If I can teach a million-dollar business owner the behaviors and characteristics of an entrepreneur, they can call themselves one, but if they don't know the competencies, the attributes, they don't understand it, but if I can teach them that, and they can do that, and think that way,
they'll pop to 15 to 25 million. If I can teach the entrepreneur how a CEO runs a business, this is an entirely different mindset to make these massive movements from who you are, to who you need to be in order to create capacity for the business to grow to its opportunity, and the business's growth and the opportunity for the business to only be limited to the extent that you're thinking small. What is up Entrepreneur DNA Family, welcome back, this is an incredible
episode of an incredible guest. This gentleman sold his last company for 150 million, 77 times EBITDA, now partner with Grant Cardone, Brandon Dawson is here. What does that do? Thanks for having me on your show, excited to be here. This is incredible. So, coming from my perspective, small, multi-million-dollar businesses, not into nine figures yet, what does it take someone to gain that
traction to go from? I got some things going, cash is going good. But man, you know this, because we've talked before, there are several things that it takes to get to some of these bigger numbers, and let's jump into that to start with all these entrepreneurs out there that are getting going. Yeah, they can couple bucks. Yeah, well, there's 31 and a half million businesses that are under
125 million a revenue. Okay, 97% of those businesses go out of business every 10 years, two thirds go out in the first five, 98.2% of all those businesses are trapped at 3 million or less. So, when you think about the difficulty to go from 3 million to 125 million, you're talking about a couple percentage points of the total number of businesses out of 31 million. And then the failure rate is unbelievable. And the problem with small businesses is usually 83% has what I
call family orientation. So, somebody in the family or somebody close or the family is directly affected by the business. So, in the business suffers, the family is usually suffer. When this family suffers, their community suffers because it's just very hard to build a successful, profitable, valuable business. How did you do it? Well, the first one I raised private equity, I was 26 years old. I had a dream. I bought 138 businesses. I ran the Bell in America stock exchange at 29
years old. And if you had met me then, I would have told you I'm going to billionaire status. I got it all figured out. And I know I know how to play the game. Problem was, you never know what you don't know is entrepreneur. And you usually realize it and figure it out after something bad happened. So, at the peak of my career in 2001, I celebrated raising 20 million and basically free capital. But in the agreement that I did the international global, my first global deal, it was this thick.
And I used the word temporary debt. And by putting debt in there, it triggered an agreement that was this thick with Warburg PINK as my private equity group that said, anytime you put debt in front of our preferred equity, we have the options. Sell your company. I missed, I could have called a rebate, pre-bate, advance. I could have called a bunch of things. But I used the word debt because I just the word one word, Adam would have given this thing. So they sold my business. And I had to start
all over the problem was when they sold my business, I didn't get any money out of it. So seven years, that's pretty fun. Thinking I was on top of the world and I had it all figured out. So I learned a valuable question or I learned a valuable thing at that point in time, which is even just about the point time you finally think you figured it out and you're at the peak, it could all go away. That created a whole new mindset for me. And the mindset was I will never not be a control
of my equity. I'll never not be in control of my destiny. I will never use somebody else's money. I'm going to figure out how to engineer a business and build it different than how Wall Street tells you in these two. So I'm going to stay on this point because it's really, it's more of what I'm doing. I'm on the junior version of Brandon Dawson. I'm doing more in the space of joint venturing strategic joint ventures, partnerships to grow versus to your point,
taking on capital, taking on debt, building out this massive organization. Because you already know what I think I know, which is the growth and that expense and operating costs, whatever takes the debt to go that far. And if things crack, you're cracking with it. Now, the reason I want to stay on that point is I do want to talk about Cardo Mentures and what you're now doing. Because I think it's drastically different than what you did. Yeah. So when I had that mindset
shipped, I've got to figure it out. I realized if I figured it out for me, I could figure it out for all small businesses. So I really paid attention to every little detail. I started cracking open books and reading about business and reading about leadership and reading about entrepreneurship, reading about a research and really understanding the finite based on my experience, the experience of watching all this consolidation and wallet strategies happen around me
and asking the question, how can you actually scale a business up to 125 million? And the reason I say 125 million is Wall Street calls and business between 125 million or 175 million that's making between 18% and 40% profit. They call that company a platform company. And the reason they call it a platform company is it has all the elements needed to get to 125 million. And now you can add to that all the smaller businesses and take it to a million. Okay. But you can't be 125
million if you don't have the things required to be a platform company. So I always had it in my head. Can I build a platform company without doing a Wall Street's way? Can I bring together enough businesses to create a business? It's doing 125 to 175 million. It's profitable. It has all the resources that 125 to 175 business would have. And that's the first thought. So then it led me to the question, what does a 125 to 175 million dollar business have at a small business doesn't have?
Right. And that put me on a research path while I was building my new company. So I started my new company using the principles of the business will fund itself. My people will be alive. I'm going to use a shared equity strategy. In fact, I was the first one to use a decentralized equity platform. Hmm. So I gave equity to my customers every year they did business with me. And when they stopped doing business with me, I had a call back position to bring the equity back. Interesting. And so I
would give equity if you didn't business with me. And I give you today, I need called tokenization. But back then it was on the balance sheet as equity. Yeah. And using a step up and basis and do an operating. And doing. Yeah, you know, operating. You had a cap table. You'd come in and out of a cap table depending on how much business she did with me. And my promise was one day when I sell my business or raise capital, I'll share the upside with you. And when I did, I sold my business for 77
times. But 151 million. And I sent $45 million out to my customers and all my employees. So I could have that feel. Yep. Dude, it was a single best day. Not only the fact that my model worked. Okay. Because it's hard enough to make things work. But to actually complete a cycle of the sale, the way I did it, 77 times even. I want to highest values ever paid for a business because of the way I engineered it. And and the promise that I made to the group that bought me was a public company
out of Denmark. Engineering the business for high valued transaction and have it the home run. So the most important thing was after selling the business for one of the highest values, using them a model I innovated that didn't exist at marketplace. I was then told, look, if the buyer buys you and it doesn't work for them, no one else is going to buy anything else you'd built. So I had a new problem. So I went in and integrated in my business that I sold
into the billion dollar company within 36 months. They became worth 4.5 billion. And we pushed out to eight countries. So I knew the stuff we built worked because it was based on research from 2009 to 2018. Sure. With FTI out of Chicago billion dollar consulting firm in IGS out of Austin. I hired him and I forced rent tens of thousands of businesses. What makes them work? What causes them to fail? What decisions? Because I was searching for how do you build a platform company?
What is a platform company? How do most people build a platform company? How can I do it different? And now what I've I've done since partnering with Grant Cardone is we built Cardo Mintress from zero. My wife and I zero investing capital zero debt. Same way we teach. This year we'll do 115, 120 million in revenue and on 50 year in business. Well, last year we we we made 55 million in EBITDA.
This year will make 70 million of EBITDA. Launched a new format business in the healthcare space, bought a little $2 million business called Streamline owned by Gary Brecken as wife Sage. It was $2 million. We'll do 130 million in our third year. It's 75 million in our second year. And we've got a dozen other formats we're rolling out right now. So so from launch we've done just under $400 million of revenue, $103 million of EBITDA in five years, no investment capital, no debt.
So that is easy for you to say, but I want to make sure the listener is in the people watching this right now. I understand what you're saying, but take us through like to go from zero to selling $150 million a year in five years. Like that is a turkey lane lift. I heard it's a 150 million of revenue. That's a turkey lane list. Yeah. What's the secret sauce? Well, the thing I learned in all that research and in building multiple companies now is there's a lot of moving parts
and there's a certain place where businesses fail versus where they succeed. And after surveying thousands of business owners asking at that point, what decisions did you make versus what decisions caused the businesses by business? We started finding all these little golden nuggets. Like when
confronted with this situation, the businesses that failed said, on average, we did this. Bob, Bob, the 3% of the businesses that succeeded when confronted with this situation, we step back, we met as a team, we found a mentor, we went through this process and then we did that. Well, if you interview enough people, you start to find the commonalities behind the ones that succeeded versus the ones that failed. And what was interesting is the ones that failed,
it was almost like intuitive, instinctive, snap decisions. We need to do this. We need to do that. And the faster they made the decision with less input from the right people, the faster they went into decline. So what that sent us on was the intuition. I called it the entrepreneurial intuition. Sure. If you've never been there, you've never done it. You're not talking to people
who've been there. You're not talking to people who have done it or you're talking to people that have a concept of it, but they can't exactly tell you how they did it because what we found is in those micro moments where you're making really super hard choices. If you're making them without the granular details that made it work versus cause it to fail, you fail. And you can be close to making a good to say, if you ever talked to an entrepreneur
and said, no, I tried that. It didn't work. Yeah. Of course. Okay. What we learned is to ask the question, did you try it right? Okay. That's a big how would you try it? And in the nuance of how would you try it, we found the granular fractional way they tried it that caused failure versus success
when we started mapping. And from 2009, all the way up to 2018, thousands and thousands of businesses, millions of dollars spent, we mapped these little granular incremental choices along the growth spectrum that either plateaued your business, broke your business, allowed you to accelerate your business. And we just kept mapping and mapping and mapping and mapping. And we
created a system on how to go from zero to 125 million. There's 10 elements, 76 sub elements and 240 specific things that we found that you have to do or you're going to, that's that's insane. And that it takes a lot of research that a lot of us are not willing to do. This is why you have to make, by the way, if you haven't yet started following Brandon Dawson, do that immediately on all platforms, YouTube channel, Instagram, every platform is on. It's just Brandon Dawson, right?
I have Brandon, I have Brandon, M Dawson, Brandon, M Dawson. Make sure you're following him immediately. He is someone I heavily look up to. Obviously, he has the resume to prove it. You guys should be as well. And my podcast is building billions with Brandon. And you have an incredible book. We didn't even mention that I want to make sure everyone goes out and gets. But let's talk about your book for a
second. Yeah. I think the mindset, the mindset thing is a big thing. I think as someone who coaches other entrepreneurs and I have for a decade now, the mindset, I think that's the 99% of the success in my opinion. Yep. The tactical is the 1%. Anyone can show you the strategy. If you can't break your own mind and push through the tough times, you're going to break 1,000% and I extensively talk about my break. Yeah. And how I rebuilt. Yeah. I wanted to encourage
people. You know, one of my closest mentors, Dearest Friends, is John Maxwell. And he told me last year, he and I have been working together since 2012. I came in and helped him with his business in 2013. So we became very close. And he's been mentoring me personally. And I've been helping his business. That's been art. And I feel a little chauy. And so he told me two years
ago, he said, you have to write. I've been working on my books since 2009. But I had never quite finished what I thought I needed to finish to suggest that what I believed could happen was actually going to happen. So I had this little imposter syndrome thing saying, this could happen. I wish I would have put it out because I predicted the future almost perfectly. Right? Yeah. But John said to me, you need to put this book out because people won't understand
how you got when you do put the next book out, they won't know how you got there. So 9 figure mindset is really one of a trilogy I'm working on. There you go. So the first book is 9 figure mindset. It's how I broke, how I had the ideas, how I made all my stupid mistakes, how I learned from those mistakes, how I found my mentors, how I applied what I learned from my mentors, and what happened. Okay. To give people the inspiration and courage to understand the thing that you
talked about, you need resilience. Yeah. You need humility. You need appreciation and gratitude. Like there's certain things you hear those things from other people. But what I tried to do in my book is precisely show you how and why you need these things and how to deploy them actually in the business like business. The second book is going to be for lack of a better way to describe it. Kind of the 10x operating system that allows you to go from zero to 125 million to break points that
I've been chaired actually go to a billion. So this is zero to a billion. There's 11 break points between zero and seven to 125 million. The second book is going to be how to do that. It's the how to book and the third book is the 10 figure mindset because I have taken my net worth from a target. I was a hundred million when I partnered with Grant. I asked Grant, my next target was 350 million.
I said, can you please show me how to do that? I want my target was three to five years. We hit that target last year and now I have a billion dollar net worth mindset and then it's going to go to 10. Right. Nice. And what I'm doing is I'm actually literally documenting every technical little move to do this so that and I'm speaking it publicly. So when people go, okay, nine for your mindset, this is how I got here. And I'm like 10 figure mindsets coming. That's my third book. The
middle books going to be how I'm doing it. But I haven't speaking I do a hundred eight events a year and I speak these things out. And I have every video clip talking every business order. Here's what we're doing. Here's what we're going to do next year. Here's how we're going to do it. Here's what we're going to do the year after so that I can literally document that move to building billions. And then I have hundreds of business owners that are going from three million to 30 million to 60
million to 100 million. And I'm documenting what they're doing. So my goal is over the next five years is to create a documentary on exactly the precision behind building a business. I love that. And you say something I actually want to get your input. So I have these five laws of success. The first one is you got to decide what you want and who you need to be to get. That's one. What you want, who you need to be. Number two is you got to commit to it. Number three is you
have to take massive action in perfect action. Just keep going. Number four is being extremely uncomfortable the entire way. Never quit. Never be okay with being uncomfortable. And to me, number five, I think is so it could be number one, meaning I think it's actually the most important, which is remove your time expectation on your result to try and twitch you. Do you agree with those? Would you add anything to those? I have literally been speaking this from the mountaintops because
I believe these are the five principles of five laws, genuinely viewing caps all fives. You will reach where everyone to go is faster. You possibly can get there, etc. I agree with everything you said except for one thing, which is the precision, the third point you had two points. You have massive action, massive action with precision. And what I can tell you is that there's no way to have precision when you're doing everything to trial and error. Sure. You got to take the massive
action and be okay with not having precision. But you have to have the desire to take the things that are broken and figure out a way to make them precise. Amen. So if you have the mic, because what I find, there's just a nuance, but what I find with people when they say the precision is they start looking for the precision before they take the action because they don't want to make a mistake. I was just going to say, but don't you find when you say that word precision to me, it's almost saying
be perfect, get the thing done right. Yeah, I had professions in and on. I'm good at that. You get the top people from getting going. That's the point. You have all these people that want to be precise, so they don't do anything and then they never do anything. That's right. So I would tell people to be reckless. Yeah. Take massive action, be reckless. But have a team behind you measuring what is or is no work you get there. Yeah, that's it. So it was the micronoants, but here's
the thing. Those five laws are phenomenal laws. What I find with business owners is they're like, okay, I got it. I wrote them down. How do I do? Yeah. What's the indicator? What's the lead indicator? I'm actually doing the five laws. Right. How do I graph it? How do I set the targets? How do I inspire the team? How do I communicate it without scaring them? How do I hold them accountable? How do I? So now all of a sudden it goes how? How? How? How? How? How? Which is what all the business owners
we interviewed? They're like, I want to go from three million to 10 million. But how? I want to be resilient. But how? I want to be a great leader. But how? I want to have phenomenal books. But how? Yeah. And so then you start looking, okay, how did the people that did it do it? Like people say to me, oh, you're so smart when they come, I'm not actually that. I'm a 2.4 GPA. My intellect is actually in just understanding. I don't know anything. Yeah. So I need to find people that are
living proof examples. And here's the problem with finding mentors and you're like, oh, I got a guy that I hear this all the time. I got a guy that built a hundred million dollar business. And he's mentoring me. So I know I'm good. Phenomenal. But the problem is you don't know what questions to ask
a mentor. So if I've done research on thousands of businesses and I know a guy with a hundred million dollar business that makes $3 million a year and sold it for $10 million because he got burned out, you want to learn from that $100 million business owner or do you want to learn from the $50 million business owner that sold their business for $150 million? So who you're learning from and the wisdom and the advice you're getting is directly relative to what you want to achieve. And just because
somebody built something doesn't mean they built it right. Doesn't mean they even built it valueably. And it doesn't mean they built it well. Yeah. So if you don't know what questions to ask, you end up following people that look good. They sound good and trust me when I got into this whole business. There's a lot. I wife is half my age. She's like, we should look at some of these social media people to go big fast. I'm like, oh man, I went through the whole list. She made
a list. We went through most of her bullshitters. Most of them, their whole business is trying to sell the concept that's it. Most of them have never actually done it. Their business is just coaching and mentor and masterminds and all this stuff. And they're they're just talking concepts and people get all excited, which is fine. But what I noticed is very few people, they give you the actual technical ability to do it. And then we came across brand cardone. She did the first video she showed
me. I'm like, I never work with this guy. It's just he was promoting a loud and shooting money guns and had his hat on. I was just like, what is this? Yeah. And she says, you got to look at the genius. How he's grabbing attention. So once I got over my own ego, this very important. Once I was like, okay, I'm willing to look. I'm willing to listen to this book, Tenants Rule. As soon as I listened to it, as soon as I actually looked behind the scenes, I was like, this guy is a genius.
He knows what he's doing. He was the only social media person that actually had an operating company that precisely laid out how to do something and it was in sales and marketing. Well, that happened to be my weakest areas. My strength was in all the other operating factors of the business finance, people, leadership, strategy, data, technologies, investment, things like that. That's my strength. So we went to the growth corner 2019 to say, okay,
what kind of audience does he have? What does he really do? Does he really work with his wife? Can we complement his core business? And then the fifth thing, could he help me actually create a 350 to 500 million dollar network? I went to growth con with those five things with my wife to find out could we get this these five things from here? And within the first half of the first day at the 2019 growth conference, 34,000 people, Marlon Stadium, we're like, this is all we're going to
partner with Grant and Helena Cardo. And I told some people that I'm here to figure this out. And then by the second day, I were going to partner what is Grant? What is Grant? I'm like, Grant's never met us. Yeah. I just heard that story recently, right before you came in here. And I think that's incredible how you guys played hot girl games and it worked. That was my wife's idea. I was like, I was like, you guys can just talk to Grant. I'm so excited.
She's like, so down. That's right. I could down. That's it. Yeah. It's in difference. In difference has been a game changer for me. So let's dive in. I want people to get some of the tactical brilliance that is in your head that I've had the pleasure of experiencing. But let's talk about the break points. We just talked about the questions about how do I do those things? And I know through your at least seven break points, I think we can review in a matter of
time. That is part of it. It's how. And then there's the who and all those things. But let's go through these break points so the people can leave here with like, oh, this guy's something. Yeah. So, so let me tell you something really simple that all your listeners can do home listening to this or while they're driving. It's not going to take a whole lot of effort. But all it takes is for them to be honest with themselves.
Anybody can be a founder, business owner, of course. And a founder, somebody who starts a business and a business owner, somebody owns a simple, right? It's about 15 million to 25 million in revenue, where you actually something new happens. And if it doesn't happen, you generally won't get to 25 million. And that thing that happens is you move from a founder, business owner at 15 to 25 million to an entrepreneur. And there's a very specific thing we found in our research that
allowed you to make the technical move, founder, business owner, to an entrepreneur. And that is, what you're struggling and you're trying to push through and you've got a lot of people around you and you're frustrated and you feel like you're doing everything and you're talking to mentors, you're talking to coaches, you're talking to consultants, you're talking to your account, you're talking to your lawyer, you're talking to your buddy. Somebody says, you know what you need.
You need a strategy. And as soon as you start realizing, why am I doing any without a strategy? Because a strategy says you don't do anything if there's not an expected return, you don't do anything if there's not a result. You don't do anything unless it feeds into the bigger picture, or it's all wasted energy wasted momentum and now you're going to build your strategy. That happens in the 15 to 25 million range and if it doesn't happen, you fail. And you can't get
to 25 million if at some point you're not sitting there. Now, this is why I say, any entrepreneur driving right now can go like, I don't remember that moment. Or you're saying, hmm, strategy, we're just showing up every day and winging it. Yeah. A new thing happens at 75 to 125. The new thing is become a CEO. Now CEO knows their job and a fiduciary duty to the organization to drive value. You have a fiduciary duty to investors or to the employees to drive value.
They understand that you would do nothing if it didn't drive value according to a strategy. And their job is to find the right people. Hold the team's accountable, drive to value, you have a fiduciary duty to make sure it's moral, legal, ethical and compliant, built teams that are thinking of the future, not thinking of the present. And so a CEO, a real CEO knows that's their job. Now, if you're driving your car right now and you gave yourself
a CEO title that are 10 million dollar business. And you're like, wow, I'm not spending my time doing that. Then you're not really a CEO. That is something that does drive me nuts. It's a session of weird pet peeve when people care more about a title night like the CEO CEO. Are you really? Or are you just still? Yeah, but here's the second. I hear you. But look, if you go from zero to a million and you're striving, you're fighting, and you get to 10, 10 is a huge number.
A million to a lot. I mean, at the end of the day, my friends do not run any business that generates millions of dollars. So I'm the king of that, you know, smaller circle, right? So I give respect to the people that are out there doing it. Right? So I get it. They want a title to it. But it does drive me a little crazy when people are like, on the CEO of this company, it's two million dollars. But here's the big room. Here's the bigger problem, right? When they give
them the CEO title, they give their bookkeeper the CFO title. All right. And they give their buddy the CEO title. And the only people they're fooling is themselves. And then they wonder why, if you're in construction, I can't get an insuredy bond. I can't get alone to buy something. If you're in any business, you're like, the bank's not taking me serious. So you go get a lease and
they won't give me the lease. And it's because here's the thing, the people you're dealing with, even if you've had success in your mind and your business, the people you're dealing with, the professional world, they actually understand the difference between a founder, a entrepreneur, and the CEO. They know based on how you're presenting your financials. Like, I don't need anybody to explain anything at all to me about their business. I just need them to
hand me their financials. That's right. Once that happens, I know everything I need to know about the competence of the leader. Okay. Well, so does everybody else. It's in that space. So when you're in business and you're giving yourself things titles and you're telling everybody how successful you're actually creating the enormous amount of resistance in the ability for your business. Because the business isn't supposed to be you, the business is like a little baby you birth
and you're supposed to nurture it. You're supposed to lead it. You're supposed to protect it. You're supposed to guide it. But one day, it should be able to take off and run by itself. Instead of you holding everything back and and and misguiding it. Okay. And so so now what happens when you're the CEO, well, something magical happens at 150 to 250 million for if you make it there. And that is you move to the investor. Because you start realizing I don't need to do all the work
anymore. I've got a team on average of 12 to 15 people. So at 15 million, you have to have a leadership team with three year year out of business at 25 million. You have to have a leadership team with five or year out of business. As 75 million, you have to have a leadership team minimally of seven or year out of business at 125. It's 12 and at 250, it's 15 to 17, 18 people. If you don't know that you don't know what those roles and responsibilities are and you're going to
add a hockey and wing it and hope it finds itself, you're going to go out of business. So so what is important is depending on the type of business you are, you know what the three people are, you know what the five people are, you know what the seven people are, you know what the 12 people are. If you know that all the way down into a million dollars and you understand why would I do anything without creating value? Why would I do anything without a strategic plan? Why would I do anything
without having the intentionality behind it? You start having those conversations with yourself and you're like, because here's the other thing. You've never heard of anybody that ever built a business so that started overbilt one bigger faster and made more money. Yeah. If you ever heard anybody selling their business to a third party for a lot of money, they break it. They step back in by openings on the dollar, grow it back up and sell it again. Marshalls, because they
they have moved to understanding what an investor decision-based process is. A CEO decision-based process, a founder process and an entrepreneur process and a founder process. Well, here's the if I can teach a million dollar business owner the behaviors and characteristics of an entrepreneur. They can call themselves one, but if they don't know the competencies, the attributes, they don't understand, but if I can teach them that and they can do that and think
that way, they'll pop to 15 to 25 million. If I can teach the entrepreneur how a CEO runs a business and they're willing to make, because you're talking about mindset. Yeah. This is an entirely different mindset to make these massive movements from who you are to who you need to be in order to create capacity for the business to grow to its opportunity. And the business's growth and the opportunity for the business will only be limited to the extent that you're thinking small.
Because if you're thinking big, everything, everything, lose with belief, the higher you believe, the higher you achieve. Operational effectiveness is moving you towards reaffirming that belief for pulling you off of it. And me, we then us leadership is the thing you have to develop for it to breathing grow. And John Maxwell says 21 Eurifubo laws, first law, law the lid. The lid is the cap. If you're not elevating your lid, you can't elevate the lids of the people below you,
which means you're stagnating your growth. Three lids, belief, operational effectiveness and leader. That's incredible. I mean, in everything you say, it kind of brings me back being capsizing the five laws. So you have to decide who you need to be to get there. So what do you want? Okay, great. Let's just use a billion dollars. Who do you need to be to get there? I'm watching from the sidelines. I'm seeing how often you guys are working weekends. I'm how many people put
in a hundred and eight events you're speaking at this year. Name other people that do that. Besides maybe grand, right? My point being is, who do you need to become? You're sacrificing your Friday nights and drinking because you are on stage on Saturday morning. Now that may not be your jam anyways. I'm just saying. No biggie. Right. You'd have to give something up to get something new. So the person going today, zero to one million, what's the first break point they're going to go through?
One million. Okay. Zero million. Yeah, you need two to four employees. Yeah. You need to be generating 250 to 500,000 revenue per employee. You need to be running somewhere between 18% and 45% profitability. And that will get you and the product and service that you deliver or sell needs to be delivered and sold and delivered effectively. There's three things you have to master to get to a million. One, you got to be able to master your promote.
You got to be able to convert and sell and you got to be able to deliver operations. And that will actually take you if you can build that business to a million to to four employees, 18 to 40% profitability and you can get that system to work. That system will take you to three million. Should they all be focused on sales? I think that's a big, I think that's a good question. Should all four of those people be focused on sales and driving revenue? Well,
it's one or two of those have to be operationally sound like. Yeah, think about it this way. If I'm promoting, I'm grabbing attention. And people say, well, what's promotion? Promotion, they go, well, I do marketing. Well, marketing can be promotion, but it can also not be. Promotion is a very specific thing you do for a very specific result. There's actually seven
promotes in business. Promote who you are, promote what you do, promote why you do it, promote the value proposition, promote why somebody should join your team, promote people to take over your roles and responsibilities and then teach everybody the six promotes. That's the seventh. If you just live by that every day, which means I would never hire anybody without teaching them the six promotes got it. That means when my service guy goes out to somebody's house,
they're promoting because I've taught him how to do it. If I'd hire the service guy and say, his job is to do service or her job is to do service that dental hygienist or the front office person, no one's out promoting everyone shouldn't be promoting. That's strong because they should be aligned with the success of the business. So that's the next piece. So marketing and promotion, everyone, conversion, everyone needs to be able to know how to ask the question every year,
enough to make a decision. Would you like to move forward with us? What's stopping you from moving forward? Who do I need you to get in contact to make so you can make a confidence decision and moving forward with us so we can answer whatever questions you might have? Like teaching people how to communicate. Yeah. Is that difficult? Not teaching them how to communicate, let them all practice on your customers or butcher your business case in the community. That's
not good. Yeah. That'll take you out of business. So really, and then you got to deliver on your promise. So those three fundamental things, you got to learn how to promote everyone needs to understand their responsibility to promotion. Now a business owner will say, but how do I get my
people to promote? They're just showing up for a job. Well, that moves over to the thing you learn and break point two, which is personal professional financial goal planning, actually including your people and the success of the business, giving them a clear picture of what what what the business looks like. What there was a study done when they took a big jink saw puzzle and they shook it up the through through down a one room with a bunch of competent people.
And they went over to another room did the same exact jink saw puzzle, shook it up through the room, put the box in the room so people can see it. The room with the box organized and did the puzzle super fast. The room that had no box, they were all fighting. What is it? It's this, it's that move this piece because because they're where they're scat that led me to this statement, where there's confusion in business. There's always failure. Yeah. So if you can learn that out of
a million, you're going to move to a million super fast. And if you live by the rules, I just describe you popped a three million like really super fast in them. What's the break point of three nine three to eight three to eight. Okay. Now you have to shift from the what you do. The idea and then delivery of the what you do with your two to four people, you get up to three million. Well, if you're running two 50 at three million, you have 12 employees. If you're at 500,000 at three
million, you have six. So as long as you're living in those rules and making 18 to 40% and you're you're understanding the algorithm of how to how to take certain amount of your profit every month, you don't you don't spend it all and give yourself raises and go you take it and you start throwing it in a reserve account with the goal to build 90 days and six months than a year than 15 months and 18 months of cash reserves. And that becomes a target that cash reserve target for the first three
to five years becomes a target. Yeah. You always want to have six to nine months of cash in a reserve account. Now it doesn't mean what you do that, you can't spend it, but you know you can do it and you could invest it. You would never spend it. You'd invest it and you'd only invest it like the CEO would and something's going to create massive value. See you start thinking differently. Yeah.
So your five rules are the right rules. Buying up boils down in the fact there's three to five things in break point one three to five things break point two three to five things break point three three to five things in break point four and it goes all the way up to break point seven and if you bypass or you stop doing the three to five things, think of it as the thickness of the concrete in your
building extra levels on your house. At some point if the thickness of the concrete will not support the growth of the future growth, your house will collapse. Yeah. You have to understand this is to what you said earlier in your five laws have to decide where you're going. I would never start constructing a building and say I don't know I might want it to be three stories or 10 stories or 15 stories. If I thought I'd want it to be 15, I'd engineer it to 15, but I could stop it three.
That's right. I'm going to invest more on the front end. You're going to have to suck it up because the number one thing that causes businesses to go broke is they don't understand the rules and the laws of investing. Yeah. They think of it as spending and you hear from them. What you think is what you say, what you say is what you do, what you do is what you're no for. You know, much money I spend in marketing. It's like, okay, I already know you don't know what you're doing. You should
ever be spending money in marketing. You should be investing in right. 100% right. And if you're investing, you're looking for the returns. If you're getting the returns as an investment, it's not a spent. That's right. That language you use directly correlates to your knowledge of if you're a founder, an entrepreneur, a CEO or an investor. Yeah. And the sooner you can learn what those people think and what that means they do, you can choose to be that before you even start
your business. And it's been proven that people that know how to do that can go start a business from scratch, build their second, third, fourth, fifth, eighth company and sell it. Yep. Because they think by the time they do that, they're thinking like an investor. They're not an investor says, how do I put money in? How do I get the most amount of money back? How do I leverage all my resources? How do I leverage all my assets? How do I make sure the right people are doing the right
thing at the right time? And I have downside protection. I've hedged it and I have upside maximum opportunity. And then I'll do I'll do something. That's how an investor think. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think like a founder. I'll start it and I hope that works. So we've gone through two and what I want you guys all to do just for the sake of time because you could do this for an hour straight, two hour straight, be Dawson.com. Yep. That's what I think even has those on another
separate video. Make sure you find it there as well. This is something all of you if you're just starting today or if you are three million or you're at eight million, what are the breakpoints again? One zero to one. No, that's a sub break point. It's zero to three million, three to eight million, eight, 15, 15, 25, 25, 45, 75, 75, 125 and then it goes up to a billion. Yeah. If you're anywhere in any of
those, so you're going, you're there. Make sure you're reaching out to Brandon. Him and his entire team, they're doing hundreds of events a year. Go to their event, reach out to him. This just keep going. So there's got to be an end. And I love this. You know, this is I love helping yesterday at our event. A guy walked up to me and he's like, man, I paid $400,000 with you guys over the last two years. All my friends are telling me what were you thinking? What were you doing?
My family's like, why are we putting a stress? Because he took a second loan out of his house two years ago to do his first thing with us. He goes, I came to you. I had a bad partnership. He told me exactly what to do. I resolved the partnership. The guy left. I took all the friction out of my life. I listened to all these people telling me you're wasting your time going to all those events or just taking money from you. Boom, boom, boom. He goes, I just got $70 million for my company. Let's go.
That they told me. That just gave me shivers. Two years ago, I bought a partner out. The guy that you told me to get rid of how you did it. And I paid him less than five. I remember him. That's incredible. And I just got 70 million. I live for those moments, dude. Yeah. It does just one decision, one technical decision for making a good choice or a bad choice. Yeah. And my commitment is to help business owners learn the rules to make the best choices possible.
Make sure you are following my guy Brandon. He's a wealth of knowledge. I'm an I look up to mentored by go to bdoson.com. Go to branded mdos and all over social media's YouTube channel. This is the guy the scaling expert Brandon Dawson's been a pleasure, bro. Thanks for having me on your show. Absolutely. All right, guys, if you like this share it with two of your friends and make sure to be ready for the next incredible guest on next one. See you guys later.