Billionaire Investor Reveals the Worst Thing To Do With Your Cash!

Every one of us needs to look at the gig economy. We need to look at what business we work in or have worked in. What do we know more about in terms of a business than an average person? We're really all going to be entrepreneurs, and we need to use technology, which can allow us to do that today, to go into our own business. Only thing I'm firmly convinced of in investing is that I'm going to die. So I manage my investments to— I want to die happy. I want to die with enough money to spend. I wanna die with my kids' obligations taken care of for them getting started in life, and obviously leave my family enough to go on if I die soon, not that I'm expecting to. That's an investment criteria. I'm buying happiness and peacefulness. But even with all that, the stock market is going up and up, and I don't see anything stopping that because there's virtually an unlimited supply of money, and the companies that are growing and doing well have unlimited cash, and they're making so much money.

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All right, get ready for part 2 of my interview with Paul Zain Pilzer. If you saw part 1, you know that Paul is an unusual economic genius. There's a lot to learn from him. His flow of thought is something that is very unique, and his ability to communicate how he sees the macro view of economics and what it might mean to you individually on the micro level is something that is very, very valuable. So dial in. Here we go. Part 2, Paul Zain Pilzer.

All right.

Now, I have some of these dollars that we've been talking about. I'm sitting on some cash that I would like to invest. Somebody who's got, for whatever reason, maybe their business has grown, they've got cash for any variety of reasons, and they've been very insecure as to what to do with it. Maybe I still have some in the market, maybe my brokerage account, you know, I left it in. Maybe I've got some real estate, or maybe I'm liquid, completely liquid. But I'm a little bit paralyzed. I don't know what to do. It seems like uncertainty is everywhere and everybody's got a different opinion. So, if you're advising me, given everything that you know and understand right now, what do you recommend? Do you recommend that I go into investing in certain vehicles? Sit in cash? What would you recommend?

I recommend something I've never done before, not to take a strong position in anything. I'd recommend a portfolio of debt, but I wouldn't even try to earn interest. I'd put it in the brokerage federal money market accounts. So don't even try to earn a quarter percent. That's real secure money. And any fixed assets you have, for example, I invest in a lot of private equity funds. I owe millions of dollars to them. Now, they don't come get me and take it if I don't spend it, but they take what I spent already. You invest in a private equity fund typically, and you don't keep funding, you lose what you've already funded or it gets diluted to nothing. So on one thing, I say you're investing in Extremely, let's call it a 30-year portfolio might be an extremely low interest. I mean 0.01% money. Don't try to earn the extra quarter percent or whatever it is, too risky right now.

Is money going to devalue though? Do you see the dollar, if it starts because there's more and more printed, each one's worth less, so if you're not attached to something else, it's going to—

Theoretically, that is a straight strong force for the devaluation of US currency. But as we talked about earlier, the amount of money around the world that wants to come in here and buy US currency, and they don't want it back, and they don't want anything for it, pumps it back up. And what we've seen is it's maintained its value or gone up even with the US leading the COVID fight.

So, do you think it's more the external money coming in that's pumping this up, or do you think it's the Fed intervening that's pumping this up, or a combination?

Combination. But right now, it's been the Fed just really started pumping it up. This year. It's been going on a long time. And as I say, the main rule of COVID investing is look at everything that's been happening, now accelerate it, convert months to weeks, convert 5-year periods to 1-year periods, and then you can make investment decisions. The rules of economics, and in many cases, the rules of investing have not changed under COVID. But what has changed is the speed with which things take place. So, think of the things that you thought I might stay in here 5 years, now you may have to reevaluate, I may stay in here 1 year. We're seeing an area where there is no right way to invest anymore because things are so uncertain, which means any type of obligations you have that you say I've got to pay this much money, my kid's college for the next 2 years till they graduate, you should put in my mind in federal money funds. Just you'll sleep easier, because you'll know that money's covered regardless what happens to the market.

How long is this going to last? If I'm interpreting correctly, you're saying stay Stay in cash, protect the cash.

Stay in cash for anything you have that you're going to have to pay. You can always skip an $80 meal like we had last night and go spend an $8 meal and get the same amount of calories. But you can't do that with your kids' college tuition. So anything you have of a real obligation coming up that you— even if you have a job to cover it, you should keep that money extremely liquid and liquid again in federal money market funds not in any type of investment.

Okay, so let's say now, I've got that handled. Now, I've got some money to play with. Maybe I call it gambling, but I got money to risk because it's not— all the other bases are covered. I thought I heard you say earlier, you think the market's going to keep going up, for example.

Market's going to keep going up because there's no place for people to put the money from things they sell. There's no way to get out.

So, do you have money in this market right now?

No.

So, why not?

The amount of return I would receive is so much lower than sleeping. I manage till death now. It's a very interesting model. I'm 66 years old.

And I'm—

only thing I'm firmly convinced of in investing is that I'm going to die. So, I manage my investments to— I want to die happy. I want to die with enough money to spend. I want to die with my kids' obligations taken care of for them. Getting started in life and obviously leave my family enough to go on if I die soon, not that I'm expecting to. That's an investment criteria. I'm buying happiness, peacefulness. I'm dying to get back in the market, but I've been calling it wrong, frankly, for the last few months in terms of this last rise. I thought all these factors would work in so the market won't crash when GDP goes down.

Wrong.

All these factors caused GDP to not go down. And the market went up, up, up and up 50% in the last 6 months, because there's no place to put the money. We have an unlimited supply of capital before we go and print money and the Fed says we're going to keep doing. Even when it was going up, the Fed had to reassure everyone saying if the private market stops supplying all this capital, we'll supply it. But even with all that, the stock market is going up and up and I don't see anything stopping that because there's virtually an unlimited supply of money. The companies that are growing and doing well have unlimited cash and they're making so much money. Microsoft, Apple, the tech companies, Walmart, these companies aren't just being bid up in stock prices, these companies are really producing products and shipping and making a lot of money. I see that as continuing.

You said something very interesting because it gets into the psychology of it, saying I'm investing my happiness. I could go into the market, but I don't need to. I want to sleep at night. This disposition towards investing, has COVID caused you to just take stock in all that?

Let me say it, I'm expecting to go back into the market. In my lifetime, if not tomorrow or 6 months from now or a year, I'm expecting to go back in the market when the market takes a really severe dip. I've been wrong about that for 6 months since we last met.

I see what you're saying. Basically, you anticipate that there— at some point should be a dip and that's when you want to buy back.

Well, whatever the dip is, I believe the market will overreact to it. If the dip is that the stock market should go down 30% or 40%, these are huge numbers except we just went up 50%. They're in the range. If we say the market is going to go down 30%, 40%, I believe the market will overreact. If it goes down 30%, it really only went down 25% and 5% was speculative. And that makes me feel comfortable putting money in equities, at least for the short term. I believe the market will overreact almost any time. And they'll go down faster than they would, as long as GDP continues where it is, which is lower and lower. But even GDP, the metric, it no longer makes sense anymore. Because in GDP, we're seeing the price of everything is falling. So we're seeing the things we want to buy. Are going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, which is going to make GDP go down. But gross national happiness, the purpose for GDP, is going up because you're buying things at a lower price.

So, would that be deflation then at that point if things are getting cheaper? Is that a concern?

It's deflation along certain markets. In general, yes, I expect deflation. But it's deflation along this flavor versus that flavor of orange juice or juice or anything you want to buy. It's deflation when all our car plants are still making gasoline cars and ask anyone who has an electric car, They go, I'd never drive a gas car again. Not because it's good for the environment, it's a lot more fun to drive an electric car and they're becoming a lot more affordable. And the best example is, we have a bunch of electric cars in our house. I happen to like small cars, so I drive a Tesla Model 3 Performance. It's very small and it's cheaper Tesla. Well, there's going to be a Model 2 next year. They're talking $25,000. You and I can remember when Teslas were $150,000, $130,000. My wife's first Model X was $130,000. The next Model X was $90,000. Now, they're looking at making the equivalent car she's driving now, Y, it was $50,000. They're about to make small ones that are really sharp for $25,000.

This gets interesting because what you're saying is our needs are satisfied at a lower price. GDP can actually go down, but we can be just as fulfilled as—

The part of GDP, you still have a better car to ride in that $25,000 Tesla than your $100,000 Mercedes. So you're getting a better car, more enjoyment, doesn't break down, lasts forever. And not only that, when you buy an electric car like a Tesla, not to use just Tesla, it's true about— I also own a Chevy Bolt. When you buy a car like that, you have no maintenance. You have no brake pads because it puts the money— the electricity goes back into the batteries instead of brakes being hit to slow down. Once you drive one of these things, you go, why would I ever drive a gasoline car again? And before you can say that and bid the price up of electric cars, the technology of making them is dropping the price so fast.

So, this becomes— yeah, so as you said earlier, I think the old laws or the old rules were kind of in a different planet. And you obviously can't think the old way.

Before, all automobiles were gasoline automobiles. Price of gasoline was a major determinant about automobiles and which kind of car you buy and whether you bought a fuel-efficient car. Those rules are worthless today because say you buy an electric car and you never use gasoline and the cost of supplying electricity, you can now buy solar panels, put them on your roof, charge batteries in your house that charge your car completely. And when we talk off the grid, we mean really off the grid. It gets your cars off the grid. And then your cars, I recently had a meeting with the CEO of our Rocky Mountain Power Company and he's the most excited thing about going on in the power business, utility business, is electric cars, 'cause the new electric cars go two ways. They charge, electricity comes in that port, but they also put out electricity. So when your power goes down in your house, your neighborhood, your state, everybody's electric car can power the whole system. It's absolutely amazing. Just as if your car gets dead on the highway and you call for help, your wife can show up with another Tesla, plug in the cable, this is next year, and it charges your Tesla on the road.

Wow. Yeah, so we're sitting on a bunch of batteries that we can charge with the sun.

But all of this changes our technology on just automobiles and changes all the rules of economics. And we start to see that each sector of the economy needs to be individually analyzed, watched, looked at, decided what's going on here. And then you really got to pick the right investment portfolios.

So you're out of the market waiting for a dip And then before you want to go back in, anything else you're investing in right now?

Looking at real estate, looking at anything individually I control, looking at businesses that I'm active, like our family's Planet Fitness franchises, anything that I can get up in the morning and use my knowledge and apply some expertise I've learned, hopefully a little more than the guy next to me or the guy on the right or the left of me. And every one of us needs to look at the gig economy. We need to look at what business we work in or have worked in. What do we know more about in terms of a business than an average person? Then looking at the gig economy, say, can I create a gig or an industry out of this? We're really all going to be entrepreneurs. The line that Nixon once said is— or Milton Friedman said, we are all Keynesians now, which Richard Nixon repeated and went on the COVID of Time magazine. We are effectively now all entrepreneurs. We all have some skills and we need to use technology, which can allow us to do that today, to go into our own business.

So you've painted some pretty vivid pictures here. And incidentally, it is interesting because I think exactly right. It's like when you're going into a market, you're going in, you're investing in these kind of third-party areas. You don't have control. It's like placing a bet. But if you invest, like maybe I buy a business, well, now I'm in it, I'm working, I got some expertise.

You'll find certain tools of the business or certain labor, certain people you need to fire. Aren't working out, you can make the decisions very quickly.

Yeah. And so I got more control over my investment in that respect.

And right now, you just can't buy the stock market. I mean, even with the market going up, the Dow or the S&P 500 has had some real losers. But the winners have been so strong, like Apple and Walmart, that they've covered them up. You've got to individually now pick stocks. I used to like the stock market the last 10 years because I said, look at this. I don't need some fancy investor who beats the market, I just need to buy a bond fund out of Vanguard or out of Fidelity. I'm not sure you can do that anymore because those bond funds running on autopilot are picking up a lot of dogs along with the good assets.

Now, the new roaring '20s, has your view or your vision for what's going to happen in the '20s changed based on what's going on right now? Talk about that.

It's actually gotten stronger. I saw before COVID that starting in 2020, our economy would soar. And I called it the new Roaring '20s, 2020 to 2029. I see everything I've predicted to put together that book more so right now and going in faster. That's the good news. And I'm very optimistic about the economy, mainly because of the amount of what I call technology gaps. That's technology we've developed. It's on the shelf, but it's not yet on the factory floor. It's every time I go in and watch a guy make pizza, I love pizza, and I watch a person instead of a robot, and they'll probably make a robot not as a shiny machine, but with hands and a face and they'll tell nice things as he pretends he's Italian, of your background. They'll have Italian robots, they'll have Vietnamese robots, and they'll make the food and act out ethnically, make it more fun. Of course, dining out is really an experience more than it is calories. We're seeing great new stuff, lots of people making lots of money on all this technology replacing labor. As the economy grows, we have an unlimited labor supply called the robots. Scary part, what this is going to do in social unrest is so scary. Our government needs to stay ahead of it, starting with universal basic income and starting with figuring out what we're going to do to retrain people when frankly, there isn't— aren't jobs to retrain them for. They're going to be looking for jobs that don't exist. They say we're going to train people, it's on both sides of the presidential campaign. We're going to train people for the jobs of tomorrow. Keynes was right. Only a third of the people work. There are no jobs of tomorrow for two-thirds of the people. We have to figure out what we're going to do to keep those people happy and say, go get a PhD. Go to the movies, go spend more time with your kids. We're going to redo the algorithms of family and basic economic life because those who are working and using machines or designing the machines are so unbelievably efficient. We can easily produce all the food and all the shelter we need. We're now talking— I'm sitting on some boards that are looking at low-income housing. I've said, all you have to do is just build smaller homes if we change the zoning laws a little. In the 1930s, we used to live in 130 square feet of space per person.

Wow.

Today we live in 750 square feet per person. This is US number. Nobody I looked at in 1930 in history ever died of too few square feet. It was not a cause of death when you died living in a smaller place. And we need to start building housing. We have a huge crisis coming of housing, but I believe we'll solve it by changing the zoning laws and allowing houses to be mass-produced. And housing to be produced at smaller sizes that people really like and with better common rooms or something else to do. We know the most important thing for people facing Alzheimer's or facing old age or depression is community. If you make them a smaller house, they got to go to the community center or whatever else they're doing more often. So, I see all the tools and technology to build a really great society as we go forward. The rocky part will be the new Roaring Twenties, massive opportunities for people who bet on the right tech companies. And the technology changing, really scary for what we're going to do when people lose a job and they go, where do I get the training for the new job? We go, sir, you're 40 years old. It's not worth training you. You're way too old. Maybe 35 might be that age. We're seeing it all the way in hiring right now. I see the kids get out of school and get these amazing jobs at six figures plus right through COVID this last year, working as engineers for some of the top companies. But we're also seeing that when they lose their job at 30, 35, 40, and I get these calls I never got before. "Professor Pilzer, how are you? How are the kids?" "Well, I'm not really talking about family. I called you because frankly, I got fired after 18 years yesterday, and I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know what to learn." I don't know what to tell that person either.

What do you tell somebody who's getting out of high school now?

Save money. Your base of capital is your freedom. You can't always assume that you're going to work. Before, you assumed if you stayed healthy, didn't mess with drugs, didn't get in trouble, there'd always be a job for you somewhere. That's no longer going to be the case, particularly in the roaring '20s, because the machines and the robots or the people who design them are going to take that job away from you. You need to be a robot designer or parts of it to make it happen, or you need to do things that can't be replaced. I so applaud my daughter now studying social work. She wants to be a social worker. And there's just something about a tie between two people, one young, one old, often helping someone out. It's a beautiful experience. I don't think the robot's gonna take that away for a while. Even though Japan is trying. Japan has robots left and right to do all the take care of old people. But they haven't solved yet how to make them friendly and how to make the old people want those robots.

Yeah, a robot with empathy I think is still a ways off.

Yes.

So that's interesting, 'cause your response is very immediate. What should you do if you're getting started right now? It's save money. So, ideally, if the populace had good savings, as we look at the profile of America, there's a lot of debt, a lot of consumer debt. I forget whether you probably know the number about what the average savings is per person in the United States.

[Speaker:JOHN DEL VECCHIO] Well, the market's actually bifurcated. The average savings is ridiculous. It's a few thousand dollars and most people, there's a study that said 95% of the population couldn't last more than a month on savings. All that's true, but that's the average and nobody's at average. The people taking care of themselves, I see it all the time where here during COVID every night I get multiple dinner invites from people who are visiting Park City, come into town, oh, let's go see Paul. I would love to see them, except I got this call, this call, this call, this call. So much money flowing into or is is saved up by the, I don't know what we call ourselves, the baby boom generation or some of the millennials, and they're doing so well and they don't need anything. The other half of our population is bifurcating into ground zero. They're going to be living from stimulus package to stimulus package. Frankly, we're taking away hope because we're not having the job opportunities for them, and we need to cover them with universal basic income and then watch them develop interests and hobbies, books, literature, social work, doing volunteer work and saying, this is my life going forward. I'm not going to retool and have a new career, which is what we told all the unemployed people for the last few decades. The robot I build is going to have a new career and I'll have a new career building the next robot. It's why you're seeing the kids going to engineering schools today. In the US, and that's our real core strength, I just have a bunch of college kids now in my house. My kids all are at the college level or applying to college. The kids graduating these engineering degrees from top schools, they're at $130,000, $150,000 starts. They're at signing bonuses of $25,000, $50,000 for a 22-year-old kid just getting out of school. Because the robot or thing they build or what they retool, they make for their company so much more than that. That's going to continue, if not multiply, that the people who have mastered really extreme technology I mean, they're building the silicon wafers that power the chips that power everything, are going to continue to go up and up and up. And each time they succeed, we have less employment from the masses. We can afford to take care of everyone because we produce so much food, shelter for so little today. It used to be 1.4 acres was necessary for a family to farm just to survive. Today, 1 point, and they could put a farmhouse on it. Today, 1.4 acres is 300 residents when you build straight up. Only something else has changed. I now notice my friends who are leaving New York call me up, and a few from LA, and they go, so what are you looking for? Well, I wanna come and add a house in Salt Lake. I consider Utah very safe. It's the number one state economically right now. Can I come in? Now, what's your criteria? No elevators. I said, well, you're scared of elevators? Paul, you can't sell an elevator building apartment. In New York City, because the rules of an elevator— I hadn't thought about this— getting in one at a time, and if you're a couple getting in two, you can have a rush on the elevator and have 45 minutes or hours at a rush hour to use your elevator to get up to your apartment building. Before, everyone wanted the high floor.

Right.

I mean, we all bought high-rise apartments on the beach, any place. Now with elevator rules with COVID because COVID has made us think, if it's not COVID, it could be Ebola, it could be so many other diseases that we need to retool the whole plant of what we live in or come up with different masks. I don't have answers here, I have questions. But it changes the investment. I could have had a great full building that no one wants to be in, or I could have a building that doesn't have elevators and it's laid out that now it goes up in value because people don't want to wait on the elevator anymore. One little change like that has massive changes in the economy.

I'm starting to even more wake up to the implications of COVID because as you said, people say, oh, well, this will pass, but there could be the next one and the next one. I think there's going to be some permanence to the dynamics.

The changes coming across COVID, the most important one that's almost universal is changes that were going to happen anyway in 5 to 10 years, and now going to happen in 1 or 2 years. Just watch how fast. Anything I've been saying about economy and technology for the last 40 years, boy, was I right. But COVID accelerated that. Separately, we come up with changes that we never expected. Whoever thought you'd never want to be in a high-rise building on the upper floors because you're only allowed one person or a couple in the elevator at a time?

And now the values of those investments go down. I mean, so there's ripple effects.

But on the other end, maybe we invent a new system that cleanses the air, that removes all viruses. We mount it on the top of every elevator cab, and now we can pack them full again. We put those same systems inside my Planet Fitness gyms and inside other businesses. We're looking at that now at Planet. We've got several gyms in test market for super clean air. I still remember this 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, 2009, I went to visit gyms in China. As I noticed when you went from gym to gym or hotel to hotel, they advertised the clean air by their own little scale. They bragged how clean the air was. In their gym. I'm going, you don't tell that to someone in the US. They don't even think about it. But we're going to come up with clean air systems that are virus-proof. It doesn't seem like we couldn't do them. We're going to have to retool some things and put some air flowing over here and air flowing over here. And we'll even have a meter that tells you how many particles are in the air that got in so you know if it's working or not. We will solve a lot of this with technology, but the changes are going to lead for very interesting interesting times. You want to be the first restaurant, gym, whatever that installs these systems once we have a base for how clean the air would be, just like we have for lighting in retail or in gyms. We have— they measure the lights and we measure the foot candles and say, this is what you need to work here. Well, we're now going to have that for clean air, but until we get it, it's going to be pretty scary.

Wow.

Well, Paul, as always, fascinating. Lots of great updates here. And also, thank you for sharing personally kind of what you're doing with your own investment strategies right now. And I think we're going to have to update sometime in the future to see how these Roaring '20s are unfolding relative to this reference point that, you know, in our discussion right now. But thanks so much for coming and sharing all this.

It'll be my pleasure. Thank you, Patrick.

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Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.

So, you know, the theme here of Wealth Breakthroughs is something that I know you personally can speak to, and I think your experience personally, plus what you found since your wealth breakthrough can really have an impact on a lot of people. So, can we hear your story? Tell us about kind of your trajectory and how you got to be doing what you're doing today.

Yeah, it's been an amazing journey. When I think about wealth, just the evolution in my life, in my lifestyle, and the impact I've been able to make, and my thinking about money and wealth is just, it's hard to even imagine. Back in the mid-'90s, I was a stay-at-home dad. And I wasn't a stay-at-home dad because I had a dot-com and I sold out for $30 million and I was just sitting back and playing with the kids. I'd been a corporate failure. And I was, I was in the corporate game and it just didn't fit. I was that square peg in the round hole. And so I left it. I quit when my son was born, when he was a just a year old, I left. And my wife was supporting the family. And it was a struggle. This was the mid-'90s. And back then it wasn't such a thing. There weren't very many dads staying home. And by the way, we were on one income and it was desperate times. We didn't have much money to go around. There was one time where I put together a budget. We had $400 in disposable income for the month. The year. And so by disposable income, like after I went through the budget and said, this is our rent and this is our groceries, $400. Wow. And so it was desperate times. And so I was looking around for ways to make money and I ended up starting to publish online. I started publishing a newsletter. It was actually a newsletter about the stock market and investing. And I had a lot of interest in investing at that time. I didn't have any money to invest, so I just studied and studied and studied. And so that first newsletter went out to, I like to tell this story, it went out to 19 email addresses. 19 people that I knew their email address that I thought might be interested in my newsletter. And it was really not 19 people because one of those email addresses was my second email address. One was my wife's email address, but I felt better about saying I had 19 people subscribed to this newsletter. That eventually started to grow through word of mouth. And I started to add a few subscribers per day and then a few hundred per month and it just grew and grew and grew. I came out with a paid version of that newsletter because initially it was just free. And I started to build a business. And I did a launch. I'm now famous for doing launches and for teaching people how to do online launches. But that first launch I did $1,650 in sales. And if you flash back to what my disposable income was, I was just, I was flabbergasted. I was amazed. It was an incredible amount of money. It was amazing. I was doing backflips, not literally, figuratively doing backflips, but I was literally jumping in the air to have $1,650 in income. And I had this thought right then that what might've been one of the most important thoughts I ever had in my life. And it was like, If I did that once, I can do it again. And I can do it again and again. And I probably, I might get better at this. And that's what happened. So the next launch did $6,000. Huge quantum, 4x almost over $1,650. And then $8,000. And then gradually figured that stuff out. And I'm going to tell this story in a very concise way, but it didn't. It was one step in front of the other. Eventually, a few years later, I did $34,000 in a single week in a launch for another newsletter, a brand new newsletter. And that was the launch that brought my wife Mary home. And she was able to retire, retire, to come home, be with the kids, help with the kids, and help me grow my business. And it just didn't stop there. A few years later, I actually, we were ready to buy a home and I needed a down payment. So I did a launch that did $106,000 in a single week. And then eventually I started to help friends and then eventually I did launches that did millions of dollars. And here we are a short 20-some years later and I've now built up this business where I've got 30 employees. I've got my influences all over the world. We have my products being licensed. I've got a best-selling book. It just goes on and on. And my students and clients have done over a billion dollars in sales. And it's just, like I said, been a rocket ride.

So if, you know, as you're telling the story and you're thinking back to the time that you're a stay-at-home dad, and then you sit where you are right now having this conversation, is it somewhat unimaginable to you?

It is, it's absolutely. Back then, the thought that anyone would ever want to buy anything from me that I created was the furthest thing from my mind. I wasn't a marketer, I wasn't a salesperson. I just worked for a paycheck before and not been terribly successful at that. So the idea that anyone would buy something from me was crazy. The idea that someone would want to interview me actually and have fancy cameras and a in a set? No. And if you would ask anyone around me that surrounded me, they were like, Jeff, why would, why would people want to interview Jeff?

But here's the interesting thing, it's not like you had some guidebook or reference point. You literally started with a need, which is saying I need to make some income and I have an interest, basically, which I guess was the stock market. And what I find ironic is saying I have no money to invest in the market, but I still want to study it. Maybe what I'm studying I share and it's worth something to somebody. But you started to figure out these, these launch models to be able to work from home and get this done. And you, you innovated this whole thing and you literally created an industry, you know, cause I've, I've in my own businesses have used your work and it's translated into millions and millions of dollars of revenue. And, and when I look at how you got started, it wasn't like you went to some slick Ivy League university, had a degree, you studied and analyzed the market, you saw a market need, you, all those kinds of business cases that you try to— you're a guy that literally had $400 a year of disposable income and figured it out. Is there something special about you? I mean, how did you get that figured out?

Very gradually and incrementally. I would like to say I just had this genius plan from the start, but I'm a big fan of baby steps and just moving in the direction and then course correcting. An analogy I like to use is golf. You take— so I've done some golfing in my life. I'm not a huge golfer, but I've done some golfing. And the thing I've noticed about golf is you take— it's a little white ball and there's this little hole and it's a third of a mile away. And it's completely improbable that you can hit this little golf ball into this hole a third of the mile. It's just ridiculous. But you can take someone who's never golfed before their first hole ever, and they'll swing and they might miss the ball. They'll probably miss the ball. They'll probably, the first time they hit it, it'll go sideways, maybe even backwards. But you give them 10 or 12 or 13 or 14 tries, and they'll end up every time putting that ball in the hole. And it's because they gradually course correct. They hit that first one, it's way over there, and the second one's way over there. But as they get closer, they course correct. I'm a big fan of baby steps, of just taking that first step, that next step, and then gradually course-correcting until you hit the goal. And so for me, I just, it was desperation. Now so many people are interested in impact, and I'm in this game now for impact. That's why I'm here with you. That's why I traveled to be here with you, for impact, because that's what my world's evolved into. But back then it was desperation and needing money. But I would say from the start I did have a few things. This internet, this connected world was just starting to happen. This was 1996 when I first started. And I had some instincts I think that served me well because I think the world really did change with this connected world. And there's some certain words that get tossed around like integrity, and authenticity and congruence that really, that's what business is largely about now. Because everything is so transparent. People can look up your reviews instantly. They can check your social. They can see what you're really delivering to the world. And everything I do, everything I've done, my entire model of business is built on, honest, congruent sharing with people and building value before you ask for the sale. And that was something I think I got that from my parents, really. I think I just got that from my parents and I carried that into business and I didn't have anyone to tell me that's not the right way to do business because I was just figuring it out on my own. In 1996, 1997, there was almost no one doing business online. And so I didn't have anyone to learn from. So I just stumbled into this and gradually evolved it, and here we are today.

[Speaker] You know, I think there are many points you made, but one of them I think is interesting is like, you don't come across as the guy that's gonna get hired to be a salesperson in a corporate environment that could go out there and push a product, what have you. But a fundamental principle saying, you know, just build some value before you even ask is literally the driver, or one of the big drivers behind you know, what you do. And it's almost in that respect, it's almost not sales. I mean, technically I guess it's sales, but it's not salesmanship, so to speak. And that principle applied to the very first launch you did, still applies now just as much or no?

Absolutely, more so now, more so because there's more transparency now. People can find you, they can see you, they can look at reviews. That stuff didn't exist. You know, my first, probably 8 years online, there was not even a photo of me online because we didn't share photos back then. But if you would have at the beginning, and frankly, I went through this. So before I started this, I was like, my original thinking was we need more money. Mary needs some kind of relief of this pressure of having to support the family and getting up in the dark and coming home in the dark and working so hard. And so I need to make money in some way. So I thought maybe I'll go get a job. And so I went to all these career counseling and I took these tests to see what you were suited for. And I don't have them anymore, but I guarantee if you looked at them and you looked at this whole spectrum, like of what's the most likely place I'd have success, sales would be like, I'd be in the 0 percentile for sales. I have no sales experience. I have no sales instincts. And really, I think what I ended up doing is because I didn't know how to sell and I was uncomfortable with selling, I was uncomfortable asking for money, then I ended up overcompensating by building value, building value, building value before I asked for the sale. And lo and behold, it ended up like working really, really well and turned out to be the way the world is tilted that way now.

So it's interesting because it's almost like you turned a weakness into a strength. Right?

Yes, absolutely.

So it worked for you not to be able to have a very slick sales ability. Uh, that's interesting. So, and you sort of answered this question already, but I want to be clear in it. You know, the principles and the idea of, uh, you know, doing a launch of a product that is some value that you can create for a particular audience, uh, that ship hasn't sailed. It's not like, oh, you know, if you didn't get in on it at a good time, it's— today there's people who are still starting from scratch applying these principles and making them work?

Yeah, I started that first launch was at the very end of '96. No one knew what I was doing because I just had a few, by that time, thousands of people on my email list. It grew and grew and grew. In 2001, I went to my first marketing conference. I thought everyone was doing this stuff. I shared it with a few people. I started coaching a few people through it in like 2001, 2002, 2003. And they had success with it. And up till then, I just thought it was working for me. I didn't know if it worked for them in other markets like writing love letters or how to get traffic to your website and/or for airline pilots. And it started to work in other markets. So in 2005, I started teaching it and people started having success in just about every market with any type of product you could imagine. And really the results now are bigger than they've ever been. Just a few months ago we had the biggest launch ever that I know of in our kind of little bootstrapped kind of businesses that was literally in the many tens of millions of dollars. Wow. And yeah, so— Who'd have thunk?

Yeah, exactly. And this isn't something that is fading. It seems like it's actually gaining momentum even more so. Now. Uh, why do you think that is?

Well, I think there's more people online, I think, than there's ever been, and there's more people coming online. I think there's more people that are buying online. There's more people walking around with their phones. I mean, it wasn't that long ago we didn't have a phone. You had to be on your computer to be online. Now we're on— everyone's on online all day long, every day. I also think many of my clients are selling what I call wisdom products or training products, knowledge products you could call them. And so the whole idea of consuming training online, electronically, has exploded. The interest in people in furthering themselves, frankly. I think I see a lot more interest in self-education. I think it's become the norm. I think the dollars being spent on self-education are going through the roof. And so the market's growing, the acceptance of buying that online is growing, and people are creating bigger followings faster, and then they're able to sell a lot better and more effectively.

Yeah, and here's, I think, one of the— call it a special aspect of what you're doing— that's kind of the warmth and humanitarian side, is that, you know, we can talk about certainly there's some people who are running somewhat scale enterprises that can do, you know, tens of millions of dollars on a launch. But there's also musicians or people that have, you know, like teachers that, you know, they don't have much income. They have no big staff or anything around them. And they would look at a series like this, Wealth Breakthroughs, you know, and they would say, I'm not in that position to create a wealth breakthrough for me. And I think it's contextual in many respects. You have that person said, "Here's what my passion in life was. I eke out a living. I don't have a lot of disposable income. I know nothing really about investing, and nor do I maybe even have a lot of desire there, but I would like to enhance my financial position." Like for you, a $1,600 launch was a wealth breakthrough, right? I mean—

That was the biggest launch of my life. I had a launch that did $1 million in sales in 53 minutes. And the impact of that million dollars, that pales in comparison to the $1,650.

Yeah. And so really poignant is the fact that the wealth breakthrough doesn't have to be this huge thing for whoever it is that, that, that's watching or that has some type of a passion. It could be something much smaller but extraordinarily meaningful. So when you have people, and I know you've had many that approach you and say, I got limited means, I've got some maybe relationships, I do have a skill, I'd like to figure out how to translate this into a product that other people would care about. What are the steps? How do you guide them?

That's a big question. So there's many different flavors, many different ways you can go. And I think that if someone's got a skill and it's a skill that they can transfer to someone else, that they can train with someone, that they can coach someone, And especially if you've worked with a few people, even informally, you've helped a couple friends through a partnership breakup or helped them learn how to meditate or showed someone a few guitar chords and you've had some success working one-on-one, then the next, this is a tried and true path, is you go from there to small group coaching. And online, electronically is a great way to do that. And so these days it's so much simpler because You could literally do a live broadcast on Facebook or on Instagram or who knows, by the time people watch this there's probably gonna be a new channel. And those tools are available for free. And so you could put together a small launch, put a small group of people, and by small it could be 6 people, a dozen people, it could be, I would love it to be 30 people. 30 or 40 people would be like the ideal number. Put that small group onto a call, onto a live broadcast, and teach. And the beautiful thing about this is what— it's very interactive. So part of the process is that you survey people. And first of all, the part— the first step is you, you take your topic, whatever it is. If it's guitar, you split it into 5 main content areas and say we're going to do 5 of these broadcasts. And that's what you're actually selling. Then you get on the broadcast, well before the broadcast you do a simple survey. And there's plenty of free survey tools out there. Google's got one, SurveyMonkey's got one. You ask, you say to people, hey, this is gonna be our first topic for our first call. What do I need to cover? What's your most burning question about that topic? You gather all those questions and that's why I want you to have, it'd be ideal if you had 30 people go through this with you. So that you have a critical mass and you get the good questions. And then you just get on and you simply answer those questions. And then you do that 5 times for each one of those topics and you've got yourself your first product. And what you've done is you've developed a training that's tuned to what people want. Because if you are that expert meditator or if you're the expert guitar player, you've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner. We call this the curse of knowledge. You've forgotten that. But in doing this process, you're tapping back into those beginners figuring out what they need to learn, and now you're teaching that to them. And that's how you create a great product the first time out.

And then from that product is what you continue to relaunch and monetize over time and try to keep building your audience.

Yeah, I literally, so my training on how to do these launches, it's called Product Launch Formula. And I did this process, I had 6 people, 6 people go through it. And because I wanted to have more Then I invited a bunch of friends. I let them in on a complimentary basis. So we got up to that 30. I did the training over those 5 calls. I added in 3 or 4 bonus calls because I obsess about overdelivery. That initial set of calls, then I remade, I reshot those because again, I obsess about, I got that perfection streak, which is not a good thing for entrepreneurs, but I've got that streak. So I rebuilt it. And that product, which has now been rebuilt, I don't know how many, many times, but it started with that one launch, that what we call a seed launch for the 6 people. So that is now from 6 people, we've had tens of thousands of people go through it. I've done tens of millions of dollars in sales. I put people into my events, 1,000 people come to my events from around the world. They've done over a billion dollars in launches, all from starting off with the training for 6 people.

You still get giddy as you talk about this.

It's just ridiculous, it's ridiculous. What the whole online world has done for bootstrapped entrepreneurs, and by bootstrapped, if people don't know what I mean, it's people that you can start with nothing. You're not going out and you're trying not trying to land venture capital, you're not trying to get investors, you're just starting with what you've got with a few dollars. I started this business, I went and I rented a mailbox at Mailboxes Etc. And that was my, it was like less than $50 and that was all the money I spent for the first 6 months in business. And here we are. And this is available to anyone.

[Speaker] So with this experience and listening to this story and the history behind it, you know, sometimes I talk to people and they're like, you know, I set goals and I had a vision and I wanted to create this big wealth. And when I was 8 or 9 years old, you know, I knew that I wanted to be wealthy. I didn't want a job. And in your case, you know, it seems almost a little bit the headspace was a bit different, that this is still almost to some degree shocking to you that it turned out this way. So talk to me about your reflections on the headspace for wealth generation and creating financial independence.

Well, when I first started out, I did find one training product, and it was called Turn Your Computer Into a Money Machine. And that sounds hopelessly cheesy now, hopelessly cheesy. And it came on a floppy disk, and I spent $99.50, and I had to think about spending that money for a week. I lay in bed each night thinking about writing I eventually wrote the check, I mailed the check, they mailed me a floppy disk. Sheila Danzig is the person who created this, and that floppy disk changed my life. It was some of the basics of really direct marketing. And it wasn't even about the internet. It was about like America Online and CompuServe, if anyone remembers those progenitors of the internet. And it had this one little one page that said, oh, there's this thing coming called the internet, it might be cool. So that training, part of that training, she had you set goals. So I sat down and there's many ways to set goals. There's the SMART goals and the achievable goals and the shoot for the moon goals. And her, she said, think really big, as big as you can possibly think. So it was sort of the shoot for the moon goals. And I did that. I took a very—

Was it hard for you to do that?

No, no. So I wrote down an income goal. It was $100,000. And then I wrote down a lot of lifestyle goals. I wanted to have a fast computer. I wanted to have a nice office. I wanted to— I love spending time out in the wilderness on river trips. I wanted to go paddling in Ecuador. I wanted to do a Grand Canyon River trip. I wanted to have all these days.

You remember these goals? Goals all these years later?

Because I've— I still have them. I still have the printout because I typed them up and I printed it out.

Wow.

And I wanted these days, so many days with my family. I wanted to weigh a certain weight. I wanted to— and yeah, I listed them all out. And, uh, pretty much the funny thing is those goals are the same goals I've got now. The number, the, the dollar— I actually don't even have a goal for for income anymore. I just, I've left that behind. And if I did write one, it'd be bigger than $100,000 now. But yeah, so I did set those goals. I did have this vision. And it's a crazy, because I, it wasn't like I look at it all the time, but like 10 years later, I found them, the printout. And it's like, wow. And I hit all of them, but they were all relevant to me. Because right from the beginning, I defined that lifestyle and health and relationships was part of my goals. It wasn't about just about money.

Well, this is really fascinating for me because a lot of times people have the perspective how their life would change or how they'd be different if they had more money, right? And a lot of times people will look at other people who have made a lot of money and say, oh, money changed them. Them. But in essence, you're saying that, you know what, what I wanted out of life is no different before I had money than now when I have it.

I would agree with that 100%. I think— I don't think money necessarily changes. I think money amplifies who you are.

Yeah.

And if you're a good person, you're happy with yourself, I think it will amplify those things. If there's some challenges I think it can amplify those things as well.

Yeah, that's actually a really astute observation, just amplifies. So maybe if there's some things that people want a wealth breakthrough, maybe they have to take a look in the mirror first and say, maybe there's some things I want to fix about myself before I get on that train.

Yes, I might phrase it a little differently in that, that you're not going to be able to make big changes in your relationship to money, in the money you have and the impact in any area. Like, if you want to start a business, you're going to become a different person.

Yeah.

If you want to have great wealth, you're going to become a different person. You're going to have to become a different person. And it doesn't need to be scary. I don't want to scare people off. I think it's a great big journey. You know, a number of years ago, for the longest time, we had a very, very small team. Multimillion-dollar business with really myself and my wife Mary and like 2 other people. And then a few years ago, I just decided our work is just too important and we were helping too many people. And I'd actually gotten some bad advice early on in my career about don't build a team, it's just going to make your life a living hell, which I think was horrible advice to me at the time. Time. And so I got— worked my way through that. I said, if I'm really going to build my impact, it's time to start building a team. And then I went and got some coaching on that. And the coaching was, yeah, you can build a team, but to build a team you want that's really going to perform and be able to serve, and you're going to have to learn to serve them, and you're going to have— there's going to be some personal development. There's going to be a journey for for you. And I was like, bring it on, because this is going to be the most interesting learning I'm going to have in a long time, is learning how to be a leader and really learning how to be a servant leader. And so if you want to start a business, if you want that wealth, you know what? If you want any major change in your life, you're going to have to show up and do the work.

So you kind of anticipated a question. I don't know if what you just said is the answer or if there are other things, but I would like to know some of the big lessons or some of the highlights that you've learned along the way that you share with people now?

Well, yeah, so I've mentioned a few of them. First of all, any, any time that you're going to, to make a big shift, a successful shift, it starts in here. It starts here and it starts here. It's, it's all a personal development process. It's all a process. And frankly, if someone's watching this, they've already started the process. They have already started the process. And then one of the things I've noticed is that anyone— I get to hang out with a lot of really successful people, just so many dozens and probably hundreds of self-made millionaires, people that are doing great work, having great impact, making a great income. And what I've noticed is they're all into personal development. Yeah, every single one of them. I thought I was like the weirdo, because like in the mid-'90s, in addition, I bought two programs back then. It was, the first one was the Turn Your Computer into a Money Machine, and the other one was I bought Tony Robbins' Personal Power 2 off the infomercial. And I was, when I bought that, I was sort of embarrassed. I hid it. I went through it all and it made an incredible impact on my life. Unbelievable impact. But I was embarrassed. I thought like, I must be broken that I need to do this personal development because it really wasn't a thing that was out there. Then you get around a bunch of successful people and you realize that we've all got this addiction to personal development, to growing our game, to growing our mental game. So that was a really huge one and that continues to this day. I think for me, things like, I remember when I was trying to be a stock market trader, I bought a program then. This is after I had enough success where I could spend some more money on programs. And the program talked about nutrition and meditation. And I'm like, I just want to trade the stock market. Why is he talking about nutrition and meditation? Like, who cares about that? Tell me like one to buy and one to sell. Well, lo and behold, now, you know, it took me a decade to learn, that taking care of your body, my friend Joe Polish likes to say, you need to treat yourself like a million-dollar racehorse because, newsflash, you are the million-dollar racehorse. So taking care of yourself, how you eat, how you sleep, your spiritual health, your mental health. I meditate every day, yoga every day, I stretch every day, I generally get some type of activity every day. I'm aiming for 8 hours of sleep every night. Those type of things make a huge impact.

So, if we call this a game of creating wealth or success, how much of it is headspace versus how much of it is the other stuff?

Well, as the person who sells the other stuff, the training, the other, I'd say it's 80%. The mental game, the inner game. You know, for me, here's another one. It's been a nonstop journey of learning to think bigger, learning to think bigger.

Are you still learning to think bigger now?

Absolutely. It doesn't stop.

How do you learn that?

Well, for a long time, it was I would just look at other people that were a few steps further ahead than me. And so it was pretty easy. For a while. I remember, you know, I had that $100,000 goal. And then I hit that within a few years. And then it was really easy to think about a double to get to $200,000. And so right when I was about $200,000, I went to a seminar. And I remember this to this day. I was at this marketing seminar. It was one of the first seminars I ever went to. And we're in the buffet line, you know, and we're just spooning, you know, the green beans out of the buffet line. I get to talking to the guy next to me. And we just started talking about our businesses and he just casually mentioned that he was doing $100,000 a month. So his business is over $1 million. He was the first person I'd ever met that had a business over $1 million. And I'm like, you know, he's spooning those green beans onto his plate just like I'm spooning the green beans onto my plate. The thought of a million-dollar business It hadn't even occurred to me. And really to go, I'd already done the hard work. I got to $200,000. I mean, to go from $200,000 to a million is a lot easier than from zero to even $10,000. And it's like, okay, well, I guess it's doable. And then a couple years later, I went to another seminar and I heard this, there was someone there who had a product and it was about dating. It was teaching guys how to get dates. And they said, their business was doing $5 million. And just to show you how this thinking can just keep on creeping in, I'm like, there's no possible way they could be doing $5 million. It's just ridiculous that a business like ours could be doing $5 million, and in dating advice. Give me a break. I just, I don't believe it. Even though by that point my business was at $1 million. I mean, to go from $1 million to $5 million Again, that's a lot easier than those first few steps, but it had creeped back into my thinking, this limited thinking. But then I dug behind the scenes and yeah, they were doing $5 million and a couple of years later, $25 million. And so again, we're talking a lot about money just because it's an easy measure to make. It's an easy one to talk about. It's an easy scorecard. But that, I just kept on looking for people that were a little further beyond. And then at some point I started to run out of, because my business is at the higher end of most online businesses. And especially when you account for the fact that I also have a pretty amazing lifestyle and I get a lot of time off. So it can be, but these days it's mostly driven by the impact. Like we'll do things at my events, we'll bring people on stage that have had great success And now I'm measuring myself more by how many people I can have on stage with me that have had that amazing success or how much money we can— we've raised a lot of money for different nonprofits. I'm very proud that I had that— initially had that $100,000 goal. And now we regularly raise $100,000 or $200,000 for nonprofits at my events. In fact, we did a million-dollar fundraiser at one of my events.

Wow.

So it's driven more these days by that impact, and that's where my thinking is getting bigger, I think.

I guess, yeah, when you get out of survival and now you got momentum, you know, then you can start thinking more about impact, and, you know, money becomes a means of expanding the impact as compared to expanding your bank account, I guess, at that point.

Since I've been teaching for so long now and I've gotten to know my people so well, there's this sort of the spectrum of I want to make a million dollars or I just want to save the world. And people usually come into my world with one of those. And I love the impact people because that's where I'm at. But I totally identify with I just want to make the money because I can remember when I was desperate. And the funny thing is, is the folks that just want to save the world, they end up finding out that it takes money to save the world. You know, you just, you just can't. Continually put your work out there and just give and give and give and give without getting and without funding, right? And then those people that want to make the million bucks, they start almost without fail, almost without fail, because I've seen so many people go through this, they start to get that wealth, they start to get that abundance in their lives, and then they start to think about, wow, is that all there is? What can I do? How can I help?

It's sort of like the old adage, the best way to help the poor is not be one of them.

Exactly, exactly.

So, you know, as you're looking at reference points to say, okay, how do I set your markers as far as, you know, what's my next level of growth, how do I think bigger, you know, it seems to come through inspiration. So how do you see the role of inspiration in all this?

So I think that at the end of the day, what we're doing, at least in my world, in this, really for any entrepreneurs is we're creating from the ether. We have a thought and then we turn that thought into reality. And in that one sentence I just said, there's a lot of work and there's a lot of sweat and it's hard. And there's times where you doubt yourself and there's times where you just have to muscle through. But at the end of the day, we think of something, we see it in our mind's eye, And then we create it. And at that very first moment, there's inspiration there, and there's inspiration all the way through. And you need to stay inspired. And you know what? No one stays inspired all the time. And that's where you get back to, like, the mental game, the inner game, taking care of yourself. For me, it is about the meditation. It's about exercise. It's about being out in the woods. It's about going for runs. Out in the forest. It's about getting away in wilderness trips. Those are the things that fire me up. Those things, and then just getting face to face with other creators and face to face with, with my people at my events. I'm, I'm a natural introvert. Like, I'm like at the, at the cocktail party, I'm the one in the corner, and I'm just gonna try to find one person I can talk to and then just try to be as entertaining for that one person just so they don't leave me. And so I'm just gonna be talking, talking, talking because I'm just not a natural moving through the room. But when I get to my events, then I turn into an extrovert. I get on stage because I'm around these people, my people that are out there changing the world, that are making a huge impact, that are building their lives, that are designing their lives, that are taking the reins of their lives. And creating the life they want. And that's where I get inspiration.

When you look back over, you know, your trajectory and, and, you know, the experiences you've had, any mistakes that you highlight, saying, boy, these were, these were mistakes I made that other people can learn from?

I think for me, an easy one is that it took me too long to start building a team. We were way understaffed for way too long. So that was the number one. There was a time where I think some people might see this as a mistake, but in this world, there are times when the sun just shines on you. It's the Beatles' White Album. It's just that when everything comes together. And there was a time for me in 2007, 2008 where Everyone in the world was just talking about me and thought it was the moment. The wave was cresting, or the first huge wave was cresting. And at that time, my son was in his mid to late teens. My daughter was in her early teens. And I just said, I'm not gonna travel now. That would've been the time for me to be out there on stage speaking every month. And I said, I'm just going to pull back. I'm not going to travel. I'm sure I could have made money, a lot more money. I could have built the business faster, but that was a decision that I'm super happy with that definitely worked for me. So some people on a financial basis, some people might want to look at that and say that was a mistake, but for me, that worked.

It goes back to those original goals you wrote and saying, you know, this is who I am, and you didn't take opportunity over values. The value was being with my kids more than the opportunity to make more.

Yep.

Really interesting. What do you think the future is going to be now? So here we are. What you do is still on fire. You obviously are still completely animated about it. You're excited about the prospects for people doing online businesses to create financial freedom, to have wealth breakthroughs. What do you think is on the horizon? What's coming?

I've been asked that question for a long time because in this business, a lot of folks are just always moving on to the next thing. And I've sort of stayed in my lane. And my product, Product Launch Formula, has become a brand. It's become an actual brand in a world where there were not brands. So this is arguably the first brand that existed in this online information training, certainly in the entrepreneurial training world. It's the first one to become a brand. It's now 14, 15 years old now. And all along I've just kept on iterating and making it better because I am fired up about it. I'm excited about it. In the last few years, it used to be that I couldn't in my mind couldn't talk about impact. It was back in 2005, people just, they didn't want to hear about impact. They wanted to hear about money. So thankfully that has shifted and it's okay to talk about impact. And that's been a joy to me to share that piece. I think one of the things that I've, it's a nonstop journey for me and nonstop development. I just spent 8 days out doing a vision quest to figure out what my path was, including a 4-day water fast and 3 days solo out in the woods all by myself fasting out in Montana in the winter. It was a winter, snow on the ground. It was a crazy time to get a vision. And my vision is that this path I'm on is a pretty amazing one. So I want to keep on evolving that. And one of the things I see that a lot of entrepreneurs go and they create something really cool. And this is for the more advanced people. They create a great business or what looks like a great business on the outside, but behind the scenes, it's a little bit of chaos there and a little bit of internal chaos. And I think that In fact, I know that a lot of entrepreneurs are, they have some brokenness inside them. Sort of like if you study behind the scenes, every rock star out there, I've read every, not every, I've read a lot of autobiographies of rock stars, probably a dozen or more. And almost every one of them came out of a broken home. And that's what drove them forward. And I think many entrepreneurs came out of fundamentally damaging circumstances early in their life, and they go and they create something cool, and they create something great, and they still have that damaged 3- and 4-year-old inside them.

Wow.

So it didn't heal them.

Exactly. So I think there's a lot of people that have had a lot of, a lot of outside success, and their Instagram feed looks amazing, but I think if they healed some of that stuff inside of them then they could create even bigger and better and more beautiful things. And for some reason, I seem to be the person who built the business and kept the marriage for 30 years and have the kids who still like to hang out with them and stayed in shape. And I don't know how I've been gifted to have this life I've got, but I've done a lot of work to get here. And I think I've got a lot to share on that to help someone. Some of those folks that have seemingly built the business and the wealth they want but still are feeling a little bit broken inside.

So given that, how do you define wealth, call it true wealth?

I think having daily joy and peace and financial abundance. My friend Dean Jackson likes to have these phrases, I know I'm being successful when, and then you put a root, you answer any way you want. And so like a couple of mine are, I know I'm being successful when I know the phase of the moon. In other words, I'm outside experiencing the night sky often enough so I know what phase the moon is in. That's— I probably lost most of our viewers at that one, but I don't think—

I think just the opposite. I I think they said, "Aha." Right?

I know I'm being successful when I never have an alarm clock. The only time I use an alarm clock is on ski days and when I've got a flight to catch. So I think wealth is individual. I do think there's a financial piece. I had a situation where I could never work another day in my life. And I haven't grown my lifestyle in a huge way. It stayed pretty simple. Yes, it's gotten— I do fly first class, yes. But I'm still in the same home I was in 19 years ago that I did that launch to buy.

Oh, you're still in the same house?

Yeah.

Wow.

In '99, so when things were starting to happen, we got a new home. But since '99, 2000, yeah.

A lot of years.

Yep, something like that.

Decades.

So, yeah, same home. I drive a Chevy pickup, you know, because I'm going up the mountain to go skiing. I'm going out to go mountain biking. You know, Porsche 911, like, what? I'm not going to fit my mountain bike in the back of that. So, for me, a key is having enough financial abundance so that I don't have to work. That I can choose to work. That being able to get outside, having a relationship with my kids where they still want to be with me and still mountain bike together, we still ski together. You know, having a strong marriage, being healthy, eating the food I want, being able to go to a restaurant and not look at the prices, being able to eat organic food all the time, being able to take off time.

Yeah, isn't that a big part of it? Because I guess being unhealthy and stressed but, you know, having a lot of money in the account is not the ticket, right?

Right.

You know, there's that saying, the, the man or the woman with, uh, with good health has a thousand problems. The one with poor health only has one problem. So if you run yourself into the ground and you're eating horribly and, and you're living unhealthily but you have a great big bank account, it's all going to come crashing down.

So I have to ask because I'm fascinated by this, you know, I'm going to circle back to it. What motivated you to go on a 4-day fast, go into, you know, Montana, you know, for another 3 days of fast in the woods in the middle of winter? Like, what drives that?

There's a very long answer to that, but it is the reinvention and the inspiration piece. So I'm gonna pop back, because there's that launch that did $1 million in 53 minutes. That actually went on to do $3.7 million in about 34 hours before we closed it down. We were overwhelmed, we couldn't take any more clients. So even though sales were coming in at $100,000 an hour, we shut it down. We said, enough, we can't, we need to service our clients. And so $3.7 million in 34 hours. That was in 2008, and that wasn't that long from I just want to make $100,000 and have a nice computer. And I actually— this is going to sound strange, but it put me into a tailspin. I didn't know what my life was about because I still had those goals and I'd hit every single one of them. In fact, $3.7 million is a lot more than $100,000. It's 37 times. And you know, when I say $3.7 million, you don't get to keep keep all that. There are costs, but still you keep a lot of it. And it's like, what is my life about? Was this all there is? And what am I gonna do now? And it sent me down this long path of meditation retreats and going to Tony Robbins events and on and on and on. And eventually I figured it out. It was about making a big impact. And then periodically I get, you have something big happen. And so this past summer, business is better than it's ever been. It's booming. Team's doing great. I've got lots of time off. And I'm sitting on the front porch meditating and saying, what is next? Because we all need something that's next. We all need it. And that's when this sort of this opportunity to go on this vision quest showed up. And it was, the timing was just perfect. It was just a couple days after our launch. And there's a big confluence of events, but it was just like the world dropped this in my lap. And I'm gonna challenge myself. I'm gonna challenge, that's really what it was about, is challenging myself.

Yeah, that's extraordinary. You use this term launch. What do you mean by launch?

That's a great question because I'm sure we've already used the word a bunch and we're probably gonna use it a bunch more. So the idea of a launch is that you have a product, a service. It could be a widget, it could be a book, it could be a piece of art that you want to get out into the world, you want to sell, right? And so in the context I use it, it's this process that I've developed where you will build up to it, similar the way that Hollywood would build up to the release of a new film, or the gaming industry. They're doing a fantastic job these days of building up to a release of their new game. And it's the idea of you build value, build value, build value so people know this is coming before you actually ask for the sale. And so we've got a—

So it's kind of like an event.

Yeah, it's turning your marketing into an event because these days there's so much noise out there. Everyone's a publisher and that's a beautiful thing, but everyone's a publisher. And everyone's got their Instagram feed and their Facebook feed and it's overly full, and their inbox, and it's just incredibly full. And to stand out, you do wanna take your marketing, take your message, and turn it into an event. And that moment when a new product comes out, it's like births, it's like weddings, it's like graduations. Those events grab our attention. You wanna grab people's attention with that. And it could be for a new product or it could be for a product that's on the market that you want to re-release. And then it's just basically creating a new offer around that re-release and bringing it out there.

This spirit of contribution that you seem to be in now, you know, what can you contribute, what can you do in that realm? Do you think that this is something that's always been a part of your thinking, but now that you have the means and the time and the space to do it, you're doing it? Or did it emerge from somewhere else?

I think I was wired that way. I think that there's this StrengthsFinders, is there, is this book where you go and you figure out what your strengths are. And so, yeah, exactly. And so my number one strength is significance. And when I first read that, I'm like, what does that even mean? And then I read it and so, well, it sounds like I just have a big ego, really. It's just an ego that needs to be stroked, that I want to feel important. But I think that's in a less altruistic way. Maybe it's not just about contribution. Maybe it's just about, you know, about me feeling significant. And I'm willing to go there because I think it does end up building a lot of value for people. But yeah, I think that was something I was born with.

Yeah, really interesting to see how that unfolds. So now if you were to look back across, you know, you're now decades of experience and certainly a lot of people are learning from you, they're modeling you, they're inspired by you, etc. What's the thing that you think you're most proud of?

The thing I'm most proud of is the communities I've built, which a lot of people don't necessarily see. They see me out in the world, they see my marketing, they see my product, they see my book. But when they actually come out and they truly experience like a live event, I somehow have this capability to create an intimate experience with 1,000 people people in the room and create a community, create a bubble that wraps around that room, a bubble of incredible possibility and connection and sharing. And so I'm really proud of that, of those events. And those events, they're a lot of work, they're risky, they're expensive to put on. And I'll get through one of them and I'll just be pretty much wiped out and I'll be like, never again. And then a week later it's like, I have to do that. Because look at what I created. And then from within there, we have some smaller communities. We have a group of our highest-end clients that I meet with. And those communities, the level of connection, sharing, contribution, support for each other is just amazing. So the world sees me as this guy who figured out this launch stuff and has been teaching it, and I'm very proud of that. And I'm incredibly proud of the results my clients have gotten and the results they're getting in some incredibly worthy, worthy realms like helping parents with autistic children or helping parents be better parents or helping people with their mindfulness or just on and on and on. Or even helping people with their tennis game. I'm proud of that impact and those ripples because I'm helping these people become known experts efforts that are reaching other people. So I'm really, really super proud of that. I'm proud of that work. I'm proud of what we've contributed— millions of dollars to nonprofits. But the magic thing that I love is those communities, because when you just see people light up and start to connect within those events, it's just sheer magic.

That's awesome. Well, I want to just first say personally, thank you for the impact you've had on my life and the people I serve. And then secondly, thanks for just sharing this for all the people who are viewing. So thanks so much for your time and effort.

You're welcome. It's been great being here.

If I hear the term powerhouse, one of the first names that jumps into my mind is Dean Graziosi. Dean is well known. You probably have heard of him before. He partners with Tony Robbins and projects, and he has a lot of great success in his own right individually in several entrepreneurial ventures that he's been involved in over years. He seems like this sweet, amazing guy, and you wonder, is he really like that? And I have to tell you, he is really like that. He came to Park City and visited. We did this interview right in my home, and man, does he just light up. Does he just deliver his energy and his ideas, his thoughts, all contagious. You really feel like you do anything after you listen to Dean Graziosi. But it's not all just the air and the abstract. It's also the specific step-by-step process that you can follow. Those two things are so important that they go together, and that's what Dean brings to the table. He's an amazing human being, and I'm so happy to share this with you right now. A lot of anticipation for this interview. Dean, thanks so much for taking the time.

It's good to be here, man.

So you're well known. Even people in our crew were excited that you were coming when they heard you're coming for our Wealth Breakthrough interview. Tell us your story. How did you get to be doing what you're doing?

Yeah, you know, and first off, it's good to be here with you, man, and I love all you're doing for the world. Seriously.

And likewise.

The world needs more, more of it, you know? Access to knowledge and information, inspiration, tactics. I'll tell my story just so everyone watching knows that wherever you are, I get it. Because I know what it's like to be broke and hope for more, have envy that others are getting ahead, feeling like You're being left behind, trying to get that first sale. Know you have more to give the world, but you don't know where to start. And then once you start, you don't know how to get the wheels spinning, right? But I know what it's like to get to $100 grand a year and be like, oh my God, I made it. But then I realized that wasn't it. And get to $100 grand a month, and $100 grand a week, and $100 grand a day, and $100 grand by 10 in the morning. So I've been at every one of those pieces and have failed miserably in between. Sleepless nights, you know, an ulcer, and it's not because you're so stressed, But over time, your knowledge, your failures, the things you go after, they go from knowledge to wisdom. And when I look back now, I realize that was my journey, and I'm so blessed. I wouldn't change one bit of it. And when people say, is it worth it? It's like, hell yes. What's the opposite of going for it? Being at the end of your life? And I know you asked me about my story. I just wanna back up and give you some of the things that drive me is I always think of at the end of my life, if you're sitting with your maker, God, whoever you believe in, you're sitting next to him, And you say, "Well, you know, I—" And he asked you how your life was and you go, "Well, you know, I was going to go for it, but my wife wasn't always on my side," or, "I lived in the wrong area," or, "My husband, he had his career. I didn't want to disturb him in any way," or, "I didn't have the intelligence," or, "I wasn't born with money." I believe our maker would be like, "Oh my God, another one. I made you human. I put you on Earth. I give you limitless potential." And I think about that all the time. And that's why I think it doesn't matter where you are. We heard that a million times. It only matters if you can gain the capabilities and you have the stamina to keep going. So what I hope, and the reason I flew up here to be with you and want to do this interview, is I hope at the end of this, even if just one person gets the inspiration to go, or one person gets a tactic that we share, that's enough, right? Take what serves you from this interview, throw the rest away, you know.

So I'll go back to my story here, but So let me ask you a quick question before you do that. Do you think you've learned more from your failures or your successes?

Yeah, hands down from my failures.

Hands down. Yeah. So it's tuition.

But, and you don't like it. Yeah. Like, like when people say— I sometimes people say embrace your failures. Failing sucks. This is the worst feeling in the world when you're in the middle of it. You're not going, thank you God, I was appreciate— I was looking forward to this next failure. But, but what you realize, especially looking back now, and we've been in this game for so long as an entrepreneur, and, and then the in the self-education industry. It's my next level of life always lived on the other side of my biggest failure or my biggest fear. Right? The fear that you ignore, that's the one that you need to freaking tackle. That's the mountain you have to climb or you're going to stay where you are. And we all know 5 years goes by like this, right?

It reminds me of the Joseph Campbell quote, "In the cave you fear most is the knowledge you seek." Yeah, yeah, exactly. So in your own story then, You tell us a little bit about the miles.

Yeah, yeah. So I'll just pop through the milestones. So, um, in high school, if I go all the way back to high school, wasn't a great student, had dyslexia, really just didn't want to be a part of school at all. By 11th grade, I was out of school by, you know, 11 o'clock in the morning. I did gym, math, and English, and I think I was out. Maybe ceramics, maybe ceramic class. Um, because I had dyslexia and because I felt inferior being in school, I just was going to go to work. Right? But I guess if I, if I go back, you don't realize this stuff when you're in it. It's retrospect, it's hindsight, it's looking backwards. Is what I realized at a really young age, Patrick, is that both my parents worked really hard. My parents were married 9 times between them. I watched them move all over, so they were struggling to be happy. They were struggling financially. I lived in a trailer park until we got evicted from it, and my mom worked 3 jobs to make $90 a week. My dad worked in a collision shop all day, all night, come home, you know, dirty hands, and paint fumes give him a headache, but he had to do it. And what I realized at a young age, I don't know when it was, is that hard work had nothing to do with success. And again, it wasn't like an epiphany, and like, I'm gonna go out and find mentors, but that's how it led. It's like, I love my dad, I love my mom, but they're stressed all the freaking time. They never have any money, and they're not really that happy. And they were looking for a relationship to make them happy, now that I look back, and that wasn't doing it either, right? Because they weren't internally happy, but they couldn't find time to work on themselves because they had to worry about paying the bills. And it was a really— like, it's epiphany at a young age. Again, I said it wasn't like the sky parted, but I realized hard work didn't do it. And then I realized if you could get money out of the way— like, money solves problems. It does. If somebody says money doesn't buy happiness, that's not— they haven't given enough money away. They haven't given enough meals away. They haven't helped somebody. Like, money solves problems. And I realized that at a young age and I went after it. Like, I was just hungry for it. And if I look back and I always tell everybody, find a burning desire. We all need that. You've heard it a million times. But mine was my mom. She worked 3 jobs. She'd come home at night. Literally, her hands hurt. She got arthritis young. Her legs would hurt, her back would hurt because she was cleaning houses and sweeping floors and cutting hair. And I just remember saying, I don't care what it takes. I'm gonna make money and retire my mom. Right? And that was the first lesson I learned on having a compelling future. It's like, I'm retiring my mom, which I— I did in my 20s. But so I realized that didn't work. I found some older people in my town that seemed— that my dad didn't even like. It was a small town of 5,000 people, Patrick. And you know, it's like small town, half the town, three-quarters of the town was Italian Catholic. Everybody's rumors on this on the weekends at church. Like, it was just a fun little town. And my dad wasn't the happiest with these guys, but I became friends with a couple guys, 60, 70. One guy was almost 80 years old. And they just had different habits. They treated people differently. They felt like they just had a different sense of peace, but they were the wealthiest people in town, also happy, also good parents, good husbands. And I was like, I want to do more what they do and less of what my parents do. Not disrespectful. And it took me down a path. When I was 17 years old, I had a firewood business. By 18, I was fixing wrecked cars. I'd fix them up and sell them. By 19, I bought my first house with no money down, fixed it up, sold it. By 20, I had 22 apartments. I had a collision shop. By 22, collision shop. By 24, I had tow truck company, auto sales company, real estate company. I was at apartments, then I started buying raw land, subdividing, and then building houses. Um, how did you start getting in?

Because these are not related things that you're talking about, you know, real estate and tow shops, you know, they're not in the same category of business. Was it just circumstances that led you in those directions?

I think so. If I look back, the 3 guys that I told you about in my town were all in real estate. My dad was in a collision shop. So collision shop got me there. I wanted to go to real estate because I just said wealthy people do real estate. I'm going to do that. And desperation and stupidity are a magical combination. You could think back in your own life, right? When people said, oh, you can't buy real estate with no money down, I was stupid and naive enough to go, yeah. I think other people do it. I saw a guy on TV doing it, right? And being desperate to get away from a painful situation, both of those were such drivers that I got in my first deal. And so I want to back up a little bit and I just want to put myself out there to really understand something. At 22 years old, I was working with my dad in his collision shop. He made me a 25% partner. All my friends at maybe 21, maybe 20, all my friends had gone off to college. I was in Miami University dancing on tables, having a blast. My friends are all over hitting me up like, dude, come down and visit. And I'm like, at least my dad named his collision shop Paul and Dean Autobody, and I got 25%. He probably made $50 grand a year. I was probably making $12 grand a year, but I owned a piece of this. At least I wasn't the complete, you know, not-go-to-college loser, right? And I knew there was more. Me and my dad fought a lot. We did, because he had his old ways and I thought I had visionary ways, and he thought I was young and dumb, and I thought he was old and stuck in his ways, right? But my dad Long story short, he's the youngest of 12 and got beat as a young kid and never worked on that. Bipolar, up and down. He went through his fourth divorce and gave up on life, closed the collision shop, chucked himself in some place, and they wouldn't let him out because then he got really mad and he just went away. And he said, I'm letting it all go, go work at a factory, you're done. So imagine, no matter what age you are, at least I had that hope. So now I'm using a credit card to pay my dad's mortgage so he doesn't lose his house while these in someplace that they won't let them out. I moved all the stuff out of my dad's collision shop. I find this barn, a 100-year-old barn on the property where I was living. I put a wood stove in it, I put a compressor in it, I put the tools in it, and I'm working on people and friends' cars, changing brakes, doing motor jobs, changing oil, painting. And I'm just like— and this is the part where I wanted to get into, and it's the two voices I'm still fighting to this day inside of me. The voice that said, see, you're not that smart, you probably should have went to college, your friends are smart, you didn't come from money, your parents don't have money. This is where you belong. You're going to make $500, $800 a week the rest of your life. I had that voice saying we're screwed and wanting to feel depressed. But I was lucky enough to also have this other voice that would say, screw that. I don't care what everybody else does. I don't care how much. I don't care I don't have a college degree. In fact, because I don't have a college degree, because I have dyslexia, because people think I can't, because I'm an underdog, watch everybody. I mean, even in 12th grade, my little slogan under my name was, you don't hear me now, but someday you'll hear me roar. Something like that was my quote. So I had these two voices, and some days voice would win, for lack of a better word, telling me I can't, and I'd be depressed and think I couldn't. But most days this one was just a little bit stronger, and it was like, it was like almost a tie score. It was like 21-22, the better voice would win. So now I'm in this collision shop working on one car at a time. Half of me, part of me thinks this is pathetic. My friends, I'm embarrassed for them to come home now because now I got envy that they all figured it out and I'm stuck. My dad comes home and he's in a terrible space. I get in the first fistfight of my life with my dad. We stopped talking because he was just really in a depressed mode. And then one day, and this is the part I want to tell you, one day I just said, if I don't make a change, like it was probably a low moment, I'm going to be my dad. I'm just, again, if my dad saw this, he knows the way I feel. I said, I'm going to be my dad. I'm going to be another generation of broke Graziosis who work their asses off, die with, you know, their hands dirty. They have strong man hands, but nothing, not a dollar. I'm not going to be that guy. And I went down and again, if it was desperation, whatever drove me, I went to the woman who owned the collision shop building that my dad moved out of. And I said, "Hey, I'm not my dad. I love my dad and I don't have any money, but I have a burning desire." And I knew if you let me back in that collision shop, I'll pay you more rent than anybody else, but I have no money to give you. I went to her house a couple Sundays in a row. She gave me a hug and she said, "Go for it." I still remember Mary LaPreste, sweetest lady. I could cry thinking about her. She had no reason. I got goosebumps. No reason to do that for me. And she did it. And I named it Dean Collision Center. And I just went after it with pure desperation. Like, I still play, Patrick. I still play like I'm 10 points down in everything I approach. Like, I don't take anything for granted. I don't expect someone's going to give me money. I don't expect that the government is going to help, or I'm going to get the loan at the bank, or the deal's going to go through, or the partner. I don't just— I just play like I'm 10 points down. I go in that collision shop, I start working, and then I built up that collision shop. I realized little things from my older friends, that giving reciprocity, over-delivering, being transparent, being authentic. I closed Enterprise Rent-A-Car, which this tiny little shop with this young kid, I get this big account, which meant 2 or 3 tow trucks and a, you know, a million-dollar-a-year account. And I got— I started going there, and then houses and real estate and all those things I showed you. I told you, and then— and I'll go really quick so we can get to some deeper stuff. But then in about— I was about 25, 26 years old, I bought Tony Robbins' course. And it was the first time I was ever introduced to personal growth or self-education. Like, it was just— it was— I didn't read books back then. I was just grinding it out. I didn't realize, like, I had an extra 4,000 pounds on my back. The way I would stress, the way I would worry. I would never practice gratitude or never have a morning— like, nothing. I would just think that stuff was Fufu. Until I saw Tony one night and I just believed everything he said on this infomercial. I bought it, I got those capabilities, and everything shifted. I mean, the way I thought shifted, the way I practiced gratitude shifted. Not overnight, I wasn't like, oh, this is perfect, but it shifted me. And it taught— it introduced me to Wayne Dyer and Dale Carnegie and Jim Rohn and Earl Nightingale and Eckhart Tolle. And then all of a sudden I'm like, oh my God, why didn't somebody When I was young, my guidance counselor said, "You're not going to school? Ooh, you can work with your dad or at the local factory." No one said, "You can go down the middle road and read books, get a mentor, work for someone for free, go to a workshop, go to a mastermind." That world, like, it blew my mind that that world existed. And I went headfirst in it. Within 2 years in 1998, I filmed my first infomercial. I released my first course on helping people do what I did. My first one was how to make money with cars. And I went on TV in 1998 and I had a 20-year run. Since then, my brands and my companies have done over $1 billion and I've been able to touch the lives of millions of people around the world. And now we're on another journey doing some great stuff. In fact, I'm partners with Tony now. So the world's a crazy place. I hope that wasn't too long.

That was actually perfect. And the lessons I think are in the story in so many ways. One of the things that's really interesting, 'cause people say, okay, well, Dean was, picked the right horse, you know, he got into real estate and that's what did it. But no, there's something more fundamental than that because of the success of the shop, right? Saying you closed— I had a kick-ass firewood business in high school.

Yeah.

You know, so, so there's, there's a, there's a more foundational element saying, okay, this is the key to success or having a wealth breakthrough. Now you focus your attention in firewood, you know, auto mechanics and towing, uh, real estate, whatever it might be. And obviously there's arguments to be made on the practicality of what, you know, industry you'll get in. But ultimately you're going to succeed no matter where you go. Would you agree with that?

Yeah. And here's, here's what I'd say. In my 20s, if someone said, if you have a foundation for success, you anchor in success principles— so I wrote Millionaire Success Habits. It's one of the best-selling books last couple of years because I wanted to share these. But if you told me in my 20s Dean or Patrick, if we were sitting together in our 20s and someone said, if you anchor in a foundation for success, you guys could do whatever you want. I'd be like, this guy's drunk. Get out of my face. Give me the tool. Like, you just want the thing. Should I do Shopify? Should I start my own business? Should I get into real estate? Should I do seminars? Should I do events? Should I be a doctor or chiropractor? We all think it's the thing. It's never the thing. It's never the thing. And I think maybe you could say the same thing as I would bet to say I thought mindset was 10% in my 20s, then 30% in my 30s, and now in my 50s it's 95%. Because you can give somebody a business on how to sell $20 bills for $10, right? And they'll come back to you a month ago, you know what, nobody thinks this is true, doesn't work where I live, nobody really likes $20 bills, I don't have time for it, my husband doesn't believe in me. It's like, oh my God, right? So, um, I'd love to chat about, if you want, some of the things I believe are the core pieces to sustainable or I'll go down any road you want.

Yeah, so I definitely want to talk about that. So a couple of things. First is, and what I relate to, is that I had— my daughter's dyslexic also, so we had to pull her out of school and homeschool her because that environment just wasn't adapted to her. Because otherwise you end up, you know, she did at points in time hit herself in the head saying, I'm stupid.

I know, and you lose your confidence. You do nothing.

Exactly. And the headspace starts to degenerate. And I think she gets that from me because, you know, I, I think I'm mildly dyslexic, but they didn't have— they didn't really diagnose that back when I was in high school. So it was— I understand those struggles and, uh, there's a sense of identity that comes along with this. So two things I have, you know, an interest in. Number one, it's education, because one of the things you said is, wait a minute, I was in school, my friends went to college. I, you know, I was like not even making it in high school and it was very debilitating for me. It was, but then all of a sudden a world opened up. It's like, you know, the seas parted and then all of a sudden you see, my God, there's an entire line of education for me that can lead me to places that my other, even my friends couldn't get to with the education track they were taking. So maybe in a brief statement, you can talk about what you think about education right now. And, and because most people who are watching this, you know, the viewer is looking, they're in that education system or went through through it. And that's probably a thing that has to be corrected.

Of course, I mean, this is a topic for me that's like so near and dear to my heart because not only was it personal, I just watched— I mean, there's a whole generation of millennials right now with angst, with debt, who are getting houses 8 years later because of their college debt and don't know what to do with their life. The, the education system just didn't keep up with times. It didn't evolve as fast as the world has evolved, and it's been letting people down for a long time. And now The world is realizing it. I just— it's why I'm such an advocate of it. I'm sure you are too, because self-education— and that's the industry we talk about— saved my life. Yeah, I'd say my partner Tony Robbins' life probably saved you if I didn't learn from other people, if I didn't know that existed. And the reason I want to be such an advocate and the reason I love doing an interview like this is, you know, many people right now are listening or watching and they don't know what to do with their life because they were only told one path, right? They were only— if, if general knowledge— Napoleon Hill wrote in 1937, General knowledge, no matter how wide, how vast, will never lead to economic growth or money in your life. The only thing that does is specialized knowledge. And that's how we learn. That's how what self-education does. It allows you to gain specialized knowledge from somebody who's already done it. If I want to know what you do, I just want to spend a weekend with you, right? I don't want to go to school for 4 years. And I'll give a prime example. My daughter's here. She came with my wife. She's probably gonna be like, oh, cringy, he's talking about me now because she's 13.

But we'll look off camera and look at her. Yeah.

But here's the thing. Here's what I told her because this is personal. It's in my house. My firstborn, love her to death. I tell her, let's just say she's really great with art and fashion. If she wanted to be an interior designer, and this is the story I've told her, I hope she doesn't go to college. I hope— most parents are like, try to get your kids in college. I hope she doesn't go. She wants to go one year for fun, fine. Go goof off and then we'll get back to life. But I said, here's the thing. You can go to school for 4 years. We can pay for that. That's fine. Then you can get out and get a business and maybe an art degree. And then you go work for somebody for for 4 or 5 years and see how all that works. And maybe 5, 10, 12 years later, you start your own business. And that's the path so many take. And most people never start their own thing. They get sucked into the mediocrity. They get the mortgage, the car payment, and they got the bills, and they stay in the job. And they never reach into themselves and find another level, right? I said, or, Bri, we could search and find the top 5 interior designers in America. We'll look all over, find the top 5, and together we're going to craft the best letter in the world. And say that you're going to go work for her or him for a year for free, and you'll be the best employee they ever had in their life. I said, between— if we send it to 5, we're going to get 1. Then we go out. If you feel comfortable with them, you work for free and you be the best employee they've ever had. But the entire time you are extracting every bit of knowledge. You get them to condense their decade or 2 into a year and extract it. When you're done and you come home, you could start off where they left off. Yeah. That's self-education, and no one ever explained it that simple. Get a mentor, find somebody, get in a mastermind, read books. Books are filled with treasure maps. You just— I mean, every— think about this, Patrick, with all the books we've read, the people we've met, pretty much every answer to every question I've ever had, I can find between a person I know, a book, a course, or a workshop, or a mastermind, right? But most people don't even know that. It seems foreign to them. Most people think, oh, I want to make more money. Let me go back and get my master's. Do you know right now, if you go back and get your master's, on average in America, it's only about a $6,200 a year raise. So you go back, spend 2 years, spend the money, it just doesn't work. So self-education saved my life, and it's absolutely— I just got done writing a book. I just launched it called The Underdog Advantage. There's a whole chapter in there that said underdogs self-educate. Because in so many cases, when you're an underdog, you don't have privilege around you. You can't go to the best school. You can't ask your parents. They think you're insane. Your friends think you're an idiot. They tell you to stop dreaming. So what do underdogs do in most cases? If you look back from George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or anybody from Michael Jordan to LeBron James, if you're a sports fan, if you look at any of those underdogs, what did they do? They self-educated. They read the books. They practiced in their room. They got a coach. Like, they self-educated. So, yeah, I think one of the biggest secrets to wealth and ongoing wealth and sustainable wealth is you must continue to learn. And who you learn from is so important. You want to learn from— this is going to sound terrible, but you want to learn from a teacher, a professional teacher in a classroom who's never done it, or do you want to find a non-professional teacher who's actually doing it, had success, and willing to share it?

It's an obvious choice, right? Yeah. So there's a thing that I think is— it correlates with this, um, is that you have a sense of identity when you're that kid in high school getting ready to come out, starting your business. Etc. And over time you have your experiences and you grow. And like you said, you know, you can go from $100 grand a year to $100 grand by 10 AM. You know that that can happen. Yep. Has your identity changed over time, your sense of self and how you perceive yourself, or do you think it's pretty much the same?

I think I probably had moments where it changed, but right now I'm, I'm back to who I was, just smarter, wiser, and, um, not as much of a fool, make less dumb decisions, right? Yeah, right. Time allows you to figure that stuff out, right? You hit your I've been hit on the thumb with a hammer enough, you know, that that hurts. I should stop hitting myself with it. But I think for me, I actually, um, I like to be— again, this is one of my traits that I think everyone should hear— but I like to be underestimated. I like to really practice, not practice being humble like it's a practice, like I want to be humble. I want to always remember, because, you know, as much as, as well as we've done, you could lose it overnight, right? So I never want to rely on that. But of course, it's a part of my identity now that I get to, you know, impact people's lives. I have money. I don't worry about money anymore. I can take care of my family. I pay— I retired my parents many, many years ago. I can provide for my kids and do all those things. But I think the more, especially in today's world— and I'm going to digress a little bit here, Patrick— but I think people always ask me, how are you so good at sales? And I think that's my unique ability—marketing and sales. And I create great products once I get it in their hands. But if you look at what I do, I'm extremely authentic with my sales, whether that's on TV, online, or whatever I do. And I think that's something we need to take into consideration in today's world. I think leaning into your authenticity, leaning into your weaknesses, being exposed, being vulnerable to your weakness, but letting the world—people—let the world see your strengths I think that's what we want subconsciously more than ever. People always ask, what's the X factor? I think I'm— I just want to continue to find really who I am and let the world know more of who I am and work a lot on my strengths and ignore my weaknesses.

Interesting concept, or, you know, that you're bringing out is strengths versus weaknesses. And so you're— what I'm inferring, at least I think from what you just said, is that what you do is you build success success based on strengths, you don't try to get your weaknesses up. Is that, is that the way you see it?

100%. Like, so your daughter has dyslexia. Do you know Ned Hollowell? Yes, very well. Yeah, so that's a great guy, right? ADD specialist. Um, we had a business together. Oh yeah, okay. Focuses on dyslexia and ADD and, and things that make, uh, kids lose their confidence. Yes. Right. So talking to him one day, and I feel like I probably had ADD as a kid, definitely dyslexia. Said a lot of times they go together. Yeah. So, I said to him, "How do you cure so many kids? Why does Oprah call you the number one ADD or just, you know, specialist on the planet?" And he said something really, really simple. He said, "When you see a kid in class and he's trying to sit down and read and he can't read and he's tapping his foot and the teacher said, 'You stay there and read until you're done.'" And all of a sudden, he called him Johnny. All of a sudden, Johnny can't read and Johnny gets up and starts running around. Not only does he have ADD, he's got ADHD. He's hyper. Right? And then they medicate and they push and all that does is knock that confidence down more and more and pull that kid and go— he goes inside, and then there's no way to get to him. He said, what most people don't realize, the cure for ADD, the cure for dyslexia, is not to point out the kid's weaknesses. What I do is I get with the teachers, I get with his family, and I get with his siblings, and I say, what's Johnny good at? Johnny's good at math, he's just kind of bad at everything else. Okay, we're going to focus on math, and we're going to make Johnny so good at math that we're going to get his confidence back because he's going to get A's in math, he's going to feel good about himself. And guess what? When Johnny gets A's in math and people start patting him on the back and his confidence goes up, we're going to fast forward and he's going to be sitting down reading that book. Like, I get goosebumps talking about it because it's so simple. In this world, I remember, I remember Mrs. Thompson like it was yesterday calling me stupid. Just sound it out. I'm like, I'm trying to sound it out. I can't. And I'd go home and cry in 7th grade and I'd feel really bad about myself. I'm not blaming Ms. Thompson. That's probably how she was brought up. The whole point is those little nuances, we need to do that for ourselves because no one's going to say, Let me identify what you're good at, Patrick. Let's help you. We got to look inside and go, stop looking at the stuff I'm weak at. Stop saying I didn't— I'm not far enough ahead in my life. I should have done more. I missed that opportunity. All those things, we could say that forever, but it serves us nothing. It serves no bigger purpose. That's right. Because at the end of the day, kind of leading back and forth, I believe we should ignore our weaknesses. I still suck at reading, and I'm a multiple New York Times bestselling author. I just released my 6th book. I can't even write a sentence without 14 words being lit up. And I can't even word check, can't even fix them sometimes, they're so far off. And I just put like amazing in there instead of some elaborate word, right? So we have to ignore our weaknesses, I believe, and all of me, it's what helped me. And then find out what we're good at and get so good that they cover all the rest. And someday, if it's not now, you pay someone to do all the things you're weak at, and you stay in that core competency, in that unique ability. And I think there's a bigger buy product, Patrick. And you said something really cool, and I'm— I wouldn't have any doubts with you about pulling your daughter out because nothing happens in life without confidence. That's right. If you think of the people we know that their confidence is just a little bit down, they play small their entire life. You don't close the deal, you don't start the company, you don't get the girl, you don't get the guy, you don't get the partner to give you the money, the bank doesn't give you the money. You know, people— when your confidence is down even 5%, it doesn't work. And here's something, if this is— if nothing else can shock you into not working on your weaknesses, How do you feel when you work on your weaknesses? Right. If you said to your daughter, right, she's having a good day and you tell your daughter right now, if she was here and you sit her down and say, hey, here's a book. Can you read these 20 pages to my friend Dean? How would you make her feel? Yeah, right. If you did it to me, I'm literally reading my book, my 6th book. I'm reading it. I'm a month in, dude. I still can't read. My brain goes faster. My eyes and my brain goes faster. Like I know what's coming next and I skip and I skip and then I mess up the words, right? If you did that to me, I would feel really— I would lose my confidence. And when you lose your confidence here, am I supposed to go down the street and do good on video or go down and close the deal or make a deal on the house or whatever business you're in? You don't. So to go along with that, work on your strengths and ignore your weaknesses is one of the biggest things for success, is protecting your confidence. And if watching the news robs your confidence, don't watch it. If reading out loud dings your confidence, don't do it. Like I tell, I tell my kids all the time, like, a teacher wants you to read in front of the class, you don't want to, don't, don't say no. Just say no. Like, if you were in my— if you work with me and you're on my team and you said, hey, I'd be really embarrassed to read in front of me, I wouldn't go, well, then I think I'm gonna fire. Like, then don't read. What are you good at? Oh, I like doing this. Okay, bring in your artwork. Or do— like, I would never do that. And that's not the real world, and that's what we miss. But someone did that to her teacher or his teacher, and they just think that's Let's make them get great. Work on your weaknesses to get stronger. It's like, oh, then you, then you end up with a bunch of weaknesses that are okay rather than polishing this diamond that lives inside of all of us.

You know what's brilliant in that example or that metaphor is, um, is the fact that, you know, everybody— and well, maybe let me see if you have the premise before I make the statement. Is it a premise that you hold that everybody has some genius in them? Everyone. They just— okay, so everyone, there's nobody— so somebody out there saying, well, no, I'm not really good at anything. And that's a fallacy. So that everybody has some genius. And of course, if they're working in their genius or expressing it, like my daughter's a genius songwriter and a singer. So that's, that's, that's her life. That's her career. That you can't stop her from wanting to sing. And when she's singing her, like, as you talk about confidence, like trying to get up and read in front of a room or, you know, what her experience was horrible. I was worried. I'm speaking in front of 3,000 people. There's a band on stage so that they invite us to come do a song with them. And I'm like, I want to bring her out on the stage, get her used to it, 3,000 people, you know. No problem.

Walked right out, had all the confidence in the world. She was in her unique ability, right? She was in her core competency. Exactly.

So it shows up everywhere. So to me, what's fascinating and what speaks to, you know, what you're talking about as an example is that it becomes critical then to find out what is that unique ability, what is that genius that you have, and uncovering that. I'll never forget when I was sitting with Halliwell once in his office and we're working on this business and he's talking about ADD. And I finally looked up at him at one point, said, Ned, you know, based on what you're describing, I think I might be ADD. He goes, you're totally— it's like you didn't know. And, and he said something so profound that was so true for me. He said, you know, somebody with ADD could spend 10 years trying to turn a weakness into a strength. They just keep— wow. And I'm looking at myself saying That was probably most of the pain in my life. Yeah. Trying to get good at things that were weaknesses for me. And that set me free. Yeah. In a big way.

And the reason— you know what? The reason you and I are talking about so many different conversations, it's been too long since we've been together. I have so many things I want to share. So I love this. I hope, I hope we're not going in too many different directions. But I have to tell you, so just talking on this because I really want to anchor this in because there's a lot of people watching or listening right now that have been carrying around a weakness since they were in school. They were told they were sloppy, they were unintelligent, they couldn't read, they weren't fast enough, they were lazy, they were a procrastinator. And you carry that and it's like 4,000 pounds you got to push off, right? So I'm doing a small mastermind maybe 10 years ago, 10 people in the room, and I'm going around the room and saying, what's the biggest thing holding you back? Why haven't you had a breakthrough? It's this, it's this. And I get to this guy, Tom. I remember Tom, probably 68 years old, and this was in real estate. And, uh, Tom had already done 4 deals at the time, probably made $15 grand a deal, whatever. Let's just say he's at $60,000 in profit. Amazing. He retired, was sick of being retired, he wanted to do it. So I get around to Tom and he says— I said, why aren't you going faster, Tom? Why don't you go to the next level? He's like, you know what, I'm not doing another deal until I get organized. He's like, I'm the sloppiest person. Well, I could clean my car and it's a disaster. I go home, my home office, and there's bills stacked all over. He's like, I'm a mess. I need to go to— and this was 10 years. I need to go to Office Max. I need to get a filing cabinet. I need to label everything, and I need to start a system and a process. And I said, Tom, how old are you? He said, 68. I said, can I be honest with you? You're gonna be a slob to the day you die, and who gives a shit? And he looked at me like I was being rude at first, and I said, Tom, listen to me. There's a bunch of people in this room younger than you. They haven't done 4 deals yet. You did 4 deals. Why do you think you did those deals? He goes, I kind of got a knack. Hitting around to find these deals. He said, well, wait a minute, what do you mean? And he explained. I said, let me just ask you, do you think it's worth your time at 68 years old to try to keep your car clean or your office clean? What if you just did one extra deal a year? You found that sniffing around method that you have. What if you did one extra deal a year and you got better at that and you find two? I said, how's it feel when you get made that money? How's it feel when you sold the house? He goes, oh, everybody said I couldn't. It felt amazing. He's lit up. And then I talk about being organized and I He'd literally shrink. Shoulders would shrink, face would go. He looked 10 years difference in age when he talked about doing the thing he was good at or doing a thing he wasn't. And I said, Tom, what if you just had a different point? What if— I said, did teachers tell you that? He goes, yeah. He goes, truthfully, my wife tells me that all the time. He said, great lady, she just tells me all the time. I said, what if you just admitted you were a slob? What if you got amazing at what you're already good at? You did one extra deal a year and you paid someone to clean your house, clean your car, and keep you organized. And he started to cry. And he's like, why didn't anybody ever tell me this? And like, I went over and hugged him because he was crying. Because you know why he was crying? Not because of what I said. He was crying because he held on that he was inferior because he was a slob since he was a little kid. His mom yelled at him to clean his room. His wife getting on him, probably at work getting on him. This was an amazing man who had a weakness. Who gives a shit? I'm never going to get good at spelling ever, ever in the history of the world. He's never going to be clean. And here's the cool part. He called me, he got a hold of our office, got my email, sent me this long email about 6 months later, went home and just told his wife the whole thing. She felt so bad that she was on him like that. She said, why don't we make a deal? She quit being a teacher and she went partners with him and kept him organized because she was an organized teacher. And he goes, she does the organization, I do the deals. And he was on fire. And not that— I mean, I was just glad he was there in that room because he would have held that to the day he died.

That's right. Right. And that's interesting. Because these are the pieces of identity thing that you might hold on. I suck because I can't X. And then as a result, it's like, you know, it inhibits. I mean, you know, how can you try to express fully? So then if we talk about— well, let me ask this first. Yeah. What's your definition of success?

Oh man, that's probably changed all through the years.

And that's interesting because you saw it probably some way before and you're seeing it differently now. So maybe you can speak to that.

At 24 years old, when I finally started making making a little money, success was that on a Thursday I could jump on a plane, fly to Miami, go to a club, get bottle service, and dance on a table till 3 o'clock in the morning. That is so far— I would die if I did that today, right? But that— I thought I was successful. I was the broke kid from a small town. Now I'm in Miami. It's amazing. The energy's good. I'm alive. Like, that was success. It was also taking care of my mom. There was, you know, I'm exaggerating, not really, but there was other things successful. I believe success, identifying what success means, and it was a really great question. It's one of the most important things. I just did a New Year's Day training. I started with that. I said two things I think are the most important questions to start. What's success mean to you? And who do you want to become? Right. And my, my buddy Tony Robbins, when I was 48, looked at me and he said, who do you want to become in your 50s? And I never had it. No one, all these time, all this time in this space, no one had ever asked me who I wanted to become. I thought about what I wanted to accomplish, who I wanted to kind of, how I I wanted to evolve, but who do I want to become? What kind of— and I started thinking, what kind of man do I want to be? What kind of father do I want to be in my 50s? What kind of husband do I want to be? You know, I'm going to be a father again. Like, who do I want to be? And when I started crafting that, it helped me align what success really means to me. So at this phase of my life, um, success means to me that my kids are with me exactly half the time. So success to me, at 3 o'clock when they come out of school, my truck's parked there to pick them up no matter what, or my car is parked there. There's not a billion-dollar deal that could stop me from picking up my kids. There's not a billion-dollar deal that could take me away from not having them with me and being there with them and being present and playing life and games and doing fun stuff. And, you know, because they're not going to be here forever. Also being a better version of me to be a better husband, like, that's, that's success to me. Having a great team, my office, I got 60, 70 people, they're amazing team in the world, and making an impact on the world. That's where I'm at. And, and pretty much if it falls outside of that I'm not really interested. I'm not like— I don't go to fancy parties. I don't do the cool stuff anymore. I, I love coming home. Like, so, but it doesn't mean that that's for everybody. Success means to me that I'm in control of my time, how I'm as a father, as a husband, as a leader, and doing impact. I don't want anybody telling me what to do. And when I even think that I could lose that, I would chew through your fireplace, right? But I continue to, to create what means, like a beacon of light, right? This is, this is one thing I'll share with everybody, what everybody does wrong. You can ask somebody what success means, they tell you, and they don't think about it for another 3 months. When I think about success means to me, no one's gonna take away the father, the husband, the leader, the impact I'm gonna make. No one's gonna take away from me. But I need to look at it every day, Patrick. So when I get up and I still fight— people say, you got enough money, you could quit forever— I still fight like I'm broke. I still fight like the underdog. I still fight like I'm 10 Why do you think that is?

Why are you still fighting like that? Because I don't ever—

like, I always— I know what success means to me, and I— it's like that I was talking about, like a beacon of light. Like, I model it, right? But then I always push it out like 20 feet from me. I never keep it right close to me.

And you enjoy that? I do. So you like the energy? I do. The energy of being— you'd rather be 10 points down than 10 points ahead?

I do. I love that. That's just for me, but I identify that, and I do that because, like, right now I want to help fix along with my partner Tony. Look at— you're on a mission. Look at what you're doing with your documentaries. It's amazing what you're doing. When my partner Tony— we want to help provide, uh, an alternative to the current education system. We want to make self-education the new norm. 10 years, somebody goes, you went to college? Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, you got self-educated? Okay, come in the door. Like, that's what our goal is. So when I wake up in the morning and I think about that, dude, I'm fighting like I'm broke. I'm fighting like I'm living in the trailer again. Like, I am like Like, I'm at the office right now before the team and after the team right now, um, because of that.

So, um, to me it's just that, you know, that you maintain purpose. And purpose is that fuel that keeps driving you to, to do what you're doing. You know, one of the things that comes to mind as you're explaining success and, and the giving it the characterization that you are, uh, in a previous series we interviewed Roger Hamilton, if you know Roger. And I asked the question, how do you How do you define wealth? And he said, "Wealth is what you have left after all your money is gone." And I thought that was a really good definition. Wow, that's really great. I'm going to think about that forever. Yeah. It's just like— and to me, that's what it sounded like saying, "Hey, you know what? If all the money were gone, my wealth are all these things that I have in place," which includes your intellectual capital to go recreate it again. Of course.

And the thing I'll say, though, Patrick, is I'm not going to poo-poo on wealth. Like, here's the thing I know. My dad is a good man underneath it all. My mom's an amazing lady, right? If I look at them, closest people in my life other than my family that's here with me now. But money was always an issue with them. So when money is an issue, you don't have time to figure out how to eat vegan or plant-based or get a personal chef or get a personal trainer to get get you in better shape. When you don't have money, you don't have the opportunity to go to a Tony Robbins event or go on a 90-day binge and reading a book every 10 days and work on your inner peace and get rid of the demons you have from your parents or being molested or, or being taken advantage of or being cheated on. Like, all those things— my— neither one of my parents ever had a moment, and I'm not making excuses for them, they just didn't have a moment to work on themselves because they're always working to make just enough money to pay the bills. Yeah, right, you're in survival. So you're in survival mode, and who could blame them? So what I say is, when, when people say money can't buy happiness, like, BS. Like, I believe if you build a core for success, and that's start— you have to have the mindset and the foundation and the habits. Without that, you're going to be spinning your wheels and you'll dabble in everything. Then bring in the right capabilities, whether that's a Shopify, real estate, and the self-education, whatever it is, a million different things— being a chiropractor, being a you have that foundation, they're the people who win, right? Look at the people successful in your life. They have a mindset that gets them over the obstacles. Plug in anything, they'll be successful, right? If you plug in that, success happens, right? So for me, if you can sacrifice a year or 3 or 5, because those years are going to go by anyway, that's right, and you can build some wealth in your life. For me, when I got money out of the way, it's when I started to look internally. And I'll tell you, when, when money wasn't when I wasn't running to chase the money to have freedom, when that stopped, it was a weird time in my life. I don't know if you ever felt that, where there's no more like, I'm here, I have the house, I have the money, there's no bill collectors, I'm not going broke. It was like a weird time, but that was the time I went inside. That's the time I started getting therapy on a deep level, reading books obsessively, reading books that healed my soul and my past wounds, and saw what I messed up in last relationships and said, why did I make— why did I do that? And how I could be better man, better father than my father was. And I became a better person because I got to work on me, not my poor parents trying to pay the bills.

You bring up a really interesting point about saying, hey, you know what happens when suddenly that pressure's off and you've lived in it for so long? Yeah. You know, my wife, who is also my muse, taught me that we get addicted to the hormones of stress. There is literally— for me, there was literally a withdrawal. It's like saying, wait a minute, like there's big things going on right now, but it's all handled. And I'm like, I didn't know how to be comfortable without the stress and the pressure.

I've been there.

It's like it was like a withdrawal process. And, you know, mindfulness practices are the way to transcend that, which is what it took for me. Yeah, really.

But you had to get to that point to work on mindfulness practice. That's right.

And that's the point you're making.

I mean, at 27, I don't know what you're doing at 27. But if someone said, hey, let's get you some mindfulness practice, I'm going to go grab a cocktail and I'll be just fine. Right.

And those are the stages of, you know, kind of the trajectory of the arc of life, because you're exactly right. At 27, it was not, you know, that— no, I was working 7 days a week, night and day, you know, as an entrepreneur and loving every minute of it. And I didn't want to stop to think about things I wanted to do. I was—

yeah, exactly. If you don't stop, you don't think.

You're golden. Yeah, you don't have to pay attention to any of these things. So this is, to me, completely fascinating. And overall, I mean, when you look at embedded in all the things that you described, um, you know, what success takes, what, um, how people can self-identify with weaknesses and suddenly it starts to take them down, the importance of confidence— I mean, all these things, it's all gold. I mean, it really is the gold. Here's one thing, and maybe sort of final thought as people are watching this. I observe many times people who've struggled for years— I've worked with people who've been struggling for years as entrepreneurs, and they, they stay just in survival mode. I mean, they're paying the bills, but it's stressful. They're not breaking through, and they're looking for a wealth breakthrough. And so often I found that they're literally just one or two clicks away.

Yeah, they're on the one-yard line. They don't even realize.

They don't even realize it. So is that your experience also that many times people, they've been putting in the, the years, they've been studying.

As you're saying it, can you think of 10 people you know, at least 10 friends you have, at least 5 women, 5 men you think of right now that are in the game? They know some of the same people we know, but they never can get past that threshold. And I, I would say, you know what, some of the things, um, a good friend of mine, Randy Garn— I don't know if you know.

I know Randy really well. Just had dinner with him last week.

Yeah, sweetheart of a guy. Um, Randy has a saying he always says The little things aren't the big things. The little things are everything. Yeah. And I want you to think about what I'm going to say right now is a little thing that you've heard before, but what I notice in all of them, the one thing I have in common is they'll have a story, and the story is about the size of the income they can have, right? So I don't know about you, but I had limiting stories, right? We all have, right? That the voice of saying you don't have education, you didn't come from any, it takes money to make money. But then I found a new story. It No, I could start my own collision center. And then you get a breakthrough that my collision center is going and I'm doing half a million dollars in sales and I'm making 100 grand a year. It's like, oh my God. But when you get there, if you keep that story, it's not enough to get you to a million, right? And yes, you need the tactics, you need the capabilities, you need a new way of thinking. The, you know, the, the business that got you out of Egypt and the business philosophies is not the same one takes you to the promised land, right? We got to evolve all our thinking. You have to self-educate. So many people think they go to school for 5, 6, 7 years, that's it for the rest of their life. You got to educate nonstop, right? But what I notice is a lot of them that are stuck will have a story that's actually keeping them stuck there. And that, that can sound pretty foo-foo and like, oh, I've heard that before. But next time, and I'm, I'm, I'm obsessed with this because I'll have people say, damn, Dean, now you're in, you know, Tony and I launched a business. We did the biggest launch in internet history.

Yeah. It's become a legend already.

Yeah. Become a movement. People like, how did you jump into that and do it? Because I carried with me all the capabilities. I changed the new story. I just want to tell you, my story for the education system is, in within 20 years, Tony Robbins and I will create an alternative to the traditional education system and we'll make them evolve. Instead of put— I'm not trying to put them out of business. They'll go, oh damn, these guys are taking our business. They'll evolve. And secondly, we'll make self-education the new norm. Or people, when they're getting interviewed, they'll say, okay, who did you self-educate with? Who did you mentor under? What workshop did you go to? Oh, I went through this. Oh, great. Come on in. Right? That's my goal. So I have a new story that's massive, and it's— Patrick, it's literally pulling me out of bed in the morning. Now, if I had a story that said, dude, you're lucky you got here. You had dyslexia, you didn't go to school, your brand has done all that, you got this big house, you got money, dude, you should like, like, be careful. You don't want to lose it. If I kept that story, there's no way I would have done that, right? So I had to upgrade my story. And people right now might be listening, go, oh yeah, that's what rich people say. It's not. I wish someone would've shaken me at a younger age. I'd be so much further ahead and say, the story you're telling yourself, let me hear it. Come on, give it to me right now. And you think it's empowering, but then when you dissect it, you go, ooh, that's why I'm stuck. You need new story.

Upgrade your story, upgrade your life. So what's interesting is that, and you can see the purpose in it and you know, so I feel the vision of how you're understanding self-education and literally one of the things that's preventing a breakthrough in humanity is a very old antiquated system of educating people, which is literally counterproductive to them expressing their genius in a world that's so full of wealth and resources that that old factory-style education is no longer necessary.

I mean, just think, what if your daughter didn't have you guys as parents? Yeah, right. What if she had a parent, not bad, loves her to death, but was so ingrained in traditional— you're an entrepreneur, you're a visionary, you work on yourself, on a deep level. And I love hearing great stories about you, I do. You touch a lot of people's lives in such a great way, dude. I mean it. But you're heart-centered, you and your wife, so you recognize that and you did it. But just think, what if you forced your daughter and said, "Get to school, get good grades, you're gonna get grounded." Where would she be compared to you? Probably fast forward 5 years from now, she's gonna be leaning into who she is, singing in front of thousands of people, making people have experiences through her music, through her impact, and changing the world, right? Same person, that's right, just different stories, different stories, just different stories.

So, and education is the path to writing a new story, it's creating a new story, right? Which is just amazing. So I'm like overly excited and stimulated because I know when you're talking about this big vision of shifting the system, it's not like some abstract goal that is like you're just reaching for the stars, you mean it. Yeah, I mean it. And I believe we're going to do it.

And so does Tony. I think, I think if two people could do it, we could.

I hope we can help you. I really love that. So listen, I can't express my gratitude for you to come here to share all this. I know it's going to make a big difference for the people who are watching, and I am just uber excited for what you're going to be creating in the future. So thanks so much for this time and effort.

You got it, man. I appreciate it.

You pass many of these every day. As a matter of fact, you probably patronize many of these each day. What am I talking about? Franchises. Most people don't recognize how lucrative a business a franchise can be, and it may seem like, oh, it's out of your realm of expertise, you don't understand it, it's not an area that you can go. People have some money saved, they don't know where to put put it, one of the things you want to do with money is create cash flow, which is what franchises do in a pretty predictable way. But what do you know about it? Well, you're about to know a lot about it. My next interview is with Eric Van Horn. He is an expert in franchises. He's had many in many different categories, and he's going to explain to you why owning a franchise should be one of the considerations you might want to have if you're considering a wealthier future. Enjoy this interview. Eric, thanks for taking the time to sit and talk with us. It's my pleasure. So we're going to be talking about franchising. That's your area of expertise. Really excited to have this conversation because not many people talk about this when we talk about wealth. And I think it's an important area. How did you get into it? What brought you into doing what you do?

I remember when I was a kid in high school, my dad was an entrepreneur as far as I knew, because he had a job and then lost his job. And then started his own business. And he was working a lot and working in the business, had employees. And then one day I came home from school and I started to play, play in the yard, doing some fun stuff. And then he was there and was interacting with me. And little did I know that that was a conscious decision that he made, was to spend time with us kids at that time. And I realized that I want to do that when I'm grown up. I want to be able to spend time with my kids, and entrepreneurship was the avenue for that. I didn't realize it was going to be franchising until years later. So I graduated from college.

What did you study in school?

Business. Business administration. All right. And I went for 2 years, and then I took a year off, and I traveled a bit, and then came back and finished up my second year— second 2 years of school, and I graduated with a degree in business. And I was ready to go to law school at that point. And I took the LSAT and I was registered for school. And then I realized how much work it was going to be. That was— the attorney route was not going to give me the lifestyle that I wanted. And so I was in my early 20s and I started a landscaping company. I started this landscaping company and I was mowing the lawn, planting flowers for some older lady. And she came up to me and gave me some water and said, you know, basically, Eric, what do you want to do when you grow up? And I said, I want to be a real estate investor. And then the next thing that she said is like, oh, we did that about 20 years ago. And I said, well, what do you mean? She said, we did it for tax purposes back then. We have this condo down by the beach. And I was in Virginia Beach at the time, and I was just intrigued. Tell me more. And she said, we just want to sell it now. We want to simplify our lives and we don't want the headache of having a tenant in that condo anymore. And you know, being a guy that was wanting to be entrepreneurial, I said, well, how much do you want for it? And I didn't have any money at the time. You know, I was about ready to go to law school. And she said, we don't want anything for it. We just want someone to take over our payments. And so I was studying real estate at the time and I realized there was something back then that was called an assumable mortgage, where I could really just assume her mortgage. And so I came back to her house, I delivered her an option contract with $100, and the option contract said I had the right to buy your house in the next 30 days and with no money down. And she said, all I want is for someone to pay the closing costs. And so I called up my parents. I said, you're not going to believe this. But I have this opportunity and you can buy this house with me and we'll split the profits 50/50. But I need you to come up with the closing cost. And so, they wrote the check for the closing costs. And well, before that, they said, Eric, it sounds too good to be true. And my real estate broker said, I don't know how Eric did this but he did. And if you guys don't do this with him, I will. And so, we bought the house and a few months later, they bought me out. My parents bought me out of my portion, and I had my first large chunk of money. It's not very large now, but at that time it was a lot of seed money for me. And I knew enough not to go buy a new car or do something like that, right? And I had some friends looking at some franchises at the time, and I really didn't even know what a franchise was. I went to business school and we really didn't even talk about franchising. And so I ended up meeting some people that were franchisees and then meet I was meeting the founder and I realized, well, this is really interesting. The whole concept where there's something that was a proven model that I could step into and I don't have to do everything from scratch. And so, I ended up buying my first franchise in my mid-20s.

What was that first franchise?

That first franchise was Liberty Tax Service. And I had no desire to do accounting or taxes. And I don't think I ever did a tax return return as an owner of that. And it was a really good lesson in business for me because I was a marketer and this was really a marketing company. The product was taxes, but the way to get revenue in the door was marketing. And then I wanted— I was always looking for opportunities, and the founder of that company at the time had started another tax business. So he had history in, in the business, and he had history and selling a lot of franchises. So in addition to owning the franchise, I sent him an email and said, I would like to sell franchises. I would like to learn how to do that. And he said, I'll never forget it. He, the reply back in that email was, show up on this date and we'll give you a shot. And so it was a challenge in a way, right? And I knew that's how he operated, but I also knew that he mentored people in groups. So that He spent an hour every day at 4 o'clock, our 4 o'clock meetings with all of the franchise development reps, which are salespeople. Right. And he spent an hour with us telling us, teaching us, coaching us, and helping us help him sell franchises. So I wanted— and then I realized being on the inside of a franchise has its benefits as well.

Yeah. So was that franchise successful for you?

Did it work? It was a challenge at first. So I look back and it was one of the toughest franchises that I've ever owned, and I've gone on to own a number of them, and that was— to that point, it was a really tough franchise. It was a seasonal business, and getting into the seasonal business, I thought, well, I only have to work 4 months out of the year, but then you have to hire new people every year, and there's just challenges that come along with that, and the industry went through a lot of different So we were constantly having to adjust from a hiring standpoint and adjust from the industry changes and just the way things were going in that business. It was a really difficult business. And I owned and ended up owning 12 stores.

Oh, 12 of them? Yeah. Wow.

In Kansas City, I had some. And then in Austin, Texas, I had some. And after owning them for about a year, I bought what's called an area development. And a lot of people know it as master franchising. And I bought that with my parents, 50/50 partners in Austin, Texas. And so I remember at that time flying into Austin and people, when you're on an airplane, they ask what you do. And I said, I own Liberty Taxes here. And nobody knew what that was. So 10 years later, almost 10 years later, I flew into Austin Someone asked what I did. I told them. They said, you guys are everywhere. So I understood the power of franchising. I understood how you can quickly grow a brand. You can quickly grow a market. And as an area developer, I took that market. I bought that entire region. And we started out with 4 franchisees, and we ended up with 42 locations. And as a master franchisee at the time, I got half of the royalties off off of that. So, I was building, I was like a mini franchisor in that market. And when I ended up selling that, that was my first real large chunk of money that came into my bank account that I'd never seen before. And that was seed money for the next thing that I started to do.

[Speaker:BRAD_STONE] So, before we get into that next thing, so when you had the development deal, you know, the master franchise, so you were kind of both selling franchises because it wasn't you personally just going to put up all 42. Correct. You went and recruited a bunch of people to put them up and you had a piece of each one. So you were their partner in essence. Is that the structure?

Yeah, I was. And I was kind of the middleman between the franchisee and the franchisor. And I would, I would sell. And so that's why I wanted to work at the corporate office to learn how to sell so I didn't have to, you know, figure that out myself. So I was selling for myself in Austin, Texas, and then I was selling in other parts of the country for the corporate office. So anybody that was looking at a franchise, they would come to me, and then I developed a personal relationship with them, and, and I got to know them and their families. And so I really wanted to see them succeed. So one, I would sell them, but number two, then I would support them. Yeah. And that's really when I started to understand franchising advertising, because really at that point, they didn't really understand what I did, or they didn't really value what I did as an area developer. And I knew that at the time. And so it wasn't a job where I was getting a lot of thanks. It wasn't a business where I was getting a lot of thanks from them. But I also knew that I was giving them a ton of value. And when I ended up selling that area development, I would get all kinds of emails from them. Eric, we never realized how much support you gave. We never realized how much you did. And, um, and then I just realized, like, I want to be a part of brands, franchises that offer a lot of support and a lot of help to their franchisees.

What did it cost for you to get an area development deal? Is it basically you just have to hit a certain mark of, uh, in development as far as the amount of, uh, franchises you're putting up? Did you have to purchase the rights for the area?

How does that deal work? Yeah. So at the time, I think the prices have gone way up since then, and it was really expensive for us at the time. So years, this roughly, this was in the early 2000s. Okay. And the way they price these back then, I think they still do it today, is either by territory or by population. And it was in the hundreds of thousands is when we— is what we paid for that. And what you're really doing is you are— it's a super passive business because you are— you get them up and going. And then once somebody knows how to run the business, you don't have to do a whole lot of coaching at that time because when they open up their second location, they don't need you as much. And when they open up their third location, they really don't need you.

And you have people doing second and third locations, not just the ones. And what did it cost to, you know, at that time, if you came to me and I'm in Austin and saying, okay, you got me interested in wanting to buy one of these franchises. What would it cost for me to get in business?

The franchise fee was about $40,000 at that time. So they would come up with $40,000, and then it wasn't that much more. It was around the $100,000 mark to get started because we weren't going into high-end real estate. It was, it was small square footage, not in the best of centers, not in the best parts of town. And so landlords weren't asking premiums for those locations. So it was a really inexpensive business to get going.

So at a point in time you decided, okay, we've got 42 of these things, you own this, basically you own the development deal, and you get cash flow from each of the— I guess they give you an override. So is it the franchisee that was paying you, the franchisor, or both?

The franchisee was paying me, but they were paying the franchisor the royalty. So let's say there was $100,000 of royalties that were paid. $50,000 would come back to me. So the franchisee would pay the franchisor and the franchisor would then pay me.

Okay. So yeah, so the franchisor was basically paying you out of their proceeds for the development deal. I see. And then, and you also had transferable rights, meaning you can sell your position there, which is what you ended up doing.

Yeah. And a lot of times when you have an area development like that, it's the corporate office it's the parent company, the parent franchisor that buys it back from you. Because as an area developer, you are the— Massage Envy did area developments, and there's a, there's a number of different franchisors that use that as a growth model. Because we paid the franchisor money when they didn't have a lot of money, typically when they're just getting started, right? They didn't have to pay for the operational team. I was operational team. They didn't have to pay pay for someone to sell franchises because I did that. And so it was a win for them early on, cash injection, free labor. But on the back end is when it was a win for me because then they wanted to purchase back that cash flow. So they bought it.

So it was the franchisor that bought you out.

Correct.

That's great. So then what was your next move? So now you say, wow, okay, suddenly I'm rich. Yeah, I'm rich.

At least I thought I was at the time. And so I was wondering what was next for me, and I knew about this thing called franchise consulting, and I knew that there was a company out there that helped people buy franchises that didn't know what they should do. And I knew about franchises, so I didn't need educated on that. I needed deal flow. I wanted to see and hear from the franchisors what was going on on the inside of these organizations. Because I had insight into Liberty Tax like that nobody else had, right? Because I was on the inside. So I wanted to get on the inside of some of these other ones that I didn't know a lot about. And so I started to help people find franchises, and I did it because I wanted to help myself find my next brand. So I found my next brand, and then I had friends, you know, calling me up and saying, what are you doing, Eric? Because other people were starting to exit. At that time. And then that's when I found my next one. It was an area development in a home care, senior care business, and I ended up purchasing that.

So you got an area development deal from them. What was the name of that franchise?

Synergy Home Care.

Okay, so Synergy Home Care. And so you basically— were you researching the market and then saying that that's where I'm going next? And so what was it that attracted you about that?

It was the aging population, the demographic, and and, and I was not finding very many area development opportunities out there. They get less and less every year, right? And I wanted to find another area development because I had such great success with the first one, right? And that was aging population, great demographic, and I did not have to own a location myself, and I could do what I already learned at Liberty Tax and just do it with a different brand.

Why should somebody look at franchising as a potential way to build wealth?

Franchising is an easier way to own a business, in my opinion. You can, as a franchisee, you buy into a system, and it's a system of doing business. It's the trial and error has been taken out of it. You, as a new business owner, that you don't have experience hiring, you don't have experience marketing, you don't have experience in opening up a first location or finding customers or doing all the kinds of things that you would have to research or pay a consultant or hire expensive people to do for you. You buy into that system and they are your business partner and they've done it. And not only them, one of the greatest things about franchising is all the franchisees. So, if you get into a system that has a number of franchisees that have gone through the trial and error in addition to the parent company doing that, you get to learn from all their mistakes. And I remember one of the first big cost savings that I had as a franchisee when I realized like, I am so glad I'm a part of this company. We were spending a lot of money, over a million dollars in a build-out to open up a Sola Salon Studios. And the parent company, Sola, the founders of that, noticed something with the building and said, you guys should look at taking care of this and having this addressed before you actually start. And, um, and it saved us, you know, a ton of money by just having that one thing. And the landlord ended up paying for it where we didn't have to. And, and I realized, like, I thought that just right there paid for a lot of those franchise fees that I had incurred already, right?

So it's it's a safer bet, you know, because a lot of times entrepreneurs get excited saying, hey, I'm going to— I want to open up an elderly care or whatever it might be. I mean, a CPM, go up a tax shop, but saying, hmm, might be better off if there's a full business system set up, full brand, you know, that's done. And, you know, because a lot of people say, well, why would I give up my royalties? Why would I think the people who would say that type of thing never started a business from scratch? For sure, right?

And even to your point of like CPA starting a tax business, they know taxes, and so why don't they start? We didn't want CPAs. Like, if there was a CPA that wanted to open up in Austin, Texas, that was a big red flag because we wanted marketers. We wanted people that were aggressive. We wanted people that could get customers because you could pay someone to do the taxes, right? And a lot of people that I talk to that are looking at buying a franchise they think they know what they want, but when you ask them a number of questions that just probe deeper and deeper, they—

what they really want is something else. Is there much franchise opportunity right now for solopreneurs? I mean, I know that like in big ways private equity money has moved into the franchise world. You know, that, you know, sometimes you got, uh, like I know Planet Fitness, for example, you know, they got private equity companies buying up, you know, dozens of these things and managing and controlling. And, you know, they have their own business systems to put into these business systems to, you know, I'm sure things like McDonald's are owned by a lot of PE companies, you know. So these big franchises are like that. Are there still opportunities for, you know, somebody to say, um, hey, you know, I've got a certain amount of money in an IRA, or, you know, I'm looking down the road to my retirement, and I think there's a strong argument that, uh, you know, rather than me having money sitting in a market and hoping there's a return. Buy a cash-flowing business and let me live off of that. So, what's your view on all of that?

Yeah, I think a lot of people put their trust in the market. They have this 401(k) and that's their safety net and that's where they want to build wealth. And then you have this other group that sees that and they look at their 401(k) and they're like, I want to use that money and have combined with my own efforts and build something. And I see people more and more doing that. They're using their 401(k), they're using their retirement, and they're taking control of their destiny. And there are, there's a lot of franchise opportunities for people like that, especially if they're coming out of retire— or before they retire, and they can buy a business where it's more semi-absentee. And I work with a lot of semi-absentee franchisors, and I help a lot of semi-absentee absentee franchisees, because I'm one of those. I live in a small town, and that's, you know, that's not in a big market. So all my businesses that I own are out of state. And so I love helping people that are— that want to be that solopreneur, that just want something instead of just having their money earn interest for them, find a business that allows them to do that.

Are you, uh, still in the elderly care space?

I ended up selling that back to the franchisor. And I remember—

so history repeated itself in a sense.

You developed it. Yeah. Yep. I developed it and sold it back. And then I was on to my next one. And this is the one I had just recently had a larger exit on. And I met the founders again with this group that I'm a part of where I help people find franchises. I knew the founders of this company. It's called Sola Salon Studios. I knew that they were going to be at this meeting. And I cornered them at the bar before everything started. And I was real strategic with that. And I just kept buying them drinks. And people tend to get more honest when they're having some drinks. And I was just asking them question after question after question. And then I was texting my future business partners. This is what I'm hearing. And then they would text me another question. Then I would ask them and buy them another drink. And then they were in the mobile home park business before that. And they sold that and that went into a REIT. And so then they started up this salon company. It's called Sola Salon Studios. And what that business is, is you take about— well, we would take about 7,000 square feet of retail space and we would put about $1 million into that facility. And we're left with about 40 individual suites that we would lease out to salon professionals, hairstylist, estheticians, massage therapists. And so back in, uh, at the bar, I realized I want to put this partnership group together, and we wanted to buy an entire county. And so we targeted Orange County, California, because this franchisor had not sold it yet, and I knew that it was just going to be a big, a big one. It was going to sell a lot of franchises in a short period of time, and In the past, I saw good brands sell out quickly. And I knew I could open up a couple of them myself. And I knew with the partnership group, I could open up a lot of them myself and negotiate a better deal and lock up a larger territory. And that's exactly what we did. And so over a 5-year period, we built 12 solo salon studios in Orange County and really pushed out a lot of the competition because they saw us growing so fast. We were first to market, and they stayed away for the most part. And about 5 years later, there was another opportunity to exit.

So you had the master development deal on that particular one, plus you— your partnership, did they also put up franchises that you owned in that, you know, in that deal?

So this was the first one that I was not a master developer. Okay. I was not an area developer. I was franchisee, and we secured the rights to block everybody else out so we could develop Orange County unencumbered. That was our market. And that's 12 stores? It was actually— we purchased the right to 12 stores, and then they wanted to put more stores in there, and that's when we knew we didn't want to keep developing, and we didn't want them coming in or competition coming in, and we had a choice to make.

That's when you You sold it. Yeah. Now, did the franchisor buy them or somebody else bought them?

That's another interesting one. It was private equity that bought that one. So that was my first time dealing with private equity and dealing with that process. It's a long process, you know, much longer than the other ones. And it was the private equity company that ended up buying the parent company sold out. Oh, really?

So they sold too.

So they sold too. We were the first ones. We were the only ones to get acquired during that process. But what was great about that, we were an attractive market. We had 12 stores and there was room to grow many more stores in that market. And so they saw there was a lot of runway. There's a lot of white space in that market. And, and so we took advantage of that and we exited.

Was the business model there that it was rental income basically, that you're, you're, you're getting leases where you can sell subdivide and then you can rent individual things? Is— or where was revenue generated?

The revenue is exactly generated that way. We would— we had 40 individual suites and we would lease those out to salon professionals under 1 to 2 year contracts, and we would charge them every week. Then that business, they're used to that. And that's what's interesting. So many people, they see a business and they think the business is something Like, I would tell people I'm in the salon business because I didn't want to get into everything and explain it to them. My daughters thought I was in the salon business. They thought I knew how to cut hair and do all of that stuff. And they thought it was pretty cool at the time. But I was in the real estate business. So, in my mind, I was in the real estate business. And then that's really when I started to experience extreme semi-absentee ownership. We had 12 locations. Over $12 million invested into them, and we had about 5 full-time people working for us. We had our director of operations, and then we had 2 to 3 leasing agents, and then at any time we had 1 admin person and a person that was doing all of the fixing of stuff.

And the franchisee was responsible for the marketing, uh, for the most part, uh, so which was you. So yeah, I imagine you had a marketing some marketing people on hand to promote the place?

We are marketing people that they were the face of the business and they were the people helping. They were boots on the ground giving tours and they were also doing the marketing. So there wasn't a whole lot of marketing to that business. It really marketed itself because in that business you had hairstylists who hate where they work and they have a book of business and they're so afraid to move out. Because in that business, a hairstylist that's working for somebody, if that somebody gets wind that this hairstylist is moving to a different business, their stuff will be out by the front door. And they're gone. And so it's a really interesting business. We had to be really careful in how we approached them because they were so afraid to come in and even look around. So there wasn't a whole lot of marketing that we had to do. And they were, they were ready to start making more money themselves. They wanted a simple, easy way to make money and we provided that solution. Their other option is to continue working where they are which is full of drama and they absolutely hated it. Or to go find their own space, build it out, lease it up, sign a long-term commitment, a long-term guarantee and they didn't want to do it.

Nor probably had the resources to even if they wanted to.

That's their— that's what they enjoy. They enjoy interacting with people and doing their service. They don't enjoy running a business.

So like everything else, it seems that good franchises are solving some sort of a problem. You know, like you're just— you're just literally describing the plight of an esthetician or, you know, a hairstylist and operator of some variety where either they are in an environment that is untenable and or they try to go out on their own, which is, you know, very risky. And, you know, they're probably not business people that can do that very well. So now you basically provide, you know, space. So you're in a subletting business for the most part and solving a problem for a large volume of people. And of course, there's a lot of customers for that in Orange County, California. 100%. Yeah. Wow. So you have another move?

Yeah. What's next for me is I'm becoming a franchisor. And I'm helping franchisors become better franchisors. And doing that, I have all this experience as a franchisee. I think it's 7 or 8 different brands that I've owned over the years. And so I have an incredible amount of experience as a franchisee. I've helped people buy thousands of territories and start their locations. And what's next for me is I'm working with my business partner, Bedros Julian, who owns Fit Body Boot Camp, and he's an incredible man at masterminds. And I'm a huge believer in masterminds. And so the two of us are helping franchisors be better and basically learn from us. Bedros as a franchisor who's made mistakes, myself who has sold thousands of franchises over my career, and help them avoid a bunch of mistakes. Themselves. And then myself and two—

that's consulting basically, and that's that part of it. And then you're gonna actually put up franchises or be a franchisor yourself?

Yeah, with Bedros and I, it's a Franchise Ignition mastermind, okay? And we're consulting with franchisors. And then the second thing that I'm putting a lot of time and focus and attention in is a franchisor, and I have the two other business partners in that. And we are going away from everything that I've done in the past with beauty and fitness and things like that, and going into the service-based business.

So when you say service-based, what kind of service-based business are you considering?

So we see a big need in the service-based business, and we see private equity and what they're doing, and they like to put together a number of different franchises in the service-based sector and, and, and put money into them. And so we realize there's a need for somebody to come in and as owners who are active as a franchisor and that are not private equity, and to help franchisees in the service-based business. And so an example of that is one that's really attractive to us is roofing, siding, and gutters. Because we know that business is, you know, it's got its challenges. And we also know that it's a very good business for a lot of people. And as a franchisor, We want to go into businesses where we can, where we can make money as a franchisor, but we want the franchisees to be able to do well. And, and we know roofing is one of those sectors where they can do that. And so what we would like to do is acquire mom and pops or young franchisors that don't have the expertise, or they don't have the knowledge or the capital to take it for from 0 or 10 or 20 or 30 units to over 100. And so we are coming in and partnering with them or acquiring a majority stake to do that.

Yeah. So this is very interesting. I've actually was a franchisor in my past life some years ago. So I've been through that whole process of what it is to get those things set up and, and go out and market, et cetera, et cetera, and all the regulatory side of it too, which is never fun. But so, On the other side of this though, somebody's watching this right now and they're saying, okay, franchising is one of the paths I'm considering for my future. How do I go out now and figure out what is the right franchise for me to buy? I'm not going to go, you know, have, you know, a couple million dollars or, you know, $5 million to put into, you know, a franchise. How do I spot a franchise that is solid, called established even, but hasn't hit that tipping point where now it's like ridiculous money to try to get into one. Is there a sweet spot there for me to try to find, and how would I do it?

It's an interesting time in franchising right now because what we were talking about with all the money being dumped into franchising through private equity, and a lot of the data that you get out there as someone, a consumer looking, is through magazines and websites and looking at that, and a lot of that's historical data. It's really not looking forward. So that's the place where people start, but you really don't get any information that way. You need to talk to somebody that knows the inside of franchising. You need to have someone that's knowledgeable but also cares. Because it's— you don't want to get to a salesperson. Right. And there's a lot of people out there that are willing to sell people that are looking for franchises because the salespeople in franchising have gotten so good. Like, they, they know the hot buttons, they know the pain points, they know all of that. And so you just have to be really careful on who you're talking to because things sound really attractive and reality is not always what it appears. So you need to get with someone that really knows it, and the there's consultants out there like myself that help people, and I would definitely work with a consultant that—

because they know things that you may not know, you know, questions to ask. Yeah, and, and I guess due diligence would probably be a good idea to go to some actual franchises and talk to the franchisees and see if they're happy.

And that's the key. So really, once you start talking to a consultant, the good ones are going to spend some time with you and they're going to talk about their personal they're gonna talk about how they've owned and, and the challenges that they've had. If it's all good out there, then you're probably talking to the wrong person. But then let's say you're looking at some brands now, and a lot of people that I work with and a lot of my colleagues work with, they come in thinking they want one thing. Let's use Subway for an example. They think, Eric, I want a Subway. And, and you start asking them why, and all the, all the reasons they want that are safety reasons, because they see the customers, their customer, and they see it's a value product and it's a big name, and that's why they want it. What they don't think about is employee turnover. You ask them if they're okay with high employee turnover and what that really looks like in that type of industry, and that scares them to death. And that one question, that scares them from most food concepts. And especially something like Subway where there's high turnover. And then you start really finding what they, what they want. And it's— and it is not Subway. But it's something more stable. It's something that they maybe can share. They can have their family come into and do some of the work. Or it gives them the lifestyle that they want. At the end of the day, most people come to me and they want something lifestyle-oriented. The widget doesn't matter. Service doesn't matter, but it's the lifestyle that that business can create for them. And everybody's different with what level of lifestyle that is.

Is it reasonable for somebody to say, um, I just want to do one? You know, in other words, I just want one cash-flowing franchise that, you know— or is that like really the only way to, to make real money here is to have multiple franchises?

Some people can only afford one franchise. And if that's the case, they should only buy one franchise. There's franchisors that would sell them 3 franchises, but they really should only buy one, and that's their stepping stone. That was Liberty Tax for me. I couldn't have purchased a solo salon at that time, and that was a stepping stone. And so a lot of people just have to adjust their expectations before they get into it, um, so they can see it as a stepping stone and they then get into multi-unit ownership. But multi-unit ownership, to me, that's where everybody should be looking. And in my opinion, you know, it should be about 3 locations, and that's kind of the sweet spot. More than that, you're probably taking on a little bit more risk than you should, unless you have really, you know, big risk tolerance or high risk tolerance. Less than that, there you don't really get to take advantages of economies of scale. So for myself, I'm opening up some locations in Denver of a company called Yoga Six. And I have multiple locations that I'm— Yoga Six, it's a yoga franchise? It's a yoga franchise. So it's called Yoga Six. And I went into that with a business partner of mine. He's the operational partner. And I'm more of the advisor, board of advisor partner. And we are going to open up multiple locations very close to each other. And there's a couple reasons for that. One, I want to find the best real estate. So if I had one territory, I could only find the best territory in that one search area. If I own 3 or more, then I can find the best real estate within any spot within that territory. And that's happened. What I thought was the best market that I wanted to go into didn't have the best real estate deal at the time. I went into one of the worst markets that I thought I wanted to go going to, but I got this incredible real estate deal. And so that's where we're opening up our first location. And then I have 2 other locations that are plotted around it. And in addition to real estate, it allows me to hire faster and build out my management team. And that allows me to have less involvement in the business because I can have a director of operations now. And I can have managers in each of those locations. And my manager, my my first location can open up my second location and I can, you know, grow it that way.

So Yoga Six sounds like a newer franchise because I've never seen it, never heard of it. So what's the franchise fee for Yoga Six right now? So if I said I might want to go open a Yoga Six, what's the franchise fee?

So yoga studios are typically a lot more expensive than some of the other brands that I've owned, like a Liberty Tax, or less expensive than a Sola, but a lot more expensive than a Liberty Tax. And, and at first you don't realize it. You don't— you think just because you open up a yoga studio, it's not going to be that expensive. But then you realize you have to demo the whole place, and then you have to buy nice stuff to go in there. And the real expense in yoga— it's hot yoga. You can't just be normal yoga, it has to be hot yoga. And that just increases the expenses astronomically because you have to have everything ready— the HVAC system to bring in all that hot air quickly and to take it out quickly, and it just drives the cost. So anytime that I'm looking at a franchise myself, you look at the franchise disclosure document— we'll get in the weeds for just a quick second— in the Item 7 part of this big document that franchisors are required to give everybody looking, there's an Item 7, and it lists the high and the low end of what they anticipate that investment to be, right? I always look at the high end and then add on a bit more to that, and that's proven to be true for me in a number of different franchises that I've opened, and I'm expecting the same thing with Yoga6 as well. So I always love to have those expectations going into it.

Are franchise fees negotiable? In other words, you know, if I were to say, okay, go ahead and give me the, the franchise circular, I'm going to read through it, that's going to have you tell me what fees are, etc. If— should I be like— if you were consulting with me, should I be going back to the franchise or and say, I'd like to pay less for this, or make a counteroffer? Or are they usually pretty much what they are, what they are?

Everybody likes to negotiate, right? Yeah. And, and including myself. And I try every, every time I get into a new brand, I try to negotiate something. But I think the best brands don't negotiate at all. And to be able to take that position of not negotiating, you have to have a good contract, a good disclosure document, good franchise agreements. When I say good, it's— they're always weighted towards the franchisor, but it has to be fair enough that the majority of people wanting to buy will buy. And if it's, if it's too strong, too weighted towards the franchisor, then they do negotiate. And I know franchisors that do negotiate. They'll negotiate territory size, they'll negotiate, um, just different types of things. And they have to put that in writing. They might have to disclose it to everybody else, and they might not have to disclose it to everybody else. But the best franchisors, they don't change it for anybody. And what I like about that as a franchisee On the other side of it is knowing that you, as my neighbor franchisee, got the same thing that I got. I agree so much with that.

It's like, you know, was I a sucker? You know, because I just accepted a deal. But will they actually charge more money for a franchise based on like an area that it's in, saying, well, this is a more valuable area, so we price this one up here, this is less valuable area, we price it lower, or they usually just standardize no matter where they are.

I've seen franchisors do change the pricing schedule, the price of a territory. We did it at Liberty Tax. We had small market territories where we didn't think that the area was large enough as, and attractive enough as some of these other areas. And we wanted to sell them and people wanted to buy them. And so we charged a lower fee for that. And that was all disclosed in the document. Sure. Okay.

And that would make sense, right? I mean, it's like real estate. It's worth a little bit more over here than it is over here. So what do you think the future of franchising is? Do you think it's still on a growth trajectory in general, that there's going to be more and more franchises coming into the marketplace? Or do you feel like it's kind of like stabilized? What do you think? What do you think is going on with that?

I think the future of franchising is really interesting. We're going into some changes from a legal perspective, that franchisors are having to report income different ways, and there's just more and more regulation coming to franchisors, which is a good thing for some regulation, and some of it is, is cumbersome and will be a challenge. But I think with private equity money coming in to the franchisors, they are going to continue to grow. When I look at emerging brands, there's a lot of emerging more brands coming up. I talk to a lot of people that are thinking about franchising, and I've seen and I've had a lot of conversations with these brands, and there's more and more of them. So I think there will be more brands coming in. The challenge is, is getting to that 100 locations. It's— most franchisors never get to 100 locations, and you have to get to scale as a franchisor to be able to make money.

And that's what I'm saying, like, boy, you know, maybe when I see a franchisor get 90, 92 locations, that's the time for me to buy. They're not big enough yet where their prices are going to jump, but they're big enough to say that, you know, they look like they're here to stay. And that's— that's— is that kind of like a sweet spot, you know, if I'm making an investment?

If I had my perfect scenario, it would be to buy a franchise when that franchisor had a number of people open, right? There's a number of franchisees that I can call and talk to because that's probably the most important thing to do, right? And maybe they have 100 or so locations open. And so there's history. There's history with just getting them open. There's history with some of them being open for a number of years. And there, there's history in different parts of the country as well, because they all perform differently in different markets. So that would be ideal. The challenge today is, like I was saying earlier, so many people are trying to buy franchises. The salespeople are so busy good at selling franchises, that you have to get in early and you typically have to make a decision early on before it's proven as much as you would like it to be. So, you have to take more risk to do that.

But if I'm the franchisor, I don't want my salespeople selling people who aren't going to win, right? Because that's going to kill my franchise pretty quickly. But, you know, salesperson's commission. So I guess they're thinking a little bit more short-term than the franchisor sometimes.

Well, there's a lot of franchisors that are doing things the right way and they're growing the right way and they're not growing too fast or growing at a really good sustainable amount where they can keep up with it. And there's some franchisors that have private equity exit on their mind, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think as someone buying into a franchisor, I want align with their vision. I want to align with, with where they're going. I know some franchisors that their, their founders are like, they would— they do not want to sell. Like, it's like family. Yeah. This franchisor, I was talking to one the other day and they said, Eric, I use the Thanksgiving test. I want, I want any franchisee that's in my system to be able to come to my house for Thanksgiving anytime and us to be able to enjoy that time together. And when I hear franchisors talking like that and I know franchisees, it's one thing to hear that. But then when I talk to their franchisees and I validate that with them because I know what's going on culturally inside of franchises, that means a lot to me. There's a lot of weight that I put on that. So, I think those ones that are— that have that culture. And I also think it's that moral compass of the founder. The founders really involved, they're also focused, so they have that moral compass and they're focused on the business, that's one that I think has a higher probability for franchisee success. Because who— if they want you to come over to their house for Thanksgiving, like, that's, that's their moral compass, that's what they want. And so I feel comfortable going into a brand like that that has a number of them opened, and it's not just about making sales.

So now you got somebody's attention. People are watching this. Somebody's looking, saying, I'm feeling better and better about this franchise. I'm liking this. I like what I'm hearing. I like what Eric's saying. And I feel enthusiastic, not necessarily a whole lot of confidence that I know how to go and buy this. So, so now what's my next step to try to validate, you know, a franchise to go into?

So when you're talking to a franchise company, you understand some operations, you understand some financials. But if I had to tell someone, like, what is, like, the crux, the most important part about buying a franchise, it's talking to franchisees. I mean, the franchisor can tell you whatever they want, and sometimes it's like, I know from the inside, like, what they're getting from the franchisor is absolutely true. And others, you're just like, you question, like, what are they What are they really saying? Does it really line up with what the franchisees are experiencing? So the way to really understand that as somebody looking is talking to franchisees. And I see so many people go about this the wrong way. And the wrong way is, how much money are you making? You know, how easy is this? And, you know, are you happy that you did this? You know, those are all, they're not bad questions, but they have to be put into context. And if I'm from corporate America and I'm just going into franchising and I'm talking to a franchisee who has 3 locations open and they've been open up for 2 years, that person is on easy street probably. I mean, they, they, the first one was probably a nightmare to open up. You know, like it was difficult. It was tough. It was like a business to open up. And then they open up their second one. It's a lot easier. And then their third one, they, For me, like, every time I've opened up— anytime that I've opened up a third one, like, I'm not even there. I, I don't even go to grand opening. It happens, and I've been on vacation, and I got a note, a text that says, hey, we just opened up, you know, location number 3 or 4 or 5 or 6, and I had no idea it was even opening. And so once you get a number of them open, it's easy. So if you, as a prospective franchisee, calling them to see like Hey, how is life? Is it good? Would you do it again? And you catch them at year number 3 with 3 locations open up, they're probably on vacation somewhere. Life is good. But if you catch someone early on and they are opening up that first one, it's a completely different story. So, you have to have context to who you're talking to and how much they're like you. I see a lot of people that don't have experience in business or hiring and things like that. And they, they need to be talking to people like themselves. And how much support does the franchisor give in that area? And I know franchisors that give a tremendous amount of support. Like, you know, one of the franchise— Yoga Six— we had the corporate team interview a number of our general managers before we hired them. That was part of the process. So they provide a lot of support in that area. And so you just You have to have context to the person that you're talking to to see if they're in the same phase of life and to see if what is challenging to them would be challenging to you. I've talked to corporate people that have high-paying jobs all around America and they're on the plane all the time. And, you know, there's two different types of people that are okay. Some— one person that is making a lot of money, that's fine. Flying around the country is okay if their manager quits and they have to hire another one. Somebody else that would, you know, they couldn't fly anywhere. They would, that would just like drive them crazy and they wouldn't be able to make really good decisions. So I see a good franchisee is also a good decision maker.

Yeah. Well, this has been more than fascinating and I could tell that you eat, breathe, and live this stuff. With enthusiasm. So, uh, really a great, uh, great overview and profiling on what it means to be in the franchise business, the various aspects of it, how to vet and, you know, determine if a franchise might be right for you, etc. So I definitely appreciate you taking the time to share all this, and I think it's an area of wealth development that is critical for people to assess and see if it's right for them. Great, I've enjoyed this.

Thank you.

To see the next episode in the Money Revealed series, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

I started first with the stock market, learning about equity, investing, assets.

Then I got into investment property, then low input businesses, and I slowly learned about these different asset classes and built up.