The Goal Is NOT To Retire...

I want to talk about how to build portfolios and bank accounts so big that you get to choose to work again, but you never have to. I have a belief that we've been told some lies. Those lies have become so pervasive in the world that we live that we call the lie the norm. And one of the lies that we've been told is this word that for my parents, at least, and maybe some of you can. Can appreciate the same thing. For my parents, this lie was so real that it became a goal. And it was one word. Retirement. Retirement that one day, years in the future, when my knees hurt, when I've got a little bit more pounds on, when I have gray hair, I can eventually ride off on the carnival cruise sunset, and I can stop this thing that I've done for the past 60 years. What a bizarre concept. But the real truth is people do not retire from lives they love. You'll never retire from a life you love. In fact, what do you try to do when you love your life? You try to not die. And so the idea today for us is that we figure out a way to love the life that we live, to lean into other people. And then eventually our mind is so open and our life is so full that. That we go this step further, which is to try to not die. And I have five items on the agenda for us today. The first agenda is I want you to leave here knowing how to buy a percentage of a company with your mind. I know that sounds a little crazy, but we're gonna try it. I want you to learn, which is already. You already have this part opened, how to never trade your time for money again. And I want you to learn how to set up structures that pay for work today for years to come, AKA annuitize your income. I also want you to flip your script on something. I want you to think about why you should charge less for something today in order for you to get a bigger percentage of it in the future. And we're gonna break that down. And then the last is how to make offers so good on a deal, the owner asks you to do the deal. Now, I was listening to some of the people talking about how to make offers on houses, how to find their pain points. And if this opens your mind slightly, by the end of this presentation, I want you to start thinking completely different. Where when you start to make an offer to somebody for a percentage of their business, for a percentage of their asset, they are actually the one trying to pitch you to do it. You're not Chasing deals, you're not chasing people. You are getting them to chase you. And that's what I call the expertise to equity framework. Now, I know a lot of people come on here, and there's a dancing bear, and it's like fireworks, inspirational video, motivational quote. And we're not going to do any of that. We're going to make some money today. Does that sound okay? Instead, all right, you guys can Tony Robbins with Tony Robbins, and you can make some money with Pace and I. All right? Now, the idea all started when I worked on Wall Street. This is me on Wall street working for somebody else. And what was fascinating about this guy whose name was Dan, is Dan made a ton of money. But I didn't realize how much money Dan made until one day he showed me his big, huge, fancy new house. He. He bought, like an almost over the top house. Like a house that was so big it makes Pace's house look small. You guys seen Pace's house on the Internet's pretty big. And I remember thinking, God, Dan, like, you've been here for 10 years, but you make way more than I do. If I make a million bucks a year, you must be making millions and millions and millions. And I really thought that the real answer was salary, right? I thought it was the money that he was making in his salary that seems reasonable to me. And instead of that, I realized it had nothing to do with that. When I asked Dan this question, it changed my life forever. And so I wanted to share it. I said, dan, can you explain to me how you get paid? Because I think I'm missing something. And he said, well, what happens in private equity firms when you're at the partner level? You own a part of the company. You not only own part of the company, you own part of every deal you do, and you own part of every fund you're a part of. So he's like, so Dan actually ended up leaving the company after, let's call it another five or seven years. And can you imagine, you leave a company where you are a W2 employee with all the benefits of W2 employment. You get ownership in the company while you're there. You leave five or seven years later, and you're still getting paid millions. That sounds weird, right? And yet there's an entire industry in which they do that every day. And so I said, dan, how would somebody like me get something like that? And he said this. This line to me, which has made me more money than anything else I've ever done. And it was, find out what you're good at and use it to get ownership. Find out what you're good at and use it to get ownership. And I said, that sounds kind of esoteric, but once I institutionalized it, it changed just about everything. And so I started asking Dan, well, if I was to do that, what would be the best way to do it? And he said, well, when you go to a location, so you guys want to get to the airport from here, you want to get out of here, Are you going to like whatever road you're on, just sort of hope that the road that you're closest to, on, most comfortable with is going to eventually take you the most direct route to the airport? Does that seem reasonable? You're going to try to find the most direct path to wealth? And yet what do we do? What do we ask people when we talk to them? Like for the first time we say, hi, I'm Cody, what's your name? And they go, hi, I'm Dan. And I go, dan, what do you do for a living? That's what we would do. But the way we got to what we do for a living is usually how our parents, our friends, we kind of knew somebody that looked rich and happy that did it. We've never actually wazed or Google mapsed our way to the fastest route. Nobody has ever told us that. So I thought, ok, if I wanted to optimize what I do every day while I am working for making the most money humanly possible, what would I want to know? And I'd want to know something like this. What you're looking at here is from 1989 all the way to 2010, private equity versus S&P 500, aka public stocks return private equity, meaning ownership of private assets in some way, shape or form. Now look at the difference between the two. I'm no mathematician, but blue line looks better. Huh? You'd probably take that if you could. All right, well, that was just one time period. What if we go from 2000 to 2021, what do we see? We got a blue line up top. We, we got a red line. That's public equities. Huh, interesting. So we make one switch from buying Google Facebook meta like they tell us to do every day on cnbc where they create entire media channels in order to sell us into more things that have a lower return than what the richest people in the world do. And I go, okay, what about if we look at it as something on a risk return ratio basis? Basically over to the far left, we've got cash. This is the least risky asset class. All the way over to the right, we've got emerging market equities, most risky asset class, right. Typically emerging market equities. Investing in, let's say, Africa or I'm from Latin America. Latin America would be pretty risky. Cash less risky. Unless you're under a Biden regime with the Fed printing money. But, you know, who am I to say this line between the two. Look at them. Cash to the left, private equity to the right. You have the highest returns and the lowest risk profile. What does that tell you? That if you got to play a game in which you found the fastest map to money, it would be spelled private equity. And so I started thinking about this and I thought, well, if we want to be rich, and I am talking Jeff Bezos maniacal laughter rich, we would probably play the private equity game. We would own private companies. And if I haven't convinced you of that already, let me tell you one more. Anybody in the audience know who these three guys are? These are three of the richest men in the world. Three of the top five richest men in finance in the world. We've got Leon Black to the left, founder of Apollo. We've got Henry Kravis, kkr, one of the biggest other private equity companies. And we got Robert Smith at Vista. So three of the richest guys in the world all got there from owning private equity. Here's my beef. I think instead of those guys owning it all, many of us should own more of it. And let me tell you why I know that to be true, because sometimes I do wonder what God thinks about rich people, because I don't know. We got Leon Black, who paid $138 million to Jeffrey Epstein. Seems like a poor move. We've got Robert Smith, $139 million, biggest tax evasion payment ever to the IRS. The richest guys in the world play games we can't even imagine because they have Google mapped their way to the fastest outcome to using unfair advantages continuously, continuously and continuously. And they never share their homework. Is there anybody in this room right now who is a private equity AKA you invest in individual companies and you are a general partner in the audience right now. No one, maybe. Let me tell you why they're not in this room. Those mother don't share. I've been one real estate. You guys are unique, actually. You realize that there is an ecosystem and a community in which if I help one, then I become richer too, through an interchange of ideas, leads and opportunities. These guys don't share. And so that is why 28% of the Forbes 400 list is run by these guys. This is why they own Boca Raton. They own half the world. And why sometimes people don't like rich people because they are not reaching the hand down. Then that is a huge mistake. I think every time you make a dollar, figuring out a way to help somebody else make a dollar is probably a pretty good thing. And so that's why we need you. Not my best look. This is my graphic design team. But that is why we need you. So today, I'm going to show you the exact process for how I started building Main street holding company, Contrarian Thinking Capital. And right about now, this is where people go, oh, by the way, Cody, all those guys you showed me, you know, I forgot to tell you. I wasn't bored with a silver spoon. So how do I buy private companies when I don't have a lot of cash? And you know what's crazy about that? You're not even allowed legally to say things like how to buy a business with $0. The government does not allow it. Sit on that for a second. Why? Because they think you're stupid. They think that you don't know how to delineate the between what's true and what's false. And so they want to think that gatekeeping is okay and that all of us should have to have millions in order to make millions. And I stand categorically against that because. Thank you. I think you either make the rules or you get ruled. That's right. And we don't want to get ruled here. So we're going to take this back. We're going to take this idea of what you know and get it into ownership. How about some talking nerdy to me? Let's start with some notes. Okay? Words mean things. Definitions are important. I want to start with expertise to equity. Here's the definition of expertise to equity. Can you contribute your time, effort and expertise into a business in exchange for a percentage or ownership of that business? Now, the important part about this is if you know how to speak the language, you can learn how to manipulate the language. If you learn how to manipulate the language, you can learn how to make money through the language that is the only international language which is green. And so it's really important that every time we speak a word, we know the definition. And if there are words here that you don't understand, I want you to know what those are. Those words are shields that the really, really rich use to protect the house. You guys could play a fun game and you could Google terminology and private equity, and you would find things like ebitda. You would find things like adjusted ebitda. You would find things like dbpi. You would find things like expense ratio. You would find this world of words that is used to block you guys out. So we're going to make sure that we don't allow gatekeeping today. When I do expertise to equity deals, there are three ways I like to do them. I want in my deals to either get a percentage of revenue, a percentage of profit, or and a percentage of what I call value or the actual valuation of the company if and when it sells. Now, a lot of times when people think equity, they only think value, right? But we want both. And let me tell you why. Because can you eat potential? No. Can you cash flow and pay your mortgage off of what you say a valuation is of something before they sell a company? No. And so we are going to make sure when we do deals to get equity, you guys get both distributions that cash flow and equity in the deal, which is what gets you big, huge, chunky bank accounts. Now, typically people, when I talk about finance, probably not in this room, but typically people think about 101 level thinking of money. And whenever I think of 101 level of money, I hear this word. I hear this word monies. And I think of this guy. Anybody else? Borat, show me your monies. Because I think we were kind of taught this 101 level of how do I get monies? Well, I get monies because I do work and I pay for things. That is the only interpretation I can do. So if you're Mexican, you sound like Borat. If you're Russian, you sound like Borat. I'm gonna just save you guys from any others. The second level of thinking is that trading time for money is not actually what we want to do. That's 202 level thinking. But where we actually want to go is past 202 level thinking. We start to get into how to use other people's money, or if you guys are in private equity, how to fill your pipelines like Ron Burgundy. But the thing that most people don't teach us is they don't teach us 303 level of making money. And 303 level of making money is really different. And I want to explain it to you like this. How do you get money in deals so big where it feels like you should have no fucking opportunity to get a deal? Let me introduce you to Ryan Reynolds, who owns part of a mobile company, makes no Sense. Why would Ryan Reynolds, a very good looking, I might say, sorry, husband, member of our Hollywood cabal, get a percentage of a company that made a billion dollars? And why would he get it for? How much do you guys think he paid for that company? $0. Who would do that deal? Well, he understands the game of expertise to equity. Ryan got it because he has audience. He understands marketing. If you've seen their commercials, they're pretty snazzy. He has expertise in how to distribute something to many people and get them to buy. He has what's called a name trust transfer, AKA I like Ryan. I trust Ryan. I might use Mint Mobile. He has a team to execute on it. And he has $0 but a beautiful smile. And this is one way to get expertise for equity. But then there's another way. There's like this guy, Drew Brees. You guys know who this is? All right, I'm not into sports. So I was like, I don't know. Does he play soccer? Now Drew owns all these companies. You can see here, which is interesting if you think about it, because you can't see, because it's a little. Little. But do you think that many people watch a football game and then want to buy mosquito repellent? Is that a natural transfer? No. I mean, I don't watch the sport, but guys tell me, I don't think so. So why would Drew get a percentage of every single one of those companies? Because private equity is so smart. They used him like Ryan Reynolds. He became a part of this company called Franworth where they do deals where they take a percentage of companies based on Drew Brees name a bunch of characteristics from Drew and their expertise in raising money. So we're going to steal their homework. We're going to figure out how to do deals with our brains. And at this point, some people might go, cody, I don't know what to tell you. I'm also not famous. And so can I do these deals if I don't have biceps like the rock or I'm not a silver fox like George Clooney. And what I'll tell you is you can. And I'm not going to spend much time here. And there's going to be a bunch of words on it. But this is to show you one of the most powerful things in the world, which is when somebody shows you what they've done, what does it make you feel that you can. Right. They're normal. They seem average, intelligent. They've done it. Why can't you? And so I'm going to show you Hans Haunts did a deal just like this, was an employee, changed it to bonuses, sold to private equity. $0 owned part of a business. Or Ross, who owns part of an E bike company in partnership with one of his buddies who needed some help with sales. So now let me show you how I do it. Let's do this firsthand. So we have a venture capital fund. This venture capital fund is called Contrarian Thinking Capital. In this fund we invest in a bunch of different deals. Normal, totally normal. But the key that I want you to take away, so when you structure the next deal for you to raise third party capital in an unfair advantaged way and to get equity without as much money as the normal person, I want you to think of deals like this. So we just invested in two companies, Company A and company B. Company a, we did a 2x cash investment in additional advisory shares for every dollar that we put in. So what does that mean? If I give the company $100,000, I say, hey startup, that is the software for Laundromats. Hypothetically, I want to invest in your company. I'm going to give you $100,000. But on top of it, I want to tell you problems that laundromats typically face because I own some. I want to introduce you to a few people who are going to help you grow in this space. I want to show you my process for getting sales. And for that I want $200,000 worth of your company. It's called advisory shares. And the second portion, I say, hey company, I'm going to invest $100,000 in your company, but I want 20% of contract value generated by CT US used to buy additional shares. So what does that mean? It's like, okay, I'm gonna give you 100k, but if we drive another hundred thousand dollars in leads to your business, I want just $20,000 worth of those leads in shares in equity to the company. And what I want you to see from this is what is possible when you understand the language of deal terms. It will completely change how you view making money. The idea is you do not have to have Leon Black level of cash to make a big impact. You just have to have a better story. And that better story should start with something that I call a flywheel, an investor flywheel. And every single one of you has this, whether you realize it or not. Let me show you what mine is so that you can see what yours might be. So we do VC deals and cash flowing deals on this left side. In the middle we have Our rather big audience. And on the right hand side, we have our community now. Our community feeds our audience, our audience feeds our VC deals, our VC deals feeds our audience with content and vice versa. And so it's that idea of, have you ever seen a watermill where you essentially, if you were to push it the first time, it's quite hard, right, to start anything from static position creates a lot of physical force and friction, but after you've gotten it moving, you, it moves without any additional electricity. And this is how your business should feel eventually. How many of you business owners have ever felt how awful it is running a business when you're first starting? Raise your hand if it's been awful starting a business. Raise your hand if you started a business and it wasn't awful ever. Oh, good. No liars in the room. Love this. It's awful. But raise your hand if you've then felt that there's a moment, there's this beautiful moment in time where it starts to work without you pushing it. Have you felt that business owners. And I promise you there is this moment in whatever it is you are doing where it will feel so effortless, you will feel a little guilty about it. Like, sometimes I'll talk to Pace and I'll be like, how you doing, man? What's going on? He's like, I'm in Montana. I'm kind of offline for six days. I'm like, excuse me. I'm like, well, what are you doing next week? He's like, yeah, I'm gonna kind of fly all over the place. But I haven't been in the office in a month, so I should probably go by, this is not a dream. It is part of what is called your flywheel process. And you get it by doing what I told you about in the beginning, which is what I'm gonna explain right here. We consider ourselves value add investors, right? And that's like such a cliche term right now. It makes me itch slightly saying it. But for this company that we invested in, we said, hey, why don't we post about it a little bit? Why don't we make some intros and let me mess with your copy? And for that we drove 30 product demos, which is a lot for a B2B SaaS software, with one post that drove $60,000 in annual reoccurring revenue. Now why that's interesting is because that $60,000 in ARR is interesting because when you go to sell a company that's in software, do you know what a multiple is? How much does a SaaS company sell for? Typically somewhere between 10 and 15x revenue. So times 60,000 times 10. And that's what one post is worth for this company. Think about that for a second. Now, I started out by telling you guys how you make money. How do you make money is not by learning tactics and doing things for yourself. It's by making so much value for somebody else that they'd be crazy not to do a deal with you. But here's a tough truth, is that if you don't know what you're worth, you'll forever be underpaid. And if you do know what you're worth, you'll never be underpaid again. Most humans. Let's play a game. How many people here are W2 employees have some amazing. How many of you guys know how much money you drive every single dollar to the company? Like, I make $100,000 a year. I drive $10 million in revenue to the company. I'm gonna say 3% of the hundreds of hands in the audience. So how do you know what to negotiate more for if you don't actually know what you're worth? And I want you to think about that in every single sense of the word. Now let's figure out how to find your worth here. And whenever I think about this, another voice comes into my head. A voice that I can't get out of my head, really, that makes me wonder, individually, very nice. How much. How much is. How much are we all individually worth? And I know it feels heavy, and that's why I make a little joke about it. Because it's hard for us if we don't have a lot of confidence to realize the value and the worth that we can have. You guys feel me on that? Sometimes maybe you don't feel like you're worth what you even made dollar for dollar be worth at your company. Maybe you feel so much like you're not sure what you're worth, you don't even want to ask the company what you bring in. You're scared of the answer. But let me tell you something. How many companies do you think stay in business if they pay their employees more than they bring into the company? Zero. And yet so many of us have no idea what worth we drive in the world. And I want you to change that. Now we're going to ask you four questions. And if you answer these four questions, we will teach you everything you need to know about determining your value in order to do deals. Four questions to Leon Black, minus the Jeffrey Epstein Sound good? First is what is your expertise or experience? Everybody in here has some component of it. We're going to break that down. Second, what can you give instead of time? Third, what are you willing to give or do? Don't just tell me what you want. Tell me what you are willing to do to get it. And fourth, what is that worth? What value can you drive? So let's start here. What's your experience or your expertise? We're going to start with a few models. So this is the time to bring out your phone. You can take all the pictures you want. You can stick steal my homework. Fastest way to an A start by listing specifics, your experience, your skills. Are you good at Marketing, sales, scaling. You are going to write down in the experience and skills side all the things that you are uniquely skilled at. And then you're going to write down the industries that you know, we humans do really bad with this. Hi, I'm Cody. I'm here to help. With what? Yes, that's not very useful. If instead I said to this room right now, if I said to this room right now, hi, I'm Cody. I help businesses increase their sales inside of the southeast US in multifamily. How many people in here might want that exact same thing? Shout it out or raise your hands. So that's like 30 people in the room with one very specific niche that want the exact thing that I am uniquely skilled at. So your skills are always somebody else's needs. The problem is you're too scared to figure out what you're worth and you're too scared to tell people that you are willing to solve their problems. The next step. What can you give instead of money now money's great actually. I love using money if I can. It's one of the highest leverage things you can do. But if you don't have it, let's use something else. What you can see here is what's called the value matrix. And you can do this exact same thing. It's how much time are you willing to give? This is the least useful metric unless you're a babysitter. Kids probably need you to actually be there just about anything else. I don't care how long it takes you to do something, I just want it done. Second is skill. Third is advice. That's a thing that you are uniquely skilled at. Fourth is connections, people that you know. Fifth most valuable outcomes. Don't tell me who you know, tell me what they're going to do for me. And I want you to list these out the truth of the matter is, if you internalize this quote, you probably don't need to listen to anything else. That you can beat 99% of the smartest people out there by simply working harder than is rational. And this is something we believe intensely at contrarian thinking my company to the tune that this week my COO who's sitting here, Chris Piper, had one of my other employees calling this week Hell Week for us because we're in five different states in five days doing speeches and we got a new business that we're launching and we're investing in somebody else. And when Chris heard her say that, he stopped her and he went, hell week. Why are you calling it that? She said, oh, I mean, it's just kind of a joke, right? That seems innocuous. Why is Chris such a jerk? Chris, come on. But instead he said, your words are really powerful and the things that you say out loud will become the realities for this week. And so instead of you calling it Hell Week, I want you to call it Easy street week. And every time something's hard, I want you to go, this is super easy, isn't it? Because a weird thing happens to us little mammals that derive from apes is that we believe the words that come out of our mouths. And we believe them so much that it leads to us going from making $400 an hour for a 10 hour consulting gig to earning part of a business that could go to $5 million in earnings with no time commitment expected in the future. Like Dan Sullivan, your words have a lot of power. Be careful what words you use. Now this is where we get to the what are you willing to do to get it? So anybody know who this guy is? This is Bill Perkins, author of Die with Zero. He's become one of my probably closest mentors. And Bill Perkins is a hedge fund manager, damn near a billionaire, if not more. And I was at Bill's house right here. This huge compound on Lake Austin, multiple locations is beautiful. And we're walking and talking and I was really excited to pitch Bill something. I was gonna pitch Bill this idea of what I was building in small business land. So you can imagine, you ever had that feeling where you're like, I'm just like, you come home to your partner. You're like, I can't believe what just happened today. This is going to be huge. Let me tell you about my idea. And your partner just like shits all over it. Does that ever happen to anybody? Just like a shin kick right at your exclamation point. So I'm telling Bill all about this and all of a sudden Bill looks at me very quizzical and he goes, do you think that you have been around small business for so long that small has infected your thinking? Now young Cody would have been like, was this idiot know as I walked out of his $30 million house to my Prius. But older Cody was like, huh? This man has more than I do in many ways. What does he know that I do not? And so I thought about it and I came back to him and I said, bill, I think you were right. And the idea I had at that time ended up not becoming the idea. And the idea that I ended up going with, I just invested millions in. And Bill just gave me $3 million to invest alongside me. And what's crazy is this idea might fail, but it is so big that even if we fail, we will create something incredible. And that's why I want you guys to internalize something that the best way to stay poor is to take advice from people whose lives you do not want. Right? We've all done it. How many times have you listened to Aunt Sally tell you why are you working so hard when Aunt Sally lives in a double wide and has three ex husbands and two cats? I'm sorry, 12 cats. We have to be careful. It doesn't mean that we can't listen to people who are on different stages of our financial climb. It doesn't mean money is the ultimate indicator of human. It is not the case. But it does mean that we have to be really careful whose words we let inside of us. And ultimately when we are going to pitch ourself and our offer to somebody else, we better make sure that we pitch them something they care about. Let me tell you how takers pitch in a deal. They say, I will take, I don't know, $5,000 up front and a percentage of the business if we hit XYZ. Here's how winners pitch. I will take 1/5 of my fee or if you're real confident, I'll take $0 of my fee. But I'm going to take a percentage of the upside. If I grow your dental business by 10%, I want $0. Now I'll work for $0, but I want 5% of the company on a go forward basis. I want 5% in distributing equity on a pro rata basis. Every dollar that you distribute to yourself, I get a dollar that's called pro rata. And then I want 5% of the value of the company when you sell it. Cool, Cool. That's how winners negotiate. Now the hard part is figuring out what are you worth. So let me tell you the way to not do it. The way to not do it is to be time based. I will work in the business for 100 hours. Tell me, business owners and bosses, do you care more if your top employees work 100 hours a week or actually do their job and achieve the thing you want them to do? It would be number two, right? Of course. The same thing for all of us that have teams. So instead of that offer, you say, I will increase the value of this business by X. I will drive you more clients. I will operationalize your business. I will make introductions. I will stop the pain of the fact that you're a terrible operator, but you're a great visionary. Let me come operate it for you. How many people have you guys seen? How many partners Pace has in his business? He's got an entourage of behind him. And why? Because Pace would be the first person to say I'm not really a details operations guy. I'm like kind of running around town, flight tracking, buying RV parks in Montana. But what does he do? He finds the people who are the details people. Then he gives them a cut of the business. And what does Pace do? Pace makes them the offer. Which is exactly what you guys are going to learn how to do. Now here's how to do this in real time. I might say something like, what if I can guarantee that if I add 300k in value to your business, I could take 15% equity in the company? How could we reverse engineer so we could make this offer to somebody and they would actually take it and we would know if this is reasonable or not for this business. That seems hard, right? How much work do you guys think you'd have to do to figure out if this was a reasonable offer for a business? Shout it out. How many hours do you think? 10 hours? 20 hours? 50 hours. 5 hours. 30 seconds, mother. Let's do this. Okay, 30 seconds. Here's how. Scenario one, we need to know what the current business is. We need to know the revenue, we need to know the profit, we need to know the valuation. And then we're going to have an ask. Cody, I don't know any of that about the business. Let's play a game. Sir, in the green glasses, what do you do for. Oh, I know who you are. Oh, this is. I already know some stuff about this guy, so I got an unfair advantage. We got the plant guy in front. You guys like the plant guy. This is actually Perfect, because I think Pace did this with you actually after talking to me. Ah, this is like the universe. Okay, anyway, so the plant guy, you sell plants and you post about it online, right? To simplify. Much more beautiful and eloquent than that. But right. Okay, so he sells plants. Let's say these aren't real numbers, obviously, but let's say that the plant guy has a business that does a million dollars in revenue. Now how would I figure that out? Well, might be a few different ways to figure it out. One, if the plant guy has social media, I could look on his social media and I might be able to see if he has an Etsy store. How many orders has he had on Etsy? I might be able to ask him. Because business owners are weird. We tell you guys our secrets. Could you imagine going up to somebody like, how much money you worth? They're like, yep, let me tell you. Not normal. You go up to a business owner, they might tell you 9 out of 10. But let's say that he wouldn't. I used an example yesterday that was kind of useful. So if you wanted to calculate how much money we were making off of this event right now, if I was like Pace, say, I didn't want to ask Pace how much money he made, I'd go, okay, there's about 2,000 people in the room times $8.97 a ticket, right? So I would make some assertion about how much money that is. Let's say that it's not this number, but it would be. Let's say it's a million bucks. Well then I'd go, huh, I don't know how much profit he's making off of this. How could I guess how much he's actually putting in his pocket? Well, I could Google really quickly average profit margin for a large event company online. And really quickly, it would show you that the margins are about 20%. So now I'm down to $200,000. Then I'd go for evaluation of profit multiple. So I'd say, well, Google magic machine. Can you also tell me how much do events companies get sold for? So if it's not just a one time event, but an annual event, aka company, then those companies sell for 5x. Looks like they sell for 5x profits, not revenue. The Internet tells me this. So within 30 seconds I have a rough enough assertion for a business owner to go, oh, this lady kind of knows what she's talking about. She at least has a ballpark. And I probably would phrase it like this plant guy. Do you I would assume your business does somewhere between 1 and $3 million in revenue. I know that your industry is about 20% margin. I've seen the multiples. They sell for about 5x. And guess how I know all that? Google. But I don't tell them that. Right. They don't need to know our secrets. Then the second part, I'm going to go, okay, well if I know that this event does that per year, what if I could get it from making a million dollars a year to another 300,000 1.3 million. Well, then I would know that I would drive $60,000 in profit. Right? That's 20%. And then I would take that 60,000 and I'd time it by 5 because that's the multiple of the business. And then I'd have my equity percentage 15%. We get taught and get scared about valuations and calculations so that we run to Wall street and they tell us what our businesses are worth and they tell us what we should do with our money and they tell us that we should trust the banks with our money. Mistake in many instances. And yet that's all we need to know to have a very rough evaluation for a business. So right now, is anybody in this audience, does anybody in this audience sell their services to somebody else? Like you consult or you have it. Okay, perfect. How many of you guys who sell your services actually take equity and distributions from companies and not just a straight fee or payment? So let's say 4% of the couple hundred hands that go up the second that you leave here. You could recoup your cost of this ticket x100 by changing one thing the way you do your offers. And if you do that, you could be like Robert, who basically knows everything a dude could know about lawn care. And this is me giving him a plaque for him buying a multimillion dollar lawn company based off his expertise. And the only way that he knew how to do this was very simple. And we teach lots of different ways to do this. There are plenty of different ways. But it's not just a revenue increase. There's something called, there's a value. If you guys know, you know the difference between a dollar made once and and a dollar made continuously over time. Do you know what the value is that's different upon sale? Or what's called the multiplier. Essentially this dollar, if it's a dollar, you can expect again and again and again as opposed to one off transaction. This one is worth anywhere from 3 to 10x. This one, it's the same dollar on an annualized basis, but you get a 3 to 10x benefit on it for being able to sell it. So if you guys have your yard mowed at your properties, if you guys have roofing companies come and do maintenance, if you guys have property managers come and they have any portion of what they sell you as transactional, and you can help them go to subscription or recurring. You have taken $1 and you have turned it into $3 or $10. You think you could ask for a portion of that? Yes, you could. This is what I call the equity equilibrium rule. The more value you give, the more value you get. And the last part I want to focus on here is how do you find these deals? How do you find deals where the owner will give you a percentage of their business? Well, you look for the companies that have the problems that you are uniquely situated to solve, and you offer them. And the formula is so easy that even Cody can do it with public math. It's called you need a company. You have to have something that already makes revenue plus pain. And then you need a potential painkiller, which is the thing you're gonna do to solve it. I don't wanna make it more complicated than that. Then it's not. But I wanna add one metric. My richest mentor, one of them that I told you about, Bill Perkins, he said a truth to me that I've never forgotten. When I asked him, he's built multiple successful companies. He's built an incredible life. He has a happy marriage, he has great kids. And I was like, bill, what do you think your secret is? How do you keep doing this again and again and again? What can I learn from you there? He kind of stopped for a second and he's like, I'm not smarter than anybody else. I don't work harder than anybody else. He's like, my only advantage is that I'm faster than anybody else. By the time they have thought about the idea, taken it to their investment committee, I've already put it in action, made three mistakes, and found a better way. And that is what I want you guys to do. The difference between winners and losers is speed, urgency. It is not that they know more, it's that they have a faster feedback loop. So if you are going to do any of this today, if you're going to take action, my one big ask for you is do not wait. Your money that you want, your life that you want, lies all on the other side of the things you say you will do but never did. And the second that you ask for what you want and you make change, your life will change forever. Now, there's three other graphs that are important here on how to make offers so good an owner asks you to do the deal. The first is what I call the equity leverage. Teeter totter. Basically, the more pain a business has, the more you can ask for, the more profitable a business is, the less you can ask for. The same on the other side. The more value you can bring, the more money or equity you can ask for. The less you can bring, the less you can ask for. And there's one nerdy slide y' all are ready to get. Lastly, nerdy for me. And I just want you to take a screenshot on it, because at some point, you're going to come across a deal. You're going to say, I sat with Cody Sanchez. You're going to say, I kind of remember how to negotiate it, but I can't. Exactly. And you're going to come back to this slide, and you're going to plug in three numbers, and those three numbers are going to tell you how. How to negotiate this deal. And I'm telling you this because sometimes a screenshot is the difference between a guy who never had equity in a company before to a guy who now is working on his second deal. By keeping it so stupid simple and realizing that pain plus problems times potential profit equals an opportunity so big it feels almost uncomfortable. And if we can internalize this, then everything can change that. If you do nothing else but you master the ability to understand words, manipulate them, and translate them into money, you will never be poor. Nobody can stop somebody who understands terms and the ability to negotiate them. You will never be poor in a salary. You will never be poorer working your own business. You'll never be poorer as in 1099. And yet this is something that we are all so uncomfortable with. You know, we have an analyst on our team whose name is Karim, and Kareem is from Egypt. Have you guys ever negotiated with an Egyptian? I mean, the thing is, most of us, if we are Americans or North Americans, we don't actually know how to ask for the things we want and make other people want them to give them to us. And I want you guys to have that difference. So just for you guys today, I'm going to give you what I call my equity to expertise terms. This is a bunch of worksheets and scripts that even Cream would be proud of. And you can take a little screenshot of it right there. It'll scan directly to you the truth of the matter is that if you build a life you never want to retire from, it is the greatest gift that not only you can give yourself, but a community like this, because it means that you can pass it off to the next generation. The happiest man I know might surprise you. He's a garbage man. A very tall garbage man, actually. And this garbage man used to be a software engineer, and he chose to go become a garbage man. Weird what's going on there. These two strapping young gentlemen, they wash windows. Do they look sad? You know what's weird is that I think we were told a bunch of lies. We were told that this is what would make us happy. How many of you guys are immigrants like I am, come from immigrant families. How many of your immigrant families were like, I'm Latina, so how many of them were like, no, honey, don't be a doctor, an attorney, or an investment banker. Go wash windows? And yet they had more ownership as a generation than we do. We are at the lowest level of. Of ownership in this country than we have ever been. And what do you think is better, being an accountant or owning a window washing company? I know the answer. There is no greater joy, no more difficult truth than this one word owner. I want you all to know that you have done the most difficult, but the sweetest thing, which is that you have put your skin in the game, in this game of ownership, to take back this country of ours. Because the truth is, if you do not, we stay that nation of serfs. We ask for permission for the things we want out of our life, and we hand nothing down because we have to have handouts instead of handouts. Ups. So it all starts with you. Thank you guys so much.