Capital Raising Masterclass Going from Zero to $1,000,000

Today we're actually talking about capital raising, going from 0 to 1. One of the biggest problems and questions I get asked, Bridger, how do I raise capital? Number one, but the hardest piece is raising that first investor dollar. Actually getting the first investor in is the biggest question going. I love the book actually, Going from 0 to 1, called Zero to One, fantastic book. Talks about those are the biggest problems of business is getting your first dollar in the door, getting your first investor, first customer, all that kind of stuff. Today we're going to talk about this. Specifically for funds. So you want to go out and start a private equity hedge fund, venture capital fund, real estate fund, debt fund like I did. I did debt funds, launching a new real estate fund right now. How do you actually go out and raise capital? And this has actually been something that, um, I've actually— I don't want to toot my own horn, but gotten decently good at, um, and it's been one of my skill sets when I set up new partnerships. One of my skill sets is actually raising capital with our partnership and group, and I'll walk through all of that right here. Let me know if you guys can see me and hear me. I just want to make sure this live stream is working. Drop a two in the chat if this is working. I want to make sure you guys are here. Say hello. Tell us where you're calling in from. We're gonna we're gonna do a live Q&A as well, so I want to actually answer your questions as we go. We're gonna be talking about capital raising at the beginning, but I'm gonna open it up for Q&A. Actually, want to hear your questions, have a little fun, and and talk back and forth. Mason, are we looking good? Okay. Let's see. All good on YouTube, it looks like. I see someone on Facebook's telling me it's looking good. Let's see. I'm live on my personal page as well. Check on there. Mason's helping me out. We're we're new to the streaming life. We're uh I would say we're pretty new YouTubers and new whatever content people. So bear with us a little bit. But it sounds like I see I see Austin on here. See a few other people um at least on on there. Let us know where you're calling in from as well. Actually want to see where people around the world. We got this fun community of fund. managers all around the world, this small, tight-knit little niche. I was trying to get confused there. Tight-knit niche group that we bring together of people launching and scaling funds. Oh, I see a bunch of people. Hello, hello, what's up? How you guys doing? Awesome, welcome in. Okay, so people that are hopping in, we're, you know, we're letting people hop in for a second. Again, we're talking about capital raising, how to go actually out and land investors, raise capital. In the chat, actually, I want to hear: Has anybody raised money so far successfully? I know we have a number of people in our top-tier black card group that have done very well. We've got we actually brought on Simon Vandy last month, raised over thirty million dollars this year. We have a couple other groups that have raised over ten million. And as you guys know, the I don't know maybe you don't know, but the shoe in the back we talk about this a lot. That shoe maybe I'll grab it right here. Here it is, the floating shoe. This is our Wall Street Rebel Award. So this is for any fund that raises over ten million. we send them a pair of shoes. These are custom made. They got like the skyline on them. This is the generic one that actually I made for my fund, but we'll put your fund and name and we'll customize it for you. And we send you a floating display as well as a little award. And the reason we do it is just because I feel like there's not a lot of milestones in business that you hit. I mean, anybody made like— like we— I remember we hit like our million dollar mark and I ran into— I went to my business partner's office. I was like, Hey, we made $1 million. Like, it's our first million dollars. And it was like, woo-hoo. And like nothing really happened. Like, it was very— it was a cool milestone for us, but like there wasn't a trophy. There wasn't an award. There wasn't something. And so, we wanted to create an award for our community and our people. Any fund that goes out and raises over $10 million, not $10 million AUM, but any fund that raises $10 million, And today we're talking about capital raising. We actually have a forum coming out. The video should be done today. We're gonna be launching this website tomorrow. You guys actually can opt in and submit all your details and we will send you, we'll pay for it, we're sending you a custom sneaker, custom shoe display case, and you guys can have it in your office as a little award, kind of as a ceremony of, hey, we've raised $10 million. We're actually, you know, we're pretty legit. So it should be fun. Let me put this back here. Let's see if I can get it up. All right, there we are. We're back. Welcome in, you guys. Silverthorne, Colorado, UK, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Phoenix, Arizona, California. Welcome in, y'all. I'm from Salt Lake City, Utah. If I was able to start a fund in Salt Lake City, Utah, you guys can start a fund wherever you're at, okay? I'm living proof that this can happen. Um, for some of you guys that don't know me and hopping on for your first time, welcome in. If this is your first stream with us, type a 2 in the chat. This is your first time hopping on with me, but my name is Bridger Pennington. I started my first fund 4 years ago, barely got it off the ground. And some of you guys know my story, so I won't dive deep into it, but I had— I went to college, I started 6 businesses my first 2 years of college. I was just a chicken with my head cut off. I did online marketing, forex trading, real estate wholesaling, all these, you know, quick make money online type of offerings and actually did pretty well, made some money in pretty much all those businesses. But finally, I met with a mentor and it was my dad's business partner actually, sat me down, taught me the secrets of funds, how funds worked, how they're put together, what private equity was, hedge funds, venture capital, and essentially that all a fund was really was just a pool of money. Investors put money into that pool and people like us could draw from that pool of money and go make investments. And he said, yeah, we started an investment fund. At the time, they managed over $8 billion of real estate out of their real estate investment funds. I was blown away. I was intrigued. I wanted to learn more. And so I asked, I said, hey, can you mentor me? Can you help me out? And he says, Bridger, go talk to your dad. Your dad knows way more about this than I do. I said, no, no, no. My dad's— we live in a very average house. He drives a crappy car. You live in this huge big mansion. He was making tons of money. I want to learn from you. And he goes, Bridger, me and your dad, we make about the same amount of money. And my chin about dropped to the floor. I was like, huh? And I'm sitting in this huge mansion. I'm like, huh? Come again? He's like, yeah, me and your dad are pretty much equal business partners in this. And I left his house. I drove straight to my dad's house. And I was like, Dad, what the heck? Like, what's going on? Like, you're making all this money. And like, why aren't we— like, why do I still have to— why can't I order a soda at Chipotle because it's too expensive and you're making, you know, you run an $8 billion real estate fund. And he kind of laughs. He goes, yeah, you know, that's kind of what we do. And I like to live, he goes, I like to live very conservative. I like to live well within my means. And my partner kind of likes to spend his money and we just live different lifestyles. But long story short is my dad sat down and taught me about funds. And he's the co-founder of an incredible family of funds. As of today, they're over $25 billion they manage. Wow. And I was able to learn directly from an incredible mentor that taught me the ins and outs of funds. And he grew up in ghetto North Las Vegas, got C's and B's through college. I mean, had this incredible rags-to-riches story. And now he just retired. He's a partner emeritus on the board and all that kind of stuff. And just incredible to be able to learn from him. And for 8 months, he taught me. And I finally got the courage to go launch my own fund. We were going to do a debt fund. I was working at another company. I wanted to lend money to some of these clients. I talked to the owners of the business. I took the idea to my dad. He loved it. We put it all together. I said, Dad, how would you like to be our first investor into our fund? And he looked at me with a little twinkle in his eye and he said, Bridger, if I invest in your fund, I would ruin the experience of you raising money on your own. Your first investor is your hardest investor to find. And if I invest in your fund, that'll be a crutch that you'll never be able to recover from. And he said, no. And he kicked me out and he said, go do this on your own. And so I took him up on the offer and I hit the streets. He said, go talk to everybody you can. And that's actually what we're going to talk about today is how to go find that first investor, which is the hardest thing, the 0 to 1, that very first investor. So that's what we're going to talk about today is capital raising strategies. Now, as I get into this, there's a lot of ways to raise capital. I'm not going to share— there's not just one secret way to raise capital. There's a lot of ways to raise capital, and we're going to go through a lot of different things. Myself, I've gone out and raised and deployed millions of dollars out of my funds. We launched that first fund. I raised a whopping— just sorry to finish the story. I raised— I hit the streets. I talked to everybody I knew. I was 22 years old. I was in college. I raised a whopping $49,000 from 6 different investors. That actually was our target. We hit it. I was ecstatic. And that was one of the— that's a teeny fund. As you guys know about the funds, that's a teeny, teeny, teeny fund, but it was enough to get started. And we were doing this, we were doing loans for $2,000 to $5,000, these microloans to entrepreneurs. And our first group of investors, we got them a 64% return. Wow. on their money, and they were ecstatic. They did really well. We closed that first fund, restructured a little bit, launched our second fund. That fund we scaled really well, raised and deployed millions of dollars out of that fund. We just closed that fund, and now we're launching a third fund in real estate. So actually, we are, we are pivoting to real estate. I've got 2 incredible real estate partners we're partnering up with, uh, looking to raise $50 million for that fund. We've soft raised right now about $18 million. We're actually just— And the reason I say soft raised is we are just finishing up our legal documents. We've had— we had one partner that wanted to step out, so we had another partner come in. So we've had to restructure our documents a little bit, but, uh, that's where we're at right now. And, and I say soft raise, we'll talk about what I mean by that in a minute, but soft commitment. So who knows what that actually means? Maybe it'll end up only being $10, $11 million currently, but we are, we are on our way, well on our way to $50 million. We believe we can raise that in the next 3 to 6 months. We'll be well oversubscribed in that fund. It should be pretty fun. So that's what we're doing, and we're doing— we're buying big box stores, and that's where I'm at. So now I'm on the journey right now. I, I'm in the game, just so you guys know. I'm in the game of running and scaling funds, and I, as I grow, one of the fastest ways that I learn is by teaching. And so that's why I love Invest on Fund Secrets. What we do here is I get to learn a lot faster by number one, teaching and sharing with you, and then also connecting with you. I love connecting with and helping other people run and scale their own funds as well, because none of us At least in my world, we didn't go to Wall Street, we haven't gone to Harvard, we haven't done the Yale route, whatever. We're just scrappy entrepreneurs that figured out this incredible vehicle of running funds, and we want to harness it for ourselves. And so that's what we're going to talk about today is, is number one, just funds in general, but more specifically, actually capital raising strategies and how to go about doing that. So with that being said, with that introduction, let's dive into it. Should be a fun episode. Welcome in. I see Eleanor on here. Jalen Brown, how's it going? How do you approach people in your network program? I'm excited to talk about all this. Welcome in. Welcome in. We'll answer your question in a minute, but thoughts on Dan Pena only acquiring companies through debt vehicles? It's one way to do it. If, yeah, if you can raise the debt and service that, a lot of times you need an equity piece as well to go acquire those companies. They all will use a fund type of offering to do it though, whether they're going to raise debt or equity, they use a fund as a vehicle to do it. So, I think it's a fine way to do it. I don't have any problems with the way they do it. If they can get a cheaper cost of capital, then by all means, go get it. A lot of times, you still use a fund vehicle to get that money in and to go purchase that business. Okay. I love it. All right. I'm going to talk for a minute. We'll get back to these questions in a second. So, I want to dive into now, To start this episode out, I had— I have the whiteboard here, I have my iPad, I have all the stuff, and we could not connect other— we had an overhead camera we can connect and connect the iPad to film with. I couldn't connect it, so I'm sorry. From the bottom of my heart, I'm sorry I couldn't connect the other camera. So we're gonna have to improvise a little bit here. I've got this whiteboard and we can like throw it up like this, but see how it gets a little glary and you can't see it very well? So we'll try. We'll try a few things, but we'll talk for just a second here. All right, so let's go back to capital raising strategies and stuff that we've actually talked about with our Black Card groups. Our top tier is our Black Card group. We coach them and help them directly. We actually had a discussion about this the last few weeks. We've been talking about various strategies to get into capital raising. Now, the first thing I want to say on this whole game and something that I grossly overlooked when looking to start my first fund was The problem of raising capital, right? For whatever reason, I love the fund structure and putting it together, and every person hits that wall of, crap, now I've got to raise money. And I personally, I looked around and I said, well, I'm too young. I'm inexperienced. I don't have the track record, and I don't know a lot of people with money. That's not a great recipe to go out and start a fund. Usually, you want to have a great track record, a lot of experience. You want to know a lot of wealthy people and pull them together into a fund is a great place to start. If you have that, awesome. That helps even more, but I was starting out. I was 22 years old. I didn't have much to get off of. Excuse me. I asked my dad this question. Back to it, my dad is running these big funds. I said, Dad, I can't do a fund. I don't have the experience, the track record, all this kind of stuff. He gave me an example that's changed my life. Some of you guys have heard this, and bear with me if you've already heard this, but He said, Bridger, imagine me and you just found a Lamborghini Aventador in Billings, Montana. And I'm like, okay, what do you— why are we talking about cars? Okay. He goes, no, we found a Lamborghini Aventador in Billings, Montana. There's a lady selling it in Billings, Montana. She's going into bankruptcy. She needs to sell it. She's selling the car for $50,000 this weekend auction on Saturday morning. And he said, we've had a mechanical guy check it. This isn't a broken car. There's nothing wrong with it. Just go with me. This is— it's a perfectly good Lamborghini Aventador. It's awesome. Okay. We have a verified buyer Monday morning that'll buy the car in California for $200,000. All right? So Bridger, could you— he asked me the question, could you raise and find— you can't use any of your own money. Could you find $50,000 by Saturday morning to buy the car and we will flip it Monday morning for $200,000? We'll make a $150,000 spread. Could you find? The only thing stopping you is finding the money. Could you find fifty thousand dollars by Saturday morning? And I thought about it, and I kind of went back and forth, and I was like, well, maybe, you know, I don't know. And he goes, no, like seriously, it's foolproof. It's a hundred, and that's and obviously nothing's a hundred percent guaranteed. He goes, Bridger, it's an example. It's a hundred percent guarantee. There's no way you can lose your money. Family, friends. Former boss, college professor, could you find the money? And I kind of thought about it and I said, well, yeah. You know what? I'm like, I could scrap together. I think I could call enough friends and family and uncle and a dad or whatever. I think I could maybe pull this together. And he goes, why? And I said, well, it's foolproof. And it's— we're putting all this together and it's a foolproof, it's 100% guarantee. And he goes, what if— and he goes right there, he goes, aha, there it is. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he goes, 3 minutes ago or 5 minutes ago, you were telling me that I'm too young, I'm inexperienced, all this stuff. And all of a sudden, you're telling me you could raise $50,000 by Saturday morning. Why? Because the deal was so good, was so amazing. And a little light bulb went off on me. And he said, Bridger, it's not the— yes, it helps to have great credentials and track record and all that kind of stuff, and we need to build that. But if you have a good enough deal, the money will find you because investors, especially right now with $13 trillion rolling around, there's a lot that goes on. Okay? So that was the first principle I hit. If you can have an incredible deal lined up, a lot— and he goes, Bridger, the first, actually one of our first funds over $100 million that we raised, We were out raising money. We found 9 times out of 10, because there'd be Harvard guys and Yale guys all pitching their fund and they would pitch, hey, you know, over the next 18 months, we theorize that we can go out and raise, you know, some money. We're going to buy some real estate properties. And my dad and his partners would walk in and say, we've got a property. It's in Miami, Florida. It's appraised for $9.2 million. We can buy it The end of the month for $4.5 million. Do you want in or out on this deal? And they had a deal that they would bring to the table and it was very tangible. It was— and they said, hey, we may not be the Harvard guys, but look at this deal. You've done real estate forever. Look at the deal. And he told me 9 times out of 10, the investor chose the deal over the degree. All right. We got some scammer people in the comments. Which fund did your dad raise? So I've been asked by them. You can look them up if you want. I've been asked by their legal team to not give that and use the name of their fund as a way to promote our stuff. So I don't. My dad's name is John Pennington though, and you can do some research yourself if you'd like. And I think they're actually going over there. They might be over $28 billion now. I'm not sure. They're actually at that cusp. They're going from $25 to $28 billion. So go check them out. And 100%, if you wanna call this a scam, great. You can look through all the SEC documents, everything you want. Go look at them. They're all online. You can go Google Bridger Pennington SEC documents. You can see all my funds, everything laid out. So go for it. Awesome. Yeah, I love the scam comments. Yeah, I run a fund right now. I'm in the game. And we do this as well, but I'm in the game. We're running funds right now. I love it. Back to the topic of capital raising. Okay, that was the first thing that we went after, right, was finding incredible deals. If you have a good enough deal, especially— I'll get on that topic— there's $13— excuse me, $18 trillion of negative, zero or negative rate loans or bonds in the world right now, meaning people are guaranteeing a loss buying a bond. What that tells me is that investors are looking for yield. Investors are looking for return. And if they're looking at— essentially what that's telling us is there's an investor out there, and the analogy I'll use is a beach, okay? And they're going to a bank or a country, and they're saying, hey, I want to— can you hold my cup of sand? And they're on a beach and there's sand everywhere. Hey, can you hold my cup of sand for the next hour or 2? And before I come back. And the country with the bond or whatever is saying, yeah, I can hold your sand, but I'm going to charge you a few grains of sand to do so. That's what a negative interest rate means. Apparently, these sovereign countries, whatever, our central banks are telling us they have so much money, like sitting on a beach with sand everywhere, they have so much money that it's a hassle For them to take your money into a government bond or whatever, it's at negative interest rates, that they will, they're going to take a fee for doing so. That's what a negative interest rate bond is telling us. Also, it's telling us that these investors, whoever's— and it's not like there's a small amount. There's $18 trillion trading at zero or negative interest rates. Right now, it's not like it's a small amount. That's a huge amount. Okay, what that tells me is people are looking for yield. That these investors have looked around the world apparently, and they've looked everywhere, and they're looking at their risk adjusted rate of return and saying, "That's our best. That's our best opportunity is a guaranteed loss. If I only lose a little bit, that's that's what we want there." And From that, I can derive that there is a lot of people looking for yield, looking for return, which is good for us, for people like us going out and launching and scaling our own funds. So bringing it back to the topic for today, which is going from 0 to 1, getting that first investor, getting that first introduction, let's go into actually some strategies to go out and do this. You guys ready? All right, let's get into it. So if you're interested, and again, this is for hedge funds, it's for private equity funds, it's for real estate funds. By the way, all these funds are ran pretty much the same, okay? They're all run, just so you guys know, a hedge fund, private equity, real estate, debt fund, venture capital fund, those are all ran almost identical. They all have a general partner, limited partnership, investment advisor, management company. They're taking management fees, they're taking carried interest fees. They have a pref, catch-up, carried interest, all that kind of stuff that we talk about on this channel. All in there. The difference, and if you guys ever wondered what's the difference between a private equity hedge fund, all that stuff, the difference is what they invest in. A real estate fund invests into real estate. A private equity fund, they take that same pool of money, they go buy and sell shares in privately held businesses. A hedge fund takes that same pool of money and they go buy and sell shares in public securities, right? It could be bonds, options, futures, forex, crypto. A venture capital fund takes that same pool of money and they go invest usually into small startup companies. A debt fund takes that same pool of money and they go issue loans. Okay, it's not that complex. And that's why we bring it together. And it's what I hate about Wall Street and just, maybe it's not Wall Street, but just finance in general. No one talks about how to set up and start your own fund. It's like this secret world that no one talks about. And this anyways, this is what we do. So let's dive into it. So you know, You've found that great deal, back to the fund launch form that we talk about, found that great deal. Now how do you go and find those investors? First thing I want to talk about, and I wish I had my whiteboard, but we're going to use my hands, okay? 2 sectors, and this is for finding high net worth individuals because usually you're looking for high net worth family offices, people with money to invest. Now there's a few rules with the SEC, okay? And we're going to start at kind of a base level and go more advanced here. The type of investor you can invite into your fund. There's 4 different types. Number 1 is a non-accredited investor. Okay, a non-accredited investor does not fit into the other categories. Okay, number 2 is an accredited investor. Okay, so non-accredited, you know, the basic kind of like zero, right? They don't fit in the other ones. The first level is called an accredited investor. An accredited investor has a million-dollar net worth excluding their home. They make $200,000 a year. With their— them by themselves and plan to do so in the future, or they make $300,000 a year with a spouse. Okay, that's a credit investor. You probably have heard of that before. A lot of funds to even invest into funds or for you to raise money, you need to have credit investors or above. Now, the next tier is called a qualified client, and a lot of you guys don't— a lot of people don't know this. The next tier is a qualified client. They have a $2.1 million net worth excluding their home. There's a few other things that go on that, but that's just basic. $2.1 million net worth excluding their home. And then the next tier above them is called a qualified purchaser. A qualified purchaser has a $5 million net worth excluding their primary residence, or it's an entity with $25 million in assets and their primary business is not investing. It's an actual separate company. Okay? So those are your 4 tiers. So a lot of times in the funds that we run, You're looking for accredited investors or above. And in some funds, has to be qualified client or above. And just so you guys are clear too, sometimes you'll hear on CNBC or something like that, they'll talk about, you know, we only take qualified investors into our fund. And if it's a big institution, they don't mean— you think they mean accredited investor or above. That's not what they mean. They mean a qualified client or a qualified purchaser. into their fund. And just, just so you guys are clear, that's, that's what we're talking about. Because of the 3 exemption, they can only take qualified purchasers in that fund. So they can charge 2 different fees to you. Anyways, I'm getting distracted here. So back to us. Now it makes it even harder. Okay? You can't just raise money from your buddy down the street wants to give you $5,000, $10,000. You have to raise money from accredited investors or above. Now there are exemptions. There's Regulation CF, Regulation A funds that you can raise from non-accredited investors. We won't talk about that for now. But you can do that. There's just a lot more hoops to jump through to do that, but most funds raise from that or above. So it makes it even harder, right? So to the next point, how do you get in front of these people then? How do you actually find those high net worth individuals or find those family offices, which is essentially just a rich family that has money that likes to invest? That's all a family office is. They run it through a fund structure. How do you do this? Now there's 2 categories I like to break it into and I I wish we had the whiteboard. I'm almost, I'm almost mad. Here's the whiteboard. We could draw it out, but it just, I don't know if you can see it that well. It's just like, it kind of gets glary. And anyways, I'll use my hands. I digress. All right. You got 2 categories. Okay. I'm going to draw a little T here for you. On the, on this side is work your way in, or you can buy your way in. Work your way in or buy your way in. Now, this is how to get in front of the investor. We're going to talk about closing them and all that stuff in just a second. How do you get in front of the investor? Okay, on the left, work your way in. This is what it sounds like, working your way in. This is a lot of networking events, groups you're going to. This is developing relationships over years, going and making friends with people and finding, you know, all those different ways to get into. There's a lot of work you can do. LinkedIn actually is a pretty incredible tool. You have to do a lot of work though. You don't want to just be the spammer dude. I get hit up 1,000 times a day. Hey, I got a software, invest in my thing, whatever. That just doesn't work, right? To be, you have to really work on relationships and developing these over time. Okay? That's your work your way and typically takes longer. And this is actually, this is not just true for investing, but this is true for business in general. You can work your way into your business or you can buy your way into your business or buy your way into investors. What do I mean by that? There are easy shortcuts you can take to get in front of investors. A lot of times they just take a little bit of money. You can join. I'll just give you a few examples. You can join the Ferrari Club of Miami Beach or the Ferrari Club. We have one in Salt Lake City, Utah. Again, I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah. If I'm able to do this in Salt Lake City, you can do it wherever you're at. Ferrari. But guess what? You have to have a Ferrari to join the club. Okay. There's mastermind groups. Denver Buyer Club. There's a ton of groups. Actually, I'll tell you a quick story back to my dad's funds that and no. Yeah, Eleanor. No whiteboard of truth and justice today. So what they did on one of their first funds, I mean, they didn't have a lot of money to go around. My dad's partner comes home one day, his business partner says, hey, John, I just bought season tickets, box seats to the Utah Jazz, 4 seats. It cost about $30,000 to $40,000. And my dad, and he's a very conservative kind of the numbers guy behind the scene, chin dropped to the floor. Like, huh? He goes, yeah, I mean, it's a great way to network. And my dad was like, are you kidding? $40,000? You spent $40,000 on jazz tickets? Like, what are you talking about? And he goes, whoa, before you get mad at me, let me talk to you the strategy behind why I did this. And he goes, okay, you got about 3 minutes before I punch you in the face. Like, what? Why are you spending our money on jazz tickets? He goes, this is why. Because I can go around, I can call up CEOs and executives and all this stuff, and guess what they all have? They all have gatekeepers. Okay, it's always a gatekeeper, and you say, "Hi, you know I'm Bridger. I'm calling in. I would love to meet with Mrs. Johnson," and that gatekeeper is instructed to say, "Sorry, Mrs. Johnson's busy. She can't take a call." Blah blah blah. Hang up. Okay. However, if you call Mrs. Johnson and you say, "Hi, I'm Bridger. I'm calling Mrs. Johnson." We actually have two tickets tonight. The Utah Jazz are playing the Los Angeles Lakers. We have box seats. There's dinner beforehand. We have a reserved parking space and everything for you. We would love Mrs. Johnson for her and her husband to come to the game tonight with us. That receptionist is going to pass that message on. And what happened, and this is what they did actually, they went out and they did this. They called up every executive or any wealthy person they could ever find and say, hey, you want to come to a Jazz game with us? And what they would do is they had this, they had a shared box. It was like, there was like 30 seats in this box. It was a bigger box, one that was kind of combined of 3 boxes. They'd go, they would have 4 hours to sit down, to chat, to make jokes, to talk. And guess what? Over 4 hours, they would slowly— I'm gonna talk about this in a second— how to talk about a fund, bring it up, how to close an investor, all that kind of stuff. And I was talking to my dad. Their first, one of their main, one of their first main funds, they raised over $80 million. Almost 100% of that money came from those season tickets for the Jazz. Wow. $80 million raised. Was it worth the $40 grand? Work your way in or buy your way in. It's another great example. And now there's a lot of groups you can kind of do a hybrid as well where you can buy your way into a mastermind group and then you kind of got to work the group a little bit, all that kind of stuff. So does that make it— are you guys following along so far? Is that making a little bit of sense? Drop like a fire emoji or something in the chat right now. I got to make sure you guys are still with me. Let me know if that's making a little bit of sense as we're going on here. All right, so let's go to the next tier here, okay? Now, that's getting in front of the investors. You can work your way in, you can buy your way in, you get in front of these investors, you get in front of these high net worth individuals, and actually, I want to make a— I want to stop here for a second. If you are, you know, not the type of person that's a, you know, the natural born salesman, the person that can go out and is charismatic and can talk and meet people and Get investors in. There's just a personality that's just good at that, right? And just people are more naturally good at that than others. Okay? If you're not that person, that's totally okay. And don't don't put yourself down like I can never do a fund because I'm not the person. Go find someone who is. I actually got a call about six months ago from some this a great friend of mine calls me up Bridger. Hey, and he's just a natural-born salesman, great guy. I love him to death. Bridger, hey, I've got these, and he's helped other groups raise money for them, but never, he's just done it for fees and commissions. He's never actually raised money for his own stuff. He goes, Bridger, I'm friends with a couple billionaires, very high net worth individuals. They love me. They want to invest into my stuff. The problem is I don't really have like a fund or anything. He goes, he goes, Bridger, you know, I got all the— I have— I'm very well networked. I just don't know how to use my network. Can I partner with you? And could we bring some of those investors in? And I was like, like, you want to introduce me to all your billionaire friends? Yeah. Yes. The answer is yes. Yeah. And he goes, great. And you can run the fund and all the mechanics. And I said, great. That's what I'm good at. You can manage the money. He says, great. And bam, just like that. There are people out there who already have built the network, who have already done all these great things that are looking for great operators to partner with. And so again, it's not the how, it's the who. I love that. And I learned that from Russell Brunson, taught me that. If anybody follow Russell Brunson, I love Russell Brunson's stuff. Great guy, internet marketing kind of guy. Actually, the reason we actually started a Facebook group, started a YouTube channel was because of him. He said, just start publishing, just see what happens. But it's not the how, it's the who. It's not how do I raise money, it's who do I find that can help me raise money? Okay, so if you're struggling with this right now, don't worry about it. Go figure out the how. And in our Black Card, our top-tier groups and stuff like that, we help you connect the money raisers to the fund managers to the expert investors. We help do all that stuff together. Okay, I digress. All right, bam, baby, back to the point on here. So now I'm talking to people that are the money raisers right now. Okay, so Again, work your way in versus buy your way in. Now we've gotten in front of the investor. What do we do there? Now, there's a few things that happen and there's different scenarios that play out. There's a fantastic book. I bring this up every time I talk about money, but it's a— you should go download the book right now. I don't get any referral commission, whatever. I just think it's an incredible book. Oren Klaff, Flip the Script. Oren Klaff, Flip the Script is one of the best Books ever. I'm gonna pull it up right now so you guys can see it. Oren Klaff, Flip the Script, is literally the best book ever on capital raising. And he's got a number of other books, but this book right here, Flip the Script, he's got orange— or excuse me, a yellow cover on it. That book right there is the book. Flip the Script, Oren Klaff. This thing is incredible. Oren has raised money for a ton of different groups and just great storyteller. I love this book. Anyways, That's the book you guys gotta check out, okay? And tell Oren hi for me. I would love to have Oren on my podcast. I've reached out to him multiple times. He's never responded. So if you know Oren, I want him on my show. I love him. I've probably sold him thousands of books. That book's incredible, okay? And one of the main points he— and he brings up a lot of great points. One of the main points he brings up though is the concept of status alignment. Status alignment, especially when you're trying to meet and network, even if you get to the Ferrari club or even if you get to the box seats, you still have to deal with status alignment. And the example he gives is this, is every celebrity or any person that ever talks to you, and he actually shares a few examples of him meeting celebrities, they're always, the first thing when they meet somebody is always status alignment, okay? Where does this person fit in? So if you're going up to Kevin Hart and you run up to Kevin Hart and you go, Kevin Hart, oh my gosh, I love your movies. You're incredible. You're so funny. Kevin Hart, can you sign my thing for me? And oh, and can you invest in my fund or whatever, right? If that was your pitch, Kevin Hart in your mind instantly goes, oh, this person is a fan, okay, and I'm gonna categorize this person as a fan. They're just a fan of mine and great, yeah, I can sign an autograph, whatever, but they're a fan, okay? For someone like Kevin Hart, so, and you don't wanna be in the fan category. Oh, I love your stuff, I've seen you online, like you don't wanna be that. I have the same thing. I mean, we have a teeny following online, but we have some of that as well. People approach me, I love your stuff, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, great, that's awesome, but it categories in my line as a fan, okay? Now, Kevin Hart, back to Kevin Hart example. If you went up to Kevin Hart and same thing, you said, hey Kevin, I'm actually, and I'll use a random example here, hey, I'm a director or producer for another movie. We did this on Universal Pictures, whatever. We did a movie there, all this kind of stuff. And he goes, oh, okay. Instantly in Kevin Hart's mind, he goes, oh, this person is at kind of my same industry level. Maybe they're not a famous actor, it's not like Matt Damon or something, but they're in the industry, they're working on another movie, they're not a fan, they've kind of upgraded to a fan or to someone that's on an equal plane. Now, I don't know Kevin Hart's interest or whatever, but there's people in Kevin Hart's life that are above as well that Kevin Hart would love to meet. I don't know who that is. Maybe he loves F1 racing or whatever. You're an F1 race car driver or whatever, you work there. That might even be an increase in status alignment, okay? But Oren Klaff in his book argues every time you meet somebody, regardless of what your net worth is, whatever, it could be skewed, you need to have status alignment with them or show that you're, essentially showing that you're at the same playing field as them. I'm the same way. If people contact me, Bridger, I'm starting a fund. I would love to get your advice on something. I go, oh, okay. This person is looking for mentorship from me. Okay? I put that in my mind. That's what's going on. Now, if somebody else contacts me and goes, Bridger, I'm running a $120 million fund. We're doing X, Y, and Z, and I would love to connect. Now I put them, oh, this person's like me. They actually run funds. Oh, they're at my level. And then if someone contacts me, hey Bridger, I run a, you know, A deca-billion-dollar fund like my dad. Oh, now that's above my status. Like, oh wow, I actually want to meet that person. And so we all do this. We all do this to everybody, okay? So when first meeting that back to meeting an investor, status alignment is huge. And in Oren Klaff's book, I won't even repeat his words, but he goes through the framework of status alignment. You can do a number of things. He calls it a flash roll is one of the things he says, where you'll spit out some very specific jargon for an industry. And so for like, for our example, if someone came up to me, Bridger, hey, I'm running a— I've got $120 million AUM. We're doing a real estate fund. We're buying opportunity zones. That's all jargon that I understand perfectly. And I go, oh, and it helps me status align a lot easier. Okay. It's specific to industry and what's going on. Okay. So number one, status alignment. Now, Number 2, there's a lot of ways. I'm not even going to dive into all the different ways, but how to— the big question is, Bridger, how do I convert a friend or someone I met at a party or at a jazz basketball game or whatever? How do I convert that person into an actual investor? And one thing that I know, there's a lot of ways to do this. One thing that's helped me like crazy is this, and I'm going to tell you my secrets right here. This is what it was. This helped me like crazy. Okay, I started to use this technique when I first started, and I kind of, I was, I'd already raised my first little micro fund of $49,000. I raised that already, but now we were on to, we were raising some bigger dollars, and I started to use this, and I started to realize it worked really well. Okay, so what I would do at a dinner party, a charity event, a networking event, I would, number one, going places where wealthy people hang out, charity events, political events where people are donating, Entrepreneur events, all this kind of stuff where those types of people would hang out. And we start to chat. And number one, everyone loves to talk about themselves. So, I would do some kind of status alignment at the beginning to make sure these people knew who I was and that I was at the same status as them. And then I would get into them. Let's talk about your business. What are you doing? Tell me more about you. How are you hiring employees? What's going on? All this stuff. What are you interested in? What do you like to invest in? What's your life, you know, world-changing project you're working on for the next 5, 10 years? Whatever it is. Naturally, when I ask about their work, they're gonna ask me about my work. Bridger, what do you do? And I would, and then it's great opening, right? Bridger, hi. I, let's see, hold on one second. Sorry, I'm looking at a comment on here. So anyways, back to the thing. Bridger, what do you do for work? And I say, Hey, you know, we I run a fund. We're doing these real estate projects. We're doing X, Y, and Z. It's been really great. We've done a lot of great stuff, and then I'll say this. Now, two things can happen in that conversation. Number one, and by the way, you can't solicit investors, but I can just talk about kind of what we do. I can't give them specifics per SEC rules, but I can talk about kind of what we do. Yeah, I run some funds, and we do X. You know, we do real estate stuff, and it's great. Now, they're gonna do one of two things. Okay. Number one, they're gonna dive deeper. Okay, and they're gonna go, Bridger, no, tell me more. What's your fund do? Are you raising money? I want to, I'm interested. Great. And they're just a hot lead. Awesome. I can turn them into an investor. Now, number 2, which is more common, typically they're like, oh great, blah, blah, blah. And they kind of are like, okay, awesome. I get it. Let's move on to the next thing. Before I let them finish or move on to kind of cycle through the next partner, I go, hey, you know, this is the line I use. You guys can steal it if you want. This has helped me raise a lot of money. I go, hey, you seem like a very, obviously a very active investor and very person that's in the game. I just go, and I would say this, I go, by the nature of what I do, I get a lot of deals across my desk. I get a ton of real estate deals. I get companies to buy. I get all sorts of random stuff across my desk. Most of the stuff I can't do because my fund only does this little niche of stuff. And I say, hey, if I get a really good deal across my desk, can I send it your way? It sounds like you're in the game and you like looking at deals. Can I send you a good deal? And 9 times out of 10, that person goes, yeah. Now, whether they're rich, poor, status, whatever, everyone loves to look at good deals. And if I can give a few examples, hey, I got this great deal for a movie and I got a great loan we could do and a great real estate project. I kind of throw out a few sectors. And I say, hey, can I send you great deals? And they go, yeah, sure. And I go, well, let me get your email. And I grab their email and I put it down and I take their email and I actually follow up with them. And I literally, I do get a lot of deals across my desk. And so what I do for the next 2 to 3 months is I start to email them deals and I make sure they're good deals too. But I say, hey, oh, I've got this awesome land deal. Hey, I'm going to send it over to you. Let me know what you think. No hard feelings. I'm not even involved in the deal. I just want to send it your way. It's just goodwill. And over the next 2 to 3 months, what happens is they start to recognize Bridger, me, as the deal guy, as a person that has really good deals coming across their desk. And they— and again, the status alignment. I'm now at the status of Bridger's the person that has really good investment opportunities just always surrounding him. And what happens over you know, the next month, 2 months, 3 months is I'll finally say, hey, I've actually got a good deal. It's called my fund. And here you go. And we're actually raising another round of whatever. And we would love to have you involved. If you're interested, let me know. If you don't, no hard feelings. I still want to stay friends. And it's a fantastic way to convert someone I met at a party, you know, a little networking event, whatever. How to convert them from someone who just knows my name to now someone that knows Bridger as the deal guy to someone that potentially could invest, and that's worked for me time and time again for what we've done in there. And literally, that's that's that's what we've used as well. So there's a lot of there's a lot of different ways to go about it. You can use you know there's a lot of different techniques you can go about. And Oren Klaff, I won't even spoil you on that. But Oren Klaff's book again. Flipped the script, incredible. But that's actually something I've used over time and time again. Hey, you look like a deal person. Can I send you great deals? I get their email and I start sending them over email or over email a couple of deals. And over the next 2 to 3 months, I start to nurture that relationship. And then over about 3 months later, I will convert that person into an investor. Okay. That's been one of the most useful techniques I've used. Now that's one technique of meeting somebody. The second technique that's been, and I've used a lot of different stuff, techniques, whatever you want to call it, closes. The second one that's been most productive for me is this, is I use my age to my benefit. Now I'm relatively young, mid-20s, and there's a lot of old wealthy people that love to mentor young people. And what I'll do is I'll say, hey, I'm in the game. I'm running funds. I'm running businesses. We actually have done— I show— I make sure they know that I have a promising future. I'm not just some grimy person trying to pick someone's brain, but I'll say, hey, I would actually love, if you're open to it now, I can even pay you for it, whatever, but I would love if you, to get some mentorship from you on us on, and I make sure it's specific, on how to scale my employee base. I'm trying to go from 5 employees to 25 employees, and I don't know how to set up HR and all that kind of stuff. If you're open to it, no hard feelings if you don't want to, but I would love to get some mentorship from you. I've done this with a number of investors, and what happens is I bring them on as a mentor to me, and they like— number one, they like— I try to be a very coachable person when I work with them. I want to be, number one, very coachable. I want to listen and I want to execute. That's what I mean by good coachable. I listen and then I execute what they tell me to do. There's too many people, and I do— we coach people in our groups and stuff like that. There's too many people that listen and never do Anything. And those people are really frustrating to work with because I tell them exactly what to do and they won't do it. They won't execute. So I make sure I'm a good— I'm a coachable person. I sit down with these mentors and then we go to lunch, whatever. They give me a task. I do it that week and I send them an email update. Hey, I did the task. Thank you so much. It worked out great. And what happens is they become my mentor and I become their mentee. And over time, and usually these people are very high net worth and they love to mentor, give back, whatever. Eventually, I will take my new fund or new offering to them and say, hey, what do you think of this? This is what we're proposing to take to investors. I would love to hear your feedback on it. And they'll sit down and they'll pick through it and I'll send them my pitch deck and all this stuff. And if I was actually pitching you, what would you poke holes in? What don't you like about this? And what they'll do is they will walk through my pitch deck. They'll do, you know, they'll give me feedback and I'll go back and change things and come back and eventually, we'll get to a deck that's really good. And it, number one, it helps you a lot just get better at pitching and practice. And then number two, I say, hey, this is actually a really real offering. If you like it a lot, we're actually looking to raise money. And if you want to get involved, great. If you don't, that's great as well. But I would love if, you know, this is open to you. I've had a number of investors come in that way as well. So now I've done other techniques and I'm always trying out new stuff, but those are the two that have worked for me the best. Number one, can I send you deals? Can I can I get involved with you? You know, send you good deal structure. Number two, can can we be a mentor mentor mentee type of mentality? Now the third thing I'll bring up, and actually on our last week on our black card call, we talked about. I know we're going long, but I think this is fun. You guys you guys still with me? Is everyone still on? Drop a two in the chat if this is if this works. Drop a two in the chat if that's working as well. So the last thing, and I actually mentioned this in my Black Card group, I believe everyone on this call right now should go start a show. You should start a podcast. You should start a YouTube channel, whatever it is. Go and start some type of online marketing, online presence. It helps so much with everything you're doing. And whether it takes 2 years or 5 years or 10 years to— it doesn't matter if you even build a following, whatever. The beauty of having a show is you can very easily invite people. Everyone loves to be interviewed. Everyone loves to give advice. Everyone loves to be on a podcast. So what I'll do, and you guys can look through my— our interviews, there's a number of people that I've interviewed on my show that really didn't relate to funds very well, but they're a very high net worth individual and someone I wanted to meet. So I said, and I use that third technique as, hey, I've got a great podcast, a great show, a YouTube, whatever. Let's film an episode together. We'll publish it. We'll edit it. We'll make it pretty. And you can have that and then give you exposure. And it's actually a really great way to land investors is bringing them on your show. And guess what? The best thing about podcasts, YouTube's, YouTube, you can tell subscribers, views, all that stuff. Podcast, they have no stats besides reviews. How many people have reviewed this channel? That's it, and number of episodes. So you can start a podcast today, put out 30 episodes first, you know, get good at being on podcast, test it out. Don't, you know, don't like have your second episode be an investor or whatever. Test out your podcast for a minute. By the way, it takes 30 episodes anyways to find your voice. That's actually what one of my original mentors that got us into this space, he said, Bridger, Make 30 episodes of your podcast. No one's gonna listen to it anyways. And number 2, it'll help you find your voice. It'll help you find what you're good at talking about and what you're not good at talking about. And guess what? After 30 episodes, you can just delete them all and start over if you want, if they're bad. But at least get to 30 episodes. And once you're there, then start inviting. I'll go on your show. I literally go on every single show that I get asked to go on, just so you guys know. Anyone that's reached out to me in the last 6 months, I've said yes to your podcast and show. And I don't know how much longer I'll do that, but I literally get on any show, any podcast, anytime anyone invites me. So if you want to invite me on your show, you're welcome. It's interviewbridger.com. Go to interviewbridger.com. Bam! You can interview me. I can be on your show. Now for me to be on your show, I have a few things. You have to have the show up and running, published, and you have to have— I can't remember the metric. I think it's over like 20 episodes. If you've done those 3 things, I'll get on any show. I don't care how big or small the show is. And most High net worth individuals are the same way because you can't see stats on a podcast. Every single one of you, I'm giving you a challenge right now. I gave this to our Black Card group a couple weeks ago. Go start a podcast. Go start a show. It'll change your life and it'll be a really easy way for you to get people involved with you, get them on your show and get talking about whatever. And then it builds a relationship. They can know and meet, you know, know, like, and trust you, and it helps plant the seed to build a relationship for later. Okay. All right. With all that being said, again, back to the beginning. This is for people that are raising money. Okay. You can work your way or buy your way in. Number 2, once you're in, right, using status alignment, and then you can use a number of techniques. I like to do the deal flow technique, or I like to do the mentor-mentee or the podcast technique. One of those 3 offers are usually my offer, and to get them on my show, to get me sending them deals, Or to have a mentor-mentee relationship, is what I found is the 3 most. I've used a ton of other ones, but those are the 3 most productive for me, okay? Now, again, back to the beginning. If you are not the money-raising type, that's okay, okay? Find someone who is. Find someone who likes to do a show, likes to interview people, likes to go to networking events and meet people, all that kind of stuff, okay? Be that person. Now, a few questions on here between the channels that we're on. Welcome in, you guys. Fun to see everybody. So, questions on— I mentioned Black Card Group a couple of times, all that kind of stuff. If you want to learn more about our programmes on YouTube, we have links below as well. I'm not going to go long on this, but if you want to work directly with me, if you want to work with our— we have coaches and teams of people as well, and we try to help people launch scale funds. We've got a number of funds that have raised over $10 million, 2 funds over $50 million. It's been pretty successful. what we've done so far. So if you want to learn more, in the chat right now, type I'm in, okay? I'm in in the chat. And what we'll do is all we're going to do is come through and I'll send you a direct message. Myself or one of my team members will send you a direct message saying, hey, what's going on? Are you starting a fund? Are you doing a syndication? What do you need help raising money? What's going on? And what they're going to do is open up the conversation and they're going to make a couple, you know, messages back and forth. And if they want, they can hop on a 15-minute game plan call with you. Okay, that's all it is. We— and I don't want to— actually, on that call, literally, we do not want to sell you. It's not a sales call. It's literally a game plan call. We're going to sit down and game plan with you what tweaks you can make to your strategy, what you do in your fund. We want to give you some quick wins. And our ultimate goal, guys, I make great money running my funds, okay? I do this for fun. I have a lot of fun, and I have a lot of fun running investment funds because I think it's a great thing. And number 2, I learn a lot. I learn by teaching, and so that's why I do this. Yes, we make some money. We have, you know, and our programs are not cheap. We do that to help people pay— people who pay pay attention, that come in, that pay a certain price, pay attention, and they execute and they get results. And so that's the purpose for it. So again, if you want to open up the dialogue, open up the conversation, and hop on a 15-minute game plan call, with one of our guys. I've trained them directly. In the chat right now, type, I'm in. Okay, I'm in. Type that in the chat right now. And what we'll do is we're gonna scrub through and find everybody on there. We'll send you a direct message. If you don't get a direct message from us or myself or one of my team members in the next, I don't know, 24 hours, send me a message. Message me on Instagram or Facebook or whatever. Say, hey, I was on the call. No one reached out to me. I wanna talk more about funds or setting up a syndicate. We'll open up the dialogue and whether, you know, we can talk about— yes, we have coaching programs that are expensive. We also put out a lot of free content. We put a lot of stuff on our YouTube channel. We have a 1-hour free training. We have a free PDF guide, all sorts of free stuff that you can have as well. So we can direct you to those things as well to help you launch Scale With Fun. Does that sound fair enough? So the keyword in the chat is I'm in. Okay? I'm in. If you want to learn more, see what we do, all that kind of stuff, I'm in in the chat is what it is. If you're on YouTube, At the bottom of the description, there's a little because we can't DM you on on YouTube. So on the bottom of YouTube, at the bottom, there's a little link that says book a one out one on one game plan call. Click on that link and you can book a call right there if you're on YouTube. Sound good? All right. With that being said, I just wanted to that's a little plug, I guess, for us. I want to answer some questions here for a second, and I have got to hop. I actually have an interview in four minutes. So shoot, I've gotta hop off in just a second. I forgot about that interview, I just pulled it up at the top of the hour. Okay, let me answer a few questions here. Bridger, I'm 20 years old, I wanna open a fund one day. Awesome, Ben, keep us posted. I would book a call and see how we, see where you're at, see what we can help you with. Okay, let me scroll up a little bit here from the Facebook group. Kalichi, I sent you a message, okay? Paul, I'm trying to look for questions here on capital raising. I wanna make sure I covered everything. Just finished the book a few weeks ago. Awesome, that book is amazing. I am a big— if anybody knows Oren Klaff, please, I would love to get him on my show. I've tried to reach out to him a couple times. He's pretty hard to reach out to, so we'll get him one day. We're gonna get him here pretty soon. Okay. All right. Okay, I'm looking through, I don't see a lot of questions actually. Let me scroll to the bottom again. If you have questions on what we've done, let's see, I'm in, yeah, I'm in is the keyword. Yo, what's up? Have you heard of the new unicorn setup Grow? No, I haven't heard of Grow. I don't know what they do. What are some other strategies you've used, some that one could use without the time investment of building a deal pipeline or a show? So Manuel, I would tell you, you know, what are some other techniques besides building a show or that pipeline? I mean, there's a— again, there's a lot of ways to go about it. Those are— yes, they take work, okay? They take work to build up a pipeline or to build up a show. But it's totally worth it, okay? So I'm gonna give you a challenge to go start. Starting a show, you have no excuse to start a show. No excuse not to start a show. Go start a show. Now, as far as a pipeline, that takes a little bit of time, you know, finding types of deals that are coming across your desk. The show will help that as well. The last thing I'll say is be an event thrower. If you— and it's a whole different strategy. Takes some work again, Emmanuel. This is— everything takes work. I'm sorry, I'm not gonna give you a magic pill. This is not— Oh, sign up for this thing. It's blah blah. It takes work. Okay? Throwing it, throwing a be an event thrower is another great thing. Throw an investor real estate investor group of St. Louis, or go join real estate investor group of St. Louis. There's there's groups all around the country. Every city that you're in has a real estate investing group. Go find them on Facebook, on YouTube. Literally type in your city real estate investing group. Go find them. Number two though, throwing events. If you guys saw on our Instagram, we threw an event called Cars and Coin. About 3 weeks ago, and what we did is we invited a bunch of people with supercars to come. All their cars came out. We had a bunch of car people come. Everyone that has a car loves to show them off, and then we brought on 2 really great speakers that, guess what? People love to speak in front of crowds. So we brought in people with a lot of fancy cars and people that are really great, you know, good speakers talking about cryptocurrency and real estate funds. We brought them and we said, hey, we're going to get smart people in a room and these smart people in a room and put them together, And bam, we had a fantastic event. Fantastic event. You guys can go see our video that we put out. It seriously was an incredible event. We'll roll those into more events. And these are local for just me. This is not investment funds. This is local stuff I do in Salt Lake City, throw events to get investors, pull together smart people, entrepreneurs, all that kind of stuff. I don't, and I tried to, by the way, one note for throwing events, the quality of the event is by the quality of people that show up. So if you just invite everybody, everybody come to this event, blah, blah, blah, the quality of people that show up are gonna be all over the place. And what happens if you get a billionaire to show up and then also just someone that's never started a business, doesn't, you know, a W-2 employee, those 2 people get in the same room and they meet and there's this way off status alignment. And guess what happens? The person that's on the, you know, that's just starting out, they're kind of like, oh, that's kind of cool. But the billionaire, they'll never come back. Your high net worth people will never come back. They'll give you one chance to come to an event and they're going to test out the people in the room and decide if they're going to come back again. And so if you can curate a room of people that have, they all have pretty similar status alignment, what happens is people go to an event and they meet 2 or 3 or 4 really great contacts and they're like, shoot, this event was amazing because I didn't spend, you know, the Everyone at an event will talk to 3, 4, or 5 people, and they talk to these people and they will decide if the event was worth it or not. If you can make sure that those 4 or 5 people they talk to are really high quality, they'll come back to the next event, and we feel like we achieved that at our Cars and Coin event. All right, I got an interview I got to hop on. Love you guys. Again, I'm in the chat. On YouTube, you can click on the bottom link, book a call, whatever on there. Hope today was valuable. I believe in giving value up front, and hopefully, they got some stuff. Message me if you have any more questions. I'd love to chat. You guys are awesome, and I'll see you on the next video.