CapCon Recap: The Best Ideas & Secrets From CapCon6

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Welcome to capitalism.com. so the purpose of this episode today is. I want to recap the Capitalism Conference. The Capitalism Conference happened at the end of April 2023. This was Capcon 6. I think it was our best one we've ever done. The way that I would describe it is it was magic. Magic happened at this point. Event. It was nourishing, it was fun, it was communal, it was capitalistic. And I'm dealing with the Capcom crash now. It was so much fun, it was so rejuvenating. And then everybody left and it was, oh, happens every year. Every year I have this Capcom crash. Like, what am I doing with my life? Because you get this insight into your purpose when you have 200 high level entrepreneurs in one place all talking about how we can collaborate together and how we can work together. And I want to put people on the show and I want to help everybody's business. I want to dive in and help them make more money. It's just this wild fest of exciting opportunities and then everyone goes home. So I think we need to build a compound and have everybody live there. So let's recap what happened at Capcom. So if you were there, this can serve sort of as your field notes, your review. And if you weren't there, it will show you what you missed and give you some of the big takeaways from some of the speakers. And some of them will feature on the channel, some of them will keep secret. Some speakers requested that their stuff stay private. But I'll give you the highlights, I'll give you the details. So we started the event with opening words from me about how capitalism is really the blending of community and freedom. Freedom and community go hand in hand, and we don't often think of them as that. Oftentimes we see this almost as opposed to one another, because freedom often means going out on your own, carrying things on your back, blazing a new trail, and that's a lonely journey. And community is about giving to others, about being selfless. These two things don't often go hand in hand. And when either one is taken to its extreme, it causes problems. But the perfect marriage of these two is capitalism. Capitalism is where freedom. You can go out on your own in service to the community. We don't really know what our lives mean or what our purpose is until we view it through the context of other people. Our purpose, what we call our unique ability or the thing that only we can do. We only know that in the context of other people. It's why we Internet entrepreneurs feel so Sad and lonely so often because we have these abilities, we have these gifts and these desires, we have these opportunities, but we're not really in the context of other people. We are not seeing our customers, we're not saying hello, Mrs. Johnson when she comes into the store. It's not that type of entrepreneurship anymore. It's likes and clicks and comments and people behind screenshots. So we have freedom, but we lose the community part of it. This is one of the reasons why I make it so emphatic as part of my message, to choose the person that you're going to serve and to go all in on them. That's a real Internet business. And meanwhile, we're comparing ourselves to the people who are blowing up in terms of likes, followers and money. And we have this distorted view of what is.

Normal. We have this distorted view of what we where we think we should be. So capitalism is really the freedom to serve a community, which is why we do events. That's why we do things like capcon. The next person on the stage was the perfect example of, of that idea of community and freedom. And that person was Jimmy Darts. Jimmy Darts is a kindness influencer. He has about 10 million followers. I think it's more if you count other platforms, but his main platforms are Tik Tok and Instagram. Jimmy basically goes into Walmarts and blesses people. He looks for people who are doing acts of kindness and he gives them money and often changes their life. The cool story about Jimmy, however, is that Jimmy got his start in the capitalism.com community. I wish you could have been there to hear him share because Jimmy wanted to come to Capcom several years ago and he couldn't afford it. He just so happened to be a waiter at the restaurant attached to the venue where we were having the Capitalism conference. So he was there learning from all these people and listening to these, these people because he followed the show, he followed my work, and he eventually went on to start a product business that allowed him to have some freedom. And now he goes around the world blessing people. And that's his main gig. Now, Jimmy, Jimmy did a little bit of a cap con first. I almost wondered if he was going to do an altar call. He is a spiritual man. He's a good Christian man. And Jimmy wasn't pushy about his spiritual beliefs at all. But he did pray over the crowd. And not only did he pray over the crowd, but he did a. He conducted a spiritual healing from stage, which was a little new for me. Some of you know my background that I Used to be a Bible believing Christian. I don't call myself that anymore. So it was a little bit interesting to navigate, but it was mostly well received. We had a couple interesting comments about it, but for the most part it was very well received and a very heart centered presentation about why Jimmy does what he does to create change in the world. And I left convicted to do more good. But it also made me proud that someone had emerged from our world and was now creating such an impact in the world. We also announced that Jimmy and I are working on a project together. Jimmy and I are creating a card game through my team and it is called Undercover Kindness and it's a game where you're basically a challenge game where you're challenged to go out into public and to do these random acts of kindness and you can post videos of them, QR codes on the game where we'll archive people doing these random acts of kindness and just use it as a way to create more good in the world. And that, that's really exciting. That should be launched here and within the next 45 to 60 days. Right after Jimmy was Cody Sanchez. And Cody Sanchez is an eight figure entrepreneur and she comes from the private equity world and she looks at valuations and buying businesses and she's looking at how businesses can be positioned as an asset. It was so funny because she's behind the scenes. She's in the green room while Jimmy is giving his talk and she turns to me and she goes, you want me to follow that up with greed and profit and stuff? And I said, absolutely. So Cody gets on stage and she, she comes from this very unique perspective. Where Cody didn't come from the Internet marketing world and then graduated in the private equity world, she did the opposite. She grew up in the private equity world and now she's building scrappy online businesses. And so she looks at our world through a very unique lens that most of us don't see. Like my, my experience is I grew a scrappy online business, I sold it to the private equity world and that's how I got into that world, how I got to know that game where Cody did the opposite. She came from the private equity world and she's like, hmm, these Internet based businesses are pretty darn cool. So I took two things away from Cody's talk. The first is build your business like an asset. If you build your business like an asset, then it can be sold and it's just a healthier business. I am particularly guilty of leaning on my own skill set to drive a business Rather than building an asset that can be sold. I've sold multiple businesses in the past, but I know I could run better businesses if I was only focused on building the asset. And I know this intellectually. I teach this stuff. I have a hard time implementing it sometimes. So this is a really good reminder about how to do that. And the second thing that she taught in her talk was about looking for businesses that you can attach to the business that you're building. What businesses could you bolt on or partner with or acquire that would amplify the total value of the portfolio that you're building? That was. That was really cool to think about. She talked about several ways that she does this. She talks about horizontal and vertical integration and how she looks for and negotiates deals sometimes with no money out of pocket. She. I think now that I'm processing it, I think one of my favorite parts is when she talked about how she finances deals because she listed out several ways that she finances deals with seller financing, with notes, with raising capital, with SBA financing. And that was really cool to see that you can go out and attach businesses. I'm actually getting all excited just, just thinking about it now about how you can attach businesses sometimes with no money out of pocket to be able to bolt on to what you're already building. So if you have a core asset in your business, like an email list, if you got a newsletter business and Matt Paulson, I'm thinking of you if you're listening to this. If you got a newsletter business, you could bolt on other businesses that you could use the email list to promote. If you have an advertising business, you could go acquire an audience and partner the two together. If you have an affiliate marketing company, that's your primary revenue source, you can go out and acquire other people's products and plug them into your distribution channel. If you run a YouTube channel, you could partner or buy other YouTube channels and build a media company and you could do all this with technically no money out of pocket. This was really inspiring for me and it made me think bigger because I do invest in businesses, I do buy businesses, but this gave me some creative ways to be able to structure it that stretched my mind a little bit. So the next person after Cody was. Was Garon Jones. Garen was the perfect blend between Cody and Jimmy because Jimmy was 100% heart centered. Cody was 100% head centered. And we did that intentionally because it put people in their heart with Jimmy and then it put people in their head with Cody and people then going, oh, I don't know, I don't know what to do with my life. And Garen Jones works with entrepreneurs to get them.

Connected between their head and their heart. And so Garen was talking about how he works with entrepreneurs to align their core purpose and their mission so that they're attacking their goals. Those head centered goals from a heart centered place. How do you align those two things? As entrepreneurs, we are often so disconnected between those things. You're either a starving artist, all heart, or you're, you know, super heady without any meaning or community or connection to your customers. And both of them work. But the fulfillment comes when those two things are aligned and talking to each other. I think Joe Dispenza calls this brain heart coherence when these two centers, these two energy centers are connected and talking to one another. And so Garen was sharing how to do that. And one of the tips that he gave was about discovering what you did as a child. And for me it was performing. I did community theater and stuff at church and I loved the stage. And I've got goals as a capitalist. Right. So how do I align these two things? Well, I do YouTube videos and podcasts and speak on stage and I attract partnerships with people that I'm going to build a company with. That's how I personally do it. And Garen is really good at getting people into a play state that aligns those two energy centers. And then to end the day, we had Sean Puri. And Sean is a serial eight figure entrepreneur. He's also the host of My First Million, which is the number one business podcast in the world, most weeks. And Sean, wow, actually was the most surprising talk. I, I walked away with way more from Sean than I expected. It was much more applicable than I expected. And the one thing that I really remember, and I want to go back and watch his talk again, but the thing that I really remember that Sean talked about was that he sets a goal and a framework for his business. Like, okay, I'm gonna have four products that do 25 sales a day at a 30 price point to target this person. He sets the framework and sort of the thesis for how this business is going to work. And then he says, okay, how do I have as much fun as possible within this framework? What's the most fun that I can have to test this thesis? And that's how he builds his businesses. So he has this idea, this vision, and then he tries to find a simple, fun way to do it. And he's done it in E commerce, he's done it with podcasts. He's done it with newsletter businesses and one other business. I forget what the other business was, but he's had four successes. Four successes following this framework. It's funny, Sean will say, hey, I'm not the guy you should listen to because, you know, if I. If you really want to be a successful entrepreneur, you should just do one thing. I do multiple things. And I was like, no, no, no, I want to hear about how you do multiple things. Because I'm a guy who does multiple things. Gary Vee is somebody who does multiple things. And Sean was like, well, you'll make more money if you just do one thing. And that's probably true. It makes me sad, but it's probably true. But he talked about how he sets these frameworks so that he can focus on one project for like two years and then he flips it or sells it, or exits it, or automates it so he's not in it, he can move on to the next thing. And so he's a 0 to 10 guy and he either has a portfolio of eight figure companies or he sells them, takes a really solid exit and moves on. And so he's following his impulse. He's following his fun en route to the next big breakthrough, which I thought was the most beautiful application of everything we had talked about that day in one talk. My favorite part of the entire event were the evenings. So after all of the talks, I changed and put on comfortable clothes. There was open bar and there was unbelievable food. We ran out of food faster than we thought. But. But it was really good food. And we had yard games and live music. And it was just a. Like people didn't want. We had to drag people out. We had to literally drag people out. We're like, the bus is leaving. You will be left behind. You need to leave. And there were. People were just there for hours. We had a campfire and cornhole. And it was just. That was the best part of the event. The second day of the event, we started with a panel of eight figure entrepreneurs. These were people from my network that I knew that ran eight figure businesses. And it was four different industries. We had E commerce, we had food, we had client services, and we had information products. So those are the. The four industries that were eight figure businesses. And it was really interesting to see how every eight figure business owner had a different approach. But the mindset and the underlying principles were mostly the same.

All of them mentioned that at one point they had their back up against the wall. At one point there was a Period in which they weren't sure they were going to make it. One person had to buy out his partner, but he didn't have any money. One person was having marital problems because of lack of funds. One person was just getting out of prison. And it was really interesting to hear how all of them had their back against the wall and they used similar principles and mindsets in order to have the success that they had. It was also really interesting to hear them talk about how they hit eight figures. But it's been really bumpy rides. Every single one of them was like, it's been really bumpy rides. It hasn't all been smooth. It was very humanizing to hear all of these really successful business owners talk about how from the outside it looks like X, Y and Z, but on the inside it's really A, B and C. And it was a very tactical session. We'll probably release this as an episode. I would highly encourage that you study this one because there's a lot of really deep nuggets in that panel. We then went to Tom Davin, who is the CEO of Black Rifle Coffee. And Tom Davin was sharing how they created a raving fan base in a. In a niche like coffee. Coffee is obviously one of the most saturated markets in the world, and yet they're a billion dollar company. And they're pretty new too, right? I mean, they're only like 10 years old. And they came out of the gate with this raving fan base, this core audience to launch to. And so we di. We digested that into the plan. And Tom was so sweet. He put. He said, he said, Ryan wanted me to create an acronym to give you guys the formula. So I just created a random acronym, and it was just this random group of. Of letters to give the formula. And he, he broke down each piece of the business and what needs to be in place in order to have tremendous success. We'll probably release this one as well, so make sure you're subscribed. And you're looking for that keynote from Tom so you can see his playbook for how they took, you know, an ordinary product, a good product, but an ordinary product in a very saturated market. And they created a plan to go to eight the nine figures, and now they have a billion dollar valuation.

The next speaker was Shaquille Prosla. And the reason why I invited Shaquille to the stage is because Shaquille privately shared with me that he had lost $6 million on a deal and it was about ready to give up. But then he turned it around into $100 million win in about 18 months. It's a crazy story. And so he went through what he did in order to turn that around. And the interesting thing was that it was mostly relationships. It was Shaquille looking for the strategic relationships and who they could serve, not just from the customer standpoint, but what vendors could they serve, what vendors could they partner with, what problems could they solve, what assets did they have within their business that they could rely on to create value for other people? And that's what Shaquille did to turn this thing from a dud into a major win. It was also really interesting to hear how Shaquille thinks about risk. Shaquille has no problem taking big risks in business. And it's funny because he's so calm and he is unassuming and doesn't draw a lot of attention to himself, but he loves taking big risks. And this one did not pan out until it did. And the thing that I wanted the audience to see was that sometimes it can look like you're about to fail, but sometimes you're three feet from gold if you keep digging. And that was the case with Shaquille. And he shared the story about how he turned that around and what lessons he learned along the way. And then we ended the event with Tarot Isocoppola, and he is the founder of four Sigmatic. Now, what Tarot did, I think besides Jimmy Darts, who is just so heart centered and so wonderful to listen to, Tarot was voted as the most popular speaker. And that's because Tarot gave this playbook that was so unique and helpful to the entrepreneurs who were in the room. And basically what Tarot shared was that he takes a blue ocean approach to every business that he gets into. And what he does is he looks for two industries that he can combine. So he wanted to start for Sigmatic as a mushroom company, not as a coffee company. But then he looked at coffee and said, these two things can be combined. And as a result of them being combined, I can have a new form of coffee that no one can compete with. It was masterfully done. To hear how he goes into these industries, he looks for two. Two things that he can combine. And by doing so, he has no competition. So he was. He. He told one person that was there, he was like, oh, you're in the food industry. Bath bombs. You should have bath bomb foods. And we were like, what? Where is he going with this? But then he talked it out. He was like, you should have a type of food that you Drop it into a liquid and it becomes this drink. And it actually made sense for the brand. Right? It would not make sense for most brands, but it made sense for this brand. And it was a unique way of. Way of seeing how you could take a brand new approach to a business. And he did these live case studies with people who were in the audience and workshop their businesses about how they could do things completely differently from everybody else and stand out. This was, it was really mind opening for me to see. Oh, I usually see it what everybody else is doing and I stop there. I could see what everybody else is doing in one industry and what everybody else is doing in another industry. And I could combine them and come up with something brand new. And that is a blue ocean strategy that allows me to launch the types of products that have an impact for my audience and for my followers and customers. That was, that was really refreshing and really cool to see. And here's the best part of the whole event. After Tarot spoke, we had this surprise planned where we had these awards ready made for all of our members who crossed 10k for the first time and those who built million dollar businesses. We're on a mission to create a million millionaires. So we wanted to honor everyone in the audience who was a millionaire who built a million dollar business or had a million dollar net worth. We want to honor all the people that follow us that have done that and we want to honor a million of them because we're on a mission to impact a million millionaires. The weather did not cooperate after Tara got of sage. The heavens opened and hail fell from the sky. And we were outside.

So we threw everybody into a room. We brought all of the live music inside, we brought the open bar inside and we had a ruckus. Amazing, wonderful time connecting with each other and seeing how we could serve one another in, you know, in this small little venue. Everybody was packed in when it stopped. It had been like three hours. We had an amazing night. It was so much fun. It was my favorite part. But then when it cleared up, I stood up on a chair.

I was like, all right, everybody outside, we have surprises for you.

And what was supposed to be a 90 minute awards ceremony, we did in 10 minutes. I just called everybody on stage. I said, the hardest part of your.

Business is getting the first 10,000 in sales. All these entrepreneurs have done it. Give it up for these future billionaires, everyone.

And it was great. And then I called up all the people who had crossed 100k and I.

Was like, we're out to inspire a million millionaires. And this is the first batch. Give it up for these billionaires and wall changers, everybody.

And it just was so fun for everybody to be on the same team, cheering for each other's success. So often. We're doing this game alone, we're playing it by ourselves and we don't have a group of people who's rooting for us. And to have everyone on stage rooting for each other was a special moment. So that was Capcon 6. It was the best event we've ever done. Every year I say, how are we going to top that? And we figure out a way and we do it. And we are doing Capcon 7. We're changing up the venue, we're changing up the format and it's going to be really exciting. And we'll keep you posted on details about the upcoming event. I am nurturing my capcon hangover with fun and rest and building podcast studios and pickleball and waiting for the next inspiration. I am doing this experiment right now where I prioritize fun instead of hard work. And it's hard work prioritizing fun. That muscle's weak. But for the next couple months, kind of want to do this experiment where I don't force growth, I allow growth because I can only force growth for so long before I, like, hate my life. And, you know, just a couple months, let's just like, Capcom was so much fun and there was so much opportunity and so much activity. Can I get more of that in my life? And so I'm going to put more attention into the capitalist pigs because that is all fun masterminds and small events. That's capitalism.com/pig. If you want details about that Mastermind, it's the most slam dunk, no brainer, stupid. Can't say no offer I've ever made in my career. Three years of Mastermind for about three grand a year. It's stupid. I'm even embarrassed to say the price because it's so stupid low. It should be 25 grand a year. It should be 75 grand. Is not. It's like it's about 10 grand, a little bit under. Depending on the price of Ethereum, you can buy it with a credit card. Capitalism.com I'm going to be putting more emphasis and focus into that because it's so fun and I want to make it more fun and I want to build more community. I want to have mini Cap Cons throughout the entire year. So that's going to be my focus for a few months. And my team and I are exploring how do we build capitalism.com More like an asset, how do we build this more like something that exists bigger than one person? And, and that's a healthy conversation. It's the right conversation. And I'm, I can't answer that question by doing things the way that I've always been doing it. So I'm prioritizing fun and getting new ideas and new relationships and stuff like that. So I'll keep you posted on how all that goes. Thank you for listening or watching. If you miss Capcon, you can get on the waiting list over at capitalism.com capcon and you should come. It's really fun and it's really great and you'll meet people that'll blow your mind. Ask anybody who was there, anybody, anybody. They'll tell you it was worth it. All right, thanks so much. See you on the next one. Take care. See ya.

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