses before never run anything before I could never buy a business. I have no money. We teach them the Venmo challenge, which is basically you open up your Venmo or PayPal.

Because that means you're doing cash transactions. So it's a small business. And you look through the mall and you're like, huh, my landscaper, my cleaning lady, maybe my, you know, the farmers market that I just bought some cheese from. And I go to all of these people where I could get to the owner and say, Hey, could I buy into part of your business, maybe. And you know, you cleaned my house, do you need more customers.

Maybe I could help you get 20 more customers. And I could own part of your business if I help you grow it. Would you be open to that. And so we do a Venmo challenge with people who've never owned a business because then you get a partial shot at a business.

Is there a bit of a generational opportunity in the sense that the younger generations are native to social media. So they have their own leverage when they're brokering those conversations. They can go to the baby boomer and say, listen, you're running a great laundry map. But there's this thing called TikTok.

And I could make you bang on TikTok. And so if you give me, I know, 30% 50% 100% of your business, we're going to with my unique leverage because I know how to make content on TikTok. I'm going to send this thing to the moon. Grandpa. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I think all you have to do to understand this is understand how much a business makes.

So in order for you to ask for equity, you got to figure out what it's worth, right. And there's a very easy way to do that. You go online and you go, what is the average laundromat in Charleston, South Carolina, make per year. It's about $200,000. Okay. What's the average profit margin of a laundromat? 15%. Okay. So I know that this business is probably making something like $30,000 a year, because that's the profit off of 200K in Charleston.

So what does that mean? Well, if I could double the profit of the business from 30,000 to 60,000, could I ask for half of the business, maybe, or maybe you ask for 20% to double it. And it's a no brainer offer for them. You're already making $30,000 a year. I'm not going to touch that 30,000. But if I double it, can I have 15, 20% of the business? If I don't double it, I get nothing. Don't worry about it.

How do you figure out if it's a good product? Because I've just finished wrapping dragons, then, which is like shark tank over here. And the single most frequently expressed reason why someone's business hasn't taken off yet when they're pitching to me in dragons, then, is we just need some marketing help.

So, you know, and I'm the the dragon that's most known associated with marketing. So often that's directed towards me. They're thinking that I can come in and just press the button that I have in my backpack and things going to pop. What do you think about that? You never have a marketing or leads problem. You have a shitty product problem. And nobody wants to believe this truth. But it's true. Here's how you know.

Here's how you know. Here's how you know if you have a shitty product or if you have a marketing problem, do you have 20 to 30% referrals or reviews to your product. If you don't, you have a bad product and you have a leaky bucket. And you are trying to say, Stephen, please bail me out from my leaky bucket ship with your marketing help.

But what's the truth of the matter is, and I see this with our companies and small businesses all the time, they're like, I have a leads problem. I have a leads problem. If I could just get more eyeballs, my company would grow. No. Actually, your first customer is going to be the only customer you will ever get. Get them to refer other people to you. Get them to write reviews where they say nice things about your business and treat the current customers like they are your marketing and sales.

And I think that is the biggest issue with startups is that they think that they just need more attention because they can't actually see that what's happening is when the attention comes in, it's falling out of the leaky bucket. And it's falling out of the leaky bucket. So fix your problem, fix your product and you'll fix your sales. So that would be the first thing I would ask them. I would say, what's your referral rate, what's your review rate.

And then they're going to go like, I don't know. And you need to find that answer. And if they say, well, actually for every person that we that buys one. Like what would be a perfect example? Remember that like squeegee face product, Mr. Klean. Is that what that's called scrub daddy scrub daddy. There we go. Okay. That's like a dragon's den, but shark tank product. Okay. So scrub daddy.

Scrub daddy was perfect. Why? It's a scarring pad for any beer that doesn't like a little scarring pad to wash up dishes with. Yeah, like a sponge. Yeah. Anyway, so it was kind of cute looking. It looked different and it really worked. And so what would happen with scrub daddy? Well scrub daddy, they would you would buy it. And then you would use it. It would work great. And so you would tell your friends, like, if there's this new thing, it never gets dirty.

It doesn't have any issues with like all that gross stuff that gets on a sponge. You can squeeze it all the way out. It doesn't scratching your dishes. You should totally buy this thing. And so you instantly know you have a good product because other people are sharing it. And those are those are network loops. It's very much like, you know, Tamaff polyoptia right billionaire from one idea. One idea. And every business has this idea. And nobody looks for it.

And the idea at Facebook was called seven friends and 10 days. They could tell with 99% predictive certainty that if you came to Facebook and you interacted with or brought seven friends in 10 days, you would stay at Facebook forever. So all they had to do was make sure that when they came to your city or school, you had density enough where you had seven friends and 10 days. And if you got those seven friends on your phone, you're like, I'm going to stay. What is that in your business?

I have about 50 different companies in my portfolio at flight group now, some of which I've invested in and some of which I've co founded or founded myself. One thing I've noticed is that most companies don't put enough effort into the hiring process. In my mind, the first and most critical thing in business is assembling your group of people because the definition of the word company is group of people.

And throughout all of my companies, whenever I'm looking to hire someone, my first port of call is LinkedIn jobs, who I'm happy to say are also a sponsor of this podcast. They've helped us source professionals who we truly can't find anywhere else, even those who aren't actively searching for a new job, but who might be open to a perfect role.

So if you're not looking on LinkedIn, you're probably looking in the wrong place. So today, I'm giving the driver of a CEO community a free LinkedIn job post head to LinkedIn.com slash DOAC now. And let me know how you get on terms and conditions apply.

What you're speaking to there is this idea of retention. So great product is attentive. And if it retains its customer, then the customer is going to sit around and evangelize and bring other people with them like a like their throwing fishing rods into their network. And the example you gave of Chimoff, who was one of the early executives at Facebook, is the same thing.

If you bring seven people with you, you're going to stick around for the party, stick around for the party long enough, these network effects build our chimass here so that you know, when these network effects get bigger retention increases.

And this is why it's so important to focus on the product, right? Because we're talking about this time LTV lifetime value. We're talking about if we make a really good thing, people are going to tell their friends, they're going to continue to use it. And then they're going to market it for me. But most people will focus on just trying to get a tip top video to go viral versus making something truly great. Elon's an example, isn't it?

Oh, yeah, it's much harder to obsess on making a great product because it's slower. You know, you're like, well, I have one person and they're only going to, you know, refer 0.3 of a person. You know, I can't grow fast enough with that. And so what do we do? We top a funnel, top a funnel, top a funnel. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it.

But the problem is you can either spend a bunch of time creating an incredible product once or you can spend the rest of your life marketing and doing sales. So it's again, it kind of goes back to this idea. If you want to win and be successful in life, upfront pain always leads to long term gain. And people do not want to hurt upfront. So they hurt for the rest of their life. And I think that's the same thing with products.

They try and skip a step. They skip a step. And by the way, I'm guilty of it too. Like we have one company right now where our referral rate is basically zero. And we're slamming these add dollars and all this marketing budget. And I looked at myself the other day, I was like, Cody, you're an idiot. You're doing the thing that you tell other people not to do, which is we have to fix referrals and reviews. Why? Because they fix there's three hours referrals reviews and retention.

If your business doesn't have the three hours, you will spend your life marketing and marketing is actually quite hard and expensive. And then you also have people that you don't even realize you think that they're their proponents of your brand, you know, they pay you every single month for a service or a product, but they're actually detractors.

They just haven't found a better a better product. And so that's what often happens to business. You're like, no, no, these people love us. No, they don't have they refer to anybody to you. Have they left you a positive review. That's the only way you know it's super interesting because there's a bit of a paradox in what we're saying here.

Because on one end, we were talking about intensity and urgency and going fast. And these kind of people that just kind of, you know, short and deadlines and stuff like that. But then on the other hand, we're saying that you need to go slow and build the thing right because the slow way is the only way in the long term.

I was hugely inspired by the story of Tesla and Elon Musk for this very reason because if you look at their stock price, there's about, I don't know, six, seven, eight, maybe 10 years where they're completely flat. They, Elon's not, you know, made significant amount of money from it. He needs just going through absolute pain.

And then all of a sudden the company just explodes. And actually the most inspiring thing for me, having been a person who built a business that scaled hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. But was really built on unsustainable foundations. I, I know what Elon did in that 10 years when that stock price was completely flat. He laid every foundational brick of Tesla perfectly. And he was doing it basically in silence. And it's so tempting in business, I think, to take shortcuts.

When you're laying those sort of initial like building a house, like when you're putting the foundations down, he said, you know, we're going to completely make a new battery. We're going to build the entire super charging network. So that all of our cars can go to 15,000 charging locations around the country. We're going to build a brand new factory. In fact, we're going to build every single piece of this car. And it's going to take 10 years.

But, but the patience, I think, is is really the thing that leads to the perfection in the long term. And it's a big thesis that I've been playing with a lot recently because there's a part of my heart that just wants everything to happen quick. But as I've got an older, I start to think that slowing down in big thing in the big things like the laying the bricks is actually the most important thing.

And this is I'm throwing this at you as just a point to see if that it resonates in any way. Well, I think you're right. The thing that I think is the problem is when you're young and starting. We're usually you're not as smart as Elon, like you wouldn't if you gave a 20 something 10 years to build what Elon has built in silence.

They wouldn't know what to build. They wouldn't know what a strong foundation looks like. So I always optimize for urgency up front because you have to have all these shots on goals to realize whoops, wrong goal, wrong goal, wrong goal. And then I do think you get to a certain level where then you become Warren Buffett Elon Musk, where you know Warren Buffett says once the lifetime opportunities come around about twice year.

And so you basically do nothing else except those two each year. The problem is he can recognize that because he had decades of shot on goal, shot on goal, shot on goal. So I think it's this it's this balance of yes, once you understand what good or great looks like it is your moral imperative to work as fast as possible towards good or great. But in the beginning, since you don't know, just do more faster.

It's interesting because the thing I was thinking about when I passed the floor to you there was I should have probably said what I'm actually referring to him much of it is actually hiring. Because you know when I'm starting a new company now, I could because we you know we get tens of thousands of applications coming to the inbox. I could resource that company with people in two weeks.

But in fact, one of the biggest pain points across all of my businesses is we hire so agonizingly slow. Yeah, same. Because we know that that's when we talk about laying the fact foundational bricks of a good company. It's all about those initial highs. Yeah, it's so true. I mean every business is a people business before it's a product business before it's a profit business.

And the beautiful part about that is if you don't have a business right now and you're listening to all this, you should feel very empowered. Like exceptional people are in such high demand. And the sky is the limit on what you can make both as your own owner or working for other people until you become your own owner if you're great. And great is largely just I say I'm going to do a thing. I do the thing repeat.

And if the bars that low, man, I think there's way more opportunity than anybody realizes, which maybe gets back to what you said before, which is disability to bend the world that I think both you and I see is really because we see how easy it is. Like, have you ever seen, have you seen like how people will take one of those iron rods, you know, really strong iron rod. And you heated up. And it's just like, it just bends immediately, right.

But if you were going to try to brute force it, it never would. But once you see them heated up and then bend really easy, you go, oh, well, I'm never going to try to brute force that again. And then you just look how easy that is if you just heated up. And I think that's part of the hack of life is just figuring out heat and time and what those two ingredients are. That's really I always think about the bloody like what do you call it that big hole in the ground, you have the grand canyon.

You always think it's just such a nice and I like because I'm like, how did that get there? Well, actually, it was just water trickling through there for a long enough period of time. You don't need to brute brute force it. It wasn't like a meteor an asteroid hit the earth. It was just consistency of a very gentle force over a long period of time. And that's really how rivers and how earth is literally carved.

It's interesting because I was also thinking who's speaking about this idea that at all times throughout your 20s and your 30s, you are actually without knowing it interviewing and being interviewed by your former, your future potential business partners. Oh, yeah, because what's 18 years old and I went to San Francisco. And funnily enough, I just sent a cold email to a billionaire. I said, I just saw you bought a company.

It was a funny email that said, here are five reasons why girls call me back in bars and his five reasons why they don't it was basically my CV better than that format. And he called me within 24 hours when I was in the UK, I was like, Hey, love this. I'm going to set you a challenge. How would you get us to 10 million users? I thought, fine, made a deck. Since I'm just how I get this new company you bought to 10 million users.

He goes, cool, I'm going to give you $10,000 a month. I was in the UK just sat in my parents house. I'm going to give you $10,000 a month. I'm going to fly you out to San Francisco. And you're going to help us build this company. And while I was there, I was around some really, really smart people. One of those very smart people. Ten years later, when I had a new idea, he was the first person I hit up through his Instagram, via through his Twitter DMs hadn't spoke to him for 10 years.

Turns out he'd bought a $50 billion company that had I peered and he was the CTO. And I said, Hey, there's this new thing called the blockchain. I'm really interested in it. I want to build a company with me in it. And he goes, yeah, cool. And I just I just reflected on the fact that throughout my 20s, there are so many people that I met that in my 30s, I then leveraged. So what I was actually doing is I was being interviewed by them without knowing it.

You know what I mean? Because a thousand percent actually I won't say his name, but we have a mutual friend that knew you from back in the day then. And what is fascinating to me is watching the two of you, because you're slightly younger than him, I believe. And he's been successful, but your success is like way more. And so when I was looking at the two of you and thinking, what was the difference between the two? He's also smart, also driven in the same ecosystem, had the same network.

What was the difference between 20 year old Stephen and 20 year old X. And I think part of the difference is grit and time and consistency. You chose a few things. You stuck with them for quite a while as you have with this pod. I mean, how many podcast episodes of you don't know. I got to look at 400.

The average podcast is like what 11 episodes and then they cancel. And then you also chose bigger games like bigger and bigger and bigger as you scaled. And this other guy that I know that I think really highly of too, just like didn't want to work that hard for that long on that big of things.

And so I think if you can just have time, consistency, grit and then try to solve bigger problems because they pay better. You know, you're probably worth 100 X of that guy net worth wise because of those four things.

So interesting, you know, one of the things I've, I've thought a lot about over the last couple of years is that I basically have one skill set like I have a very narrow skill set. And I essentially applied it to different markets in my life. And I think we all can't need to start thinking of this lens. Let me make this make really specific sense. So my skill set, the start of my career.

My main skill set was in social media at the very start of my career. Now what can you do with that skill set. You can sell dresses for boohoo dot com, which I did. And the impact of me doing that for boohoo dot com their sales increasing is X right not a huge amount.

So there's a lot of people that have that skill set of social media. So that drives down my potential to charge high numbers when I was 26 or 27 years old. I moved that same skill set to of social media, same skill set. I moved it to a different market, which was companies before they IPO.

Now if a come and this was during that sort of reddit Wall Street bets moment where like reddit took down a massive hedge fund in America and they pumped game stop. I thought to myself, I have this skill set companies before they IPO now really care about retail investors, the average person liking their stock.

So if I go and use that same social media skills set that I used to sell fizzy drinks and dresses with companies that are in the biotech industry, they know nothing about social media, they think it's.

Which craft right before they IPO, what would my returns look like and honestly the same skill set just moved to a different industry where it's guess and the person paying me stands to make potentially one to two billion if their IPO is successful delivers a thousand times the value of selling the dresses for boohoo dot com.

And I just think people often they're thinking I need a promotion, I need whatever much of the time I'm like just move your skill set to a better market where it's guess and the person that's paying you stands to make more.

I don't you know, I mean it's like a different way to think about it's really and yeah, and it's I think it's so brilliant because it's a little bit asymmetric. It's like hard to put your fingers around it. What people like what people like that will never make you rich is this.

Here's steps one through four to get into real estate and if you do this now you two will be a millionaire isn't you never going to get rich that way the way that you get rich is actually putting together multiple ideas that don't seem like they go together.

And that cross pollination is what gives you outsized returns you're like social media biotech IPO what yes, and so when you have that weird cross pollination that's where massive growth happens and I think you know it's the same with me I was like I remember with my CEO at the time what I I wanted. I was making a lot of money let's say I was making seven figures a year working for somebody else I was actually happy I would have stayed there for probably ever at this investment firm.

But I saw the future of social media and newsletters in particular I was like why am I go why am I on the road every single day doing stake dinners trying to sell pensions and sovereign wealth funds are investment vehicles I could be doing this all with the internet like we don't need to be meeting in person anywhere to the degree that we are. And so I went and told the CEO of my company that and he was basically like if you want to roll left and I want to roll right you need a new boat.

And I was like okay fine so I couldn't convince him and so he kind of gave me his blessing and said like go do it somewhere else because we're not doing it here and I was really mad at the time I built up a billion dollar business for this guy in Latin America where a business didn't exist like three years before four years before.

And as far as mad I'm like I am your best international sales force I was total victim mindset about it I was like it's because I'm a woman you know all these dudes they don't get it I was I was mad. So I left and he did me a huge favor by pushing me out actually because then I went and said you know what newsletters plus private equity plus social media plus laundromats and car washes I don't know but I think.

And together they now are responsible for us having a business that has 26 businesses in it businesses that do tens of millions of dollars in revenue some of the venture ones do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and we don't even have to have third party investors it's a lot of our own money because we've bought profitable businesses using using totally unfair deals because of our social media presence and so.

You look back and connected dots there right so someone that's you know at the start yeah how do they get enough dots to connect like what's the strategy to even be able to look back some day and connect these. If I wanted right now to figure out how could I find my cross pollination of ideas yeah I'd need three things I need a whiteboard I need a whiteboard pen and I need a smart buddy.

Okay I can get your whiteboard pen yeah exactly well all I would do is I would put it up on the wall okay and I would try to find my smartest most brainstorming open minded friend and I would write down everything I think I'm good at right yeah I mean so let's say it's for you right now let me screen record so that I can see what you've done and put it on the screen for everyone at home to watch what a fun idea and what was the question again what are you so the question is if right now you want to find where is your.

Unfair bet that can make you your millions with your skill set.

That nobody else in the world can replicate except you here's what I need I would need a whiteboard I would need a pen which I would do if I was you and I would need a smart friend perfect like so I've got Steven here and at the top of the right whiteboard I would write on this side skills oh my god you're going to see my handwriting like a doctor and on this side I would write money and I would start writing down all the things that were brilliant so I'm going to do it.

I'm going to do things that were brilliant so let's pretend it's it's Steven here it will pretend like you don't have all the things that you have but your core skill set you can put your hand on the screen by the way my makes me nervous and I am doing this like a boomer I am the handwriting is a little bit it's giving doctors okay oh yeah look at that okay so bear saying okay so social media right you're incredible at social media what else are you probably good at well you know a lot of people you've got a network what else well it's not just social media though it's actually a few particular things and I'm going to do it.

I'm going to do a particular things it's like YouTube and I think you're one of the best in the world that short form video right you're also one of the best in the world at like a data driven social media strategy so you can kind of say up front hey we think this is going to go viral because the data says this thing over here what else is Stephen good at he's charismatic he can probably get people to agree to things just by talking to them.

You know what what else British accent you know so probably you want more in person interaction because we've got you know a very charismatic person what else is Stephen really good at well he has a lot of questions. This is my hinge profile by the way I'm good looking funny you know exactly so so we'll just say these there's a lot more deal flow but let's just pretend that all you're good at is social media you're good at getting to people which is a network you don't even have to know

which people just can you get them your charismatic your data driven okay great got all these skills now how could we apply these skills to get the most money humanly possible and I would do exactly what you said so how do you figure out most money humanly possible it's two things it's the how would I do this it's the size of the problem.

It is the value of the solution interesting okay and so if I'm thinking about this for you if I go and I give your social media skills to a trade or service business I'm not going to make that much money how do I know I'm not going to make that much money because I'm going to go look up online what is the average revenue of this business and the average profit margin yeah

yeah now you probably didn't even think this way when you were thinking about it but you guys look online right now what's the average profit margin of a biotech company and average revenue let me tell you what it is it's going to be like 50 to 80% and it's going to be hundreds of millions that you could potentially get trade services business a lot less yeah and so that's where I would start skills plus money really equals to three things which is like sector

size of the business and profitability of the business and I would play this game and what that might look like as you go okay I know that I have some friends in let's go to the places that we know have the most cash in Silicon Valley in on Wall Street if they could make a lot more money if they had a lot more attention

because what I'm selling is attention I want to get to the people who can make the most money with the most attention and that means that I'm not going to go to Walmart only has 6% margins I'm going to go to the highest person that I could get to and it be fun if anybody's listening to this right now try it like tags Stephen and I in your stories on Instagram of your little charts and let's see and I'll give feedback anybody that tags me in it if you're like here's the here's what I think my skill is here's what I think the industry is I'll tell you one way or another and it can be fun you can see other people's examples live

so people for people that are only listening on audio and that can't see what the this chicken scratch chicken scratch you've just drawn on this iPad and on one hand you have you list your skills and then on the second side you're listing the ways you believe you could make the most money from those skills based on the size of the problem you'd be solving with them and the value of the solution.

So for example let me let me try and play this game with you then so okay so I am a writer so I'm going to do my skills on the left I'm a writer and on the right I'm going to write money yeah I'm a writer I'm really get writing stuff and that's it and I kind of get I kind of get the internet so I kind of

understand LinkedIn blogs and stuff like that but that that's it I'm right to go with what would be the worst what would be the worst thing you could do if you're a writer to make no money to make no money because sometimes it's easier to do the negative.

Okay working for a local newspaper. Yeah local I was thinking like fantasy books like you could write like fiction you know really hard to make money in you could write for a local newspaper that's an even worse idea so I like that so now you've got your bottom tier right which is like 14 bucks an hour or something like that.

Now if you look about I mean you could Google this what is the highest paying jobs for writers I bet the thing you'd find on top copywriter why I got better one what's the better one you know I know this because when I was in working in biota we could high one which is a medical writer. Oh so smart. I was specialized. Honestly we sort of typical copywriter when I was working in my social media company we might pay entry level 25,000 pounds which is probably about 35,000

dollars. Okay a medical writer someone that can write about the psilocybin compound in my psychedelics business would get paid 150,000 dollars or more we just couldn't find some we found loads of people that could write. Yeah but nobody that had within their skills stack even though it's quite easy to teach the ability to write using medical words slightly medical words doesn't mean you need a medical

degree. You could probably learn how to write become a medical writer in a month if you really committed yourself to it so that's the truth and same with finance we go to the things we know so you know biotechs you know there's a niche there I know finance and I know that again it's one of the highest paying industries so a financial writer. That look like it would look like somebody who knows how to write probably an

investor update. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So hugely lucrative and then the other thing you could do is I guess I didn't even think about this before it would be like size of the problem it would be value of the solution and then it would also be structure of your job so like if you're a copywriter I wouldn't take a job for 35k what would I do I would say hey pay me what is the salary you want to offer 35,000 I'll take 10,000 so I can eat because I'm

hungry but can I have a percentage of the upside that I drive above and beyond goal so if I'm going to write copy that converts into revenue like I'm going to write a funnel for your biotech company or I'm going to write a funnel to get investors for you if right now per month you get a hundred thousand dollars through that funnel how about you just pay me an extra 10% of everything I drive above your hundred K so I think that's another way you can make more money is getting smarter on deal

with the trade. Well that's actually when I moved into biotech how I got paid and when I talked about a fair big big paid a thousand times more than I would have previously it's because the way I got paid was in options in the IPO. So I got given in that particular company I got given 400,000 shares effectively in the company at a certain price and so when the company IPO at 3.2 billion dollars on the

market in July 20 I don't know 21 or something even though I don't any works in the company for about six months just helping them build out the marketing team think my like net return was on the equity value at the time was quite close to 10 million so six months work 10

million return because I you know and the really really really the reason I did it was because so interested in psychedelics but it just opened my eyes to the fact that any kid with social media skills and that knew how to structure deal with these people could have walked in

there and said give me some stock in this IPO and I'll run your social media for six months. You're so right could change your life. Yeah and it's it's something I'm struggling with trying to get people to understand right now is that even if you never buy a business which is what people fixate on well I haven't bought a business yet I haven't bought a business yet it's like you're never going to regret learning how to do deals.

I never going to I think that is the most valuable skill set in the world. I completely agree and it's so unfair that people don't know about it. It's so unfair but it's also your fault if you don't know about it because nobody's gatekeeping this information anymore it used to be gate kept like when I first started off in private equity I wasn't allowed in the rooms where they were actually doing the deals in the terms and if I wanted to see what the final

terms were like I had to kind of you know sweet talk my way in the figuring out how they structured it. But it's an unknown unknown so before I knew I didn't know that I didn't know. Yeah that's true yeah that's very true but now I think there's enough people out there talking about it where you're like I mean if you think about whether you like Donald Trump or not what is

you really good at deals. Yeah of the deal like it that's it and that is what I mean Elon Musk how does Tesla actually make money they make money through credits through credits for solar so he was able to survive for those 10 years of building that company because he has some of the best solar tax credits in the world that he negotiated with the government. So where does one go then where does a 25 year old kid listening to this go to learn how to make deals.

Well I have a book coming out yeah called Main Street Millionaire yes exciting I know and we have we have stuff we can tell them about that later too.

Well I'm going to link Main Street Millionaire below so everyone can pre-order it I've pre-ordered I think 10 or 20 copies of it maybe a couple more. But that's like 30 bucks and you learn almost everything you need to know about doing deal to start and that book is only what you need to know I made it on purpose not really long not overly intense it is exactly what you need to know.

And then if you like learning deal making and you like that book then you go to contraining thinking dot com and we have courses and free newsletters in a community all about buying businesses. But that's where you should start I think I agree because you the way that you break down information is so accessible and it really appreciates the naivety of the person on the other end you have a remarkable way of communicating in a way that's really.

And inviting versus excluding and a lot of people when they're talking about these subjects they exclude you but they don't even know that they're doing it because they're so smart and they're so advanced but I've been lucky enough to take a look at the initial copy of your book the sort of first draft of it and it was exactly what I think 99% of people that are listening to this right now need to.

It's the gap that they have in their thinking and so highly recommend everyone go and pre order i'm going to link it below really highly recommend it and if i'm wrong about that these do send me a few some ideas.

Well and I spent three years writing it and that that was always the part of service about is like when I get it to all my smart friends what are they going to think so when I showed it to you and like Andrew Wilkins and all these people who had done deals I was like fuck you know what's up they're going to like it so there's that means a lot basically is what I'm trying to.

I'm trying to heavily anticipate a lot of people are talking about it so i'm very very excited and one of the one thing I did want to talk to you about before I just go to the last question here is prejudice because I don't think we will talk about it enough obviously you and I and really everybody experienced prejudice and business and in life and wealth and everything investing whatever it might be.

What is your perspective on that when I say prejudice I mean you're a woman in business I was young black guy at one point that had a big afro and was very very poor trying to make it in life what relationship should we have with the prejudice we face. I had a woman asked me the other day how do I show up as a woman in a male dominated industry because you've you've done that Cody and ice and she said I had I've had struggles with it and my feeling and response on the distance.

The feeling and response on that is this that what do you think the universe gives you when you tell the universe that I struggle because I am a woman in business it's going to give you struggle what do you think the universe would give you if instead you said I have such incredible opportunity because I look different than everybody here and if I am good I am so much more memorable than every Tom Dick and Larry in a blue suit that looks just like everybody else what if the thing that you think is your biggest weakness and the thing that makes you feel excluded and less than is actually.

The biggest strength is actually your biggest strength and if you could flip your mindset on that how much more money and opportunity would you have and how much more interesting would you be for other people who are wealthy and successful to be around do you want to be around somebody who is labeling themselves as a victim and complaining all the time or do you want to be around somebody who thinks that the world is full of opportunity.

It's a hard lesson to learn because the truth of it is business is hard you will be shit on people will keep you out people will judge you for your skin color and being a woman or a man or not for sure but don't let that into your psyche instead to the opposite and watch what happens. It's so interesting it's so it's so difficult to say that because you're not denying the reality that prejudice is real no you're giving people the most optimal productive way to move forward in spite of it.

Exactly. Yeah it's like what's true to you they don't like it. No people don't want to say that they want to be some people want to be victims of that prejudice. It's true I think the tide is turning I mean I for the first time ever you know I posted the other week and I was like well we might get all we might get something interesting on here and my like for instance I believe that the word I call it latinx because I think it's funny but Latin X is the most ridiculous thing you could

be called latino why because it doesn't exist in our language Spanish the word latinx makes no sense to anybody so I think it was made up by a bunch of white people at Berkeley is my joke and that in fact if you went to Latin America and you said you know how does it feel to be a latinx person they would laugh you

out of the room that I've no idea what you're talking about and I said that on social media and I thought I was going to get so much hate that I would like have to not look at it for a while and what happened a bunch of people are like you know what yeah I agree so I actually think that if you want to beat the curve today do not be woke do not be annoying and victimized and woke instead watch what happens when you start being a little

based today when you start saying the quiet part out loud and for the first time and like probably since pre-COVID I think the world is changing and I don't think that means you should be a jerk or be divisive and I think we should like protect comedy at all costs especially in dark times but I do think that that type of person is no longer interesting and if I'm right that means that a lot of young people have to change our perspective

because for a long time we have been able to get away with some things like saying because I am a woman because I am a latino because of this you should give me that and I think the world right now is starting to say I don't fucking care we're all human and that's uninteresting to me so we'll see if I'm right or you can tell me in the YouTube comments if I'm just a privileged asshole

it's interesting because you said something earlier and I remember thinking most people wouldn't have the guts to say that it was when you were referring to your working culture at your company where you're saying if you talk to me about work life balance in an interview you're not going to get the job yeah even saying that a couple of years ago would have sparked outrage Cody says that if you mention work life

balance in the interview but what you're actually being is honest honest you're being honest yeah and people don't like honest they'd rather you lied and signal like did some virtue signaling they just be really honest about how you feel yeah that's true and maybe your toxic yeah at least you're honest about it you know what I mean it's it's so true I think the worst thing that you could do is pretend to be something that you're not

especially in this age of no trust on the internet all that means is that you're going to get canceled it's like what we saw happen with Ellen right like everybody was like Ellen's the nicest person in the world and Ellen is probably like the rest of us human we're 20% of the time she's crazy

or rude or mean or having a bad day or gets on her high horse because she's super successful or gets out of touch and then but what happens because Ellen said that she was nice all the time she was perfect she was whatever when somebody finds that out about you then they cancel you

because you were a liar and so instead I think the better thing to do is be like I'm human I'm flawed I'm really intense I'm kind of hard to work for sometimes but I also help make my people make more money than they could anywhere else and if you want to be exceptional in a group where we pride

ourselves on being the most productive people in the world then they're going to love it at my company and let's just be honest about it I'm going to go close in tradition where the Lasca Sleeves are question for the next question that's been left for you is what is one business idea

you've always wanted to try but never seem to get to what's held you back it's almost like they knew you were coming it's almost like they knew God that's a good question I'm really good at taking my interests to the finish line I think when I get to my tombstone there's not going to be much that I regret at the end of my days because I've tried just about everything that I wanted to and I feel very privileged to have been able to do that thus far oh I do have one though

you know what I've always want to do that maybe at some point I'll get to is what's the most powerful book that's ever lived the Bible arguably right if we just say by total viewers over time and I think the reason why is because it's a story it's like truth and guidance in a story and one thing that I've always wanted to do is write a book that was a story that told people some truths fiction

yeah and so I think at some point in my life I'd like to do I suppose a parable be the word that I'd use I would like to write a book that's a fiction story that's beautiful that transcends that lets people escape and like secretly you don't even realize it it's getting into your brain and it's teaching you things and I don't know if that's a business but that is one thing that I have not done yet

Cody thank you so much you're a real real beacon of wisdom and inspiration and hope and optimism in a world that needs it so so much and you're also wonderful human on and off camera so thank you so much for your you're just being a wonderful person and doing so much for so many people that will never get to say thank you to you but they come up to me all the time in the gym the chads and they tell me how much they appreciate you so

I'll stop it you're gonna give me allergies and then people are gonna not you know I have a black heart and they're gonna see the truth that I'm kind of nice you don't have a black heart thank you so much Cody