My Diabolical Plan To Buy The Cleveland Indians

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. It's gonna be so fast today. We're gonna be in the Freedom carpool lane today. That's how fast it's gonna be. Because today we're gonna talk about my diabolical plan to own the Cleveland Indians. Now, why the heck should you care about this? Well, at Freedom Fast Lane live a couple. It was already a couple months ago we had Gary Vaynerchuk at the event, and I didn't want Gary to come on and share about his cool social media strategies. I didn't really care to hear about motivation and crushing it. I said, gary, I know you plan to own the New York jets, and I want to know how you plan to do that. And he gave us his plan. He said it would take about six or seven million dollars to own the New York jets by the time he was ready to do it. And he walked us through his plan, and what was really interesting was to hear how someone who thinks at a higher level plans to accomplish what some would consider a very ambitious dream. I have a dream like that, and it's to own the Cleveland Indians. And you know, the. When I. When I started with that dream, actually, you know, I don't think I've ever told the story of why I even have that dream. Growing up as a kid.

I wanted to be the general manager of a baseball team. I'm fascinated by the trade and the free agent signing processes and the negotiations that happen, and that's what I geek out on. And growing up, I wanted to be the GM of a baseball team. And I realized at some point along the way, probably when I decided I wanted to go to school to be a pastor, which wasn't how my life worked out, in case you didn't know, I am not a pastor, I decided there was something that didn't sit well with me about being the general manager of a baseball team because that required having a job. And jobs, very specific jobs are scarce. There's only 30 general managers in Major League Baseball, and you don't get to dictate if you get that job or not. Somebody else dictates if you get that job. So I realized that it would be easier for me if I controlled my own destiny and just bought the team. That's how I was going to be involved in the trade process and the free agent signing process and bringing a championship team to Cleveland, Ohio, my hometown. And it was then that I said, okay, you know what I got to do? I'm going to have to own this team. And that'll take about half a billion dollars if I did it now, probably about a billion dollars by the time that I'm able to do it, by the time, you know, that's, that's a reasonable idea. So I do have a plan to own the Cleveland Indians. I don't necessarily have a project to own the Cleveland Indians, meaning my billion dollar idea, my billion dollar plan isn't here yet. There's some things in the pipeline that could be billion dollar ideas, things that I'm working on right now, but you know, they're not on the path to be billion dollar ideas yet. So what I think is necessary to point out is I've realized that the path that I'm on is not going to get me to the place where I want to be. For those of you who are haters in the YouTube comments and the things I do, which, by the way, I'm fairly sure the dumbest people in the world are in government, but the second dumbest people in the world are hanging out on YouTube comments. They're people who comment on YouTube videos. But for those of you who hang out in the YouTube comments and things, it might shock you to realize that I don't podcast and do videos because my goal in life is to sell things on the Internet. I do make a great living selling things on the Internet, but selling business courses or selling training on being an entrepreneur is not how I'm going to own the Cleveland Indians. There's a very, a much, much bigger reason why all of that exists on the plan to own the Cleveland Indians. And that has to do with audience. It's all about audience. I just sounded like Trump there. It's all about the audience. That was the worst Trump impression in the history of the world. I should stick to Bernie Sanders impressions. It's all about the audience. I'll work on it. Anyway. The plan of owning the Indians has nothing to do with how much money can be made on the Internet or how many memberships to the tribe or how many workshops or how many mastermind members that can be brought into our fold, that plays a different role. So what I bring this up for is because I realized a couple of years ago that being on the path that I was on, which was mostly Internet based businesses and information based businesses, that that was not going to get me to the level that I wanted to be. And that's. That sucks when you realize that. I mean, when you realize that the thing that you've been building is not going to take you where you want to go. That's a hard truth to realize. But if you don't realize that, then you're on a path, you know, to destruction because you're, you're not going to be happy. You're not going to get the result that you want. So lesson number one, evaluate the things that you're doing right now, are they going to lead to the path that you desire? Mark Jenny said in our podcast together, look at those around you. Look at Those who are 20 years ahead of you and are they old, rich and happy? If not, get yourself a different industry. But the reason why I do some of the things I do, like record podcasts and talk about things on YouTube a is because I can't not. It's what I'm good at. What I enjoy doing is talking about business and entrepreneurship and politics. These are the things I geek out on. But they play a bigger role into how I plan to own the Cleveland Indians. And that is because I believe that long term, the exponential ideas, the disruptor ideas, will come from an audience stretching my ideas and deal flow.

From what I can tell, those who have reached billion dollar valuations, billionaires aren't necessarily the people that we tend to think they are. They're not always, they're not always business founders, although sometimes they are. What I've seen is that a lot of those who are the billion dollar valuations, the billion dollar individuals, they have a part in a business and they're really wise investors. They get pieces of businesses and they invest very wisely. This is essentially the model that I'm following. An acquaintance of mine, Tai Lopez, here in my garage, he has a saying that I think is really interesting. And he says if you're participating in an industry or you think you know what you want to do with your life, add investor to that to see how to be in the top 1% of that industry. And that quote really stuck with me because I started realizing that I was building businesses and I'll always build businesses. I can't not. But what if I was an investor to businesses? What if I funded and advised businesses and I wasn't monopolized on my time on those businesses, but I still provided value with my connections, with my audience, with my funding. If I could do that, then I could step away from operating a whole bunch of businesses and still have the exposure to those businesses for their cash flow, for their equity, for their valuations. By doing that, I could really create the most amount of value and the most amount of net worth in the shortest amount of My own personal time or time commitment, my own involvement. And so that thinking got me to step back and say, okay, I know that the path I'm on isn't going to get me to where I want to be. So I'm gonna have to start some different businesses and I'm going to have to invest in some other businesses. So everything that I do in my businesses now are in place to help me step away from operations of companies, build on the businesses that I run, create more disruption type ideas and be exposed, be invested in other businesses that I either advise or I've given my capital to. That is essentially my plan to own the Cleveland Indians. Where all of this is fueled and where I think that most business success gets fueled is by having a large. Actually, large can be taken out of the equation. Really just a responsive, hungry audience. I don't care if you are selling weight loss pills because the company shreds, sells weight loss pills and they did it all through having a super rabid audience. I don't care if you are selling kitchen utensils because Rachael Ray sells kitchen stuff and she has a really rabid large audience. I didn't care if you're selling advertising because Glenn Beck sells $60 million a year in advertising because he has a really large, rabid, hungry audience. I don't, I don't care if you're selling snake oil, because Alex Jones sells snake oil in the form of supplements and debunkable information. But he's got a really large, hungry audience. A buddy of mine is named Nathan Latke. He runs up a podcast called the Top, and he's a buddy of mine here in Austin and he thinks at a really big level. And he pointed out something really interesting to me recently where he said that there are tech companies now that are growing and getting huge valuations simply because they're getting the exposure of people with large audiences. That's why I do this. That is why I bought capitalism.com and will be launching capitalism.com later this year. Because the fuel for everything that I'm building will be run by an audience. Because that is ultimately what business comes down to. It's taking rabid audiences and putting them into a sequence for turning them to clients and customers. That is business 101. That is marketing 101 is being in front of an audience and sending them to an offer. That's advertising 101. Now if you own the audience, then you own the distribution. So if you in your businesses don't have a controllable audience. If you're completely reliant on Amazon.com, if you're completely reliant on affiliates and you don't have your own audience to impact, you are flying naked and you don't have a long term business because the minute something outside of you changes, you're out of business. If you don't have a business but you've wanted to be in one, the first thing you need to be thinking about who is my audience, who is going to be my audience at some point? Even if I'm selling a product on a channel to get my capital raised, what do I do now to start putting myself in a position to where I can build an audience once I am taking sales and it's worth my time to do so. If you look at what we're doing with the tribe, the tribe is not about teaching people to build businesses so much. That's what we do. On a getting started level, if you were to break down what we do, we coach and mentor people to build breakthrough businesses and to scale them into the multi millions, yes, we do that, but there's a much bigger diabolical plan behind that. Yes, it's fun to coach and mentor entrepreneurs, but from an equity and net worth standpoint, there are better things that I could be doing with my time than coaching other people. I could be starting and focusing on my own businesses, which by the way, I make like six times the money that I do running my businesses than I do teaching building business stuff. So the bigger plan is because I know that by having a large audience from freedom fast lane, from having.

People who follow our trainings and build businesses, that there will be opportunities that come out of that, that there will be opportunities of somebody who's got the next great thing that comes out of our training and is partnered with an investor that they found in the tribe. So they've got their idea, they have their sales in place because they followed our training and they've got investment capital from somebody that they met in the tribe. Someone like me can step in, take a position in that company and help them grow and be exposed to that business. So the, the, the surface level of the tribe is yes, we want to create as many entrepreneurs as possible because I believe that entrepreneurs are how we fix the world. I think the biggest problem in the world is that we've got 6.98 billion people who are not entrepreneurs on this planet. And, and we gotta change that when it's more like there's 2 billion people who are not entrepreneurs. Now.

We'Re solving some problems, but the biggest problem in the world right now is that we don't have enough entrepreneurs who are solving big problems. So.

If in our tribe we're incubating entrepreneurs and new capitalists and new problem solving business owners, then when that next big idea comes out, we're in a position to where we have the firepower, the cash, the audience, the investor network, the connections to be able to put that company on the map, to be able to do something special with that business. And we'll have exposure to that business because we either invested in it or we advised it. And that that is going to be how our net worth explodes so that I can buy the Cleveland Indians. I know that this is kind of a weird way to explain the thought process behind what it is that we're doing, but one of the things I'd like to show you how we're thinking is the bigger picture, the longer term view of the businesses that we're building. Because we don't, we're not building anything with like a two year plan and I'm not building anything around my personal brand to be a cash flow business. I have more like 25, 50, 100 year plans around the businesses that I build. And the longer term that you can think, the more successful you will be. The longer term that you can think, the more people you will serve. And if you're going to be a billionaire, if you're going to own a major league sports team, you, you've gotta think with a long view and you've gotta help a heck of a lot of people. And that is a very different approach than what can we sell today? What can we sell today in order to make a few bucks? I've had that time and I think most people have to have that time. You have to have a cash flow business for a while until you can pivot and think about breakthrough and disruption companies. But once you're there, it doesn't really make sense to think about, okay, I, how do I make an extra 50 grand a month or a hundred grand a year or whatever it is? Once you already know that that's possible, that loses its luster. So how do my physical products businesses fall in or fit into a plan to own the Cleveland Indians? Because my physical products businesses at the time of this recording, and it's Q1 of 2016, when I'm recording this, my physical products businesses alone do about $700,000 a month in total sales, maybe a little bit more. We factor in retail sales, but retail so new right now it's a little bit preemptive to calculate that in. So online physical product sales are about $700,000 a month. And those businesses, they might cap at like $2 million a month, like.

20 million to $30 million a year. Company is probably where, if we look at our biggest competitors, if we look at the publicly traded companies in our industry, if we look at all the channels that we could be in, then we're probably looking at the high end, a $30 million a year company. That alone still is not going to get me to my Cleveland Indians. So where do they factor in? Well, a business like that, besides the fact that it stretched me, it's taught me how to build real businesses. But when you sell a business that's in the tens of millions, you know, doing more than about $10 million a year in revenue, you tend to attract higher level investors. That exit plan is different than if you're selling a million dollar company. A million dollar company is going to sell for a few times earnings. A company that's doing $10 million or more can be in a position to have a much higher valuation. So if we do that in the next few years and those companies sell for tens of millions of dollars, which is the intent, then that is a first stepping stone. It's the first chip away at what it will take to have enough cash flow to own the Cleveland Indians. But what it will really do is give you a huge war chest to invest in other breakthrough and disruptor companies that have the potential to go exponential, that have the ability to be worth billions of dollars. And if you have the cash flow, if you have the capital to do that, and you have the audience behind you, and that is bringing those ideas to the table, or you have the audience behind you to be able to put a company on the map. And let's face it, if Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, Pat Flynn and Neil Patel all got together and decided to invest in a company and blog and podcast about it all the time, that would put a company on the map. I envy that. I salivate at that idea of having an audience so rabid that you can put a company on the map. Because if you control the distribution, if you control the capital flow and you control the audience, you're in a position to do some pretty cool things. You're in a position to build some truly exponential disruptor companies if you have all those pieces in place. So where we are right now in the process is obviously building the audience, and that's the Fuel for everything. My physical products businesses are growing by leaps and bounds and in a position to be sold at some point in the next few years for tens of millions of dollars, which will give us a war chest to invest in future businesses. And at the same time, I'm starting to plant the seeds of what those exponential big companies are. I don't talk about them publicly yet, but Sean Coyne and I, since we sold our yoga products business, are, are working on and have been setting the stage for what I think is my first real disruptor company, tech startup, for lack of a better term, but a type of company that can impact half a million to a bill. I'm sorry, half a billion to a billion people and be acquired for a billion dollar valuation. It's a hit, a grand slam or strikeout swinging type of a project. And that's what we're working on next. That's where Sean and I decided to put our time. Once we sold Xenactive, we took the proceeds from that and we put it all, almost all of it towards this disruptor company because we want to do something really, really different. And this is the trajectory that I'm moving towards is have the distribution, which is the audience, make your money and have your base hits and your doubles and maybe even your triples with good strong businesses that have strong cash flows that can be sold so that you can invest that cash into your home runs, your unicorns. And that is how I plan to own the Cleveland Indians. However, Travis Sago, my mentor, has been challenging me on part of this thinking process. I was hanging out with Travis a few weekends ago and he said, dude, what I would encourage you to do is think what's the fast lane to get to Cleveland Indians? And what I mean is, how could you start doing this tomorrow? How could I take an idea that might take 72 years for some people, or at a really fast pace, 72 months? And how could you start doing it in 72 minutes? That's always a really interesting question. And Travis is really good at clarifying this with, with me and looking at how could I start having equity? How could I start being exposed to having an ownership piece of the Cleveland Indians now rather than waiting until everything was lined up, how could I start doing that? And, and because of that, I'm doing things like lining up and building a network of investors, some of whom are based in Cleveland. So if ever the opportunity comes up that they're selling a piece of the Indians, I have the network to be able to get with those individuals and Create an investment plan to buy that ownership stake. It's things like being involved in Indians charities so that you get to know the owners and the presidents so if ever they, you can find out what they need. So if they ever need something that is $100 million in value that I can provide, I'm in a position to possibly get an ownership piece. How do you start positioning yourself now in the fast lane so that you can start do that rather than waiting for it all to line up. This is one of the other things that I'm starting to think about and I bring this up because we tend to wait for our ideal situation to exist before we actually go after and tackle our goals and our dreams and we don't have to, we can start doing them now. You know, there's a gal, one of my business coaches, her name is Rachel. And Rachel has lost, I want to say it's £53 in the last 90 days. She looks like a completely different person than she did two or three months ago. And when you ask her, you know, how the heck did you do that? She just says, laser focused commitment. And deciding, I'm going to do this now. I'm going to follow this plan now. I am not going to wait for this. I'm not going to do this the slow way. I am going to commit to this absolutely now. Going to get a trainer and workout five days a week. I'm going to dial in my diet and not have cheat days. I'm going to have someone hold me accountable. And that's how you win in every area of life. You dive in. And so one of the things that Travis has helped me see is how do I dive into that dream of owning the Indians now? And I've lined up all my businesses to support that goal. But sometimes I think there's things that I could be doing more now. And that's kind of what I think about right now. Hey, if you've got a business idea or if you've got something that you haven't really dived into and, and you know that you have been putting it off for way too long. So what we do inside of the tribe, the tribe is made to bring business builders, investors and marketers together so that when you bring a business idea to the table, you first of all have the plan laid out for you in our breakthrough business boot camp to know how to take sales, get it to the million dollar point and scale it to build an audience that rallies behind you to get into retail stores. If that's your model to have rabid, raving fans. And we partner you with investors, we partner you with people who have audiences so you can put that company on the map. That's what we do inside the tribe. And hey, if you bring an unbelievable idea to the table, you may just find me as your first investor. You can find out more about the tribe@freedomfastlang.com tribe. As always, thank you for listening to Freedom Fastlane. Thank you for being a part of the change in the world that we so desperately need. I so strongly believe that entrepreneurs and capitalism is how we fix the world's greatest problems. It's not going to come from government, it is not going to come from politicians. It is not going to come from anywhere outside of ourselves that we are the change. We hold the keys to all the change that we want to see in the world. And what we are missing is people who take personal responsibility for the results that they get. And they use that to impact their communities, their countries, their families, and that is how we have true progress. Thank you for joining me on that path on that mission. Thank you for listening and subscribing to Freedom Fastlane and I'll see you on the next show.