This Game Made Me a Millionaire By 25 | Here's How You Can Play

In this video, I want to give you tactical information of how we scaled our business from $0 to $7 million in about 2 years, how I launched 3 funds in my 20s, and ultimately how I approach the money game. So when I got to college, a lot of different people give you different advice, right? They tell you, go after your passions, go after your interests. Now, what's funny is typically those people are usually broke or don't know much about this money game. And typically they struggle with money through their 20s, through their 30s, through their 40s through their 50s into their 60s and hope to retire. Or better yet, hopefully their kids will support them once they hit that retirement age. And I just thought, I don't want to be that person. I don't want to be a financial strain on my family. And I want to be that type of Atlas person that can go out and do these incredible things around the world and don't have to have anybody supporting me, don't have to worry about money, have complete financial freedom. So let's head down here to the whiteboard of truth and justice, our infamous whiteboard. We do a lot of training on here on this thing, the money game. Let's talk about it. Now, at this point in my life, I started to get very intentional about the vehicles I was going after. What do I mean by that? So, I got into college. I started my 6 businesses my first 2 years of college. Literally 6 businesses. We did Chinese tutoring. I built websites for people. We did forex. I wholesaled 2 houses, okay? These are the types of businesses I was in, and what I realized was this, especially with my Chinese tutoring business. So, I speak Chinese. I served a 2-year mission in Taiwan. I spoke Chinese. It was awesome. I loved it to death. I came home and I was like, I'm gonna start teaching other people about Chinese and maybe tutor some kids that are in school or whatever. We'll do this, and I was making pretty good money. I was making $20,000, $25,000, $30,000, $35 an hour as a tutor with people. So I started to hire other tutors. I was hiring, I think I had about 8 tutors that I'd hired. And I realized this, I was going out finding the clients, finding the leads, setting them up, and I would set up a tutor to go meet with them. Now I had to pay my tutors pretty well for them to do this. After all expenses and costs and marketing things, every lesson that they taught, I made about $6 per lesson. Now each one of my tutors were part-time. They were doing maybe 5 lessons a week. And I was like, man, this is a lot of work. And some of these lessons would cancel or reschedule. I had to manage that. I just I was like, man, this is not worth the money. Like the margins are so thin on this business. I would need 1,000 tutors for me to make any significant money. And I need a lot of clients, a lot of lead flow, a lot of marketing spend. Man, this just seems like not a good model to be in. Again, back to this question of shopping vehicles. What kind of vehicle did I want to be in? And I finally came down to 2 things that I pointed out that I wanted to be in. I wanted an income source that had 2 things. Number one, took very little time or relatively relatively little time. And number 2, I want something with really good margins. So I found 2 different vehicles. There's probably more than this, but 2 for me that I felt had very high margins and could scale beyond my own time. Number 1 was investment funds, which as you can see behind my head, this is what we talk about and teach investment funds. You can leverage your time like crazy and it has huge margins, right? Your margins, you have fund managers that make hundreds of millions a month just from their funds. And the second one was online marketing. or just marketing in general. Online marketing had pretty good margins, not as good as funds, but also you could leverage your time really well. You could just set up a few little videos or an ad and it could run while you sleep. So I identified these 2 that I wanted to get into, but I lacked a few things. Number one, I lacked a lot of resources. I didn't have the knowledge to get into the fund world or the knowledge to get in the online marketing world. I just knew I wanted to be there eventually. And second, I didn't have the network to get into these categories as well. So I had to be resourceful, especially to get into this space. of how I was going to figure this out. Now, this first one, I really lucked out. I have an— some of you guys know my story. I have an incredible father who was running a deca-billion-dollar fund. I did not know this growing up. I learned this later on in life, and he became an incredible mentor for me in the fund space. And just disclaimer, my dad never has invested in any deal, project, property, company, anything I've ever done, ever. And I still, I keep pitching him all the time. He always says no to me. But what he has done has been an incredible mentor for me and my brother. Number 2, on the online marketing space, I really had no one to turn to or no one to go to. I tried all the traditional things. I went on YouTube. I read books. I tried to find mentors. I kept hitting a wall and just never could figure out how to nail this thing. And that's when something drastically changed for me. I got invited to go to this event in Boise, Idaho. My business partner drug me up there. We sat down for 3 days and talked all things online marketing. And the first thing I learned at that event was this: wealth attracts wealth. That the people who made a lot of money and had a lot of success, they just copied what other successful people were doing. They just followed the paper trail of success, and actually, a lot of successful people like to share the steps that they took to get there. It's funny because a lot of people go to college and they try to learn, they don't know it, but they're trying to learn this money game, and they're learning it from broke college professors who have never played the money game in real life. They're good at the academic game, but they've never figured out how to make money in the real world, and I had to make a decision. I said, wow, I've got to move whom I'm listening to. At the time, I was at university, I was at college, and I said, yeah, those people can teach me certain topics. But if I want to learn the overarching money game, I got to find people who have been there before me. And at this event, I was blown away. I was able to go deep, to go all in for 3 days and fully immerse myself in the online marketing space. It was breakfast, lunch, dinner. The people I would chat with on the side walking to the event, I met people who were doing online marketing, that game I want to learn. They were doing it all around the globe in different companies of different products and all Making it work, and I walked away from that event with pretty much the foundations of what Investment Fund Secrets is today, which today has over 10,000 students. We have over 35 employees. We're throwing a thousand-person event next month. The thesis of all that came from a three-day event I attended back in my early twenties. Now, I said at the beginning, I want to give you some tactical things, and you've heard the cliché saying, "My network is my net worth," but it's kind of true, and I want to teach you how to get in these rooms, how to get around wealthy, successful people. That can give you ideas in high-margin business and help you along this paper trail to win the money game. Does that sound fair enough? Now, with our training, we usually help fund managers go out and find very high net worth individuals that want to write checks for $500,000, $1 million, or even $5 million into their fund. And we have a 3-step formula to help people do that. I think this applies to what we're talking about today. So, number 1 is get in the room. This is how do you actually get in the vicinity of these people, these mentors, these people that have done very well successfully. How do you get in the room with them and actually talk with them and get around them? Number 2, once you're in the room, how do you make value-based connections? And then number 3, how do you actually convert those connections into dollars? That's what I want to share with you today. Does that sound fair enough? So number 1, let's talk about getting in the room. Now there's 2 ways to get in the room. You can work your way in. So this would be truly like working your way in. You can go on LinkedIn, you can go to free events, you can kind of network in, you can meet a lot of people, shake a lot of hands, and slowly try to work your way into certain rooms. And like in the name, it's It's a lot of— it takes a lot of work, which is totally fine. The next way is you can buy your way into these rooms and groups. This is pay-to-play networking. I'm in a group right now. It's $24,000 a year to be in a group. You can join events. You can join masterminds. Now, the qualifier for these rooms— you can join the Ferrari Club of San Diego. You got to buy a Ferrari to be in that club, right? This group, this— you have certain things that qualify you to attend or be in that Usually makes it a lot easier to find the perfect person that you're looking for. Now, both are good and both these things can help you grow and scale your network, but I wanna give you a little secret of something that is kind of a hybrid of the two, and I believe the best of both worlds. I'm gonna draw a little line here and say events and broad-scale events. I am a total product of events. 'Cause events, you gotta pay to go. They're usually a couple hundred dollars or a couple thousand dollars. Once you get there though, you've gotta work the room a little bit, but it gets you in a qualified room with people that you wanna meet in a general sense. You don't have to pay $24,000 to be there. So maybe only a couple hundred bucks or maybe $1,000, but that still congregates a pretty good group that you would get if you paid that $24,000. I think last year I went to 4 or 5 events that I literally had to travel. I got on a plane, traveled to an event. I did that, I think, 5 times in the last year. Why? Because I love, number one, the in-depth knowledge I get from events. And number two, I love working the room and actually usually come out with some really good contacts and really good people that I get to meet. The second tactical thing I'll give you is just like events, and this This is, by the way, is the number one networking thing I've ever done in my entire life. And it helps you compound on events. We'll talk about this in value-based connections. It kind of goes into this next category is having a podcast. Having a podcast for me has been my number one networking tool I've ever done in my entire life. And kind of going up into this thing, 'cause so you get into the event, right? Let's talk about you're at the event and you meet some people that you really wanna get to know. And sometimes it's just awkward. Oh, can I get your business card? Why? Like, why do you want my business card? Oh, I'd love to just get your number or connect, hang out with you in the future. A lot of people are like, that just sounds so flaky. flaky and just so weird. I don't know if I want to, you know, talk to you, right? However, if you go to that same person and say, hey, do you want to be on my podcast or my show? 9 times out of 10, that person will say yes. People love to be on podcasts. They love to be on shows. They love to be highlighted. And the best thing about podcasts for you is they are so easy to start. You can literally start a podcast for— buy a microphone on Amazon for $25. You don't need video. You don't need a nice studio like this. You don't need lights. You literally just record audio and you can publish it to all these platforms. And they have no clue how big or small your podcast Because guess what? Podcasts have no metrics. You cannot see how many views a podcast has, a thumbs up, or there's no ratings. All it is is number of episodes and reviews on your podcast. And you can have, you know, if you get 50 reviews from friends and family and coworkers, you're all of a sudden super legit. That is one of the easiest things you guys can do to leverage connections once you're in a room and have a value-based connection. Now, in addition to podcasts, I want to reference something that again makes these value Value-based connections. Because now let me— what do I mean? Sorry, let me slow down. What do I mean by value-based connections? Have you ever gone to an event or a party or something and, you know, you meet 20 or 30 people at this event? You're shaking hands, you're saying hi to people. But what happens is that when you leave that event, you usually only remember 1 or 2 people, maybe 3, that you met at the event. Remember, you got their business card like, wow, okay, I really got to make sure I reach out to this person or follow up with them or call them or text them. Why did those 2 or 3 people stand out from the 30 people that you met? It's because you had a value-based connection with that person. Subconsciously or consciously, all of us, whenever we meet somebody, we deep down go, how can this person benefit me? Am I attracted to them? Can they give me money? Can they give me status? Can they give me a connection or a partnership or something? What can they bring to my life? Can they bring me love? Can they make me laugh? Are they really funny to be around? That's why we tend to be attracted to some people and not attracted to other people. They give us something that we crave in our life. So when I meet somebody, I just wrote them down here. I try to play into these things if I can when I meet someone so that they will want to remember my name. They will want to reach out or connect with me or somehow follow up. Now, I said this before, a podcast does this in a lot of ways. A podcast instantly gives someone status. A podcast is very good at this. It also gives you connection and sometimes they can actually share and maybe you can add on here mentorship. People like to share their knowledge. Podcast does all 4 of those, does a really great job at it. Another good one I run investment funds. I like to— I'll tell people, what do you do? I go, I run an investment fund. A lot of people are intrigued by that. Their ears usually perk up. They go, what do you mean by an investment fund? I go, well, I run a hedge fund and we trade these certain things. And they go, wow, that's really cool. And then I will lead with this. And this little line changed my life forever. I say, hey, I get a lot of deals across my desk just by the nature of me running a fund. I get lots of deals and lots of connections and stuff. Most of them I cannot do. Hey, if I've got some good deals that come across, maybe I can't do them, but do you like to see good deals like in real estate? 9 times out of 10, that person goes, yeah. Like, who doesn't want to see a good deal? And they go, well, let me get your email and I'll make sure to send you some deals. And I take down their email and I guess I really do get a lot of deals across my desk and I start to send them deals. So on that one, I hit on money, right? I give them kind of money and connection and a little bit of status too because there's somebody that I would actually send deals to. That's kind of giving them status. You must be rich, you must be wealthy, you must be something if I'm going to send you these types of deals. We won't go into all these but another good one is humor. If you can make someone laugh, right? That's a whole trait in itself. I'm not super good at that. I would say I don't know if I'm that great at that but whatever. Love, if you're looking, you know, to date somebody or mentorship is another good That's a good one. You can ask people to be your mentor. Now on this one, before we move on, do not ask people to pick their brain. It is one of the biggest pet peeves I've heard from a lot of different people. Stop asking to pick your brain. Hey Bridger, can I pick your brain over lunch on marketing or funds? No, there's no value in that connection. Essentially what you're telling me is, Bridger, I don't have any good questions or things to bring up. I just want to sit down and just kind of chat with you and see what comes up. And if you can share a few things over an hour, that would be cool. What do I get out of that? I get nothing out of that. I don't get anything out of a random conversation that you haven't even spent the time to think through some cool topics you want to touch on, okay? Do not say this to anybody. If you're going to ask someone to mentor you or go to lunch with you, have something specific. Hey, and I'll do this to a mentor. Hey, a mentor I found, our company is going from 5 to 20 employees right now. We're hiring a ton of people. I would love to take you to lunch and ask you about how you hired people and your process of onboarding and bringing on employees, maybe firing employees. I'd love to learn from you on that topic. Now, they still might say no, but there's a way better chance they'll say yes because people love to mentor, especially on specific topics. So again, don't say pick your brain. Have specific things, but mentorship can be a really good one, which then brings us to number 3, converting these into money. Now, this depends on what you're doing. For our fund people, we have a whole strategy to walk people through for this and help them convert their money. And we actually— we can talk more about this later at our event. Thank you so much. Click the link below. Go to fundlaunchlive.com. See you guys there. Bye.