Never Work Again Interview with Adam Markel and Ken Courtright!

This is Adam Markell. I'm so happy to be hanging out with all of you and looking forward to seeing you. I have the pleasure today to be hanging out from my home. It's a beautiful day in San Diego, California and I'm hanging out with a buddy, incredible guy by the name of Kentwright, who's going to be one of our incredible trainers at Never Work Again. So, Ken, good morning. How are you?

I'm not as good as you. I live near Chicago. It's one right now. I mean it's literally one. It's negative 10 with the wind chill. I wish I could quickly turn my computer. My lake is freezing as I'm watching it and I forgot to take my boat out. So it's not a good thing. So you're much better than me right now. But other than that, I'm awesome. But I am looking to improve.

Beautiful. I know. That's what I love about you most, is that you're always looking to improve. I live my life based on this acronym, C A N S. I can sci constant and never ending self improvement. So we're all a work in progress and it's just good to spend some time together ahead of the event that's coming up. Never work again. So, Ken, if you wouldn't mind, I want to just give our viewers a little short description of you and then I want you to just jump right in because we're going to keep this hangout nice and short and sweet. We're going to get right to the chunky stuff, right to the really good stuff. Ken, you are the CEO of a company that literally owns more than 400 income producing websites. That gets more than 100. I want to say this very loudly now, 100 million visitors each and every year. So could you tell us a little bit about your company, a little bit about what makes you special? And the most important thing for the people that are watching this is that what are they actually going to learn that will help them to be able to create passive income in their life and I mean in their immediate future, not like their life 20 years from now after they job to death.

Okay, sure.

Give us a little bit of that.

Yeah, yeah, no question. So we're in our 23rd year. We're a growth consulting company. We're actually not a web company. We do do a lot of web projects, but at the core we have 31 employees. We're a growth consulting firm. A couple of years ago, we just hit the Inc. 5000 list. We're one of the fastest growing US companies. I'm going to start with the late. As of late, we have been partnering up with a lot of different individuals and helping them with what are called S curves. An S curve is simply that maybe they have a 9 to 5 or maybe they have a small business, medium business, big business. Maybe they're a private equity firm and they understand something. It's a law called entropy. Entropy says anything man made or God made is built to go from order to disorder. So their body is going to break down, their car is going to break down, their business is going to break down, their personal household income is going to break down. And so they basically find us because we don't advertise and we help them put an additional revenue stream into their household or their business. We were pretty much a straight shooting growth consulting company until five years ago. And then we kind of got into this ability to help people put a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth stream of revenue into their household. Bottom line is we had a little bit of a tragedy in the late 90s. My wife and I, we had a number of different businesses. One of them really took off. It was a chain of video stores. And so we started putting all our muscle into one income stream. And without going through the whole story, we went from making $10,000 a month net per store to losing $3,000 a month net per store. That happened within seven months. It was 19 months of pure torture. We had a miscarriage. We had an emergency sales meeting on a Saturday to just have a meeting, see if we could fix it. And the sales rep had a heart attack and died in my arms. It was nasty. And it was in September of 1998 that I vowed I will never ever have one source of income again. It's been 15 years and I think we're sitting on 512 different revenue streams, six different countries. What I'm going to cover at never work again is basically the principles of what is an S curve. You've got your household or your business or a private equity firm. Matter of fact, I had to prep for this. So this is me and Brian tracy and chapter 39 is on S curves. This is called against the grain. The concept of an S curve, I didn't make it up. Jack Welch from GE coined the phrase and it basically goes like this. If you have a job, you make money and hopefully they give you a raise adjusted for inflation. But outside of that, you're hoping just to keep the job. Basically, if you have a business, businesses go. Here's early adoption, here's Mature and growth. But at some point, I have never heard of a business that didn't at some point hit entropy and drop. The story I wrote about Chapter 39 is the true story of 1968 Corning Cook, where how did they go from 35 years, the global dominator in their space and within a 16 month window, literally almost filing bankruptcy paperwork to stack an S curve on top of their business. And within a year and a half they were dominating completely new industry. At the end of the chapter, there's something called the legacy question which says, what can we do nights and weekends that doesn't take any extra overhead, any extra time, but puts a second source of revenue into our household that was started back in the day by Corning Cookware's story. It's a Harvard Business Review case study. Right now. It's phenomenal. I heard of this story in the mid-90s before I kind of crashed, if you will. And then I just said, this will never happen to me and my family again. And I began pursuing what can I do over here nights and weekends to create a passive residual without my effort type of income. Then not every one of them was successful. We did some good ones, not so good. But the bottom line is it's been 15 years since that stumbling attempt. Now I kind of have a model, I have a system. And so when you guys invited me out, I said, okay, I'm going to treat it no different from the stage than I would. If I'm sitting in front of an individual, then I'm going to say, okay, what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Let me assess your current situation and I'm going to walk the audience through how do I assess that. And then we're going to look at some opportunities. It's called a SWOT analysis. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Because certain passive revenue streams aren't for everybody. So there's a blend of options out there. I know you guys have some tremendous speakers coming in talking about a ton of options. So I'm going to just kind of wrap it all up and say, okay, here's how I look at things and I'm going to cover about 8 to 10 different talking points. I'm also writing the next guerrilla marketing book. It's called Guerrilla Marketing Today. I'm taking over for Jay Conrad Levinson, who passed away. His whole concept is what can you do to grow something for free or nearly free? Well, of the six to eight to 10 things I'm going to cover that, people could leave the conference and go march and go with on Monday for free and grow their current business. They can also take those growth tips that I'm going to cover in the first half of my talk and apply it to an S curve and bring in a second, third or fourth passive revenue stream. I'm going to kind of just sprinkle some different ideas, different concepts and see what fits.

Beautiful. Ken. What's impressive to me is that I was an attorney for 18 years. I represented people buying businesses frequently and typically buy a brick and mortar business or what have you. And it's a lot of it's very complicated. You don't always know what you're getting into with employees. You don't know exactly what's the true value, the goodwill, what's the value of the database, the customers. Oftentimes, even the financials can be suspect. And you pay 4, 5, 6, 7, sometimes 10, 11 times earnings for those businesses. And it's a mystery. It depends on how much money you spend on the due diligence side. But what was fascinating to me is that you are looking and have for the last five, five, six years looked at the Internet at websites as actual businesses. Not any different than a laundromat or a pizza place or an accountant's or dentist's business. And you've looked at those from the standpoint of how much revenue they generate and you've been able to buy them at a serious discount. They're no different than any other business. Would you tell us a little bit about that? I'd love our students to know.

Absolutely. In the growth consulting business, a lot of times we would be brought in to kind of strengthen what is called ebitda. We would be brought in and say, okay, how can we grow this? We're going to make a stretch run for 12 months. We want to sell this business in a year. And EBITDA is earnings before interest, taxation, amortization, depreciation, etc. And so the average business, the average brick and mortar business, sells for 3.6 times earnings. That's the average business. The better websites out there, there's still businesses, but they just have very little if any overhead, very little if any employees. And so because they're so empirically pure, eBay bought rent.com for 40 times earnings. Mint, QuickBooks, Intuit bought mint.com they never made any money, but they gave the kid $170 million. So they're really powerful websites. The average authoritative site that's worthy of buying sells for 17 times earnings. But we kind of have built a system, built a model and because there is so many properties out there, web properties available, we don't get every one of them. As a matter of fact, we miss on over 90% that we offer on. But we found a way to buy web properties at 2x2 times earnings. So we literally help people buy an asset for their family, for their household with a 50% return. It sounds too good to be true, but when you see all the effort, all the due diligence and all the prospectuses that we read through, again, we don't get all of them, but we do have a system. And now we have for multiple years now we have a brand and a recognition worldwide. So, yeah, we built a really cool model. We can assess an online property, just like a rental property, but an online property. Run the numbers and we can tell within 15 minutes if this is a.

Keeper or a dude. The proof in the pudding is that you actually have a private equity fund that gives you money to buy websites. And I don't know, we purchase 40 or 50 websites just for them, right?

Well, no, 180.

Oh, sorry. That's a lot of websites. And the reason being is that each of those websites is just a little cash machine, right?

Yeah, they're mini ATMs. Yeah.

Because they simply spit out a certain amount of money monthly. And once the website's been purchased, it's like any other business. You own it, there's a transfer of ownership, and then the business is managed. And so, Ken, what you guys really do is you manage the website. What I want is to almost. There's two things going on in my head right now. One is that I want our folks in this short amount of time. We've only got a few minutes left just for them to really get a hold of the meat so they understand what the meat is. This is not a sizzle, and there's no meat to the sizzle. I want them to know what the meat is, and I want them to understand that a part of the meat is that they don't have to take on another job and that they don't have to manage another business. Because a lot of these folks are entrepreneurs. And this is a training about how to create passive income. This is a training about how to get out of the rat race and become financially free. So the last thing that we're teaching anyone is that you need to have multiple streams of income. Now, that may sound odd because the misnomer is that you don't want multiple streams of income because that's like you can have 16 jobs and work until you're dead and you can have income, but you have no life. So the idea is to have multiple streams of passive income. And that's where I think this is really key. So if you could tell our folks about the meat, which is really you monetizing it and you doing all the SEO work to increase the revenue of the website and they pretty much just watch the checks come in.

Yeah, it sounds so too good to be true. To the point where our national commercials, our Professor Hans Von Puppet, they run on ESPN and Fox. Professor Hans Von Puppet, a real puppet out of Hollywood, has a commercial that says, he starts off by saying, and I'm not going to duplicate his voice, but he says, do you want to hear something absolutely too good to be true? And it's a 60 second commercial on something that sounds too good to be true. But then he finishes, but it's true. So the reality is these web. Let's talk WebMD for a second. It's one of the largest revenue generating sites. You go to marketwatch.com, look it up, it made $512 million last year. So you have a website that has a lot of traffic because 500 doctors write content into the website. It ranks on 29 million keywords and it makes a half a billion 500 million in ad revenue. So because there's eyeballs, there's traffic. When there's traffic, the big sponsors, the big pharma, and anybody wants in front of those eyeballs. So as long as there's traffic, there's ads. And as long as there's ads, there's revenue. So take that 500 million dollar site down to a small site, maybe on recipes, cupcake recipes or something. If there's a little bit of traffic. There are definitely businesses that need that little bit of eyeballs, whether it's local or whether it's national. So what's kind of neat about what we're doing and why 71% of the people that take a site with us buy another one within a year is because they don't have to do anything. So they basically fund a deal. And I don't mind saying it this way, I kind of like saying it this way. We take their money. Let's say somebody says, okay Ken, here's $1,000. We take their money. If they give me 1,000, I have to take the 1,000 over here and buy a website for $1,000. That's making $500 a year because we'll only pay 2x2 times earnings. So if somebody says Ken, here's 1,000. I say, okay, I have to find them something making 500 a year. And I do that. There's 107 million websites today in the US and Europe that have ads on them. So I'll say that again, nice and slow. Between these two countries where most of our stuff comes from, there are 107 million websites with ads that we could email or call and say, would you be interested in selling? To put that in perspective, the MLS listing for real estate only has 2.7 million listings. So this is a gargantuan industry. So when somebody says, I have $1,000, I have a tool that scans every ad out there, every website with ads, and I can tell by the traffic and peel the ones probably making $500. And I have tens of thousands of sites I can email, say, are you interested in selling? I'll give you 1,000 bucks, something like that. That's not exactly how it goes, but it's pretty darn close. Then what happens is, if they give me $1,000, it's making $500 a month. I physically turn the site over to them. It's their site, not our site. I don't own it. They can host it if they want. They can keep the domain in their name, whatever they want to do. But once we get it on the 91st day, I physically put it in their name, and who is. It's their property. But we split revenue 50, 50. That's it. We split revenue 50, 50. And what I do is I take my half of that revenue stream. So they're still getting their 15, 20, 25%. I take my half of the revenue. I buy content with a third of the money to keep it going, because that's what was getting it going is new content. New content. I take a third and buy content. I take a third and market the content, and then I take a third for payroll and profit. But what's beautiful is they funded it, they handed me 1000, and now they get $250 a year, but they're doing nothing. They do about as much work as when you put money in a mutual fund or a REIT, a real estate investment trust. The average REIT in 2007 averaged a 31% return. That's too good to be true compared to our numbers, but it's very passive. 71% of people that work with us buy another one within a year. I like it because my last name is Courtright. And in the last 180 years, there has never been a male Courtright that had a job. I was taught at a young age that the 1905 definition of job in the Webster's Dictionary was a temporary means of income till your business takes off. 1905 definition of job, temporary means of income till your business takes off. So if you think back to 05, everybody was either a farmer, a pharmacist, the blacksmith, that you were a something, you were a business owner. So there were, until the Industrial revolution, there weren't many jobs. Most people were very forward thinking, okay, what are we going to do to make a living? Make money. Our family's been raised in a very different way than Norm. So we were taught to always look for opportunity and always. Every brother I have, every uncle I have, we had businesses in our 20s, not small ones, and it's all we know. So we're just taking those principles. When you invited me out to never work again, I'm like, wow, what a joy this will be. I mean, I'm going to literally, it'll be like my dad talking right through me. So it's going to be fun.

All right, well, we're running out of time, so I just want to thank you. I'm hanging out from home today. You're hanging out from home. We've both been very busy traveling all over and it's just good to be able to see you. And what's amazing too is that our students that are so lucky to be attending, well, we've got two of them. Right? So I'll read. Never Work Again in Palm desert, which is December 4th to the 7th. We're at the Westin Mission Hills Resort and Spa. An unbelievable place for no other reason. To get to Palm Springs in the winter is just terrific. So that's December 4th to the 7th. And then we've got our Never Work again super course one day shorter in in Orlando, December 11th to the 13th at the Caribbean Royale Hotel and Spa. And again in Orlando, December 11th, 13th. And here's the thing. I know that some of you that are listening to this are very excited about meeting Ken, being able to learn from him, because he's going into not only the more detail about the vehicles and how they're created and what you can do, as Ken said immediately, meaning right after the program's over, whether you decide you're interested in the model that Ken is teaching about, it's a teaching program. It's two things, actually. It's teaching and reprogramming. Brain change. We do some of the most world renowned brain change technology with our students. That are there because for the most part, most people have been programmed since the time that they were very little, unlike what Ken just said, most people have been programmed to actually work a job. So not the definition we've all gone by, which is to do something temporarily until our business takes off. That's hopefully the way anybody that's a part of our Peaks family, that's how they feel about it. They just want to be entrepreneurial and they want to get their money working for them. As Robert Kiyosaki said, versus us working for money, never work again is the only place on planet earth, as far as I know, where we actually brainwash you. I gotta say it, you're hearing it right here. We use the most sophisticated technology to work with your pathways, your neural pathways. We use neuro linguistic programming. We use a number of processes involving your olfactory senses, your audio, visual, kinesthetic ways of learning so that you can actually come out of the program never thinking of passive income in the same way again. Because now you've learned about it, you've seen the opportunities. You got to learn from people like Ken so that you can literally apply, as Ken said, certain things the day after you leave the program, whether you want to move forward in purchasing a website or that's not your thing, you will be able to take certain things you've learned, strategies and tools, and apply them immediately. So that's one thing. What we find is that if we don't work with your brain with those neural pathways, so that you see passive income as the path of least resistance versus the current way that you look at the world, which is that you have to have a job. And if you don't have a job, that you can't pay your bills and you can't retire. That's how we've all been raised. Get a good job, get a good education, get a good job, work really, really hard your whole life, that someday you might be able to retire when you're 70 or 80 years old and then live the life of your dreams. I don't think anybody's looking for the 78 year plan. I mean, I know I'm not signed on for that. I know, Ken, you're not signed on for that. And hopefully there's nobody that's watching this that's enrolled to attend this program that that's something you want very much longer. And if for some reason you're watching this as a part of our Quantum Leap family and you haven't even registered yet, well, I got to tell you, the Most important thing that you can do this year while there's still little time left in 2014, is to get to this program and not leave this as one of the gifts that's left hanging under your arm that never goes unopened. You brought the program. It's part of your quantum. It would be ironic to say that you couldn't attend simply because you couldn't take time off from work. Want to let that land for a second? There's a lot of you out there that you know that you've got responsibilities, and we completely get that, and you've got a job and bills to pay and all the rest of it. But to continue working with the mindset of, I can't leave my job to go learn how to leave my job, there's an irony there, nothing that the side of your life that's aching, and I mean aching, for financial freedom, for time freedom to be able to be at home. I'm here at home, and Ken's at home. And I got to see my kids this morning, and I'll see them when they get home from school. I mean, this is the life that we want you to have. And I can't force you to do it. Ken can't force you to do it. The only thing we can say is that he's a lifelong learner, as am I. I wasn't able to create financial freedom from what I learned as a child. I grew up in a tiny little apartment. My dad and mom both worked. So I didn't learn financial literacy or the language of how to create passive income in that environment. I had to learn it from people like Ken and then take action to be able to create a different result. Because we know Einstein said the mind. Very interesting. The mind that creates a problem is often not the mind that can solve the problem. To do the same thing over and over again, expecting that the result will be different is the definition of insanity. I'm so excited. I'm going to be training the event in Southern California, Palm Springs. I will be your trainer. We've got an amazing gentleman who'll be leading and training the event in Orlando. If that's the event that you'll be going to, Ken will actually be at both of these. So whichever event you. You choose to go east or west coast, Ken will be one of the master facilitators there to share not only how he was able to create passive income and from great adversity, mind you, and he'll go into much greater detail about that, but the specific things you can do right now. As soon as you leave the conference, move down that path, you'll get enormous programming on the brain change side that will come from us. And of course, Ken will get into the meat of exactly how you can purchase a website that produces 15, 20, 25% ROI, passively, year after year. And Ken is your partner in that. As he said, it's a 5050 deal. So, Ken, I want to thank you for taking the time and being with us this morning. And I can't wait to see you in just about, I don't know, three weeks.

Looking forward to it. I can't wait. Can't wait.

All right, terrific. Thanks, everybody.

Take care.