Bullish: 4 Types of Leverage In Any Business To 10X

I'm not trying to convince you on what the thing is for you. I'm trying to just convince you that I'm sold on that thing. Have you ever met someone before and they are just so convinced on whatever it is that it makes you kind of convinced? Welcome to Bullish, where we talk about the journey and process to build ourselves and companies into multi-billion-dollar people and brands. Currently, my business and investment funds have done tens of millions in revenue, and this is the documentation of the journey to scale to the billion-dollar realm, all while we give back and do good in the world. My name is Bridger Pennington, and welcome to Bullish. Now, people keep asking me, Bridger, you know, share stuff on the podcast or the show that I can't hear anywhere else. Stuff that people aren't talking about, things that aren't happening, things that aren't, you know, on just the recycled entrepreneur crap. So I wanted to get into something today that I think is pretty unique, something we share. And we're gonna talk about this concept of raising capital. In business, there's 4 types of leverage. You have the leverage of capital, number one, the leverage of humans, You have the leverage of technology and the leverage of media. There are 4 different types of leverage pieces in your business. And again, what leverage allows you to do is like a lever, you can pull and move more weight with your own weight or strength than you could have before with a lever. If you leverage media, if you leverage humans, if you leverage technology or capital, they allow you to do a lot more than you could have done just by yourself. If you hire an assistant or a whole team of people, you as a person have way more output than you did before. That's leverage. If you have technology, one human now has the leverage or the output of 10 humans through whatever AI media. If you have a huge media outlet, one human can touch and reach way more people through media than they did before. Capital is the same way. If you can leverage capital, you can go do all these cool things. By the way, I think capital is the most important because if you have leveraged piece of capital, you can go and lever media. You can lever, you can actually, you know, buy media. You can build or buy technology and you can buy, it sounds really bad, but you can buy humans. Okay, human leverage, human capital. You can hire humans, you give them salaries, bonuses to come work for you and you can do way more. Again, if you can master the game of capital. So today I wanna talk about this game of raising capital. Now, as a lot of you know, I currently run an 8-figure hedge fund. I'm the founder of 2 prior funds and now We consult on dozens of funds. And actually last year we had 120 funds launch out of our group. These are investment-style funds. So private equity, hedge funds, venture capital, real estate funds. We have 12 funds, over $100 million in our group. And they actually talk with me. We hop on calls. I get to work with them every single day and work with these really high performers. And what the cool thing is, I get to see what works and what doesn't work. I get to see people that try to go out and raise $10 million of capital. And fail, and other people that go out and raise ten million and succeed. And today I want to share with you guys some of the stuff that I've seen of people succeeding and not succeeding. So I'll start with this. And a lot of you guys know Ed Mylett, big fan of Ed Mylett. He actually spoke at our last event, Fun Launch Live. We were together prior to this event at a little small gathering at someone's house, and we were just talking face to face and shaking hands, and everyone's hanging out. And Ed said something interesting. He said, "In sales, I'm not in sales." By the way, raising capital is just sales. Yeah. It's just sales at a big end. It's the goal of most salespeople. You get to raise capital or do big deals or transact and help one business buy another. He goes, in sales though, he goes, I'm not trying to convince you of this thing. A lot of times in sales, we think we got to be so convincing and persuasive. We're trying to convince someone of that thing. He goes, in sales, all I'm trying to do is convince you that I'm sold on the thing. Let me say that again. I'm not trying to convince you on what the thing is for you. I'm trying to just convince you that I'm sold on that thing. You ever met someone before and they are just so convinced on whatever it is that it makes you kind of convinced? Like they are so sold on something. Like this is the greatest thing in the world. This like new probiotic pill I'm taking has changed my gut, my health, everything. Oh my gosh, I'm happier. I have more energy. And you're just like, wow. Okay, this is a friend of mine. They're a pretty reasonable, rational person. And they are so excited and sold on this. They are convincing me that they're convinced about this probiotic pill they just started taking. And it's starting to convince me to take it just because of how convinced they are. And that goes into the level of conviction of the salesperson. You read in any sales book, the level of conviction of the salesperson is typically what drives more or less sales. And if your salespeople can be convicted on the thing they are selling, if they can convince the person they're relating to that they are sold, they're here. Now I wanna tell you a story. Let me take you back a couple years, my wife, and I wanna get to the parts where they're kinda more unique and interesting. 'Cause I said, I'm trying to share stuff that no one else talks about. It's not just recycled entrepreneur content, so I wanna get into this, but I wanna tell a quick story. So me and my wife, we grew up on the same street together. 7 doors down, I think she moved in when I was 7 or 8 years old. We were friends our whole life, but I was friends with her older brother and her family. She was 2 years younger than me, 2 grades younger than me, 3 years younger than me. Maybe 2 grades. We went to high school together, very fun. I was a senior, she was a sophomore. I actually picked her up to school, we drove her there, but we never dated, never romantically liked each other, we were just friends. We then go to— I served a 2-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ. I went to Taiwan, spoke Mandarin Chinese, came home, and we started to date after I got home. We dated, dated, dated, and we were just madly in love. And I can tell you more stories later. We had this incredible first kiss, first time I told her I loved her. It was just magical, beautiful. And we keep going. And then my wife, this is, we're in college and we're like, man, we could get married. This is just beautiful. And my wife tells me, hey, I actually want to serve a church mission as well. And I was like, okay. I said, hey, I loved my mission. And by the way, any person in high school listening to this, I would highly, highly, highly recommend between high school and college, or maybe in college a little bit, but then leave, go out of country if you can, or go serve. Go build orphanages. If you want to do a church mission, I think it's one of the greatest things you can do in your life. Takes you to a different culture. Hopefully, it can even be your own culture, but a place where you go and serve people just unconditionally. You go serve, you build, you grow, and do it for an extended period of time. Not like a week, even a month. I went for 2 years. You don't have to go that long, but whatever it is, I highly recommend it. It opened my eyes to incredible— how the world works, how it functions. It gave me time before I got home to just jump into college. A lot of kids just jump into college and then the first day of college, okay, what's your career? What's your path? What's your major? Who are you going to marry? What's all these choices all pound up into one day? And what that gives you is time to explore and look at the world and actually be intentional about the career you pick, about the route you go in life, the model you follow. And I talked about in previous episodes where I came over from my mission, just totally changed as a changed human. And I came home very ambitious. I knew that I wanted to be in business. I wanted to make money and I wanted to leverage capital so that, so that I would have money to go serve my family, my friends, my people around me and live my passions. I didn't really care about working my passion. I wanted to make a ton of money so that I could go skiing. I love skiing. That was my passion at the time so that I could go snow ski and have season passes and just go hella skiing and do whatever I want skiing-wise because I made so much money in my business and I had time to do that. If that makes any sense. But anyways, I take this back. So, with my wife, we're dating. She tells me she wants to serve a church mission. And for girls at the time, it was 18 months they go out. And I was kind of sad, like she's gonna leave. And by the way, when they serve a mission, they are gone. They're not FaceTiming, we can't talk really, they are on their mission. So anyways, long story short, she serves a mission. She goes to Portugal, speaks Portuguese, it's amazing. We are barely writing on our mission though, because it's, I mean, we can talk once a week on Mondays, we can send emails to each other. And then by the end of her mission, we decided like we're just not gonna write anymore. And I'll tell that story in the future. But so, Well, I'll tell you a little bit right now, actually. We're there. She's on her mission. She decides, hey, I've got to turn my heart over to God. And this is the— he's asking me to give up everything. And this is just her. This is her connection with God. And she was— she said, hey, Bridger, I love you. You've done nothing wrong, but I need to stop writing you. And it kind of crushed my heart. And I was like, man, like— and I understood what she was saying. I got it. But at the same time, in the back of my brain, I was like, maybe she's lying to me, though. Like, what if she's just writing some other guy? She had a bunch of guys that liked her and wanted to date her. And I thought, man, maybe she's just writing me off just because, you know, she wants to write these other guys. She's just making an excuse. So I said, whatever, cool, no big deal. And it was a big deal to me though. But I told her, no big deal, you're fine. Like, I'm still dating around, whatever. Like, no big deal. But inside I was crushed. And so I had about 6 months before she was scheduled to come home. And so those 6 months though, I said, huh, all right, I'm gonna make some changes. I really wanted to marry this girl. I thought I did at least. I wanted to marry her. And I said, When she comes home though, there's gonna be probably 6 to 10 other dudes at her house waiting, gonna wanna say hi to her, gonna wanna date her. And I knew a bunch of these guys and they were studs. They weren't like just some whatever dudes. These guys were studs. They were smart, they had money, they had like the fitness. They were like, there was like, I know there was a bunch of these guys. I was like, dang, I gotta beat out the competition. And so I had about 6-month window and I thought, hmm, what am I gonna do when she comes home? How am I going to build myself into the most perfect person possible so that, you know what, even if she does turn me down though, I put my best foot forward. So that 6 months, I went balls to the walls. I started, I think I started another or expanded my fund. My fund like doubled in size that 6 months. I raised more capital. We were doing more deals. I was launching another little option to make money. I had a 4.0 GPA in college. I had purchased a new car because I thought this car would be way better and look cooler. When she came home, I'd have this cooler car. I went to the gym constantly. I got down to, I believe my lowest, I was 6.4% body fat and shredded, not like skinny, but I had like muscle on me too. So 6.4%, I had a full 6-pack showing, it was awesome. I was tan, I had cool hair, I had the money, I had college, I had my whole career lined up. I had all these offers from companies that wanted me to come work for them out of college. Anyways, and it builds up to the day that she's coming home. And I promise this story has a point. Builds up the day she's coming home. And so I knew the day, we were messaging a little bit, I knew the day she was coming home and her mom, I'm talking to her family like, hey, when can I come over and see her? So they said, hey, let her come from the airport, give us a couple hours with her and then that night I'll text her, text you and then you can come over and maybe take her out or you guys can go out for a little bit and see her. 'Cause they're all excited to see her as well. I said, great, sounds like a plan. So I planned my whole week out. I had blocked out all my work, I had extra, front-loaded all my homework at school so that I had like 3 or 4 days available that I could just do nothing, just hang out with her and just be fully present. So anyways, that day comes and I am super nervous. I woke up, I had the perfect routine. I had showered, I did meditation. I was trying to get in the peak mental state. And anyways, about an hour before, her family lived about an hour away from where I was at school. So I drive up early, I'm in the area, I shower, I shower again 'cause I got sweaty. I'm putting on deodorant. I put on deodorant 3 or 4 times in preparation just 'cause I was just so nervous. I was practicing. I knew what song, if she got in the car, I knew what song I was gonna play. I knew what next song I was gonna say. I had practiced in my brain everything I was gonna say when we got there and I was like ready. It wasn't like I was nervous. I was like ready. I was like, this is gonna be awesome. And because I had practiced so much in private, I was confident in public. And so I was confident. I was like, okay, this— but I was just, I was still obviously a little nervous, but I was like, no, this is gonna work out. Anyways, her mom finally texts me. It's like 6:00 PM at night. She says, hey, we're ready for you to come over. And her family, by the way, my wife's family, they love taking videos and I thought they'd have like cameras there because they were really excited for me to see her and us to reunite after 18 months. And so I'm like, okay, I'm ready. And I'm circling her neighborhood. I've been circling her neighborhood in my new car for, I don't know, 45 minutes waiting for this text message. I get the text. I'm like, okay. I'm coming over. So, I come over and within, you know, 2 minutes I'm at her house. I pull up and like no one's there and I thought people would be like at the house. I knock on the door, no one really answers. I'm like, huh, okay. And I was pretty comfortable with their house so I decided to just walk in because I'd been there a lot and so I walk in the door and I go, hey. I kind of announced myself and I had completely shocked them by the way. Just to give you context, the mother— my mother-in-law now at the time but her mom at the time, Thought I was still at school and was about an hour away because I was going to drive up from school. She didn't know I was circling the neighborhood for the last 45 minutes. And so I show up and I shocked the whole family. They didn't know I was coming. So they're there, they're eating. I walk in the room, I walk around the kitchen. It's like there's a little room that I come around into the kitchen and Lauren, my now wife, is— she just had taken a bite of a big peach. Huge peach, taking a bite and like stopped mid-bite and everyone kind of froze 'cause I walked in and they're like, oh my gosh, it's Bridger. And then Lauren, she took the peach out of her mouth and threw it across the room and then we ran together, we hugged, it was this awesome, we reunited, it was amazing. And we talked for a little bit, it was kind of awkward but fun. I said all my right lines and it was great, all the stuff I'd practised was perfect. I then said, hey, do you wanna go on a drive with me for a minute? just so we could talk, catch up, just kind of be alone for a sec. And so she's like, sure. She comes in my car, my car is perfectly cleaned, it smells good in there. She gets in, I play like our favourite song, the song she knew from 18 months ago that she loved. I play the song, she's like, oh, I missed this song. I'm like, yep, I knew it. And we drive up and it's just awesome. We end up having, we go out for 20 or 30 minutes, we talk, we hang out, and it was just, we reunited, it was just amazing. Everything went perfectly. Came back to the house, we then hung out with the family and then We ended up getting married. We have a kid now. We've been married for 4 and a half years now. It's been amazing. I tell you that story because a lot of people in my group, I have a lot of people that come and pitch me for capital. They come up and we actually do a lot of practice calls. So, in my group, people come and practice pitching with me. I've heard now, I would estimate over 1,000 pitches from people in my group and outside my group, just people pitching on deals, properties, ideas, funds. And I can very quickly discern between a good pitch, a bad pitch. I can call fraudsters. I actually have a pretty good BS detector at this point. It's funny enough, this week, this huge group just blew up this last week, a big Ponzi scheme, this whole thing. And I had like 4 or 5 friends call me like, Bridger, I should have listened to you. You called this Ponzi scheme 2 years ago. And I'm like, I know, it was pretty obvious to tell. And none of you listened to me. They all put in hundreds of thousands, couple guys millions of dollars into this thing. And I'm like, dude, it was a Ponzi scheme from the beginning. How? Anyways, I digress. So, people come and pitch me though. I get a lot of pitches. And what's funny enough is I go back to that thing that Ed Mylett said. A lot of people show up to a pitch and they go, hey, you wouldn't want to invest with me, would you? If I would have done that with my wife off her mission, if I would have just shown up, I hadn't really prepped, I was kind of flabby, out of shape. I didn't, you know, I had a crappy car. I hadn't worked hard in school. I kind of was just lazy during her 18 months. I was just waiting around, bumming around. My wife, who's a high-powered, high-performance woman, no chance she would have married me. She would have said, Bridger's kind of a bum. He's not really, he doesn't really care to show up that way. He's not dressed sharp. He doesn't, he's not looking, he doesn't have everything together. It's not as if all of his ducks are in a row. And that's kind of an obvious example, but we literally do this so much in pitches and in presentations. I can't tell you how many people come and pitch me and they, and we tell them before the pitch, make sure everything, Bridger and my assistants tell them, Bridger's gonna rip you apart if you're not ready. And I can't tell you how many people show up and their pitch deck is kind of sloppy. And the numbers aren't actually really that well portrayed and the graphs are a little bit off and the charts and everything aren't done that well. And it takes the extra effort and it's not that much effort. I talk to people on the phone, on my computer, and I'm like, guys, this is, this is the final 10%. If you would have pushed 10 more percent, it's not like they need to do 250 more percent. They're almost there. I'm like, you guys have a really good fund idea. The core of it is actually really good. But the way you showed up on this call, the way you're presenting, you're not using the presenter mode on— you're just flipping through slides that are kind of sloppy. And I can see, like on PowerPoint, I can see all the controls. Hide those controls. Have a good intro question. Can you hook me? Can you get past my croc brain? We'll talk about this probably on previous or different episodes. But, you know, most of us, when we show up to a pitch and I'm actually going to invest real dollars, everyone puts up their defenses. They call it the crocodile brain. Like when a crocodile or tiger attacks you, you have a fight or flight instinct. Most of us have that when a pitch comes. Is this gonna hurt me? Is it gonna harm me in any way? Should I fight it? And if you can build a pitch that in the first 1 to 3 minutes breaks through that croc brain, gets them into what I call their midbrain or neocortex brain. If you can break into their neocortex brain, which that is actually where problem solving happens, where there's a rational thinking, where they can actually think through the stuff. Your chances of getting an investment off that pitch drastically increase. But a lot of people show up and because their deck is kind of sloppy, they don't have a good intro question, they're not getting that first 1 to 3 slides isn't a good hook to keep my brain entertained. And/or it makes me nervous that they're talking to me and they don't have their Zoom cameras on or their Zoom cameras on and it's kind of, they're not dressed very properly, they're kind of sloppy. Why would I invest in someone who can't even— button up their shirt and, you know, crease their shirt the right way or build a pitch deck that looks presentable? Why would I give you— How am I going to expect me to give you hundreds of thousands of dollars and you're going to be— take really good care of that money if you can't even take care of your shirt or your hair or turn on a Zoom camera or practice presenting or answer some objections? Or when I dive into your numbers, you don't get flustered. How am I expected to give you that kind of money? And so back to the story with my wife. She was convinced that I was convinced on her. Women love men who are in love with them, especially if you're married. I texted my wife this morning, actually. Hey, love you, honey. Just middle of the day, random Monday morning. Honey, I love you so much. You're an amazing woman. Thank you for all you do. She texted back and you could tell it made her day. Oh, thank you so much. Love you so much, Bridger. You're amazing. Women love that. They love when you show up and you're attentive. And guess what? Investors love that too. When you're put together, when you got everything around you, when you've done everything on yourself to be presentable and you are convincing them that you're convinced. On our asset class, I pitch a crypto fund. So, we have an 8-figure crypto fund right now. When I show up to calls, people are all over the place about crypto. They love crypto. Some people love it. Some people hate it. When we show up and we show them how convinced we are on crypto, that we're sold on crypto, and me and my partner, Dan Young, I mean, pretty smart. Maybe not me, but Dan is a very smart person. He's a high-powered CEO. He's a very successful business person. And if he's convinced, man, maybe I should be convinced too. Now, we don't take it to the point where we're, you know, crazy Bitcoin maximalists. I say, hey, just like you, 60% of my portfolio is in real estate. You know, I have some stocks. I have bonds. I, you know, about 10% to 20%, though, of my personal net worth is in cryptocurrencies. Why? Because this is a very moonshot category. This technology is inevitable. It's not going away. And it's good to have some exposure to this. And they go, wow, that's pretty reasonable. And I go, hey, when I look at my portfolio, I want to have some exposure to a brand new asset class that there's potentially central bank digital currencies coming out. There are a bunch of companies that are announcing their place and moving into the crypto blockchain space. Hey, it might be good to have a piece of My portfolio exposed to that asset class. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. And let me show you some charts and graphs and data that back this up. Oh, and our fund takes a risk mitigated approach to this. And we're just like any other, you know, your wealth managers that talk about risk mitigation and, you know, taking the upside and hedging on the downside. We do the exact same thing. We just do it in a new asset class. This is very vanilla. And all of a sudden I'm breaking through your croc brain. Oh, this is just like, this is just like getting into any real estate or stock portfolio you've been in before. It's very vanilla. It's very— just the only difference is it's in a brand new asset class called cryptocurrency. We're taking the same old-school approaches to this asset class. However, you get exposure to potentially huge upsides. And in, you know, 50 years when your grandkids are asking you, hey, what'd you do in the, you know, 2020s? Remember this when crypto was coming out? Did you ever invest in any of that? Ah, grandkids, I didn't want to do it. Man, grandpa, if only. If only you'd done that, or is the conversation gonna be, hey, grandkids, the reason y'all drive Ferraris now is because Grandpa took some pretty calculated bets back in the 2020s, and he's done a decent job, right? Anyways, I digress. But say you can break through showing up, being fully present, being there, preparing, putting on deodorant 3 or 4 times before you meet your future wife. One of the most important days of my entire life was that day, and I recognised it in the day I was there. I said, this is probably gonna be the most impactful, important days of my entire life is the day my wife comes home from a mission. I got to meet her again and kind of re-meet her. And it turned out we have a beautiful marriage now, beautiful family. It's pretty awesome. Convince people that you're convinced.