Equity Over Salary: The Secret to Attracting A-Players with Dakota Malone | The Better Than Rich Show Ep. 175

Solopreneurship is hard because you are trying to manage multiple skill sets, which is possible, but to me, it's just not worth it. I would rather have a very strong operator, some sort of backbone to leverage so that I can stay focused on what I'm good at, which is sales. And so I have two business partners with Community Solar Authority, one I've been working with for over a decade, who's my very first sales manager that taught me how to knock doors. And we've been together mostly our entire minus my sabbatical that I kind of mentioned earlier. We split off, but eventually we came back together.

Welcome back to the Beth and Rich Show. We are in for another treat today with Dakota Malone. And Dakota is someone who has done something that not many people have done. He has survived five 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 heart surgeries. We talk a little bit about that, but we spend most of our conversation talking about the sustainability of humans, sustainability of our planet, sustainability of building a life resume, self healing the unconscious mind. We talk about entrepreneurship and sales. It's a really inspirational conversation that we have a little bit of his personal journey of how he got to where he's at right now and how he's built several successful businesses. So I think you'll really enjoy another great conversation on the Better Than Rich show with Dakota Malone. Welcome to the Better Than Rich show with your hosts, Andrew Biggs and Mike Abramowicz. The Better than Rich show helps ambitious leaders who are on a mission to leave the world better than they found it, change their perspective on what's important, increase their income and impact, and systemize their life and business. If you've ever struggled with finding your purpose, have felt disconnected or distracted or found yourself going through the motions, this show will remind you that what you do matters and will reinspire you to chase your highest dreams. It's time for you to become better than rich. Welcome back to the Better than Rich Show. I'm your host today, Mike Abramowicz, and I am here with Dakota Malone. Dakota, welcome to the show, brother.

Thank you so much for having me, Mike. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. And you know, we're going to get into your story a little bit, but not every guest we've had has survived five heart surgeries. So I know we're going to unpack that a little bit. But I think the most fascinating thing about this is you're 30 years old and you have co founded a very successful community solar company. After being in the industry for four years. And before we clicked record, I asked you, I said, well, you're pretty young to do this. What was the story to get there? And as you started sharing that with me, I'm like, yep, I relate to that. So I figure if we started there with you just kind of unpacking a little bit from age 20, getting your foot into solar to where you're at now at 30 after going through solar and then co found your own solar company, I'd like you to start there because I think that sets a really strong foundation for where I anticipate we're going to start. We're going to explore of sustaining a growing company and stacking layers onto a growing company because that's something that we specialize in, we talk a lot about on the show. So why don't you unpack that, take us through that journey a little bit.

Dakota yeah, no, I'd love to. And I admire your work for many reasons, Mike. I remember when I first checked out your stuff, it's obviously in line with a lot of the same principles that I live my life by, sustainability being one of them. And of course thriving post five heart surgeries led directly into my line of work. And so I'm happy to kind of unpack that. You know, I was 19, 20 years old. I had graduated with my two year degree. I never wanted to go to college in the first place, but my parents made me. I remember handing them my two year degree and I was like, please leave me alone, I'm going to go figure out business. And I remember being in my room as a kid with like the blankets over my head with my first laptop at like 2am and I was the kid that was googling like jobs without a college degree that I can make $100,000 a year or more. And so I was priming myself from a young age of wanting that time freedom which came as a result of I had a very sheltered life as a child. I wasn't allowed to play sports. My doctors were telling me don't do this, don't do that. And it really didn't coincide with my rebellious personality. And so I was always very outward and like, I want to get out, I want to explore. And so, you know, I was 19, 20 years old. My friend was making a lot of money. He was posting it on Facebook about how he was doing door to door sales. And I remember messaging him, Mike. And I said, I don't care what you're doing, I don't care what you're selling. I'm in. And my very first work trip, it was like day two of the job, we drive out to Albany, New York and we're doing door to door sales in the energy space. And I remember it was day three, middle of winter, we were knocking some of the most dangerous streets in Albany and I was at a Stewart's gas station with a cup of coffee around my hands because I was so cold. I had zero sales experience, no reason to believe I would ever be good at door to door sales when my dad calls me. And he worked at a manufacturing plant where I'm originally from in upstate New York, basically saying, hey Dakota, I got you lined up with a job, you can come home now. Again, it was my third day and I remember telling my dad, hey look, I think I just want to knock doors instead. And he was like, what is wrong with you? Like you were throwing away an opportunity. And I look at that Mike as a fork in the road for me. You know, I was a young kid, I don't even think I was 20 yet, I think it was 19. And I had the choice, you know, I could go back and live a cushiony life, eventually make my way to six figures working in a manufacturing plant, work my way through leadership, et cetera, or I could really blaze my own trail. And again, for my rebellious personality and just my personal story of wanting to get out, I went ahead and chose to spend my twenties in this adventurous state. So a couple of fun facts. I've moved over 40 times in the last 12, 13 years and again, a lot of it was for work, just exploring different parts of the country. I've lived east to west coast, also did a sabbatical, took mini retirement over in Europe, which happy to talk about, obviously a big part of my journey, jumping into entrepreneurship, really going from self employed, learning the skill set of sales, and then stacking that on top of more and more skill acquisition to jump into entrepreneurship. And so my 20s was adventurous. I was all over the place. I was interacting with lots of different types of communities, from some of the poorest and most dangerous places in the world to some of the most rich and luxurious places in the world. Doing door to door sales with everything in between, really understanding the foundations of what entrepreneurship was. And from there I was able to kind of scale into what I'm doing now. And over the last six years I had mentioned I've been in the energy space for over a decade, but for the last half decade plus, my company has been serving as consultants to some of the most significant solar developers in the country and we have a streamlined interest in deploying access to renewables specifically for large users of electricity. And so we've built a seven figure business with sustainability principles in mind. And that's really off the backs of how I chose to spend my 20s, which was really interrelated to what my childhood was like, going through some of the experiences that I did.

Yeah, great. I relate fully. I mean especially being a Cutco guy. I mean I sold Cutco. My business partner sold Cut Go.

I forgot I read that about you. Yes, I loved that.

So full alignment there. I mean it's getting engineering degree and then my dad being like, you're gonna sell knives, you're out of your mind, you know. And then did it for 20 years and 19 and a half million in sales and 5,000 people I've coached and trained and all the foundational principles and everything that came from that. My wife, we met at Cutco. So just the direct sales approach and what it teaches is found and I absolutely love that. And your origin story, did you stay with the same solar company for those first four years and like build door knocking within the same or did you kind of bounce around to these different companies?

Yeah, so this was actually before I jumped into solar. I was in the energy space. I was in the energy space, yes. So and I had stayed with a single marketing group, but we jumped around at a different direct sales arm. So we were working with some of the largest energy suppliers in the country. I started in residential. We eventually got into exploring commercial and then large commercial. And then we saw the writing on the wall with renewable energy and the growth of the industry, basically the job security behind it. And it was 2017, 2018 when we chose to make the jump into the large scale commercial solar space.

Got it, got it. So you got obviously this strong foundation in sales, Big, strong foundation in sales, which I have a strong foundation in sales. But there's a lot of nuance that's different between sales and entrepreneurship. Sales is transactions, where entrepreneurship is systems. So if you're cool with that, I really like to kind of go direct our attention a little bit towards this nuance. From your perspective. I know from mine and I share this on the show a lot. But from your perspective, what do you find the difference between you're being a solopreneur, you're really good at sales, you're running your own independent selling company, your own independent selling business to. Now I'm going to be an entrepreneur and run a business where it's like I'm responsible for attracting, converting, onboarding and retaining my clients and also talent as I grow to scale. And there's a lot more systems and predictability and sops and flowcharts that really. I don't want to use the word need, but it requires some sort of attention that sometimes the sales guy, they're not prepared to go make that jump. So loss of word there, but you understand the question. I'm hoping so. What would you say here, please?

Yeah, for me, I just think they're totally different skill sets. For my experience 2016, I was the number one door to door salesperson in the company I was working for. I think they had over 2,000 plus agents in the world and I was number one. And so I was a ridiculously good salesperson and closer, but I was a terrible manager and I still am. So they're two totally different skill sets. And then you think about mapping that over into you have a very strong foundation in execution or sales or you're a strong operator. That does not map over into the full scope of entrepreneurship. And that's why I don't do my ventures as a solopreneur. I just don't believe in it. You know, I had mentioned kind of before we jumped on the call, Mike, I was just teaching a workshop for what I call my niche creator operating system. And so a big chunk of success for how I've grown Community Solar Authority has been through leveraging content and systems, et cetera, on top of what I can do in sales and also a lot of other things like strategic partnerships, which I know you've done an episode on before, all sustainable strategies. I think the real truth to it is that solopreneurship is hard because you are trying to manage multiple skill sets, which is possible, but to me it's just not worth it. I would rather have a very strong operator, some sort of backbone to leverage so that I can stay focused on what I'm good at, which is sales. And so I have two business partners with Community Solar Authority. One I've been working with for over a decade. He was my very first sales manager that taught me how to knock doors. And we've been together mostly our entire, minus my sabbatical that I kind of mentioned earlier. We split off, but eventually we came back together. And I've learned through other ventures that I want business partners I can trust because I've made that mistake before as well. And so one of my business partners I've been working with for a long time, he's also very strong in Sales and but then we have a co founder who is all about automations operations systematizing our business and to us that's been the biggest blessing. Mike, because without it we would just be sales guys running around with a very strong pedigree in sales. But we would fall apart at the seams because we don't have those systems and operations. And so literally everything that we do, very similar to a buy back your time principle, but instead of the delegation, it's really replacing. And so I went ahead and chose co founders where I could replace all of the stuff that I'm not good at and doesn't bring me energy. I can give it to them and I can focus on what I'm good at which is generating these larger partnerships and really closing the deals that are going to bring meaningful revenue to the company.

Cool. So I have two, maybe even three topics to explore here. So first, I love who, not how we mentioned it on the podcast. Dan Sullivan. I love Buyback your time by Dan Martell. We mentioned a lot on the podcast. I don't want to push back, but I want to like nudge you to give more explanation here because when I hear finding these types of who's, it's expensive. It's expensive with dollars, even though it's not expensive with time per se, maybe a little bit of time to find this expert, but I gotta spend dollars to find this expert. So if I'm an entrepreneur listening to this, they might push back a little bit. It's like, good for you, Dakota. My company doesn't have the money or the means to go find this expert. So therefore I just end up doing all this stuff myself. And I'm not really good at that stuff. But I also don't have the resources to go pay an expert at it. That's number one. I'd like for you to speak to that. And then number two is, hey Dakota, I've done that. I found an expert. I paid them top dollar. And then the foundation of my business was resting on the shoulders of this great who that when that who left, my business crumbled. So this person was so paramount to the success of the company that the company wasn't really that successful, was one really good person because the systems didn't come. I didn't have a strong infrastructure that I put this expert in. So I thought the expert would solve my problem. But the predictability of the system and the Playbooks actually couldn't handle when that person left. It put the business in a whirlwind. So those are really like two topics that, I mean, they're pretty large, but I speak to those and I'd love to speak to those with you because this is something that maybe is not talked about enough. So I'd like to hear your thoughts on those two topics, please.

Yeah, no, and it's funny because my answer is kind of similar. And of course I'm only going to speak with what's worked for me and my personal experience. And I'll also say that I do a lot of coaching as well. I've been as a result of learning to heal my own trauma from the physical trauma from five heart surgeries. I got really into hypnosis, which led into nlp, which is all about the programming we use behind the language. And I would say to your first point, Mike, to call someone out, which I don't have a problem doing, that language is really a limiting belief which is like I don't have the resources, I don't have the money to do that. And really you are only as limited as the beliefs that you carry. And here's my answer to the strategy. And again, this is just what I've done is I'm not coming in and hiring experts and paying them like we're very much a lean bootstrap startup. But I give equity because I want to build businesses with people who want to act like owners. That's how I've built my business now a csa. And it's how I'm planning on building my next business. And this is very similar to principles the Cody Sanchez's of the world teach. When you're thinking about buying up small businesses and then being an owner, not an operator, you're bringing in an operator to run that business. But the way that you do it is you don't give them a salary, you give them ownership. And even if it's something as small as, you know, 15 to 20% ownership plus a salary, then you're able to take that, keep them and really shift them into a mindset like they're here to stay, they are an owner of this business and there's just a greater level of responsibility that comes with that. Again, that's just my strategy. None of us have taken a salary from building csa as a salesperson. We have lived off of what we've killed for the last 10 years and we're perfectly comfortable with that lifestyle. But that comes with the territory. We're expert closers or really good salespeople. And I would never take a salary compared to uncapped earnings. And of Course, as an owner, you get the benefit of that revenue share model as well. And so when I think about bringing in an operator, I'm giving them equity and I'm saying, hey, in this case, his name's Nat. Amazing dude. I've actually, fun fact, I've never met him in person. He lives in a homestead down in Texas. He's got chickens running in and out of Zoom sometimes when we're on calls. And I love the dude. And we've been working together seamlessly for six years. And to me it's because we set our business up in the right way. You know, again, like, I have no problem giving out equity for someone who's going to show up to our business and really take their share of ownership, because that's what I'm looking for. It is expensive when you think about giving away equity, but the alternative is you have a business that's half baked and then like you said, you run into problems where if they leave, then your business falls apart. If you try to do it without them, then you're not buying back your time. And to me, I built CSA to be a lifestyle brand. And I know that I'm a terrible manager. We have no employees. We've grown our entire business model based off of sustainability practices like strategic partnerships. So where we're partnering with some of the largest energy companies in the world, same thing with solar developers. We're leveraging their millions and sometimes billions of dollars of resources and we're just finding ways to create synergy, which I believe the synergy created in partnership is much better spent than the energy wasted in competition. So I know that's a couple of kind of threads to leave with those questions, but that's really how I would think through some of that.

It's a great response. And that's exactly what my business partner did with me. Brought me in as an equity share and fucking pay. I earn what I kill, right? I mean to using your words. I think that's important and I really like that because it's a different mentality. I think a lot of business owners are approaching it one way where it's like, this is the dollars I have in the bank, so that's all I can afford. And I got to think about how to hire someone with the capital versus what you're sharing is like I'm going to give them an equity stake and I'm going to pay them like a percentage off of what I want to give them from the company and let them have an invested interest to help us grow this thing and be a partner in this. So too many people don't think that way or they're scared or they play a scarcity, like, maybe I don't, I don't want to give that up, or maybe they're not going to be motivated by that.

And the one last thing I want to drill down here and is if you think about the money you have in the bank to hire someone, you're not going to get an A player for whatever dollar amount you're thinking of. Especially if you're thinking in scarcity, like, oh, I can never do this. How am I supposed to, how am I supposed to take the money I'm earning? You'll never get an A player. And so the stats between, I guess, B + players and below compared to the work that you'll get from hiring and working with an A player is literally, and this is just data 5x Mike. So in order to give away the equity, in order to make that happen, to capture an A player, not only are you getting a 5x return, but you're also adding the ownership component. So they're just going to care. And to me, it's like a no brainer. I would never spend money to hire a B plus player when I could just partner with an A player. And again, I do the same thing in strategic partnerships. So when I'm not even talking about. And again, this is just personal preference because I don't want to manage people, I want to partner with people. I give them revenue shares based on what we're closing together. And to me, they're taking ownership in that we're being, we're able to run our core offer and we're taking that synergy and we're just getting more shit done. And so that's just kind of my final thought there is I would never do the former where I'm looking at the money in my bank account, trying to offload it into a B player that doesn't care. The returns just will never be there transparently.

Just a sidebar question to this. If hypothetically, your operator, I know that's not a strength of yours, as you mentioned, but if that operator disappeared and using this as an example, how is your operator making sure that the business stays predictable? Because if that's not the strength of the salespeople, so that way his position could be replaced or if he wants to cash out his equity. And as an example, he's like, all right, I'm out. And he says, give me my 15 or 20%, I'm out and you guys can figure it out on your own how documented is what he does. So that way it could be a little bit easier on you and your other partner to find a replacement for this person. So using this as the example, because someone listening to this might be on the flip side of that they're really good at the operations, but they're really terrible at the sales. But they found this really good salesperson and sales manager and sale this person who's running that section of the company and that person's crushing it. However, if that person cashes out and they just want to move on to the next thing, how might that, how might this business owner enforce documentation? So that way there's some level of predictability and scaling. So that way if that who wants to take a sabbatical or if that who wants to leave or cash out, the business doesn't necessarily have to suffer. I share this because when I was in my previous, when I was in my direct sales office, I left for eight and a half months because my son was born premature. For those that know the story, I was in hospital for eight and a half months where my office ran without me and still produced a quarter million in revenue and six figures in profits for me without me there. Because I put so much predictability and infrastructure in place where it could be run without me. And I think that's what a lot of our business owners that are listening to the show want is they want to have predictability. Predictability can come from a who, but we also want to make sure we're leveraging that who's intelligence to create predictability beyond the who. Well, how would you speak to that for how you're maybe hedging against that for your company or what counsel you might offer to somebody who asks that of you and your mastermind group?

I love this question. And I was recently on a different podcast. It's called the Manufacturing Executive Podcast by a gent named Joe Sullivan. And we were talking about this as a business sustainability principle, which is like you have a mass exodus of boomers leaving businesses, now they're selling their businesses as owners. But from a manufacturing perspective, you have all of this freaking knowledge with senior guys of 30 to 40 years. And if that business is not capturing that intelligence and writing it down and getting it into SOPs and training the younger guys, they are in for a massive upheaval in their business. Because as that talent exits, all of the knowledge does as well. And you know, I'm watching my dad, he's 62 he's ready to retire. He's been there for 38 years and he's been a direct result of launching some of some billion dollar initiatives for the manufacturer that he works for one of the largest aluminum recycling plants in the world. And I think about that in the same exact way that you posed the question Mike, for us, which is getting a little tactical. We have our entire business set up in Notion. So I have a very strong sales background as I've started to acquire more and more skills like content creation. My entire content creation system is automated so that I can build a niche B2B business using systems, automations and tools. And the same way with Nat as an operator, if he ever wanted to exit our entire business lives in notion. All of our SOPs are written down, all of them are plugged in. We are heavy into automation and on the other side of that is really about testing. I'll take sabbaticals and we all do. I just recently went to Costa Rica for two weeks and my philosophy is like, let's just exit the business and see what breaks because then it will really reveal what is flawed. And for us nothing went wrong. We got deals closed, business as usual. I got engaged in Costa Rica, I went to a music festival, I had a blast. And that's the other advantage of not being a solopreneur is I have two kick ass business partners that I can rely on. And again I think it's. Some people want to build a big business and be a big behemoth. Other people like us, we started and we still operate this way. Where I built our business to be a lifestyle business, I don't really plan on ever exiting it, especially as a brokerage. There's really no intrinsic business value which also keeps us within the business. The way that you grow something that doesn't have intrinsic value because for example, a lot of our clients are just one time payments, very similar to a real estate transaction. The way that you build value in a brokerage is that you get people to never stop selling. And so that's why we're so big on strategic partnerships, because our deal flow is crazy. We never stop selling. But it is just really like how you set up your business. What does that look like? But for us to kind of answer your question, Mike, is yeah, we're really large on SOPs. Nat could walk away for two weeks and nothing would happen. I have everything that I need directly in notion, so I could just, you know, within a couple clicks really get the idea of what we need to do. And we are thinking about, you know, how do we buy back our time and how do we step out of our business? Right now we have a lot of our time bought back because we've run through the book a lot of the same stuff that you teach at Better than Rich, which is like, go through the process, do the time audit, see where you can buy back your time. And for us, aside from partnership calls, selling, making content, steering the ship as an executive and building relationships, those are the three to five core tasks that I focus on every day. I have a lot of time freedom right now, and so don't my business partners, which is a luxury. We recognize that it's a privilege to have that. But it was from a result of building the business in a very specific way to set ourselves up for that. That's kind of how I think through that.

Yeah, it's a great response. And I'm with you on the lifestyle. My business partner right now, he's in Malaysia. He was in India for several months and now he's in Malaysia. And he's just like traveling wherever he's going, he's homeschooling his kids. And myself, you know, our newborn daughter, she's five months and my son is three. And last year we took. We took nine full weeks off last year in 2023. So 100% with you on the lifestyle. Different chapter, different season of life, I would say, you know, but you're entering there, congrats on the engagement. But having that foundation is really, really critical. And that's what we want for business owners. We want them to create a business that's a vehicle for them to pursue their life, not where the business becomes their life. And too many business owners get stuck in that trap a little bit. So I really am glad that you're bringing this to the listener right now. You mentioned strategic partnership a couple of times. I know this is a huge focus for me, for my pillar of the company that I'm focused on with brand development and sales as well. What would you say to somebody that is listening right now if they're not familiar with the term strategic partnership or if they're not, it's not a big piece of their strategy. Because the backstory of this question is too many business owners get stuck in the business working on like the stuff that anybody else can do. So we talk a lot about buy back your time administrative, get that offloaded, support with marketing and fulfillment, like getting a lot of that offloaded so you can spend time in strategic partnership because strategic partnership can Create a high level of predictability inside the business, and you need time. Only the owner, someone who's really skilled, can really add value to these partnerships. And I think about, like a real estate professional, they're like, only I can do. You fill in the blank where it's like, realistically, if you spend that much time doing what you're doing over here with showing houses or putting open house signs up or something like that, and you forged a lead generation with accountants and financial those and financial services or attorneys who are dealing with debt, divorce, disaster, death of loved ones. And they're constantly having houses that they need to sell. And all you're doing is working with those people that funnel you their leads as an example. And you have 10 partnerships that have 10 Ds every month or every year. You have a very predictable business of leads that are coming in now. You have your picking because you spent that time instead of showing one house, creating a partnership with someone that can get you 10 houses as an example, because they have this flow of your avatar of your ideal client. So that's like the framework. And I'd really like to kick it to you to just kind of riff on why, what strategic partnerships have done for you, how do you focus on them, where do you search for them, what counsel do you offer about this? I'd love to have you just jam on that because I think it's an underutilized strategy for business owners because they're like, I don't have the time to focus on that because I'm so focused on this. But it's like, buy back your time on this shit so you could focus on the strategic partnership. So let me have you just riff on that a little bit, Dakota.

Yeah, so many threads come up, and I guess it's just because it's such a big piece of my business. I had everybody shaken at my workshop because we did an exercise and I called it partner with your competitor. And it was like a thought experiment. If you have someone local in your market or larger, regionally, nationally, where you look at them as a competitor, go through and take the time and in the thought experiment and think about how you can find ways to partner. For example, creating content is a fantastic way to do it because what it does is it opens the door, it adds value without asking for anything. If you were a competitor of mine, Mike, I might get on and say, hey, I would love to riff with you. Let's jump on a podcast just like this and really talk about our story, how we help our customers and how we think through XYZ, it's 20 to 30 minutes, you create all the content for them, send it back, and all of a sudden it's like a Trojan horse into blossoming relationship. Let me take you back in my timeline because this was something I wanted to solve for when I was a door to door salesperson. Before I was an entrepreneur, I could only make money when I was knocking on someone's door. And I freaking hated it because I was working six days a week, sometimes seven. And I would wake up based on what city I was in. Like at one point I lived downtown Chicago. I would have to wake up at 6am to jump on the train to get to the northern suburbs where the office was, go through a sales meeting, drive out to the field, pick up the team. By the end of it, I wouldn't get home till 10 at night. And I was spending all day only making money when I was actually knocking on doors or when my team was. And so when I took a sabbatical in 2017, I essentially was fed up. My best friend called me. He was a K9 officer in Italy in the Air Force. And he said, why don't you just quit your job and move to Italy? And I was like, if you double dog dare me, I will literally do it right now. And he's like, I double dug dare you. And that was it for me. I was committed to figuring out in this case how to solve for remote work. And I told myself that I would not leave Italy until I was able to solve that problem for myself. Because I knew at that point I had skills. I wanted to get onto entrepreneurship, but I wanted to do it in a way where I could earn this time freedom. And so I was reading a lot of Tim Ferriss at that time, the idea of many retirements and taking these sabbaticals. So in this case, I quit work entirely. I left my team, left my office, dumped the whole thing. I had a lot of money saved up from door to door, which again was a blessing. I invested into crypto that year. I saw 13 countries in 2017. But really my core focus was learning what that looked like to earn money without spending my time trading, trading my time for money. That was really the foundation for what got me to going back to the question and answering that. Where I learned that instead of a one on one transaction of like, hey, Mr. Customer, I used to go to a manufacturing site, try to sell them, and if they did a transaction with me, great, I got the deal. But what I learned is that I Could just go make strategic partnerships and I could create a system where they would never stop bringing me deal flow. One on one transactions turned into our strategic partners bring us on average five to ten deals a year. For us, we're running like a Berkshire Hathaway model. I'm not trying to do a thousand transactions. I'm trying to do like 30, because I love to buy back my time. But those 30 freaking deals better be worth lots and lots of revenue. And that's how we built our business. Again, very intentional, very hyper focused. For example, like some of our clients right now, one of the largest water authorities in the country, one of the largest sewer authorities in New York, an international transportation company, they're worth $80 billion. All of these came from strategic partners. And the way that I think about it again is taking the energy that would have otherwise been wasted in competition. So when I would go to the manufacturing sites, they're like, hey, we've already got a partner that does our energy. And I'm like, cool. Well, they're not doing community solar, which is what we do. And if they are, like, there's no way they're as good as us because we've been doing this longer. We have access that nobody else has. Our businesses set up in a very streamlined way where our value prop is access because there's only so many solar farms, there's only so many a players in the space. And we got lucky. We were mentored very early so that we have relationships that nobody else can get. And so what we did was we took that value prop and we started going to these energy suppliers, energy brokerages. But then we just took it cross laterally. Mike. And we partner with construction companies, commercial real estate groups, real estate brokerages, architects, and anybody who's working with large, large users of electricity, which is our ideal client fit. I mean, we're partnered with a guy who sells gyms to municipalities. He sells parks and like workout equipment. And he goes in and says, hey, by the way, I'm partnered with community solar Authority. These guys also help municipalities think through improved operating profits by lowering electricity costs. Would you be open to a conversation with them? And so we set up our strategic partners in a way where all they're responsible for for is bringing us an introduction. We've leveraged that relationship because they've already done transactions together. They know like and trust that organization. They bring us into a zoom call. So we jump on zoom and then we deliver our unique offer. The way that we do it is we give away revenue, share it's not a fixed price, it's not capped, which is very unlike what every other billion dollar solar company does. So we're just differentiating ourselves. We have a total blue ocean strategy where nobody else can copy us because of our value prop and we just transparently leverage the shit out of it because we're willing to do what other people won't. Because we're a lean bootstrap startup. And really our comparison to other types of partnerships that our players can work with are those giant corporations that don't bend the rules, they don't get creative, that will never do a revenue share model. We're able to find really unique success in that area of strategic partnerships just by leveraging a couple of those principles that I talked about.

It's great. Dakota and listener, you obviously could go back and listen to what Dakota just said. For you specifically, that's listening to this, you might want to think, what's your version of this? How might you find who in your space? The simple in the simplest way has a pool of your target clients. So therefore, number one, you need to know who your target client is. And then number two, you need to know who has access to that target client. And then number three, how might you add value to that person or that group? Who has access to your target client? What Dakota shared, how does he add value to them? He gives them Rev Share. That's a tremendous value add, but maybe you can't or choose not to or aren't able to give Rev Share. What could you do to add value to them? What do they want? They want leads, do they want reputation? Do they want recognition? Do they want gifts? Do they want money? Do they want credibility? Do they want to give back? Do they have a charity or philanthropy that you want to get involved in? Imagine that was their path. All they wanted to do was you support their charity. Like what? Of course. Yeah, we'll promote your charity for you. Send us clients you don't necessarily know until you enter the corridor and have the corridor principal, like go have a conversation with them and see how might I be able to add value to you? I know how you could add value to me. I would love for you to be a referral source. I want to earn your trust and I want to support get that partnership. But I want, before you give me anyone, I want to add value to you. What are ways that I could add value to you, to your company, to your values? What's important to you? I did some research. These are some things that I saw that we could Align with. What do you think about that? That's what I would like for you as a listener. Just really explore because what Dakota is talking about can truly transform your business from something that is you fighting for the onesie twosie leads to create this flow of predictable lead flow into your business and have almost like a team, like you're having an external team doing some marketing for you. Dakota, would you anything you want to say about that before we kind of get take a little pivot in a different direction?

Yeah. Just to drill down deeper and get super tactical here. I had mentioned, I know we have a lot of mutual books on our shelves. I saw $100 million leads underneath. Buy back your time. But the strategic partnership is all about $100 million offer. And the idea is that the same way you make an offer to your end user, you need to figure out what your offer is to a strategic partnership. And so you use the same exact value equation. What's the dream outcome? What's your perceived likelihood of achievement? How fast can you make it happen? Meaning the time delay and then what effort and sacrifice can you remove? And so our value prop to our strategic partnerships has been look like a hero and add more value to your clients, help you keep them longer and generate additional revenue. And those three things, they want to look good to their clients. They're already taking care of them for xyz. But if we can come back and save them an extra hundred thousand dollars a year for free, which is our offer to end users, then all of a sudden the person that referred us looks like a badass. They're like, damn, Mike, you just helped us unlock millions of dollars in savings with solar. You're not even a solar guy. Thank you. So we help our strategic partners look like a hero and they naturally keep their clients longer because of the value we add. So they're like, look, Mike, you helped us save 100 grand with solar. Like, I'm never going to a different vendor now because of the value that you added. And then again, the last piece is the revenue share, which is like, you know, now you're generating revenue based off of an uncapped earning, which is huge. And then again, we're creating unique offers to our strategic partnerships the same way we do for our end users. It's obviously going to be different, but that's what your listeners can really think about is how do I create an offer so compelling to our strategic partners that they're going to want to work with me and nobody else.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. Dakota, the conversation is kind of just flying by. What did we not talk about today, Dakota? That you're like, man, I really think we should hit on that. Or I'd like to talk about that before we go to our final three questions and allow people to kind of follow up with you.

Hmm, that's a good question. I've loved this conversation, Mike. You know, obviously we have a lot of overlap, which is just awesome. And I've loved being in just such a flow state with you transparently. Again, from my perspective, as far as like skill stacking, I think the whole idea of another model, which is what I do as a content creator, building a B2B business and then using a content engine as a way to buy back your time. The content can be very similar to strategic partnerships, which is, yeah, you have to put in upfront work. Yeah, you have to create content. But when you can create it in a systematized way, kind of getting into $100 million leads. Alex, from Rosie's second book. You can really build a machine based off of content. And even as a solopreneur, going back to maybe you're a strong operator or maybe you're a strong salesperson. If you can add in and learn the skill of content creation and then systematize it. We don't need to go too deep. But just as a separate plug, I think that's something that the listeners would probably benefit from looking into. And obviously I know that you do a great job of that as well. So that's probably the last thing that I would plug in, which is just like, go do some more research, go read those couple of books, offers and hundred million dollar leads. And I feel like people could really pull a lot of good stuff out of that.

It's really relevant. It's relevant to me right now. I mean, my business partner started 2021 out of circumstance. Like I got to the hospital like, how can I replace my wife's income? And it was like, let's find out. So that was September of 2021. We officially partnered up 2022 and really starting to figure out what the product market fit is. And so we're still in that exploratory phase. And what's really fun about this, to your point, is my lead magnet going into the year, I switched it up just to like, what can I add value? And that lead magnet shifted to a 90 day delegation planning session with a 25 page workbook. I said, I will help you delegate all those administrative tasks. You don't have to use our service. I'll just work with you to help you figure out what, how to delegate your bottom 20%. And if you want to use our services to take that off of your plate, we'll do that. But at least you'll leave the conversation knowing what the bottom 20% is and how to get those offloaded. I just shifted that up. I had 40 something conversations in Q1 and 26 of them decided to use our service. Right? So it's like, that's a perfect example. Right now what I'm thinking is like, okay, how can I add value to the marketplace? I've been doing these free, I'm calling them get shit done workshops. They're GSD workshops where I'm hopping on and I'm training your chatgpt for you, training your chatgpt to get a process offloaded. So I started with your avatar, tone and brand. I call it atb. I will train your JPD for you and with you so that way somebody else can write content for you as you with a trained AI. Right now I'm doing inbox management. I will train you on how to organize your inbox and train your AI on how to organize your inbox so you can delegate it effectively to a virtual virtual assistant. I'm doing like communication guidelines, all these different things, but what's happening is why I'm doing these for free. Why am I for as little as 2 to 4 people to 10 to 20 people, why am I doing this as a lead magnet? Brand awareness. Well, to your point, Dakota is product market fit. I want to add a tremendous amount of value to the marketplace for free brand awareness and the right person happens to be there or knows someone, I'm also letting them know, hey, by the way, I'm also, if you like this style or know someone else that would like this get shit done model, in the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be launching a get shit done mastermind, where this is what I'm going to be doing behind the paywall. So I'm just doing it for free now. But if you wanted to continue doing some of this stuff for me, so I'm doing that for like two months free, this type of thing and then that leads into an offer. So listener, I'm really encouraging to think from Dakota's lenses, what can you do to add as much value to the marketplace before you just go start asking and taking? Like, what could you do to add value and give and demonstrate what your expertise is while simultaneously letting people see that and experience that get them a small result or maybe a large result, and they'll be like, damn, if this is your free stuff, Holy shit. I can only imagine how good your paid stuff is. All right, you got my attention now. And once you have their attention, then I could get them interested and then I could get them invested. But let's start with getting their attention and getting them intrigued before we just try to get them interested and invested right off the bat. I think too many people just try to get the kill using that word today that they kind of neglect the process a little bit. So I really love that you're bringing some of this to the table. So anything else you want to speak to before we transition to final three questions? Dakota?

No, I loved that.

Cool. We ask every guest three questions. First question, it could be rapid fire. What do you think the world needs most today?

Enhanced sustainability. Real quick, I look at life through the lens of sustainability, and I just straight up believe that when we can bedrock sustainability as a principle into the fabric of humanity, not just our businesses, not just the environment. For me, I look at it through four pillars, which is human, social, business, and environmental. When we can plug sustainability principles into those four aspects, our lives in our world improves. And so for me, I'm always thinking about that. How do we do that? How do we teach people how to do that? Because ultimately, sustainability is about what we want to preserve. As a person who believes in creation, like, we literally create the lives by the language that we use as individuals, but really as a collective, like, what the world needs more of right now is sustainability.

Appreciate that. I know we mentioned a couple books already. $100 million offers, $100 million leads. Buy back your time if there was one to two or three additional books that you would recommend listener to check out. What. What might that be?

Yeah. So aside from the ones that we answered today, there are a few books I read over and over and over again, and they're right behind me. So the first one would be Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Fantastic book on negotiations. I've read that book 14 times, and it's made me a lot of money. So I recommend that another one is called A Lion Tracker's Guide to Life by a guy named Boyd Vardy, and he grew up as someone who lived in the African bush. And it is a book on tracking, but he maps it over into what he does now, which is life coaching. Fantastic book. And the third, I would say I just wrote about it today, actually, which would be a book from Ryan Holiday series. He Writes a lot of good books, but this one in particular, it's called Courage is Calling. It's really about living as a virtuous person, which I believe is extremely important, especially as men. I would recommend any of Ryan's books, but Courageous Calling has been at the top of mind for me. And then maybe a fun one, which we didn't really get to speak on today. But I'm a big believer in, like I said, hypnosis, initiations. I'm a student of shamanic medicine. There's a book I've read called Crossing the Boundaries between Nature and Psyche, and it's all about initiatory practices, getting out into nature and how it really starts to blur the lines between what is myself, what is outside of myself, and the way the psyche opens up and expands our awareness, which is super important from my perspective, for personal growth. The author's name is slipping me at the moment, but it's called Crossing the Boundaries between Nature and Psyche. That's a fun little bonus I'll throw in.

Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, we've had some of those deep conversations. Untethered Soul and Power of now and Plant Medicine. And we've had some of those deeper conversations on the show, for sure. If anyone's interested, Mike Bursik's episode was really, really strong about that. But, Dakota, final question. What does it mean to you to be better than rich?

Amazing question. Yeah. I had also just written about this recently, and I'm also reading a book on actually indigenous wisdom. And it really is centered around, like, what are the real luxuries of life? And for me, it goes way beyond, like, quote, unquote, being rich and even being wealthy. You know, for me, I've just got some of them here. Like, the real luxuries of life are being present, peace of mind, slow mornings, people you love, the ability to serve the world, the freedom of choice, a good night's sleep, the art of movement, community, and people who value you, connection with the land, healthy relationship with food and sacred space and ceremony. To me, that is what is actually important in life and the real luxuries. And again, when you can buy back your time, you can start to embody those principles of being better than rich. Because life is so much more enriching than the money in our bank accounts or the investments that we have. It's really something that, point blank, is accessible to anybody. Anybody can walk outside, get some vitamin D, let the sun hit their skin, be barefoot, grounded to the earth, take a deep breath, do a breath, work, practice, get grounded, become present, find peace, have the awareness. All of this stuff is available to everybody. You do not need to be an entrepreneur. You do not need to have millions of dollars. You do not need anything to access the real luxuries of life. And so those are some of the things that I think about when it comes to being better than rich.

That's great, Dakota. I'm sure people are going to want to stay in touch with you and follow your journey and be a part of what you're part of. Where could they go to learn more?

Yeah, I encourage people to jump onto my LinkedIn, which is just LinkedIn.com in DakotaMillone. I talk a lot about commercial solar, which I know is very niche. And you know, I only have about 5,000 followers at the time, but that's why I built my niche creator operating system, because you don't need hundreds of thousands of followers to build a really big business. I am going to be launching some additional ventures in the next couple months here and so maybe I'll start to post about some of that. But I encourage people to connect with me on LinkedIn. I post a lot about entrepreneurship, human sustainability and things outside of commercial solar, as well as a lot of like, business and tactical stuff about like, hey, here's what's working for my business, go apply it to yours. So if you can skip over the specific stuff for our end users and partnerships, there's a lot of wisdom that I just kind of spill all out onto LinkedIn. That's why I encourage people to follow me.

Great. LinkedIn.com n DakotaMillone we'll put that in the show. Notes Dakota, thank you so much for your time today. Listener as always. Thank you. Quick housekeeping items you probably already know. I recently launched our Get Shit Done mastermind and as I'm recording this in May, we haven't released it, but when you're listening to this, it's probably just official release. I just had three people sign up and it's not even launched yet, so I don't know how many. I'm going to cap it out. I'm probably thinking like maybe 10. So it might already be full, but the whole point is each month we hop on for 90 minutes to get shit done. You figure out where your lead domino is and then once a quarter we hop on for four hours to get what that lead domino is and get that done. So it's concentrated, pays for you and, and your assistant or you and your key player, your key person, your operator, to hop on with me and other business owners expert led facilitation breakout room to actually get shit finished. It's not necessarily collaboration or education, it's GSD installation implementation. So if you haven't seen information about it, you should. And I don't exactly know where that would be, so just email me mikeethenrich.com because like I said, it's not launched officially yet, but mikebetterthanrich.com send me an email or just go to better than rich.com it probably is on the site, so take care everyone. As always, Leave Today Better than you found it Till next time on the Better Than Rich Show. Cheers. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the show, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review to catch all the latest from us. You can follow us on Instagram betterthanrich and join our Facebook group at the Better Than Rich Show. Thanks again for listening. We look forward to seeing you next time. And remember, Leave today Better than you found it.