How Regular People Create Six-Figure Incomes (Without a 9–5)

Have you ever wondered how ordinary people turn their side hustles into six-figure incomes? In today's video, we're diving deep into the secrets that successful investors use to find incredible deals, even when it seems impossible. You're going to learn strategies for spotting opportunities where others only see obstacles and how to creatively finance these deals without using your own money. Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale your investing, the techniques shared here can completely change your financial future. Special thanks to Jeff Hayes for partnering with us to release this video exclusively here on my YouTube channel. Channel. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #Believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time.

Believe.

Well, hopefully you caught part 1 of James Saccomano's interview with Robert Allen. Now it's time for part 2 so you can get the complete story. I think real estate is a direction for a lot of people to figure out how to create a side hustle. And I think what Robert explains with this interview with James is something that is actionable that you can take an action on and maybe create a better future for yourself. So let's dive into it.

Now, the new game, that's the subject of this conversation. How do I play this new game? Well, when things get harder to buy, to find, when it seems like every investor in the world is looking for the same kinds of deals, Then you have to go what I call wider and deeper. Okay? And this is the new— you need to stretch. Wider is you're going to have to go further afield from your own home, whereas my book, I say it pretty clearly, don't buy a property that's outside of 50 miles of your own home if this is the first property you've ever bought. Just don't do that. Why? Because it's risky. If you have a bad tenant, you don't want to get in the plane and fly 2 hours to go take care of your property. You know, you want to be able to drive to it. And I still hold to that. Keep within a radius of respectability. But wider means there are opportunities everywhere. So, in the United States is one place you can invest. Are there other places in the world where you can invest? The answer is, yeah, send me to any city in the world, take away my wallet, give me $100 or €100 or ¥100 or whatever it is, you know, and you're going to find highly motivated sellers in every city in the world as long as they have a traditional, you know, democratic kind of a society. Even in China though, you can buy— properties are privately owned. So yeah, you can go— I can go wide. I can go anywhere in the world. And the rules are pretty much the same. People would say, well, you can't buy properties in Argentina. You can't buy properties in South Africa. You can't buy them in— yeah, yeah, you can. Yeah, you can. And so sometimes other places, the fight, the competition is lower in other places. Let me give you a quick example. San Francisco, hot city. If you advertise a great property in San Francisco and it looks to be a bargain, your phone is going to ring off the hook. Just is.

Right.

But about 4 hours away, Reno, Nevada, it's still a nice market and it's still— people are still looking for deals, but it's a different style of investing. And so, are Our student finds, by looking online in Reno, finds an 8-unit apartment building, nice property, retail price. He knows that it seems to be low priced. It seems to be a very reasonable price. And he goes, what would happen if I advertised this lower price, still retail, still, if for that market the price is high, But what if I advertise that same property in a marketplace that was hotter and higher in its median price? So this is creativity. This is saying, I'm going to market that property, I'm going to flip it to a higher priced marketplace.

Sure, they look at those numbers and go, that's a steal.

Totally.

They—

he advertises in San Francisco. Now you got to put the ads in the right places and to let people in San Francisco know about it. But the price is maybe a third of what a property would cost in San Francisco, a similar property, 8-unit apartment building. It would be a million plus, you know, sometimes $2 million.

Sure.

In Reno, much, much, much lower. He advertises in San Francisco, his phone is off the hook, blown off the hook. Two advantages to that. Remember, You need to learn how to find deals. So, he had to look in one market and using the 9 ways of finding highly motivated sellers. And then he had to fund it. Now remember, he doesn't have the financing to buy that apartment building. He doesn't have the credit, the cash flow, collateral. The banker wants that stuff. But he knows that somebody in San Francisco does. So, the mindset you have is, if I don't have it, 'Well, somebody does. And I can show that somebody how they could take advantage of my knowledge and they could buy that property and I could win at the same time.' So he says to them on the phone as the phone's ringing, 50 people are calling, 'Where is it located?' 'You know, it's located in Reno.' 'No, I'm not interested.' 'You say, what are you looking for?' 'I'm looking for something here in San Francisco.' 'What kind of budget do you have for that?' 'You know, I got $100 grand.' Good. Now I take that name down and he may not buy the property I have, but I got the money now. I've got somebody who is seriously looking for deals and now I can pretend like that's my money. So I can go look and as soon as I find something that fits his parameters, I can call him on the phone and I could say, 'Ma'am, sir, I found one.

You want it?

Here's the location. Drive by. Have a look at it. I got it all tied up.' You tie it up with a earnest money option is what they call it. And now he flips it to them.

What is the earnest money option?

Earnest money option means when you tie up a property to buy it and you give the seller an option, you give them a down earnest money, you give them an earnest money. How much? Well, they'll want this, the realtor will want you to give 10%, you know, 20%. You want to obviously get by with as little as possible. $100, $500, $1,000, $2,000, $3,000. And sometimes you don't have that kind of money. So, you might sometimes even have to borrow a family member's money for the earnest money and just to hold it for a period of time. So, as soon as it's signed, an offer is signed by the seller and you, the buyer, it now gives you a period of time when you can sell it to somebody else. You could flip it, flip the paper. To somebody else. So, you need to put a clause in that contract. Those of you who are, you know, advanced real estate investors, you've heard this technique a thousand times. But beginners, they have never heard any of this kind of stuff. So, you have to make sure you put your name as you sign the offer, and/or/assigns, which means my, I'll buy it and/or, 'Whomever I assign to buy this property in my place,' which means now the paper is valuable. That piece of paper has a value to it. Can I sell the piece of paper to somebody without ever going to bank to qualify for a loan, without having putting any huge down payment? The banker doesn't have to be involved at all. I'm just selling paper. So our student, advertises to sell that property in Reno and gets lots of people to call. And one person says, 'Reno? Yeah, let me go look at it.' Our student had never seen it. He'd only seen pictures of it. He wrote an offer sight unseen, gave an earnest money, the seller accepted it. Now he tells the potential buyer to go look at it, which he does. He says, 'You know, this is worth more, you know.' And our student says, well, if you'd like to buy this right to buy it, I'll sell it to you for $15,000 in cash. And the guy goes, yeah, okay. And now our student sells the paper for $15,000 in cash. The buyer goes buys it, buys the property, owns it. I don't know, still, he might still own it to this very day. So this, the reason we got into that long convoluted story is I was asking you the question, How do you get creative when your market is so hot that there's 10 offers on a property? You find a place where there are deals, where maybe where it's not as hot, but the price comparison is huge. And since most beginners don't understand what I just taught about buying a house within your 50-mile radius from your own house, Most buyers, beginners, they don't really understand this. Don't go to another state to buy a property. You know, don't buy a property in Florida when you live in Seattle. You know, prices in Florida are going to be much less than they are in Seattle.

Sure. And people are moving there.

And they are. They're moving there. So, the question is, what if you found a property in Florida? Couldn't you advertise it anywhere? If the price looks cheaper there, than it does in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego. There are investors in San Diego who would buy a property in Florida all the way across the continent if they could buy a property that was a third as much as it costs in San Diego. So what I'm trying to teach about this, the different mindset about the new way of thinking, is you have to go, you have to go wider and deeper. The wider is I got to look at different marketplaces. I can go as wide as the world. Deeper means I have to dig deeper than most people are willing to dig. And, you know, beginning investors, they're lazy. They're just lazy. And they've heard stories about millions being made and people flipping properties.

And it's supposed to be easy.

Totally. So they jump in and they find it's a heck of a lot harder than they thought. And number 2, they'll leave them— they end up buying a property and they have no idea what they're doing. And so they become a highly motivated seller. They, their, their, the toilet backs up and floods 3 floors of their little apartment building and they go, I'm out, I'm done. They run an ad in the newspaper, like I really saw this ad. It says, I'm down, kick me. That was the, that was the, the ad in the paper. I'm down, kick me.

I think you got a motivated seller.

Exactly. So they've had a problem with the property. And they don't want it and they got to get rid of it and they're willing, sometimes they're willing to pay you to take it off their hands because they're that desperate. Extremely rare. I'm not saying that happens every day. It doesn't. It happens maybe once in a year if you're really looking for it. But they end up having to sell it because they're highly motivated sellers. They're don't-wanters. So, going wide means look, I got a whole world to look for. Going deep means I have to go deeper than the beginner's willing to go. So, the beginner, they want to be lazy. So, they're going to go and they're going to buy a service that shares with them the foreclosure listings that are available at your county courthouse. And everybody in the world can go listen, look at that listing. They're too lazy to go to the courthouse. They're going to hire somebody to sell them the list of all the people that are at the county courthouse that they could get for free. And then the list has been picked over big time. There's talk about competition. And they aren't willing to go themselves going a little bit deeper, you know, and finding out who owns these properties and how can I communicate with them. So, one way to go deeper is to pick a target territory. So, it's a mile by a mile. There's a mile square. You pick it in an area where if you're living in your city, For example, my first million came from 1 mile square below Brigham Young University. There were how many properties in that mile square? Maybe 1,000 properties. I knew that 1% of them would be highly motivated to sell, so that's 10. I knew that there are 10 properties in that marketplace at that very moment, no matter how hot it is. Now, I got to figure out how to dig deeper to find those 10. So, I went to the courthouse and I got the tax records of everybody who owned a property in that target territory. It was my buying farm. And I put it up on my wall. I had this big beautiful map and it took me like 6 months to do this. So, I was really afraid to call people and talk to them on the phone and you know, just really negotiate and So I wanted to get ready so I wouldn't make a mistake, right?

Well, and you feel like you're doing something.

Yeah, exactly. And we ought to go deeper on that one because that's what I call the results generating activities that you gotta do. And most people don't do enough to get a result. So a results generating activity is I gotta make an offer and I gotta get a rejection. If I don't do those two things, I haven't done enough. I might be looking, But if you haven't written an offer, it's not enough.

Your whole wall is full of data.

Exactly. So, in my case, now I have the data on all those owners. How do I communicate with those owners? So, I'm going to set up a mailing campaign where I'm going to send a budget where it's going to generate a highly motivated seller. I'm going to communicate with them. It costs money to mail. So, I'm going to have a budget. And this is where most investors, they won't even spend a budget on that. They're lazy so they go to a realtor who spends money on their advertising for them, does all the work for them. That's lazy. To be a real investor, you have to dig deeper and you have to do things that people aren't willing to do and you have to spend money that people are not willing to spend. So, I know that if I send 100 letters, it's going to cost me $100. That 100 letters, what probability is that somebody in that neighborhood has a property that they want to sell? 1 in 100. That means just like normal marketing, if I get 1% response, that's pretty good. So 99 rejections or 99 people who do not respond and 1 of them might respond and say, "Yeah, I got a property for sale." Then I'm going to do an analysis. Do I want that property? I'm going to ask those 5 questions: location, condition, financing, flexibility, price. And I'm going to come up with a score, which is a system I teach in my books. It scores 1 through 15, and if it scores 11 or less, I don't want it. You know, if it scores 11 or more, I'm going to probably make an offer. So, that one, I'm going to make them an offer. And I'm— if they tell me what they want, and I realize that's too high. I'm a business person. I buy wholesale, period. People who buy retail are speculators and they're hoping the market goes up. That's what happened in 2008. Millions of speculators who all got taken to the cleaners big time. So I'm gonna write an offer even if the seller tells me what he or she wants and I realize that the price is high, I'm gonna write an offer at the price where I win. And it's probably gonna be rejected. And if that's the case, good, good. Thank you very much. You say to the seller, listen, if you ever feel like you need it, let me know. I'll be here, you know? But I'm not trying to offend you. It's just that I wanna win and this is how I win. And if you don't win at this, let's not do business. So Sir Richard Branson, You know how he got that island in the Caribbean, Necker Island, which I have been on, swam on the beaches of Necker.

I sailed by it.

Have you sailed by it? Necker is great. He went there when he didn't have a lot of money with his girlfriend, and he said, let's go buy an island. Let's go window shopping. And most people don't window shop because they can't afford Tiffany's. So they don't even go in the store. They don't even look. He says, "Let's go window shopping. Let's see if we can buy an island." He couldn't afford an island. So he and his girlfriend fly to several islands around there and they find the broker that deals islands and they fly to Necker Island and it's beautiful. It's an unbelievable island, extremely valuable. And the guy says, "It's $5 million, £5 million," or whatever at the time. This is probably '69, '70. '70s, somewhere in there. And Sir Richard says, well, he wasn't a sir at that time, he was just a broke kid. And he goes, I'll pay you $200,000 for it. And he was thrown off the island. Talk about being thrown off the island.

Yeah, I don't think the Sex Pistols had made it yet.

That's right, exactly, exactly. It's true. I think he was making a little bit of money on doing other things. He's an entrepreneur. And he comes back to England, he tracks down the owner, and he says to the owner, I made an offer and it was, would you ever get an offer? He says, no, it was never presented to me. And he goes, it's £200,000, you know, would you like it or not? And the guy says, no, I don't want it. So this, I'm going from memory, I think these numbers are right. And so like 6 months later, the guy calls him and says, okay, I'll take £200,000. From £5 million. So Richard Branson goes, I'll pay you £185,000.

He's ballsy.

Exactly. And the guy says, 'Okay, I need the money.' So now maybe he had never seen, maybe he inherited it, it wasn't that big a deal to him. But now Sir Richard Branson has only one problem. He doesn't have the money. Okay, now there's a rule that one of my students taught me actually, and I love this quote, 'Just say yes and figure it out.' So the guy says, 'Okay, I'll take $185.' So he says, 'Okay, good, I'll do it.' But he doesn't have the money. What does he have to do? See, if you find a great deal, you got to go fund it. And so he has to go raise the money from friends and selling all the assets and from an aunt and, you know, a sister. And he, you know, he raises as much money as he can. Now he owns Necker Island, which has a value of probably millions and millions of dollars that he bought for less than £200,000. Now, you want to know why he was able to fund it? I'm not sure this is actually really true, but I think that it's because of that island that he was able to really launch a lot of his other ventures because it just stretched his mind so big. Now he owns 400, you know, Branson properties, virgin properties. So when people think of rich people, they always think of people who have the money to go buy an island. He didn't have the money to buy an island, and neither does the the person watching this show, you don't have it either. Because there's going to get to the point where the property you want is bigger than you, bigger than what you could afford. But if it's a deal, just say yes and go figure it out. Because there's lots of money chasing deals and deals are rare. So, as I think it was Schuller that said, "Money, money is attracted to great deals." So, if you don't have the money, then go find the deal. Go window shopping until you find the deal, tie it up, and off you go. So, that was one way of going deeper. I said, go find a very focused territory in your city and go deep in that one. Find out who are the owners, realizing that they're being approached by real estate agents all the time saying, would you like to list your property? And real estate, forgive me for saying that, I'm going to say some nasty stuff. Having been a realtor myself for a couple years, I know what it's like. Realtors ruin the market for investors because they are looking for listings. And in a hot market, they're going to go to that seller and say, 'I can get you whatever you want.' And so they make property values retail instead of finding someone who needs to sell their property and bringing an investor to buy it. So, real estate agents are playing a retail game. And guess what they're going to tell you when you walk in the door and say, "Hello. I just read Robert Allen's book on nothing down. And I'm here to buy a property with nothing down." And they're going to what? They're going to throw you out of the office. Because they're playing a retail game. They're playing a traditional game. We're not traditional. We're creative. That means I look for someone who needs a creative solution. I become resourceful enough to buy it. Then I find somebody I can sell it to or I own it myself. And for me at first, I was a bird dog. And then I became an angel. Or talk about— let's go deeper on how to find deals. Let's go deeper.

Yes.

Most people wouldn't hire someone to look for real estate. For you. They'd hire a real estate person. But they wouldn't hire an exclusive employee that all they do is find real estate for you. Let me share with you a technique for finding an employee and paying them zero. Not nothing. So, I went to my MBA department where I graduated with my MBA. I said, "You have a summertime work, don't you? Great. Like a job? Here's the job. I'm going to teach you how to find real estate deals. I will share with you the secrets of how to do that. You're going to do that all summer long and I'll pay you zero. However, if you find a deal using the techniques I show you, I'll give you a percentage of the profit." And when I flip it or sell it or Whatever, refinance it. You're going to make profit from it. But no profit until I profit. When I profit, you profit. We both win. Rex was the number 1 student in the department that year and Rex was my bird dog. I paid him nothing. He was all day long, every day looking for real estate for me and would bring me deals. And we bought 3 or 4 properties that year. That summer. One of them was a beautiful 12-unit apartment building located in my zone, my area. I knew what its values were. And Rick comes to me one day and he says, the owners are meeting. They're having a terrible argument. They want to sell. You know, quick, go. It's a Saturday. I go and they're in the middle of an argument. And they had been arguing for years. And finally it had reached the point. And so, at the moment when they want to sell is when I show up, which means that because I'm looking, the deal is in my lap. I say to the sellers, "How much do you want for your property?" They tell me, "I know it's below market, at least $50,000, maybe more. I know it. It's gorgeous on a fabulous street, located a few blocks from the university, well taken care of. There's— it's not distressed in any way. It's just the partnership is distressed." And I said, good, let me give you a $500 check here to tie it up. I'll give you your price. We'll close in 6, 7 weeks.

This goes back to what you said earlier about, look, invest in the people or look for the people.

Looking for people problems, not property problems. Exactly. Exactly. So, there are a lot of reasons why become people become highly motivated. There are like 30 reasons. In this case, it was a partnership problem. I said, I'll give you whatever you want. Didn't negotiate. There's no negotiation. I just gave him $500, which was low by the time, which was low. And I said, now don't cash that. Let me set up the escrow. We'll get it all taken care of. So I gave him a check that didn't have enough money to cover. So basically, I wasn't that, that's not true. I'm just having fun. So now I have to find somebody who's got the money to close in my place. And I had been dealing with some real rich investors. I'm the bird dog, but Rex was my bird dog. I'm the senior bird dog. I go to the buyer and I say, 'I need $7,000 in cash for this piece of paper. You close on it in your name.' 'And at the closing, I walk out with $7,000 cash. Is that a deal?' He said, 'Are you kidding? Fabulous deal. Way below the market. Everybody wins. I just should have won a lot more. I should have done a higher price.' What I'm trying to say is that my going deep was finding the deals by hiring people and paying them nothing. So this is what I mean by going deep. If you don't have it, somebody does. Meaning, You don't have the time to look for deals? Then set up a system where the deals flow to you instead of you flowing out to get the deals. So, we can go deeper in how to find the deals. You can go deeper in how to fund the deals and go deeper in what do you do with the property. So, let's go deeper on that one. Let's go deeper on what do I do with the property where I can make it more valuable See, so, the problem with today, prices are being driven up. And therefore, we have to pay retail for real estate. So, then I'm going to go to another way of making money. And the thing you understand about real estate is its cash flow makes it more valuable if it has higher cash flow. Okay? Because commercial real estate is based upon cash flow, not on how much it costs to fix it, to build it. Single-family homes, their value is based upon what it costs to build it, based upon what other properties like it are selling for. Commercial is totally different. So I want to change the game. This is the new way of thinking about real estate. I'm not going to be a real estate, a residential real estate investor. I have to flip the switch. Remember I said you need to be, you flip it or a fixer or a flipper or a flip-flopper. A flip-flopper is a person who finds its current usage and flops it to another usage. For example, commercial real estate. When I go to commercial real estate and I increase its cash flow, I dramatically increase the value of that same home, the same house in the same neighborhood because I make it a residential, a rental for residential people who have serious problems. I turn it into a, for example, people who have autism. They have homes for people with autism and they have government funding And so you have a 4-bedroom house. It has 4 bedrooms for 4 tenants. These are not your normal tenant. A tenant you would normally put into that house might be $1,000, $2,000 a month. But each of these autistic tenants, or it could be serious other health issues, you know, all kinds— the government funds those things. Of course, you need to have a business going. It means you have to have some professionals that show up at that place. Who can take care of. So it requires employees. It requires a totally different mindset. You're not managing apartments now, you're managing a business. But since the rent goes up from maybe $2,000 a month to $8,000 or $12,000 a month—

Because it's a care facility.

Totally. It's a care facility. Now obviously there's zoning issues and you got some neighbors that will not be happy with that. But guess what? It's a huge marketplace where they've now converted a property from a rental into a business, a care facility. Big money from that. Now I turn that business up, that house, maybe that house cost me $300,000 to buy. Now I double its value, double it, and I get cash flow and its value goes up. So my net worth goes up and my cash flow goes up. So that's what I'm trying to say. You have to look with new eyes at every property, which is the new game that we're trying to teach you here. It's just seeing the world with different eyes, you know. When I walk into a real estate property, I see things differently than most investors do, especially beginning investors. I see opportunities everywhere because I have so many examples of things I've done like that. Like, oh, we could do this with that. We could flip this one. We could increase its value. We could, you know, we could split it off and sell off half of it to somebody else.

You're not stuck in a narrow channel.

I'm not stuck. I'm much deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper into that. And sometimes when the market's hot, You have to go deeper and you have to just think in a totally different way. And yet there's still profit everywhere you look in whatever market you're in. There is a strategy that works for you. And what I hope our viewers are getting from this is you can do this. You can do this. Don't let anybody tell you you can't do it. You can do this. However, it requires you some training and some learning and some deepening of what you think. And deep— and all these speculators are out there. They're just trying to make a quick buck. They're get-rich-people. We don't want get-rich-quick people. You know, we don't want that. And you don't want to be that way. You want to be a business person. You want to improve. You want to create value.

You want to create value for both of us. Totally.

So no value, that's get-rich-quick. You know, it's just, it's not, it's not, Not good. Can you do it? Sure, you can. But eventually, the market changes, the cycle changes, and you get holding, you get left holding the bag. Not gonna do that. Don't play that game.

What's the most creative thing you've done with a single-family home?

Well, the house we just bought. Oh, okay. Beautiful neighborhood, fantastic neighborhood. Nobody was selling. We wanted to live there. You know, so I went deeper.

This is your own home?

The home I'm living in right now. What did you do? And it needed some work. It needed some work to fix it up. And the values— and we knew it was a good price when we bought it, but it needed some work. And that was the problem with it, right? The seller needed to sell. So we put letters on— there are 50 houses in this neighborhood. And we put letters on half the houses. And we basically said, we want to buy. If you want to sell, call me. One person called and said, yep. I said, what do you want? What price do you want? They mentioned a price and I knew it was a great price. Done. We're in. We're, you know, $200,000 or $300,000 in extra profit just because we did it right. So, you know, there's so many little tricks like that.

So you found the neighborhood you wanted.

Yeah.

Nothing was for sale.

Totally. But yes, I don't want to buy a bargain in the wrong neighborhood. No, I want to buy the best neighborhood there is. And I want to buy— frankly, this is the secret— you need to buy the worst property in the best neighborhood because that means the value will always be stable. If you buy the best property in the worst neighborhood, it's going to be a while before you get your money out. But if it's the worst property in the best neighborhood, In this case, I'm not trying to say anything out of school to the sellers. They needed to sell. They were ready to sell. They named a price, and I knew that price was good. So, real estate's a fun game, but can I be blunt?

Please.

My blunt is, why am I here? Why am I even doing this? You know, why don't I just go buy a small island somewhere and retire, right? Because this is what I do. This is what I love to do. So real estate gave me the freedom to do that, to do what I love to do. I love to teach, right? I would rather fix up a human being than a piece of real estate any day. So for the last 40 years of my career, I've been fixing up people. I find people who want, have dreams, and I say, I'll show you the vehicles for you to get to your dream. Real estate is one vehicle. There are other ways in which I teach them, but this is what I was born to do. This is my purpose in life. And I know that's a crazy way to say it. I believe that the reason I know that is because the first time somebody wrote me a letter and said, Robert, that seminar that changed me, changed my life, you know, it changed my life. And I didn't change their life. In fact, I didn't even teach the seminar. It was just my seminar that somebody else taught. It was my ideas organized that way. And I began to realize that I liked my real estate, but I got joy from that letter. And the joy never goes away. And I have thousands of joyful letters like that, thousands of them. And today we're going to generate some more.

[Speaker] Sure.

People are going to go, "I like that Robert Allen guy," or, "I don't like that Robert Allen guy. I like those other people that are, you know, in this video that they're shooting here." And so you'll resonate with somebody, and you'll go— then I say, "Go resonate with whomever you resonate with, because maybe they're the people who are supposed to take you to the next level." But a few people are going to resonate with this message, and they're going to go, I kind of like the way he teaches it. He's fun. He's creative. He's different. And then they're going to go, maybe he could teach me something.

Sure.

And if that's the case, great. Then the universe put us together. And let's resonate together, right? That's what I was born to do.

And you became an author. Way back then, you wanted to be an author.

Yeah, people ask all the time. You do make more money. From your real estate information or from your real estate? And I was so embarrassed to answer that question for so many years because I felt like, well, yeah, it's true. I do make more money from my real estate education.

But why shouldn't you? Because that gives, right?

I know, but I was, I was afraid of what the wrong people were thinking. They were not my audience, meaning there are these people out there who don't like people like us who share messages like this. Because they think, well, they're making more money from their real estate education than they're from their real estate. And I was allowing that to affect me. So I would say, well, but real estate made me a fortune. And but today I'll say, yeah, I'll make 1,000 times more money in the information than you will in the real estate. Because you know why that is? Because my city where I buy my real estate is fixed and it goes up and down in the neighborhoods, but it's fixed. But I reach the world and there are 7 billion people and a certain percentage of those people are looking for this message. And so I have billions of possible customers. It's unlimited. Whereas my real estate is not unlimited. Even the cash flow from my real estate can only go up so much unless I'm doing some deal like turning it into a care facility where I double the income. But generally speaking, your apartments are going to go up 5%, 8%. But my information can go up 5,000%. Why is that? Because what does it cost to create an online program? What's your physical cost? 1%. 1%. And the profit's 99%, whereas in any other business, in any physical business you're trying to market a product in, your physical cost is going to be 25, 30, 40, 50, 60%. Therefore, your profit margin is a lot lower. The information business is big time.

But if you hadn't embraced that, you wouldn't have those letters.

Totally.

Right? That joy.

Totally. Totally.

You'd have a big bank account, but you wouldn't have that joy.

Well, I was, I knew I was always going to write a book even before I had anything to write it about. I knew that I would be an author, and I've been an author a dozen times since, reached millions and millions of people traveling all around the world, speaking to China and Russia until COVID happened and shut that down. But now I did it. I just did a session in Italy. In my office, in my home, 7:30 in the morning to thousands of people on Zoom. Hey, maybe I like this.

There's always opportunity, always opportunity, right?

Yeah.

Robert, thank you so much. There was so much in there. I love the story about going to San Francisco with 3 days because it kind of mirrors where we are today with Because you had such a tight time frame.

Yeah, yeah.

Finding the deal, right? So even if there were a lot of deals at that time, you had 3, less than 3 days and no, literally no money.

Right.

So that to me mirrors today because finding the deals is that much harder, right?

Come and go that fast. Yeah.

So I'm on that time constraint and then how to get, how to find the money, get creative and make it the right property And then once you got the property, what's the right thing to do with it? And I think that's kind of all of it.

Mindset is so important. Have you read Think and Grow Rich? It's just, it's the classic book. You just have to read the 13 principles of Think and Grow Rich. Desire, faith, autosuggestion, specialized knowledge, imagination, decision, organized planning, persistence. The Power of the Mastermind, The Mystery of Sex Transmutation, The Brain, The Subconscious Mind, The Sixth Sense. I know those principles backwards and forwards.

Sounds like it.

Because mindset is everything. And most people allow this critical voice to talk them out of their dreams. The critical voice is a liar. It doesn't want you to win. Don't listen to it. You are destined to do great things in your life. So now go do them.

There's no more perfect way to wrap this, sir.

Thank you. You're welcome.

Well, it would be kind of redundant if I said the next interview is amazing because these are the founders of amazing.com, Jason Katzenback and Michael McClary. They teach people and a lot of people how to set up an Amazon business. And I have to tell you, I was like kind of shocked because It almost in some respects seems, oh, can something that mundane really generate that kind of revenue? And the answer is yes. So you're going to learn something here, and that is that maybe something doesn't have to be sexy and juicy to be profitable. So tune into this interview. You can act upon what you're going to learn tomorrow and see if dollars start floating in. Jason, Mike, thanks for taking the time to sit with us and have this conversation. So the joke is almost too easy, and it's probably not even funny to you anymore, but you have an amazing story, right? So let's talk about, you know, your lives maybe before Amazing.com, and then we'll get into what you're doing right now. So Jason, why don't you start? Tell us your background.

Yeah, so originally I was going the corporate route with life, but I, back in 2003, I remember the CEO decided to abolish all bonuses that year, and I just realized that I needed to stop working my butt off to line other people's pockets, and it needed to be more about what I could spend my time on to give me the most ROI. So I started my first business back in 2005, and it was a pretty cool success. You know, that first year we did over $3 million, and it just really got me the bug for the internet. I went from, you know, working for a corporate company where I was working all these hours to try to improve my lifestyle. And I found I just had to work more and more hours and it didn't seem like I had any freedom. And then I started my own business and also I could work from home. I could travel as long as I had an internet connection.

It was good.

Now back then Wi-Fi wasn't like it was now. So, the freedom wasn't quite the same.

Was it a related industry or was it—

Well, what I did initially was I started with little ebooks. So, I would research topics online and I would figure out what people were looking for whether it was learning to get your driver's license insurance, health issues. And then I would hire ghostwriters to write the content. And then I would use SEO, a lot of article creation, article marketing to just dominate the search engines. And I started doing really, really well. So then I started teaching that. And I launched a product in 2005 called Portal Feeder that was based off of that, how to build websites to be able to promote affiliate programs, products, anything like that. And that's when I realized the feedback I got that I was very good at teaching because I was very— I had a lot of empathy with the people. I would really work hard with them. I cared a lot about customer support. We got a lot of feedback on that early, that it was our customer support that made the difference because we really followed through with the customers. And so I started refining that membership model and teaching model. It was always based on the businesses I was doing. It's like I had to be a success success in the business I was teaching. And so initially, starting back in 2005, it was focused on SEO and PPC, but all Google related. And then in 2012— not 2012, 2010— that's when all the penguins and all those things came out from Google with the different algorithm changes. And I realized I was kind of doing the same thing again. I was working for someone else. I wasn't creating an asset because I was building businesses always based on hacks and, you know, how you can trick the search engines, rank on the search engines. But then suddenly the search engines decide to change their algorithm, it's like you have to start over. And that's when I met Matt Clark, actually. It was in— I'm not sure if you've heard of the Mavericks. It's a mastermind group.

Yannick Silver.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we met in that. I joined that in 2011, and me and Matt got into a mastermind group. And so So he was— here's this young 24-year-old kid at the time doing like $100,000 a month selling his own products on Amazon. It was just mind-boggling to me. It's like, how can you have your own manufacturing? And he's like, well, I private label it. And I knew private label from the context of content, you know, like for someone to, you know, to repurpose content. But he was actually doing it with products. So he started teaching me that. And so when I launched my first product, within 4 months I was doing over $100,000 a month profit. And that was because I was able to take all my SEO skills, all my marketing skills from Google, and translate it onto Amazon. Now, I also had a little bit of a helping hand because at that time Dr. Oz was really pushing health supplements like Garcinia Cambogia, raspberry ketones. My first product was a raspberry ketone, and so that really helped. But the cool thing was, is the product I started selling was the exact product that my manufacturer was selling, but because I differentiated it, used all my marketing skills skills. I was selling my product for 3 times as much as my manufacturer, and I was ranked number 1 and they were like number 30, kind of thing. So it was— so the bug hit and we started teaching people the Amazon model.

Can I ask a question about that? I'm really curious. So you're manufacturing— so basically you were being— you were white labeling from your manufacturer, and when you started outperforming them on such a significant basis, did they at least like take notice and say, hey, maybe we should copy some of what you're doing, or were there any conversations around that?

No. Interesting enough, as much as I thought that it would actually hurt me once they figured out who I was, the opposite. Because manufacturers, most of them, that's their business model, is the manufacturing side. They're not marketers, and so they almost just dabble in that kind of stuff. But, you know, a lot of our students have asked that, like, what about when the manufacturer finds out you're selling the products. Like, well, that's not their business model. It's like my business model isn't manufacturing. Now sometimes sellers will start to develop so much they build their own facility to manufacture. I don't want to get into that. I don't want to have more warehouses and employees and those kind of things. So no, I mean, in fact, they— it was more of a partnership. They started giving me better deals because I was such a high-profile seller, and they kept dropping the price on me. So it was just The only problem was the one drawback of that industry is I didn't like selling that product. I mean, you know, and that's something with any business. Like, I think, you know, it's great to start a testing business. Like, when you're going into business, you always, you know, like, don't look at it like, I'm going all in on this. Like, you know, test the waters, make sure. And that's what we tell a lot of our students is, you know, pick a product and learn the business model, learn the system, and then start building a real business.

Did you think there was gravity there? In other words, you said Dr. Oz was promoting this, so was that what got your attention, said, hmm, I think I know.

It was research. It was really, it was just following our strategies of figuring out what are the best sellers on Amazon, how many reviews do they have, how much competition does it look like they have, is this an emerging market? Because Amazon, you know, I had in the mindset at first it was like Google, like if you're not number one, you're nothing. But it's not like that. Like on Amazon, people browse, you can direct traffic to it, it's very different that way. So I, it was never that. It was all about, no, this opportunity says let's see. And as I started doing the business model, I started feeling kind of— I didn't like selling people a weight loss supplement when their responses— when I'd, you know, because I tried following up, giving them value, saying, as you buy this product, you know, here's some exercise tips, all that. And I get responses like, if I wanted to exercise, I wouldn't have bought your product. And so you just start feeling guilty. It's like, well, you know, as much as they say it works, this isn't really good for you. So I've actually gotten out of the health industry, and now I focus primarily on the house and home.

But—

So I could see the trajectory into Amazon for you. And we'll get more specifically into those aspects. But I want to know Mike's, you know, how did you arrive here? Sure.

Well, I'll go back even a little further and probably people don't know this, but I actually sold paint right out of college.

Paint?

Yeah. So I put myself through college by working at a paint factory that my dad worked at. And in the early '90s when I graduated, the job market was not there for anyone. Luckily, the factory called me back up and said, you realize we have more jobs other than just factory jobs. Professional jobs. And luckily I was able to take a job with them. No idea that I was going to be selling paint, but I took that and moved to Alabama. And then within a few months, they realized that computers were now all the rage in the early '90s. And Mike, the, you know, 20-something kid out of college, must know computers.

Didn't.

But I vowed to learn them. And so I moved to Chicago, really got into the whole data analysis with the company as computers were taking off. And that led me to another job of once I realized, like, data and computers was where I wanted to go. I got into consulting business. Then I started traveling, consulting. I found a client that I was doing a lot of data analysis with, telecom company, and they actually got me involved in the finance side of it. And so shortly thereafter, I became a finance director for a large telecom company.

What does that mean to be a finance director? Like, what kind of stuff did you do?

Yeah, so I focused a lot on the revenue recovery side where a business You know, you get so big, you don't realize where you're leaking money. You just look at the numbers, the top line, the bottom line. You don't realize that there's all these little gaps and holes in your system. So my job was to find those gaps and plug them. And we did that with data. And I always loved research. I love analyzing what's coming in, what's going out, and where's the delta between those two. And I really found that that was a great spot for me. And so after doing that for them for a while, I loved the work I was doing. But I felt chained down. I was this guy that sat in an office. I had a team working with me. We're always looking, you know, it's, it was mostly cable at the time. Cable did not have a really good, you know, perception among people. And so I didn't have this feeling that I was bringing joy to people's lives, doing anything like that, and definitely not my own life. I had a lot of stress in that job. So it was a great, you know, great group of people, but I wasn't really feeling fulfilled. So then it was about 2012. I realized I wanted to do something different. I didn't want to have this corporate job with this week or two of vacation every year. You know, was making good money, but I was stressed out not seeing my family. And luckily, you know, I saw an email come by. I talked about, hey, there's a great opportunity on Amazon. It must have been months after, you know, Jason and Matt had started really, you know, finalizing and fine-tuning how to build a business on Amazon. And I was one of the first people to get this email. And it just really, you know, stoked something inside of me to realize this seems like a good opportunity. And I remember, you know, hearing about the training and it all just clicked, you know, why why go out there and try to invent a brand new product? Find something that people already want. There's already a demand, right? That's half the equation of selling. If you know that there's a demand for something, then create something that fulfills that demand or something that even does better than that. And that's what the model taught me. And so I jumped in. I took this, you know, I learned how to build my own business on Amazon, how to build a brand of products. I had no idea the products I launched. My first product was a leather conditioner. I didn't know anything made of leather.

I'm actually looking for one of those right now. I'll talk to you about that after this.

Yeah, good. But I knew I could source in the United States. I knew there was, you know, a low quantity to get going with. The price was, was right. I knew I could make a good profit margin. And most of all, there was a demand for it and not too much competition at the time. So I started off with that. And lo and behold, a year later I was making enough that I could actually quit my corporate finance job in order to pursue this full time. And it's just kind of taken off from there. And a lot of other things happened since then as well.

Yeah.

And I want to get into that in a moment. But when did the transition come from you being a customer, you know, of the company to actually coming into the company?

So I'd say probably start about 6 months after I started, you know, doing, you know, learning how to build a business. And we actually met in Austin for the first time. There was a live event for all the people learning how to this new business model. We got to meet for the first time. At that point, it wasn't just virtual community, everyone talking on Facebook or in a private group. It was 500, 600 people in a room face-to-face meeting Jason, meeting Matt, and then talking about all of our successes, our failures, what was working, what wasn't working. And what was amazing about that— not to use amazing again— was how much everyone was sharing with each other. Yeah, we had 500, 600 people that you thought were competitors of each other, but they're all helping each other out because the world out there is so big. There's so much demand for everything. There's no point in trying to keep it all to yourself. And so when I started sharing more and more of what I was finding out, because let's face it, you know, two guys can't figure everything out and do it all the time. They're, they're running, you know, a large business, bringing all kinds of students. They need other people to help. And so I came in as more of a mentor in that role. There's probably a handful of us in that. And then after another 6 months of doing mentoring, then they realized we need someone to help with training.

Right.

And so I came in and started doing training about 6 months later. And then a few years down the road, as it was really building the rapport, the relationship, We're all, you know, we realize we're in this together. We're helping change the world. We're changing lives. We're building a great business that's expanding beyond Amazon and beyond just e-commerce. Realized it was, you know, a better idea to bring me in full time to really help, you know, with the business and the customer support and also the building of the products to make sure they're as good as they can be.

Yeah. If I just want to add one thing on that. So, you know, he's talking about our events, our first event, what really surprised us and when he talks about changing people's lives was that fact. And that's one of the reasons we pulled Mike in too, because he has a lot of empathy for people. And because it's, you know, one thing to teach people, but if you're not relating to them, if you're not understanding them, you can't help them. And at the end of the event, we had, you know, the whole room was lined up around the room, and it took us an hour to go through everyone wanting to take a picture with me and Matt, shake our hands, and tell us how we changed their lives. So it was this spark that went in my mind. It's like I found my passion. We're changing people's lives. And it's, you know, oftentimes you hear about passion, follow your passion, find your passion. And I used to get stuck in those mindsets of like, how can I be passionate about something? Like, I got to find my passion. And you see people that are health experts and all that, but it's when all of a sudden you find it and it was changing people's lives, the energy it gave, and and just the spark that we saw in Mike and how he wanted to affect people's lives. And so he's definitely been an asset. He's a very successful seller of his own brands, but he's got a real knack for being able to relate to people and help teach them. So it's been a really good partnership.

So Amazing, you know, is legendary in the digital marketing world because the size of some of the launches you've done. Yeah, you know, it's— people know about them, and it's this whole concept of the virtual world. But what gets my attention is You decide to have a live event, which is like the, you know, kind of like the other direction a little bit. So what was the internal dialogue saying? You know, hey, this is all about how to be virtual and, and, you know, really build a good business, a profitable business virtually. Let's get everybody together live. So what, what was the impetus behind that?

It's about camaraderie, um, and sharing ideas and the fact that, you know, over the 7 years before that I went from being in an office to working in my home and going through a lot of ups and downs. Working from your home can have a mental challenge at times. You know, you get depressed, you feel alone, you don't have people around you that can relate to you, can bounce things off. So it's really about creating that community. And we also knew that we wanted to have an experience, so not only to help people create a community, but also to help connect people that can help one another. One of the biggest things that me and Matt did originally was we created this mastermind group. And so I started selling in October, we had the mastermind group in November, and then every one of us in that mastermind group by February were crushing it. And so it really opened our eyes too that you have to be sharing. As Mike said, there's just too much to teach. And so it was really just about how do we create community with people, how do we make people feel they belong, and how do we get that camaraderie so people feel that they're not just on an island by themselves doing this business, that there's actually something more to this. And it just worked. It really did.

Did you have— I guess this is really a question for you because you're there at the point in time, but when you got together with Matt and you said, you know, let's, let's put together this product and this project and let's go launch this, did you anticipate the size it would be?

No.

You know, I was going for, you know, my target was the John Reese, Frank Kern kind of million-dollar launch, you know, the Mike Filsaime kind of thing. And what we did originally, what we launched was 3 products in 1. It was originally called the Amazon Money Machine, and then Amazon let us know that you can't do that. So we quickly changed it, and thankfully at that time, you know, we were nobody, so like we had time. We changed it to the Amazing Money Machine and then the Amazing Selling Machine. John Reese actually helped us change that. But when we started, we were focused on Private label, wholesale, dropshipping, and Kindle, because those were the 3 aspects of Amazon. But after the year of doing that and all the community testimonials, we were looking like, yeah, people were making a few thousand dollars a month with Kindle, some were doing okay with private— with wholesale. Private label, we had people crushing it. We had one guy, David Paul Doyle, actually, he was one of our first guys that, um, he's right now NatureWise, and he's one of the biggest health brands on Amazon. He was one of our first success stories and we just looked at this and it's like, so by having this training, we should probably get rid of the, you know, look at the 80/20. What's getting us 80% of our results was private label. And then so when we did that and now we had these testimonials, you know, you go from the first year launching the product doing $1 million to the next launch we do, just the launch itself in 9 days doing $7 million. You know, it was kind of like, whoa. And then the next launch you did $10 million. $10, next launch you did $16, then you do a $22 million launch. And it was just, it was two things happened. Number one, we were the first to market. We were the first real established system. But the other cool thing is all of that pre-training I did of creating communities, courses, all those kind of things just fed right into that. So it was just really all those relationships from affiliates and everything that I had. It was like the perfect storm. And, you know, it plays with your mind too when all of a sudden all this success comes. It's like winning the lottery. It really— there's a lot of challenges that come with that, a lot of challenges. But no, I, I was hoping for like a $2 or $3 million launch. I had no idea it would do what it did.

And the biggest launch was the $22 million, was that the— yeah, so that's, that's a, it's a lot more than one.

Yeah, it was pretty incredible.

But with all the people now that have come in because obviously you opened up this, this kind of new frontier. That's an opportunity. You know, when I look at it, sometimes I think in terms of, um, it's almost like, uh, learning franchise, you know, as far as saying, hey, there's, there's kind of a turnkey business method here that you can adopt. But franchises, you need a lot of money to be able to engage in. Here you need very little investment to be able to kind of get a product, get a business, get the whole structure together and be able to go to market. And then so if for some reason it didn't work, you don't really have a downside or much of a downside. And if it does work, it's a terrific thing.

And we actually teach that where some people will, you know, there's one person we were just talking to that put like $16,000 in their first inventory order. And it's like, what are you doing? Like, that's absolutely— you want to start as risk-averse as possible. And the idea is start with this. You know, you want to start with about what, 200, 300 units?

That's about— that's all you need for it to get going. You know, you don't, you don't need to spend thousands of dollars. As a matter of fact, you only started with $500 worth, you know, got me about 100 bottles of leather conditioner. But, you know, and talking about risk, um, you know, we're in— you're building a business, there's risk involved in it, but I like to think of it as calculated risk. Yeah, you don't just go out there and blindly spend money on something you don't feel has a proven way of working out for you. And one of the things that, you know, probably the biggest thing we built up is all this credibility, social proof, all these success stories of people who've made it work and all the reasons why people who didn't weren't able to.

So we know what not to do as well as what to do, which is really important. You know, it's not just do this, do this, but here, don't do this. It can be the difference between success and failure.

And that's why we have— one of the challenges we have, we have to keep it up to date all the time. And e-commerce is changing every single day. Amazon changes every single day. You can't open the paper, not read an article about Jeff Bezos or about Amazon without seeing something in the news about them changing or expanding to a new business or shutting down a part of the business.

Right.

We have to stay on top of that because if we don't and we teach someone to do something wrong, that could hurt their business big time.

In line with that, because I— there's, there's a question I have relative to that, because one might think, okay, well, now you've done this for some years now, you've had all these thousands of people who've come in are doing it. Um, is it saturated? Is there still a lot of room for people to come in? Where, you know, where do you think you are in that particular Part of the arc.

Yeah.

If you look at it, saturation is a state of mind.

Yeah.

There's, there's absolutely no way that a business or an entire section of the economy that's growing so big could even become saturated yet. Amazon or e-commerce in general only has a fraction percentage of all retail sales. I think it's not even over 15% of all retail yet.

So it's an expanding universe, right?

Absolutely. You know, and the way that it's growing, the number of sellers can't even keep up to pace with the way that the amount the market is taking over.

Wow.

And Amazon still does only about 50% United States right now. They can still grow there. They're expanding into other markets, other areas, and there's always new products coming out. It's a constant, you know, continual flow of new, new ideas, new products, new methods of marketing that you can just take advantage of. And, you know, but one thing is the sooner you get in, the more time you have to take advantage of. That's why I always want people to get in as soon as they can.

And people make the mistake of thinking this is an Amazon business. It's not. It's a physical products business, but you're leveraging Amazon to get started. And the whole idea is once you have a proven brand, once you have your proven products— and there's so much opportunity on Amazon, like you said, you can expand internationally so easily— then you create your own e-commerce store, you start going on different websites, and you expand how your product reaches. But the world's changing. I mean, just— I was just telling about an article I was reading where it listed all the stores closing this year. You know, people are gonna go somewhere to buy. And then people say, well, what if Amazon starts selling all their own products. Well, then would you buy on Amazon? You know, if you know, if I only go to Amazon and you can only buy Amazon brand products there, I'd start looking elsewhere, right? You know, because Amazon doesn't want that. Amazon admits 50% of the revenue is from third-party sellers. So there's so much growth, and it's just like a hockey stick right now with how quick that Amazon is expanding. And some people think that it's oversaturated because I think it's a fear, like they want to talk themselves out of it where they're looking for opportunities but they almost seem to red flag everything. And no matter what business model I've been teaching, that's the number one thing. Oh, is it oversaturated? Is it oversaturated?

They feel like they missed it.

Yeah, they feel like they missed it. And it doesn't matter that the first year we started selling Amazing Selling Machine, the number one question was, is it Is it too late to get into it? And the only thing that determines success or failure, in my opinion, the number one thing is mindset going into it. You know, you hear mindset, you know, some people say, oh, it's irrelevant. It's like, it's not. And every success story we talk to, the people say right away, this is, I knew I could make this work. And so it's really believing that if you're going into this and saying, this isn't gonna, you know, The word try, I think sometimes people misuse. Like, oh, I'm going to try that. Why don't you just do it? Don't just try it, do it, implement it, like fully go in. And it's even incredible sometimes people buy our course and they'll send me their— because they'll be struggling. I'll say, let me see what you've done. It's like, well, you haven't followed the training. It's like, well, why are you doing this? Like, is this a hobby for you? Because if it's a hobby, then I'll step back and it's like, you just go have fun. But if you want to change your life, if you want to be a real successful business, then you can't just try. You have to do it. And it's all about mindset. And at the end of the day, there is so much room on the internet for e-commerce. Whether it, you know, Amazon right now is a behemoth, but you remember when Google took over Yahoo? People were like, there's no way, like, Yahoo's gonna be it. And then Google came along. Like, there'll be something come along. But the thing is, people are always going to need to buy. There's always, you know, whether it be, you know, and I love it now. Like just the other day I ordered a bottle opener because it's like, oh, I got to go buy a bottle. Wait a sec, you know, order it and same-day delivery, you get it, you know. And the big thing, so it's like I'm just going to do more and more of that. And I think the world's turning that way. So it's really, if you want to change your life, if you want to do a business, look for the reasons why to do it. Now be cognizant, like obviously if it's you know, you want to look at the market share and all those different elements, but at the end of the day, if you want to change your life, you just got to take action and really believe in yourself.

I'd say that, you know, in line with that, who's, who's the avatar for you guys? Like, this is the ideal person or the ideal 3 types of people that really are our customer.

It started with this guy, with really— and the idea was because it worked from, you know, mid-40s, middle-aged kind of person that had some disposable income to be able to buy some inventory. Not a lot. And they were looking for something else. It was somebody that was stuck in a job and they were just feeling like, I have to commute to the office. It's really like the commute could summarize it, like if you're sick of the commute. But it was more the middle-aged person that was an executive that was looking to, to get that freedom. But it's since changed a lot.

Yeah.

Now we see people from all walks of life. I think anyone who wants to make a change in their life and has a, has a reason why they want to do that, you know, and money very seldom is the reason why. It's what you want to do with that money. But if you have a reason, if your why is you want to spend more time with your family, you want to travel, you want to, you know, buy nice things, there's nothing wrong with that at all. Just understand what it is you're doing this for. If you have a reason why you want to make a change, that's our ideal person. Because having a good reason why you want to make this successful will help you be successful. And I know, like, number one thing that got me successful was as soon as I started and made the decision that I was going to build this business, I didn't, I didn't, you know, wonder what's it going to be like when I'm successful. I started visualizing I've already made the step, I've already made a change, I'm already successful because I've already taken that big leap.

Now, you're full-time as an executive when you started, you said, right?

Yeah.

So because that's one of the big questions that come up, how much time How much time do I need to be able to make this work?

I was nervous starting out, thinking, how can I build an entire brand and a business while, you know, having two young kids at home, having a wife that, you know, she needs attention from me and vice versa. So I couldn't just, you know, ignore all those things and having a full-time job that I travel to. Luckily, I was able to do it within an hour to a day. So the way that, you know, the training— when I, when I took training to learn how to do this, it was laid out where you could watch it anytime you wanted to. It's online, it's virtual. Support, the help, the mentorship, that's all virtual online. So anytime you wanted to go watch it, I usually— my plan was work all day, came home, I had dinner with the family, then I would go downstairs and I'd watch some training for an hour or two, and then I'd come back upstairs and hang out with the family a little bit more. And then 10 o'clock, I'll go back downstairs and spend another 30 minutes to kind of plan out my next day. So it's never more than a couple hours a day.

But I think what's important is that you had a kind of a structure around the training. In other words, uh, it's probably not a, I'll get to it when I have time, because that probably never shows up.

Yeah, those are the people that a year later, they're still— we have people from ASM 4, they say, okay, now I'm starting, you know, and that was 4 years ago because you get lifetime access. So once you join, you'll keep getting all the upgrades. And so we'll have people starting now say, now I'm gonna commit. And it's like, you know, it's just mind-boggling at times when you hear that because it's like, why didn't you make this financial investment back then?

But it's—

you have to be able to do that. You have to be able to dedicate— we recommend a minimum of an hour a day but really, like, if you want to make it work, 2 hours a day is probably more realistic, like, really to be able to get it done in 6 months. Where if you dedicate 2 hours a day, in 6 months you'll have a dramatic transformation, and you'll know at the end of those 6 months you either— because that's another thing, one of the things that we believe is that everybody can do this business, not everybody will want to do a business. Business. You know, a lot of times being an entrepreneur, there's a little bit more responsibility in life because you're more responsible for everything in the business. And so after 6 months, we do occasionally have people that say, no, this just really isn't for me. So we actually offer a guarantee on that, that if you're not— you follow our system after 6 months, if you're not, you know, if you've done everything and you're not happy, we'll refund you still. Because sometimes people fall into that victim. Very, very small percentage of people do that. But it's just an interesting phenomenon because some people, they think that they want to be an entrepreneur, but then they don't.

It's not for them.

It's not for them.

Yeah.

So another category of person I wonder if this is right for, which is on my mind. So I've got a 22-year-old son who's a senior in college, you know, finance economics major, who, you know, looking at going out into the job market saying, hmm, I wonder if I, you know, how do I go look for jobs? Looking for. But then he just comes back from a trip to London and says, you know, I found a, you know, a small gin over there that they don't import over here. I wonder if there's a way I can figure out how to import that over here. You're thinking about ways to take products from one place, bring them and distribute them to another audience. Is someone like that that's like maybe, uh, ready for the job market?

Just the Dysons, like they're 29 years old now and they're, they're doing what, half a million, half a million a month in sales, you know, and half a million.

And these are—

so who are, who are these Channing and Justin Dyson.

Yeah, we just had them in Hawaii for some video.

Are they college, like you just out of college or what?

Well, Justin dropped out of college once he realized how well the business was doing.

Right.

And I think that Channing, she now owns a beauty shop that she still does some part-time work in, but now they're really just running their own business, selling all kinds of, you know, children's apparel and different types of products that for them, they have young kids. They realize that, you know, Could we make something better? Could we make something that we would want to buy as parents? And knowing that there's hundreds of millions of parents out there, they were similar to what your, your son was. They wanted to bring something different to the market that they knew there was a demand for, and that gave them their passion to really dig into this business.

One of our early success students, John Gill, who, you know, quickly became an 8-figure seller, one of the things that he was most dedicated to us for is how this transformed his family because he taught his son the business model. And now his son does better than him, and he's like, I, I feel safe now, like my son is taken care of. Um, so absolutely, you know, and the neat thing about this business is, you know, we recommend that you start— you know, when we teach you, we try to teach you the most effective way to get the fastest results possible with the least amount of risk as possible. Now, there's always some risk, um, but the reality is, if you only have $100 to start with, you can start with $100. It's just, it's going to take you a little bit longer to find the right products because some types of products will have minimum order quantities. So you might have to have $1,000 for that product. So keep looking for another product because the idea is just get started with a product. Find a product on Amazon that fits certain criteria so you know that it's a good seller. And if it's proven on Amazon, that's why we also sell— like, if you're just starting out, don't start with a brand new product. Don't say, I have this idea, It's going to do well. Well, if it's not selling on Amazon, you have this whole other hurdle that you're going to have to figure out. So what you do is you find a product that's selling well. First of all, you try to figure out how to make it a little bit better.

There's steps in this process. So is that the first step?

So finding the product's the first step in the process, the most important one, because your product is everything. I like to think of it as the base of the entire business. And that's why we're very, very careful about the criteria we use. We want to make sure that it's priced a certain amount of price because if it's Too low of a price, you won't make enough profit. If it's too high of a price, you can't afford enough inventory, right? You also make sure that the competition is at the right spot on Amazon, because if you have too much competition, you can't compete with people that have unlimited pockets to outspend you. But there's not enough competition. There's a reason for that, that the product probably isn't in demand out there. You also want to make sure that it's not too heavy because, let's face it, shipping is a cost of business nowadays. And if you can remove that from the equation, then that makes it much easier to get going. And then you also want to make sure that you can private label it. That's a big part of what we talk about here. So it's much easier to take a product, a generic product. Think of a thermos instead of selling the thermos brand thermos, create your own brand of it, you know, come up with the Mike and Jason's Thermos or whatever it is. Jason, Mike and Jason. And brand that yourself because if you own the brand, you own an asset and you're bringing cash flow every month. And you're building an asset that at some point, if you choose to cash out and retire, you have that built up. If you sell someone else's exact same product, you're building their business, right? But if you make your own, you're building an asset for you.

Yeah.

And that's a really important point. A lot of people ask two things like, why don't I just sell somebody else's brand to start out? Well, with Amazon, you're allowed one listing. So let's say, you know, whatever it is, Acme spatulas, there's only one listing on Amazon. And then you'll see underneath the the buy box where you click the buy button, other sellers. So then all of a sudden you'll notice that there could be 50 others competing. So what's happening now, everyone's driving for the lowest price, right? So now it's a commodity product. But when you're your own seller, you're the only listing. You might have Amazon because it depends on how you have things set up. They can resell your used stuff. So if someone returns something, but that's the only time you'll have a competitor. So it's, it's just you get all the profit, you get all the sale. And so people think, oh, it's easier to start this way. It's not.

Do you ever have a manufacturer decide to acquire somebody who is white labeling, saying, hey, you know, this is really good, I like this brand of my product, I think I'll buy you?

So I haven't had that, but I had had them want to partner with us and several other people as well. So once they see, like, like your example with your, your raspberry ketones, where they could have very easily came to you and said, Jason, let's partner on this, we'll give you a better deal, let's share in the profits. I had one of my suppliers suppliers came to me after seeing the growth and wanted to partner on a whole new line with them. They do want to do that sometimes. You don't have to do that. I mean, again, they're, they're really happy being a manufacturer, knowing that they have someone out there who knows what they're doing selling their products. That's what they do best. They manufacture, they distribute them to their third-party sellers, and then let us do what we do.

Stay in their lane. So now, okay, so step one is finding the product. What's step two?

Next one then is seeking the manufacturers, finding them. And this is what blew my mind when I first learned the business model. I thought that if I was buying any kind of product out there, that whoever made— maybe it was a Rayovac lantern. I thought Rayovac made that product. They had a plant somewhere in St. Louis and they're, they're churning out lanterns. Ends up there's, you know, 100 plants in China all making similar lanterns and they're private labeling and branding for you. So the first thing is to find a supplier from usually overseas, or if you're selling like a beauty product or some kind of health supplement, in the United States, you need to find those suppliers that are looking for you. And I didn't realize you could even do this. I didn't know that's a possibility. I wasn't aware of private labeling at that point in time. But nowadays you can go online to sites like Alibaba.com, even Google, and search for private label products, and you will see hundreds, if not thousands, of different suppliers that actually are looking for you to sell their products for them.

And it's so much easier today with freight forwarders. And, you know, a lot— that's a big concern people have. Okay, well, how do I get the get product from China to here. It's so easy. It's really just a matter of picking up the phone, talking to the freight forwarder. They ask all the right questions. I don't even know if all of them need a phone. There's probably online forms now. And they'll make sure it goes from the manufacturer right to Amazon. So it really— we don't recommend this, but you could start and run this business without ever touching the product yourself, ever. Now we always recommend get a sample, make sure you check the product. But you really don't need to. It's— yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't see any of our products anymore.

Not at all.

When we're creating the products, I know for our brands, like, we obviously— I'm sure you do this too— you look at the product, you buy the competitors, you compare them, you feel them, you see how you can make it better, and then that's it, you know. And then the only other time is launching a new product. Launching a new one. Yeah, yeah. You don't have to have a warehouse or anything.

So that's step 2. What's step 3?

Step 3 then is your piece of property or real estate on Amazon. Like Jason mentioned earlier, every product has a listing we'll call it on Amazon. It's like, it's almost like having your own mini website on Amazon. What you want to do is you want to make sure that as many people as possible that go to Amazon, if they see your product, they want to buy your product. And so there's very specific criteria. You want to have the best images possible. You want to have the best title possible. To make sure that it gets a lot of traffic, but also doesn't look spammy. Looks like a product that I'd want to buy at the store. You want to make sure that you have plenty of details in the bullet points, those 5 points right below the name of the product. And you want to have a good product description as well. And there's, you know, there's— it's not overly complicated, but there's a formula for making sure you have all 4 of those in place. And there's a 5th one, there's kind of a secret one that most people don't— when you're buying on Amazon, don't realize Amazon in the back end has these hidden search terms that if you want your product to show up for other searches that aren't in the title, aren't in your listing, you can put them back there too.

Oh, well, yeah, we had at one of our live events, we had someone come on stage and be vulnerable because they showed us their product and we looked at it, audited it. It was actually Mike that did it. He suggested, oh, do this in your back. And the next day sales were up 20%.

Wow.

Just by optimizing it right. And one of the things with the—

they say thank you or they're very successful now too.

They have— and it's really cool cool how now that with their success, they're paying back and they're treating in third world countries people with eyesight issues. So they're— it's a very cool story. But with the, the one thing to keep in mind when you're creating your listing on Amazon is when people can go into a store and touch and feel the product, you have to try to figure out how to give them that experience virtually. So your pictures have to be— we call them lifestyle images. Think of the person. And a good way to do this is look at your competition first of all and see what people are complaining complaining about. And if you can create a picture that negates that— so let's say someone, it's a spatula, and someone says, oh, it broke on me. Well, if you had a picture showing them bend it, for example, you know, unbreakable. But really, you just want to get in the person's mind, try to get that person able to visually see themselves using the product, and it makes a huge difference.

And if you use video also to that, you can now.

Yeah, Amazon has allowed that. Video is obviously super powerful. Sure.

Yeah.

Yep.

What's step 4?

The final step is then launching your product. So this is where we can really beat the big brands. You'll think the major brands out there like Nike or Adidas or whoever is selling on Amazon, you think they'd have these huge marketing departments that go out there and they do a huge launch on Amazon. To them, Amazon is just another channel, another sales channel. They just put a product up there and they hope that people come by because of their popularity. Well, the way that Amazon looks at products nowadays is that there are certain triggers, certain levers you can pull. And if you know what those levers are and those triggers, you can get your product ranking very quickly, usually within a week or two. And it involves— it's not overly complicated either. It involves, you know, getting your product live on a certain date, getting some targeted focused traffic to that product, really focusing on people that you believe are more prone to want your product.

Do you drive that from outside of Amazon or within?

Both.

Both internal, external. I mean, Amazon has— Amazon's investing $15 billion this year in tools for sellers just like us.

Wow.

And those tools allow you to really narrow in on people buying on Amazon. Based upon their interests, their age, their demographics, the type of products they want. But in addition to that, Facebook makes advertising so easy too. You can also drill down to the demographics to your exact target customer. And once you find that match, you have a product, you have a person that you know wants that product, that traffic will convert. And then as soon as Amazon sees the product converting, this is where that— it's a snowball effect. If someone goes to your product and buys it, Amazon says, wow, this is a popular product. Let's move them up in search rankings. That happens again, they move up in the search rankings. And if you know how to make those, those, those triggers get pulled and activated, it's pretty simple now to rank a product on Amazon within a couple of weeks of launching it.

The big thing, though, the crux of this all is you have to have a good product.

Yeah.

And it doesn't mean like a good product doesn't mean it's the most expensive product, but it's just look at what you're giving the user and make sure you're fulfilling on that. So whether it's a spatula or something much more complicated. Just make sure that it's a solid product because no marketing can help a bad product. You might launch and do really well, but then once the negative reviews come in, you're done. And another tip too, especially for people who want to start from scratch, is start with a simple product. Because if you're like, let's say you want— the difference between a spatula and, I don't know, a phone, like any kind of electronic, is one of them is going to give you a headache because you're going to be dealing with all these different departments from manufacturing. You're gonna be dealing with reviews because of, oh, this electronic part doesn't work. But if you start with something simple, it helps you get going, learn the system, implement it. And then from that point, that's the other thing— you might start with a spatula and end up selling baby supplies.

And that's a really interesting point or a question I have. What's the experience typically when somebody succeeds with a single product? Are they normally then moving to build the next one and the next one, or sometimes people focus on the first product?

Is it curse. Yeah, because people can get— I don't want— I hate using the word lazy.

That's complacent.

Complacent.

Or they think they're better than they are.

Yeah, that too. Like, that is actually, you know, it's— and we have people with one product doing hundreds of thousands a month, and we keep asking them, when are you gonna add your next product? And, you know, they just— they're doing so well with their lifestyle, and it's like, that's a risk.

It's all about calculated risk again. Yeah, you know, it's— so there's three 3 ways to really grow. You can sell more of that same product, you can launch more products, or you can expand in other markets. And the easiest one is to sell that same product. And people kind of fall into that trap. And it's easy to do because the cash comes in quicker than any other way. But the first step I would do is if you've started— if you've started a product that you know there's a demand for, simply expand into that same category. Come up with a complementary product. Instead of a spatula, come up with a fork.

Because I'd have to imagine on a sort of on a decay curve, you know, if you've got a single product that you've been selling a lot of for some period of time, it's got to decay over time.

Absolutely, I mean, life cycle. Yeah, and sometimes people get lucky, they get a long, long time out of it, but I know all of the products that I started originally selling now are not my top sellers. Some of them we don't even sell anymore. And that's another thing, people seem to make this mental commitment that I have this product, oh, it's gonna be forever, and it's like, no, you can't look at that. Like, it's a business you're building, and you wanna build, and that's why we say build a brand, because if you've got, you know, if it's a spatula, well, build a brand about that so that you can start relating, you know, build that home improvement brand or the kitchen brand. Because then all your communications, you start— because you got to build an audience.

Yes.

At the end of the day, and if you're trying to sell a spatula plus, you know, some kind of baby equipment and then some kind of outdoor, you've got this disjointed message. But if you can keep everything within one kind of niche, it's just so much more effective.

Would you say the value then is more in the brand than it is in the product?

Long term. Absolutely.

Long term. Because now you can launch other products under that brand. And then, you know, you have existing customers that you can convert into the new product.

I can't tell you how many times that we've launched a new product, and before doing any marketing, we start selling them because we have— you have a brand, you have an audience who trusts you. You know, as long as you have a quality product, uh, you provide stellar customer service, you will build some raving fans out there that'll be advocates for you. I love people who respond to a negative review that are customers of mine even before I get a chance to, because they want to say, hey, have you contacted the company? Did you tell them about your problem? Did you give them a chance to take care of it? 9 times out of 10, they haven't. Yeah. And it's nice to see advocates. You build up that camaraderie with your own customers.

Yeah.

So as we're having this conversation, in my own mind, I'm sitting here thinking, hmm, I could think of 3, 4, 5 different things that this could be kind of fun. And incidentally, this sounds like fun to me. Sometimes I hear things, it sounds like work, and of course effort and work is involved in anything that's going to be successful. But this sounds like kind of fun too. Like, I'm getting tickled by some, uh, you know, I wonder if I wonder if that would work, you know, different products, different passions, what have you. So what's a proper expectation? Like somebody's watching this, they're saying, hey, I, I, this is a whole new universe to me. And it is really this universe of its own, right? I think I got an idea or two. I should start researching, et cetera. What's the right expectation for somebody saying I'm starting at square one right now? You know, what should I expect as far as outcomes? Of course, you've talked about some pretty extreme examples. Of successful people, but let's talk typical.

So I mentioned 6 months, and that's kind of how we designed the course. The idea is now you get lifetime access to it, always upgrades, but the course is delivered over 8 weeks. But we realize in 8 weeks, you know, you probably don't even have your product in inventory yet because, you know, the first few weeks is all about finding your product. And then once you order your product, depending on where you get it from, if you get it Domestic, like within the United States, for example, you could have in a week. But if you get it from China, sometimes the lead time, depending on the time of year, you could be, you know, up to 8 weeks. It can be a couple of months. So really, we figure about 3 months from the time you start to have you have your inventory, and then the next 3 months launching the product. So that 6 months is really a good time frame, but that means 6 months of working 1 to 2 hours a day, right? And I think that's very realistic. And at the end of those 6 months, no matter what the level of success, you'll know whether this is working for you or not. Because you're right, it is fun, you know, and it's— it, in a way, it's kind of like the stock market in a way, because you're watching these graphs and you're buying and selling stuff and just watching how it improves. And, you know, it's all the, the science, the analytics behind it, really interesting. So yeah.

I can't tell you how many times that, like, on the weekends when I, you know, get together with family and friends, I'm talking about this business. It's addictive. It really is. And we talk about it all the time. You know, we do a lot of training, but we still talk about products and ideas and new launch strategies. We're always thinking of something new to help out people to get better results. And then we, we spend a lot of our money and time testing things out. Yeah, we've wasted a lot of money testing things out, but there's a reason.

Yeah, we call it tuition. Yeah.

Now, someone wants to realize, like, you know, after 6 months, what can they expect like financially? The way that we try to narrow in and give people advice on where to like start with the product— don't go for a product that's going to make $1 million a month. Don't go for a product that's going to make you $10 a month. You want something very reasonable and realistic and achievable. So we target products that should get you anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 in revenue a month.

What's the typical margin on that revenue?

25%.

Okay, so that's great.

We don't want you going any lower than 25% because then you've got marketing costs and things, and you want to be able to put money in your pocket. The other important thing on that too is we recommend give it a full year. And if you, like, if you're working already, can make your plan to work the whole year, because what you want to do initially when you sell is reinvest 100% everything back into it, because you want to, you know, you're gonna, once it takes off, it's going to take off. You're going to run out of inventory, you're going to be panicking, all these kind of things. But it's like, settle down, that's part of the process. But the thing is, if you're trying to spend all profit right away, you're not going to be able to reinvest and grow. So that's one thing to keep in mind. But yeah, within— I'd say that's pretty reasonable.

And the biggest successes we've seen are those people who've taken their profits, they realize the potential this business has, and they put it right back in the more inventory. They do that a couple of times around and then they put it into a new product. And then after a year, year and a half, then you can really make the decision, how much do I want to pull out for myself, for my lifestyle, for my why?

Right.

And then how much do I want to continue putting back in the business so that it continues that steady climb upwards.

Yeah, and it's important to realize this isn't a hack, this isn't any of those short-term things. You're building a brand, you're building your own physical products brand, and we're teaching you how to do that by leveraging Amazon to explode it, you know? And so you're building a real business. So any business takes time, but if you look at the comparison of trying to start a business anywhere else outside of Amazon compared to on Amazon, selling. It's incredible. It really is.

I have to tell you, you know, what excites me about this is there's so many times I speak to people who want to become entrepreneurs, you know, sometimes called wantrepreneurs, right? You know, they'll take some training, they'll learn some things, but there's not really a good path for them to leverage things, tools, Amazon environments, what have you, where they have the money, you know, the investment that they can make to get something moving, or at least test something to see if it's even viable. So what excites me about this is like, sure, if I want to open up XYZ franchise, yeah, you know, you got $1.5 million, $2 million, you know, and you can get approved for it, et cetera. You can go and get your franchise and it's a pretty good turnkey business model, et cetera. But in this case it's like, yeah, I don't need, you know, I just need a little bit of capital and some time to get this started to see if I can throw my hat in this ring and get it going.

And a huge component that we're seeing exploding right now selling businesses. So the Amazon— there are so many people looking to buy Amazon businesses that we're having, you know, 4 or 5 times multiples easy of people who are getting, you know, high 8-figure buyouts of a business that they started on $1,000 because they've created this only a year or two ago. Yeah, and they're only selling on Amazon.

Obviously. Now that's even more fascinating then because— and I think a huge benefit because it's one thing to say, hey, I I'm able to build a cash flow business means I get to make some money over time that I can pull out of it. But if you're saying that you're also building an asset that's saleable, that's extraordinarily attractive, especially because if you got some good history and financials, you can get good multiples on a business like that. Yeah.

And so what I'm doing right now personally with my physical products brand, I don't take any money out of it. I focus it all 100% back in because my plan is in 3 to 5 years I want to sell it for cash out so that it helps me my next phase of life. So, right.

And that's maybe I'll call it a real business versus a lifestyle business. Correct. And there's nothing wrong with either, you know, it's not lifestyle businesses aren't bad, but you know, if you're really looking to be a business builder, then on tax side, I guess you're paying capital gains on that as compared to regular income when you make that transaction. So, you know, there's a whole bunch of benefits to that.

The great thing about this too is you don't have to make the decision right away. You don't have to go in wanting either cash flow or lifestyle or a combination of both. You can decide that as you get into the business. We do know a lot of people who want the lifestyle business, right? They're okay making an extra couple thousand dollars a month in pure income so they can travel, they can pay their house payments, they can get an extra car. And in order to maintain that type of lifestyle business, you can keep going just on a couple hours a week. Once you have your product up and selling, it's really just keeping track of customer questions and making sure inventory is in stock. If you want to grow it and turn it into a brand that you want to sell as an asset, Yeah, you got to put more time into it. Yeah, it's a real business. Yeah, that's what I love about it. It's a real business that you can have both components.

Yeah, I, I just— one caveat I want to add there. So for example, right now I work 90 minutes a week on my Amazon business. That's it, because I have employees. Now you can't do that. I don't want someone listening to say, oh, I can work just a couple hours a week. Well, no, no, no, you'll get to that point. When you start, you have to invest the time, you have to get things in place, you have to then get the employees involved, but then it gets to a point, you're right, that's all you have to do is a couple hours a week. You know, it's always wise to know what's going on in your business, but it's one of those things you can set up, hire outsourcers, employees, family, whatever you want. I'm not a fan of hiring family personally, but yeah, it's very doable.

Well, I have to say this has been a really great peek into a universe of of real potential for people that maybe don't have other paths open to them. So, your enthusiasm is palpable. So, I appreciate you coming here and sharing it and sharing it so openly. So, thank you very much for this time.

You're welcome.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

It's that time again. Elliot Roe, you know what to do. Let's dive in.

Hello, my name is Elliot Roe. I'm a mindset and performance coach. I work with high performers in different industries. And help them overcome issues that are holding them back. Today we're going to do a short hypnotherapy exercise on limiting beliefs. A lot of business owners hold themselves back from taking the steps they need to take to be truly successful, and a lot of the time that's linked to the limiting beliefs that they have. So we're going to do a short state change exercise to help you on the pathway to making those changes. So if you're interested in joining in with this exercise, please make sure that you're not driving a car or operating machinery, make sure that you're somewhere safe that you can just close your eyes and relax for a few minutes. And with that being said, if you could just close your eyes now and take in a deep breath. And as you exhale, just allow yourself to relax. Take another deep breath now. Slowly exhale, releasing any stress, any tension from your body. Focusing in on the sound of my voice, all other sounds relaxing you further, relaxing you deeper. Start to notice the top of your head and use the power of your mind to relax and release any tension that's stored there. See that relaxation as a color or feel it as a warmth, and allow it to slowly spread down now through your forehead and eyelids, down through your cheeks, just smoothing the skin of your face as it goes, relaxing your mouth and jaw, your neck and shoulders, through your arms to the tips of your fingers and thumbs, relaxing your chest now And as you relax your chest, allowing your breathing to slow, your heart rate to slow, down your back and spine, thighs and knees, through your shins to the tips of your toes, your whole body just so comfortable, just so relaxed. And now just starting to count backwards in your mind from 300. After each number, repeating the word relax. 300, relax. 299, relax. 298, relax. Just counting these numbers down, each number that passes sinking heavier, sinking deeper. And then taking control and slowing this count. And as you slow this count, your breathing can slow, your body can slow, ticking over like a perfectly maintained machine, so calm, relaxed, and tranquil that you can stop this count completely. Completely and enjoy this time that's just for you. And I'd like you to find yourself at the top of a warm, softly lit staircase of 10 steps. Make it vivid, make it real. And I'm going to count you down from 10 to 0, with each number I count taking a step down that staircase into deeper levels of relaxation and calm. 10. First step down now, no need to hurry. 9. Sinking deeper, relaxed.

8.

7. Doubling this sensation. 6. 5. Halfway down now.

4.

3. Deeper still now, and still deeper. 2. 1. Just one more step to go. To zero, totally relaxed and totally calm, just enjoying this state of relaxation, enjoying this state of comfort. And from this state of relaxation, just allowing your mind to drift, drifting to those beliefs that are holding you back. Drifting to those beliefs that have stopped you being the best version of yourself. These may be beliefs around your self-worth, your value, what you deserve in life, how you communicate with others, beliefs of what your business can truly be. Start being honest with yourself now. Where are you holding yourself back? Why are you doing this? Just allowing your mind to scan through this and making the choice today to take control. And taking in a deep breath for me. And as you slowly exhale, just feel a sense of ease through those emotions as you start to break down those fears, breaking down those beliefs, and then allowing your mind to drift. I'd like you to find yourself in a beautiful forest, walking through a beautiful forest towards a lake. And I'd like you to notice that for all of these years you've been carrying a bag full of heavy rocks on your back, and those rocks represent those limiting beliefs that you've been holding on to. As we reach the side of that lake, I would like you to make a decision that today's the day we're leaving these limiting leaves behind. And I'd like you to start taking those rocks one by one and throwing them in the water, just starting to make the choice to release these limiting beliefs. Now, one by one, throwing those rocks into the lake. And with each rock, you can notice your body become lighter as you let go of those feelings forever. And I'd like you to take a few moments to empty that bag into that lake now, and then taking that bag off of your shoulders and just notice it dissolve away into nothing, because it's not useful anymore. And as you remove that bag from your back, I'd like you to now run through that forest, noticing that you're faster, you're lighter, you're more confident than ever before. Life feels easier. Life feels different now as you run through this forest with a smile on your face, noticing that things are different. Life is easier. You can feel yourself moving towards your potential. Everything easier than it was before. And I'd like you to feel your confidence growing and growing inside. Feel that confidence rising and bring that confidence, this shift, this change back with you now as I count you up from 1 to 5. Now 1, 2 coming up now, 3, 4, and 5. Open your eyes feeling great. So I hope you enjoyed that short exercise on letting go of those limiting beliefs. Beliefs. If you'd like to do more of these kinds of exercises, you can check them out on my app Prime Mind on the iPhone or on the Android. I'll talk to you soon.

I'm really excited for this next interview because it's with a dear friend of mine, really a brother, Rick Sapio. Rick is a mentor of mine, also a dear friend. I've learned a lot from him about being an entrepreneur and what the principles are of being an entrepreneur. And when he starts to lay out these principles, I mean, anybody at this point who's starting any kind of a business needs to learn the principles that Rick understands and apply them. And when you do that, the probability of success goes up significantly. So Rick is a great guy. He may not come across extraordinarily smart, but he is brilliant. I'm going to get a laugh at him when he sees this introduction. And I hope I got a little bit of a laugh out of you as we head into my interview with Rick Safio. Rick, thanks for taking the time to sit and have this conversation.

You're welcome.

So, uh, let's talk about your story, cause I think that really helped to form a lot of your activities today and kind of your outcomes. So talk about your background.

Yeah. A lot of this that I'm going to talk about is relatively recent. I would say the last 15 years-ish. Of my 56 years on the planet. And I have come to realize that if somebody watching this has not done the work to link what they've become as an adult to what happened to them in childhood, if they haven't done that work and, you know, dug really deep on it, I think that they're not going to have as fulfilling of a life. And it took a lot of deep work for me to understand what motivates me, and I didn't appreciate just how screwed up my childhood was. So my mother Marie, she wanted a big family, and she's from Hoboken, New Jersey, Italian. And I ended up being the 7th of 10 kids. So she had 10 babies. And it's interesting, in February of 1963, right, right when she found out that she was pregnant with me, her 7th child, at the exact same time she found out that my 4-year-old brother was given 6 months to live. So he had a rare form of cancer, which by the way was curable 2 years later. It's called Will's tumor. But the whole time she carried me, she was going back and forth to, you know, chemotherapy and crying. I think about a 4-year-old in your home. He was the king of the house. He was the light of her life. He was everything. And I have a 4-year-old at home right now, and I know what that's like. Just imagine that. And once she had that diagnosis of Frankie, her life changed. Her, her future was all nervous breakdowns and in and out of mental institutions. And I don't believe in my, in my life I had a sane conversation with my mother because of this. It was horrible. I didn't realize how difficult knowing that you're gonna lose your child could be. But it got really bad. When I was born in October 1963, my brother died 11 days later in the same hospital. And so my mother linked me coming into the world with his death. And my childhood was not pretty. I, uh, I had, uh, all kinds of— I was a cesarean birth, and I've learned that there could be some issues with cesarean birth. I had really severe allergies. I had OCD. I was sick a lot, and I drove my mother nuts, absolutely nuts. And I had a psychotherapist tell me, you know, did something happen in your childhood to make you so driven that you have to prove yourself all the time? I'm like, no. I told this part of the story, and then it occurred to me that whenever I was bad, my mother would scream at me and say, "Why did God take Frankie and not you?" And I called my older sister when I had this revelation. I go, "Debbie, did you ever hear Mommy say that to me?" And she goes, "All the time." I had suppressed that, like completely suppressed it. But my response was some version of I'm worth it. I'll prove it to you. I'm— you know what I mean? So I had this drive that was so unknown to me from childhood. So fast forward a little bit. When I was 11, my dad comes home from work one day. He had been having backaches, and we didn't have a lot of money. He's got— he was in the car business, and he's raising all these kids. And he comes home and he says, I've got some news, really bad news. And he was crying. And he said, um, I've got cancer. And in the first visit to the doctor, they said it's in your, your lungs, your kidneys, your bones, and your brain. They gave him 6 weeks to live, first visit. And I had an aunt who was into natural cures and stuff, and she got radical. She completely changed the food in the house. And long story short, he ended up living 2 and a half years. And in those 2 and a half years, he basically set us up for life. And yet, so you have to think about it, we're in North Jersey, right outside New York City. Um, it's the '70s. He died in 1977. We really had no parents after that because my mother was in no shape to raise us. And all of us are married, uh, over 250 years of marriage, no divorces.

Between all the siblings.

Isn't that crazy? Yeah. And I think there's, like I said, 44 nieces and nephews. I have 44 nieces and nephews when you count the grandnieces. But my point is that when he was dying, I just became a sponge for everything he believed in and what he taught. I went to church every Sunday and prayed a lot. But I'll never forget, after he died, there was a service And the priest said— it was a big service because we were like a very known family with all the kids— and the priest said, in life, you know, I'm in the audience, and he said, let me tell you a story. And he said, my hope is that one of you here hears what I'm about to say. And I'm like, for some reason I got this zing, almost like a spiritual zing. I said, he's talking to me. And it was a massive crowd.

There was probably 13 or so.

It was right after he died. I was 13. And he goes, in life you could choose to be the the horse or the rider of the horse, but whatever you choose, life becomes the other thing. He said, you can choose to become the horse, life becomes the rider, and life will take you wherever it wants you to go. Like, that's pretty cool. He said, or you could choose to become the rider and life becomes the horse, and you could take it wherever you want it to go. And I remember at 13 saying, I'm getting on that horsey. And it was just an awesome experience that despite the fact that we had no money, despite the fact that I had no parents— I mean, I had a mom, but it wasn't— there was no relationship really. I just realized at that point, like, I could go with my friends who were doing bad things, or I could go this way. And it was around that time that, as luck would have it, I got my first mentor. His name is James O'Donnell. And he's recently passed, but he heard that I was good at math. Now, I'm really young. I was in like 5th grade at the time. So when my dad got sick, I was— I think it was at the beginning of my 5th grade. And when he died, I was in 7th grade. It was at the end of my 7th grade. Anyway, long story short, I had never been exposed to money or entrepreneurism or any of that. And James O'Donnell took me out to lunch one day and he said, I heard you're good at math. I said, okay. He said, if you get an engineering degree like I did, it will train your brain to think and it will, it will help you in business. You could be a doctor, a lawyer, a businessperson. You can work on Wall Street. You could do whatever you want, but get an engineering degree. And this is really funny. As a young guy, anytime somebody asked me after that, What are you going to do with your life? I would say, I don't know, but I'm going to get an engineering degree because I could become a doctor, a lawyer. I could work on Wall Street. I could do whatever I want because it'll drain my brain. I literally repeated that. Here's the messed up part about that story. I had one meeting with James O'Donnell, and the meeting was he told me this and he said, let me take you to my company. And I'll never forget, I walk in this building, it's got his name on the door. There's all these draftspeople. It seemed like hundreds to my young eyes. And they're addressing him, Mr. O'Donnell. And I'm like, wow, I want to be a business guy. And it's funny how people miss those opportunities. They miss as the recipient and they miss as the giver. One meeting I had with him lasted about 2 hours. So let's fast forward. There was— my house was not organized. I never got letters in the mail. I'll never forget. I was 18. And, um, there was a letter sitting on the stack, on the stack of mail on the TV set, and it said my name on it. I'm like, what the hell was that? And it said from the state of New Jersey. I'm getting emotional thinking about it. And I opened the letter up and I'm like, unbelievable. If you want something bad enough, the universe conspires to bring it to you. And it said, Mr. Sapio, you got one of the 10 highest scores in your math SAT, and we're going to give you a free ride to Rutgers Engineering School. And I'm like, holy shit, this is unbelievable, because I had no hope. My mother wanted me to work for the gas station on the corner because she's like, we need money. And this is like one of those searing moments in your life. You can't— I can't ever forget it. I was so excited, I showed it to my mother and she looks at the letter and she goes, "You're not going to college," and rips the letter up. And I'm like, "Wow, the only way for me to get what I want in my life, I have to break." And I literally just broke. I break away. When I went to college, I was there for 5 years. It was a 5-year program. I never went home. I was there. I built my life there. So my independence skyrocketed. And I have to tell you, it was brutally hard. I went to a public school. I get there and I had never seen so many Asians or Indians in one place. I remember they did the first roll call and they got to Raj Patel and 7 guys stood up.

And you're from a very Italian neighborhood. So that was pretty much what you knew, right? That's what I knew.

I didn't. And what was weird about it is they curved all their tests.

Test.

So I never saw calculus before. I didn't know what it was. And all these different things that we learned— chemistry, calculus, physics— they had already been exposed to it. And the tests are curved. And the first 2 years at Rutgers is this: the, the 3rd lowest grades, you get booted. So 1 out of 3 people got booted. And so it was brutally hard for me because I had never really applied myself. And now, um, I'm just not gonna quit. I'm one of those guys, if I'm If I'm saying I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it. So anyway, I go through Rutgers and what I learned is about myself as an adult now that I got from childhood is the immense chaos of my childhood. Just think about all those things and what probably transpired forced me and caused me to say, I have to know answers. I need to seek patterns and solutions because I don't ever want to have that chaos. So my entire adult life has been all about creating simple systems to live a fulfilling life and to have success. And a lot of those systems have come out in terms of modules and formulas and ways of doing things and things we've trademarked, things like the Catalyzing Statement. But all the 48 modules that became Business Finishing School was all the way to say, listen, if you want an easier way to live your life, Rick, and people that are learning this stuff, there's very easy formulas to, to, to live by. For example, my wife and I in our marriage, we sat down when my wife was pregnant first and I said, honey, I don't know. I'm going to share a simple one. Uh, that's where I'm going. I said, honey, I don't know if I'm going to live past 50 because my dad died at 50. And she's like, okay, well, you're 45. And I said, if we have kids, I want to do for them what my dad did for me. And we created this thing called a family placemat. And on that family placemat is 35 pods of information. It includes our family values. It includes our family rules. It includes what we talk about at family meetings. It includes what my wife and I talk about when we have meetings. It says on there that we're going to have date night every Monday night at 7:30. It has our wedding vows on there. It has our family crest and what it means. It has Ben Franklin's 13 virtues. It's been on our dinner table since the day my son was born, and he has seen it, and have all 4 of our kids have memorized this thing. And it's basically, if something happens to me or mom, here's what we stand for. To me, that's incredibly simplifying, and our kids are thriving. So the 3 operating values that we have in our business and in our family is simplicity, probability, and and leverage.

These are lenses that you look through, which— and this is the whole thing, like, you know, when you talk about, you know, operating values, simplicity. And now that I'm hearing more of your background, because I always know you're like the simplicity guy in many respects. You crave simplicity, you demand simplicity, you force simplicity into existence. And it's not just in your businesses but also in your personal life, for all the reasons maybe that you just said now that motivated you. So what does it mean if to have a lens like that, if you're, if you're in a business to look through it and say simplicity, probability, leverage, just briefly explain what each of those things mean to you.

So simplicity speaks for itself. We live in a chaotic, complex world, and I like to dumb things down as much as possible because we can't get things done unless it's simple. And so every time an opportunity comes up in my family or in my business, I'm like, Is this gonna simplify my life or is this gonna complicate my life? And it's a daily debate. And an example of that in our family is we try to go out to dinner with other couples sometimes, a lot, and they're like, oh, we gotta get a babysitter. My wife and I have not missed a date night. Monday night at 7:30, date night. Now, why do we do that? 'Cause it's simple. Babysitter knows, kids know, neighbors know. Employees know, the restaurant knows because we only go to one or two places, and it completely has gelled our marriage. And Monday nights— why Monday? Because restaurants are empty, so it's quiet. And you do— you think about those kind of rhythms in all areas of your life. I've been working out with the same trainer for 11 years, 30 sets in 30 minutes, 5:30 in the morning.

Boom.

Simple. And you apply those into business And it kind of creates a lot of automation. We don't have to think about date night. I don't have to think about working out. I don't have to think about a lot of the meetings that we have. So that's simplicity. Probability is an interesting one. I believe that, and there's all kinds of stats on this, there's a great book on the power of habit by Charles Duhigg where he says more than 95% of what you do and what I do on a daily basis is unconscious. We don't add conscious thought to it. Do it. And so probability forces you and me to add consciousness to our decisions. And so probability means if you do something in business, is this going to increase the probability that you hit the stated objective? If you do something in your personal life, is this going to increase the probability of you hitting the stated objective? And people don't think like that. So, uh, Example I like to use is, you know, your office manager quits, you need to hire somebody quickly. Do you hire the best person you could possibly find in the city, or do you hire your out-of-work alcoholic sister-in-law? And most people just bring somebody in, they don't think about it, they got to fill a spot, and they destroy their company. But one cool thing— and I brought this up to my wife a thousand times, I'm driving her nuts— I'm like, honey, what do we want our kids to be when they're 18? And we've laid it out. We want 18-year-olds that are like me and my wife were— independent, entrepreneurial, able to make money. Um, and so on our placemat it says, you will never receive an inheritance from mom or dad. We want to teach you how to fish. So our kids are like motivated, even though the oldest is 12. So they're 12, 10, 8, and 6. But anyway, if we want to increase the probability that our kids are those independent 18-year-olds, right, What do we do? We certainly aren't going to drive them around in club sports and take them to different cities because they're good athletes. No, we're going to teach them the things that they're going to need as adults. So I met with— this is an awesome story— I went to the best private school in Dallas that I could find when Luke was a baby, my oldest, and I sat down and I'll never forget this meeting as long as I live. I said, uh, doctor, how many kids have you graduated in your life? He was about 65 and he goes, Thousands.

Why?

I go, let me ask you a question. The best kids that you have ever had, can you think of a few? He goes, yeah. I said, what did their parents do? And he said, no one ever asked me. That's a great question. And he goes, I have the answer for you. Here's what you do. No TV in the house, no cell phones. Make sure they learn how to play the piano. They have to learn discipline, so put them in martial arts and wrestling. Get a chess coach because it'll train their brain. And have dinner every night as a family. Those were some. There was more, but I'm just— so I went home, I was like, I'm like, honey. And she's like, you're crazy. So here I am looking at you 12 years later. My son is a concert pianist. He's testing for his black belt in karate. He's thriving in school. He also is an incredible rated chess player. And what we've realized from all that stuff is— you could read about this in Deep Work— that what we're actually teaching our kids to do is focus. When you put devices in people's hands and you drive them all over the place, mom has to get on a plane because there's a soccer tournament in New York, the other one has a soccer tournament in California, the family's split apart. We have family dinner every night. I said all that to say we make decisions consciously to increase the probability of that outcome that we want. So all of us have that. So that's probability.

But from the business side, is that just the question? Like you say, okay, I want to create wealth in my life because that's the theme here, right? Would you look at any decision you're making, say, okay, does this increase or decrease the probability that I can create the wealth I want to create? Is it that kind of that simple?

So I love the way you said it. Here's the bottom line. Everything that we do as business people We should strive to do things as simple as possible that increase the probability that we have the stated outcome. Now, the stated outcome for me and for people watching here would be to create wealth and use high probability decision-making to do that. But oftentimes people use low probability. So this is just an interesting thing. We hear it our whole life: buy low, sell high. But when people buy homes, they look at neighborhoods after they've appreciated. They buy Apple after it's appreciated. They get excited about tulips in Holland after they've appreciated. The name of the game is buy low and sell high. Completely highly probable. It's highly probable, but it's completely against human nature. After the market crash in 2008, it was devastatingly low. What were individual investors doing? They were running. What was Warren Buffett doing? He was running, except he was running in a different direction. He was buying as much as he could at the bottom. He knows that good markets follow bad markets. And he's just trained himself to, you know, when there's blood in the streets, that's when you buy. So that's a highly probable decision. When you buy a company at a low, whether it's a stock or I don't care what you do for a living, or you buy into a neighborhood at a low, You know that highs follow lows, right? But it's so, so hard to do. You know, I think about the banking industry and I'll never forget this story. I don't want to say his last name, but I had a banker in Dallas, Texas, and they were loaning money with 10% down to buy buildings. So 10% down, you buy a $50 million building, you put $5 million down and they loan you $45 million. Fine. Doing those loans all day long. After the market crashes, he says to me, I wouldn't do a loan on that same building for half the price because a client came in to do that. So they just loan money at $50 million, but they wouldn't loan money at a valuation of $25 million with 50% down. Like, why wouldn't you do that? Just because we're a banker, we follow the herd. We're bankers, we follow the herd. It's just— and I think bankers kind of train us to think to take risk at highs. You follow my logic here? If I was a banker, and I'm not, I would wait for lows and do loans. Anybody, any entrepreneur aggressive enough to put a lot of money down on a commercial building at the market low, I'm in. I want somebody like that. I want somebody who's smart enough and makes decisions in a highly probable way.

You look at this stuff, I think you're just in your own business activities. I mean, you have varying funds, you know, the public funds, private funds, uh, private equity funds. So you make investments, you look for these types of things. This is kind of— you're looking all day long, you're trying to make these decisions. And I know about you too, because you— if you say, hey, this has got a high probability of success but the deal's complicated, you don't want it. So like, do you— these things ever wrestle with each other?

Yeah, unfortunately today, and you see, we all see it, is It used to be when I was a turnaround guy in my 20s, you take over a company, you make quick decisions, you could turn a business around quickly. Today, unfortunately, something's crept into society and into business that's horrible, and I call it electronic sludge. Do you remember 20 years ago, you meet somebody, you want to raise money, you shake their hands, they give you a check the next day? Now, everybody's online, they're sending emails and text text messages and they're checking you out and they're talking to their attorney and they're waiting for— everything seems to have slowed down into electronic sludge. So now more than ever, you've got to find deals and opportunities that are simple because the complexity is growing exponentially and this electronic sludge is not going away. And everybody sees it, but nobody identifies it as such. I think it's more important now than ever. It's also more important— the guy who wrote the book Deep Work, one of the things that he's concluded is since money is a commodity, the thing that separates the haves and the have-nots in business is this ability to focus. 50 years ago, if you had a job, you're working for 4 hours at a time on your job. Now people are working in 7-second slugs. They start working and then it's bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. So the people that have the ability, the confidence, and the diligence to be hyper-focused in their job for hours at a time, those are the people that are going to make it because they actually— you can't make progress. You know the people that are this way? Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was a low-tech parent. They did a great interview in which they went to his home to see how many devices he had in his house just before he died because he had 3 kids. And Steve said, we don't have devices in our house. The iPhone and the iPad wasn't meant for kids. That's the quote in the New York Times. So why is it these titans of industry have figured out deep work, but the average population is, is mired in electronic sludge. And of course you have to have Netflix going, you got to have your Facebook, and you got to have easy access. So this is the divide right now: those who can focus and who have trained their kids to focus and have trained their employees to focus, and everybody else. And I think it's probably about 1% are in this category. It leads me to something I want to share with you. After 2008, when the market crashed, I was scared because I'm in the fund business. All of our assets were way down. And through a series of very fortuitous things, I had the opportunity to meet Boone Pickens, T. Boone Pickens. And T. Boone Pickens was this massive, larger-than-life character. He's a billionaire, unbelievably well known. When I went to his house, he had pictures all over his house. Like every famous person you could possibly meet, including every president. And at one of our meetings, I'll never forget, it was 2007, he gets this call and he's kind of yelling at the guy. And it was a long call and he kept calling him W, W, W. And he hangs up the phone and I'm like, who were you talking to? He goes, oh, that was President Bush. He needed some advice. He's yelling at the guy. So after meeting him, and he introduced me to a lot of very famous billionaires, I spent a lot of time with these people.

You said, I mean, you set an agenda to go interview a certain amount of billionaires.

Yeah.

What caused you to want to do that?

Because I was scared. I wanted to interview people that have been through a lot of ups and downs who were self-made. And I met people like Richard Branson, and I was mentored by Warren Buffett in my, in my 20s. He wasn't part of this, but here's what I learned about very, very successful people that have been successful in business. And I'll explain it by way of a story. There's a famous story of the guy, the inventor named Dean Kamen. And Dean Kamen is probably the most prolific inventor that ever lived. He invented the Segway. He invented that cool Coca-Cola machine where you just pick the flavor, but he's had hundreds and hundreds of successful products. And I heard this from somebody who was there, that he was in a meeting 10 years ago, and at the time he was probably 55. I don't know how old he was. And they were in a board meeting, and he's talking about, you know, the task at hand. And people before the meeting started were talking about Madonna, and he's listening. And apparently Madonna was in, you know, front page news. And he goes, I may be the only stupid one here, but who the hell is Madonna? I think that's awesome. If you are so focused on your work that you have no idea about pop culture, I think that's awesome. And people that move the needle on culture and society from a business perspective, they're just focused. And here's what I learned. Every single person that I interviewed had a very simple life. And I boiled it down to my 5-finger rule for success in business. If you know what your 5 priorities are in life, you move the ball down the field so far. So let me give you an example. I have a friend, I don't want to say his name, but he's famous. And he always says, God first, family second, career third, health and fitness fourth. And I'm like, awesome, you say that all the time. So I was really excited to meet his wife and kids. I flew out to California one weekend. I was single at the time. And I land, and he picks me up in a limousine. There was weird people in the car with him. We drive to a restaurant. He's trying to impress me. He got a private room, and there was a lot of alcohol and weird people. Then he— at the end, we go to a strip club, and he knew a lot of people there. We go home. It's late at night. His wife and kids are asleep. We wake up early in the morning. We go play golf. I, I hope that you love golf. I don't care. I hate golf. I'm not going to do anything for 4 hours chasing a ball around. I personally hate golf. I'm sure the industry is great and I apologize to you golfers out there, but we play golf all day and then he goes to another restaurant with another weird group of people. And then Sunday morning comes and I had to go. I never met his wife and never met his kids. So let's listen to this. God first, family second, health and fitness fourth, whatever his priority was. What I learned about these wealthy people and these successful people, these people that had massive impact, is they only do their priorities. So what I've determined, I've been working on this for 10 years, that my number one priority is being a husband.

But wait a minute, just back up for a second, because it sounds like what his priorities were and what his life were were not aligned.

100%.

So what's the point? What's the moral of that story?

So here's the moral.

Okay.

What I realized from him and all these billionaires is my number one priority is being a great husband. Being a great father comes after that. Number two, health and fitness, because if I'm not alive— like, my dad didn't treat his body well, he died. Number three is my career and purpose work. Number four is my key relationships, like my relationships with business, etc. And number 5 is learning and development. Now, here's the thing. If you follow these people around that are crystal clear on their purpose, they get up in the morning at 5:00 AM and you follow them around with a video camera all day long, what you will find is that almost 100% of their waking hours, they're dealing with their priority, a priority. What you find with that gentleman you just asked about and the vast majority of the planet is they say, this is my priority. But they spend 90% of their time doing something else. If you want success in business and you want to create immense wealth for yourself, figure out what your 5 priorities are and only do that. That's why Dean Kamen's story is so compelling to me. He was crystal clear on what he had to do when he was awake. I read a lot about Roman history and, you know, I don't know if people even know this, but The Colosseum in Rome, there was 440 of those throughout the Roman— 440 of those massive Colosseums. Why? Because people just needed to be lulled into unconsciousness. And I think that's what media does, that's what technology does. So it pulls people away from their 5. And the interesting thing about the 5, which I have taught my kids, is where does God fit into all this? Like, who made you? Somebody made you. And I put God right in the middle. God's in the palm. But I said to my son when he was 11, he was questioning spirituality. I said, Luke, what's the most incredible thing that was ever created? And he goes, a computer. And I said, okay, what about the human brain? He goes, oh, the human brain. I said, who created that? He goes, a really smart person. So some— I don't care where anybody is religiously or spiritually, but the most complex organism that's ever been, that's ever been identified, something powerful had to create that. So I put that guy right there.

So you talked about simplicity and probability, you didn't mention leverage. What is leverage and how do you apply it?

So I'm going to talk about leverage by way of a story. But leverage to me is when you do anything, it should be leveraging your existing infrastructure or your existing relationships. And in business and wealth creation, I often see people making investments that don't take advantage of what's already in place. So leverage comes in many forms. You could leverage technology that you already have. So oftentimes in business, I see companies, they're going down a path, they have a strategy, and I want to talk about business strategy in a moment, which is big for wealth creation. They have a strategy, but they're doing things over here. And I see this a lot unrelated, but, you know, I see a lot of doctors, you know, they start making money and they decide to buy the building. That they're in. And sometimes that works out, but I've seen a lot of times where it hasn't worked out and it's added so much complexity. If I'm a doctor, what if I leverage my knowledge of medicine to create a product for the marketplace? So leverage is leveraging existing infrastructure, existing technology, existing relationships. So when I talk about leverage, or, you know, thinking about a new opportunity, I first say, is it simple to implement this opportunity? Is it probable? Is it increasing the probability that we hit the stated objective? And is it leveraging something that's already in place? I ask those questions. Southwest Airlines, supposedly this is a fact, I have not done the math myself, but when Southwest Airlines went public, the first 30 years that it was public, from like '74 to 2004, it was the best performing stock of all stocks in the United States. An airline, an industry that Warren Buffett used to say is the worst industry in the world, an airline startup was better performing than Microsoft and Philip Morris. You think about that. Why? Because Herb Keller understood simplicity, probability, and leverage. And he employed that in his business strategies. Here's what they did. They took a long time before they started. And they said, how are we going to make decisions in this firm? And they said, we're going to pick a strategy, which is, if you remember at the beginning, it was one plane, the 737. We're only going to do direct flights. There's no seat assignments. There's no change fees. And on and on and on. They had a big focus on their people and their culture. But once they launched, it was permanent for 3 decades. They didn't change. It wasn't until they got massive that they started changing. So an important part about wealth creation, in my view, is having permanence about your belief systems. I'm never going to change simplicity, probability, and leverage. Southwest Airlines said it's permanent. But what happens in most companies? They bring on a new executive. We're going to change this, change this, change that. No, you've got to take time at the beginning. They took 3 or 4 years at the beginning, went through this immense thought process, and then they launched. And here's the cool thing about Herb Kelleher. He would say some version of what I'm about to say. He said the best businesses in the world employ this word: monotony. And you're like, monotony? How is monotony— monotony is employed by Warren Buffett, he's got a very monotonous life. When a company knows exactly what it has to do, it's monotonous. Everybody knows their role. Everybody knows what they're trying to do. We're just trying to get better and better, better at these short-haul flights. And then once that monotony grows, then it starts expanding slowly, but in a very simple, probable, and leverageable way. When you think about a company, if a company isn't clear about its purpose, and its values and its catalyzing statement and its strategy, how does it know if a new opportunity is a great thing or a massive distraction? So until you've done that work to come up with the reason the company exists and how it's going to make its decisions and how it's monotonously executing on its objectives, If you don't know what those things are, how the hell can you tell the difference between a massive distraction and an opportunity? You can't. So I want to use the story about Jeff Bezos, which I think is really cool. There was a famous cover of one of the big magazines—

Time magazine— his pockets were inside out.

His pockets are inside out. It said some version of, you know, Amazon's going bankrupt because Bezos won't change his strategy. His strategy was permanent. Now, I don't know if he articulated it this way, but I believe that a business strategy— which, you know what, who the hell knows what a business strategy is? But if you're in business, you better have a strategy. And I think, as Jeff Bezos did, it's really simple. What business are you in? When we make investments in companies, we look at 1,000, we make 2 investments. We interview employees, we say, what business are you in? You get 20 different answers. Jeff Bezos, crystal clear, sell books, two words. When he started Amazon, it was to sell books. So it's what business are you in, so what, who, and how. That's all that, if you have a crystal clear answer to those three questions in business, you're gonna create immense wealth for yourself. So answering the question, what business are you in, sell books. Number two. Who? Who? Someone with an internet connection. Everybody thought you're insane. Only 4% of people have an internet connection in 1994. He's like, we're just going to focus on those people. What do you think about it? We forget you'll never compete with Borders. You'll never compete with Barnes Noble. They're going to flush you down the toilet. So, uh, what business? Sell books. To who? People with an internet connection.

How?

We're going to ship them from warehouses because books are small, easy to store. We're going to ship them with Fourth-rate mail. So it answers the question of the business model, how you deliver the product. And it also answers how do you market. We're going to market online. So that was their strategy for 10 years. And they burned through billions of dollars. But what happened is, first of all, everybody said you're crazy because you're never going to be able to compete with Barnes Noble and everything else. He goes, if you focus on a strategy long enough, what happens? You add simplicity, probability, and leverage. Why? Because you start building momentum if the strategy is well thought out. And then people start spreading and saying, hey, I got my book on Amazon. And then they start shipping books to their friends because it's easy. And it just spreads. And only when they had mass did he do what? Started adding other products. It's a massive lesson in creating wealth through a business. And here's the cool thing that everybody forgets. In my opinion, permanence. When my wife and I created that placemat, we said, here it is, it's permanent. When Herb Kelleher created Southwest Airlines, as long as I'm alive, it's permanent. When Jeff Bezos laid out the strategy, it was permanent. And you only add to it using leverage, things that are taking advantage of existing infrastructure or existing relationships or existing technology. Amazon is a brilliant example of this. But here's the thing. Anybody can do this. Anybody can employ a simple business strategy to create wealth. Anybody can make decisions from a simplicity, probability, and leverage standpoint.

Explain what you mean by catalyzing statement. What does that mean?

So I think this whole purpose statement, mission statement, values, all these— all convoluted things. And so we went out and we looked at the marketplace. And what we realized is that The world is too complex. We came up with this term about 15 years ago called the catalyzing statement. And a catalyzing statement is a statement that catalyzes your important stakeholders to help you. Stakeholders are employees and vendors and the marketplace in general. Could be your community around you. So a catalyzing statement massively catalyzes action. And anybody can create a catalyzing statement. And so the story I love to tell is I loved Lovitello's Pizza. It was Lovie's where I grew up. It's the best pizza in town. And all the owner wanted to do was, I just want to go back to Italy. I make the best pizza. And this guy worked his ass off and died making pizza. He was so pissed off when this crappy pizza came along. Domino's Pizza. He doesn't know a damn thing about pizza. And Tom Monaghan, who created Domino's, sold the business for more than $1 billion.

Why?

Because of a catalyzing statement. You could sell crappy food and turn into $1 billion. Ironically, he's got a bigger estate in Italy than Lovitello could ever possibly have. But here's the thing: 30 minutes or less or it's free. That catalyzed so much action. Why? It catalyzed people who want to drive fast to make tips, who became their managers. Talk about leverage. It catalyzed a meme in society: 30 minutes or less or it's free. You think about massive things that have happened in society, impossible things. John F. Kennedy knew there was no way we're going to get to the moon and back. This is not— it's not even possible.

The Russians were kicking our ass.

Yeah. So when he inherited the The space program, all it was was about beating the Soviets. He created a catalyzing statement. When he said, "We're going to send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade," what did that do? It catalyzed massive action. The rumor was they got 100,000 resumes for people that wanted to help, and it made decision-making easier. So when somebody came to them with a new technology, "Is that going to get us to the moon and back in 7 years?" "No, next, next, next." And you think about— there was a crappy carmaker called Volvo, and they had expensive cars that weren't really good until an engineer put a stake in the ground. We build the safest cars in the world. And that company turned around overnight, and engineers that wanted to build safe cars came forward, that they were a stakeholder. Pregnant moms said, I'm not buying a Cadillac, I'm buying a Volvo. They build the safest cars in the world. It catalyzed all this action, and they went from, I think like 10th or 13th in the world to 4th. And then what happens? Some CEO comes along and says, "Ah, we're not about safety anymore. We're about performance." They should bounce that guy. But you think about all these ideas. You know, Fred Smith, he got a C on his paper. Federal Express, what did he say? You're going to compete with the U.S. government? You're going to raise $100 million in 1975 and you're going to buy 90 planes that ship packages? Are you really going to do that? Only if you have a catalyzing statement. What was it?

When you absolutely positively has to be there overnight. I remember it well.

You still remember from 30 years ago? Yeah. So that means— so here's the cool thing about catalyzing statements. Anyone can create one. And what does it do? It adds simplicity, probability, and leverage to your life. And there's thousands of them. We created a charity because my purpose in life is to inspire entrepreneurship. And I surmise that there's probably about a billion homes in the world. And our catalyzing statement became an entrepreneur in every home. A billion entrepreneurs. Wouldn't the world be pretty cool with a billion entrepreneurs?

And define what an entrepreneur is to you.

An entrepreneur is very simply anybody who takes responsibility for outcomes. You could be a stay-at-home mom whose outcome that you're pushing probability toward is, I want to create independent kids. And that becomes your mantra.

That's the catalyzing statement for the stay-at-home mom in the entrepreneurial context that you have.

So anybody that takes responsibility for outcomes is an entrepreneur. And the old French definition was somebody who takes resources from one level and brings them to another. If you're a human being that decides to take responsibility no matter where you are in your life and you use the resources that you have and you own those resources, who cares about your childhood or anything else? You're being entrepreneurial when you decide to take responsibility. So that's our definition.

So what's interesting, I think, in summarizing some of this— simplicity, probability, and leverage— catalyzing statement. And you've said this multiple times, and tell me if you truly, truly believe it: anybody can do this.

Anybody can do this. It's frustrating when I meet, run into friends, and, you know, they're 11 years in and like, still thinking about my catalyzing statement. And a catalyzing statement is— all it is is a get-to of a purpose statement. Bill Gates is a fantastic example of this. He wanted to build the most recognizable software company in the world in his 20s, and it was going, and, you know, he's a good businessman. But he said these famous words, and it changed everything. Everything. The computer on every desktop.

Yeah, I envision a world with a computer on every desktop.

And he said it over and over and over, and almost going back to monotonous. The really best CEOs on Earth are monotonous. They repeat themselves over and over and over. But everybody else thinks Success is all about changing and adapting. No, it's about finding your purpose, turning your purpose into a catalyzing statement like Bill Gates. He wants to have the most recognizable software company in the world. How do I make it a get-to? A computer on every desktop. We're going to beat the Soviets in the space race. How do I make it a get-to? We're going to send a man to the moon and return him safe to Earth.

Before the end of the decade.

Yes. And so the cool thing is none of the things that we've talked about here that have created immense wealth for people. None of them are difficult. They're all relatively simple. But just like dieting, it's relatively simple. Eat less and exercise more. But for some reason, people choose not to execute on that. So I'm hoping that you execute on these simple things.

So this has been absolutely mesmerizing. And, uh, but I know that you have built through simplicity, probability, and leverage a series of principles that you apply to your business activities that you've taught to thousands, tens of thousands out there in the world that people can adopt. Now I want to have a little bit of a lightning round with you because I happen to know what you teach in business, the principles. You and I have known each other for years. We were in an accountability group together. Every week you'd be coming to the phone with these different business principles, and I'd be like writing furiously. Oh my God, this stuff is gold. So what you've taught me in the way these principles have had a massive impact on my, my success, my wealth development, but also on my experience in life. The first one you talk about is values-based decision-making, and then you translate that into what you call the doorman principle. Explain that, please.

Values-based decision-making presupposes that you have a set of values that guide your decisions in business. No one's conscious of this, but just imagine two morons. They don't have a college degree. They decide they're going to start a company together. They're shunned by society because they're both weird. Their names are Steve and Steve, and they build a trillion-dollar company named Apple. Did anyone ever think, like, how is that possible? Everybody goes to business school. How did two guys decide to— how did they do this? And there's a little-known story inside Apple that, uh, they weren't doing well, they were losing money. This guy named Markkula comes along, it's 1977, and he says, um, I will invest $250,000 in you. Think about it, $250,000. I want 40% of the company, but every decision from this point forward has to be made according to this list of values. It's called the Markkula Document. Nobody even knows about it. And when you look at that Markkula Document, you're like, holy shit, everything Apple does stems back to a document in 1977. So this isn't hard, folks. If you have a list of values that your company operates from, starting with simplicity, probability, and leverage— and you could go look up the Apple document if you want— magic has to happen after that, because what happens is You're making decisions that are very consistent with a set of values. I know about you and I know about me and I know about all you guys watching out there that every single problem that I have ever had and that you have ever had started when I let someone or something into my life that didn't align with my values.

And I have to say, you said that on the phone to me 10 years ago, maybe.

Yeah.

And, and, and I rejected the comment when you said, I said, No, that's not true. There's other reasons why I had major problems in my life. And then I started to go back and look at the lawsuits or the challenge, whatever the things were. And every single major challenge I had was because I let someone in my life that did not share my values. It was 100% accurate when I applied it.

And we know scientifically now that your brain rationalizes everything. So let's say you have a, clear set of values and you meet somebody, "Oh, I'm going to make a lot of money," and your brain's— your gut only says yes, no. Your gut is G-U-T. Your gut is God Uttering Truth. And every time you don't listen to gut, every single time, you, me, everybody, every time, it's like, "Why didn't I listen to my gut?" So what I do with values-based decision-making is I have a crystal clear set of values that I make the I made all my decisions from in my business and in my personal life. And they're imprinted in my gut. And to this day, when I get into an opportunity, my gut's screaming no. And I'm like, but, but, but, but, but. So this is something that you have to be vigilant about. And what did we learn together? That the only way to be vigilant about stuff like this is you can't do it in a vacuum. You have to have accountability. So I met a group of billionaires years ago now, 20 years ago. And they started meeting at the age of 30 when they were just getting along in life. And they met every single week in the basement of a church for 40 years, Wednesday morning, 6:30 in Minneapolis, St. Paul. And this group of 8 men created 4 billionaires. It's crazy.

Why?

Because of the accountability. So the accountability is when we, you know, when we meet every week is hold me accountable to this set of values because it's hard to do on your own. So values-based decision-making, where was it born? So I'm 16. Remember, I've got 6 older siblings and I'm watching the chaos of their lives. I'm watching who they live with and who they married and what they chose to do for a living and their commute times and stupid things like drugs and alcohol. I'm saying it's got to be a better way. And that's where Simplicity was born and that's where values-based decision-making was born. It was born when I was 16, when I wrote my first set of values. So as I said, a lot of how I've become in life was born out of my childhood. So here's the thing about values-based decision-making. When you come up with a list of values for your business and for your personal life, you gotta have the accountability. And so there's a built-in system that we've created, and it's in our book Who's in Your Room, but we call it the doorman. And I imagine that there's a doorman sitting at the room of my life, and that doorman will only let people in that align with my values. So an example of that is last week I was asked to be on the board of a company, and I said, "Bob, I am so happy that you asked me, but my doorman won't let me do this." He's like, "Who's your doorman?" I go, "He's the guy that holds my values." So I blame it on somebody else. And if I accept this board position with you, I'm honored that you asked me, but if I accept it, I'm not gonna do a good job for you, so it's gonna hurt you and it's gonna hurt me. But you blame it on a third party. So the doorman principle is unbelievable. There was a woman, I'll call her Jenny, 10 years ago now, she was crying. I met her at an event actually. And she's like literally bawling her eyes out. She just got off the phone with her husband. Her 16-year-old daughter, She had 4 daughters. 16-year-old was the oldest. She was dating a drug addict for 2 years. They were robbing from the house. They were having sex in the house. She would not see her own daughter for sometimes a week at a time. Absolutely, positively destroying this family. She's like, what should I do? I'm like, well, you're asking me? I'm not a psychotherapist. And I said, let me just teach you values-based decision-making and the doorman principle. Next time you're with your daughter, sit down with her. Ask her what her values are, ask her what the values are of the perfect man for her. And then I taught her the doorman principle. So I don't know how long later, 45 days later, I get this freak call from her. She calls me, she's crying on the phone, and I'm like, oh my God, is she in jail? Is she dead? What happened? She goes, you're not gonna believe what happened. I taught her the values-based decision-making, the doorman principle, and she started listing words for her future boyfriend or husband, honesty, integrity, hardworking, God-fearing, like words I had never heard come out of her mouth. And I kind of forgot about it. We went on our way. About 3 weeks later, I'm having breakfast with my husband, and she walks into the kitchen, and no one says a word. And we were scared to even say anything. She goes, "Mom, Dad, I broke up with Trevor." And they were like in shock. And the mom goes, "Why'd you break up with him?" And she said, "He didn't align with my values." And you think about all that would have been destroyed in their future. One simple conversation, values-based decision-making, built a trillion-dollar company and saved the family and all the destruction. And it only works if you sit down and write out your values and what they mean to you. And if you can't do that, I won't do that, I can't help you.

So one of the things that you said relative to this that stuck, uh, one of our calls, you said, absence— absent of clear values, one cannot distinguish between opportunity and distraction.

How do you know if you haven't written out your purpose statements, which you could do in 5 minutes? A purpose isn't out there, it's in here. You peel it away to get to it, and people are looking out there It's the most insane thing. If you want to know what your purpose is, it's no different than an acorn. An acorn has every single thing it needs to become a giant oak tree. You have everything you need inside of you, but you've got to be willing to peel the onion and go inside. And that's where your purpose lies, and that's where your values lie. I believe in my heart of hearts that your values and your purpose are inside your DNA. But if you're not willing to do the work to peel back and write them out, then I can't help you. So let me just say the quote that we say often at our company. Unless you're crystal clear on your purpose and your values and your catalyzing statement and your main objectives, you have absolutely no ability to distinguish between something that's going to help your life and something that's going to destroy your life. How do you know if you didn't do the work?

Beautiful. Next, you teach management by objectives. What's that?

Management by objectives is— I love the quote from— I heard him say it too. He's a crotchety old guy now. Sorry, Jack Welch. Jack Welch used to say, tell me what your quarterly objectives are as a human being and as a company. What are the 5 things you want to get done? Just tell me what they are. Next quarter, what do you want to get done? And tell me what do you want to do as your 5 objectives 20 years from now? If you know what you got to do this quarter and you know what you want to do 20 years from now, the middle takes care of itself. I love that quote because everybody's in this murky world. What do you need to do now that aligns with what you're doing in 20 years and magic happens? That all presupposes, though, in my opinion, that you've got a purpose for the company and for yourself, and you've got values for the company and yourself. The next step is management by objectives. What are the quarterly objectives? What are the long-term objectives? And each quarter, you sit down with your team and you come up with 5 objectives for the company. Here's the interesting thing. People have a lot of problems with their employees, and I think that all of those problems stem from no clarity on purpose, no clarity on values, and no clarity on objectives. I sit down with my executives and I say, here's where we're going, here's our company objectives, what are your 5 objectives? And so on a quarterly basis they get bonus on their 5 objectives. Here's the cool thing. People hate employee reviews. It's the easiest employee review in the world. How'd you do on your 5 objectives?

Did you do them?

And people say, what about values? Well, the objectives are going to align with the values, right? So it's such an easy, straightforward thing. And it boils down to what we call the 5 ways to pay people. So when small company entrepreneurs come to me, they want to get big, I tell them, look, if you want this to be simple, highly probable, and leverageable to your existing life, then just do these simple things. You don't have to, but here's one of those simple things that we encourage people to do. Pay employees 5 ways. You want employees that are going to stick around for the long haul. So 5 ways: give people a living wage, so a base salary. I like base salaries. I like benefits. We use PEOs a lot, the professional employment agencies where they do payroll and benefits. So you get like IBM benefits. So people have a base salary. So when they're going home and they're having dinner with their spouse, they're not looking for another job, but they're saying, I really love where I work because they pay me 5 ways: base salary, benefits. The third way is a bonus on them achieving their 5 quarterly objectives that align with the company's objectives. The next thing is a companywide bonus. Everybody gets the same thing. So everybody, if we hit these 5 objectives as a company, Everybody's going to get $500 at the end of the quarter, and I'm taking you to dinner at the nicest restaurant in town. So everybody's pulling each other to achieve the same thing. And then lastly, something long-term, something that 10 years from now you're going to get, or employee stock options. But my friend Brett, I love this. On every employee's 10-year anniversary, he bought them a cruise around the world. And I'll never forget, he hired this new employee. Sherry was her name. And I went to his office. I go, hey, Sherry, nice to meet you. And she goes, 9 more years. I'm like, 9 more years? Oh, she goes, I get my cruise in 9 more years. This guy bought 10 years of employee loyalty on a $5,500 cruise. Think about that. But he also paid him 5 ways. And so we complicate this. So I often say CEOs don't have a motivation problem, they have a compensation problem. Because you've all seen the study, 5 million people were studied by Gallup, and what they found is they interviewed employees of companies and they found that 70% of 5 million people either hated working for their company, working against it, or looking for another job. Some version of, I don't want to work here. 70%. They went back and re-poll the small number of them, like 5,000, and they said, this is too bizarre. What would make you go from the 70% that hate your job to the 30% that love it? We want to know what the company stands for. We want to know what the values are. We want to know our objectives. This is simple shit. Why aren't we doing it?

Next, you— this is one that really made a big difference in my life— rhythms and rituals to amplify time and success.

So when you think about great companies, they have baked into their culture rhythms and rituals. And oftentimes people do things once. We're going to do a new member drive or a new client drive or a new drive of some kind. Well, if it's the third Wednesday of the month, why don't you just do it forever the third Wednesday of the month? So now everybody knows, and you bake these rhythms into your culture. Was everybody— has anybody ever consciously thought about how tens of thousands of McDonald's restaurants get opened by 16-year-olds in the morning and closed by 16-year-olds at night, it's because of the rhythms and habits baked in. And I like to answer this by way of an example. I took over a nonprofit board about 20 years ago. It was failing miserably and it was last in the world out of 180 offices that did this thing. It's not worth getting into what it was. So I get to the board meeting and I just put a calendar like 6-foot wide for the whole year on the board, and it was blank and you could fill it in. And I said, "How often do we have meetings for the board?" "They go monthly." "Well, when do we have them?" So at the end of each meeting, they would say, "When do you wanna meet the next one?" I said, "Well, it's Wednesday morning, it's 8 o'clock. Let's have it the first Wednesday of every month at 8 o'clock. Put it on the calendar. When do we want the announcement for that meeting to go out? How about a week before? Put that on the calendar." When are we doing our fundraising? Well, we generally do 4 events a year. Why don't we announce that they're 2 weeks after the beginning of every quarter 4 times? Put that on the calendar. When are we doing our educational events? Well, we generally do them, you know, once a month. How about the second Tuesday of every month at 7 o'clock? Long story short, we filled the calendar in. I said to the admin, publish this calendar and blow it out to all the membership. This organization in 1 year went from 180th to number 4.

Why?

Because the rhythm and the calendar ran the company, and great companies do it that way. So you don't have to reinvent things every day. Monotony— it actually became monotonous because the admin team would say, I'm just following the calendar. And so any company could do this. And, uh, so that's why we say for this module, rhythms and rituals Individuals that amplify time and success. And if you recall, we talked about the billionaires, these guys that were in their 30s that became billionaires. Why? Every Wednesday, 6:30, they knew what chair they were going to be in. My wife and I know every Monday at 7:30 where we're going to be. We're going to be on a date night. We're not going to be talking about business. Why? Because on Wednesday mornings at 8, we have a business meeting. That's when we do all that. Rhythms and rituals to amplify time and success. It works in your personal life, works in your business life.

So let's maybe kind of tie this all together with the business frame. So because what you do, you get it down to basically a sheet, I think, right? Saying, okay, we're gonna— if you put together this business frame and you say this over and over again, it's— it just do this work, just the discipline to get this one frame built out And the probability of a successful business goes way, way up. It's a simple thing. The frame is simple. The probability is high, highly leverageable, because once you invest that time, you're going to have it and you keep running. It gets monotonous, and that's when people get bored and maybe start to stray off the reservation, right? So just give us the business frame, if you don't mind.

So what I'm about to tell you is a very straightforward way that will increase the probability that your business creates wealth for you and your family and for shareholders or whatever you have. And I often say, you don't have to do this. You could follow any method you want. But if you want simplicity, probability, and leverage, here's a good option for you. We once joked that the opposite of simplicity, probability, and leverage is chaos, death, and frustration. So Any business, any business should have a purpose statement. That's the first step of the frame, and it should be 4 or 5 words. We exist to solve world hunger. A computer on every desktop, or whatever. It's just simple. So if you do want to have simplicity, probability, and leverage, you could follow this simple frame. And the first step of the frame is your purpose statement. It's 4 or 5 words. We sell computers, could be your purpose statement if that's what you want your purpose to be. It could be a little bit more enlightening, like we cure babies of debilitating illnesses. That's a purpose. But then you get to the catalyzing statement, and the catalyzing statement is what turns the purpose into something that catalyzes action in your stakeholders. And some really good catalyzing statements over the years are And we've talked about this too, you know, America, land of the free, home of the brave. I think a statement like that is what's causing people to want to come here for 250 years when it absolutely positively has to be there overnight. I envision a world with a computer on every desktop. We build the safest cars in the world. We can go on and on, but a catalyzing statement catalyzes your stakeholders. Again, every single business on planet Earth could do this. And I've coached a lot over the years. I am not a coach, but people ask me. Purpose statement, catalyzing statement. The next thing is, what are your values? What are the 5 or 6 values that you're going to make all decisions from in your business? That's how 2 guys without a college degree named Steve and Steve created a trillion-dollar company. Trillion-dollar company. Values-based decision-making. Write them out. The next thing is real business strategy. Your real business strategy is what business are you in really short. We sell books for Amazon at the beginning, right? Southwest Airlines, we fly direct short-haul flights. That's what we do. Then the next question is, who do you do it for? Not what your avatar is, it's just who? People with an internet connection, people that take buses in Southwest's case. They wanted to convert people from buses to planes. And then lastly, how do you do it? And the how is very short. We're not talking about a lot of thought. Sure. How do you market it and how do you deliver your product or service? And to use Amazon as an example, their how is they ship books by fourth-rate mail because it was cheaper and they market online. So it answers both questions: what, who, how. The next thing is 20-year objectives, your long-term objectives. I don't care. People say this all the time. I want to sell my business in 10 years. Well, great. You're going to sell the business to somebody. They want to know where it's going to. It makes your line of sight better. If you know where you're going to be in 20 years, it helps make decisions for what you need to do now. So the next part of it is long-term objectives. What are the 5 things you want this company to have 20 years from now? And then the last part, and you're done, is short-term objectives. Every quarter, what are the objectives for the business? What are the objectives for the employee. Now, once you have that laid out, and I've taken so many companies through it, takes a few hours, that's it. They fumble around for 15 years and then a few hours to get it right, just like Marc Kula did with Apple. Here's the cool thing: you then have to wrap this around with— I call it TDE— trust. Only hire people that trust that frame, that believe in that frame. Discipline. And execution. You gotta have the discipline to follow it, and then you have to execute. And here's the easy part, but no one does it. The very small number of business leaders that do this have unbelievable success. They know what their frame is, and they may have their version of it, and it might not be exactly like that. And then all they do is beat the drum and never stop. They do the same thing over and over and over again. That's why really successful people sometimes are boring. I used to fancy myself a singer, and I sang at open mic night at Caroline's in New York. It was at the height of Seinfeld fame, and I got behind the mic. I sang, and Jerry Seinfeld walks in, and he's not that famous anymore, but at the time he was the most famous TV star, at least. And he trips, and he, you know, "Hey, let me say a few words," and he gets up and he does this 30-minute routine. You know, he burps, teases somebody in the audience, trips, drops the mic a couple of times. It was funny as hell. 2 years later, I'm in Vegas and it says Jerry Seinfeld in big lights. I'm like, oh wow, Jerry Seinfeld, I'm gonna go see him. So I got a ticket. He did the exact same routine, exactly. Famous people get really good and really deep in what they do well, and they do it over and over and over again. It's kind of monotonous, but if you want to have immense success, figure out your purpose, your catalyzing statement, your values, your strategy, your long-term objectives, your short-term objectives. Put trust, discipline, and execution, and then repeat yourself often. That's success.

Last thing I want us to talk about quickly. You have recently told me you adopted what you refer to as cathedral thinking. Yeah, you've adopted for your company, you've adopted for yourself personally. What is cathedral thinking?

So cathedral thinking cuts through the heart of everything we're talking about. When you're building a cathedral, you know that you're not building it for yourself or your family, you're building it for people 500 years from now. And when you have very long-term thinking, we recently put everything that we do around the 100-year club. When you do things for the long haul, what it does is it informs every— everything you do now if you do it right. If you have a crystal clear picture, a legacy of what you want your business or your life to look like 100 years from now, what it does is it changes how you do things today. So if I want to live to be 120 years old, it's going to inform what I put in my body And there's an incredible story of Pastor Loritz, African American guy in Atlanta. I'll never forget the story he told, and I might not get all the facts right, but it was just an incredible story. I was crying hearing him tell me this story. His great-grandfather was a slave. His great-grandfather couldn't read or write. And after the Civil War, the slaves were freed. And this guy said, "I don't ever want any of my offspring to ever have to go through what I went through." And he wrote a family legacy document. He said, "If you're in our family, you are going to get a college degree, you're going to be really careful who you marry, so you're going to have a list of the attributes of the perfect spouse, and you're going to be a really good business person." And this guy has 300 offspring as a result of that one document. With no divorces and a college degree because he used cathedral thinking to create a legacy. And this was an illiterate slave in his 40s. And I believe that those who embrace long-term thinking, when you do that, you have a crystal clear image about where you want to be and where you want to go. It makes today easier. It makes it easier to employ what we're talking about— simplicity, probability, and leverage. When I first married my wife, she thought I was crazy, but I wrote something out and I said, it's 2070, it's April 17th, we're in a log cabin, there's a fire over here, we're sipping hot chocolate, our great-grandchildren are playing outside. And it was very clear where we were going to be 50 years from now. So what happens when we have a fight? We're not running for the exits. We're crystal clear where we're going. And you can use this very simple thing for anything, just like this slave did. Here's where my family's going to be in 300 years. Here's where my marriage is going to be in 50 years. Here's where my kids are going to be. And I'm going to ask you a question. What are your kids doing in the year 2065? And most people say to me, I have no idea. Well, my wife and I know because we helped them write it out.

I know this all to be true because I know you, and it makes me really emotional because it's, it's, it's got such a beauty to it about what life is really all about. And, um, you make it really simple. It's just the question is, and I know your frustration is, why don't people just do the simple things to have an extraordinary life? If you want to, you know, live abundantly, you want to live wealthy, you want to not only generate monetary value, but you want to enjoy the life that goes with it.

I'm glad that you said it that way because people often say you never talk about money. This is the best kind of wealth because by living this way, you're generating all kinds of money, not only for yourself but for charities you support. So it— at the end of the day, it creates immense wealth. It creates wealth in people's hearts, in their families, in their homes, in their businesses. So thank you for having me.

Yeah, it's a beautiful purpose. Thanks for sharing it all. And, uh, I know that you've touched a lot of people's lives right now, so thank you.

You're welcome.

And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. To watch another amazing 6-figure side hustle video, check it out right there next to to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there. If you can understand how to put yourself on page 1, you're getting in front of the most amount of buyers who trust Amazon as a brand. If I'm going to try to make money online, that's what I'm going to do.

Because the Amazon business, once it gets started and gets going, it tends to stay going on its own.