14 days until FLL... How I leverage events to make millions

How events have made me big money throughout my career, whether it's helping me scale my business or actually raising money from investors at events. Events have been massive for me in my career. For example, Ugly Unicorn, our hedge fund, we just hit twenty. We're just right around. It's between twenty-five and twenty-seven million dollars AUM, and a lot of those investors we found that we raised money from came from in-person events, shaking someone's hand, meeting them eye to eye. Events have been massive, and most of them were events that I did not throw. Now, I know a lot of you guys know I'm throwing Fun Launch Live. We are 14 days away, I guess 15 days, 14 days tomorrow, 14 and a half days away from Fun Launch Live. It's going to be phenomenal. And I'm so excited. I throw a lot of my own events. So if you are wondering on how to throw your own events, which is great, I'll walk you through all that, the mechanics, the numbers, all that stuff in this video. Additionally, if you are attending events, I attend a lot of events. I attended an event End of last week on Saturday, I'm taking another event on Friday. They're local events. I go, I meet people. I usually it has helped my business a lot. I tend to attend an event maybe three or four times a month. I go to in-person events that are not my own to go meet and scale, hopefully scale or meet cool people in my business and just build a network. So let's talk about that in this video. Does that sound fair? So welcoming you guys on this live. We're live right now. So type in where you're calling in from. Let me know what's going on. Say hello in the chat. We're live on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and all sorts of places. So. There'll be chats coming in from all over the place. If you go to my iPad though, let's actually break into this for a second. So, hopefully you can see that. Let me know if you can see it, if it's flipped or something, if it looks weird. Does it look weird? Does it look backwards? It looks backwards to me, but let me know in the chat if it's backwards. I don't know why it would be backwards. Let's try it sideways here. Yeah, it looks flipped, hey? Let's try it one more time. I'll unplug it and then we'll plug it back in. Well, we'll see if the iPad can work. If not, I'll just try it. I'll try to write backwards for people. But so events that have made me lots of money. So I remember first getting into this game of Funnel Launch, I attended actually an online marketing event and it opened my whole brain to the idea that we could actually run a business like Funnel Launch, do it virtually, have Zoom calls and help other people around the world. Launch and Scale Funds. We actually launched Fund Launch. It was called Investment Fund Seekers at the time. A lot of you guys were on that first call we did. And it's funny, when you build videos or an online something, I mean, you hope, you're like, man, if 100 people took this program, that'd be really cool. Maybe 300 people took the program, that would be awesome. If 1,000 people take this thing, that would be insane. At this point, we're over 77,000 people have taken one of our programs at Fund Launch, which is insane. Our programs are all around How to build funds, how to launch them, how to scale them. And it's been very rewarding to do this. And so we had so many people coming into these programs. We said, well, why don't we get in person, throw live events, get our community of crazy people like me and you that want to throw funds, get them together. And so that's how we birthed, you could say, as an analogy, we birthed into existence Fund Launch Live. So Fund Launch Live was the idea. It's not like other business conferences. It's not like, you know, we're just going to show up and have booths and you mingle around booths and you hopefully you meet somebody. We wanted an event that actually moved the needle, would actually walk you through the process of launching a fund, was way immersive. Um, if anybody's learned a second language before, I speak Mandarin Chinese. I went to Taiwan and, and hopefully Taiwan's doing all right. They just got hit by a 7 point, I think 7.3 earthquake today this morning. And there's, I think, 70 or 100 people stuck in caves and it was Very sad. I lived in Taiwan for two years as a church missionary, which is fun. We can talk about another time. But if anybody's learned a second language, first off, it's there's a couple lessons from learning anything in life, but especially a second language. I went over when I was nineteen years old to Taiwan, and I was like, "I gotta learn Chinese." We're gonna we're teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ in Chinese, and I gotta learn it. And there's something about immersion that completely changes how you learn something. Your environment, though, when you just are fully enveloped in something, you tend to learn a lot faster. There's actually the FBI, CIA came and studied. We have this thing called an MTC or certain missionaries. How do you guys learn languages so fast? And most people could learn languages in a matter of months when most people it takes years or decades to get the same level of proficiency. And it was, the answer usually is immersion and also a lot of prayer and God's power to help you learn a language. But Immersion was so massive. And you show up and you suck so bad. But the idea is you're like, I'm in the environment. I'm going. I'm shaking hands. I'm at the event. I'm in the place. I'm in the country learning the language. And I'm just going to show up. I'm doing reps. If anybody's done phone sales before, it's reps. You're doing outbound phone sales. It is reps. It's knocking on doors. And what happens is you suck and you are so bad at something. But what happens is we When you do more of that thing, you tend to suck less and you suck less and you suck less and you suck less until you're kind of a little bit good. And then you're kind of a little bit better and you keep sucking less and less until you're actually pretty proficient and actually pretty phenomenal. If you listen to anybody's story of any entrepreneur, anyone that's been successful, that's generally the story is I was so terrible at the beginning, but I stuck at it. I kept going. I kept showing up. And I tend to get a lot better. I'm gonna— so sorry, I got 5 analogies I could share, but events were that way for me. I naturally kind of like people. I like meeting people. I generally like getting to know people's names, et cetera. I like people throughout my past. And so I actually generally liked going to events, but I was so terrible about it. Like I didn't know what to say. I was awkward. What do I, you know, how do I introduce myself? Like what do I do? And what happens was I just sucked and I sucked less and less and less till I finally got kind of good. And now I'll go to events and meet incredible contacts. We, this last few months, so we just raised $2.8 million, got wired in to, excuse me, $2.7 million got wired into our accounts last Friday for our fund. We just raised that in a single month. The month before that, we raised over a million. The month before that was about a million. The month before that was about $1.7, $1.8 million, somewhere around there. So over, over a million a month, we are raising in our fund every month. right now. And most of that money that is coming in, those investors, we met at an event where I sat down, I met somebody, we had a great conversation. We talked about what they were doing in their business. I tried to give a lot of value. We tried to go past them. And what happens is they want to come work with us or invest in our fund or whatever the thing is. And we've been able to be extremely successful in events. And so events have been massive for me when making money. So For people that just joined, welcome in. Say hello in the chat if you guys can. Say what's up. Funnel Launch Live is 14 days away. So grab your tickets at funnellaunchlive.com. We are almost— the booking links for the Hyatt, the hotel that we're at, I believe Saturday is just about sold out. The other days are on teetering of selling out. So if you have not got tickets, if you haven't booked your room yet, I would highly recommend. They are almost sold out. Like the room block is selling out very quickly. So go to funnellaunchlive.com, you guys, grab tickets. Um, so events, I'll, uh, literally I've shared the story before, but I'll share it again. Funnel Launch, all this stuff that we have would not have happened unless I went to one event. And I'll share that event with you right here. So I went to an event. I was, man, 20-something years old. I just got into college and Mason, my, my now business partner at the time, he's just a friend, said, Bridger, we got to go to this online marketing conference, uh, up in Boise, Idaho. And I said, all right, I'll go to any conference. So whatever, I've never been to a conference. I was very skeptical. I'm like, I'm not going, this is dumb. But anyways, I'll go with you 'cause we're friends. So we drive up, we go to the event, we sit down. It's like 200 people, relatively small event. And on stage, there's this guy and he's preaching about online marketing and running an online group and all that kind of stuff. And at the time, again, I have no followers, no nothing. I've got zero. And for a long time, I had been, I don't know about you guys, I kind of got mad at influencers. Am I the only? I don't know if I'm the only one, but influencers, I'd go, these freaking influencers are so lucky. They can just do whatever. They get on a Zoom call like this, a live stream, and they pull up, you know, hey, we're selling shoes. Here's the shoe. It's here's my discount code. Go buy it. And they make millions of dollars. And I was kind of frustrated. Like they're so lucky. They got it so easy. Anybody else felt that? MrBeast can just launch a chocolate bar and it's worth $100 million overnight. Jake Paul can launch Prime Energy. I mean, it's just, it's $100 million overnight. Like these people are so lucky. And then, and I literally was kind of mad. I was like, and I live, I actually know a decent number of influencer people just from high school or growing up. For whatever reason, I just was around a number of people that were influencers. And I was like, man, people like me have to work the hard way. And I was starting businesses. I'm like, I just got to grind. I'm behind the scenes. I got to grind. Those people are just so easy for them. They just have a following for no reason at all. They do stupid dances on TikTok and they can just pull up a pair of shoes and people buy it. Okay? Am I the only one? I don't know if I'm the only one, but I was like, I was so frustrated by this thing. So anyways, I go to this conference about online marketing and he's talking about all this stuff of online marketing and branding and you don't have to be a public figure. He kind of mentioned both. You can be or you cannot be. But he challenged the audience and he said, A lot of us people, you know, wish we were. And he like said my problem back to me: wish you were influencers, wish you were out there. But you know, like what's stopping you? All those people have the same exact starting point as you. You're so passionate about your business. I'm gonna challenge. And you got us all riled up. You guys are gonna crush it business. Yeah, like we're gonna take over. And then he's like, you'll do anything, right? You guys are gonna do anything to take over your business, your take over your industry. We're like, yeah, we're gonna do this. So again, I'm at an event. He's telling me this and he goes, all right, cool. Pull out your iPhone right now. All of you have a phone in your pocket. I want you to go live on Facebook or Instagram, whatever the thing is. Go live right now and tell people your story, your dreams, what you're gonna do. And the whole room just shut down. And he's like, oh, what's going on? I thought you guys came to an online marketing conference. I thought you were hyped up. I thought you were gonna do anything. You're willing to execute and go after your dreams. But the moment I ask you to go online and make a simple 1-minute video, you tell me, you know, you can't do it? And so he looks back and I was like, I'm going to do this. And so I took my phone. I went to the corner of the auditorium. He said, I'm going to give you 5 minutes. And I actually pulled out my phone. I remember going on Instagram and I hit the live button on Instagram and I talked. I was so awkward. I was nervous. I didn't know what to say. And I started talking about what I hope to do with my life and my hopes and my dreams, just kind of what I was doing at this weird marketing business conference. And it pushed me out of my comfort zone like crazy. And I was like, huh. And it was terrible. I wish I could pull the video. But, and I've seen this from hundreds of influencers. They always, if you look back at like MrBeast's first videos or anybody's first videos, they are awful. But the idea that you suck, you're going to suck no matter what. So you might as well just suck now and then suck less and less and less. until you're actually kind of good. And I still don't think I'm that good at being on stage or talking on camera, but at least I'm better than I was before. And maybe in 5 years I'll be better than I am now. An event pushed me out of my comfort zone like crazy. It pushed me to execute. And then after that, I thought, well, maybe I'll start a little Instagram profile. Actually, what I did, just so you guys are aware, and now we have about a quarter million followers on social media, which is good. I hope it keeps growing, right? I think I've sucked less. We're still okay, and I hope we can do a lot better in the future. But I started a separate new account. So I was like, I don't want my friends and family to see this. I'm just gonna start brand new accounts. And I started posting on those accounts. We started talking about funds and Fund Launch, what we're doing with funds, how I was running my funds. And people like y'all, I guess apparently liked it. And then we launched this little course thingy and then we did more. Now Fund Launch has done around, we're just shy of $30 million in sales in just under 3 and a half, 4 years, something like that. Maybe it's 4 years. Wow. We have Fun Launch Live in 2 weeks with over 1,500 people that are going to be live in person at Fun Launch Live in Orlando. And by the way, if you guys haven't got tickets yet, we're 14, like literally in 2 weeks, room block is about to sell out at the Grand Hyatt. So make sure to get your tickets and then get the room block, get your rooms booked like ASAP. They're about to sell out. This event is all designed on pushing you out of your comfort zone. The reason I shared that story is this is not like other business conferences. It's not a conference where you just show up and you look at booths and and you, hey, what's up? It's not like a— it's not a big convention. This is a conference with very targeted content. We bring in hand-selected speakers. And this year, by the way, it's brand new content. If you guys have come in the past, it's brand new stuff you've never heard before. This is— each speaker will dovetail into the next one. And the idea is to immerse you, like I talked about learning Mandarin Chinese, immerse you into the world of funds, private equity, hedge funds, venture capital, real estate funds, debt funds. Almond farm funds, car wash funds, dental roll-up funds, funds that buy vending machines, funds that go buy pizza stands. Okay? I want to immerse you in this space for 3 days. It's crazy what can happen when you immerse yourself in something. Just like what happened with me with getting past that fear of being online, clicking live on the button to go live and be on a public platform. To be honest, it's— I actually don't love being a public figure. I don't love being on social media. I do it because I feel like I have a mission and a message that needs to be spread to the world. Um, I, me and my wife always talk about happily, I will happily delete all my social media accounts. I don't care to be on social media. I do it because I benefited so much from people before me that shared valuable content that helped me launch some decently successful businesses. And hopefully, I can share some content that's unique. No one else is preaching about funds and how funds are put together. And so I wanted to be and do that for you guys. OK? So, Fund Launch Live, people are asking in the chat. It's fundlaunchlive.com. fundlaunchlive.com. This is our 3rd event. Tickets and the room block is all there. So, fundlaunchlive.com. Just go there. I'll actually share my screen for a second. Dress for the event? Someone's asking about dress. Business casual. You can wear whatever you want. Some people are Way dressed up. Some people are dressed down. It's up to you. But I would say I say business casual would be probably standard for the event. All right. If you share my screen, let's see if it's see it's backwards. Any reason it's flipped? Can you figure that out? We'll put it on our crew here. But yeah, funlaunchlive.com. It's it's backwards. I don't know why. But here you go. Funlaunchlive.com. You can see it all here. Oh, there we go. That's looking good. So funlaunchlive.com. You come down. Tickets are we are fifteen days out. Okay, which is pretty fun. We're gonna be in Orlando, Florida, all in person. This is pictures from our event last year. This is not some stock. This is actually from our event. That's, you know, that was me on stage. We have this, we spend a lot of money on stages and making it cool and making it very immersive for you. It's hyped up. We hire one of the best MCs in the world, Devon Brown, to come help and make it high energy, a high, just fun event. 'Cause when you're high energy, you tend to do things a lot better. I just flipped back, by the way. Maybe want to flip it back. Does it still flip backward? We got Steve Eisenman coming. He's from The Big Short, one of the main dudes. The movie was inspired after him. We got Oren Klaff, one of the best capitalists in the world. John Pennington, Todd Buchholz, Cody Sanchez, Peter Zihan, Dr. Benj Harvey, Neil Bawa, Andrew Smith, Ben Reinberg, Bryce Sutton, Lincoln Archibald, Jeremiah. We can go down the list. It's we have a pretty phenomenal lineup. We just added Vina Jetty to the lineup. Ria Campbell. It's going to be a very, very fun James Fishback. He's launching a $100 million fund in macro. He was just on actually Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign with him. It's gonna be very fun to have him with us. So there you go. Funlaunchlive.com. Sorry if it's backwards for y'all. I'm not sure why it's doing that, but there you go. You can put me back to full screen. So grab your tickets there at funlaunchlive.com. We're excited to have you guys in person. The last 2 events, we do survey and feedback at our events. The feedback was actually phenomenal at our previous 2 events. People, number one, they said this event was unlike any other event I've been to. Yeah. Yeah, I've been to other stuff, but nothing as immersive and targeted as Fund Launch Live. Fund Launch Live is around if you are interested in ever in the future launching a fund or syndication in the world of private equity, venture capital, real estate fund. If you have an existing business that you want to scale, if you have an existing portfolio strategy that you want to scale, a fund may be the most lucrative thing for you. And so That's why we're throwing Fun Launch Live. If there was other events that did Fun Launch Live better than us, we would just stop throwing Fun Launch Live. But no one does this. It's some of the most unique content on earth, which is pretty fun. So I'm excited to have you all there. Events, back to events a little bit, have drastically changed my life. I, again, I attend events regularly. So I'll share a few things. Number one, I go to events or sorry, number one, I host events. So I host events. There's a lot of benefits from hosting events. You guys remember, think back to like When you were in 8th grade, remember going to like your first high school party and maybe you were a little bit younger, but you got invited. You went to this party in high school. And remember everyone talked like, oh, the party's on Friday night. It's going to be at like Kyle's house. Oh, we're going to Kyle's house this Friday night. Oh, it's going to be over up. Oh, and then you show up to the party. Oh, whose house is this? Oh, it's Kyle's house. Or who invited us? It's Kyle. The event thrower gets a lot of benefits from throwing an event because people recognize or ask who is the one throwing this event? Who's hosting the event? So you get a lot of benefits from there. Secondly though, the problems with hosting events is you got to pay a lot of money. We will spend roughly $1 million on Funnel Launch Live this year. That's what we did last year. We'll roughly do the same this year. $1 million I'm spending to throw this event for you. The other side of it is, and I, and this is why I attend a lot of events, other entrepreneurs spend millions of dollars in marketing and ads to bring a certain group of people together. And I can buy a ticket for a couple hundred bucks or a couple thousand bucks and attend. And I almost get the same benefits as the person who spent the millions of dollars to host the event. So for example, we've seen a lot of success in, for my fund, people that want to invest in my fund, people that do real estate. It's a lot of people that do real estate that want to invest in a blockchain fund. And again, we manage about $25 to $27 million right now, give or take, given that crypto is pretty volatile depending on the day. We see a lot of successful. So if someone has spent millions of dollars pulling together real estate investors and I can buy a ticket for a couple hundred bucks and show up, what has tended to happen in the back is a lot of people say, hey, I love real estate, but I also want to buy some crypto or I want to be in the blockchain space. Tell me more about your fund. And they've already conglomerated the people together. I can just show up and insert myself into that stream of people. So that's why, again, I like hosting events. I like attending events. I think all of you should do the same thing. And if you host an event, please invite me. I'd love to come. I'd love to check it out. So we've hosted a bunch of other events. You got it figured out. Oh, thank you. We're flipped back. So that's like the— that's one of the big magics. And for whatever reason, I know we live in this virtual world right now. We're in a live stream. Yes, we can, you know, talk over virtual, but there's something about shaking someone's hand, looking them in the eye, and just, I don't know, meeting people. and laughing, giggling, having drinks together, whatever the thing is. There's something magical about events. I met my 2 business partners that I currently have that are amazing business partners, Dan Young and my fund and Mason Vrains with Fund Launch, both at in-person events. It's the first time I met them. We introduced— we just hit it off. We had, you know, those people that you just hit it off with and you feel like you're connected and just something sparks? I met Mason and Dan and just something hit. We practiced, we worked together, and just it moved on. I don't know if that would have happened Virtually over Zoom or over DMs. There's something about getting out in the world and just meeting people. And proximity, I think, is power. Being in the room is massive. That's why I have— we've spent a million dollars assembling a room for you of crazy people like us that are the crazy 1% of people that think, I could do a fund. Like if you tell your aunt or, I don't know, your brother-in-law that you're doing an investment fund, People think you're crazy. People think, okay, yeah, there goes Bridger again on his crazy ideas. But what's fun is when you get together with other crazy people like me and you, and you see what they're doing, you can share notes. Oh, I'm actually not that crazy. It was interesting. I listened to a study this morning. It was talking about what actually determines monetary success for someone throughout their life. They did this huge study. Was it ACT scores? Which school they went to? Career choice? There's all these different factors. But what they found was the highest correlation. Was it— is it skin color? What ethnicity you're from? Background? They looked through all this stuff. They found that it was the zip code that you were born in. Isn't that interesting? The zip code you were born in predicted with more accuracy than your ACT score, your color of your skin, your parents' income, the college you went to, the degree you chose, the zip code you were born into. And the analysis was we're a product of our environment. And it didn't depend if you were a poor family but lived in a rich zip code, it didn't matter. You would do better than the same economic or ethnicity family or background if you were in a different zip code Why? Because your environment is massive. It's the old saying, you know, you're the average of the 4 people you hang out with. And so what they found was if they, for people that were born in bad zip codes, if they could move their environment, change their environment and get them to better zip codes, whether that was college or different environment, different career, it then drastically increased their earning potential. Just the zip code they were in. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. There's a massive amount of benefit of being in the right room, being in the right environment of people that think the same way. Have you ever been in a room where you feel like you're the wealthiest person in the room? Man, I'm just crushing it. Like, I'm making so much money around these people. And then you go to a different room and you feel like you're the poorest person in the room. Am I the only one that's felt like this before? Like, you're like, dang, okay, I got to think differently. I got to level up. When you're in that other room. We are— studies keep telling us that we are just products of our environment. And so I like to think a lot about what's my environment? Who are actually the people I'm hanging out with? Which— and that's why I love going to events with people that are crazy enough to think they can do a fund. That's why I like hosting stuff like this. I got to hang out with y'all. People that hop on these calls are not normal people. You guys that are on this livestream right now are not normal people. You guys are people that— Want to play bigger, want to scale, or already have scaled. I like that environment. That's why we throw these summits. We go to Cancun. We go to Hawaii. We go to now Orlando in two weeks. I get to be around people that are like-minded, that are doing cool stuff. If you're with me, give me a I don't know. Give me a yes in the chat or something if you're if you're there with me. So if you guys want to come, I think we fixed the screen. Funlaunchlive.com. Here's the link. If you want to go there, let's see if it works. Hey, it looks like it's working. All right, funlaunchlive.com. 93% sold out. Room block is almost sold out as well. So if you come up here, if you've already bought a ticket, it'll— if you click on just get tickets, it'll take you to this funnel. It'll walk you through, um, you know, you just type in your first name, email, phone number, you walk through. I think tickets— we've been raising prices every week. We just offered like a payment plan on tickets as well, a couple hundred bucks. You guys can go there. Um, but if you come back here, it'll walk you through the whole process of buying a ticket. If you have a problem, by the way, you can message Matt right here. He's live. Uh, or message myself, bridger@funlaunch.com. Or you can come here and then once you've got your tickets, come book rooms. So book rooms at the Hyatt. Rooms are going fast, okay? So like actually, like this morning, they were not available. They just added a few more rooms today. I believe the 20th is almost sold out. The 19th is almost sold out. If they are sold out, just double-check on the other website, just the Hyatt's homepage, but they should be discounted here for y'all. But just check the website. They are almost sold out. So I would grab Grab a grab a room if they are not sold out yet, and then Fun Launch Live again. This is brand new content stuff we have not shared before. This is gonna dovetail over three days of this event for to help build out your entire fund thesis. What you are doing for a potential fund, something you're working on, and to really dive in deep. I go to other some events, and I again all events are great, but some events are better than others. You know what I mean? This event is designed to give you real actionable nuggets and insights for exactly what you need in your fund to move and execute. To actually, because it's fun to go to events and people talk high level. They're $30,000. And it's what's just 30,000-foot level, which is great. But also like, how is that going to affect my life today? Like I need stuff like, Yeah, it's cool to hear, you know, if I'm looking at steps, step 392, but what about step like 1, 2, and 3 right in front of me right now? And so we do both. We'll have speakers that talk high-level, 30,000-foot level, and then other speakers that talk specific to like right now. It's actually what's unique about our event is if you go back to my screen here, we put this here on purpose. Discover how 18 normal investors scaled portfolios to $10 million to $30 billion. We put that there on purpose. We have some speakers that manage $2.5 million right now. And they just said, hey, I just started 6 months ago and this is the steps I have taken that has worked for me right now in 2024. Other speakers manage $30 billion and they say, hey, this is what's worked for me over the last 2 decades. It's helpful to have both. If you have one or just without the other, it doesn't stick very well. And I believe pretty much every speaker we have, I'm trying to think of all of them, have a background of being kind of just normal. They weren't born into some perfect family. They didn't have the Vanderbilt name or the Rockefeller name. They just figured out that running a fund was one of the most lucrative vehicles on earth, that the Forbes 100 list is riddled with fund managers. They said, I'm going to figure this thing out. So what they did is they came down. You can come read some of the profiles of people. They said, I'm going to figure this out. Some of them, it was shorter. Some of it was longer. They all followed a sustainable formula to do this, and I think that's what's so special about Funnel Live. That's why people keep coming back year after year to come to Funnel Live is because of how special of a message that is and and how targeted this event is. So if you are on the fence, if you're someone that wants to level up, change your environment, come to a better space, come to Funnel Live, grab a ticket. I and I've I've been there. My first event, you can go back to full screen. I so when we were this is me and Mason. Again, Mason drug me to an event. The ticket price was $1,000 a ticket to go to this event. This is a different event, not the first one I told you. This is when we were starting out. We had no money. We had to get a plane ticket and a room. We shared a room. We got the cheapest plane ticket we found actually. And plane tickets to Orlando, by the way, are very cheap right now. Orlando has Disney World and Universal. They're actually very cheap tickets anywhere in the country, which is great. And we got a pretty good rate on the hotel, but it was a lot of money. And I thought, man, what is the return on this investment? We spent, you know, a couple thousand bucks going to this event. And, uh, and I was like, man, we were— and we didn't eat the food. We were kind of— we had like, you know, like we took protein bars with us to like save money from Costco. And we went to this event, and over 3 and a half days, it put me in an environment where I was around people that were making way more money than I was, that were playing the game at a different level. And it— I, me and Mason will both tell you the exact same story. It pushed us We said, why not us? It's funny. We were sitting there. We were poor. We were broke. We didn't have any money. We said, why not us though? These people I'm talking to are kind of like me. There's nothing special about them. One of my favorite things I've ever had in my life. You ever anybody ever met a billionaire before, or someone who's a hundred millionaire? One of the funnest things about meeting those, and I've been able, I've been fortunate enough to meet a number of billionaires, a number of centimillionaires, what they're called, hundred million dollar people. Currently, I'm on hopefully on my way to a hundred million dollars. I'm over the ten million dollar mark personal net worth, and I'm trying to get to a hundred million dollar net worth. And I think I'm like, how do I get there? What are lessons they have learned that I have not learned yet? My favorite thing about meeting those people is they're just like me and you. They're not that special. I was on a call with Alex Hormozi. This is like a man two years ago. We're talking about billionaires, and he's like, he's like, yeah, man. They they put their pants on just like me and you do—one leg at a time. They have to tie their shoe. They have the same you know gut problems or you know ah their back hurts. Like they have they're they're not like superhumans. These are normal people. And what happens is when you get around it, you realize it starts to normalize. Oh, like I could actually have a $100 million personal net worth or a billion-dollar personal net worth because that person is kind of like me. And they're not like this superhuman genius crazy person. Like they're a regular person that just applied themselves in a good asset class, in a good field, worked extremely hard, scaled, learned a few lessons that I have not learned yet. But like I I can get there. And so me and Mason went to this event. We're like, we can do this. And maybe we were crazy or dumb or stupid, but one year after that event, we had done $2.5 million in revenue. We're like, holy crap. We came back to the event the next year. We did $4.5 million in revenue. The next year we did about $9.5 million in revenue, something like that. We're like, shoot. And then we went to the event. We were one of the people that were smart and successful. Now Funnel Launch has done us roughly somewhere under $30 million in revenue. Right below $30 million. And people ask us like, and we're like, and I always tell people gladly, I am not that smart of a person. But we've applied ourselves. I've learned lessons. I bought my way into rooms and environments where I could learn and shorten the growth curve of business. I could shorten the timeline of how long it takes to learn certain lessons in business. You're going to like, I talk to my sales team all the time about this. I'm like, you can learn how to be a good salesman now. Or you can learn in 10 years, but you've got to learn the lessons sometime in life. If you want to be successful, you've got to learn these lessons. You can learn them now or later. You got to learn how to overcome objections, how to intro and just do discovery on a call. You got to learn how to sell the vacation or, you know, go over a product in a way that shows that not the features, but the benefits to them. These are simple, basic selling things. And you can learn them now or can learn them later. And we, a lot of us, pay the ignorance tax every year. Every year we pay a lot of money in, I would call ignorance debt, because we do not learn the lessons of business. And funds are the same way. There are things right now that I'm learning that I, man, if I knew that 3 years ago, have you ever had that? If I knew that 3 years ago, I would have made so much more money. Well, what are the things in 3 years from now that you're going to look back today and say, man, if I only knew that, I would have made so And how do we shorten the gap of learning those things? Well, typically, we learn from people who've gone before. You learn from somebody that's already made those mistakes and those lessons. And how do you get those people? You find mentors. You get in rooms with people that are smarter, who are down the track further than you, and you can stand on the shoulders of people that have gone before. That's why I love being in person, being in the right environment, shaking people's hands. It raises a vision. It changes how I think about things. And that's why we wanted to throw Funnel Launch Live, to give that same benefit. That's why I wanted to spend over $1 million on this event. If anybody knows about throwing events, you generally break even or even lose money throwing events. Like, that's just how most events go. I got a big pro forma from another event company. Like, a lot of events don't make— they don't make that much money. Now, we do make money from— it's the brand. It gets people involved in our community. There's tons of stuff that we do make money on from events that are external, kind of tangitory things. But the actual event by itself, I think last year we went into the event, we were down like $200,000. We lost money going to the event. And we still threw one this year. Why? Well, okay, yes, it added goodwill, added brand value. We had a lot of clients that came to the event that loved us, wanted to work with us later, which is awesome. But the actual event by itself, I said, we need to help more people do this though. I was such a beneficiary of Great people that went before me, that we need to help more people figure out what funds are, how to build them. We need to fight against BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, these three mega funds that are taking over the universe. We need to help regular people like me and you figure out what funds are, how they're put together. So with that, drop questions if you guys have in the chat. I'm happy to answer whatever questions you guys got. If you want to share my screen, fundlosslive.com is where tickets are at. Room block is almost sold out. Yeah, go ahead and share it. So right here, funlosslive.com. You can grab tickets. Room block again, the 20th, I believe might be sold out already, but hopefully it's still available. They're trying to add more rooms to our block right now. Book rooms is right here. You can get tickets right here. Come to the event. We are 15 days out. We are right at the deadline here of getting tickets and flights and everything booked. It's massive. So I invite you guys out to FunnelHacks Live. It'd be very fun to have you all here, which is pretty fun. Now I'll share another. Anybody You know, maybe you're all bought in, but you're— maybe you got a spouse, a friend, a cousin, a coworker, a business partner that is not bought into your vision. Anybody else feel that before? I've totally been there. I've been sometimes the spouse that didn't believe, and other times I've had a spouse or a friend or a cousin that didn't believe in me. And give me like an emoji or something in the chat if that's any of you guys. Give me like a yes or something. I need a little feedback. Anybody here? What's up, Elena, Kyle, Mike? What's going on, you guys? Sucher, good to see y'all. And by the way, we're live on a bunch of different platforms. I have a mix of comments that come into my screen right here. So I'll tell you this, and it's hard to be a spouse of entrepreneur. We just got to admit that straight up. It is hard. I have a beautiful wife. Her name's Lauren. Amazing woman. And it is hard to be married to me because I'm like, all of us, people like us that are entrepreneurs are crazy. We're like, I'm going to go raise money and do this thing. We're going to buy this business. And like, you know, our hair's on fire like all the time. And our spouses are like, okay, like— and they're always trying to— well-intended, whether it's parents, a spouse, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a cousin, a business partner, they're always, you know, let's pull things back. Let's make it good. But you see the vision sometimes. And again, my wife believes in me like crazy. My wife is my best business partner of all time. She's amazing. But still, there's a little bit of hesitancy when you're like, hey, let's go raise $100 million in a blockchain crypto fund. Like, she's like, whoa, okay, I just need to get sold on this idea. So one of the best things that ever— I didn't realize at the time. I took my wife, we spent some money, and I brought her with my business partner, Mason. We flew out to Nashville to an event in person. It was an online marketing event we went to. This is 2019, I think, 2020. And she came and I drug her. I was like, hey, just come with us. Come see what's going on. She came and sat in the seats and listened and was in that environment like I talked about earlier. And we had this happen to people last year that came to Funnel Hacks Live. They brought a spouse or a business partner that was skeptical about doing a fund. And what happened was over 3 days, they go, oh, I see the vision. Oh, I see what you're talking about now. It paints. Oh, I get it. And my wife, she came to this event. She and I, and then a year later, I was like, hey, I want to throw a big event just like that one. She's like, I'm totally on board. I get it. I get the vision. She's like, I'm all in. I'm like, cool. Are you okay if we spend $1 million on this? She's like, whoa, that sounds like a lot, but like, I'm in because I see the vision of what we're doing. And it's massive. If you have a team member, a spouse, family member that— and maybe you're all in and they're supportive, but they're maybe not all in. That alone, having the support and team around you might be massive. We had an event last— I keep talking about events, but this whole call is around events. I had to get my team bought into certain events. We were going to do— we were going to change our content style for Funnel Launch. We were changing how we're doing our studio, our setup, our events. We spent something like $12,000 flying out. It was like 8 members of our team to an event. I believe it was in— man, I can't remember the city. It might have been Orlando. I think it was Orlando. We flew everyone out to Orlando. And I just said, hey, you're invited here to catch the vision of what we are looking at. We spent $12,000 to fly all you out here and be here and buy tickets and everything. But I because I wanted you to catch the vision. What happened was over it was about four. This event was four days. They caught the vision. We came home that next Monday. We had a full meeting. We had broken down. We had ideas. People were on whiteboards. Oh, we got to do this. We got to try this out. It transformed our entire business over the next twelve months. Was it worth twelve grand? Hundred percent. Best twelve grand I ever spent getting my team. Of people, my video editors, my marketers, all on the same page, rowing in the same direction, was massive. That's why in-person events. I can go. I can tell you story after story of how in-person events have shaped and changed my whole career. It's been absolutely phenomenal. And again, that's why I love Fun Launch Live and what we're doing. And that's like one of the reasons I feel like we. I feel obligated to do this event. I feel obligated like we have to throw this event. So again, share my screen one more time. Funlaunchlive.com. Go grab tickets there. Right here, funlaunchlive.com. There should be a link down below in the description as well. Buy tickets. We are 90. We are almost sold out. We have sold out the last two events. We plan to sell out this event as well. Room block is almost full. I believe that I keep saying the 20th, but I heard this morning the 20th was sold out. They just opened up a couple more rooms for the 20th for that day specifically. We're just about to sell out. So go grab your rooms. By the way, if you can stay on site, we are we. Specifically went to a hotel on purpose. There's so much benefit of what happens. We have the event during the day. At night though, when you're on site at a hotel, people stay up late. They're at the bar. They're talking. The after-party networking that happens, we have after like a cocktail hour and a party that we do is massive. There's huge benefit to being on site at an event. Last year we did a convention center and we didn't like it because the convention center kicks you out at like 10 PM. It says go home and everyone goes to different spots, Airbnbs or other places. When we're at an actual resort, which we're at the Hyatt, here it is right here. It's a beautiful resort. You get to all be in one spot. You get to meet people on the elevator, in the morning getting breakfast at the Starbucks. Like everyone is in one spot. Everyone's got the lanyards, the little wrist things. Like you know who's at the event. And again, allows you to be in that environment for a longer period of time. And just by osmosis, you're going to meet some incredible people. So with that, go to funlaunchlive.com and grab tickets. We are literally right here, 15 days out, 7 hours. From the start, it's April 18th through the 20th in Orlando, Florida. I'm so excited, by the way. I've got brand new content that we're sharing. You can go back to full screen if you want. Brand new content that we've never before shared is going to be shared at this event. And the way we structured the speakers, how they dovetail one to another, it's going to be phenomenal. Very excited for you guys. I want to spill the beans. I want to share all the— we have updates and announcements, new stuff for our community that'll make it way easier for you guys to launch your funds. But I digress. We will wait. We will wait for the event here in about 15 days. All right. Thank you all for being on today. FunLossLive.com. If you guys enjoyed this, give me a little yes or hello in the chat. Thanks for being on here. Again, FunLossLive.com. Bring a friend. Bring a family member. Someone asked about James and Matt. They are awesome. Yeah, you can work with my team. They are great as well. If you're talking to them on the phones, they're great as well. It all goes the same place. All of it works. Okay, y'all are amazing. I will see you in 14, 15 days at Fun Launch Live 2024. We're gonna be all in the same room, all talking about funds, how to build one, how to scale one. It's gonna be very, very fun. So see you guys there and we'll see you next time.