Bullish: How To Transform a Company In 2026

We believe we need to decentralize Wall Street, that more people like me and you need to break away from this and understand this game of funds and launch this beautiful, amazing vehicle. Welcome to Bullish, where we talk about the journey and process to build ourselves and companies into multibillion-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. So when I first got in this business game, I'd read a bunch of management books and scaling books and stuff from big CEOs. And I thought they were pretty corny, to be honest. They would talk about setting a vision, clear vision for your team, clearly communicate, have clear goals. It was like, this is so standard. This is so just generic conversation, these books. And what would happen was the books and content I was reading at the time were not effective for me when I was starting a business. Because guess what? When I'm a solopreneur, just me, Or just working with a small group. But yeah, it's, it's, we gotta set good goals and clearly communicate, but I needed like a lot of tactics to get going. And that actually, there are a lot of books that were tactic books that helped me a ton. Now we've grown. I, my previous episode, we talked about going from a $10 million to $100 million or $10 million to $100 million company. And those books now make a lot more sense. I read these books from guys that run billion-dollar companies and I go, oh, that makes a ton of sense. The way he's describing that compound over a whole company through layers and layers of management means huge amount of stuff. So one of the corniest things I remember reading about was core values and mission statements of companies. And I thought, man, this is just some crap BS stuff they put on a wall and whatever. So anyways, I was in, I was getting this business game. I started 6 businesses in my first years of college. I actually took an internship. So in college, I was, I did really pretty well in my grades and I was a top performer in my class. I got an internship to go work out in Silicon Valley at a pretty big firm, a massive multi-billion dollar company. And I was going to do on their finance team. So I get there and it's this huge thing. It's the first time I ever really had a true like corporate job. It was just internship for the summer. I'm there and they, they roll out this whole training on the core values of the company and their mission statement. And then they said that they're going to hire, fire, promote on these core values, that these were central and guiding principles of their business. And what I was there and I was like, you know what, if I'm going to do something, I'm going to go all in. That's how I just treat things in life. If I'm on a job or a career, relationship, like I'm all in. And I, because the only way to test something out, by the way, is to go all in. If you just halfway do something, by the end of that thing you're doing, you won't have a clear result, yes or no, if you like that thing. Does that make sense? I'm a type of guy that likes to dive all in to something to see if I like that type of a thing. If you halfway do something, there's no point in it. So I went all in. I said, you know, I'm going to live these core values. I'm really going to absorb them and like try to memorize them or be a part of this. And what it did was it absolutely changed my whole perspective on the company. And what was cool is this company as well started to put them into their training meetings, and we would go out and we'd talk about them, and wins were based off of these core values, and they really made it a part of their culture. And so we went out, we started Fund Launch, my funds, and I kind of forgot about this whole experience of core values until about last year. So Fund Launch at the time, we were growing at a good clip. We had a Quadruple triple triple, which is pretty cool as far as growth rate. So a quadruple over 1,000% growth rate our first year and then a triple digit. So over 100% growth rate our second and third year, which is pretty, you know, pretty cool for a business. Most companies are trying to do a triple, you know, double double or triple triple double, something like that. We did a quadruple triple triple for our company. So we're there and finally we have this conversation with my executive team about core values. And so we decided, you know what, we're going to do this. So we went, we had an executive retreat, we went for 3 days to St. George, Utah. We got a house there and we're there and we spent, I don't know, 12 to 14 hours discussing the core values of our company. And I'm actually going to walk you through them in a second. And this absolutely changed our business. And with the way we put it out, we said, hey, we need to really think through— we're not just going to make something up and throw on the wall. These got to be core values. And the hardest thing was what we're going to not include. We got to keep it concise enough so that our employees, us can memorize them and something that we're actually going to go after. Because it's, if sometimes if they're too broad, too generic, it doesn't work. And also we are going to hold ourselves accountable to these core values. If you violate a core value, you are fired. You're off the team. That's how crucial they are. We're going to hire, fire, and promote on these core values. So we spent about 14 hours and we said, by the end of that, our executive team, we were pretty solid on these core values. And after this 3-day kind of experience, and we said, you know what, we're going to, once we present these to the company, like we're going to do this, we made a couple of slight changes. I'm going to read them to you. But what's been interesting, we've launched these core values and I made sure, I said, if we're gonna spend the time and effort to do this, we're gonna make sure it's brought up in every meeting and we're gonna talk about it and share about it. Because how many companies have a mission statement or core value, but none of the employees know what they are? And we started to, anyways, this is about 7 months ago we put this out and I believe it's transformed our business. And the reason it's transformed our business, we are at about a 40 to 50 person headcount, somewhere in that range. And we're not that, we're a, you know, medium-sized company, you could call us even a small company. And I was like, huh, there's, there's people that we are hiring that never really talked to me. You know, they, I mean, they talked to me once or twice, but they don't really talk to me. They don't, how would they really reflect my vision or my core values or what we're seeing as me or Mason as the founders? Like, how does that trickle down? It comes down to what we document. We put into processes, systems on our core values, if that makes sense. And what's happened is we've had people, even brand people that I've maybe even never talked to. I never hired them. I never interviewed them. And they are living and bringing up and, and talking about our core values of a company, which is phenomenal. And I go, aha, back to the beginning. I go, I read these books from these big CEOs, entrepreneurs, and I'm like, I get it. I get why they focus on stuff like this once they grow a big organization. So our core values are thus. You guys can copy 'em if you want for your company. Totally fine. And so that we have 5 core values and we made a mission statement as well. And then we have, we have sub-items of each core value that kind of explain the core values. Does that make sense? So the 5 core values are integrity without compromise, seek challenges, client obsessed, team-centric, and do good in the world. Those are our 5 core values. And again, these are going to sound simple. This took us so much time to come up with. Okay. So number 1, integrity without compromise. We speak the truth and assume best intentions. We value trust above all else. We do the right thing even when no one is looking. That's under integrity without compromise. The next one, seek challenges. We pursue excellence in our personal and professional lives. We take initiative to innovate and solve problems. We face challenges with positive energy. So that one we saw on our team, a core value trait of all the people we hired. We had multiple people that were former college athletes, that were student body presidents, that had gone and lost 100 pounds and did these fitness challenges and stuff. We like— it was almost a thing we didn't realize. We hire people and still hire people that just are excellent in every aspect of their life. And that's a core value. When we hire, we fire for— we want people that are just excellent and they seek challenges throughout their entire life and they face challenges with positivity. That was that whole, whole one under seek challenges. Client obsessed. We take accountability for our clients' problems and provide solutions. We sweat every detail of the client experience to deliver excellence. We celebrate our clients' growth and successes. We're a very client-oriented business. And so This is massive for us to work with clients. We're very— we coach, we talk to clients every day. We need to be client obsessed or nothing will work in our business. Next one, team-centric. We are willing to call and be called. We clearly communicate and hold each other accountable. We work as a team even when we disagree. I think this is massive. If we can't work as a team, there's no point of even hiring people or doing any of this, right? A great example my dad has given me for years. He's like, Bridger, everyone's a team player. Everyone's a team player, right? I'll talk to you. I'll interview you. Oh yeah, I'm a team player. I'm a team builder. It's on your resume. Okay, cool. What a team player means is if the group gets together and decides something that you don't agree with, you'll still be on the team and help the team out even more than you would have prior. So for example, we're in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We don't know really where we're at. We're on a rowboat and we've got to decide which way to row. Should we row east? Or should we row west? And let's say I think, hey, you know what, we should row east. We are pretty close to Cali. We're like, I think we're 100 miles away from California. Let's row towards California. And you go, no, no, Bridger, you're wrong. I think we're close to Tokyo. Let's row this direction to Tokyo. And we've got to make a decision as a team. And we're in there on this rowboat and we decide to row towards Tokyo. We go with your decision. And I am the dissenting vote. I decide I think we should row towards California. We're closer to California. And we sit there and we decide to— the whole team decides to row to Tokyo. Being a team player means I'm going to row as hard as I can to Tokyo, even though I disagree with the decision. Once the decision is made, once we break the huddle, we're all on a team because there's— if I have 2 options, I, if I don't row, I'm just dead weight. I have to row. And if I try to row in the opposite direction, we're just going to stand in the middle of the ocean, not go anywhere. So I can either jump off the boat and start swimming by myself, or I decide to be on a team and row with the team, even though I think they're wrong. That's what it means to be a team player. Okay? We work as a team, even when we disagree. Another one on here, we are willing to call and be called. We're willing to call people out. We're willing to call things out that are wrong. Even if you're a low-level intern, whatever, we need people that, as an meritocracy, that have an opinion, that call things out. Additionally, we are ready to be called up. Some, sometime in the future, your number is going to get called. We're going to need you to do something that's probably out of your job description, something you haven't done before. And we're gonna have you actually need to seek challenges like we talked about in our earlier metric there. We need you to be called up and you need to be ready to be called to a higher plane, a higher calling. Okay, this is what we mean by being team-centric. So again, we've already gone through integrity without compromise, seek challenges, client-obsessed, team-centric. The last one is do good in the world. Under here we have, we are stewards of the future. We actively serve our communities and families, and we seek to share opportunities with those around us. It's actually pretty cool to see the charity, the amount of charity work our team does just individually by themselves is massive. And then we started to do stuff as a team together where we go and do different charity aspects and gifts and stuff as a team. And we, we've raised now over $200,000 for Operation Underground Railroad at our events, which is if you guys watch the movie Sound of Freedom, They're the— Tim Ballard has actually spoken at our last 2 events. It's pretty cool to see what good we can do in the world. And that goes right with our mission statement. So our mission statement at Fund Launch is empower people like you to start and scale funds that move humanity forward. A lot of the funds in our group are actually really changing communities, are pulling the power away from Wall Street, from these oligarchs that have ran funds as a business vehicle to the nth degree and now control like BlackRock and Vanguard control some of pretty much every major organization on Earth. We believe we need to decentralize Wall Street, that more people like me and you need to break away from this and understand this game of funds and launch this beautiful, amazing vehicle. So that's our mission statement, is to help regular people like me and you empower people like me and you to go and launch funds that move humanity forward, which is pretty cool. We put this out a couple of months ago, and I've seen a total shift in our teams and our people, the way we talk, the way we think, The way we look at clients, it's been amazing. And I would— reason I'm bringing this up, I would highly recommend you do this for your business. I actually had a call with Black Card last week. So Black Card's our top group, people that are running huge funds, huge businesses. We had a bunch of people come and talk about core values. And a couple guys on there, they're pretty experienced. They've launched multiple, you know, huge companies. They said, our first thing I do when I launch a business is write core values. Because I want my business partner, whoever I'm working with, they need to know my core values. I'm not just going to For me, I kind of had core values in my brain of what I would do, but like to actually write them down, these are our core and values that we're gonna live and breathe at a company and as a partnership and as a team. This is what we're gonna follow. This is our true north, is massive for an organization. In my opinion, most businesses fail because business partners and/or early employees are not aligned on core values. At least from friends that I see that have businesses kind of blow up, it's typically the business partners are misaligned on core values from day one. They just didn't realize it. And then one business partner does something kind of weird, the other one does something different, and they end up suing each other and pull— it's like a divorce. They have to pull this company apart. And guess what happens? The whole company falls apart. I've seen this time and time again. It's because they didn't go back to core values. Companies that I see that, you know, employees, you know, do stealing money, embezzling things, all this crazy stuff. A lot of times they don't have core values. They didn't hire, promote, they didn't give bonuses based on core values. We actually do bonuses based on core values. One of our bonuses under Seek Challenges, we actually do an Innovator's Bonus. I want people in my company to innovate. I want them to find problems, inefficiencies. If they do that at any time, a manager can give a $1,000 bonus called the Innovator's Bonus to anyone on their team that innovates something that drastically changes their team or the company. And so you're incentivized to work outside of your job to innovate. We've given out, I don't know how many to this point. We gave out one yesterday to a guy that went out and just totally like changed his job, the role, helped his whole team out. You know those people that go and like rethink systems and processes and innovations? Ta-da, bam, you get a $1,000 standing bonus and maybe more depending on how big the innovation is, but at least $1,000. Because we need people that seek challenges in our company. We need people that are team-centric, that aren't just there for themselves, that are client-obsessed, that are going to go the extra mile. We're going to, incentivize you to do that. Incentives drive behavior. So, this is massive. If you haven't done core values, I'd highly recommend it. Build it in your company. Think about it before you launch a company. And these are, by the way, core values that we've now moved on with our fund. So, actually, we kind of copied and pasted these over to my fund. I said, these are the same core values that we're gonna use in our fund. We had a guy that worked at GE hop on our call on Black Card. He said, our entire GE, and I don't know how many business units GE has, but GE does like, they do dishwashers, they make jet engines, they make, light bulbs. They make like everything. And he goes, every business unit runs pretty much like a separate business, but they all have the core— same core values. They have different mission statements because they have a different mission, each business unit, but they have the same core values as an entire company. I think it's like 100,000 employees all have the same core values and live by those core values. If you don't have this, go out. You can copy mine if you want, but go out, research companies' core values, how they operate, What's important to you? How are you gonna hire? And if you were running a 1,000-person organization and no one can meet you as the founder, they had to just read stuff that you had posted and they could read these core values, what kind of business would they be operating under that? It's massive. You guys are amazing. Thanks so much. If you guys can like, share, comment this video, it's the only way this podcast grows. If this has been valuable to you, send this to somebody else. You guys are amazing. See you on the next episode. Bye. Bye.