BUILD WEALTH LIKE A BILLIONAIRE: Secrets from Jim Dew & Peter Diamandis

What I'm going to do today is I'm going to talk about three things that I've learned through studying billionaires that we implement with our clients that you can implement yourself. And these are the three things that billionaires really nail when it comes to their wealth planning. Let's get through the disclosures that just says, don't believe a word I'm about to tell you, and let's get into it. So the first of the three things that billionaires do very well, I'm going to just draw a continuum right here. And on the left of this continuum, I'm going to put distraction. And on the right of this continuum, I'm going to put focus. By the way, I was supposed to be a doctor, so excuse my handwriting. So on the left on distraction, I see many entrepreneurs and what they have when it comes to their wealth building is what I call random wishes. And random wishes doesn't get it done. A little more toward the focus I see goals. So there's some goal setting a little more focused I would call success. But if I had to tell you about those three areas, random wishes, goals, and success, I would put those in the red because there are plenty of entrepreneurs like you that have random wishes, goals, or success. But really, to get sustained wealth, you need another level over here. And this other level is a compelling focus. And if you have compelling focus and believe in the billionaires have compelling focus, that's when you get something that we call sustained. Well, so what are your first steps on this? For each one of these, I'm going to tell you what the concept is, and then I'm going to give you an action step. So I'll just kind of star the action steps. So the first action step for a compelling focus is something that Keith Cunningham calls thinking time. And thinking time is for you to sit down in a quiet place and first ask yourself, why do you want to be wealthy? Why do you want to be seriously rich? It's really important to get clear on your why. Also ask yourself what what would you do if you got seriously wealthy? How would you use that money? And then the second part of this I'll put another star is ties into Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan's book who, not how. I'll give you a quick story on something that happened to me during COVID So when Covid happened, they shut down all the gyms. Mimi and I are really into working out. We couldn't go to the gym, and it was making me crazy. Well, I have a friend who is a Personal trainer who said, jim, I can get you in a private gym. No one is in there, but you have to pay me as a personal trainer. I remember thinking, I don't need a personal trainer. I have been working out for 30 years. I know my way around a gym. But I had no choice. So I hired him. Two weeks later, I was surprised to realize that I had the best two weeks of workouts I'd have in over a decade. And guess what? Now I have a personal trainer. And what I realized is the personal trainer gave me a compelling focus. I wasn't on my earbuds listening to one of Paul Culligan's podcasts. Sorry, Paul, I wasn't talking to my friends in the gym. I was focused during that workout time of just intensely getting it done. So you can hire a good wealth manager to give you a compelling focus. And that's the whole. So those are your steps on compelling focus. The second area that billionaires do a really good job. I'll just draw this diagram. Here is something that I like to call wealth discovered. Most of you are making enough money already to get seriously rich. The problem is you're leaking money and you don't know where you're leaking money. And in my experience of 26 years of working with entrepreneurs, the number who know where their money's going and they're not leaking money is very small compared to, like this red. Better compared to the entrepreneurs who don't know where their money is going. In my book, I talk about Mark, which is not his real name, who's an entrepreneur who gets introduced as selling his company for more than $80 million, which is a true statement. By the time Mark sat down with me, he only had $5 million left. You go, how in the heck does he do that? Or did he do that? Well, first of all, he had taken on investors, so he only owned a little more than half of the company when it sold. But, you know, $40 million is still a lot of money. He had done no planning, no exit planning, no tax planning, no asset protection planning. So he ended up paying too much in taxes. And then he put money in a bunch of silly investments with friends and with other people and lost a lot of that. The reason I tell you that is you don't want to end up like the entrepreneur that says, I can't believe how much I made in the last 10 years and how little I have to show for it today. And in my experience, that's about 4% that actually don't have that. That are Actually not leaking money. And that's one out of 25. So in this area, what's the problem? Well, one is missed opportunities, The other one is being comfortable. Believe it or not, being comfortable is a big problem for wealth discovered. So what do you need to do about wealth discovered? You need to sit down and think about where is your money going as far as taxes, one of the biggest costs for successful entrepreneurs. What about insurance premiums? What about legal fees? What about investment fees? And what about expenses, both business and personal? You need to really be aware of those things if you're going to find out where you're leaking money and then have a good strategy so that you can start building wealth. Let's talk about the third thing, which I'm going to watch how fancy I am here. I'm going to add a page as we speak. Add page. Look at that. That's for people that say, I'm not good at technology. Mimi. So let's talk about the third thing that billionaires do really well. And I'm going to just draw this diagram here. So this is infrastructure. And infrastructure is really the people and the process for how you make financial decisions. The billionaires do a great job with infrastructure. So as I said before, most entrepreneurs, and I'm talking successful entrepreneurs like this, they have kind of a red zone as far as infrastructure is concerned. But the ones who end up in the green, this is only about 2% in my experience. So what is good infrastructure? Well, one thing that is not good infrastructure down at the bottom here is entrepreneurs that are unconsciously unaware. This is the ostrich. And this happens to most entrepreneurs at some point is you're so busy building your business and taking care of your family, you're unconsciously unaware of the people in the process. That is your infrastructure. And then another enemy is you have enough of an infrastructure. So you're executing, but you're really not at the level you need to do because the highest level of infrastructure gives you absolute confidence. So when it comes to infrastructure, here's exercise I want you to do. I want you list your professionals. In tax, legal, insurance and investment. And then I want you to give.

Them a grade.

Not five Ds. I'd say one to 10. 10 is amazing. Great personality. Proactively bringing you ideas works well in a team. All those things would be a 10. A 1 would be, you should have fired that person a long time ago. And a five, you might be, I'm not quite sure how good this person is. But rate your professionals when it comes to your infrastructure. Infrastructure is so important. I just wanted to take a minute and show you something that we created for clients, the entrepreneurs virtual family office. And this really we took from billionaire families and have honed it over the last 15 years. But I want you to think about your own situation and how you can better create an infrastructure of the people in the process by looking at this model. So we believe, Mimi and I believe that entrepreneurs are the reason for most great things in this country, the reason for jobs in the economy, the reason for innovations, the reason even for a lot of the giving that goes on. And every entrepreneur I've met in 26 years, they all have wishes and dreams, but very few of them do something that we have coined make rich real. And make rich real can mean different things to different entrepreneurs. So to you, it might mean having a certain amount of passive income every month. It might mean having a certain home in a certain area. It might mean having a private jet. It might mean time off, three months off a year to travel the world. It could be causes you care about or people you love that you want to take care of. Mimi was an immigrant, is an immigrant to America. Her family came over when she was five years old. And when she was young, it was very hard. They were on food stamps. It was a big challenge. And a few years ago, I asked Mimi, I said, is rich real to you? And she said, it is. I said, how do you know? She said, because when I go to the grocery store, I don't look at any prices. I can buy whatever I want. So what makes rich real for you could be different, but you really need to be in tune with what that is for you. And then to get there, you have to have these three outcomes. You have to have absolute confidence in your team of professionals. You have to maximize your wealth. I'll make that bigger inside and outside your business. And then you have to have a plan for sustained wealth. Because building businesses and making money is a different skill set than managing money. Then to get there, there's three main areas. First is protect, moving from vulnerable to secure. Then manage moving from uncoordinated to worry free. And then finally, grow, moving from incremental to exponential growth. Within each of these, we created three catalysts. So these are the nine areas that billionaires really nailed. And you need to also so under protect asset protection, this is having a plan so your assets can't be taken by a lawsuit. From the basic liability coverages, personal and business, all the way up to entity and trust design wealth transfer. So making sure, if you have kids, they're not ruined by money, that they only have opportunities. And then whether you have kids or not, make sure you have the right corporate documents in place so that if you get sick or injured, the right people step in. So when you're bettered, you're better, you don't lose your business, you and so that if your partner or your business associate gets sick or injured, you don't end up business partners with that person's spouse or brother or parent.

Okay.

And then finally, the time energy shield. So this is having someone in your life that protects your time and your energy from things like pitches, projects and other professionals. Under manage, the first is the wealth wheel. So this is having your wheel of advisors, we just talked about this. All a players, they're collaborating and communicating on your behalf, but you're not in the middle managing those. You need someone in the middle who can speak the languages of tax, legal, insurance and investment that can manage that for you. Linchpin partner. This is who holds it all together. This is someone, typically in wealth management, who has three distinct qualities. First, experience in building these type of structures because you don't want to have someone learn on your dime and your time. Second, someone who specialize in work, specializes in working with entrepreneurs because you have a different set of problems and opportunities than other types of investors and other types of individuals. And then finally, someone who takes a fiduciary standard of care, always represents you from a legal standard, doesn't sell products, doesn't have investment minimums, doesn't take referral fees, kickbacks or revenue sharing. And then finally, business value. So your largest asset, if you haven't exited, is your business making sure that you plan far in advance for that sex exit to get the best outcome possible for you. And when you think about business value and exit, you will exit your business, I guarantee it. Every entrepreneur exits either because you sell to a strategic or financial buyer, you get sick or injured, you die, you give it to your kids, you sell it to your employees, you get beat up by competition. Under grow the first is tax planning. So having a well thought out, annually updated and implemented tax plan investments. So building wealth outside of your company and things like real estate, stocks and bonds and private equity. And then finally profit amplification, which is identifying the critical drivers that drive cash flow in your company so you can easily monitor and improve those critical drivers. So those make up the virtual family office, but also are the areas that you need to build infrastructure for yourself.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this Video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can, you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So I'm going to end with this and then we'll open up for questions. You are in your current financial position, and no matter what I know in a period of time, you're going to have your future financial position. And let's say that's five years from now. So no matter what, from today to five years from now, you're going to be in a different financial situation. And what I've seen with entrepreneurs is if you don't pay attention to this stuff, what happens is you naturally drift. And when you drift, you can end up in instability or worse yet, if you even drift farther, which I hope this wouldn't happen to you. But if you drift even farther, you can end up in crisis. Nobody wants that. On the other hand, if you really focus on this, you can, oops, let me redo that. Your financial future, five years out. And let's go to here. Okay, so what you can do, though, is you can move up the curve and this takes. You have to decide and you have to act. And if you do that, you can get to a place called security. But there's a higher level, and that is getting to where I say you make rich real. Now in that journey. Guess when you're closest to those higher lines. Today. Today you're closest. And the longer you wait, the farther that distance is to jump. Because the whole idea is you want to jump the lines and you want to ride the cur. Once you get on the right path, it will happen for you. If you wait in the future, it's going to be riskier, it's going to be costlier, and it's going to be more stressful. So now's the time to jump the lines. Now, there's a way you can jump quicker, and that is if you get some sort of assessment. We call this a family office assessment. But if you get an assessment and you know where you are in all those nine areas, you. You can much more quickly jump the curves and get to here to make rich real. So an assessment really is having some experts dive deep in all areas of tax, legal, insurance and investment to find out where you are and then put together a game plan. As I said, earlier to give you a compelling focus so that you can get there. I don't want to make you dizzy, but I'm just going to go through the three main points again. The first is compelling focus. And remember, set aside thinking time. Why you want to be seriously wealthy, what you're going to do with the money, and the who if you need to hire someone. Second, make sure you look at wealth discovered. Where is your money leaking? And that's how you're going to max your wealth. So sit down and look at your taxes, your insurance premiums, your legal fees, your investment fees, your expenses, personal and business. Find out where the money's leaking and redirect that into something more positive. And then finally, your people in your process, the infrastructure and list out all your professionals in the areas of tax, legal, insurance, and investment and grade them 1 to 10 to give you a starting point. So with that, I'm going to just say this, that you can start managing your wealth like a billionaire, even if you're not one yet.

Most of the time speakers wait till the end to show the disclosures. So let me just take care of that right up front. Everyone got that? I'm going to begin by borrowing from the great book A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. I went from being very happy to very sad in a matter of seconds. I left a big brokerage firm in 1999 when Mimi and I started our own wealth management company and began our entrepreneurial journey to this moment when I realized we had netted more than a million dollars from our company. But just when I was getting excited, I scanned down the tax return to see how much we had paid in taxes that year. And I remember thinking to myself, you could buy a pretty nice home for that much money. And then I was overcome with doubt. Doubt about the way I was managing our own wealth. Had we hired the right professionals on our team? Was I making mistakes? Was I missing big opportunities? And even though we lived a great lifestyle, was it sustainable? You have to remember, at that moment of time, I thought I knew everything there was to know about wealth management for entrepreneurs. So I started asking other wealth managers I respected, and I kept hearing the same traditional answers. Then I heard about something called a family office, the way billionaires manage their wealth. And luckily, I got introduced to a family office in New York City. I jumped on a plane, I flew out there, and I met with the CEO and we hit it off. We just connected. And he shared with me how they would hire the best accountants, attorneys, legal, tax, insurance and investment professionals working for that one billionaire and his family as full time employees. I knew immediately that this was the best way to manage money for entrepreneurs. There was only one problem. You need about 200 or $300 million before that makes any sense. Then I thought, I wonder if I could create a virtual family office at a fraction of the cost for entrepreneurs like me and my clients who are making great money but don't yet have $200 million in assets I needed didn't exist. So I created it first for my own clients and our family. And now we do it for every new client. I'm going to cover three things with you today. I'm going to cover the entrepreneur's virtual family office. So this is the structure of how you should think about your wealth management as an entrepreneur. I'm going to go over stress testing, which billionaires do and you should too. And finally, I'm going to cover some questions you can ask yourself for a self assessment to see where you are in your wealth planning journey. First, the entrepreneur's virtual family office. If I can get a slide up here. There we go.

Perfect.

So here's the framework. I want you to think about things. I believe that entrepreneurs are the reason for everything great in this country. You're the reason for the economy, you're the reason for innovation, you're the reason for giving. And I believe you deserve to make rich real. Now, that means different things to different entrepreneurs. So to one entrepreneur, it might mean something as simple as flying first class or flying private. For another, it might mean taking three months off a year to travel the world. For another, it might mean knowing that your great grandchildren never have to worry about the cost of an education. And for still others, it might mean serving a cause you care about both while you're on this planet and beyond, which for Dave Asprey is 180 years in my 24 years of helping entrepreneurs to make rich real, you need three outcomes. You need absolute confidence in your team. You need max wealth both inside and outside your company. And you need sustained wealth. I meet entrepreneurs all the time. They had a huge exit, they made a lot of money and they squandered it because as Joe said in the intro, it's a different skill set to make money than to keep money. To get these three outcomes, there's three main drivers. Entrepreneurs love to grow, but I'm going to leave that to third. The first is protect moving from vulnerable to secure manage, which is moving from uncoordinated to Worry free. And finally grow the part you're excited about. Moving from incremental to exponential. So when you protect and manage, you get absolute confidence. When you manage and grow, you you get maximum wealth. And when you grow and protect, you get sustained wealth. For each of these protect, manage and grow, I created three catalysts and this is where the work is really done. First, asset protection. This is having a plan so your assets can't be taken by a lawsuit. Second is wealth transfer. So making sure the right people get your stuff and money when you're done with it, at the right time, in the right way, without ruining your kids. If you don't have kids, your wisdom as an entrepreneur should be passed on through stories and videos. And then finally, the time energy shield. You should have a wealth manager on your team that protects you from other professionals, pitches and projects. Under manage business value, your business is the most valuable asset you have. You need to get a business valuation to know it's worth. You need a monetization strategy which could be a high multiple exit. Or it could be turning your company into mailbox money where you live a great lifestyle and you go out to the mailbox and pick up a check. If you're under 30, ask an old person at your table what a mailbox is so we can move to the next one. The next is the wealth wheel. You're going to pick up advisors and professionals over your life as an entrepreneur. You're going to pick up an accountant, you're going to pick up an attorney, you're going to pick up an insurance agent. Often they're not all a players, they're not talking to each other. And the worst part is you're in the middle trying to manage that team and you shouldn't be in the middle. And then finally, the linchpin partner. This is who holds the whole thing together. This is a wealth manager who has three distinct qualifications. First, a specialization in working with entrepreneurs. Most financial advisors are generalists. Second, experience in working with entrepreneurs at least 10 or 20 years. And third, a fiduciary standard of care in all dealings with you. That's a fancy legal term. That means the advisor has to by law represent you and your interests before their own. Under grow tax planning, your largest expense as a successful entrepreneur is going to be taxes. You should have a well thought out, annually updated and implemented tax plan investments. I put these in three categories. Private equity, real estate and stocks and bonds. You want to have a smart strategy for how you're handling those areas to build wealth outside of your company and finally, the profit accelerator. Knowing what are your critical drivers to profitability, Having a simple way to monitor and improve those key drivers and by doing that, increase your cash flow. Second thing I want to cover today is the stress test. CEG Worldwide did a study of 199 family offices. These are families that have more than $500 million and 93.5% of them do stress testing. What is stress testing? What does that look like? It's a deep dive with a wealth expert on everything that touches your wealth. So it's looking at your business insurance, your personal insurance, your liability coverages, your estate documents, your asset protection plan, your investment statements, your business tax returns, your personal tax returns, Your P&LS, your business operating agreements, your buy sell agreements, your debt, and even the plans you put together for your employees. At an event like this, I get asked a lot, Jim, what's the first thing I need to do on my wealth management? You need to get a stress test by a qualified wealth manager that does this on a regular basis. We do it for all of our clients and we do it to answer three questions for them. First, are you making any big mistakes? Second, are you missing any opportunities? And third, does your team consist of a players and are they talking to each other? The third is the self assessment. Within the nine categories that I went over earlier, I created a question for each so an entrepreneur like you can find out. Where are you in your wealth planning journey? I only have time to go over two today of the nine, but let's do this together. So question seven of nine is how convinced are you that your annual plan for paying less tax is delivering on all the legal opportunities available to you? This is one to ten. One is bad, ten is excellent. So one might be. Every year the US treasury sends me a birthday card. I hope that's not you. And a 10 would be my plan is second to none. And most likely you're somewhere in between one and 10. Question number five of nine, how confident are you that you could completely forget about your wealth management and still know for sure that your wealth team is proactively driving your wealth forward? A1 would be it's a hot mess and A10 totally confident. We created for the nine questions the make Rich Reel scorecard. And this is my gift to you. Go to makerichreal.com and you can get the scorecard. There's no required opt in. I promise you're not going to be tagged, pixeled, prodded or poked. A lot of smart people in the room could show me how to do that. But that's not the purpose of this. I'm going to leave you today with this story. My office manager buzzed me one day and said, jim, Steve just called and Steve and Joanne are coming in tomorrow. And they said it's urgent. And that concerned me because Steve was a high flying entrepreneur. We had been working together for more than 10 years and Joanne never came in. It was always Steve. He said she didn't care about the finances and that he handled everything. The next day I walked into the lobby to greet them. First I saw Joanne. Her face was pale and she looked sad. Then I looked over and saw Steve. He was in a wheelchair and his hair had fallen out. And I knew immediately that Steve had cancer. No one mentioned the elephant in the room. I got them back into my office and as soon as we got settled, Steve went into the meeting like normal, started talking about our plan and the strategies about the professionals on the team. And when he finished, he looked at me and he said, very matter of fact, Jim, I've got pancreatic cancer. I only have a couple of months to live. Can we go over the part of the plan where I'm not here and it's just Joanne? I looked at Joanne and she had tears streaming down her face. So I went over the plan the way it worked without Steve when he's gone. And when I finished, I looked at Steve and I was surprised to see this look on his face, this look of peace, this look of contentment. And then he looked deep into my eyes and I looked deep back into his and he simply said, you got her? I said, yeah, Steve, I've got her. And we teared up. A couple of months later, Joanne called me to tell me that Steve had passed. And as I hung up the phone, I said to myself, don't worry, Steve, I've got her. Who's got you? Who's got your family? You deserve to have a team of a players. You deserve to have a team that talks to each other. You deserve to have a team that puts your interests before their own. Now is the time to get the team that you deserve.

I want to talk in the second part now about a bold and abundant mindset. And I want to start that with a video. My goal here is for you to up your game. My goal here is for you to think at a level that's uncomfortable. My goal is to have you think at, as Dan and Joe would say, a 10x level or a hundredx level. How are you going to touch a billion people on this planet, how are you going to take on the world's biggest problems and solve them? So let's watch this video and then come back.

The actual moonshot is wonderful, inspirational, poetic, beautiful, involved, great technical challenges, genuine heroism. It brought the world together. But think about the Polynesian islander on the dugout canoe deciding one day they were going to go that way. No one had ever been that way before. No one even knew if there was anything that way before. It was amazing, and it changed the world.

People can set their minds to magical, seemingly impossible ideas, and then, through science and technology, bring them to reality. And that then sets other people on fire, that other things that look impossible might be accomplishable.

Galileo is such a hero, you know, in thinking big. And what he represents to me is both curiosity and wonder that humanity had that he had that pushed him and drove himself to invent and work on the first telescopes that allowed us to see the moon.

And here we are.

These aviation pioneers were figuring it out as they went. No one really knew how to build an airplane, right? No one knew how to fly an airplane. It was amazing and crazy and wonderful, and they wanted to explore.

Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, because it is there.

There's so many challenges in the world, and you could feel daunted by that, you know, and sort of approach by that. Or you kind of say, how might we think differently about this?

Everyone else in the world is working on the next 10%. If you can be the one that delivers that 10 times improvement, you have a chance to really change things.

If you want cars to run at 50 miles per gallon, fine. You can retool your car a little bit. But if I tell you it has to run on a gallon of gas for 500 miles, you have to start over.

You need a lot of courage in this work, and you need a lot of persistence. One of the things that's really critical is not only having the courage to keep trying every day or thinking big even if you don't really 100% believe it's possible. Like you might think this might be possible. Have the courage to try. That's how the greatest things have happened.

You don't spend your time being bothered that you can't teleport from here to Japan because there's a part of you that thinks it's impossible. Moonshot thinking is choosing to be bothered by that.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the Other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Humanity's progress has been a series of amazing, audacious things, from the very small and personal up to the great big and grand. And we are a species of moonshots. And to me, that's like the really amazing, poetic and inspirational thing.

I think our ambitions are a glass ceiling on what we can accomplish.

When you find your passion, you're unstoppable. You can make amazing things happen. It's been true through all of history.

I believe in the human spirit, and I believe that there are always going to be crazy people who get out of bed one morning and say, you know what? I think I can build a space elevator and let's go do it. But I think that if we become afraid to take these great big risks, we stop inspiring people, we stop achieving things. And the biggest nightmare scenario is that we won't have what it takes to. To solve the really big challenges.

When Kennedy said that we would put a man on the moon, it's about the fact that he said, we don't know how to do this yet and we're gonna do it anyway. And that sends chills up everybody's spine because if that happens, what couldn't we.

Yeah, it's great, huh? So the guy speaking in that video is a good friend, Astro Teller. He's the head of Google X and I interviewed him at length for my next book, Bold, and talk about the fact that we're living in a world where you can take moonshots. And his ethos is. Is so true that when you're trying to go 10% bigger, you're competing with everybody else trying to go 10% bigger. When you go 10x bigger, when you have the audacity to say that and try that, it inspires an amazing group of people to come by your side and no one's competing with you there. And the question is, is it really a hundredfold harder? And the chances are that it's not. So I also, in Bold, really drill down into what the eight innovation principles are that Google uses. And then with Stephen, look at how Lockheed Skunk works maps onto that. So one of the most extraordinary companies in mindsets and how do they work? So let me share with you these eight principles. The first is focus on the user. Google's issue, and you'll see this again and again is focus on the user. What does the user need? Pretty obvious, pretty direct. The second is Open will win. I bet ON Android over iOS for that one reason. Open will win the Ability for having billions of people to contribute to you instead of thinking that oh my 10,000 employees are the best and brightest in the world, there's no competition there. The second is ideas can come from everywhere or anywhere. The whole notion of crowdsourcing, we talk about that at Abundance360. We talk about that at Xprize. At HeroX, it's the fact that you can crowdsource solutions from around the world to solve your problems. Think big, start small. So at Singularity University I constantly teach the students start with a product that has the ability to earn a dollar on day but can impact a billion people in a decade. That's the think big, start small. Never fail to fail. This is where big companies screw up, where they don't take risks. And you guys know that as entrepreneurs, never fail to fail the rapid experimentation, launch early and iterate. My friend who's the CEO Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn says if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've launched, launched too late. And I believe that when you look for striving for perfection, you miss the whole benefit of this hyper connected world today. Be a platform, float all boats and then finally, make it matter. Make it matter. Oh my God. Make it matter. So in bold, I talk about a concept that my good friend Salim Ismail Coin, which is having a massively transformative purpose, an mtp do you have for yourself and for your company a massively transformative purpose that matters that's going to attract people to work for you at xprize, it's making the impossible possible or solving the world's grand challenges. So here's the eight. We'll talk about these a little bit more. My question for you is what is the area of your business where you should be going 10 times bigger rather than going 10% bigger? I want you to reflect on that and think about that. Don't have time to do a session now, but ask yourself that question, please. So here's one of the first moonshot organizations. One of the first bold thinkers out there is Kelly Johnson, who in 1943 is called by the Defense Department and says we're losing the war against Nazi Germany and we need a jet plane. Never had a jet plane before. In 143 days, these guys did not design a jet plane. They delivered working hardware. You can't negotiate a contract in 143 days. Today they also delivered the U2, the SR71s. The question is how? How did they do this? And so Inbold actually looked at how Lockheed skunk work. Did this compared this against Google X and came up with some shared elements. And here they are. The first is having a compelling purpose or mission. An MTP that is uniquely yours. Google's is to categorize the world's information and if someone else came up with that MTP this, you know that's Google's. So something uniquely that's yours that attracts the world's top people to come and work for you. The second that Kelly Johnson and Google X share is small teams, a passion around small teams. And this is the words from Kelly Johnson. The number of people connected to any project should be restricted in almost vicious manner. This is Jeff Bezos two pizza rule, right? Teams under 10, ideally five or six, extreme isolation. Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled. Because if you're trying to innovate inside your organization, even 100 people, let alone 5,000 people and you're trying to do something that's disrupting your company, the entire immune organization is going to come out to you and say that's a crazy idea, it can't be done. If you do it, you can put us out of business. What are you doing? Come on, stop it. And so actually taking that skunk works inside your group and isolating it. It's Steve Jobs taking his Mac team to a different building with a pirate flag above. So how do you isolate your team authority and autonomy? The manager must have control of his program, create mutual trust and very close cooperation on a day to day basis. It's the notion that my team at PhD Ventures Abundance360. It's five group, it's a team of five. It's like they're a self managed company. They have the authority and the autonomy to go and run on their own. I learned that from strategic coach.

Of course.

It's all good things. Flexibility must provide a very flexible drawing. So when they designed the fighter jets and the U2 and SR71, there was a drawing in the middle of the room where anybody could go and change the drawing. There was no sort of organizational hierarchy. I need to get this person's permission. You could go and change the drawing of that airplane. And so it provided immense flexibility but also responsibility. Lives were at stake if you screwed up. But it allowed rapid iteration like never before. And then finally testing and experimentation fail often fail. Early test, test, test the next part of the book. I actually had a chance to sit down at length with a number of amazing people. Larry Page, Elon, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson studied their work and came up With a series of eight, I'll share six. Thinking at scale, strategies, passion and purpose. You know, Elon said, I didn't go and build a car company and a rocket company to make money. I'm not crazy. It was like driven by my passion. Thinking at scale and experimentation. Jeff Bezos saying, you know, you need to have thick skin if you're not failing often, if you're not experimenting on a monthly or daily basis, you're not going to innovate. Larry Page saying, you know, we need to be customer centric. We need to be doing stuff and touching stuff that people use every day. Richard Branson saying, we need to have risk mitigation. And again, you guys will get copies of my book. But specifically entrepreneurs are ones who take risk but set it off to someone else. Long term thinking. Jeff Bezos with Amazon is a perfect example of long term thinking. And then finally, you know, optimistic thinking. And Larry gives me credit on abundance often, but it's, you know, it's. We have a reason to be tremendously optimistic in the world today. And having that mindset inside your organization and your company and your family and your life changes how you think about.

The future, fill in the gaps. How did you raise yourself from, you know, homeless to billionaire? I mean, how the hell does that happen?

Well, I think if I put it in one sentence, which is difficult to do when you're really down and out and you're at the very bottom, all you could do is look up. You know, I think it's kind of in life a lot of times when people are down, they look at how to survive while they're down, but stay at that survival mode. Long term opposed to, I'm gonna learn how to survive right now and make it, but I'm immediately gonna work towards the next step. The next step. And the next step.

Yeah.

Great, great. So what was the most difficult, difficult time in your life? I mean, was it. Has it been when you've just been under maybe immense pressure from everything you created, or was it when you were really just at.

No, I think when you're down and out, can't pay the bills the next day, that's the most difficult time. When I was homeless the first time, it was in my early 20s. My wife just couldn't handle being a mother anymore, so left a two and a half year old in my arms and wiped out all the money we had and never paid the rent for three months. So we were actually evicted within three days of the time that happened. And I was in between jobs, but I had money, but she took it all. So my son and I were on the streets with this old car that we were in and we realized that, hey, we're going to make this together. He's a two and a half year old kid. But where do we get money? We don't have any money. So what we did was even though we weren't really thinking ecology, we were thinking survival is. I went around to vacant lots and picked up, you know, Coke bottles, seven up bottles. And in those days you got two cents for a little one, five cents for a big one. So I'd go there and they'd have to give you the money. And that's kind of how we survived. Then a couple, you know, several days later, a dear friend of mine who was what you would call a heavy duty biker with a gang found me. He just found me, old buddy of mine from high school and said, johnny, come on in, your son could come live with me here. And, and we've got a couple really cool biker mamas here that'll help watch him while you get yourself reorganized. So that was a nice break too.

I mean, so how did you learn, how did you learn how to be a successful entrepreneur?

Well, I don't think it's learning how to be a successful entrepreneur. I think it's just being able to do something and know that you have that ability to do it. You see, the human race has the ability, all of you do, to do 10, 50 times what, what you're doing right now. Well, if you realize you have that ability, as you go along, you find obstacles, but you overcome them or you go right around them like water might go around them a little bit. And that's really it. You look at what assets you have. It's a little bit like selling. Whether it's a tangible product or a service, it's got to be the very best. And you put forth its features and then how it benefits the customer. Well, well, with yourself personally, you put forth the features you have how these features might benefit. And if you have a product, and I'd love to share this with everybody, don't ever go into the selling business. Whether you have the greatest service in the world or the greatest product, never go in there to sell your product. Go in there to be in the reorder business. That's kind of your mentality.

That's true, yeah.

Because if you're going to sell it, that's where your focus is. If you want to be in the, the reorder business, even if it's a one time product. Whatever you do is so good that they'll want to tell somebody else reorder themselves. So that kind of helps along the way if you have that mentality. And I think selling. Oh God. Whether it was flower pots when I was a little kid or newspapers or in my early 20s. Encyclopedias, Colliers Encyclopedia, door to door. You knock on 50 doors and they could be closed in your face. You had to learn how to be just as enthusiastic on door number 51 or 105 as you were in the first door. Now that's difficult to do, but you learn how to do that. I believe the average encyclopedia salesman commission only door to door was three days. That's how long they lasted. I lasted about three and a half years. But I learned to kind of overcome rejection and be prepared for it if you're prepared. And we'll cover that a little later too. I saw your questions. If you're prepared for rejection before you start anything, whether it's your personal life, whether it's a business life, when you're prepared for it, it doesn't shock you when you come along and all of a sudden see rejection in your face, you see, well, I was prepared for that, but I'm going to continue on just as enthusiastic and as confident as I was when I started. And that's not easy.

Absolutely. Do you experience rejection, rejection today in the same way you kind of did then and you just keep yourself in an enthusiastic state or is it just much bigger levels of rejection or it's.

A little different today. In those days, let's say you'd knock on 100 doors to get somebody that's reactive to what you're saying who will listen to you. Today it's a little bit easier, I think in life as you build a history that's conducive to a good life, where in business you realize success unsure is failure. You try and be honorable with what you say you're going to do no matter what it costs you. Well, it gives you that clout to be able to talk to people and they know, here's a sincere guy. You know, this guy's a track record of doing things right and not ripping off anybody. And you know, by gosh, there are ups and downs. There definitely are. But much more easier to overcome today.

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. So, yeah, I did prepare some questions that I thought would be the most valuable to have you shared.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So what are your core values, personally and professionally?

Core values are, I would say it's the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. That's the basis for most religions. But they get sometimes carried away in rites and rituals. But that's the core value. Do unto others as you'd have others do unto you. And then it's the feeling of knowing that success unshared is definitely failure. In other words, when you make it, it's not really just about yourself making it. Hey, if you make it, you know you made it. But along the way, one of the great lessons to learn is it's not all about you. It's about your ability to be of service to this planet while you're here. And by saying, me, me, me, me, look what I did. This is me. Hey, here's my velding, my name's on it. You know, I did this, you didn't. By doing something like that, it kind of takes, takes away from how genuine you are. Because people don't like to just listen to people talk about themselves, how great they are. They want to now incorporate it to make them successful also or do something a little different. And I think that's very, very important.

You know what, I hang out with a lot of successful people. Most success in this culture is viewed financially. Although I know a lot of extraordinarily wealthy people that are viewed miserable bastards. So, you know, there's a difference there. The thing that always annoys me is if there's someone that knows the answer to something and there's a person who is asking them about how to build a business or how to do something and they know what to tell the person, but they kind of withhold it, they don't say anything. And I love what your whole notion of success unshared is failure. Because I think that's why, because so many people that know you have said so many great things about such a nice guy, so caring, so generous. And my experience with you has been absolutely that you just want to be.

Helpful, you know, Joe, it's also very self rewarding. We look around and I'm a child of the 60s, so I know what we were looking at in the 60s for self rewards. But anyways, the highest high you're going to ever get in your life, the highest high, if you want to be satisfied, the highest high you'll ever get is to do something for somebody else and ask absolutely nothing in return. Boy, do you feel high and are you energized? And that lasts a while. It's very contagious.

Yeah, totally.

Thank you.

So what is your decision Making, process or thinking when it comes to investing your time, your money, your energy.

Sure, it's very important because time is the most valuable thing you have is one. Make sure where you're putting your time and energy is something you want to do, not just because you're exploring with people you don't like or a business you don't like, or a situation you don't like. Time is so valuable. Try and speak. If you're speaking to people or a situation to people you feel there's hope for, that you could do something with. To do something great, not just make money. Whenever you go into business or in a relationship with someone just to make money, then it means you've already decided to take a portion of your time to make the. These papers that are backed up by nothing but will buy stuff. Call it a possession. We have all these great possessions. Well, if you have these great possessions, could you give them away? If you had any possession, you could give it away. Hey, great, it was a possession and you moved on. If you can't give that possession away to somebody, just give it away. Then it possesses you.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. When I look out at a lot of, A lot of my friends, they don't own their houses, their boats, their planes, their stuff. It owns them. So there's.

That's very important in life. I think you develop a way of, you know, having what you have, have our wonderful things, but understand that you have them. If something happens to them, don't get upset. Something happens. Don't get upset. If you lose some money, don't get upset. You know, just be so grateful, gracious for what you have already and know that you're going to come back and do something else. Yeah.

You know, I don't know how you would describe this, but my sense of when I think about you without really knowing kind of your MO on how you do it, is that you are very skilled at where and who and what gets your attention. Like your attention is such a valuable asset. And when I first met you, I was introduced to you by our friend Dave Kekich and when. And then you called me because you don't have an email. And I would love to have you share how you manage people reaching out to you, how you manage communications. Because I don't know if you have an email now, but you didn't have an email. And I was like, wow, you know, think about that.

I still don't. And I'll roll over to the last question also that you asked about. How do you get into situations. When I started John Paul Mitchell Systems, I had been in the beauty industry. And I knew there was an opening for products that were unique and different, that weren't in salons. Even though I had no money, that's what I went after. When I started patron tequila in 1989, we were doing shots. You'd hold your breath. I knew there had to be a way to get something so smooth and the world was ready no matter what the cost was of a sipping tequila. Hence, Patron came out. Harley distributor says, you'll never make it. It costs too much to make. You have to sell it for $37. And who cares if you sit around and sip and enjoy that tequila. And even though you don't get a headache the next day with Patron unless you drink the whole bottle, we don't advise that. Okay. That, you know, people don't care, see? But they do care. And I believe that there was a better way to do it. When I got involved with John Paul Pett, I knew there was a business I would start where my profits would help out pets throughout the world. With the profits, not with me. I knew it had just a good thing. When I got involved with Irwin Jacobs and Marquis yachts. That was something that I did that realizing that during the bad situation of 2008-2011 12, that the boat industry was down. But if you had the highest quality boats, by gosh, this is the time to get in. And that's when he and I got in it together. And I'll tell you a little bit later about Rock Mobile and about aveo. But you look for the situation, the quality, quality of the product, what the end result's gonna be, and the people you're with are these cool people. Do you all have the same energy together to kind of move forward?

Yeah, I think that's so critical because trying to do business, there's no such thing as a great business with a bad partner.

No. Yeah. For any amount of money whatsoever. Yeah.

So you obviously like how big is between your companies? How big is your team, your staff, your employees?

We're in the thousands. We don't tell Forbes everything because I like to be low key. In fact, I wouldn't even be on that list if it wasn't for Bacardi getting involved to get a little piece of patronal minority interest many years ago. I try and stay off that list. Off that list. Okay. But I have darn good people, darn good partners that work with me and they're just the very, very best. And the end result is we have thousands. But I'd like to share with everybody here, if I could, how we treat our people and what, why we, these thousands, love us. Let's take John Paul Mitchell Systems. I started the company 35 years ago. We are in 90 countries. Our turnover in 35 years is less than 70 people. But I teach people to do unto others as you do unto you. There were so many times, Joe, when I worked for people at a dollar for lunch. You don't get much for a dollar. So as soon as we could afford some money, first thing I did was give everybody free lunch. Today, even in Mexico, with my staff and my partners down there, 1500 of them that make the patron. If you work during the day, a chef makes you lunch. If you work at night, a chef makes you dinner. You want to pray, I build you a chapel. At John Paul Mitchell Systems. No matter where you are, you've got free lunch. If you carpool, we take care of that gasoline for you. So you do things for people. If we have a good profitable year, and every year we have, we share through profit sharing with all of our people, but we treat them the way we'd want to be treated ourselves. It's not like we're bosses. It's, you're my partner, right? Anybody could pick up the phone and call me. I don't have email. And the reason I don't is I'd be inundated with all the stuff I do, business wise, philanthropically, not to mention family. I'd be so inundated, I could, couldn't do all the things that I do and expand upon it. I couldn't have had email. So I'll take a phone call, obviously, go through my executive assistant. I'm inundated. And if so, this is important, I think, for you guys to know. If someone writes you a letter, people just email back and forth. Try some time, if someone writes you a letter, to take their letter and write the answer on it and sign it and then mail it back to them or pick up the phone and call it, it means a lot to people, have that personal touch a whole lot.

Infinitely greater than electronic communication. Yeah, I mean, one of the things, like every day trying to send 10 personal postcards, even if it's coming from my team, it makes such a huge impact. I mean, it's the simplest thing. I mean, if someone just hand wrote a note to 10 people a day or figured out how to have with your team, your assistant do it. And you did that for a year straight, your Life would transform in terms of the depth of the relationship.

Sure.

And it's such a simple thing to do. So did you come across this method of communication or you just knew intuitively that I'm not going into this, this world of email? Did you, have you ever had an email and you're like, this is crazy, there's no way this works?

Yeah. Well, when I started looking at it and looked at people around me just being on the computer all the time, even though all my companies, believe me, are state of the art computerization, they're technocrats anyways. So I get my reports the way I want them, but I saw that it takes so much time and I wouldn't be able to call people as much or write, hand write people, special people letters or, you know, being able to do or time to think. At least in my case. Not for everybody. But in my case I thought, mmm, let me try and stay away from this. And it worked.

Yeah. Awesome, awesome. So what, what does success and happiness look like and mean to you? I mean, how do you think about that?

Success? Success is not how much money you have, which a lot of people equate to success. Success is how well you do what you do. How well do you do what you do? And do you continue doing it that well? Do you master mastering something is doing it extremely well, but doing it that way every time and then having the ability to grow from there and realizing success and shared as failure. Now how can a janitor be extremely successful? I'll take a quick minute with a quick story. Worked all my life, from 7 years old and then paper routes at 11 years old. Throughout high school. I worked for a while at Stuart's Cleaners. I'm the guy that swept the floors, put the little drape on the hanger and just did all the work after school and on Saturdays. And Stuart was so tight, this guy squeaked. They paid me a dollar and a quarter an hour because he had to or he'd give me 75 cents an hour. Anyway, anyways, one day after school he calls me and says, johnny, come over here. He says, last night I was working late. I went up to my mezzanine to lay on my cot for a few minutes and I took my watch off, put it on the table, dropped on the floor. So I went down there to pick up my watch and looked under the cot and there was no dust. Well, the cots light, I moved it. No dust. Look behind the cabinet.

No dust.

Picked up a rug, no dust. You clean this as if I'm watching you every single minute. But, Stuart, that's my job. You hired me to it. And my mom, growing up, taught the boys how to clean. I know how to clean. So my job, which I like, my job is to do the best job I can. Whether you tell me or not, that's my job. He was so touched. He said, johnny, I'm giving you a 25 cent an hour raise to $1.50 an hour. Oh, my God. For Stewart to do that, it's like, wow, I won the Academy Award. But the lesson learned is this successful people, whether you're working for somebody else or working for yourself, do whatever you do as if whoever's really involved is watching you every single minute do it. And that's difficult for people to do. If you can do that, you do your job so well. I had a housekeeper once, 66 years old. Everything was great. I said, deanie, go home. No, mister, I'm going to stay here. Okay. For the next two and a half hours. Watch Mexican television. I know you like to watch it. No, mister, I'm not going to do it. Why? She says, because I'm 66 years old, you think I'm going to waste my life watching television? I'd be more productive and happier if I found something I missed dusting. I'm going to go through the whole house again. And she was genuine in what she said. She loved what she did and who she did it for. That's success.

That is really awesome. I mean, talk about just having that as an operating system, how that would just pave the path of your. Your future.

And don't be afraid to say you're wrong. Many of my staff will come over and say, jp, that's great, but this way would have been a little bit better. Be open to that. Can't be your ego. Well, yeah. You know what? Your idea is not bad. Mine's not the best one in the world. By being open, also, it helps you grow.

Well, so what, what, what would you consider yourself just really skilled at? And what are you just not skilled at?

Do you think about. Yeah, I would say I don't think about it, but I think what I'm really skilled at is being lucky enough. Lucky enough in life to be able to have the ability to listen to somebody else tentatively. In other words, listen to them, everything they're saying and not just think about what you're going to say next. And that took a while. I think I'm pretty good at that. And I think I'm also pretty good at being Nice to people. I believe in just being nice in life, just being nice, even with people have just a lousy day and maybe do some really stupid things, try and handle the end result in a nice manner. If we did more of that in the world, we wouldn't have wars and everyone would take care of everybody. I think that's important.

Well, absolutely. I mean, one of the ways that I gauge who I develop deeper relationships with because I interact with a lot of people is how people that are more powerful treat people that are less powerful than them. I mean, it bugs the shit out of me when I see someone kiss ass to someone who they want to, you know, curry favor with because they want something. And then they're, you know, they don't say thank you if someone opens up a door or they're rude to, like a wait staff or something.

I've seen a little bit of that. I see a little bit of that. And when you all see a little bit of that, just learn from and say, whoa, that's not going to be me. That's not cool. Yeah, exactly.

Well, it's.

Yeah.

Everybody has a purpose in life, even if it's to serve as a bad example. So what are you not good at that you have learned to avoid because, you know, it's just not your thing? Like, Dan Sullivan has a thing called unique ability where you're skilled, and then he has.

You know, what I'm not good at is taking all the time to do all the little details. Fill out expense reports, just all the details. I leave that to accountants or leave that to other people better than that. And try and take that segment of my life and think in that segment or do something else. I have a little saying that I picked up selling encyclopedias. And it's pay attention to the vital few. Ignore the trivia. Many. Yeah, too many people get tied up. I know. I was at the CIA on a couple times. I trained them in management motivation. And to Buzzy Krongar, their executive director, I said once, I want to teach all you guys here how to handle a piece of paper once. He said, at the CIA, if we could handle a piece of paper 100 times, we'd be doing good. In other words, fewer moving parts. Try and pay attention to the vital few. Ignore the trivia. Many. Or let somebody else handle that that might be much more capable than you.

No, that's awesome. So clearly you have really learned how to build teams, encourage teams, grow. Grow teams. And so you're obviously very good at having set up management structures which I think first stems from self management. You obviously learned how to manage yourself. If you could speak to that, you know, how do you not go off the rails at times? I'm sure you have, but you've learned from this. So what would you say about self management?

Yeah, we all have self management. My God, I could take it back to the US military when I was in the Navy. If you wanted clothes, you folded your own clothes, you know, and they had to be exactly perfect and you had to manage your locker and manage your time. A little bit of a start managing yourself and your time. If you cannot manage yourself and your time, where you're just at the end of the day totally frustrated, or three phones are going at one time and you haven't figured out how to that one yet. Don't think that you're a manager. You got to manage yourself first, your time, how you allocate it. The time you have for your family, the time you have for yourself. Very important, the time you have for yourself. Many people, especially entrepreneurs coming up forget that they're busy from morning to night and well, where's your time? It's like money. If you get money, whether you work for somebody or make money, what do you do first? Most people, you pay all the bills, whatever's left. Well, then I have something opposed to. Another philosophy is pay yourself for what you've done. Pay yourself first, even 5%, take it off the top and just stick it in a stupid savings account. If you had to, just pay yourself something first. If you can't afford 10%, 5%, then believe me, the rest of the money will be allocated out. Take care of yourself first, that's part of your own self management. And then try and find some time. I find love to share this with you. About five minutes in the morning, I wake up in the morning, do obviously what you have to do, do when you wake up. Then I go right back to bed and I try and clear my space. Let's say I'm in this room. I will look at the ceiling, look at the walls. I will be in present time or try to. And then I normally have just one saying, you know, creator of souls, thank you for all that you've blessed me with and may I go forward to be able to do something that helps make this world a better place. And try and be in total present time. Not about what I'm going to do today, not about my next appointment, just be. And then when you wake up, your head's a little clearer, your mind's a little Clearer and it's not cluttered.

That's great.

It works. Love it. Love it.

Well, you're buddies with Tony Robbins. Yesterday I interviewed Tony and Peter Diamandis over here, founder of the X Prize. And they talked about morning rituals with and Tony does a thing called priming where he primes himself. And so I love hearing people's rituals because what they do in their habits is what creates their life.

You can do that on the road, you can do it in an airplane. And it's free, right? Don't have to carry anything. Yeah.

Awesome.

So what's the biggest or most important business lesson that you have learned either on purpose or by accident?

By accident. One of the biggest business things that I ever learned was I started John Paul Mitchell Systems with $700. The business partner I started with was a top hairdresser, but it didn't do business. I didn't do hair. So we had no money. No money. Okay. So I did 10 or 15 things. After six months, we were able to hire our first employee. Shirley Wong was her name. I gave Shirley 10 jobs and said, I hope you could do them, Shirley. Whatever you can to, honey, I'll figure out how to help you. Shirley learned how to do 10 jobs. Not one, but 10. Then I realized, wow, it's not just the person that start the company through necessity, but people do a heck of a lot more than what people say you should be doing. We're all capable of that. So that point forward, I paid people very well, but gave them the opportunity to do more than. This is just your job. This is just your job. Now that might be anti union. Okay, no disrespect to the unions. Okay, no disrespect, but when one has the ability to do whatever they can do that they want to do, give you the end result. Four months ago, I'm in my office, I fly from Austin to LA, had do some work. My staff closes up at 4:30. Some come in at different hours in the morning to miss traffic. So by 5:30, I'm there and I hear something in the office. So I go back there and there's a couple girls working, a couple guys who said, what are you doing here? Hey, it's an hour, two hours after we close. What are you doing here? They said, jp, we love, love working here and we wanted to finish these little projects. I said, how many people are here? They said, I don't know. Hey, who's here? JP's here. 12 people came out with the same exact thing. JP, we just want to Be here. We know we don't have to be here. We're not paid for this. We want to be here. We love what we're doing, jp. We just want to finish this. You know, they didn't want to leave. Well, needless to say, we all went out for a really good dinner and a couple great bottles of wine and a little bit of good tequila too. Anyways, we were a team. But when people feel good and respected and you give them the ability to do more than this is just what the job is. You'd be amazed at how they expand their business for our size company. Take John Paul Mitchell Systems. I should be in the thousands with employees. John Paul Mitchell Systems alone now this includes the warehouse has 300 employees. That's it for the world. Now we have about 800 part time, but 300 full time employees for the world. Petrona has a lot more because hand bottles blown out of recycled glass. We have a lot of labor intensive there but you can't have fewer moving parts. But my people do. My family, they do more. More than three times that many people because they love what they're doing and who they do it for. Very important.

That's awesome. Well, you know, I mean, just as an aside, I, I got some prepared questions here, but I want to do all your questions.

They're great questions. Let's do them all.

I'll do these and then I'll put.

Anything to the side. I'm here for you.

I'm going to ask you after this thing. I have an interesting question. So what have been one or two of your biggest business or life challenges and how did you get through them?

Well, the first one was obviously starting Paul Mitchell with $700 and living for the second time in my car because our backer pulled out. That was extremely difficult. How do you start a company, balance your bills, not going to be paid, knock door to door selling your products, Extremely difficult. That story would take up too much time to tell you right now. But if you want to see that story, there was a fellow named Donny Deutsch who on CNBC had the big idea. I was on his show four times. He has a half hour special on step for step. How I did it and how you, how the hell do you do it on $700 and no money? Start a company and grow it. So it was along the way that was the biggest challenge. And you want to know the success out of that? This was a success. How do you know you were successful two years later? We should have gone bankrupt every Single day, two years later, we were able to pay our bills on time. Not pay them off, but pay them on time. We said, hey, we made it and we got $2,000 left over. We made it, we're successful, but we're all happy. And that was a real challenge. Another challenge is on. There's many businesses I started that didn't go so well, but they were good learning experiences where when I had a partner that I really trusted and they're like stealing money or kind of stabbing in the back, that was very, very disappointing. But on the whole, other partners are really great. So it weighed itself out. Yeah.

Well, I think how many of you have ever had embezzlement in your company? Yeah. So I mean it's usually. It's not a matter of if, it's just a matter of when.

Yeah. And try and handle with love. When you do. I mean it's kind of like you son of a. Anyways, try and have love. Hey, you screwed up man. Now what are we gonna do to make this right? You know, I mean you handle these things when they come up and it happens in life, you know, just something that happens and I'm sure it'll happen again somewhere along the way.

Yeah, awesome.

Handle it love.

So what's the most useful life and business advice you can give to someone who is a high level achiever or entrepreneur? Not just startups, but people that are already at a certain level because the vast majority of people here are run very successful companies.

One sentence, success. Unshared is failure. One sentence with your own people, with your family, with your friends and the world, success. Unshared is failure. We have 118 Paul Mitchell schools nationwide of cosmetology. They're all taught over several months, a culture of giving back. They all do fundraisers. We pay for the whole fundraiser. Every dime goes into their local community, their state, our country and the world to make it a better place to live. Success, unsure it is failure. And you don't need money to be shared sharing. You could do just something nice. Yeah.

Awesome.

Thank you. So when it comes to money making it, keeping it, giving it away, what should every person in this room know?

Have six months worth of what it costs you to live in the bank in cash. If things went wrong, I mean about movie theater tickets, gasoline, insurance, have that in the bank. No matter what happens, you know you're going to survive the way you survive right now for a period of six months minimum. I would say try and eliminate as much debt as possible. Pay off your house if you can. First, very, very important. And then as you're making money, whenever you make money, don't invest at all. Oh, my God, don't invest at all. You're investing on the next thing to come along. That's fine. But take a portion of it in of a secure investment. You're not going to lose. Take a portion of that and be a little conservative on that one. So as you're building your own empire, you're building something for you and your family and your friends in the future that no one could touch. Then, of course, with others, you want to take gambles, you want to invest it in, in yourself and your own growth. But take a little piece of everything and pay yourself first where it's a stable investment so that you feel really, really good. And the bigger you get, the harder it is to make sure you're investing money. I'm part of a group called the Giving pledge. There's about 103 of us, Warren Buffett, Mike, Bill Gates, and a few of us. And we've already pledged, we were so blessed in life that 50% of our wealth while we're alive or after we die, will go to make the world a better place to live. But we found in our seminars that we do. You've got to check who you give the money to. There's certain great charities, but 50% of it goes to fundraising. In one case, 80% went to fundraising, 20% went to actually helping the people out. So when you do that, check it out. But don't just give money. Give something that'll let somebody do something for themselves to continue. It's like, you feed somebody, hey, it's good, and you should feed people. But when you teach them how to fish, they could do it themselves. So that should be part of what you're doing. What's the end solution? Long term, not just what's a Band Aid?

Gotcha.

Great.

So what are the key characteristics that you think make the best leaders?

One, be empathetic. If somebody comes to you and talks to you and they're just pouring their heart out to you, listen, you may have been there once yourself, once, and nobody ever listened to you. Listen to that. A great leader is someone that could listen. A great leader that doesn't look at, okay, what am I going to get out of this? The great leader looks at, what's the entire team going to get out of this? And how does this benefit the end customer, not just me and my team, how do they benefit more than anybody else? And when you have that mindset, it's easy to move ahead. And you move ahead with a lot of people that are right on the same, shall we say, thought pattern that you're on. Very important.

Yeah.

Awesome. So what are you working on now? Because you're working on a lot of stuff that you're most excited about.

I'll just mention too. And it's ways that. And those that have really made it big financially or businesses. Think about the next thing you do, how it benefits the world, and don't be too greedy in your profits. One of them is called ROK R O K Rock Mobile. We knew there was a better way. And if I could take someone that is spending $1,000 and immediately have them only spend $300, they just made $700. What's your mobile phone cost? You know what your mobile phone costs you? Rock Mobile and my partners are the biggest phone companies in our nation. Some of the biggest phone companies in the nation are my. My partners, my carriers, all the big record companies are my partners. $49.95 a month. 49.95amonth. Right. All your phone calls, all your texting, all your data with no limitations, and all Your music, over 20 million songs, all straight on down, no limitations whatsoever. Flat feed. And in approximately, we think about three or four months, we'll be able to put on international calls for maybe another 15, $20. On top of all that, no roaming. But in the United States, that's it. Well, that's revolutionary because the average phone bill on a cell phone is a heck of a lot more than that.

Can you do this with an iPhone?

Yep. Any phone you have, it's done on any telephone you have. You don't have to, you know, get rid of your phone, take your existing phone. If you need a phone, they'll help sell you a phone. But, you know, existing phones, any kind of phone you have, just transferred on over, you know, it's very, very unique. Now, you'll notice if you go online to rockmobile.com that whatever carrier, pick maybe the carrier you already have, and it's a heck of a lot less what we charge than what that carrier charges. Well, if there's a charge to disconnect from that carrier, that 100 or 200 bucks a month, you know, or just 100 or $200 flat fee, you got to pay it. You know, we can't do that. That for you. But when you look at what you say, well, maybe you'll make it back in a month or two. The other one is. And it's revolutionary. What? Because I always wanted to affect, which most of us probably do, millions of people everywhere. The next one is Abio Aubio. Au is the chemistry sign for gold. Bio, of course, for nature. Nature's gold. Abio. Most of the population of our planet has one form or another, the herpes complex. Now, the herpes complex is like a cold sore, a fever blister, a mouth ulcer, as well as, you know, oral or genital herpes. And there's other types of herpes in that category.

In this room, it would be probably much higher.

Okay. Anyways, I worked with some genius people. It goes all the way back to the Native Americans. And over the last several years, I finally put millions of dollars into it. Double blind studies and everything else. It's topically applied. You topically apply it, right? And let's say if someone has a cold sore, you feel a tingle when it comes out, you put it on every hour. And more than 90% of everyone that does it, it doesn't come out. But if it comes out, you put it on. And in over 90% of all people, you put on every hour for a day or 2. In about 90% of all people, it disappears. In a matter of a couple of days, it's gone. I mean, it's a revolutionary product. Unbelievable. I did it under two conditions. Number one, we'd be able to have something that was all plants that was topically applied. And it is all grown in the United States of America. Some of them are very hybrid plants. Like we took some carnivorous plants and hybrid them. But number two, and this is an important thing, I wanted to be available to everybody, and everybody could afford it. I didn't want it to sell for $1,000, a little tube or 500. I want everyone to afford it. Try a retail of $39.95. That's it. So now. And we just launched it right now. Just being launched right now. But throughout the world, it's amazing. The majority of the world has one form or another of this therapy complex that this could address and be extremely beneficial on. And a lot of doctors and other people are very excited that we have something like that. And I know when I looked at your demographics graphics that about 30% of you are in direct marketing. If you want to see what the model is with Abio, you're very welcome to, but I won't. Take your time right now. Go to abio.com, you'll see what the model is there for merchandising that product. And they'll get back to you, Rachel, or some will get back to you. But that was something where I wanted something that was necessary. There was a need in the marketplace. Research had shown that involving plants on it did so such a great result. I mean people were blown away at what this product did. So I knew it was something that was necessary. I knew if I priced it properly, it was benefiting the world. So by doing that, yeah, maybe I've made a little bit less money, but I still made enough money. And what did I do with this extra money? It's going to give me ways to go and help more people on this planet with revenues do more things.

Wow, that's.

And better things.

So do you yourself seek out things like this or are they brought to you on a con? Because I imagine you're barraged with a bazillion people.

Barraged. And I would say I probably get hit with a hundred things a week. Maybe my assistants go through everything and I may see one occasionally because I am over inundated. There's no more room for anything in my life. Business wise. But along the way, if you leave yourself open, just leave yourself open to the universe and that, believe me, it works. Just leave yourself open, things will come your way and either interest you or doesn't interest you. So let's see, 10 things came my way that really interest me in a big way. And I got involved with, let's say, eight of those things. Okay, eight of those things I got involved with, well, maybe four of them went wrong, but the others went really, really right. Leave yourself open the universe. Get a feeling. What do you feel in your gut? Not just what does it say on paper and how much you're going to make. What do you feel in your gut? Is this something that'll do the greatest good for the greatest number, Be beneficial and if it is, you'll still make your profits. But you're going to do it with light, with light in your eyes and light in your soul. Very important. The frequency of our planet is changing, Joe. It's rising more and more people. Believe it or not, if you look at the news, more and more people are doing things for other people, people than ever before. It is rising regardless of how bad it seems in the news. The planet's getting better.

Well, what's perfect is we got the author of the book Abundance, Peter Diamandis here, who you know, is clearly proven that the world is getting better on all levels. That's great. So what are you most proud of in your life?

Two Things one and one of my fellow brothers from Horatio Algeria is part of your group here. I was able to in the Supreme Court receive the Horatio Alger Award. It's the only award given to the Supreme Court. And it's for Americans that went through a lot of adversity, but shared along the way to help make America a better place to live. And I was very, very proud of that because I know I did a lot and continue to do a lot. And to be able to know that someone that's with a high school education that was able to do this, that America still works. And that was an unbelievable proud moment. Another proud moment was, was when I started grow Appalachia several years ago. All these people on welfare, on how to get them fed and put them all in businesses, in agriculture. We have 30,000 people just eating off their own gardens now and going to farmers markets, selling their eggs, selling their products. And it was something I was able to do philanthropically and see an unbelievable result. Very proud. Needless to say, all my kids, my family, wife, everyone is doing great. My loved ones are doing really, really great. And my God. Hello out there. I love you. A lot of great people are doing a lot of good things right now. And I'm very proud of my association with them, to give them a helping hand. Do that.

Yeah.

You know when we talked backstage and even when I interviewed you, you know that I'm doing work with addiction. I'm doing a documentary on helping addicts. And you have a, you have a tequila company and you actually gave the land to, to Arbor. Talk about that. For them to build a recovery center.

You betcha. In Georgetown, Texas. I bought this fabulous ranch, almost 80 acres. We put horses there for equine therapy. And I built it out for them so that people would have a place to go. It's quite a program. But get an end result. I saw even within close friends of mine, close to me, they would go into rehab, come out of rehab, go right back into rehab. A revolving door. And I knew there had to be a different way. Some wonderful people, Justin, Harvey and Jim and several others found a way because they were addicts. How to get out of it but stay out of it. And put a whole program together where someone had to go there for three months and live, but then for the next 12 months be monitored. I believe they have the lowest return factor anywhere in the nation, maybe even the world, because they cared about, about it cost wise. It was very exciting too. You go to some of these shishi rehab places, they're extremely expensive, 60, 70,000amonth. Their whole year long program. Actually it's more than a year is, I believe it's 48, 49, I mean thousand dollars, that's all. And which is really cheap. Consider there's room and board involved in this.

Right.

So they did and they have a smaller program but it was able to have good results therapy by, you know, communicating with horses, communicating with one another, keeping the guys and girls separated and having a good end result. I believed in that. And by the way, I don't own any part of the company. I got the land and basically a cost. I let them just pay me back over a long period of time for the whole infrastructure I put in for them.

That's great.

It's helping people out.

Awesome. So you know, with Paul Mitchell Systems and Patron and Rock Mobile and all the different things, things that you're doing, you know, I sit and I can't help but think of like a guy like Elon Musk, you know, with SpaceX and SolarCity and Tesla. These types of entrepreneurs are so damn unique where they can be in charge or running or owning something like you know, either all of it or parts of that. Who do you call for advice? I mean, when you're like, I need to figure out what to do, do you employ those people people or do you have like a few key relationships that coach you, that help you, that when you just don't, you know, how do you know?

The answer is I don't. If there's something I don't know something about, I'll look within my own groups of families to see if there's someone there that could answer it. Or I look for outside advice from someone that knows a heck of a lot more than me. I go out there and I seek it. I don't have a regular ongoing mentor that I go to. If it's law, I'll go here. Of its administration, I'll go here. If it's getting rid of AIDS to the world, I'll go here. You know, I look for those people that are much more knowledgeable than I, much more. And they're out there, you know, And I think I do this because if you go to one or two people, which is wonderful, if you have good people, as long as those people are smart enough and kind enough to say, I know so much, but boy, this person can know a hell of a lot more, go to them also.

Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to cl. Click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.