ALL OF MONEY Explained in 42 Minutes (No BS, No Fluff)

Nobody ever taught you money, and that's why it causes so much stress in your life. Our school systems teach us nothing about money. Nothing. It's pathetic. Money's just numbers in and numbers out, isn't it? See, that's what people get thrown off, I think. I think that's the root of a lot of financial problems for amateurs and professionals. When the Finra Foundation quizzed more than 25,000 American adults on 7 basic money questions, only 27% of them could get 5 of them right. If you want to be rich— forget rich. If you just want to have basic financial security, you have to pay yourself first. There's 3 basic parts to a financial statement: income statement, balance sheet, statement of cash flow. You can teach a monkey that, but our schools don't teach that. Understanding how money works decides what you can say yes to, what you get to walk away from, and how much of your life actually belongs to you. Most of us don't speak the language of finance, and I think that's on purpose. I think people in finance do not want you to know the secrets to wealth because that makes it easier for them to keep it. In 1992, Daymond John was living with his mom in Queens. He didn't have investors, no degree in business. He had $40 to his name. His mother had taught him how to sew, so he spent that $40 on fabric and made a few dozen tie-top hats.

I go to the store, get $40 worth of fabric. I come home, I give my mother the stuff to sew the hats, and she says, I'm not sewing this. You're sewing this. I said, oh crap, now I got to work at this? I sew the hats and then all of a sudden, I have all these hats and only one head.

So he took them to a street corner and sold every single one of them in a day for $800.

That's when I went out and sold those hats outside on that Good Friday, and I sold $800 worth of hats in 1 hour.

The hats worked, so he expanded into shirts and jerseys.

Then I would start going to the Black Expos where there was like basically a flea market on the road, and I would try to sell shirts there.

His mom believed in it enough to mortgage the house they lived in for $100,000, and they turned half the house into a factory.

She said, this is all we have. Why don't I go out and I take a loan on the house and, you know, you manufacture, deliver the clothes and put the money back in.

Then he took samples to the Magic Apparel Show in Las Vegas and walked out with $300,000 in orders.

I went to the Magic Trade Show, the trade show of the fashion industry, and I wrote $300,000 worth of orders.

But here's how that business actually works. The stores don't hand you money at the show. They order, then they pay you 30, 60, 90 days after you deliver. Meanwhile, you buy the fabric upfront and you have to pay the people who were sewing it. So Daymond had $300,000 of orders and nothing coming in for months. The $100,000 from the house went into the fabric and the, and the employees. He got around $75,000 of the orders made, and 4 months later that money was gone and the stores still hadn't paid him yet. So he went to a bank, they said no. He went to another bank, they said no. He went to 27 banks and every single one of them turned him down.

I went to 27 banks, I got turned down.

The orders kept coming in the whole time until he had about $1 million of them Sitting there and he couldn't fulfill them. His mother took what was left of their money and put an ad in the newspaper. It said, $1 million in orders need financing. 33 people called.

And then mom again comes to the rescue and says, I have an idea. She takes out an ad in the newspaper for, uh, says something like, $1 million in orders need financing. And 33 people call that ad.

One of them was a textile division of Samsung. who wanted to test the urban market.

One was Samsung's textile division.

They agreed to pay to get his orders made, but they had one condition. He had to do $5 million in sales within 3 years. He did $30 million in 3 months. And by 1998, FUBU was doing over $350 million a year in worldwide sales. Orders aren't money. You can have a lot of sales and still have nothing in your bank account. Now, a lot of people think, okay, this doesn't apply to me because I may not have a business or I'm not making enough money yet. For any of this to matter. You're thinking money stuff starts once there's money, but you don't need a business for any of this. If you get paid and you pay bills, you're already making these decisions every month. You're just making them without knowing the rules of money, and it costs you real money. If you're carrying a credit card balance at 20%, that's costing you today whether or not you ever learn about what compound interest is. All progress begins with telling the truth. So here's the truth. You're not bad with money. You were just never taught about it, and you can learn it. So here's how money actually works start to finish. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Believe. Money is a skill, not a personality. So you've probably said at some point, I'm just not a numbers person. Only 27% of adults got 5 of 7 basic money questions right. That's not about who's good with numbers. It's about what nobody actually teaches you. So being leads to doing. If you decide you're the person who understands money, you'll start opening the bank app instead of avoiding it. You'll start reading the statements instead of just the total. You've been waiting until you feel ready to look at your money. It doesn't work that way. It works the other way around. You look at it and then it stops being scary every time. So once a week for 20 minutes, you look at 3 things: what came in, what went out, and what is actually left. That's it. Don't worry yet about budgeting or giant spreadsheets with 400 rows. Just looking on purpose every week until it stops scaring you. And you know when the best time to start is? Right now. How about right now? Open the app while I keep talking. The number in there is the number whether you look at it or not. Looking doesn't cost you anything. Learn your 3 numbers before anything else. Almost every money disaster comes from mixing up revenue, profit, and cash flow. So revenue is what comes in, profit is what's left over, and mixing those 2 up is how somebody with a busy business ends up with an empty bank account. The third The second one is cash flow, and this is about timing, and this is the one that actually kills a lot of businesses. You can run a profitable business and still go broke because the money you're owed arrives later than the bills you have to pay. Let's look at a real example. Let's look at a dance studio. On the year, the business was profitable. Looks great. But I pulled in his last 3 months, month by month. October was negative $5,300. November was positive $2,500. December was negative $900. So across the quarter, he was down $3,700 while believing he was doing fine. His fixed costs were about $20,000 a month before anything else happened. $11,000 of rent, $2,000 of insurance, instructor pay, software, cleaning. So the only question that matters is how much he has to bring in that month to cover it. $20,000 keeps the door open. So he set his target at $25,000. So there's something left at the end. Now he's not guessing anymore. He has a number to target. You have that number too, whether you're running a company or just your household. Add up what has to go out every month, no matter what. That's the floor. Once you know that, you know exactly what the month has to bring in. And if that number scares you, that's exactly why you need to know what it is. You can't cut a cost that you've never written down. So put every expense on one page before you decide anything. Then take what's actually in the account and divide that by your monthly floor. So if you got $30,000 sitting there and you need $10,000 a month, you have 3 months. That's your runway. With runway, you can say no. Without it, you say yes to anything 'cause you need the cash. Somebody with 6 months of runway can walk away from a bad client. Somebody with 3 weeks says yes to everything, including the work that's gonna make the next 3 weeks worse for you. If your runway's under 3 months, that's the number to fix before anything else in this video. Your income problem is usually a price problem. If you want more money and you're an owner, the fastest change isn't cutting your expenses, it's what you charge. And I'll show you my own numbers so this isn't just some theory. So my mastermind is $50,000 a year. My growth strategy coaching program is $15,000 for 4 months. If somebody can't do that, we have smaller versions that people can join. I said those in that order on purpose. It's called price anchoring. When the first number somebody hears is $50,000 and the $15,000 sounds reasonable and ones after That sound like a bargain. If I started with the lowest price first, nobody would ever pay me more than that. And when you do raise your price, raise it on the next new client, not the ones you already have. You get the new number without a single awkward conversation with existing clients, and you don't get paid for the hours, you get paid for the result. Somebody selling 6 coaching sessions is selling time. Somebody selling, I'm going to add $200,000 to your revenue this year, is selling an outcome. And an outcome can be worth 10 times the price Of the time, selling to a smaller number of people at a serious price is also just easier to run. Low-ticket offers at fifty bucks a month needs thousands of customers, a marketing machine, and a support team. That's a real business, but it's a much harder one to build first. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. Make a list of 50 people. So here's what I do if I had to rebuild. my income starting Monday with no ads and no audience? I'd write down 50 names, not 5,000 followers, 50 specific people who could each spend $50,000 with me in a year or send me 3 people who will. Real names, real companies, real people who already have the money and a problem that I know how to solve. Then I wouldn't pitch a single one of them. I'd start a show and invite them on as a guest. An invite is the easiest yes in business because you're offering somebody 45 minutes to talk about their own work. You're leading with a give instead of an ask. And after the recording, when the relationship is warm and real. You offer them a second opinion on something they're working on at no cost. You look at it, you tell them the truth, you give them your actual thinking from your expert opinion. And some of those turn into clients. Some send you 3 clients each. One of my clients works with home service businesses doing $10 million or more, where a normal client is worth $40,000 to $100,000 a year, and one platform-level deal is worth $1 million a year. At that size, you don't need 50 wins, you need 2. And if you don't have a business yet, this still works. Write down 50 people who could hire you, who could promote you, or who could hand you The opportunity that changes your entire year. You're not asking any of them for anything upfront. You're making yourself useful to 50 people who could hire you one conversation at a time. Your 50 will look different than mine.

Cool.

Write it anyway. It's the single highest value document in your business, and it costs you an afternoon of work. Start with 10 names tonight. 10 is enough to tell you whether this list is something that can be real or not, or whether you've been just guessing about who your customer actually is. Pay yourself like an owner. So a job pays you, takes a tax, and hands you what's left over, right? A company earns, pays its costs, and then you choose how the money reaches you. That choice is worth a lot of money. So in Canada, where I am, money left inside a corporation is taxed at roughly 19 to 20%, while a big personal salary can hit at around 50%. So pulling out every dollar the second it comes in is one of the most expensive habits an owner can have. I pay myself a small, steady salary, so I have a clean personal record for things like the mortgage, and the rest stays in There are legitimate costs a business can carry too. If you work from home, a share of the mortgage interest, the utilities, the internet can be a business expense because that's generally where the work happens. It usually gets worked out by space. So if your office is 1 room out of 8, that's about 12% of your house. So about 12% of those bills is a business cost. Keep the receipts. Let your accountant run the actual numbers. Your country's rules are going to be different than mine, and I am not your accountant. So take this to a good one, but go with the right question. Don't walk in asking, How do I just pay less tax? Walk in asking how to structure what you pay yourself. That's now an owner's question and mindset, and it's worth thousands or tens of thousands a year. Buy your time back. Eliminate, automate, delegate. So buying your time back is how you make more money. So do it in this order: eliminate, automate, delegate. Eliminate first because it's free. So go through your week and find what nobody actually needs. So I used to write up minutes after every mastermind meeting. It took me real time. And one day I realized Nobody was reading them. Not one person. So I stopped. And what happened? Nothing happened. Nobody cared. You've got something in your week right now that nobody is reading either. So write down everything that you did last week. The parts that nobody would miss are the parts that you cut out. Automate is second. So anything repeatable that follows the same steps every time should be handled by software or AI instead of you and can be done at 11 PM. Delegate last and start much smaller than you think. You can hire somebody for an hour a day. That, that's it. That's how I started. It's cheap enough that it won't hurt you if it goes Badly, and it teaches you the real skill. The skill isn't hiring, it's handing work off and then letting somebody do it their way. So do it in that order. You'll want to jump straight to delegate, and then you're paying somebody to do work that you should have deleted or should be handed off to automation. And there's a number underneath all of this that you can actually calculate. Take what you want to earn in a year and then divide it by about 2,000 working hours. So if you want $200,000, your time is worth roughly $100 an hour. Now look at what you filled your last week. If you spent 6 hours on something you could hand off for $20, $25 an hour, you spent $600 of your own time to avoid paying $150. So you lost $450 and it felt like you were being strategic and careful. Then make the rest of it boring. So once you're earning money and keeping money, growing it should be the most boring part. For the first 10 years, compounding barely does anything. Then it does almost everything. So take $10,000 growing at 5% a year. After 10 years, it's worth about $16,000. Give it 30 years, it's worth $43,000. The $10,000 earned around $6,000 in its first decade and around $27,000 in the last 20 years. The extra 20 years did that, not a bigger return. That's why waiting is so costly. The last 20 years are where the money actually grows. If you wait to start, those are the years that you're giving up. Put it in an index fund that holds the whole market and just leave it there. You don't have to go and research individual stocks, not because you couldn't learn, but because those hours are hours you're not putting into your own business or career. And that's what actually changes Your income, and leaving it all in cash isn't actually safe. Prices in America are roughly 22.5% higher than before 2020, so money sitting still has been losing real value this entire time. One more thing: compounding works against you too, and it works a lot faster. So credit card rates are sitting around 20%, and new card offers are often higher than that. Compounding works on debt as well, and at 20%, it grows faster than any investment you're going to own. There is no investment you're going to find that reliably beats paying off a balance at 20%. So if you have a balance on your credit card, clear it before you. invest a dollar. It's the best guaranteed return you'll ever get. You can learn this faster than you think. Nobody taught you any of this, and it isn't your fault. What you do now, though, is, is up to you. Daymond John didn't have a finance degree when he took those hats out to that street corner. He learned it the hard way. And the worst of it came after the mortgage money ran out with about $1 million in orders that he just couldn't fill and 27 banks saying no. A bird sitting on a tree Isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch; it's in her wings. So if you have the ability, then you have the responsibility, and you have the ability. Congratulations! One video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn the twenty forgotten businesses that can make you wealthy. The businesses that actually make people rich are almost never the ones that people brag about at parties. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, the typical self-employed family in America has a median net worth of three hundred eighty thousand dollars. Over 4 times the $90,000 of a family who only works a regular job. So the boring little business that you'd be too embarrassed to tell your friends about could be the exact thing that changes your entire family tree. So let me tell you about a guy named Nick Huber. Nick went to Cornell, one of the best schools in the country. He could have walked into any shiny tech job or startup that he wanted, but instead, while he was still in college, he started a business helping students store their stuff over the summer. Not glamorous, just picking up boxes and mini fridges and keeping them safe until fall. That little idea grew into a company called Storage Squad, and in 2020, he sold it for $1.65 million. But this is where it gets really good. He took what he learned and went all in on the most boring business you can imagine: self-storage units. Metal boxes in a parking lot that people rent to hold their junk. And today, his company Bolt Storage owns around 1.9 million square feet of storage across 62 locations in 11 states. Nick built a fortune out of the kind of business you'd normally drive past without a glance, and he says it out loud. He started a whole platform called the Sweaty Startup because he believes the Shark Tank and tech world has poisoned people into thinking that you need a genius idea to get rich. You don't. You need a real business that solves a real problem and throws off real cash. The unsexier the better, because nobody wants to compete with you. When everyone else is chasing the same trendy app idea, the field is crowded and it's pretty brutal. But how many of your friends are racing to start a storage facility or a bin cleaning route? None. That empty field, that's where the money is. Your purpose comes from your pain. And Nick's whole message is that the unglamorous grind everyone avoids is exactly where the wealth has been hiding for you the whole time. He could have chased status. He chose cash flow, and cash flow is what ultimately set him free. Now here's what you might be thinking: those businesses sound boring, and you didn't dream about cleaning gutters or scooping dog poop when you imagined being successful. And I get it, but that feeling is exactly why these businesses become so profitable. The reason nobody starts them is the reason they pay so well. When a job sounds unglamorous, the competition, it goes away, it vanishes, disappears. The customers can't shop you around, and you get to charge what you're worth. Rich people don't chase what looks impressive. They chase what puts cash in their pocket every single month. And a lot of these you can start for a few hundred dollars on the weekend while you keep your current job if that's your situation. So let go of the idea that your business has to look cool. It has to work. Let me show you exactly what I mean. The boxes and machines that pay you while you sleep. Start with the businesses that basically run themselves once they're set Self-storage, like Nick Huber built, runs at 30 to 45% profit margins with an average occupancy rate of around 92% across the country. People pay every month and mostly forget that they're paying. Then there are laundromats. A guy named Dave Menz bought a beat-up, struggling laundromat on Craigslist for $85,000. Everybody thought he was crazy. Today, his company Queen City Laundry runs 4 locations in Cincinnati with 250 machines and brings in well over $1.8 million a year at close to 40% margins. A single machine can make you around $90,000 a year. And then there's vending. Adam Hill started Hill Vending by himself with zero experience in 2014. He now runs over 100 machines across more than 40 locations, pulls in about $700,000 a year, and does it working roughly 2 days a week. 2 days a week. ATM routes are another one worth a serious look. Here you place cash machines in busy shops and bars and you collect a small fee on every withdrawal. A single well-placed machine can bring in $300 to $500 a month for almost no work, and you can start with just a few machines and grow from there. These businesses share one beautiful trait: the machine does the selling. You're not trading every hour for a dollar. You set it up, you service it, and it keeps ringing that register while you're at your kid's soccer game. That's the difference between a job and an asset. And these are the assets you can actually afford to buy. You don't need to invent anything. You just need to own the box, plug it into the spot where people are already spending money, and let it do the work for years. The recurring money routes nobody talks about. The real magic word in business is recurring. That means the Customers pay you again and again without you having to sell them again and again. So look for the boring jobs people need done on a schedule forever. Trash bin cleaning is a perfect example. You show up after trash day with a hot water rig and sanitize people's disgusting garbage cans. You can start it for as little as $400 to $800, charge $25 to $35 a month per household, and run 35 to 50% profit margins. One operator running a tight route 35 stops a day can pull in over $1,000 in a single day. Pet waste removal is the same story, just with dog yards. Startup costs under $2,000 for a solo operator. You charge $85 to $150 a month per yard to scoop. And if you do the work yourself, margins run 70 to 80%. There are companies doing millions a year picking up dog poop. Draft beer line cleaning is another one that could be awesome. Every bar has to clean its beer lines every couple of weeks or the beer tastes terrible. So you show up on a schedule and you charge a flat fee per visit, 35 to 50% margins. Junk removal belongs here too. People always have a garage, a basement, an estate full of stuff they need gone, and they pay $150 to $600 a load to just make it disappear. You can start with a truck and a strong back, right? And scale into multiple crews. Add in pressure washing where you blast the grime off driveways and decks and house sidings for a few hundred dollars a job with margins over 50%. And you've got another simple route business. See the pattern? None of these are one-time jobs. You land the customer once and they pay you month after month, year after year. That's how you build income that shows up even if you don't. The ick factor businesses that print money. So here's a rule that will make you rich. The more disgusting or uncomfortable the job, the fewer people will do it and the more you get to charge. Grave care is a beautiful example. Families move away and can't tend to their loved ones' headstones. And cemeteries only mow the grass, so you clean and maintain grave sites. You can start for three to ten thousand dollars, charge a hundred to three hundred dollars per cleaning, and because your material cost is almost nothing, margins run sixty to eighty percent. Luxury restroom trailers are another one. Nobody wants to rent a nasty plastic porta potty at a wedding, so high-end mobile bathrooms rent for twelve hundred to two thousand dollars per event at forty to fifty percent profit margins. A small fleet in a growing city can throw off a quarter million a year in owner's cash flow. Even something as simple as dryer vent cleaning fits here. Clogged dryer vents are a leading cause of house fires. So homeowners and apartment managers pay $100 to $300 for a job that takes under an hour, and margins are north of 60%. Portable toilet rentals for construction sites work the same way. It's not pretty, but every job site needs them. They rent by the month, and one route can throw off serious recurring money. The thing that they all have in common is they make people a little uncomfortable to think about. That discomfort is your profit margin. While everyone else is fighting over the pretty businesses, you get a quiet lane all to yourself where you can charge your premium and barely have any The businesses the law forces customers to buy. Now, this is one of the strongest kind of boring businesses of all, the ones that the law requires. So when a customer is legally required to hire you, you never have to convince them. So take commercial kitchen exhaust hood cleaning. Fire codes force every restaurant, every school, every hospital kitchen to deep clean their exhaust systems on a schedule. Or they get shut down. So you work overnight when the kitchen is closed, charge $500 to $2,000 a job, run 40 to 60% margins. A solo operator with one helper can bring in $10,000 to $30,000 a month. Chimney sweeping is the same. Safety codes call for annual inspections of anything that burns wood. So it's steady repeat business at $120 to $390 a sweep. And it's so reliable that big investors are now buying up chimney companies. That's not a joke. There are private equity firms rolling up chimney sweeps. Commercial fire inspection, backflow testing on water systems, dryer vent cleaning in apartment buildings. All of it is driven by rules that never go away. The customer isn't buying because they want to, they're buying because they have to. And that makes your income about as stable as it gets. So you're not at the mercy of trends or the economy or an algorithm or whatever's popular this year. You're riding on a rule that isn't going anywhere. And rules like these usually get stricter over time, not looser. That means your customer list only grows. Once you become the reliable person a building manager can call, you often keep the account for years, and they refer you to every other manager that they know if you do a good job. The skilled trades you can run out of a van. You don't need a storefront as well to get rich. Some of the best boring businesses fit in the back of a van and go straight to the customer's driveway. Asphalt seal coating is a great one. So driveways and parking lots need to be resealed every couple of years. Years, and you can start with a basic setup for under $3,300. Pros charge $100 to $250 an hour, run 40 to 60% margins, and a single parking lot can pay for your whole starter kit. Mobile auto glass paired with mobile sensor calibration is another. When someone cracks a windshield today, replacing it and recalibrating the car's cameras runs $800 to $1,500 a job, and one mobile technician can do $150,000 to $200,000 a year. Mobile car detailing is another easy one. You bring the soap, the water, vacuum right to someone's driveway and hand back a car that looks brand new, charging $150, $300 a vehicle with very little overhead. Even mobile bike repair, fixing bikes in people's driveways can hit 6 figures in year 1 because you skip the expensive shop rent that everyone else is paying. So notice what all these have in common. The customer stays home, you come to them, and that convenience alone lets you charge more than the guy with the fixed location. So the lesson here is pretty simple. A skill plus a van plus a phone number beats a fancy office every time. Your customers don't care where you're based. They care that you show up that you did the work and you made their problem go away. Deliver that and you'll never run out of people who are willing to pay you. The businesses you can start from your kitchen table. So not every boring business needs a van or a machine. Some of the best ones you can run from a laptop with almost no money down. Virtual bookkeeping is a quiet giant here. Every business on earth needs clean books. Most owners hate doing the books and good bookkeepers are in short supply. You can learn the software, charge businesses a monthly retainer, And stack up recurring clients from your spare room. Accounting firms are so desperate for reliable help that they'll pay a premium for it. Commercial cleaning is another one that you can start lean, just you and a vacuum cleaning offices at night when everyone else has gone home. Small operators run at healthy margins, doing fifty to sixty thousand dollars a month before they even hire a team. And here's one that's built for right now: in-home senior tech support. Older people are getting left behind by phones and apps and passwords, and their families live too far away to help. You go to their home, you patiently set things up for them, you answer their questions and teach them, charging around $75 an hour. You can start it for under $1,000. The point is, if you've got a skill and a little bit of patience, you can begin with almost no money at all. The one thing you truly need is just your first customer. Land one, do incredible work, ask them who else they know, and let that snowball effect carry you. How the smart ones turn boring into a future. So here's the final piece, and it's how the truly wealthy play the game. It's not enough to run one boring business. The real money comes comes from owning them and then combining them. So a single small business like an accounting firm or a chimney company might sell for around 5 to 7 times its yearly profit. But if you buy up 30 or 40 of them, put them under one name, one back office, one system, the whole bundle can sell for 13 times profit or more. Same businesses, but worth almost double just because you organize them together. Big investors will pay a premium because they'd rather write one big check than chase 40 of these small ones. And that gap, buying at 6 times profit and selling at 13 times times is where generational wealth gets made. And it's happening right now in the most boring industries you can name: plumbing, HVAC, uh, pest control, uh, landscaping, chimney sweeps. So think bigger than a job that you own. Start one boring business, get it running without you, then buy or start another and another. And each one is a building block. Being leads to doing here. So the day you start thinking like an owner instead of an operator is the day that the whole game starts to change for you. You don't have to You don't have to do all of this at once. You just have to start with one, prove that it works, and let it teach you the rest. That's a great start, and it's within reach for you starting this week. Your unfair advantage. So the businesses I just walked you through, they're not going to impress anybody at a dinner partner. That's the point. While everyone else is chasing the shiny new idea, you can steadily build real cash flow with your laundromat, your van, or a route that nobody else wants. You don't need to be a genius. You just need to be willing to do the boring but valuable work that other people Ready isn't real, so don't wait around to feel ready. Pick one, start small today, and let it grow. Now let's learn cash flow mastery, how to think in systems instead of salaries. You will never build real freedom from a salary alone. You're not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity, a piece of a business, to gain your financial freedom.

Profits are better than wages.

Wages make you a living, which is fine.

Profits make you a fortune, which is super fine.

Gallup found that only 31% of American workers are actually engaged at their jobs, the lowest level in over a decade. This is about more than money. It's about whether you spend your one life building a machine that pays you or renting out your best hours to build a machine for someone else. Let me tell you about a man who figured this out as a teenager with almost no money. No money in his pocket. His name was Fred DeLuca. Back in 1965, Fred was just 17 years old and stressed about how he was going to pay for college. He wanted to become a doctor, but the money wasn't there. He didn't have it. So at a backyard barbecue, a family friend named Pete handed him an idea and a $1,000 loan: open a sandwich shop. That summer, Fred opened one tiny sandwich shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was not glamorous, and that first shop barely made any money. But Fred didn't want to just run a sandwich shop for the rest of his life. He wanted to understand the system behind it so he could repeat it. He got obsessed with the process— how to make the sandwich fast, how to run the store lean, how to teach a total stranger to do it exactly the same way he did. And once he had a system that actually worked, he did something incredible. He didn't open store number 2 by himself. He taught other people to run his system and let them open the stores so the whole thing could grow without Fred standing behind every single counter. That one idea, turning a shop into a repeatable system other people could run, grew Subway into more than 40,000 locations around the world. Fred DeLuca started with a $1,000 loan and one little store and built a machine that paid him whether or not he ever made another sandwich himself. He didn't get rich. He didn't get rich from a salary or from working more hours than everyone else. He got rich by building a system that other people could run and then owning it. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's great for Fred DeLuca, but you can't exactly go build a 40,000-store empire from your kitchen table. You've got a schedule, a boss, a job. So how does any of this help you on a random Tuesday morning? The system isn't about a fast food chain. A system is just any repeatable way of producing income that doesn't depend on you showing up every hour to trade your time for money. It can be small. It can start on the side at night with almost no money. Isn't to build a 40,000-store empire tomorrow. The point is to stop thinking like someone who only earns when they clock in and start thinking like someone who's building something on the side that earns on its own. So you don't need permission to do this. You don't need to feel ready. Let me show you exactly how to start thinking in systems instead of salaries. Be a killer at one thing before you chase 10. So I need to warn you about something because the internet is full of bad advice on this. You've probably heard that rich people have 7 streams of income. So you go and try to create all 7 things at once. A little store here, some crypto there, a bit of dropshipping, a side gig, and you spread yourself so thin that every single one of them stays small. That's the fastest way to burn out and end up with nothing. Here's what actually works. The path to real wealth, especially in the beginning, is not using multiple streams. It's being an absolute killer at one thing. Pick one skill, one business, one problem that you can solve better than almost anyone else and pour everything into it until it's genuinely great. Depth beats scatter every single time. When you try a bunch of things that you don't understand and you do them all badly, the market can smell it and you won't make any money. Fred DeLuca didn't run 7 different kinds of businesses. He ran one sandwich shop and he became obsessed with getting that single system perfect. The exact way to build a sandwich, how fast the line moved, how to train a brand new person to do it the same way every time. He drilled that one thing until it was flawless, and only then did he multiply That's the order that works. Master one thing, then systemize it, then scale it. The multiple streams comes later, and when they come, they'll mostly flow out of that one thing that you mastered first. So stop trying to do 10 mediocre things at once. Build one boat that actually floats and make it the best boat on the water. Here's a simple test to find your one thing. What can you do that people already come to you for? What do your friends ask you for help with? What could you happily work on at 11 at night and not notice the time? That intersection, the thing that you're good at and drawn to, and that other people will pay you for is where you start to— you plant your flag. Then commit to it for real, not just for one weekend. Give it a year of full focus before you ever think about starting the second thing. Almost everyone quits their one thing right before it was about to work, and they jump to a new shiny idea and start the clock over again from zero. Don't restart the clock. Stack your years on one thing and let it compound. Turn yourself into a system, then step out of it. So right now, if you own a small business or you're self-employed, there's a good chance that you don't really own a business. You own a job that you can never quit because the whole thing lives inside, you know, right here, lives inside your head and stops the second that you stop. That's not freedom, that you've just built yourself a job. You have your own form of prison. The fix is to turn what you do into a system that exists outside of you. So you start by writing down every single thing that you do to make money step by step. Like you're writing instructions for a complete stranger. How do you find a customer? How do you talk to them? How do you actually deliver the work? How do you get paid? It's boring, but it's powerful because the moment that it's written down, it stops being just you and it starts becoming a process. And a process can be taught, can be improved, can be handed off to somebody else, can be repeated without you. This is exactly what Fred DeLuca did with Subway. He didn't just hope that each new shop would turn out okay, right? He built a simple repeatable system for making the sandwich and running the store so that someone brand new could open a location and get the same result that he got in his first one. He removed himself from the outcome by building a system that carried the standard for him through every store. You can do the same thing just at your scale, right? Once the process is on paper, you could train someone to run a part of it, then another part. Every piece that you successfully hand off buys you back a little bit more of your time and your life. The goal that you're aiming at is simple and And it's, I think, pretty huge. Build the thing so well that it can run without you because a business that can run without you is an asset and a business that can't is just an extra stressful job that has your name on it, right? So start with the task that you do most often, the one that eats your biggest chunk of your week. Write down exactly how you do it, every step. And then the next time it comes up, follow your own instructions and fix anything that's unclear. Do that a few times and you'll have an actual playbook. Not just some idea that lives in your head. Then find the one task that you hate most or waste the best hours and make that the first thing you train someone else to handle using your playbook. You don't have to hire a full-time employee to start. It can be a few hours a week from one person. What matters is that you prove to yourself the work can happen without your hands on everything. Once you feel it for the first time, you get hooked because you just watched your income keep moving while you stepped a little bit away, and that feeling is the whole point of building. Stopping being an employee of your own money. This one is more of a mindset shift, and it just starts to change how you see the, the whole game. You stop thinking like a person who gets a paycheck and you start thinking like a corporation, like an owner. A worker earns money, pays taxes on all of it, and spends whatever's left over. A smart business does it in the exact opposite order. It earns, it keeps the money working inside the system, and it reinvests to grow and is built to be efficient with what it owes. The difference repeated for years becomes a difference in the long run. difference between just running on a treadmill constantly and actually, you know, climbing the staircase towards success. You don't need to be huge to start thinking this way. When your one thing starts making real money, get proper advice about setting it up the right way so more of what you earn stays inside your system doing work instead of leaking out to somebody else. A business that's structured well can pay for the tools that it uses, the space that it needs, the help that it hires, all before the tax ever gets Well, an employee pays for every one of those things with money that's already been taxed. That's not some loophole; that's the entire way that the system's been designed to help people who build and own instead of the ones who just earn and spend. So keep money working in the business to buy tools and assets, and help that make you more money. Pay yourself in a smart, planned way instead of grabbing every dollar that comes a second it lands, because every dollar that you leave working in the business in the machine is helping build the machine and the business bigger. The rich don't treat their income. Like it's just this paycheck that they can go off and spend. They treat it like it's food for the machine, and they keep feeding that machine until it's strong enough to feed them for the rest of their lives. Own the thing that does the earning. So a salary pays you for showing up and doing the work. An asset pays you for existing. The whole leap from thinking in salaries to thinking in systems comes down to just one idea: stop only selling your time and. Start owning things that produce income on their own. So if we go back and think about what Fred DeLuca really owned, it wasn't one sandwich shop that needed him to be behind the counter. He owned the system and the brand behind tens of thousands of shops, and that system paid him a piece of every store in every city, whether he showed up or not. The person running one shop earned from the hours that they put in. Fred earned from the entire network all day long, everywhere at the same time. He owned the thing that did the earning, not a job inside of the thing. You wanna build your life the same way at whatever size that you're at right now. Own a piece of the business, not just a spot on its payroll. When you help a company grow, ask for a slice of it instead of a flat fee so you keep getting paid long after the work is actually done. Package your skills into a product that sells while you sleep instead of only trading your time for money. Put your surplus into assets that send you money back month after month, long after you did the work to buy them. Every dollar you move from your hands into the machine, into an engine, is a dollar that never has to be earned by hand again. Every one of those moves does the same thing for you. It separates your income from the hours. The employee is stuck in this simple, brutal equation. No hours, no money. Get sick, no money. Take a vacation, no money. The owner breaks that equation on purpose so that the earning keeps happening even when they're at their kid's game or vacation or sleeping. That's what it really means to think in systems instead of salaries. You build or Buy the engine, and the engine keeps working for you. And you don't have to own something enormous for this to completely change your life. Owning even one small income-producing thing starts to change how you see the whole world. The first time money shows up in your account from something that you built rather than an hour of you trading your time, something changes. You stop asking how many hours can I sell and start asking how many engines can I build. And that question asked over and over for years becomes the whole difference between a person. Person who retires exhausted and a person who is genuinely free. So start with one small engine, then continue to build. Use leverage so the machine outlives your energy. This advice allows the system to grow far past what you could ever do on your own. Leverage. Leverage just means you're using something other than your own raw effort and money to get the work done. So there are 3 kinds that you can start using right now, no matter how small you are. The first is other people. So you will never scale by being the only worker in your business. The moment you can, you hand off tasks that don't need you so your time goes to the things that actually move the needle forward. The second system is tools. A good piece of software, AI, simple automated process can do the work of several people all day without lunch break or days off. And the third is other people's attention and audiences. So partnering with someone who already has the customers you want can grow you faster than years of just grinding by yourself. It's actually what saved my first company when I was dead broke and about to quit. I was making $300 a month and staring at giving up. And what saved me was I stopped trying to do everything myself and started building partnerships instead, borrowing other people's reach instead of trying to build everything by myself from scratch. One of those partnerships led straight to my first deal, a great deal for me at the time, and that one deal kept the whole dream alive. I didn't outwork my problem, I just created leverage towards solving it. Leverage is how a system keeps producing even when your personal energy might run out, because your energy always runs out eventually. So you're one person with 24 hours. A machine built on leverage doesn't get tired, it doesn't sleep, uh, doesn't cap out at a number of hours in your day. And if you have the ability to build something that serves people while you rest, then I think you have the responsibility to go and build it. If you can, then you must. So don't wait for permission. Don't wait to feel ready. And you know when the best time to start is?

Now.

Right now. How about right now? You were built to own, not just to clock in. You were never meant to spend your whole life renting out your hours. So start with one thing, make it great, turn it into a system, own the engine, and use leverage to let it grow beyond you. Being leads to doing. So decide today that you are a builder of systems and let the action follow. Your purpose comes from your pain, and every frustrating hour that you have traded for a paycheck paycheck can become a fire inside you that builds something that finally pays you back. If you want to learn what history's greatest achievers can teach you about success, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. The stories that change your life are rarely the ones that you're taught in school. Coca-Cola's history starts all the way back in the late 19th century with a man known as Dr. John Stith Pemberton, a hustling chemist and pharmacist