Fund Launch Live 2023 - Bridger Pennington Introduction

Fun Launch Live! Get on your feet, put your hands together, and help me welcome to the stage Bridger Pennington! Woo! How we doing, everybody? Come on, come on. Wow, how we doing? How's everybody doing today? Woo! All right. Good to see all y'all. Good to see you guys. Ah, welcome in, welcome in. Take your seats. Wow, we made it, huh? Woo! Woo! We are here. Everybody throw— anybody's ever thrown like a party at your house before or something and you worry if people are gonna show up? You guys came. So anyways, we're here. It's awesome. Welcome to Fun Launch Live. Ah, it's amazing. I just sorry I last backstage. I was tearing up watching that video. It's just amazing. And that video and all the accomplishments this group and it's a reflection on us as a group and what we can do and what we can go after and what you guys can do. And, um, I was just blown away. I'm blown away by this, but what we together have built, and I feel like this event feels a little bit like a family reunion sometimes. There's people on Zoom I talk to, a lot of you guys I talk to on Zoom, we meet up, whatever, but it's fun to come back in person from last year to this year and see, oh, what's the update? What are you doing? Oh, we raised money. We're doing this fun. It's pretty awesome. It's just remarkable to see what this group has done. So, and we're just getting started, hey? We're only just getting started on this. So give a huge round of applause to you guys for all the stuff this group has done. It is amazing. Ah, it's just phenomenal. Now, yes, I have a beard. I saw a quote from Alex Hormozi online. I thought it was pretty good for me. It was this quote right here. It says, if you're an ugly dude, consider a beard. Leaves half your face to their imagination. That's good. So, here we are with half my face to your imagination. This is pretty fun. So, we're gonna have a great time the next 3 days. I promise to go all out. I promise to— I'm gonna give you our full everything we've got. Does that sound good? We're gonna play all out. Now, Devon talked about this a little bit. I'm gonna do the same with Devon. We're gonna try to keep the energy high in this room. I'm gonna do callbacks. I'm gonna be asking if you're there, et cetera. And I'm not doing it for me, just so everyone's aware. So, I'll be like, if you're with me, say yes. Yes. Yes! Okay, that was awesome, that was really good. The reason I do that, just so you're aware, there's some people in this room like, ah, I'll never do that. Psychologists tell us if we show up to an event like this and we just sit there and listen, you remember long-term about 0% of what you listen. If you actually take notes, we actually, when you checked in, we gave you notebooks, all that kind of stuff, you take notes, that jumps from 0 to about 3 to 5%. So, 3 to 5%, that's pretty good of long-term memory, what you retain. If you use your body and voice and energy, that number jumps to about 15 to 20%, what you retain long-term. Who's down to get to 15 to 20%? Yeah? Okay, if you're with me, say yes! Yes! Okay, so I'm gonna do callbacks like that, we're gonna do stuff, and it's not just, I mean, it is fun to do, but it's more to help you be engaged. I want, your time is very valuable, it's the most valuable asset we have is time. So, I want you to be here present and using the best of your ability for all this. Sound good? Yeah. Okay. It's going to be a fun 3 days. So, I want to talk about a few things. We're going to dive right in. Is that okay? We're just going to dive right in. We got a bunch of fun stuff planned. I've got a fun session here. I want to go deep on funds. I want to share a set of good groundwork. A lot of you guys maybe have heard some of this stuff, but I'm adding a ton of new examples and new things in here to help go from there. Sound good? Now, I think I love this. I think we romanticize the small business owner a little too much. Who owns a small business? Yeah? Yeah. A lot of people in this room. Now, I'm all for small business. You hear about in the politics news, we're trying to protect small business owners, etc. I think we romanticize it a little too much. Meaning, like, being a small business owner in itself is awesome, but it's a step to another further thing, if that makes sense. Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of Blackstone, said this. So, $400 billion. Anybody know Blackstone in here? I mean, huge group, right? We're going to talk about a few examples from Blackstone. In his book, he talks about this. He goes, "It's hard to run. It's just as hard to run a small business as it is to run a big business. It takes about the same amount of work. Takes everything you got." Can I get an amen on that for my small business owners? Right? Amen. It takes everything you got. So he goes, "If you're gonna be into business, it's gonna take everything you got. You might as well go after a business that can be big and make a lot of money and has lots of margin." There's a fantastic book called E Myth that talks about this. A lot of us small business owners. You know, we wake up, we're in a bakery, we're making the bread. We have to wake up, we do the accounting, we do the marketing at late night. We stay up, we make sure the numbers, the QuickBooks is done. We do everything, right? And we become slaves to our business. So again, I think we romanticize the small business owner too much. Is that kind of making sense? The idea is not to be a small business owner anymore. It's to be a big business owner, right? And have huge margins, a lot bigger things. So, um, really interesting book. Anybody heard of this book? No. 10x is easier than 2x. So I saw this book and I thought, that's kind of a cheesy title, the 10x, you know, thing. Like, oh, you're 10x, just set your goal 10x. And it's like, okay. But I loved his concept in here. So Dan Sullivan goes through, he goes, 10x is easier than 2x was his whole concept. Now in this room, if I asked you, show me some, write down ways that you could 2x your business over the next 5 years. Think through actually, literally think right now. Think of some ways you could 2x your business over the next 5 years. Probably a lot of ways. You could run ads, you could do marketing, you could do an affiliate program, you could do all this cool stuff. There probably is about 100 things you could come up with, right, to 2x or incrementally increase your business. But he goes, if I told you what are ways that you could literally 10x your business in the next, let's call it 3 years, how many ideas could you come up with? And most people go from 100 ideas Down to two or three. Does that kind of make sense? And actually, I read this and I and I was like, huh. And it stuck with me. Late night, I was thinking about it. We had it in our board. I was like, guys, we got to stop thinking of there's it's it's great. Don't put it away. But these are all incremental gains. We could add an employee here, do this little thing. It's going to incrementally grow our business. But what are the one or two things that will ten ten x or literally go from ten million a year to a hundred million a year? That's a big jump. $100 million a year to $1 billion a year, that's a big jump. There's probably only 2 or 3 ways that we could get there. And instead of trying to chase 100 rabbits and catch 100 rabbits at once, you catch 1 or 2 rabbits. Does that kind of make sense? If you're with me, say yes. Yes. Okay, so, and he has this quote in here, he goes, achieving 10x growth is actually exponentially easier than striving, keep striving for 2x growth. This is a reason a lot of the small business owners stay small business owners. 'Cause they don't set the plans and processes to hit that 10x. Is that kind of making sense? That was a pretty interesting concept that I've stayed with. Now, most businesses today needed significant capital to grow. All these logos on the screen, you go watch their story. The way to get that 10x growth was they needed a lot of capital to grow franchises, to new products, to new development, et cetera. Does that kind of make sense? Capital is a huge piece of leverage. Robert Kiyosaki coined this very well, but This has been taught for centuries in business. Here's 4 different types of leverage in business. Different ways that you can use, think about a lever, right? You can leverage your business in different ways. Number 1, so this is in Rich Dad Poor Dad, but it's across the universe of business. Number 1 is capital. Capital is a huge leverage point of business. Number 2 is people, so human capital. Major, major lever point. Number 3 is technology, and number 4 is media. So again, think about leverage. Those are the four main leverage points of any of us can use in business. Is that kind of making sense? So you can leverage the media. Think about like Ryan Reynolds with have you seen all these these actors that are using alcohol? Just drastically, they're like all of them now have an alcohol or a brand that they're taking and then they exit for a billion dollars. You guys seen this? The reason the alcohol company does that is they go find an actor. Let's use media as a leverage point. We'll make this a billion-dollar brand. We'll give that person 20% equity. They take $200 million. We take $800 million. That's— they use leverage. They leverage media, technology, people, capital, etc. Does that kind of make sense? If you're with me, say yes. Yes. So, now— oh, let me go back a little bit. The top one here, capital, I would argue is the most important for the rest of the 3. If you have capital, you can leverage all the other 3. If you don't have capital, you can still leverage them. It just is a lot harder. Does that make sense? If you have like a fund with tons of capital, ta-da! You can leverage media a lot easier. You can go pay Ryan Reynolds a huge check, right? You can leverage technology. You can buy big tech stack, whatever you're going to use in your company. You can go hire a whole army of people to— if you think back to these companies before, that's what they did. They leverage capital, right? Let's see here, go back. To a huge extent to scale their companies. Does that kind of make sense? Yes. So, the next 3 days, we're going to talk about leveraging this piece the most of capital. So, welcome to Funnel Launch Live. This may be the most important conference you ever attend for all your business, etc., in the future. Sound good? So, give you guys a huge round of applause. Welcome to Funnel Launch Live.