The 7 Greats Behind Explosive BUSINESS GROWTH! (Master These!) Feat. Brian Tracy

I talk about what I call the greats, the 7 greats in business. The, the, the, the, and actually my 3-day seminar has the 10 greats. But the 7, the 7 greats in business I'll give you briefly. First of all, successful companies have great leadership. And leadership is the ability to get results. But it's also the ability to allocate resources, which means it's the ability to make decisions and to make hard decisions. Because if it were easy decisions, everybody would be a leader and everybody would be rich. So making decisions using thinking, slow thinking, using long-term thinking, is the critical job of the leader. Drucker says the first job of the leader is to ask, what results are expected of me? And then I add to that, of all the results that are expected of you as a leader, what is the most important result that you need to get to achieve the sales and profitability for which you are responsible? One of the rules that we learn in business, we never complain about anybody or anything in our business, because we're the boss. We're the ones who decided this. You don't complain about your staff because you hired the person. If you don't like the person, get rid of them. Don't complain about them, you just sound like an idiot. You know, it's like picking up food from the buffet down there and saying, I don't like this food. Well, I never have liked this food. I've always hated this food. Well, why did you pick it up? Well, I don't know. The fact is you never complain about something in your business if you're in charge of it. If you don't like it, change it. If you don't want to change it, shut up. Now, which allows me to jump actually forward, is one of the marks of superior entrepreneurs is that they're intensely solution-oriented. Is whenever something goes wrong, they immediately go calm and they say, all right, what's the solution? What's our next action? What mediocre people do is they say, who did it and who's to blame? How did this happen? They go on a witch hunt. And of course that makes them become angry and frustrated. But superior executives, when something goes wrong, problem with a customer, problem with money, problem with bills, problem with product delivery or defects, they say, okay, all right, how do we solve this? What's the solution? Now here's a wonderful thing, is your success in life will be determined by your ability to solve problems. My friend Colin Powell said leadership is the ability to solve problems. Success is the ability to solve problems. And how do you become really excellent at problem solving? I just finished a book, by the way, called Creativity and Problem Solving that Amacom is publishing in New York at the end of this year. It's because I did years of research on the subject. Here's the point, is the way that you solve problems is simply to think about solutions. What are all the possible solutions? Be intensely solution-oriented. Don't allow yourself to get bogged down, negative, upset, unhappy about the problem and who did it. Focus on the solution and the actions that you can take. And when you start to think about the solutions, remember Helen Keller's wonderful line, when you turn toward the sunshine, the shadows fall behind you. When you start thinking about solutions, we could do this, we could do that, and you could do this and I could do that, when you start thinking about solutions, your mind goes calm, your creativity turns on. Like lights, you start to have more energy, you start to feel more confident, and so on. Are you with me so far? Thinking about problems makes you negative and shuts down your brain. Thinking about who's to blame is even worse. But thinking about what you can do and the actions you can take puts you back in charge. Well, the second principle, and I talked about the second, the second great is having a great product or service. And this to me was, was and is a revelation. And it's so simple it stares you in the face, but 90% of your success in business will be to have a great product in the first place. And this is something that many people miss. They think if I have a good product and I pay thousands of dollars and go to really clever seminars, they'll teach me some marketing gimmicks and tricks so I can con people into buying it. And they spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to advertise or market what is a mediocre product. And I had a good friend, Mitch, and Mitch owned 3 first-class restaurants, and he did no advertising for the restaurants, and the restaurants were always full. And when people said, where do you want to go for dinner? Let's see if we can get into one of those restaurants. And so I asked him, I knew him very well because we worked in the same organization. Dr. Allard, my mentor, owned the 3 restaurants, and Mitch was a part owner, and he ran them. And he could just start an excellent restaurant. I said, I said, what is your secret to promotion? How come these restaurants are always full? And he said, we always put it on the plate. I said, how do you mean? He said, we put superb food at good prices on the plate and just stand back. And the restaurants are full all 7 days a week. And I always thought that's the key to success in business. Put it on the plate. Put it on the plate. Put the quality, put everything into the product or service. Now, the Inc. magazine does a story on the Inc. 500, the 500 fastest growing companies in America taken over a 3-year period, and every year they update it. The last edition, which came out a couple of months ago, was— showed that the number 1 fastest growing company was— it grew 42,500%. 42,500%. Unbelievable it grew so fast. Others grew 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 times in 2 or 3 years. All new companies, or reasonably new companies, all companies started by people like the people in this room, and they grew 5, 10, 50, 20, 100 times.

Wow!

What was the key? So they went back and they did— had outside researchers analyze it, and you know what they found? Is all the companies put it on the plate. Is every one of them was obsessed obsessed with quality, and obsessed with quality as their customers defined it. And they were close to the customer. They were locked tight to the customer. As I was sharing his idea about— what was it called? What was your WTC? What did you say about customers? Joe Polish, think like a customer. I was sharing that on my conference today. Think like a customer. The very best companies think like a customer. What do customers want? What do customers need? And you know, the key to success is make your customers happy, and then make them happier than your competitors. And then every single day, wake up and think, how can I make my customers happier? And they went and they interviewed the CEOs of the 500 fastest growing companies, and every one of them was obsessed with customers. They thought about customers, they talked about customers, they visited customers, they called customers, they went and saw customers, they personally responded to customer complaints. They were just obsessed with it, which again repeats that 90% of your success will be the quality of your product or service. Now, how can you tell if you have a great product or service? Well, it's a very simple test, and this is the test that predicts your future more than any other test for the rest of your business career. How often, how many people after they have used your product or service turn to another person and say, geez, that's a great product, geez, that's a great service, geez, that's a great company, geez, those are great people. How many people say this is a great product? What percentage? 50%, 40%? Average in America is about 30%, 35%. Top companies, companies like Apple that come out with an iPod, an iPhone, and an iPad, people consumed the product. The next time they come out with an iPhone, they sleep on the sidewalks in rows of hundreds to be the first purchasers. They come out with an iPad, they sleep— hundreds are sleeping on the sidewalks to buy it and pay outrageous amounts. And then they start showing everybody else, isn't this a great product? And then they have apps, look at this app, look what you can do with this app. How many people have an iPod 5, an iPhone 5, okay? How many of you showed other people the panoramic thing, how you can take panoramic pictures. Isn't that a great concept? You know it used to cost thousands of dollars to have panoramic cameras that could take a panorama, and now you've got it in your iPhone as one of 100 or 1,000 different things you can do. So people who buy their products become their preeminent salespeople. They're running around grabbing people and bothering them and showing them the product, or bragging about the product. In a movie, by the way, The movie companies only have enough advertising for the one weekend. They could take big ads for one weekend to get people into the theater quickly. After that, the movie will either grow or die by word of mouth. And your movies that are successful, by word of mouth, everybody's talking. Have you seen that movie? You gotta see that movie. Honey, I just heard about this movie at work, let's go tonight. You weren't even planning to go to a movie, and you go there on Tuesday night and the theater's full. Have you had this experience? You see, and everybody's talking about it, the most important key to our success. So go back to the Inc. study, and I'm looking for corroborations. In the Inc. study, they did, had researchers say, what is the very best place for a company to invest if they want to increase their sales and profitability? And the answer came back after looking at everything else is invest in improving the quality of your product. Invest in improving the quality of your product. Make the product better and better and better. Make your customers happier and happier. Make your customers so happy, I say that the key to success is to get your customers to buy from you first rather than from your competitor, to buy again because they are so happy, and to bring their friends. And if that becomes your operating theme, we could talk about this all day, is getting them to buy from you, buy again, and tell their friends, then you're going to be successful, you're going to be wealthy, you're going to be respected, And more than anything else, you're going to be just as happy as you can be. Nothing gives us greater joy than to make our customers happy. Number 1 is become a great leader, which means set clear goals, be decisive, take responsibility for results. Number 2 is offer a great product and never be satisfied with the quality of the product. Constantly strive to make it better in the eyes of your customers. And here's one of the great revolutions in marketing which I think is so important, is the very best companies, the four stages of the epiphany, the Lean Startup, are going to their customers and saying, how do you define a great product? Would you buy this? Would you pay for it? What would you want more of? What would you want less of? What can we do to improve it? They're even doing this with what they call the minimum viable product idea, is they take a product idea to a customer before they even make the product, and they work with the customer shoulder to shoulder to develop the product so the customer says, this is a great product. Then they produce and market the product. So number 3 is you want to have a great business plan. But a great business plan simply requires that you think through on paper the critical aspects of your business, and especially you analyze what it's going to cost, what you could sell it for, what kind of profits you can make, who are the people that you will need. There's a great story of Napoleon's generals all around this large table with maps of Europe spread out, And this is when the French armies were conquering everywhere. And they were talking about what cities or what municipalities, what duchies that they were going to attack with the army next time. And Napoleon would come in from his office, which was nearby, and he'd say, "What are you doing?" He said, "We're talking about we're going to move the army from here. We're going to move it to there," and so on. And he'd say, "Well, gentlemen," he said, "I'm afraid that we can't do it. We don't have the horses." And you've heard the expression, "We don't have the horses." It comes from Napoleon. And what he was saying was that the entire army was driven by horses— cavalry and horses to pull the wagons with the supplies and everything else. And they could get more men by recruiting on the march, as they did. They recruited as they went through a village. They recruited people, "Join the army, see the world," that sort of thing. Join the army, see the cannons. But the horses, those were scarce. And so the whole success of the army was determined, could they get the horses? That's why when Mike talks about getting the right people is where do we get the horses? We've got the ideas, we know what needs to be done, but where do we get the horses? So these are the things that you think through in a business plan. What kind of technology will you require and what will it cost to set it up and who's going to run it and operate it? What kind of advertising, publicity, promotion will you require? How much will it cost? What kind of returns will you get? So a business plan, and there's many people, I'm sure you have lots of business plan models that are quite common, is a business plan forces you to think long-term and to think slowly. And you'll always make better business decisions if you think long-term and you think slowly. The fourth area has to do with having a great marketing plan. And a great marketing plan is what you talk about all the time. But there's a rule in advertising, I used to work for a large advertising agency, And the rule is the fastest way to kill a product, a bad product, is to advertise it or to market it. Because if you market it, what happens? More people use it. More people use it and are angry about it, then they tell more people and the product dies. So the fastest way to kill a bad product is to promote it. And many people think, oh no, the way I can get my money back is I can sell it to people before enough people know How bad it is? No! Do you have— we have the internet today. Everybody in the world can know how many troops appeared on the streets of the Crimean with balaclava masks on their face, and they know that in 3 seconds. I was just in Russia, where in Russia they control all the media, and they tell people that they were attacking the Ukrainians backed by the CIA are behind all the problems in the Ukraine. And the Russian, poor Russian people just are being sacrificed. So I'm just sending in some of my troops to help protect our— I said to my friend Sergei, I said, Sergei, that's nonsense. Not a word of what you're saying is true. It's totally false. The only people in the world who believe what you're saying are people within Russia who have no access to news on the outside. Anyway, it's—

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 If you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So I'm getting off track. My point is that marketing means how do you attract people to your product or service? There's a difference between marketing and sales. You know what it is? Imagine that I were to say to you, at midday, this group, I say, is anybody here hungry? Raise your hand. All right, that's marketing. I'm interested in your product or service. I'm interested in the product or service generally. But anybody here like to save money, make money, lose weight, be happy, pick up girls, you know, whatever it happens to be. Then the second part is, now I have a restaurant. Let me tell you why you should come to my restaurant to satisfy your hunger rather than to go to the competitors. So those are the two. It's the marketing is to attract people who raise their hand, who are interested in the benefit that your product or service offers, and selling, the conversion, is to get them to buy from you rather than from your competitors. So they are very different functions. You can't sell if you can't attract interested prospects. So marketing is a very complex process and you guys talk about it all the time. So you need a great marketing plan. How can you tell if you have a great marketing plan? Answer is you have a steady stream of interested prospects who are calling you, emailing you, coming in your door, sleeping on the street in front of your business each night to get to be the first ones to come in in the daytime. Number 5 is you need a great sales plan. And a great sales plan, of course, is a sale that consistently and predictably converts customers or converts interested people into customers. Now here's the rule. If you have a professional sales process, and all, 100% of all successful companies have a professional sales process. If you speak to the salesperson, I'm working with an international company that has a branch in Warsaw, and if you speak to the salesperson in Warsaw or the salesperson in Los Angeles or the salesperson in Johannesburg, 100% of them use exactly the same sales process. The first contact will be a telephone contact. To offer you a benefit and to try to set up an appointment, and the words will be word for word. The reason this company did this is it almost went broke because everybody was selling their own damn way. They would say whatever fell out of their mouths whenever they ran across a prospect, and they realized that without a sales process, we have a great product, which they do, it's killing them. So they systematized the sales process, their sales went up 1,000%. If it's been proven, that if you go from random selling to a proven sales process, and of course you have to debug it, you increase your sales 500% with the same number of prospects. I've seen people get their closing rates from 1 out of 10 to 9 out of 10 by simply improving the sales process. And so selling is really important. It's one of the things we focus on. Now there's 2 more points that I want to talk about in terms of GREATS. One is generate great numbers. And this is one of the most important parts of business. All business activities and results can be expressed in numerical form. Everything right down to the number of telephone rings or number of seconds it takes for a person phoning to make connection with a person who can help them. Jeff Bezos, who as you see got best entrepreneur businessman of the year, both Forbes and Fortune, they're obsessed with measuring every single activity. And they look at the seconds, the number of seconds that it takes. When we first bought from Amazon, they would advertise 5 to 7 days UPS. Today they offer 1 to 2 days max. In cities like San Diego where they have warehouses, you can order in the morning, it's delivered in the afternoon. Books, tapes, courses, clothes, it's Zappos overnight. They can deliver overnight. Because why? It's because they're obsessed with shortening the amount of time it takes to make customers happy. And the shorter the time, customers really value speed and they'll pay top dollar for someone who'll make them happy faster. It's just, they've determined that. So look at the numbers. And the question is, what are the most important numbers in your business? What we teach in our longer courses is about 35 numbers in any business. Some of them are unimportant, some of them are extremely important. And there's 5 to 7 of those 35 numbers that are the A numbers. And then there's one number that's the most important number of all. And we call this, or Jim Collins, who wrote Good to Great, calls it the economic denominator. And when I started doing my coaching programs with entrepreneurs, one of the first things we taught was to identify your number. What is the most important number in your business? The number that most accurately predicts your success and your future. And most people get it wrong the first 3 to 5 times. What is your number? What is your most important number? The number that you just basically obsess with all the time. And one company went from struggle, written up in Entrepreneur Magazine, went from struggling to bankruptcy, and then a friend of his asked him, what was your number? What was the number you were focused on? Well, we weren't focused on any number in particular. We didn't even hardly keep track. So they were just selling by gosh and by golly, and at the end of the day they were bust. He had to go home and live with his mother at the age of 26. So he said, no, you have to pick a number. So he sat down and he said, hmm, and he picked a number and it's called net contribution margin. In other words, exactly how many net dollars and cents do we make from each sale? And then we compare those sales, and that's after 100% of every expense of cost of customer acquisition and lead generation and delivery and everything else. And then they compare those against the others and they reemphasize. In other words, net contribution margin. This year he'll hit $100 million in business and he's laughing. He said, changed our whole life to finally figure out what our number was. So a question I always ask people, what is your number? Do you know? Do you know the most important number? Do you know what most entrepreneurs say? Sales, sales, everybody knows that, just sales. Really? What if you're losing money on every sale? Then the more sales you make, the faster you go bust. And you know that many companies are losing money on every sale because they don't add in all the costs of the sale. They leave out their own labor, they leave out rent, they leave out utilities, they leave out delivery costs, they leave out defects, they leave out packaging, theft. And so there's, boy, are we selling a lot. Yeah, well, how come you're losing more money every month? Did you see these companies, by the way, that announce they had $11 billion in sales last year, they lost $3 billion? You see them all the time. You say, how could you lose $3 billion if you sold $11 billion? Do you know why? It's because they don't know the numbers. And what they're doing is they're probably working harder and harder to sell more and more products at which they're losing more and more money. And nobody sat down and done the attributable cost. Okay, the last of the 7, and this is the one I love, and this is the future, by the way, The front end of business, the first bookend, is having a great product or service to start with. The last is to have a great customer service experience. And I cannot tell you how important this is. This is what Joel and I have worked on all of our lives. Make our customers so happy at the beginning and so happy with the product and happy afterwards. It's the key to repeat business. It's the key to rapid growth. Every successful company without exception is obsessed with taking good care of their customers once they get them. And if they have a customer complaint, the head of the company doesn't sleep at night. They are so, so upset about customer complaints. They'll go out and personally visit them. The company president will phone an unhappy customer and talk to them because they consider customer happiness, like Tony Hsieh, to be the most important thing in the world. What Tony says is that we're not in the shoe business, we're in the customer happiness business, we just happen to sell shoes. And if we were selling something else, we'd still be in the customer happiness business. What was that worth to Tony? Sold it for— his idea translated into Zappos, sold it for $1.2 billion and took home $350 million. Not a bad idea. Make your customers happy. Does it work? Yes. How often does it work? 100% of the time. So you'll find that the very best companies, the ones that you really like and want to go back to, are the companies that make you feel happy. They make you feel good as a result of having done business with them. With them. They take good care of you. And as a result, you go back over and over again and you bring your friends. So those are the 7 greats that we talk about here. Great leadership, great product or service, great marketing plan, great sales plan, great numbers, great business plan, and great customer service plan. And if you have those, here's the interesting thing, is if you're missing one of them, it's like dialing a 7-digit number. If you miss one of them, your company will go broke. Miss any one of them, or get them wrong, get the wrong answer, or miss it completely, then your company goes broke. So now we know scientifically, basically more and more of exactly what you have to do to build a high-profit business. And the wonderful thing is it's all learnable. You can learn any one of these skills. Anything I just explained to you is as simple as ditchwater. All you have to do is just say, ah, and what is it? You think. Yeah, I could do that. I could do more of that. I could improve that. We could do that.

I have a fascination with this idea that enterprise is the most powerful force for good on the planet when the right people are leading it. And that's a big caveat, right? The only reason a business should exist is to create some value. And so I've had this thought for a long time about we are in a world today where business should be much more noble. And every— you can't scale the back end of a business until you can scale the sales. Like when we talk about scaling a business, you've got to scale the sales. Money spent on the back end is overcapitalization until you figure out how to scale the selling, right? And so selling should be a force for good. You know, like a surgeon has to— in 2019, I injured my back badly in Mexico. It's not the right place to do it, right? I had a— massive disruption. So I was in a wheelchair and everything else, made it back to LA where my wife was, got back to Australia. The doctor in Sydney saying, you need surgery today, it's gonna happen, right? And if not, we don't know how much mobility you're gonna get back. I mean, this was the start of a 2-year recovery, surgery, weeks in the spinal ward and all this sort of business. That surgeon had a job to pitch surgery to me. He's got a job to make a sale, right? And I live in Perth, so I've got to have this surgery before I fly across the country. And of course everyone's saying to me, oh, don't ever let anyone operate on your back and stuff. And the surgeon's going, you need surgery. And here's the thing. All value lives in the ambiguity. There's no value in the thing that everybody knows about. The value is always in the ambiguity. So I'm going to go to a weird place in a minute, right? With the surgeon. He says, you need surgery. I go, I don't want to get surgery. Like, what if I end up in a wheelchair? And then he gave me one line that was the pitch. He said, Simon, being in a wheelchair is not your biggest risk. And I went, it's not? What is? He said, permanent incontinence. Ambiguity, right? Who thinks of that?

Right.

He said, you can travel the world from a wheelchair just like you do right now, but You know, if we don't get this sorted, all the nerves are going to die to the lower half of your body and then you've got bigger problems. And I went like, let's go.

Yeah. I mean, talk about an irresistible offer, I guess.

So sales for a doctor is actually the start of the healing process. So business should be the most powerful force we've got on the planet. But we can only do that when we sell well, you know?

Yeah.

And then there's a whole bunch of questions behind that. So people come to us for models and can we help them to sell and can we help them think through their business issues and leadership and structure and so on. But I think for me, the stuff that people probably don't really realise is at the heart of everything we do. Business is an enormous responsibility. And I think the primary starting point of that responsibility is how well and how ethically and how transparently you sell. So I've been in this pursuit for how do we, how do we create a much more transparent sales process where people are making really informed— they're not, they're not prisoner clients, you know, they're hero clients. They've, they've bought from you to do something bigger. So I come from this small little town where, you know, you'd go down to the butcher's and get meat and bring it home. And once a month they'd send the the account to your parents. No one ever handed money over the counter. It was all trust-based to business globally. And the bigger question is, isn't that how business should be? So, I mean, there's lots of other things I could talk about. For me, that's a really big driver. What do we do to make business the most noble thing we do?

Well, and look, even the way you talk, and I mean, it's clear that you have a lot of a lot of knowledge and a lot of doing the reps under your belt on how to present, right? So, and you're very non-threatening and you are very much, you come up, we're going to get into drawing.

So this is cool.

I got my iPad here. I'm so, I actually want to learn from you about how you interact with this too. Even before the filming of this is interesting that, you know, just think about the setup and stuff. So I've always, you know, really liked the whole concept of people love to be sold. They hate to be pressured, right? So if you do selling in a certain way, it's enjoyable. You're helping lead someone to where they want to go. And I despise the unethical use of marketing and selling. I don't know how you would frame this, but I will often say to people that are early on learning about marketing, they'll have, I don't want to do anything gimmicky. I don't want to do anything too hypey. And I'll say, well, hype used ethically is massive enthusiasm for what you're selling. Hype used unethically is lying, misleading, bullshitting, exaggerating, saying things that simply aren't true. And they're, you know, everything involves selling. Everything you do is either gonna attract or it's gonna repel. And so going back to your whole living in a small town, people knew each other. And when you're in a big open sea, a lot of people can get away with fleecing people. They can get away with selling crap in a box. They just find a new customer, client, patient, victim, whatever they wanna call them, and then they go on to the next one. So there are people that are, that are in the transaction business, and then there's people that are in the transformation business. Anything meaningful and good in the world, selling was involved, like everything. So it's not the selling that's good or bad, it's the methodology, it's the match to the person, if it's a right fit client, that sort of thing. So all of that being said, how, let me back up. The person listening to this, there's people that are in service businesses, Most of them are just entrepreneurs and founders. They're running their companies every day. Their ability to make a living has to do with their ability to go out and make sales and to acquire clients. There are investors. There are some people that are running billion-dollar companies, but most of them are just small business owners, and they're just looking for ways on how to most effectively present and package what it is they do. So when you go in to help someone, what are the obstacles that you often see that stand in the way for them getting the results? They have their business, they have their product, their services, and they're just not— they're not effective at selling. What are the obstacles?

Well, I suspect you've heard this a lot of times too, right? I hate selling.

Yeah.

Do you know what I'm like? Because selling's so— foot in the door selling. Came from the door-to-door vacuum cleaners of salespeople of the '50s and '60s. And they used to buy leather shoes where the sole of the shoe was wider than the foot of the shoe. So they slammed the door. So yeah, put the foot in the door and then they slammed the door. They can't get the door closed and you keep shouting your pitch through the door, right? And it was an aggressive, full-contact, I'm just gonna wear you down style of selling, right? And then that evolved into pressure-based selling. The gift of the gab. I'm just going to, you know, I'm just going to conversationally manipulate you into saying yes. I'm going to get the triple yes pattern set up. I'm going to find, you know, I'm going to have 101 closers that I can, you know, pluck out and all this sort of business. And salespeople used to be the purveyors of information. So if you want to buy a TV, you went to the shop and you talked to the salesperson. You said, so I want to buy a TV. And they kind of educated you about what you could have and what was available, right? Well, that's gone because everybody comes to you now having researched a bunch of stuff, right? But you're no longer a purveyor of information. You're a purveyor of realization. And there's a big difference, right? And so for someone to realize that they don't just need this thing, but they need you, They have to connect to you in a way that is way deeper than will ever come from gift of the gab, foot in the door, 101 closes, and that sort of thing. They have to connect with you at a profound level. And so what that actually means is that the business owner has to connect with what they're selling at a much more profound, profound level. It's time to draw.

It's time to draw.

If that's okay.

Yeah, draw something and then I'm going to ask even how you came about the whole drawing thing. But I want to just have you demonstrate how you communicate.

Sure.

So one of the things we've been— one of the things I spent a lot of time thinking about is if you think about, you know, a company might sell lots and lots of products, but there is some kind of company genius that sits behind all those products. There is a central thread of genius So if you think about the Virgin brand of companies, right, they do all sorts of different things— credit cards, airlines, like a bunch of different stuff, right? But there is a core genius that sits behind it that is common to all of them. And what is that genius? And so company genius usually starts with a who, the founder or the originator of the idea, of the thinking, right? And there's 3 components to that. The first component is what is that person's philosophy about what they do and the people they serve and the competitors in the marketplace and everything else. I'll give you a classic example. I've worked for a lot of years with a company called Austal Ships in Australia, and they're currently a $51 billion company. They're now a Navy shipbuilder. They're building a reasonable percentage of the US Navy fleet. They build for navies all around the world. They're also the number one high-speed ferry company in the world.

In the world.

And one of the 4 guys started it 30 years ago with $20,000 each. It's now worth $51 billion. And one of the original founders, the main guy, a guy called John Rothwell, at 14 years of age put an outboard motor on a bathtub and drove it into the shipping lanes. He's kind of obsessed with the ocean, right? But he has a fundamental belief that there should be no lives lost at sea. That's a philosophical view. Like that no matter what happens to the superstructure of the vessel, the hull should protect people on board, right? Now that drives a whole lot of stuff about how you go about doing what you do. And then there's the high story or the history, and these are the wins and lessons. So in life, there's really 3 things. There's wins, losses, and lessons. We get to make a choice about the last 2. Do we interpret it as a loss or a lesson? Right? So what are the wins and lessons they found along the way? You know, they started out building aluminum recreational boats, then they started building crayfishing boats. And then he was on a ferry in Hong Kong. It was rocking around everywhere, people were getting sick. He said, I could build you a better boat. They said, build one and if we like it, we'll buy 50. So they built one and then they bought 50. When the tsunami hit, In 2000, the US Navy had a destroyer sitting off the coast of Indonesia ferrying stuff into shore because the port was full of sunken boats. And one of Austal's ferries was sailing past with the brand on the side. And the captain of the US destroyer said, "Get me that boat," because this thing could travel at 30 kilometres an hour, low draft. It was a catamaran. You know, it could carry 100 trucks and all this sort of business. And after they'd finished the work, he said, we could use something like that as a Navy warship. And they went, yeah, we could build you something like this. Like, what are the wins and lessons and sort of have a go. And then the expertise. What is the formal and informal knowledge that you've acquired? Right. So that comes from the founder, the who. So it's like a triangle, right? And the first side of the triangle is the who, the founder. Second side of the triangle is the what, which is the big idea. That people got to market with. And that always starts with context, which is why does this thing even matter? And specifically, why with you? Like, what gives you the right to go and offer this? You know, who do you think you are kind of thing, right? Why? Why should you actually even matter to anyone that's looking to solve this problem? The why— interesting thing about context is that is usually the first thing that leaves the sales conversation. And the moment context leaves the sales conversation, all value has left the sales conversation, which is super interesting.

Yeah.

People, you know, get into product specifications so quickly and the context is gone kind of thing. And so value's exited, right? And then the second thing is concept. So this usually is where we're starting to map out, here's what this looks like, here's how we do it, blah, blah, blah, like the product spec or the specification of service. And then the third part of the what, which sometimes people don't want to talk about, is consequence. So does it work? Can you prove it? Have you got cases that show that it works? What happens if it doesn't work? What are you willing to do as a company when it didn't pan out? So, you know, I say to clients, I think companies have to take a risk. If you've taken money off somebody, you have a responsibility to say, we are all in until we get there. We have your back. So if it takes longer than we thought, it's going to take longer than we thought. But we took your money on the concept, right? So we're all in until we get you because we're meant to be able to get you there. That was the deal, right? It's a bit like, if you think about, I'll come back to that, but if you think about one of my favorite models is this futures model that says if we're talking in the present moment and let's say I'm selling to somebody and a lot of sales use false scarcity and urgency, like only now until the break finishes or while stocks last, sorry, or while stock lasts and that sort of thing. The only urgency that matters and the only scarcity that matters is the customer's scarcity. Agency. So I might be selling to someone saying, if we look at the present moment and we— time always wins. Time beats everybody. And so if you look down the track 12, 24, 36 months, people say you can't predict the future, but we actually can. I know that in 12, 24, 36 months, you're either going to be in a green zone where you're in an absolute ideal outcome. In the context of this thing that you're struggling with, or you're gonna be in a red zone where you're probably in crisis. And people think the pathway between where they are today and where they wanna be is a straight line, but it's not. Time bends everything. Time compounds everything, good and bad. It doesn't care. And so if you drift, which is why that red line occurs, if you don't take action, if you don't make decisions, If you just drift, like if you don't clean your teeth, they're going to fall out of your head. I can guarantee that, right?

Yes.

And it will accelerate as time goes on. You'll be fine for 30 years and then they'll just start falling out really, really fast. Because time compounds everything. But it also compounds the upside. And the only thing that drives that green line heading up is great decisions and action. The difference between ideal And crisis is the difference between drift and decision, right? But the problem is people come to you and you've, you know, if I was selling to somebody, I'd be saying, you've come to me because you feel like you're already down the track where the gap is huge between ideal and crisis. You're starting to feel some pain. That's why you've come to me. You know you're on the red line. But right now in this moment, we're as close to that green line as we're ever going to be. You can't be any closer than you are right now. Now in models, just kind of side note, the choreography of the model is as important as the model. I think the thing that I did, lots of people use models, but I think the thing that I did was I applied stage magic and comedy and the choreographic patterns to walking through a model for impact and lacing punchlines all the way through the model. So right now you're as close as you're ever going to be as a punchline. And the idea of a punchline is there's been setup, setup, setup, and then bang, a paradigm shift in a heartbeat that they can't walk back. The moment I go, right now you're as close as you're ever going to be, you can't walk that back. Cat's out of the bag.

Yeah.

And you've got a decision to make. Are you going to jump onto that green line and stay there? And here's what I know. And I would draw a version of my genius model if this was a company.

Yeah, your 3 circles.

I've got a framework that can put you on the green line and help you ride the curve because no one falls off that line. They just behave their way off the line. And so we're going to keep applying that to keep you on that green line as we go up the curve. And here's a really big kind of footnote for everybody. I can't guarantee the outcome. I can't guarantee that ideal outcome. The economy could go bust. There's a whole bunch of stuff, right? But I should be willing to guarantee the pathway because I'm saying I can take people there. And it's interesting for people in business, particularly small business owners, right? When you want to put a guarantee on something, particularly if it's a complex sale, a product or a service or a physical product with something else attached or some complexity in it, you don't have to guarantee the end outcome, but you'd better guarantee the pathway. 'Cause all people want is a sense of certainty. And if you say, I've taken hundreds of people there before, and if you follow the pathway with me, as long as you don't behave your way off that green line, we'll get there. Yeah.

Well, let me ask you, so let's just make the assumption that if in the perfect world, everybody is able to have a pathway that takes people to a bigger future. Yep. We call it the ideal here, that does help and benefit them. What do you do in situations, or have you been in situations where people have plopped down a good chunk of money to hire you and your team to come and develop the models, help them, and you realize your pathway sucks? I mean, this is not good. I mean, there's a lot of missing parts. I mean, 'cause a lot of marketers and salespeople think marketing and selling solves everything. And I know a lot of people that can make a lot of money But they have very bad reputations. They've screwed a lot of people, but their marketing and their presentation skills are enormous. So along the way, because before we started recording, and I'll bring you to this, we'll talk about it, is what it does for the teams, the alignment, because we were talking about that before we started recording. And I'd love for you to talk about what comes out of this. Well, what I'm seeing here is You know, this is great. This is a great model, right? I mean, you have an enormous ability to simplify complex things so people can understand them, and that's a real valuable skill for anyone. The question becomes, when do you match the ability to present this with the deliverable?

So here's the thing. If you're going to challenge somebody, right, then, you know, I talk about having a fist in a velvet glove, right? If you're selling something to somebody who has a problem, you can pretty much assume at some point you're going to have to slap them with love, right? So, you know, you're going to have to do it. You have to develop the ability to be able to slap someone and have them hug you and go, thanks so much for that, right? It's way easier to slap someone when you're drawing a model Because they're looking at— it's not you slapping them, it's the model. We know this model is true. I'm going to host a whole lot of onboard masterminds in March for— we're going to the Antarctic with Peter Hillary, the son of Edmund Hillary. He says, there's this line called the experience line. You can get people to move into action if you tell I take them through an experience rather than just talk about it. And so part of the marketing for that, I've been doing some webinars where I'm saying to people, put aside all the agendas and all the labels, like forget labels like climate change and global warming and all of that, like forget all of that stuff. Just put all the agendas aside. If there were two futures for the planet, a green one where the planet is loved by the human species and is thriving, and a red one where the planet's abused by the human species and is dying. What line do you think we're on? And 100% of people say the red one. Mm. I'm going, right, well, we should do something about that. So we're gonna go to the Antarctic, we're gonna get a bunch of, you know, about 100 really great thinkers together, and we wanna do two things. We wanna have great business masterminds who are on board. And what if you got 100 great marketers and said, Climate change was the greatest product on the planet. How would you market it? You almost certainly wouldn't say, "Go and sit in the road and shut down London," like the stop oil protests. You would say, "We need to sell this thing." But the moment you go, "Is the planet on the green line or the red line?" Everyone goes, "It's on the red line." And you've just slapped people. Put all agendas aside and all labels aside. What line are we on? It's really obvious. And we know it's obvious because the The pandemic cleaned up the planet. Look how fast it healed. Clear skies over China, dolphins in the canals in Venice again. Like, the planet healed.

Yeah.

In 2 years of no movement of the human species with planes and things like that. So we know that we are creating a red line without any other science needed, 'cause we just stopped moving for 2 years and look what happened, right?

You know, this is so interesting too. So let me ask you from a real personal experience here, because like, So for instance, RFK, who's an environmentalist, I love his take on oceans and plastics and pollution and all that. Also, whenever he's asked about climate change or whatever, 'cause I think climate change and the people really pushing it, I became Richard Branson's largest fundraiser. So I mean, I've spent a lot of time, I mean, I've raised millions of dollars and a lot of it has gone to climate-related stuff. And there's so much of the climate thing that is a total grift. It is people pretending like they wanna help the planet and they're actually worse than the people that they're attacking. They use it as an excuse. It's a grift. It is a veneering, freaking virtue signaling nonsense for a lot of it. And so like Alex Epstein who wrote "Fossil Futures," who I think knows more about energy than almost anyone that I've ever known. And so I've seen arguments on both sides of this. What do you do when you have someone that is so, tied into their, like say they're full-blown, the planet, 'cause the planet can't defend itself. Now, when you go to the model, I mean, the way you framed it, it's great. I mean, whatever side you're on, you just gave a sort of perspective on doing it. What do you do when you run across someone who's like, okay, the climate change thing, it's a total hoax, it's total BS, and it's just being used to exploit and you have that sort of— how would you use the model to explain?

Yeah, so if you think about this model, if you think about it in two parts, there's this first thing about need to jump onto the green line. Like right now, we're as close as we're going to be. We need to jump on the green line, right? And the jumping onto the green line, and this is true in group coaching programs, It's true in almost all products, honestly. To jump to the green line is almost always some kind of cleanup or reset or recalibration. So it still links to what you said before when, you know, someone really— they're not on the path at all or they can't even get onto the path and you're going to take them on as a client or whatever. How do you have that conversation with them? We would say to them that jumping to the green line is going to be a reset, a recalibration, or a cleanup. We need to find your mess and fix it. And because they already know they're on the red line at some subconscious level, question has to be, what's the mess you're hiding, consciously or unconsciously? There's 3 levels of conversation in every conversation. The first one is the known conversation. This is the problem they know about and they know you know about it and we can talk about it. There's the second level, which is the hidden conversation. It's the problem that they know about and you know about it, they just don't want to talk to you about it. And then there's the unknown conversation. You have an insight on it and they're not even aware that it's there. And that's the hardest one to open up, right? And so, you know, it's a prospective client who's not even close to ready to work with you. You know, you might say, listen, in your circumstances, we need to find out if if we're gonna be able to jump over that reset line when we get to it. And it's just the model doing the heavy lifting. It's not you making a judgment. You're just going, if you wanna get on the green line, clearly we've gotta reset something, we've gotta clean up, we've gotta recalibrate. If it was the climate thing and someone's saying, this whole climate stuff is BS, I'd go, so let me draw a model for you. Do you think we're on the red line or the green line? Like once I get to the end of the choreography, I think we're on the green line. Really? Explain how the planet healed itself during COVID when we just stopped moving around. I mean, put all this science aside. I'm not even gonna try and quote any scientific studies or anything else. What's your reason for how the skies cleared over China and India, how the water's cleaned up globally, you know, when human impact on the planet significantly reduced? How do you explain that? If you think we're already on the green line. And sometimes people say, "Oh, there's this." They can hear it. They know that. They go, "Yeah, well, it doesn't matter. We're still on the green line." Now you get to say, does that sound like a really intelligent response? 'Cause the model's doing the heavy lifting.

And I'm just sitting there thinking from the devil's advocate position, Let's say, and again, 'cause I'm really seeing like to what, where does it break down and how do you address it? 'Cause I know you've had these conversations 1,000, 10,000 times. I mean, you're the world's expert in this area as far as I know, in terms of this method of presenting communication through drawings. So let's take the COVID example of the sky's cleaned up. Well, then you say, well, okay, maybe the sky's cleaned up, but look at the damage to humanity that happened in the process, the oppression, the mandates, the generational psychic trauma. At what point does, you know, so I'm still not sold that that is a thing. What would you do?

So then I might say, well, maybe there's a third line. This is this whole idea of choreography, right?

Yeah.

You hold back stuff until you need it.

Okay.

What if there was a line in the middle that was actually an amber line? That's just going up and down from highs and lows. So we had good moments and we had bad moments. Is that acceptable? And people go, well, no, that's not acceptable. No, because every low moment is just one step away from the red line. And why can't we get from the high moments and get onto the green line? So let me ask you this question. Is the green line a reasonable goal to go after? Because when people are arguing a point, they're usually arguing— so there's this, there's a hierarchy.

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 wait till the end of this video, or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

I've got a cartoon of a guy lying on the road. And a car's about to run over him. And the caption says, "Encumbered with a low self-image, Bob takes a job as a speed bump." Right? And if you said to Bob, "What do you do for a living?" He'd say, "I'm a speed bump." And he's describing his role at the task or activity level. Now, if I'm Bob's new team leader, clearly Bob's not engaged in his job. So I come along, you elevate the conversation by asking people why. Bob, why would we have you lying on the road being a speed bump? And Bob goes, because I work in the traffic slowing process. Interesting, Bob. Now I've done this in conference rooms full of people. So then I say to the room, is a speed bump in a traffic slowing process valuable? Everybody goes, yes. I go, not on an autobahn in Europe. It's completely context-dependent. So process and task has no inherent value. It's just stuff, right? So then I say, Bob, why would we have a traffic slowing process? Now for about 10 years, I facilitated the Road Safety Council in Western Australia.

How—

and we had set a goal for zero harm by 2020. Every other state said, that's ridiculous. You can't hit a goal of zero. We're going, what other goal makes sense? Like 1,000 deaths? Is that a good goal? That's nonsense, right? And the 3 big components of road safety is road design, vehicle design, and driver behavior, right? And so you get to outcome. So we run this process to get to an outcome, safer drivers or better road design or better vehicle design. Now, the proponents of each of those 3 will argue with each other over which one of them is more important, right? So then you say to Bob, why? For what purpose? Do we want to have better road design? In this case, you're a speed bump. And there's this line that exists across here. Above the line is problem. Below the line is solution. Above the line is what I call compelling self-evident value. So I say, Bob, why do we want safer roads? And at that point, Bob will probably say to me, I don't know. You're the boss. You tell me. Because people peg out of the conversation about 2 levels above where they spend most of their thinking time. I say, Bob, 100 meters up the road from where you're lying on the road, we've got a school bus pickup and drop-off point. And we have to protect kids' lives when they're leaving school and coming to school at the start and the end of the day. You're not a speed bump, Bob. Your job is to protect kids' lives. In a heartbeat, his whole view of his job just changed. So he might wanna still take a sick day before he thinks he's protecting kids' lives. If he's supposed to start at 8:00 AM and he wants to take a sick day, he just might not ring in until 9:00. When he knows he's protecting kids' lives, he still could take a sick day, but he'll call in the night before. And here's the thing about— this is a hierarchy between abstraction and reality. —oops, sorry—and specificity. And what happens is if I put 100 reasonable people in the room and say, "What should we do to protect children's lives?" They'll say, "Whatever it takes." None of them will say, "Well, whatever we can afford." They'll just say, "Whatever it takes." But the moment I put 100 people in a room and start saying, "Should we focus on road design, vehicle design, or driver behavior?" they'll start to argue. People only ever argue about solutions. They don't argue about problems. And so if I want to talk to people about climate control, my question is going to be, should we pursue the ideal line for planet health where humans and the planet coexist in a symbiotic way that does no harm to either? Should we pursue a green line pathway that offers coexistence without harm? And most reasonable people would say, "Absolutely." Is it fair? Is it reasonable for us to tolerate an amber line that harms and then doesn't, harms and then doesn't? And is there anyone that would suggest that we should be okay with this red line where we're existing on the planet, but, you know, either humans or the planet have to be harmed for that to happen.

Yeah, you know, it's so interesting as I sit and watch this, because I have to kind of remove my personal biases and things that I feel that I know, not at anywhere an expert level, because I always seek out people that know more about stuff with me. And I see more exploitation being done under the guise of environmentalists and save the planet. So I already have this built-in bias of distrust and what I don't like about it. And I see it being very exploitative of people. And the people that seem to suffer the most of energy restriction are people that need it the most, poverty-stricken people to low poverty. And the ones that complain the most about it and are trying to act like the champions are many of the people that go and speak at three-letter organizations that run the world and fly there in their private planes while simultaneously talking about we gotta save the planet. And these are just, The biggest con artists, and I'm like thinking, okay, so I could see them using this to get everyone to see, oh, we're going towards a red line while they're simultaneously just full of crap.

Yeah, so I mean, these are tools. Models are tools, right? And all tools, the ethic of any tool is attached to the person holding it, not to the tool. I can put a scalpel in two different people's hands and one's gonna harm and one's gonna heal.

You've probably never seen my video, Is Selling Evil, have you? No, I don't think so. Oh, it's so funny, 'cause you're talking about people would go into stores, they would talk about TVs and stuff. I use an example of a DVD player. Like if anyone types in "Is selling evil?" into Google or any search engine, there pops up a 3-minute and 50-second video that I was being filmed for in, I think it was 2010. And it was for a movie, a documentary. And this part never made it into the movie. It was B-roll. And one of my team members, happened to watch it at the time, and he's like, this is really good. Click, uploaded it on YouTube, and then it became this video that's been used in universities to explain selling. And I give my favorite definition of selling, which I'll use this as a segue to ask you about, you know, what people want. You have a great model, and I'd love to have you draw it, um, where I, I say my favorite definition of selling came from my friend Dan Sullivan. And I had asked Dan, you know, several years ago, you go, well, you know, what's your definition of selling? And he just said Getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. And then I go on to say, well, the key word is good for them because you can get someone intellectually and emotionally engaged in a future result that kills them, like cigarettes, or like watch porn, or eat crappy food, or harm people, or whatever. So in order to use selling in a way that's not evil, you want to help people get to a better future that's good for them. And then I say that everything that I say, you say, anyone says is designed to attract or repel. And you can use marketing like a gun. You can use it for self-defense, or you can use it to rob people, to harm people, to kill people. And so the key is to make that distinction. But I said that when you go to a store, and again, you gotta understand the time. It's funny, people watch it now like, what the hell are you talking about a DVD player? No one buys DVDs anymore. But at the time, you know, people, I mean, they still sell DVDs at like Best Buy and stuff, but in 2010, like, you know, we've still not made that transition, right? And so what I say is, you know, salespeople are the biggest educational force on the planet. Where do you learn most things about financial services and financial instruments or about anything? There's a salesperson who's incentivized that does the education. So now the world has shifted, of course, in a lot of ways. And so what was you said earlier, I actually wrote it down on my iPad. You said, you know, we're purveyors of realization, right? Yeah. And so, you know, the, the funny thing is I used the DVD player. I said I would never go and read a manual on how a DVD player worked. How did I learn? There's a salesperson that I was in some store that showed me this stuff.

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 $1 million 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 it. It didn't exist, so I created it. First for my own clients and, and our family, and now we do it for every new client. I'm going to cover 3 things with you today. I'm going to cover the entrepreneur's virtual family office. This is a structure 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. 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 3 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 3 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 Polish said in the intro, it's a different skill set to make money than to keep money.

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 wait till the end of this video, or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

To get these 3 outcomes, there's 3 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 get maximum wealth. And when you grow and protect, you get sustained wealth. For each of these, protect, manage, and grow, I created 3 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. 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 what 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 gonna pick up advisors and professionals over your life as an entrepreneur. You're gonna pick up an accountant, you're gonna pick up an attorney, you're gonna 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 3 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 3 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 3 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 9 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 2 today of the 9, but let's do this together. So question 7 of 9 is this: How convinced are you that your annual plan for paying less tax is delivering on all the legal opportunities available to you? This is 1 to 10. 1 is bad, 10 is excellent. So 1 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 1 and 10. Question number 5 of 9: 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? A 1 would be it's a hot mess, and a 10, totally confident. We created for the 9 questions the Make Rich Real 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 then 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.

So what are the creative ways that you preload your year to get the most out of it?

For, uh, it's a great question. So I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to like doing as much as I can in a period of time. And I do it because obviously I teach it to people. So it's like, I don't know if you like— they always say like, if you want to get wealthy, help other people get wealthy. So it's like, because I'm teaching other people how to get more time back to live a pretty high-quality life, it's kind of fun because then I keep asking myself like, how do I do it even better? So my wife and my friends are all like, this is great, Dan, you have so much time for us, because I teach it, so I have to do it. But what I have is a process for essentially designing my year. Okay, so the first step is at the end of last year in December, I review everything I did. I do with my wife, like, everything that happened in the previous year. My wife and I do a retreat and we look at it and we ask ourselves, fuck yeah or never again. And it's literally that simple. If it's not a fuck yeah, we just won't do it again. And I'm talking like family trips, blah blah. We just decided, uh, I'll tell you guys, we We used to go home because I, I grew up on the East Coast, live on the West Coast. We used to go to the East Coast every summer for 2 weeks. This trip we decided ain't a fuck yeah no more. They can come to us and I'll pay for it. I think you guys should give yourselves permission to do that stuff. Some of you guys are holding on to stuff. You need to create some space. It's not what you're doing, it's what you got to stop doing. Okay, so like we look at all that, then we look at all the requests of things we want to do, look at our bucket list stuff. Look at, you know, we made a commitment that like every 2 years we do like this big family trip with all our families. Her family one year, the other year my family. 2 countries a year with our kids, all that stuff. And then we have this one-page document that I'll give you. It's literally a template. It's got all the months, like days, and we take the list and we put it into the calendar visually. I use my pen on my iPad and I highlight. We have different color codes, so like red is Renee and I time. My wife Renee, and then like orange is work, and green is like my boys' trips and like all that stuff. And then we kind of look at it like a piece of art and ask ourselves, does this feel good? If we actually did this this year, would it feel good? And then we have the feedback. So like, I remember one year I used to do my vacations before my events. I don't know, how many of you guys run events? Show of hands. Okay, imagine going on vacation before before your event. Dumbest idea ever. Never occurred to me to sit down and ask myself, does that feel good? So when we were looking at it, I was like, hmm, let's move it after. That's all I did. I— and then, wow, what a crazy idea. Now I go on vacation after my event. So literally after this event, I'm on vacation, and I'm so present. The team is happy, the customers are filled up, like I'm good to go. So it's like all these little tweaks that I do Other things that I do to preload my year, I put all my like business building stuff in there. So I put all my quarterly strategic plannings with my, the key people on my teams. I put all my events in there. I put my, the things I need to do to recharge, right? So if anybody follows me on social, I do snowboard trip, snow biking trip, mountain bike trip, and they're all spaced out throughout the year. And literally, if— and I'm not even joking— if today was my last day, obviously I'd miss my kids and I love my wife, but that would be the hardest thing, right? I'm good. And I've been good for a really long time. It's a regret minimization strategy. For a long time, I've said, if today was my last day, would I be okay with it? And a long time I couldn't say yes. But now, because I know that I've done the time with my kids, spent time with my family, spent time with my teams, you know what I mean? And I just think being a little bit more intentional with a cool tool like the preloaded year, it just changes the game for your ability to get the most out of a 12-month period.

So what was present when you wasn't working, uh, that caused it to not work other than alcohol?

Yeah, no, alcohol was a big one. So I quit drinking 11 years ago. Best decision I ever made in my life. I get emotional because I think of my boys. I grew up around it. We grew up— like, I mean, I knew better. Dan, you should not drink. Oh no, it's okay. I'll be a social drinker. And fuck, if I was drinking, I wouldn't be with my wife and my kids would have to experience a lot of chaos. So I'm just like super grateful that God said stop. Like, And, um, so that was a big thing. But honestly, it was all the last-minute reschedules, the, oh, I forgot to do this with this person. Like, there's all these feedback loops that happen in our lives that should indicate to us that we're missing the mark a little bit. And it doesn't take a lot of work. I'll tell you a stupid example, but it's It's representative of the issue. Like, I have one of my best friends, I love him, okay? He read the book, said he read the book. I can tell he didn't really read, you know what I mean? Like, some people read books, I don't think you really, you didn't. And like, we'll go and do something and he'll forget a thing. And I'm like, dude, this is not the first time you forgot your thing to do the thing. And like, he'll have to drive 45 minutes back home to get it. I was like, why don't you have a checklist? And like, I know some of you guys are like, I don't want a checklist. Cool. Well then just be okay that you'll always forget a thing. I have a checklist. Does it take a little bit of planning to write down, like if Joe says, hey, I want you to do this, I say, and add it to our travel schedule, and we have like a meeting where we review stuff and we evaluate, you know what I mean? Like, it takes a little bit of planning, but because I do that, I don't have those conversations like, oh shit, it's my dad's birthday yesterday. Fuck, I'm an asshole. I should— if I knew that, I would have planned, I would have went home, I would— you know what I mean? So like, for me, it's all the times that I missed something, I wasn't on top of it, uh, that was the feedback loop to say, hey, if you just planned a little bit, was a little bit more disciplined— because that's a big character trait I think most people are having a hard time with— they make commitments to themselves in private that they don't keep. Okay, they're There's two problems. This book's gonna surface two things for people. One is that you'll never earn a penny more than you think you deserve. So the buying back of your time, it's not that you can't afford it, is you don't think you deserve it. And that's not something I can help out in 45 minutes on stage. The second one is that you lack confidence in your ability to figure it out. And the reason you lack confidence is because you don't keep the commitments you make to yourself in private, and you erode that. So until you upgrade your self-worth so that you realize your time is worth triple what you're saying it's worth, and you hold the commitments that you make to yourself in private, discipline, then it's going to be really hard for you to justify buying back your time.

Yeah. So that psychological issue of not thinking you deserve it, what needed to happen in your life in order for you to get to that place?

I think there's levels, right? It's like, do I feel like I deserve to be Literally, when I think back and I scan, when I was 26, after 10 years of being an entrepreneur, I was like, do I deserve to be a millionaire? Like really, people say it, you write it down, fucking goals, you read all the books, you write it all down. But as you write it, you don't believe it. It's just true. I can remember I went to a seminar and I wrote down the goal, and I will be a millionaire. But I'm like, will I really? You know what I mean? Like, I don't know, I'm not that good. And like, okay, I'll write it down, I'll play along, I'll visualize it. So there's like these levels of like, okay, I did it. So sometimes I wonder which comes first, right? Is it the— well, I know which comes first. It's the person who does the thing that gets the result. At different levels, what I've changed, and this will probably serve a lot of people, I don't talk about this in the book at all, is whatever my goal is, whatever the self, like, whatever the number is, the outcome I want to do, the achievement, I don't focus on just writing that down and hold it in my mind, although I do. I'm a big visualization, manifestation, energy guy, like, like bigger than most people know. If you ask me, I'll tell you all about it. But what I do now is I ask myself, what's the the daily standard that I would have to uphold to make that true. And that's where I've really learned to build my self-confidence and my self-worth, is my self-worth is not tied to the achievement, my self-worth is tied to the activity. And Naval actually said this to me a long time ago. He said, be patient with results and impatient with action. Be patient with results, impatient with action, which means that if I want to build a $10 million a year business, cool, what would need to be true on a daily, weekly basis in my schedule? Because really, I can tell you what's important to you, right? If I ask you guys, how many— is family really important to you? Raise your hands. I don't mean to put you guys under the bus, but here, check this out. If I looked at your bank account and I looked at your spending, would I see family on there disproportionate to what you just said, which is number one? And if I looked at your calendar, would I see that stuff in there as well, disproportionate to what you said. Because those are just, those are just realities. Where do you invest? So like, I have a family coach, I have a parent coach. Like, why do we invest in Genius Network? And for some of you guys, never even considered inviting somebody to coach you as a family unit, right? They exist. We live in this cool— I think it's the coolest thing in the world. There's— and Joe, you know them all. Like, there's literally an expert in anything you could ever want to do, including gifting. Shout out to Joe John, right? Like anything that you aspire to be, there's a person that will coach you and you can just pay them. Just again, then there's somebody who's gonna teach you how to outsource and delegate and you don't even have to, like it's not me, you can just hire them and do it.

And there's some people, they just for the life of them, they want everyone else to pay them but they don't wanna pay for anything.

Those people have a fucking problem. Oh yeah. Okay, I don't know, they're not in this room, but let's say they're out there. Yeah. You, how you show up as a buyer is how your customers will show up for you. And if you're struggling in your business, it's because you're putting out shitty energy. The amount of people we talk to that will not invest in themselves but yet charge a premium for people to invest in them is fascinating to me.

Yeah, yeah, completely. There's so many people that are the pontificators of self-help that are too cool for school. They only show up if they're on stage, but they won't learn. And you know what, I say this a lot, and I've I've thought of this a lot, because I started my first podcast in 2010. The first time I ever recorded a podcast was 2005, when no one even knew what they were, and it was a podcast on promoting one of our—

They didn't call them podcasts then.

Well, they had just started. Apple had just started, yeah. Okay, this is Apple. Like, literally, the first time podcasts came out. So we used it as a promotion for our carpet cleaning super conference. That was in 2005. Then I started I Love Marketing in 2010, and, you know, such a new thing. And it's amazing because I had been doing interviews since 1997, and so I've interviewed over, you know, 1,000 people for an hour to 90 minutes that we've just published. It's probably double that in terms of just, if you think, interviews I've done at Genius Network and stuff. But so it's a lot of stuff. And what I, you know, and along the way, you know, working on my recovery having all kinds of just challenges throughout, you know, a couple decades of my life and spent over half a million dollars on recovery. And I spent that much, you know, acting out addictively too. So it's kind of a— I didn't calculate every aspect of it, but it was a lot. And so I did a lot of therapy. I did— I've done a lot of work and, you know, everything from, you know, plant medicines to you name it. And what I learned now today is that many of the people, men and women, but a lot of my male friends, that are not willing to do the work or go and get real help, what they do instead is they start a podcast. It's like free therapy. Yeah, exactly. And they interview everyone and everyone thinks they have their fucking shit together. But if you actually say, "Have you ever done any real fucking work?" No. And so they do surface stuff. And look, everyone's got their own journey. I mean, I'm like, whatever. People do what they do. It's just there's something about walking the walk and talking the talk. One of the— Joey, who gave you a testimonial on your book. Coleman. Yeah, yeah. His book's great. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, his new one and his previous one.

And I met him— Michael Fishman, who I think is downstairs. Had him speak at his Consumer Health Summit. And he said, I think it's him or I'm not sure who, where, or maybe it's Garrett Gunderson. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's Garrett. Okay. Those who say, though, they say those who can't do teach, but not here. Dan did it, then masterfully taught it. A book on living a life you don't want to retire from and how to live your retirement dream today. So I've known Garrett for close to 20 years. But it's true, though. Those that can't teach— there's a lot to be said about people that are out there doing it. And I think, you know, I like it when someone's a convert of their own system. I think there's a different result when you actually walk the path and you figure out how to do it and then you're able to transfer that to other people. And I think, you know— and here's the thing on his book. Oftentimes I'll buy books for everybody in Genius Network. I mean, they invest a lot of money in this. I guess it's not that big of a deal to buy a book. What I'd like to do with this one and what I'd like to do with John, who I'm going to interview tomorrow, is I want you to buy the book. This is also on audio. If you prefer audio, buy the book. And then if you just read the book and just send me, like, literally an insight, you can email it to eunice@joe polish.com. Here's the big aha and the big insight that I got out of it. For one, I'd love to share that with Dan. I'd love for him to see what everyone's perspective— I want you to, up to your own fruition, go and buy the book and share that, and then I will make a donation to Genius Recovery in your name as a result of it for the cost of the book, just because I want everyone to do it. I just don't want to give this book out and say, yeah, go read, because I know all of you probably buy books at 10 times the speed of your rate of ingesting them. And some of you, it's You know, so, but this one really is a good roadmap, and I think you'll learn a lot. So, and I think we can have a future discussion on this too, because it's really important. But the foundational stuff that Dan teaches is great, especially for highly successful entrepreneurs, which all of you are. 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 click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead.

They're over here. Do it now. Come on. Thank you. Watch them.