How to get rich before it’s too late

I'm young, I'm hungry, I'm broke. Like, if somebody walked into your office right now and said that to you, what would you tell them to go do next?

I think when anyone starts a business or starts to make money, they really just think of the business as themselves. They think that they have to do everything and they whip themselves like a pack horse. They think, I need to be great at marketing, I need to be great at sales, I need to be great at accounting and law and everything else.

If you were telling your 18 year old self what to expect, if you get into business, it's you're going to be lied to, you're going to be stolen from, you're going to be cheated, you're going to have people call you bad names, you're going to have money lost, and at the end it's probably going to be worth it. I love this podcast because I love talking to friends about how they made their millions and helping business owners solve their problems. It's fulfilling. I love sharing all the secrets. But when I can't meet in person, there's only one tool I use. It's called Riverside. Riverside ensures I can talk to someone anywhere in the world. Recorded in 4k so the quality of the video matches the quality of the humans you're listening to. Riverside records separate audio and video tracks so we can easily cut out those awkward interruptions that are my least favorite part of interviews. They have in platform editing software based off a 99 accurate AI transcription. And if that's not simple enough, they take AI one step further for their show notes. It summarizes your entire content into an SEO optimized description and chapters, all automatic. Saves me a ton of money. So you can use Riverside for podcast interviews, panel discussions, presentations, webinars, more and best of all, it's simple. Try Riverside for yourself with link in the description. Use code Cody for an exclusive discount. I get a deal? You get a deal. Hey and welcome back, it's Cody Sanchez and this is the Big Deal podcast for those who don't just want to be rich, but free and do what it actually takes to get there. Okay, today we're sitting down with a friend of mine, Andrew Wilkinson, the Canadian entrepreneur and founder of many companies including Metalab and Tiny, who worked at Slack and built a holding company that's bought more than 40 small businesses and did about $200 million in annual revenue last year. He also wrote a new book called Never enough. Andrew is 38. He was worth a billion dollars two years ago. He's had ups and downs in the public stock market and is still worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but has gone through both highs and lows. He talks about how he got there. He talks about actionable ways you can too. He talked about what it felt like to lose millions of his own dollars. Is fame really worth it? What happens when people hate you? How does he get through all of this in order to be a happy, you know, a happy Canadian really, Right. He says not all Canadians are nice. I'm not sure. First, I want to start with the CEO story time. Let's go. So this morning I was having a tumultuous morning. There's lots going on in business and life and it was a struggle for me. If you guys ever have those days that are a struggle. So Rachel and I went to 6am Yoga and we had my favorite yoga instructor, Joel. And my favorite yoga instructors are always like 65 plus year old men, I've realized, because they've been practicing yoga for decades and thus have all this wisdom. And so Joel opened up the class with this quote that stuck with me. Maybe it'll stick with you. It's a synopsis of a poem by a man named Rumi. There's a chickpea, and the chickpea gets thrown into a pot of boiling water. And the chickpea is crying out to the woman who is boiling it saying, why do you throw me here in the fire? And the woman is beating him down with a spatula to stay in the fire, to keep boiling. And the chickpea wonders again, why are you doing this to me? Why put me in the fire? And the woman looks down at the chickpea and says, do not yell at the one that is creating the fire. Because it is only through fire and boiling that you will assume flavors and spice and vitality and be able to pass on life. It was actually for this that you were created. And Joel explained the story and said, now this isn't actually about boiling or putting you guys in boiling water or a chickpea at all. It's really about the human experience that many of us have had that moment where we feel like we are in boiling water. We feel like we are overwhelmed and the fire is roaring underneath us and we don't know where to go. And yet that exact moment of boiling is what creates the chickpea, being edible and able to pass on its life vitality. And so I think about that a lot. And Joel said, you know, he's been teaching this class for 15 years and once a year he uses the chickpea story. And oftentimes people will come back to him years later and say, hey, Joel, I'm boiling nicely. And so this idea of nicely boiling in the pot and realizing that you're in it, you won't be forever, that you probably don't want to be there right now at that moment, but that you're boiling nicely regardless. And if we could have that type of mentality with things that are a challenge in our life, instead of seeing it as woe unto me, this terrible thing is happening. But instead, ah, I realize that I'm developing flavor and I'm cooking right now. And so in order to achieve anything large in life, just like what Andrew is about to go through with us today, you're going to have to boil. No matter what you do, you will be put to the fire at some point in your life. And so you might as well learn to boil nicely. Let's get into the episode with Andrew Wilkinson. Bring the band in. Let's go. The first thing I thought we'd talk about is it's hard right now in the economy. It's tough for people out in the world. You and I were talking about this and we've both been basically with nothing. Now you've built up a business that did, you know, over 200 million in 2023. You want 40 plus companies. And if people look at you today, they probably see all of that and they don't think so much about what it took to get there where you started. And so this episode today, what I thought we'd obsess about is we're going to tell a little bit of your story, but we're really going to make this about the people listening and how we can help. And I don't know about you, but I remember when I was telling or when we were talking about you growing up, like, neither one of us had like really rich friends that we could steal their homework from. Like, that wasn't a thing. Nobody shared this online.

I actually did.

Oh, you had one.

I had one really rich friend. And I remember so I would go over to his house and in comparison to mine, it was insane, right? He had Nintendo, he had ping pong tables, he had pool, all this stuff. And I was very jealous. And it was really interesting to Contrast My dad versus his dad. So my dad would come home at 6 looking like a drowned rat, miserable, stressed out. He was running an architecture firm and he, his dad on the flip side, would come home around three, he'd drop a big fat money Clip in the table next to the door, and he would just come in and hang out and go on his computer and play online poker. His problem actually seemed that he was bored, and yet he lived in a mansion. He's this very successful guy. And I used to go over to their house for dinner and I just started asking him questions. And over time, I learned his story. His story was that he was a. He was Hungarian. He had left the Soviet Union and moved to Canada. I think with like one of those classic stories where he has like $200 or something. He became a flight attendant. And I think on one of the flights he talked to a guy who was flipping houses. And so he started flipping houses. And that house flipping over the course of 30 years turned into being one of the largest condo developers in Vancouver. And I started to dig in with him about how it all worked. And he basically said, look, I've designed a money machine. I build these buildings, I pre sell them. I own the strata on the ground floor. I get cash flow, I get my cash back once I build them. And this just started the wheels turning for me. And my dad was somebody who. His way of solving a problem was to power through. And I think I could see that this guy was going around the obstacle and figuring out a better way that my dad was riding up a Hill in first gear. This guy was in 12th gear. And so that's, for me, where it started is actually seeing other people doing this and succeeding and trying to copy their cheat codes.

So when you think about this idea of a money machine, how do you explain that to somebody else who's never made real money before? Is there a formula? You have to think about a money machine and how to create one.

That was a huge breakthrough for me because I think when anyone starts a business or starts to make money, they really just think of the business as themselves. They think that they have to do everything and they whip themselves like a pack horse. They think, I need to be great at marketing, I need to be great at sales, I need to be great at accounting and law and everything else. And the analogy I always use is, you know, imagine that you love chopping wood. You do it because it's your passion. You're bored, you get into a flow state. You're just chopping wood because you have a wood burning fire. And one day your neighbor pokes their head over the fence and says, hey, could you chop some wood for me? I've got a fire too, and I'll pay you 20 bucks. And suddenly there's this magic moment, this spark happens where you go from being somebody who's just doing a thing that you enjoy to making money from it. And over time, you start hiring your buddies. You know, you're all drinking beer and you're chopping wood and you're going door to door and you're making tons of money. And then you flash forward 20 years later, you're in a sawmill and you are just sitting in an office doing Excel. Right. I think that is the crazy transition that occurs when you really scale a business. And what's occurred there is somebody has gone from hands on the tools, doing the work, to abstracting away business to a crazy, crazy degree, to the point where you have thousands of employees and robots and all the other stuff. And I think that business is really just a process of extreme delegation. And in order to achieve that, you have to have systems and build a machine. And for me, when I started thinking of my business as a machine, not as me, that was a big moment.

Well, that really leads into something you talk about in the book, which I love, by the way. It's such a good cover. I remember when you first sent this to me, I was like, ooh, this is good. I can also like the anxiety I get from seeing you sitting on the top of this skyscraper at the end is a feeling too. But you talk a lot and have helped me with this idea of lazy leadership. So, one, can you explain it? And two, how do people start applying that when they're still in that mode of I am a generalist and do everything and haven't quite gotten yet to. I hire generalists and then I hire specialists.

Well, I can speak to how I started. So about 20 years ago, I was a barista and these two guys kept coming into the coffee shop and they would just sit on their laptops all day. And they were not that much older than me. They were maybe 25 or 26. And so I walked up to them one day and I said, hey guys, don't you have jobs? And they said, well, we're web designers. And I started asking them how that worked. And it turned out these guys would just walk around and go into local businesses and say, do you have a website? And if they said no, they'd say, okay, do you want one for 500 bucks? And they would just do this all over the place. And over time they built up this business doing that. And I looked at it and I went, okay, well, you know, I can figure out Photoshop and I know how to code a little bit. Why Don't I do this? And so suddenly, I had that. That was the spark moment for me of, oh, my God, this thing I kind of know how to do and enjoy is now a business and a service I can sell to others. But pretty quickly, I ran into a problem. I had a client who wanted some coding work done, and I didn't know how coding worked. And so I said, okay, well, I gotta go get a favor from a friend. And so I went to my friend and I said, how much would you charge me to code this? And he said, 500 bucks. And so I went to the client and I said, that'll be a thousand bucks. And they said, yes. And in that moment, I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe this. I've now made $500 of profit and I've delegated this thing, and I didn't actually have to do the work. And I think that moment where you realize that you don't sell your time, I think is incredibly powerful. And from that moment on, I think that my career has been about firing myself. How do I do as little work as possible and make a maximum return while ensuring that my clients are happy and my employees are happy? And so over time, you know, over the subsequent five years, I got to a point where I had a person running the business doing all the sales. And really, my only thing that I did was just market the business. Everything else was run, the machine was formed. And so the way I like to think about it is I want to stay in my zone of genius. For me, at that time, that was mostly marketing. So I would go out and I'd write blog posts and get attention online, and that would lead to opportunities for my web design agency. And I would pour that raw material into the machine, and then out the other side, money would come. And that was kind of the magical moment. And then over time, I had to figure out what to do with that byproduct of money. This episode is brought to you by State Farm.

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This episode is brought to you by Diet Coke. You know that moment when you just need to hit pause and refresh an ice cold Diet Coke isn't just a break. It's your chance to catch your breath and savor a moment that's all about you. Always refreshing, still the same great taste. Diet Coke. Make time for you time. Extremely curious. You know, you came into to my office and one of the first things you did is like, what are those? What do these people do? Like, what is this here? And I've noticed that about a lot of billionaires, like one of my good friends had dinner with somebody that I know, you know, and have respected and has even been compared to, which is Warren Buffett. And he had the funniest experience. He was like, had dinner with Warren Buffett. And I was like, great, what'd you learn? Like, tell me all about it. And. And his response was, well, I realized at the end that mostly Warren asked me questions and I answered them and I basically learned nothing. And I told him everything. And I chuckled that I think a lot of billionaires have that same component, which is everybody thinks that you have all the answers once you hit billions, but sometimes maybe you just know the right questions to ask. Why do you ask so many questions? And what are some of your first go tos to get information from people so that you can have those spark moments.

So funny you say that. When I talk to Buffett on the phone, I have only talked to him once and I called him two years ago and it was that exact same thing. An hour of questions and me explaining my business and him learning and really not that much advice. That's interesting. So I think the reason that I ask questions is because it's worked for me. I think I've gotten positive feedback from that since the time I was a kid. Going back to that story of my friend's father. I really look at it as I'm trying to extract the cheat codes out of everybody around me. And so I'm constantly trying to be in rooms I don't deserve to be in where I'm the dumbest person there and then just ask everybody how they did it. And I think that one quality that I see in people that are successful is asking questions, constantly leveling up in terms of the people. And I don't mean that in some weird social status thing. I just mean always challenging yourself and meeting people that challenge you and then just constantly reading. And I think those three things combined are fuel for success and learning. And when I meet somebody who's more successful than me, like I remember I met about 15 years ago, I met one of my now best friends and I was really jealous of him. I was running an agency. I was really stressed out, and I was trying to start a SaaS company. And he'd had a successful SaaS company since the time he was 15. And he was actually a very successful investor. He had invested in real estate and stocks and private businesses. And I think that often when people meet someone who's doing better than them, they tear them down. So they say, well, they were probably successful because they had rich parents or they got lucky or whatever it is. My attitude has always been, I want to crack open their brain and figure out what they did. And, you know, I want to copy that. I'm not jealous. I'm just going, wow, this person seems smart, but I bet I can do that same thing. And so over and over and over again, I'm just trying to extract the cheat codes.

I think if you're young and you want to be rich in 2024, one of the best ways to do it is to go find people who are rich and ask them a lot of questions and see what you can derive from the answers. And if all you do is be young, ask questions, and try to take action on the answers that you have some ability to take action on, you could probably be successful. What do you think? For those who are like, I'm young, I'm hungry, I'm broke right now, One.

Of the paradoxes of business is that the opportunity you seek lies in the cave that nobody wants to enter, right? So I think that the worst businesses are things like restaurants, because everybody wakes up every morning and says, wow, how cute would it be to own a restaurant or a cafe or something like that? Nobody wakes up and says, hey, I really think I want to start a grease hauling business or a, you know, draft line cleaning services company or a industrial plumbing company. And I think that the biggest failure for young people is often that they go into the thing that is sexy, the thing that draws them in, which I think is the right instinct. Right? You want to go into an area you're passionate about, but I think within that, you want to fish where the fish are. Charlie Munger has this great line about this. He talks about, you know, if there's a fishing hole where there's a bunch of big fish, but there's a thousand fishermen all around it. You don't want to go there. You want to wander off and find a tiny little fishing hole, and the fish might be smaller, they might not be as, as exciting. You are not going to take a photo of the fish with your buddies. But that's where the money is. And so I think that you want to follow your passion and then find a niche within that.

We have something called the sexy boring matrix, which basically data shows that the sexier the industry on average, the lower, the lower the, the median salary is. And so, you know, you can have, you know, 160,000 actors located in Hollywood who are quite good. Maybe they're Unais, they might be SAG, AFTRA, but there's probably only 0.5% of them making over, let's call six figures a year continuously for multiple years. And so that industry is very sexy and you can have huge outliers, but the norm is really, really low. And so I think that's one thing that you and I have become friends with over the years is talking about these boring businesses. Nobody wakes up and says they want to own a marketing agency or small everyday Main street businesses. And yet that's where the money is. So I think it's really smart.

I've got a friend of mine who, he's not a super aggressive entrepreneur. He really focused on the right thing, I think for most people, which is how do I make $250,000 a year without making a ton of effort? Right. I want a business that gives me a launch pad to launch family, launch future business endeavors. And the business that he found is or started is a photo booth, a passport photo booth next to the passport office. And what he did was he negotiated with the mall that it's in and said, in my lease, I want to know that there will be no other passport or photo businesses in the mall. He secured that he got a long term lease and everybody goes to the passport office and then says, darn, I forgot my passport photo. And they walk in and he can charge. He's got pricing power because of that. Now is that a sexy business? Is that the kind of business that somebody rolls out of bed excited to start? No, but it's low effort, high output, it's very simple and it secures him for 20 years until they digitize or whatever else. So I love those kinds of businesses and I think that most people, if they're into photography, which he was, he was a photographer, would say, I'm going to go and start a fashion photography business or wedding photography business. Those aren't always terrible businesses. But he's found the, you know, maximum output for minimum effort.

What were some mistakes that you made when you were young and trying to make money that you think other people should absolutely avoid?

Me and my business partner Chris, like To joke that we have stuck forks into a lot of electrical sockets, and we've learned a lot of lessons. You know, I wouldn't call it a mistake, but I tried a lot of stuff. I would be in the shower, and I would do what I call, like, infomercial entrepreneurship. There's got to be a better way. I would have a problem, and I would go, I'm going to solve this problem with the business. So, for example, you know, I got these little bumps on my skin. I don't know if I still have them, but a lot of young people get this condition called chicken skin. And I went to a dermatologist one day, and he said, oh, yeah, if you just put on this specific lotion with this ingredient in it, it goes away. I got really excited about that. And I built up all this. You know, I think I got, like, a cargo container worth of this lotion and then had no idea how to sell it online. And I lost, like, $50,000. I had cats, and in my house, I had all this really ugly cat furniture. And so I said, okay, I bet there's wonderful, you know, really well designed cat furniture out there. I'll start a business doing that. And I didn't run the math at any of these businesses. And over and over again, I built, like, the worst possible business where I spent more than I made on every single product I sold. I also started, like, a, you know, a pizzeria. You know, I've just. I've started probably 20 or 30 different types of businesses, and most of them have failed. And so I think going through that and being resilient is really valuable. Most people don't get lucky on the first try. I got lucky on the first try. And I think that where I got lucky is I walked into the gym and I lifted the weights, and they were the right weight for me, right? So I started a web design agency. Within six months, I was making five or ten thousand dollars a month, and that was awesome. And that built my confidence. What I think a lot of young people do is they walk into the gym and they try to deadlift 300 pounds. They go into the hardest industry with the most competition, and then they learn the wrong lesson, which is entrepreneurship is hard. Failure sucks. I don't want to do this. And so I always joke that you want to find the baby weights in the gym. You want to find something that's high certainty, that'll be very successful, and is very simple. And so I think one of the things that people don't spend enough Time on is actually digging into the business model. And this could be as simple as going on ChatGPT and saying, what are the typical margins in this business? What are the challenges? How many employees am I going to have to have? And I think that generally people who are starting businesses for the first time need to choose an incredibly simple business model. Like, let's say, junk hauling. I'm going to buy a pickup truck, I'm going to put a classified ad on Craigslist. I'm going to haul some junk. That's really simple. It's hard to mess up, hard to lose money on. At the same time, if I said I'm going to go and start a frozen yogurt business with, you know, a 10,000 square foot space or something crazy, you're going to lose all your money. Right. It's just brutal. So I think the big these days, totally.

I think that's one of the saddest things that happens to young people today is that they follow these massive trends and they think because there is a wave, a wave rises all boats. And I don't actually think that's true because we saw that with crypto, right. Then we saw it with Web3, and then we see it with AI Now. And we're seeing these young people sort of hop from next hot thing to next hot thing because they've been sold a little bit of a lie that just because a lot of people are talking about it means a lot of people make money from it, which is not actually true. It's that a few people will make so much money, it makes money lose all meaning, but most people will just lose money. And it's a, it's nearly close to a zero sum game in something like artificial intelligence, for instance, in which you're going to have very few players. But you know, our plumbers and your marketing agencies are going to be needed for a long time. So I think that's, that's super, super smart.

When I was running my web design agency, it was really hard. The challenge with running a services business is either you're, you have too many people and not enough demand, or you have too few people and too much demand and clients are fickle, they can go away. And so you go from killing it to almost not making payroll on a kind of rolling monthly basis. I would look at my friends that had software companies and I was incredibly jealous. I'd watch Jason Fried. Do you know Jason Fried?

Yeah, I remember this.

He runs Basecamp. And I love Jason. He's an incredible guy. And Basically what he did is he had a web design agency like me and then he started a project management software called Basecamp. And now it's like a hundred million dollar kind of a year business, highly profitable. And what attracted me to that model was that you make money while you sleep. You build this software and then you sell it over and over and over again and all the revenue is recurring. And so I learned the wrong lesson from that. I said, okay, I want to do that. And I decided to build my own project management tool and I started this product called Flow. So I put I think $2 million to start from my web design agency into building this piece of software. I got this little group of developers together.

And that was your own money back then?

That was my all my own money. I didn't raise investors, didn't raise any venture.

I mean, you lost your first millions all out of your own pocket.

All out of my own pocket. I've always been about extreme ownership and doing, doing things with my own money. And if I'm doing anything with a partner, I'm always the largest Investor.

Like the two deals we've done together, or one or two of them, 100%. You were, I think 60 to 80% of both deals. And then I came in as a small investor and you allowed in a few people, but I even remember you limited how much you're like, I don't know if this is going to work. Come in on this and we'll see. But I'm going to take the biggest loss, which is I think the smart thing to do. And I do the same thing. I am always the biggest GP in my own deals until at one point we don't have enough money. And I guess you stack so much proof you don't need to anymore. But I think that's really important for people to know.

Totally. I think skin in the game is incredibly important. And so I had a lot of it. I was pouring millions of dollars into this business and at first it was doing really, really well. This was a new, a new part of the market. Nobody had built a product like it. And then Asana came out and this business was, it was basically an early version. It was similar to Asana and, and the co founder of Facebook is the founder of Asana. And not only is he a billionaire, but he raised 100 million plus from all the best venture capitalists in the world. And my attitude at the time, because I didn't know any better, was, you know, if you build it, they will come. I've built this Great product, and we're going to win because our design is better. We're better engineers, we're better designers. Our product is better. These guys are like Microsoft. They don't have, you know, we're like Apple and they're like Microsoft. And of course, what happened was our business was a fart in the wind. We didn't do any marketing. No one was aware of us. And within two years, Asana had caught up on every single feature that we had built, and they were spending 20, 30, $40 million a year on marketing. They hired all the best talent in Silicon Valley, and. And they built an enterprise sales team, and they kick their ass. And in retrospect, it was like Fiji trying to invade the United States. Right? Like it. It's just stupid.

Or, to be fair, Canada.

Sure, sure. Yeah, sure, sure. With our Zodiacs, just machine guns on the back.

Okay, These are pretty tough.

In going through that, I lost over $10 million of my own money, Right. And so I think those. Those flesh wounds, like Chris and I always say, you want flesh wounds, not mortal wounds. I could afford it, fortunately. But I learned a lesson forever. And now I have this new mental model of never be Fiji invading the United States. Never compete in competitive markets. The way to visualize it is imagine if you started a pizzeria selling, you know, $2 slices on the corner, and then venture capitalists got really excited about the pizza market, and they just said, hey, let's open 100 pizzerias in this city, and they're all going to give away pizza free for the first three years. How can you compete with that?

Yeah, it's really, really true. I think the other thing that's interesting is I think these days people don't understand that. Find somebody who is successful. I will show you somebody who has failed more than they have succeeded. I have never once met a really successful human that doesn't have at least 2 to 3 to 1 on their failures to their successes. And if you cannot find a failure in a successful person, I think that person is probably not very successful thus far. What do you think a normal failure rate is for somebody? Because sometimes I think numbers are helpful. So if I'm young and I go, all right, I'm going to try this one thing, and that's what people say these days. Go hard on one thing and do it until it succeeds. Uh, I don't think I agree with that. And as a young person, I would like to know how many shots on goal is the average before I might have a win? What do you think yours was?

For the first 10 years of my career, I started 10 to 15 businesses. I don't know the exact number. A lot of dumb ideas and 90% plus failed. And a couple worked really, really well. Which if you think about it, in venture capital, they talk about the power law. They invest in 10 or 20 companies and then one really knocks it out of the park. And in my case, I think I had of that cohort, two or three worked and then one, maybe I made my money back or something. So I think a low hit rate is fine as long as you can afford to spend the time and go through that. And I think that there are ways of ameliorating that risk. I was wading in. I had no mentors, I didn't read the right books. I really didn't know what I was doing and I was just stumbling in and getting stabbed in the knife fight. And fortunately I survived and can live to tell the tale. I think over time my hit rate has gotten better because I've started moving from starting businesses to buying businesses. And I think that's a wonderful way for people to de risk who are more conservative with buying businesses. I would say my hit rate is 80% because you already have product market fit. The business is already working definitionally. I mean, it has to make profit to be valuable in order for you to buy it. And so I found that works much better in the areas where it hasn't worked. It's mostly been down to people. You know, you buy a, buy a great business from a bad person, you're going to lose money.

Yeah, you can never do a good deal with bad guy. My dad always said that to me. I think that's really important for people to know though, because, you know, we try to think about successes in a way that's totally irrational for physics and math, which is there's the power law, there's Pareto's principle, and all of them say something along the lines of 80 to 90% of the things that you try or do won't work. And 10 to 20% of them will. Or, you know, 20% to 10% of the things that you do will drive your 80% or your 90%. And I think when we are in school, we're not taught that. And so I think it's really important that you share that with people. One of the question I wanted to talk to you about is, you know, you tell some stories in the book that are, that are really powerful and you're really vulnerable. I mean, the way that you open up with some of your deepest, hardest moments I think people can relate to. Like my dad always has this line that I remember about, you know, you're not a real entrepreneur until you've had your head in your hands in the dark, wondering what the hell to do next all by yourself. With a really unique perspective of my identity is entrepreneur, owner, founder. And when I'm not that, and when I'm a failure at that, what does that mean for me as a human? What, what story do you think? Like, is there a story that haunts you from this book or from your time as an entrepreneur? Or is there a story that you feel you are at your deepest and darkest?

In the book I tell a story about hiring. So basically I met this guy socially and he was a serial entrepreneur. And at the time I was feeling very lost and I started confiding in him, I started telling him my business problems and he had an answer for everything. You know, I felt very lucky. Here's this guy who's had all this success helping little old me. And like I said, I mean I wasn't, I didn't have mentors or anybody guiding me through this. And so I started sharing everything with him and he started helping me in the business and he had frankly a lot of really great ideas. And over time he helped me sell one of my companies and I got this incredible win. I made $7 million selling the company and he helped me do it. And so I really thought a lot of this guy and he came to me and he said, okay, what's the next problem? And I said, I don't want to run my agency business anymore. And he said, well, why don't we go sell that too? And so he went out and he got an offer for 50 million for that business. And I'm salivating, I'm so excited. And at the same time I knew that if I was going to sell it, I didn't want to be the person running it. I didn't want to be locked into five years running the business in an earn out or something like that. I knew I had to hire a CEO and so I asked him to help me find a CEO. He brings in these five guys and it was almost like he'd rounded up homeless people at a bus terminal or like lobotomy patients or something like it was just, it was just, it was really bad. Like these guys who came in had no experience, they were all wrong, they were weird fits. And I, I was really disheartened, but I didn't Know any better? At the end of it, he said, those are the best guys I could find. And he said, I feel bad, maybe I could step in temporarily. And I thought, amazing. Oh my God, I can't believe this serial entrepreneur, super successful guy is willing to help me and step into my business. And he said, you know, I'm really successful, made a lot of money. This is going to have to be worth my time. And so we structured a deal whereby he would get 15% of the business in stock options. And it went great, actually. So we ended up not selling the company. The deal blew up, but he kept running the business and I started playing tennis. For the first time in years, I could actually relax. And this guy was just killing it. I mean, he was getting huge client after huge client. All the numbers were up and to the right. And weirdly, the staff just loved him. I always found that there was a certain creative type at my company because it was a design agency where they didn't like business people. And he was one of those rare business people who could get on their level and talk to them about things they loved and charm them. And so everybody was behind this guy. Almost a year in, I was having dinner, I think it was like Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I'm sitting there, there with my brother who is still working at the company. And I asked him how everything was going, and he said, it's great, everybody loves him. Business is growing a ton. But there's one weird thing, and I'm like, what? And he's like, no, no, no. Well, okay, it's. It's a bit weird, but we were trying to get a, a permit for our new office. And Brian, this guy, told him to bribe the, the city official. And I was like, are you kidding me? Like, maybe this is a misunderstanding. Did he say it wrong? And he just holds up the slack message and he shows me, literally this guy's saying, somebody needs to get lubed. And in that moment, my blood went cold. I was like, who is this person who's running my business? What is going on? And I started digging in to the business and all the accounting. I hadn't really been paying attention. I'd just been getting my nice big fat dividend checks. And I saw all these crazy, you know, first class flights, $20,000, $30,000, huge hotel bills, all sorts of insane stuff. As we dug in, we realized that he was sending leads from the business to his personal email and had actually started his own agency. So he was like a parasite who had burrowed into us and was feeding on us. As I started learning more about this guy, I realized that a lot of what he had told me wasn't true. And he was basically stealing from me. And it was a horrible experience. I mean, you know, we had to document this. We had to leave him. I was aware of this and I had to document it because this guy was so slimy. I had to stay in the business and collect all this evidence and spend all this time with lawyers and we ended up litigating it and it was just horrible. Before that happened, I used to watch movies and you would see the bad guy. You'd see like the evil, super evil bad guy. And I'd always think, well, there's no such thing. There's no such thing as bad guys. Everybody's good and misunderstood or whatever. And I always felt that I should just trust everybody. And after going through that experience, I realized, oh, there's psychopaths, there are bad guys. And I never, ever, ever want to work with a psychopath ever again. And I would say that was probably my lowest moment over the last 10 years was, you know, Chris. And I always say if things are going badly and we look around the table and there's good people there, all is well. But when there's true bad actors, if there's people acting in bad faith, then business is, is just miserable. It's absolutely miserable. Because ultimately it's a team sport. There are no problems. There's just people problems.

Hi, this is Deechen Lackman and I am here to tell you toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary release reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry. The Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota. Let's go places. Rince takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you mm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you said you hear about Dave. Or even tea time Tea time, tea time you mm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rince, it's time to be great. It's so true. You know, I remember one of my favorite bosses used to say that before I even started My first business. He said, I already know what's gonna be your biggest problem and you don't even have to tell me what business you're going to start, where it's going to be, what you're going to do. And you know, I asked him what it was, he was like, well, why don't we write it on this piece of paper? So you write it, I'm going to write on a piece of paper and an envelope and I'm going to date it for you. And when you come back with your problems in six months, you can, we can open it together and see what it is. I was like, this seems rude, you could just tell me now. And he's like, you won't really believe it until you go through it. And then when you go through it you're going to agree. And of course it came back six months later. I'm like, la la la. This is what's happening. It's this person. They just unseals the envelope and it says people on it. And I think the best part about a business is people. The worst part about a business is, is people. But that's really hard for somebody to understand if they haven't been in it yet. And I think understanding too that your biggest problem is always going to be a person chosen, not an action taken because actions you can take back, people you have to extra extricate yourself from, which is really the same thing in relationships and friendships. It's just exacerbated when money gets on the table, especially when there can be legal issues. So I think it's really smart, you know, if, if I was telling young Cody or if you were telling your 18 year old self what to expect if you get into business it's, you're going to be lied to, you're going to be stolen from, you're going to be cheated, you're going to have people call you bad names, you're going to have money lost. And at the end it's probably going to be worth it. But there will be many moments in which you will think it is not worth it. And so I think that story is really important. Let's talk really quickly about how fun it is to always be famous on the Internet, which I think is not actually the case. You know, this has been a hell of a week for you in some ways. You know, there's a bunch of people on the Internet I think that believe that it's really fun to be public. And I remember I didn't understand what my old CEO Jim Bowen said to me, which is that we get rich quietly around here. And I always thought that was selfish. Why would you just get rich quietly when we could help other people get rich? And then you get kind of rich and you get a little well known, and you realize that there's a lot of people who can't build, so they only burn, and, you know, they're everywhere. And so how has it. How has it been for you being kind of wealthy, you know, billion dollar company status and all over the Internet?

So there's an apocryphal Warren Buffett quote. I don't know if he actually said it, but it's, whales only get harpooned when they surface. And I quietly built my business in a small Canadian town for decades. And then I got bored during COVID and I started tweeting, and it was really positive at first. You know, I started going on podcasts, and I'd get invited to interesting things, and I'd meet interesting people, and I'd meet friends in my own town. I'd be out for coffee, and someone would recognize my voice and say, I heard you on my first million. Can we have coffee? And it was all these awesome people. And so it was very, very positive for me. But over time, and actually, I want to draw it back to having employees, actually, as well. When. When you have a large enough group of people following you, you're always going to have a subset of those people who are haters and critics, and then you're going to have another subset of crazy people, just psychopaths. Well, psychopaths or just mentally unstable people. In the book, I tell a story about walking out onto my back patio one day with a cup of coffee and a man standing in my backyard. And my backyard is not easy to reach. I live on the waterfront in Victoria in a secluded area, and this guy is standing there with a sign that says, 15 minutes of your time. And I kind of nervously yell, hey, how's it going? What are you doing here? And he says, you know, he's staring really intensely at me, and he says, I have an idea I need to tell you about. And I tell the guy, hey, I'm flattered, but email me. Here's my email. And I rush inside and lock the door and get my dog spray. You know, I get an email from him later in the day, and I think, okay, maybe this is just a case of hustle taken too far. Makes me pretty uncomfortable having a guy show up at my house. But. And. But, you know, I'm going to Give him the benefit of the doubt. And so I don't respond. I'm a bit relieved. And then the next day, I drive out of my driveway and my gate opens, and he's standing there and his fists are bared and he's glaring at me. And I roll down the window and say, what are you doing here? And he says, you didn't respond to my email. And I, you know, I just burn away and freak out and, you know, call the police. And stuff like that started happening more and more. I had a schizophrenic guy show up in my office, which we don't publish our office. He somehow figured out where our office is. He came in, and he started accusing us of having unreleased Apple products that he needed to get access to and stuff. You know, we had another person who was stalking my business partner. I mean, we've had. We've had some weird experiences. I think that when your audience gets big, you're going to have that. And the same thing is true with employees. I don't mean the crazy part as much, but, I mean, when you're five people, you can keep a handle on everyone. Everyone knows, you know, if you're a good person, you treat people right and you're nice to everybody, everything will be fine at five people. But then you get up to 15 people, there's always a couple people who don't really know you. They start whispering in the corner by the water cooler, hey, Andrew's kind of a jerk. Don't you think he should really pay us more or do this or whatever it is? And then you get up to 50 people, and 50 people is where you go to the kitchen to get a drink, and someone says, hi. What do you do here? They don't even know that you run the company. And I think at that scale, as soon as you hit, like, 50 people, there is going to definitely be people who are bad. You know, you're going to have a psychopath or a narcissist somewhere in your midst. You're going to have people who hate you or misunderstand you. Frankly, it's just like herding cats. You have to keep everybody happy, and you never can. I remember my girlfriend said, you know, don't you think Jeff Bezos is a bad person because he mistreats his warehouse workers? And I said, Jeff Bezos has 400,000 employees. He can't make everybody happy at all times. You know, it's always a work in progress. And, you know, not to defend, you know, they need to improve their warehouse Conditions and stuff. But when you have so many employees, you cannot make everybody happy. And I think that is part of building a large following and building a large company is you're just going to have the subset of haters and crazies.

I've certainly found the exact same thing. I think being on the Internet in this day and age, we've now made it something that people aspire to. It's aspirational to be on the Internet and to be well known. And I remember in the beginning, when we first met years ago, you were like, you know, do you think you're gonna like this? You know, and at what point do you think you will not like being public any longer? And at what point is it enough? At what point of all these businesses that you have, Cody, where there'll be enough of them? Because the fascinating part is simultaneously, for some haters, your businesses can never be big enough. They can never be strong enough, they can never be right in their eyes. But then simultaneously for you, sometimes they can never be big enough. You know, it's something that I never understood when I didn't have money. I thought, no, just a million bucks, I'll be straight, I'll be super happy. 10 million, I'll be happy. After that, whatever, you'll be happy. And so it's interesting that the never enough is a mass psychosis and also an individual psychosis for both, which is why I think your book's important. Kind of saying, you know, were we told a bunch of lies about what we should chase, things that were never going to make us happy, when in fact we might be a lot happier homesteading with a little dirt under our fingers. A small company that we actually own, customers that we know that we can shake their hands and look in the face, look, look them in the face and work that we can see as opposed to somewhere out in the ether. And maybe if somebody had told us that we would all be a generation that felt like we owned something and also were a tiny bit happier. So I think it's really important that people read this book and books like yours.

Yeah, I think that it's a really interesting question. If you think about, there's this wonderful movie called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Have you seen that?

Yeah, yeah, totally.

It's this 90 year old sushi chef who has dedicated his entire life to making the world's best sushi. And he has this tiny little restaurant in a subway station and people travel from all over the world and wait six months to get on, get a reservation at his restaurant. And that is an example of somebody who has been a craftsman. A craftsman. They have dedicated their lives not to building the machine, but to getting exceptional at one thing, and it's still a business. And then on the flip side, you have Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle, where you took this idea, the burrito, you make it into a fast, casual concept, and you build this huge business. And I think that Steve, I don't know him, but I think he was a chef. And there's this interesting question of should Steve have remained a chef? Maybe he would have been happier having three Chipotle locations. He'd be a lot less rich, but he would spend his time differently. And I think this is the fundamental question that if we go back to my chopping wood example, there's a point at which you never chop wood anymore, where you just have a machine and you press a button and the machine operates, and that's that. And it kind of takes the joy out of it, I think. And my experience of this has been that when I was a barista, I thought, well, if I can just wake up, you know, at the time, I was waking up at five in the morning to mop the floors and open up the cafe. And I thought, if I can just wake up at 10am work for myself and make $50,000 a year, everything's going to be awesome. And it was for three months. And then I adapted and I started thinking about what's next. And I think that everybody is constantly asking themselves, what's next? And if you follow that long enough, as I have for 20 years almost now, for me, that has resulted in getting to a point where, you know, two years ago, on paper, I was a billionaire. I'm not anymore. But two years ago I was. And I was still, even then, stressed about money and thinking about what's next. There was no place to arrive. There was no there there. And I think this is the sad realization. I think it's similar to travel. Everybody goes, I just want to escape. I just want to go to Europe, or I want to go to Hawaii, or I want to move to Bali. And they think if I just do that, all my problems will go away. Well, the problem with moving to Bali is that your brain comes with you, and your brain has anxiety. And that's the fundamental problem. Like, there's that great Blaise Pascal quote, which is, all of man's misery arises from an inability to sit quietly in a room. We all have this problem. We're all constantly going and going and going. And I found this even when I spoke to people who are tremendously rich and said, what's enough? They'd always say, double whatever they have. And I've seen this phenomenon. People with 50,0001-000005-00000 want a million, a million want five, and so on and so forth. That problem just continues forever.

Yeah, there's actually a fascinating paradox, something called the, I think it's called the forward looking paradox, which is basically when you are on a vacation in Hawaii, you are less happy than before you were on your vacation to Hawaii, but you were thinking about it. So we actually as human beings have this bizarre idea in our brains that looking forward to something actually makes us happier than achieving the thing. And so if you play that forward, what does that look like? That means that continuously we actually need something to look forward to in order to be happy. And so of course, we structure our lives this way. So maybe it's not just maybe we do have an inability to sit quietly and be happy with our thoughts. And instead we could just look forward to smaller things in life as opposed to having the next huge thing.

I think success and fame and money are like ice cream. You never get enough. When are you ever going to eat a bowl of ice cream and go, well, I'm done with dessert. I never ever need to eat ice cream ever again.

I'm lactose intolerant. So the answer is fast.

Sure, sure, sorbet, whatever it is, whatever that dessert is, right? Yaka chip cookie, whatever it is. But I think that, you know, you satiate yourself for a moment, but then you get hungry again and you want more. And the only way that you can really functionally solve it is actually to cut yourself off because otherwise you'll keep going forever. And if you keep going forever, bad.

Things happen and at some point you don't want it anymore. I mean, one of the things that I learned the fastest about being healthy is that I actually can't do small amounts. So if I was going to do a small amount of fast food, a small amount of soda, a small amount of cheese, I would eat the entire thing of brie. And so instead I'm like, I don't do cheese, I don't do fast food, I don't do soda. And because you eliminate it entirely, you remove one, the remembrance of how good it takes constantly. And two, you can remove the, the desire for it because you're not constantly dangling in front of your face. So I think that's, that's really smart. I want to go to like just a couple of, of quick things that are more tactical. It's really stressful just being in today's age. It seems to me like most of us are uncertain about the future, we're anxious about the current situation, and we are sort of self sedating with things like opioids, largely because the world is so uncertain and anxious. And you've had multiple highly stressful periods in your career, I think. You know, you told me yesterday, like we had a really tough day yesterday, we lost X millions. Right? What do you do when you feel stress and anxiety? How do you deal with that? In the current modern world, a lot.

Of misery comes from awareness. Actually, I think most, most of the anxiety and the perception that the world is terrible comes from the fact that our brain is not designed to hear about everyone in the world's problems at all times. Seems reasonable. You know, I think 500 years ago you would only be aware of your own problems, your neighbor's problems, maybe your village's problems. And now, at any given time in the world, there's obviously a bad thing happening. And so we have this perception that the world is terrible. And so my solution to that is less awareness. So I cut off news, I cut off social media. I have, I treat myself like a drug addict. I have very limited access to those things. Most of them are blocked on my phone. And my coping mechanism, like going and doing email maniacally is also cut off. What I try and do is really disconnect. So I just had a really stressful two weeks and I went up to my lacos, I put my iPhone in a drawer and I didn't look at it for two days. And I noticed that I was calm. And what's fascinating about that is all the bad things were still happening. You know, we had a bunch of trolls we were dealing with on Twitter. Stock was down, we're getting some bad press. All this really horrible stuff was going on, but I wasn't aware of it and I felt okay. And when I came back to it, lo and behold, life went on. You know, my girlfriend, I remember I was freaking out about it and she looked at me and she said, you're 38 years old, you have use of all your limbs, your boys are safe. I love you. Everything is fine in this moment. Everything is fine. So I try and go to, to, to the present as much as I can. And just, just on that ticker point. So everybody in the world, most people I talk to say that they can't own stocks, they can't tolerate the Ups and the downs, it's too stressful. And yet most people own a house. Well, houses go up and down. I mean, if you, if you actually research house prices, they can go up and down pretty radically, but we're not aware of it. We don't know that our largest asset, let's say you have a million dollar house, has gone down by $50,000 one day and up by 50,000 the next because there's no stock ticker for that. And I think trying to think of everything in your life and push away that data or the stock ticker I think is incredibly helpful. I think this is why I like owning private assets, because I don't know what they're worth. They don't whip around. I just, I'm stuck in them. I have to deal with them. Whereas when you own a public company, we have a public company, our holding company, and it's been really fascinating seeing it whip around and having these emotional reactions when two or three years ago when we were private, the same disaster would strike. And I guess the stock price, the private valuation would have changed as well, but I just didn't feel it. And so for me, I'm trying to build that force field and it's hard. It's hard not to look, it's hard not to engage. But it's about awareness.

Yeah, I'm religious and so one of the things that always kind of gets me through it is this idea of, you know, if God didn't think you could handle it, then he wouldn't have given it to you. And so a lot of times I try to look at some of the stuff that's happening in life. And as long as we're still breathing, it means that I have the capacity to get through it. And once I'm not breathing, it doesn't really fucking matter anyway because you're gone. And so I think having beliefs that allow you to continue to persevere are really useful. And curating those, those beliefs is really, really important. And I don't think enough people do that. You know, they allow other people to impose their vision upon them. And so, you know, I was like with these kids at University of Kentucky the other week. They're this really big football team, you know, one of the best in the country, in the US and, and I remember I said one of the kids, he's a D lineman, like all American, their first pick for Kentucky. And, and I said, you know, B. Rob, what do you, what do you do? D lineman, like, do you go try to tackle the quarterback and he said, no, I tackle the quarterback. And, like, that little tiny word was so important to him. It was like, no, I shape my reality and I sort of allow in or out different things. And, you know, I was talking to, like, Stephen Bartlett the other day, who has been through all sorts of, you know, controversy over the years. And. And he had posted a quote that he, you know, he and I were talking about, which was basically, boats don't sink because of exterior water. Boats sink because of water allowed inside of the boat. And so if you can visualize yourself as a boat with a very clean hole with no water coming in, you could have a tumultuous sea outside. And it doesn't really matter because you're not allowing it inside. And so actually, I brought you a present that you're going to hate. You want it?

Oh, amazing.

Okay, hold on a second. So I try. You. You told me you were coming into town, and I was like, I got you. I got this great thing that you should do. And I was like, it's this kind of crazy thing called biomagnetism. And they put magnets on you. And then, you know, the guy does Reiki, which is basically like, I don't know, energy transfer or something, because we're in Austin. And you said, can I please see the scientific backing video of this? And I said, absolutely not, Andrew. I don't know if there's any. You just. This is placebo effect. You sit down, you enjoy it. And you said, this sounds like my nightmare. Please do not schedule this for me. And so I brought you from my Reiki guy. This is a. This is a crystal. Because I feel like this is a.

Suppository.

That would have scientific backing. This is. He's. He's the best guy in the world, but I think, you know, sometimes having whatever your belief system is is helpful. So he was basically like, this crystal is a particular crystal that, you know, is a protection crystal. And I was like, oh, great, I'll give it to Andrew because he. The Subaru Share the Love Event is on from November 20 to January 2. For 18 years, Subaru and its retailers have supported over 2,700 local charities through the Share the Love. When you purchase or lease a new vehicle during the 2025 Subaru Share the Love Event, Subaru and its retailers will make a minimum $300 donation to charity. Visit subaru.comshare to learn more. The Burlington Coat Event is back.

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I appreciate that. I will hold it. I will grip it in my sweaty pocket.

You gotta make sure that you Crystal with him. He's gonna rub it, you know.

Yeah, I like it. I like it.

There's actually.

Awesome. Thank you.

There's a bunch of religious history that basically. Like in the rosary, right? What is the rosary? It's basically typically on some sort of crystal and you meditate over each individual bead. Islam actually has the same thing. So they have like very. And so does Buddhism mandalas, different things that you roll your fingers through. And so anyway, I was chuckling to myself as I got that for you.

A religious fidget spinner.

You fits me up absolutely right. It is the modern millennial fidget spinner, but gone back 200 years.

See, I'm. I'm a. I'm actually an atheist. And what brings me comfort is the idea that I'll be dead someday and none of this will matter. I always go back to that. I actually. When I'm really, really stressed, there's this. I think it's like a Buddhist practice. You imagine your corpse decomposing. Yeah, Right. Just to recognize none of this will matter whatsoever. There's this amazing. I don't. Have you read a How to Get Rich.

Is that. Why does it have a weird cover with a guy on a throne on it?

Yeah, get past the COVID You have to read it. It's a sample. It's the best book I've ever read on entrepreneurship and business. But it's by this guy, Felix Dennis, who built a publishing empire. And in it, he talks about all the downsides of money. He says. He starts the book by basically saying, this is a book about how to make money and why you don't want to, and here's how it ruined my life. And then he goes on to tell the story of building this massive business. And he has a wild story. He gets addicted to drugs and all sorts of bad stuff. And he says at the end of it, I wish that I had. Instead of focusing on making all this money, I wish that I'd quit at 35 and written poetry. What I really wanted to is write poetry. And I had enough at 35. I should have just done that. And sadly, shortly after writing that book, he died. He had throat cancer, and he died, I think, two or three years later. I often think about that. Life is short. And here's this guy, he wrote this kind of sad book, and he's shooting a flare for all of us. And I remember reading that book and going, silly old man. Like, I read it, like, 10 years ago, and then I reread it recently. It really made me think about that. Like, you know what? Life is short. How long do you really want to spend on these problems? Right? Like, it's. It's crazy.

What's interesting is I think this younger generation right below us is smarter than we are on it. Like, Rachel the other day was in the office, and I heard her say, I don't really want to own a house. It seems like a lot of work. And I remember having a visceral reaction. I was like, what do you mean? Of course you want to own a house. Like, this is part of the American dream, and here's why you do it. And there's all these tax benefits and blah, blah. She's like, that's a lot of work. I don't know. I don't think I want that. Why wouldn't I just let somebody else handle that work? And I just rent it? And I think they have it right in some ways. Like, I think there's this mixture that I feel, which is when I get to, you know, the pearly gates at the end of my days, and you're a piece of dust. That never mattered because you're an atheist, I want to feel like it was worth it.

I'll be in hell having liquid lead put up my ass.

I highly doubt it. If you're the type of guy that goes to hell, we're all in trouble. Plus, you're Canadian. I feel like probably hell has no Canadians. Are there bad ones, too?

There's bad Canadians.

Okay, well, shoot. I feel like I want to, like, be run dry. I want to see what I'm capable of, but try to do it from a perspective of just not. Not external. Like, what. What can I just create that is the most interesting for me in the world without other people's validations? And that's really, really hard. This next generation is more like, hey, I want to be happy, enjoy life, but be able to control my outcome. There's friction there, right? Because if you don't make enough money and you have one bad medical bill, it can derail you and throw you into poverty. It's one of, like, the main Things in the US that that throws people into poverty. You know, if you lose your job and that was your single source of income and you can't find another one, you could be thrown into poverty. And so I think there's a mix in modern society of you have, like a personal, I think, mandate to try to race to x number $250,000 a year in income, $100,000 a year in income, whatever that is, and to try to have a few income streams so you can protect yourself from negative events. But then past a certain point, the data seems to say it doesn't really matter how much money you make. And so I think it's important to have both sides, you know, because you probably would be less happy at $50,000 a year if we were perfectly honest. But maybe you'd be happier at 500,000 than at X millions.

I think it's quite possible that somebody making $500,000 a year is much happier than somebody making $20 million a year. Because simple $20 million a year often involves thousands of employees and incredible amounts of stress and attention you don't want and people needing things from you and all those downsides. I find it really interesting. I talk to a lot of people who are in their 40s. I'm 38. I'm entering that time. And everybody seems to think that this next generation is doomed, that they're weak. And it's hilarious. I was reading this really wonderful book by Robert Greene called the Laws of Human Nature. Have you read it? Yeah, I like him. Amazing. And he talks about generations and how every generation for as long as we go back, has thought that the next generation is weak and doomed. And he shared a quote in it. I think it's 200 BC so really long time ago. And it's somebody saying, I fear this next generation is weak and will forsake us all, or something like that. And I just think that this is something that every generation goes through. I mean, look at the hippie movement, right? You imagine what were people in the 1960s saying about the hippies, right? These are people who are communists. They can't get a job. You know, free love, all, you know, flower power, all this stuff. Well, now they run the world, and it's actually been just fine. And I think the same is true of this next generation. And I do agree that they probably have their priorities in line. And it seems strange to us, some of the, you know, some of the safe space stuff that they insist on and all that, but I think in the long run, they'll be fine. Just like how growing up in the 90s, they said that video games and TV were going to rot our brains and we were never going to amount to anything.

Here we are, those commercials that was like right next to Dare with the eggs frying in the pan. Oh, yeah, that was us.

Yeah.

You've mentioned a few books. If you were to tell a young person right now, here are the books to live a rich and happy life, what would they be?

So I think how to Get Rich is a phenomenal book because it shows a guy who really has nothing and is kind of a fuck up getting really wealthy and how he did it. I think it's the cheat codes. And I also think it's quite a existential and interesting book for the reasons I mentioned before of he's really telling you, here's all the levels of wealth. And I don't think that you should seek the level of wealth that I did. So it's very interesting from that perspective. There's another really wonderful book called the Triumph of Experience, which is about the Harvard grant study. Do you know about that? So I believe in the 1920s they took a thousand. I think it's 500 men from Harvard, so very successful, wealthy families. And then they took 500 kids in Boston who are underprivileged. And they followed them for their entire lives. And this is the longest longitudinal study, I think, in history. It's been going for almost 100 years now. And they've started reporting on the results. And ultimately the results of the study are, you know, there's a lot of insights like for example, alcohol and drugs ruin lives. Big surprise. It was actually reading that book caused me to stop drinking. But the biggest finding is really ultimately happiness is derived from relationships, friends, family. Investing in that is the one thing that seems to derive life satisfaction, longevity, and all sorts of measurements of happiness in marriages and other stuff. I think it's a great book to simply try and invert your life and say, well, how do I avoid misery if I do the following things? Everything will be fine. I love that book. When it comes to business, I really like the E myth. I think it's kind of a cheesy book the way it's written. But ultimately it does drive home that idea of a business being a machine. And that was the book that I read where I had my aha moment of okay, I don't need to do all this work. You know, I can just be the engineer and I can tinker and build all the widgets and Then just feed the raw materials in and have money come out. I love that book.

Oh, it's so useful. Yeah. Arthur Brooks, who you would like, he has become a friend and was on the podcast. His podcast is incredible. It's like, do you ever have a conversation where you go back and you keep listening to it? I do that very rarely because I don't really like to hear my own voice again.

I hate my own voice.

Yeah, it's a. It's, you know, and you have a.

Great voice, so that makes me feel good.

Yeah, no, I don't feel that way. I don't. I don't like going back and re listening, but I will re listen to that one because he talks a lot about happiness and success, and his thing is, you know, faith, family, friends, and work. That means something. He's like, that's it. Nowhere in there is money, Nowhere in there is fame. It's these four things that statistically, almost without a shadow of a doubt, we can tell cross culturally lead to happiness. And it sounds like it's similar to that book. So I kind of want to end with a few things, which is, you know, you've had a massive level of success by a young age. It'll be fascinating to see what happens over the next 30 years, too, because compounding is a hell of a drug. But when you were first starting out in the agency, there's a whole generation of young people that want to be Andrew Wilkinson now. And what would you tell of them as their first steps in their business? Like, if you're, like, if you want to start a agency or service business, what would you tell them to start and think about today? Where should they start?

Well, one piece of advice I often give is if you have a restaurant, you don't want to serve burgers and sushi. Nobody wants to eat, you know, off that menu. You don't know what's going to be good. I would say focus. Try and choose one thing to be exceptional at, and focus on things that are low effort, high output. Do not choose a complex business. Choose a business that requires as few employees as possible and just start getting reps. One of the mistakes I see young people make over and over and over again is they have analysis paralysis. They think that if they start in one direction, they're going to embarrass themselves. And so they need to come up with the perfect idea and the perfect business plan. And so master carpenters have this saying, measure twice, cut once. These people just measure over and over and over again, and they never Cut. And I think that people just need to focus on moving forward and adjusting over time, getting started, getting in the reps and moving forward. I think if you wanted to be an Olympic athlete, you couldn't just read a bunch of books about running. You got to run.

Oh, that's so true. I mean, I remember the first dollar I ever made. And it was like a magical moment realizing that I could make a dollar that I remember the first dollar I made in my own business. And then I remember the first dollar I made on the Internet. And then I remember the first dollar I made when I didn't have to do anything. But some employees made it for me. And each one of those is a unique stage in your life. If you can figure out how to move through those first dollars, it's kind of hard to go back. It's like once you see the Matrix, you can't unsee it. And I do think one of the cool things about what you do is you open up the Matrix. Not very many people are ever in their life going to have an experience of hiring multiple CEOs. For instance, you have, and I've hired a bunch and called you and said, I'm struggling with this. I can't figure out why this isn't working. And you've laid out, you've been like, oh, that happened to me three times. Here's the problem. Don't do this. Because I've seen this happen. And sharing your homework so somebody else can learn from it is incredibly valuable. And I just, despite maybe it making you less happy, I think it's really beautiful for society because most people are like my ex CEO, they want to get rich quietly. They don't want to share their homework. And there's a lot of downside for sharing it because people love to pick down those on high because it's the only way to get more attention is to steal it from another person. If you're not going to be a builder. So I know you don't need to hear it, but like, good for you for being on the Internet and sharing the thing that used to be only for the titans, which was business. Nobody shared this shit. And if Warren Buffett had shared it when he was 37, he would have gotten castrated too. And so I think it's really important. I want to end with the last thing in all my interactions with you, you seem to bring other people along with you. And to never really differentiate between somebody who's at $5 million and somebody who's at 5 billion. You have Bill Ackman, who's, you know, an investor of yours. Plus you have, I mean, I won't name names, but like friends of ours that I know that you've. You said, call me right now and I'll help you. Have you always been like that? And you know, where did you develop this? I'm just here to help the full stack. And I never kind of forget where I came from.

I remember what it was like to go to conferences and be a nobody. I remember I was sitting at a table at a venture capital conference in Vancouver and there was a VC sitting to my right. And he looks over at me and he says, what's your startup? And I said, well, I don't really have a startup, I have a business. And I bootstrapped this agency and told him my story. And he goes, no, a lifestyle business. And then he just turns his back on me and he starts talking to the founder next to me. And I always hold onto that feeling. I always remember that. And on the flip side, I remember I was at another conference and Derek Sivers was there. Do you know who Derek Sivers is? Derek is an incredible entrepreneur and he started a company called CD Baby and sold it for $20 million. And he had just sold it, so he's a big deal. And I walked up to him and said hello and he was so kind and present and did the Warren Buffett thing. He just asked me questions for 30 minutes and then he invited me to lunch with all his cool friends. And I just remember he took care of me and he was nice to me and you know, really, he treated me as well as he would have a billionaire. I always try and pay it forward when I meet young people who are coming up. And frankly, it's a lot more fun to talk to someone who's young and excited and doing something for the first time than it is to talk to somebody who's, you know, full of themselves and has achieved a bunch of stuff. So I don't differentiate. Not only when I meet people, but when I invest as well. I am willing to, even if it's not, let's say, it's too small for tiny. I will personally cut a check for $100,000 into somebody doing a junk haul hauling business simply because I believe in them and I want to back someone like that. I love simple stuff.

My dad always said, you want to do business with a guy who treats the janitor like he does the CEO. And so if you're finding that in a business partner you want to be it in a business partner, because I think business is just like relationships. You know, you, you become really an eligible bachelor or bachelorette when you are really worthy, when you, like, take care of yourself, when you're a good person, when you're interesting, when you're working towards things. You were going to have more success dating. And I think it's the same in business. And a lot of times people gloss over that.

It's very similar to dating. If you think about what's a red flag on a date, it's the person who treats the waiter or waitress badly or is rude to the busboy or whatever it is. And I think I always want to try and remember that, that no matter where I'm at, I'm just a guy. And so is everybody in the world. We're all stumbling and bumbling through life a hundred percent.

I did have one of my girlfriends actually reached out. You met her somewhere, and you know, she was like, see? Is he eligible? And I was like, no, I think he has a. I think he has a girlfriend. I think a lot of women these days feel like, God, where are the, where are the good guys? And, you know, can I meet them? And so I think sometimes I try to push people like you to talk a little bit about, about dating because, you know, I had Tim Kennedy do it too. I'm like, tell me about, how do women find a man like you? You know, he loves his wife, he loves his country, he's very successful. I would, I could, I could text Tim right now and if I was in trouble, Tim would come take care of me. And I could call you as I have and say, I'm really struggling here. Can you please help me? And those type of humans and men are all over the place. And I think we have to kill this notion that men versus women and men are bad and men are incapable because it's totally not fucking true. We just have to show up in a different way. And you just went through the whole dating game, so you've seen all of this. You know, okay, maybe the last thing here, Rapid fire, shorter, long emails, short. Always set calendar appointments or just call me whenever you can and if I pick up, we connect.

Aspire to the latter, usually the former.

Double opt in emails or just make introductions.

I have a bad habit of just making introductions and it pisses off everybody. It pisses off all my friends.

Okay, we're going to delete that. Wrong. Andrew Wilkinson, Mass group texts without solicitation or ask people if they want to be on a group text.

I Don't ask.

God bad. Longer or shorter meeting?

Well, I really like longer meetings. I like. Okay, so I do everything over text. I run my entire business over text. Actually on imessage, we don't even use slack or anything like that. Everything is imessage just because I don't like having multiple platforms and I. So I. Almost everything. I will do deals over text. And usually if I'm actually meeting somebody, it's because there's emotional labor to do. And so I always want to do emotional labor without a time limit. I want to talk to somebody, work through a difficult problem and have a lot of space for that. So I like longer meetings.

So it's either actually no meeting, it's tell meeting, or if we have to. Long.

Yeah, never longer than two hours though.

Yeah, kind of crazy person does that. Voice notes.

I don't mind them. I like them.

Violence. Okay, fine. Lastly, how about multiple interviews to hire? One interview to hire. And do you have to like everybody you hire?

That's such an interesting one because I found that meeting people, usually within the first 30 seconds, I have a feeling about them and I will want to go for it. So what I usually do is I will go for it. But then I do deep background checks. So after that story I shared, now we have a group of background checkers and they just go super, super deep on people. And so I'll make a job offer, but I'll say contingent on doing this super crazy deep background.

Oh, that's really good. Okay. And then lastly, multiple companies or one.

Big company, depends on the person. You know, I'm. I'm an inch deep and a mile wide. I like a lot of different things going on. A lot of people I know, they've got their baby, they got their one business, and that's all they can deal with. And that's the way they work. They're a single tracker down, a multi tracker. So for me, multiple. But I think most people probably won.

What is the one thing that has made you happiest in life if you would only pick one?

Having kids. It's such a cheesy, horrible say that it's true. Right? Horrible. I hate when people give the like treacly answer you're supposed to give, but honestly, it is having kids. Kids. Last night, you know, we mentioned it kind of in passing. We're dealing with all this Twitter hate and bad press and stuff, and I was lying in bed trying not to think about it. My thoughts just kept drifting over and over. You know, I'm in a hotel room and there's, you know, big office building across the way. There's light blaring into my room and the air conditioner is not working and I'm feeling all irritable and stressed. And the way that I got myself to sleep was just by thinking about hanging out with my kids. Like, I just think about my kids and I become happy. And I can't describe it other than to say biologically, we are programmed to eat. We know we need to eat to take care of ourselves. We are also biologically programmed to have sex. Why are we programmed to have sex? Because we're designed to procreate and have children, and so our brains reward us for having children. I mean, you look for me, I look at photos or look at my kids and I just instantly feel happy and satisfied way more than I thought. I always looked at people who talked about how great their kids were and stuff, and I wanted to barf. But if. If 25 year old me was watching this podcast interview, I'd be like, right, like.

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Thanks so much for having me. That was awesome. And thank you for the healing crystal. I can already feel it washing over me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're welcome.

I'm a doctor. Debrief time, Rachel. Okay, let's talk about a couple things we learned from listening to Andrew. I think this is a good lesson in life in general for every time you learn, can you sit with it and actually see if you can let it settle in, let it boil nicely and take home some things with you as opposed to just moving on to the next thing like we manically do? But yeah, afterwards, you know, the stuff that stuck with me the most from chatting with him is, you know, one Funny, the woman that he brought with him that he hired originally reached out to me. I missed her DM dang it. And was gonna come work here. You can often tell how a person is by the people who work with them, how they interact. And so I thought it was really sweet. He brought that little gift, you know, which was cute. You didn't get a gift, though. I did not.

But Monica was nothing but kind. So, Monica, if you're listening to this, thank you so much for the good conversation while you were here.

Yeah, we can. I'll share my gift with you. So I think that's really cool. You could tell how people are by the way that they treat all their people and the way their people treat you. The. The other debrief that I thought was really interesting from his conversation was one, he runs his business really different than I do. Like, I thought it was wild that he runs it all through text, not slack. I've actually, I pinged him on some of those, like, rapid action questions at the end because I've engaged with him before. And I'm like, let's set up a call next week. And he's like, if you want to call me tomorrow, here's my number. As opposed to setting up, like, set zoom calls. I think that's my new love language.

I've noticed this with a lot of very successful people as well. I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but I'll be talking to somebody about, like, possibly hopping on a phone call or doing a meeting, and they send me, like, they'll email me back with their phone number, and they're like, call now. And I feel like that has to be, like, a marker of, like, somebody who's very generous with their time to me is a marker of somebody that must be doing extremely well.

Yeah. Or they just delegate really well so they have time.

Yeah.

Like, I just send everybody, when they ask me that, a screenshot of my calendar, and I'm like, my life's miserable. I'm sorry, I can't talk to you. But I think. I think this idea of, like, if you let. If you have a business that actually works for you as opposed to you working on the business, which I'm just not there yet, candidly, in multiple of mine, then you can just say, yeah, give me a call. And we connect like a normal human, like we used to, like, back in the day. Was that before your time where, like, did you have a corded phone that connected to the wall?

I did for a little bit. Like, Our home phone. But my mom, like, still had a cell phone, so it wasn't like our. It was the MI for me. Like, if I wanted to call my friends, my mom had a razor and I think my dad had a BlackBerry.

Razors were the shit back in the day. I remember being really stoked about them. Yeah. Back then, you weren't scheduling meetings and phone calls. You kind of caught each other when you caught each other. And there's something nostalgic I like about that. So I thought that was clever that he did that. And then obviously the, hey, we either text or we have a long meeting, but, like, nothing in between. That's sort of interesting. We were good enough at operational processes. We could do that.

More long meetings. Also. That was a. That was a hot take from him because I feel like I. I know Jeff Bezos, like, came out with a whole book about how, like, they do their meetings at Amazons, and they're very, very, like, meticulous. And it starts with, like, a one, like a. A paper that everybody reads, basically. And then they dive into discussion. I feel like after, like, reading about so many CEOs or famous founders and hearing about, like, methods like that at Amazon versus, like, hearing about Andrew, I'm like, wow. Like, Andrew's. He just seems like a great person to work for, and I wonder how much that has really meant to his success. Like, he just seemed really, really chill for being a CEO.

Yeah, he's definitely more chill than I am.

Yeah, Well, I don't know. You're. You're. I think that's a hot take from you, actually, because I think off camera, you are really chill.

I do. So harder on camera.

Yeah, I think. I think you're harder with, like, the business stuff, but you also have, like. You're very good at, like, having two separate sides of, like, your personality.

Tell me more. Any other compliments you want to share with everybody off the Internet available?

Get it all on camera.

Exactly. Testimonial from one employee just for one day. When somebody tells me that I'm awful on the Internet. Yeah, I mean, I'm. I mean, I'm pretty intense as a CEO when I need to be, but kind of try to be funny and chill when I don't need to be.

Do you think that helps?

Yeah, I think, you know, you work for 40, 50, 60 hours a week with people. If they don't ever make you laugh, if they're serious all the time, that's miserable. I mean, there's a lot of data that says that the more that we laugh the longer that we live and the happier we are. By what was our Arthur Brooks episode, it was like, 25% increase in happiness with daily laughter. I think the more that we can make our team and friends laugh, the more happy they are, happier, people produce more. And so inherently, it's probably kind of selfish like, that you can make people laugh and then everybody produces more.

Nobody wants to work for somebody that's like a dick.

Well, I think you can get away with it. You can be a dick if you're great. That's always my rule. Like, don't be an asshole and incompetent. You know, that's like, hey, if you're an. But you're amazing and you're so good at what you do, I don't know. I might put up with that. You can't be an asshole and incompetent, and you can kind of be nice and incompetent, but if you're. If you're funny and competent, that's a dangerous combination. I'd rather have funny and competent over nice and competent, I think.

Really?

Yeah, because nice is overrated. It's like, nice is nice means you just, you know, you say the right thing. You know, you're. You're low impact, but funny to me means you have some wit. I don't think anybody says that niceness increases your happiness. Just like, oh, I said hot. You know, it's like, what was that show like with Jim Carrey back in the day?

The Truman Show?

The Truman Show. Like, everybody was nice to Truman. Did that make him happy? I don't think so. Because nice doesn't have to be. It's. It's. It's kind of like the oatmeal of life.

I don't know. If people weren't nice to me, though, I would definitely, like, be not feeling that happy.

Yeah, well, you can't be mean, but, like, can you just be there but also funny? Or do you think they're too intertwined?

I think they're too intertwined and other.

Things the Internet doesn't care about. Anyway, the episode was great. Thanks, guys, for listening. I think you are a big deal. You're a big deal to me. You're a big deal to Rachel. And because you're a big deal, remember our deal. Subscribe to this bad boy. It's the only way it grows. This is the hardest thing I have right now to grow. So if I've helped you at all in your life, give me a follow here. A little subscribe if you want to review the podcast. Oh, talk dirty to me. All right, see you next week, guys.