Unmasking the Risk-Reward Fallacy in Business Feat. Keith Cunningham

Talk about risk. I mean, because you have in the book, you have three questions to evaluate, like an investment risk. What's the downside? What's the upside? Can you live with the downside? How should everyone here think about stupid risk, intelligent risk, or however you would describe risk? Because, I mean, we get paid, I think, relative to what we are willing to take on, relative to the risk, which could be misconstrued as, let's make crazy ass, you know, judgments.

Good. Risk doesn't cease to exist just because you ignore it. One of the smartest investor, one of the smartest investors in the world today, who Warren Buffett, stops what he's doing to read what this man has to say. This is the only guy that Warren says, when Howard Marks talks, I listen. Howard Marks has written a book. You should own this book and you should read it soon. Probably after you read the Road Less Stupid. But then again, I'm biased. If my kids asked me which one they should read first, I'd point them to Howard Marks. So read Howard Marks first. Howard Marks runs a company called Oaktree, Oaktree Financial, and he's written a book called the Most Important Thing. The Most Important Thing, he says three. He says a lot of brilliant things. Three that I'm going to mention. Number one, the less risk you perceive, the more risk there is, which is completely counterintuitive to the way most of us think. If I perceive that there's no risk of having an automobile accident between my home and the grocery store, then I won't put on my seat belt. I'll text while I'm driving. I'll be talking on the phone and watching a video.

And.

As a result of perceiving there's no risk, risk skyrocketed. The way you lose money is by perceiving there's no risk. I'm a natural. I've got all this money. These are smart people. If it doesn't work out, I still got a lot more. I mean, what could go wrong? And so we begin to think in terms of. We say stupid stuff. Everybody in here has done it. I've done it. We say stupid stuff like, the greater the risk, the greater the reward. This is intergalactically stupid. This is unbelievably ignorant. The greater the risk, the greater the probability of a loss. But we say, oh, yeah, I mean, it's risky, but I mean, the reward, my God, the upside is so huge. We've done this. You and I were talking about this. Warren Buffett was playing golf. This is a true story. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are playing golf. They're best friends with two other guys. They get to a par three, which is the only kind of hole you can legitimately make a hole in one. On. They get to a par three. And one of Warren's playing partners. Right as Warren was about to hit his tee shot, the plane partner said, warren, let's have a bet on this hole. Warren said, okay, what's the bet? The guy said, $2. I bet you $2 that you don't hit a hole in one. And Warren said, well, like, what if I. No, it's $20. I'll bet you $20. And Warren said, okay, $20. I got to give you $20 if I don't hit a hole in one. And Warren said, if I do hit a hole in one, how much will you give me? Guy said, I'll give you $20,000, which is 1,000 to 1 odds. That's what that is. So if Warren loses, if Warren doesn't hit a hole in one, he has to give his playing partner 20 bucks. But if he does hit a hole in one, then his playing partner's got to give him 20,000. And Warren looked at this and said, no bet. And the guy said, why? Warren said, well, I mean, the odds of me hitting a hole in one are not 1,001, is 10,001. If I stood up here and hit 10,000 golf balls, there might be one that goes in the hole. But if I only hit 1,000 golf balls, the likelihood of one going in the hole, never going to happen. So I'm not going to take the bet. And the guy looked at Warren and said, Warren, it's $20. Last year, you made $5.6 billion. It's 20 bucks. And Warren said, I know. Stupid in small things, stupid in big things.

Write that down.

Write that down. Write that down. What's sabotaging us is the small things sometimes. So this idea of risk doesn't cease to exist, that the less risk we perceive, the more risk there is. Howard Marks in his book said, a house that can withstand a hurricane is indistinguishable from a house that cannot withstand a hurricane until after the hurricane. And what we want to be doing is building houses, financial empires that can withstand a hurricane. I mean, for crying out loud, if you know that the economy does this and nobody can predict it. I mean, you know, there's the soothsayers out there, the economy. Somebody told me one time the reason God made economists is to make astrologers look good, right? The whole idea that somebody can predict what's about to happen, I mean, they can smell, you know, but nobody knows how big or severe or anything like that. They just know it goes in cycles. And what I want to do as a business owner is build a world class defense to go with my world class offense. As CEOs, as leaders, as owners, what most of us have done is built world class offenses. And so we're always going long.

We're always.

I'm probably the only one here that did this, but when I was a kid, the guys would get in the front. I'm talking about a kid like 7, 8 years, 10 years old. And we'd be playing football and in the front yard and there'd be a quarterback and he'd draw in his hand, he'd say, all right, now you do this and you do that and everybody look at me and say, keith, you go long, right? That means you just run. And we're just going to heave the ball down there. It's going to be a Hail Mary and maybe we'll get lucky. And that's how oftentimes we run our businesses is relying on hope and luck. My dad told me years ago, keith, you can rely on the rabbit's foot if you want, but it didn't do much for the rabbit. And that's kind of true. You have to kind of think about, where am I relying on hope and luck as opposed to being thoughtful. And being thoughtful would say, is there something that could go wrong? And asking that question and building a defense so that you can live to survive another day. Which I didn't do when I was 40, which is why I lost all that money. It was all offense, plus it was arrogant, plus it was hubris. I had an exhaust pipe in my mouth and I was just inhaling my own fumes. I told somebody one time, I was 40, I was 38 years old. I told somebody one time, I was being interviewed and they said, keith, how would you describe yourself? And I said, that shows you how screwed up I was. Okay? I'm not proud to say this. I said, I'm a little bit like Haley's Comet. A guy like me only comes around about once every 70 or 80 years. That's how good I am at business. And that was right before nose down into the dirt, Right? All right, here's a final thought on risk. It's better to ensure survival under negative outcomes than it is to predict success under favorable ones.

Say that again.

It's better to ensure survival under negative outcomes. Than it is to predict success under favorable ones. And so this way of thinking, you mentioned it a second ago. The three questions, what's the upside? And we tend to be experts at the upside because we're optimistic and we can see the opportunity. What's the upside? What's the downside? Which we tend to not be that good at? We rarely ask that question. And if we do, we kind of minimize it. It's kind of like what most of us do with our competition. Most of us with our competition, minimize our. Yeah, I got some competition, but nobody's really doing. I mean, I'm different. I mean, I've got. That is about the craziest thing. Let me ask you a question. I'm opening another tab. Let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question. How much money could you charge for your product or service if you had no competition? How many customers would you have if you had no competition? I already know your answers. If you had no competition, you could charge whatever you wanted and you'd have all the customers. So what dictates. What dictates your revenue is your competition, and how you position and message against your competition? I think that the same thing is true with risk. The downside. How do I need to think about the downside and be realistic with it? And if the downside happen, then can I live with it? And one of the most powerful tools I've found in this is called a pre mortem. A pre. Mortem. You know what a post mortem is? A postmortem is, you know, somebody dies, they crack them open, they look around, say, how'd they die? Well, their heart stopped, they stopped breathing, blah, blah, blah, that's how they died. A pre mortem says, I'm about to make a decision. I'm going to project myself one year into the future. And by projecting myself one year in the future, I'm going to look back over the course of the last year, and this decision I'm just about to make has turned into a dumpster fire. This thing is a train wreck. It is a mess. So one year into the future, I'm now thinking, as I'm looking back, it's a mess. A pre mortem says, what are all the things that went wrong that caused this thing to turn out to be screwed up? If you will exercise this muscle, which is defense on pre mortems, on identifying and evaluating, minimizing risk. It's questioning assumptions, losing some of the optimism. My God, we're optimistic. We're irrationally optimistic about the initiatives and ideas that we have. And I think one of the best ways to play defense, honestly, is with what you're doing with this and some of the work I'm doing with the boards that we have, which gives business owners an opportunity to have people around them that will give them advice and tell them no. Yeah. Ask yourself the question, how many people do you have right now, right now that can tell you no, That that will question your assumptions, that will push you back on some of the ideas. Most of us don't have people around us that will do that. In fact, the vast majority of business owners don't have that. And so it's why they say leadership is so lonely. And it is because we don't have people around us that will push you look at the most successful, most successful businesses on the planet. Every one of them has a board, and every one of those boards meets once a quarter. There's a reason for that. That board is not there to inject the CEO with adrenaline. That board is there to say, whoa, cowboy, slow down just a little bit, just a little bit. Let's think this thing through. What are the second order consequences? What could go wrong? Do we have a plan that ensures success or at the very least ensures survival? Or are we going all in?

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 joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So imagine it's the beginning of 1994. Your father just passed away unexpectedly. The family business he was leading is headed for bankruptcy and owes the bank $20 million. Your well diversified portfolio looks like this on your net worth scale is a valueless business and everything else weighs into around $300,000. Since your father just passed away, the bank financing the family business asks you to sign the $800,000 personal guarantee that used to be in his name. What would you do? Walk away or sign it? This is what it looks like after you sign it. There's now an $800,000 balloon lifting everything in your entire life off the scale. You know that phrase, burn your boats? Well, effectively that's what I did when I signed that guarantee. With the help of a turnaround COO for 18 months and making a long term hire afterward, the business slowly started to turn the corner. When the current bank got the great news, we were putting their business out to bid. One of the checkboxes on the short list of competition was if they needed a personal guarantee or not. Selecting one that didn't got rid of that balloon. However, there was another bad financial decision hiding in the business too. A single bank was holding the business loan and the mortgages on the properties that were separately owned by the family. You don't want to do that either. The key to getting them to appear on the scale was finding separate banks to refinance the mortgages. Paying higher rates made the loans non recourse as well. To a cash flow thinker, this is terrible. Since there'd be less available to me as the owner. However, I was focused on net worth, building a platform for both growth and diversification. The COO I hired to grow the business gave me one of the simplest and most important points of wisdom in what would be my my future success. It was somewhere around 2004, the year we partnered with private equity, that in another much smaller family business, they were redoing their tool shop floors with this amazing epoxy stuff that was super tough and non slip. Think your typical Home Depot Depot mix on steroids. When I asked them for a quote to do the garage floor of a home we just moved into, I was greeted with the surprise of them saying since I own the business they would do it for free. Now what would you do given this opportunity cash flow wise? It was obviously a pretty awesome deal, but what if you're focused on building net worth? For some reason I paused on this and went to my COO in the business I would sell in just four short years for $500 million and described what they had offered without hesitation. He said pay for it. You never want to owe anyone any favors in business. From banking relationships to accountants, legal and everything material, we purch. This simple philosophy gave us unbelievable freedom to always get the best deals for wherever we were in our path of growth. Remember, a dollar saved in business goes right to the bottom line. This mindset flows over into your personal life as well, but in ways that are not entirely obvious. If you are focusing on cash flow, you might be looking for the best interest or dividend rates for an account thinking of the growth it will bring. When you focus on net worth, you will understand that assuming a 30% tax rate, a 5% cash back, you know, like you get on credit cards or other form of discount, is a risk free 12 month return of 7.14%. If you're focused on cash flow, you might see you might have enough to purchase that Ferrari. Yes, I always wanted that Ferrari. Never got it. Also managed to figure out it was far more fun to want it than to buy it. And that was before spending any money. When you focus on net worth, you will understand that if you bought the Ferrari, you would need to make 143% return on that lost cash just to replace it. This is true for small things too. I don't go off roading, but my car does sometimes look like that. My family makes fun of me for never getting it washed, as in literally never. But you're probably thinking I have it all wrong. It's the cash flow from the business or the cash flow from your investments that pay for all this stuff. Expenses don't come compound. Yes, that's the cash flow mindset at work. Warren Buffett is known to be legendarily frugal. I bet this is not true for the reason a cash flow mentality would think. The less you spend is obviously the more you have in your bank account. No, for Warren, if I'm reading his mind correctly, the less he spends, the more opportunity he can take advantage of. He doesn't see the cost of a $300,000 Ferrari today. He sees the $4 million of equity that could turn into 10 years from now if it's applied to the right deal. The net worth mindset thinks like this. Instead of just consuming it finds ways to get the best pricing on needs, and moves the savings into new buckets. The net worth mindset also takes the dollars you would have spent on things you don't need and starts putting them into new buckets as well. These buckets are the ABCs of investing. Always be compounding. Some of the buckets you can start filling to add to your net worth are things you already know about. They are your list of usual suspects. Some of these things even generate income, which you might keep in the bucket it came from or choose to use it somewhere else. These are your nest egg. Keep them and keep them growing. The risk of losing everything in any one of these buckets should be extremely small and the return should compound well over all the years to come in your journey through life. Since there's an abundant amount of expertise available for each of those buckets, and since this is not a 10 day talk, I'm not going to attempt any deep dives there.

However.

All of us in this room, well, Zoom Session did not make the majority of our net worth that way. And for those who have been ingenious you might recognize this gaping void Image explaining life as an entrepreneur. You put a small amount of money into an idea. You defied the odds and built something successful that's worth many, many times what you originally put into it. The cash on cash returns are probably into the triple digits. This is an example of a power loss success. Remember that car wash slide? You know the fact that I never get my car washed, which is about $20 a pop? I figure I saved about $1,000 in car washes for a year investing that into a startup in October of 2016. It was worth a million dollars in April of this year. That's the power of looking at your net worth. As business leaders, even with our survivorship bias in place, we know it is still really hard and most attempts at starting something new don't turn out well. Sometimes we'll be lucky enough to get some money back and the only good news is that failure usually comes brutally quick. This is why you need to think about using your extra compounding dollars to literally play in this space. The great thing about truly understanding your net worth is you can get a feel for how much of your total net worth you might want to put in these power law buckets. And the math of power law returns only works if you make enough bets to play long enough to find the big returns. In other words, if you assume you'll lose everything you put in, you will always sleep well at night looking for the big win. Wow. Imagine a cash flow mindset trying to wrap their brain around that proposition. Speaking of how much? When there is an opportunity in front of me and someone else who does not understand their net worth is looking at it too, I almost always hear the question how much money do you think I should put into it? Well, that question is impossible for me to answer for you, but you should know the answer by heart. It's based upon how much of your net worth you want to have in these kind of buckets and how many buckets you want to spread that risk over. The call to action is to figure out your net worth and in doing so, understand your net worth. Understand where you can take risk that doesn't change your life if it goes the wrong way, but can manifest an entirely different future if it hits big. If you do that, this talk could be the most meaningful financial message you have ever heard. Because that's how I got to where I am. When I sold my business, I stopped getting a W2 and have not had one since. Talk about the cash flow mindset getting brain freeze. I Put my liquidated net worth into my nest egg bucket and gave constant grief to Goldman Sachs, who always asks, don't you want to take more risk? I take my risk outside of that bucket. And to date, assuming Covid doesn't have further plans to change the world, being invested in Brawn, which is in the business of producing films like the Joker alone, might double that nest egg. Add other startup investments like levl, Good money, Proteome Energy, Bulletproof capitalogix, pharmapacks and so on. It could be much, much more than that. And there's no such thing as a single point of failure anymore. Success might be hard to achieve, but as successful entrepreneurs, we have all learned at least some of what it takes. Adding that knowledge to the dollars you choose to invest in startups may not take all of the risk away, but it can give an unfair advantage to the people running them. That's where the real magic happens. Let your net worth drive your budget instead of cash flow budgeting your net worth. When you focus on net worth, you will see how well you are diversified and where risk is. And when you focus on net worth, you see where opportunity is. And when you focus on net worth, you get freedom.

In 2009, you joined Shark Tank. How have your investments worked out on the show? And you know, if a business owner. These are the questions I have. Doing over a million a year was going to investor wealth, what would you recommend they look at, analyze and try to do so?

All right, so in the investments on the show, I want to make this quick. So the first three years, I think I lost 750 the first year, 500 the second, and I think I made it all. I lost about 200 the third, and I made it all back in the fourth year off of one deal called Jamba Jeff Juice, Talbotisse. We sold to Jamba Juice. Here's the reasoning. You know, people really didn't know what Shark Tank was at first, so the deal flow was poor. Second of all, the producers are really producers. So in the first season of vetting people, whatever people said was whatever people said and the producers didn't know any better. After sitting on sets for three years watching, you know, 150 people per year pitch and two hour pitches, the producers became more savvy towards this. So the deal flow became much better. And the closing ratio went from only closing 30% to now we close approximately 95%. Also, the sharks themselves have become very astute. We've all put the right resources around us after making those mistakes. So I didn't make anything up until that point. And then only one deal itself paid for everything. And now we have found ways to convert sales. And, you know, I've had a license, individual, everything else. Taking that and going into the model of having a million dollars, you want to know what would. Where should somebody invest that?

Yeah.

Like if they were going to invest the wealth, what would you recommend they look at, analyze deals and try to do?

So we're not talking about going to public markets or anything. We're talking about looking at venture that's out there in the market and angel things of that nature.

Correct?

Yeah.

Tell you truth, if it was. If it was me, first of all, I would invest in what I'm seeing is a large shift in business where many people in this room are doing this already in regards to online curriculums and things of that nature. But I'm seeing that there are kids at home and people at home that are going into these networks and into these forums and they're speaking the voice of other people, and people are prepaying for goods or whatever it is, and they're doing 2, 5, 7, $10 million worth of business. The entire business model is shifting now. You know, so they always say retail is messed up or bad or let's say My business is 20 billion. It's not a 20. It's not that. It's not a $20 billion business no more. It's just that these big guys like us aren't doing it. It's 10,000 kids doing a million dollars out of their home. So that is how business is shifting. And it's about social media and it's about continuity and transparency.

You read a lot.

I read a lot, but I don't get to read a large amount because I'm dyslexic. So reading a lot means three pages to me. But it may take two years. And usually the three pages are one of J. Abraham's emails.

That is actually funny with every adjective, every noun.

So I'm reading that, then I gotta.

Go to the dictionary.

Then I gotta read that. Go back to the dictionary. What the hell did he say?

No, I mean, he has the most expansive vocabulary of any human being I've ever met.

He's like the Muslim guys that come out of jail with kids and they just start saying everything because they studied the dictionary.

No, I. Jay's like, talk about engineer reciprocity and stuff like that.

Amazing.

But that's why he's my mentor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, so let's talk about how you. How you do what you do. You went from your first investment to being an angel investor and ranked number six in the world in around five years. So tell that story and a little bit about your life. Sure.

So I wanted to talk today, broadly speaking, about reinvention and what that entails, because I feel like it's very easy when people have a certain degree of success in any field to become defensive. And I noticed that in myself where I was the four hour work week guy and I had these nightmares of talking about email autoresponders for the rest of my life. And it's easy to go from a proactive building position to a, I need to defend what I have. And that can relate to finances, brand reputation, et cetera. And I think that's a precarious, unproductive place to be. So I decided at one point in 2007 to explore diversifying my identity into angel investing. And I'll try not to spend too much time on it. But I think that if you have just one brand or business or project, your entire self worth becomes dependent on the success or failure of that project and it ebbs and flows over time and that's a very, I think, dangerous place to be. So the angel investing started. I'll just give you the quick sequence. So I started off by putting in small amounts of money, meaning about 10k or so, into startups and helping them in ways that far outstripped any potential financial gain. And the objective there was to work with early stage startups and develop a reputation for being very highly value add. This will be important later. Once I had six or seven of those companies where I was never going to make my money back, so to speak, for the time I put in, I used references from them to then start investing and advising as a blended model in other potentially successful or later stage startups. Once I was able to then gather data from those, I was able to leverage that into say, getting to know early employees and founders at companies. Why is this important? Because you can buy stock or get equity at specific financing events, or you can buy on what's called the secondary market. And typically that's when say an early employee is like, well, it's great that our CEO is getting rich because he took $20 million off the table because he raised 100 million. But I need to buy a house. How do I get some cash out of this situation? And he'll sell or she'll sell 10% of their stock and I want it to be the first person they called. So that's how I Ended up in Twitter and Facebook. Once I had Twitter and Facebook, I realized a separate thing which was. And you can apply this in many different areas, so I won't spend too much time on it. But you have financial return on investment decisions and then you have what, in my particular case, a marketing budget for my reputation as an investor. So 20% of my investments I never expect to make money on directly. What does that mean? That means I put 25k into something like Twitter. Even at a crazy valuation, if I'm able to get unique access that makes me a Twitter investor, which then gives me better deal flow and a stronger calling card. I use that to then get better choices when I allocate my 80% for the strict financial return, if that makes sense. And I would say last but certainly not least is invest. My recommendation would be invest in companies that solve a problem that you have. I've been ridiculed by a lot of venture capitalists who are like, oh my God, you need to look at the total addressable market size. And this, this, and this and this, this. If you invest in things that solve a problem for you, it's very hard to go wrong. You will have failures. But I think it increases your batting average tremendously. I was a pre seed money advisor to Uber. Great example, Evernote. I was the first advisor. These are all examples of products that solve a problem I have on a daily basis. So I would encourage people not to get too fancy with doing due diligence in worlds you don't understand. For instance, every time I try to invest in something that's like bleeding edge biotech, which I feel like I understand on some level, but I don't understand FDA phase trials intimately. I get kicked in the balls by the universe like every single time. Just lose all of my money. So focus on something that fixes your problems. That's sort of the basic overview if you guys want to get an education in angel investing. My recommendation, and I'm an advisor to this platform as well. Oh, that's another thing. I advise platforms in positions where I will make very little money because I want exclusive access to the, to the people who run those platforms. So if I need help at Facebook, Twitter, just go down the list and name any service you can imagine. Chances are I'm somehow formally involved with that company. So I can make any phone call I need to make. So that has a utilitarian benefit beyond just the strict equity return on investment. But go to Angellist. I'm an advisor, yet another platform, Angel Co, and you can look at the investments that every one of these investors has made. You can look at the composition of the financing. You can look at the employees, the key hires. You can look at how much they're paying new hires. You can look at the equity they're offering new hires. It is such an education. You can see my entire portfolio at Angel Co Tim. And you can really drill down and see where people have made good decisions, made bad decisions. And you can just paper trade for a while and really get an MBA in early stage investing without spending a ton of money.

You know, it's a basic question, I might have asked you this sometime before, but you use the term platform. What does that mean?

What is a platform? Well, there are different types of platforms. So there are platforms that people use to market or promote a given product or service, right? So people might consider their TV show that they're on, or their blog or their email list. A platform of sorts, something that you can sort of shout to the rooftops or from the rooftops from. Otherwise, platform is an architecture, technological architecture, typically, that allows people to en masse, perform some type of task. So Twitter would be, depending on who you ask it, a microblogging platform. So you're limited to 140 characters. And so they'll have a director of platform or chief platform officer in the case of Shopify and other company that I advise. And I view that like a city state on the Internet or an entire nation in the case of WordPress, they power almost 20% or maybe more than 20% of the entire Internet. So I'm an advisor to Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and that's effectively like knowing the mayors of these respective territories. And on the Internet, that's how you.

Get away with all the shit you do, right?

No, no. You mean like my last challenge?

No, I don't even know how to.

If you guys haven't joined the Nob Nom challenge, you should join. You got two weeks left. That's no booze, no masturbating, with 5,000 people being held accountable to do it.

Why?

I, I, it's a long.

Honestly, I could see the impact on your life. That would save you hours a week.

Exactly. That's what people ask me. What do you spend your other, you know, 36 hours on? I'm like the, so those would be the two primary categories, I think germane to a lot of the conversations that people here would have is platform. From a personal marketing standpoint, what you use as your bully pulpit or your megaphone and Then platform in the sense of broader sort of technological playing field.

Okay. Awesome.

That was great. What do you think of this platform? Beautiful.

The one we're on. No, I know.

I love the.

It's the llama for contours. This is.

I am what we do at Genius Network here. Like, how would you. To take it as at the most basic level? This is going to sound totally ridiculous, but I'm interested to see how you would answer it. What is money?

So money is simply a receipt, right? So I think that money is a receipt of two other things. The first thing is how effective we are at taking our mental capital, which is our ideas, our knowledge, our wisdom. And business is the bridge between what we know and people, and that's the. That bridge is business. So it's how effective do we serve other people? And then money is just the receipt to show how effective we are at it.

Okay, so if you were. So.

Some people call it energy, some people call it, you know, but it's. It's just a representation of value. It's not value in and of itself. It's a representation of value that we can store that value. Because if I. If we're not bartering and I do something for you or like when I joined Genius Network, right then all of a sudden, I paid before I came to all the sessions, you know, and all that kind of stuff. But it was stored value until.

Until I. Until I give you any value whatsoever.

Yeah. I was like, screw this guy. But you pulled out this thing right here. Oh, yeah. This is our first phone call. So just background, by the way.

So people that aren't seeing this on video, they're hearing, like. Because a lot of people listen to my podcast. They listen to the audio version, and if you are listening to the audio, you can always go to, you know, the Genius. You can type in, you know, Joe Polish and Gary Gunderson and find this video or go to Genius Network, and you can find it there. So this is new rules to get rich. How to optimize your wealth and maximize your fulfillment. Because we're in my. One of my conference rooms in my building that has about 2200 books on the shelf currently. And I know the value of every one of these books, by the way, the ones that are not old editions and stuff, because there are some that you can't trace, but it's like $88,000 worth of books sitting in this room right now. So, nonetheless, this is a Nightingale Conant.

Program that was done how many years ago in 2008. Or 2009. And so this is how it came about 2006. I have two business partners that die in a plane crash. And Babs calls me Strategic Coach and says, hey, what can we do to help you out? And I was like, I don't know. I'm, you know, I just. I need some help. For sure. We have 42 employees. I don't really. We're. I'm figuring out how personality based we were. We don't have a lot of systems in place. And she goes, all right, why don't you just come out to Toronto? So I flew out to Toronto, had dinner with her and Dan, stayed at their guest house, went and interviewed Dan for a series thing that I was doing. They showed me the business, and they just talked to me about how to navigate a lot of that process. And all I said was, look, I would like to know how to market better. I don't really know. Like we had. Now I lost two partners. These were big personalities. They drove a lot of business in. And they said, we need to know Joe Polish. So it was a chaotic time. So you and I didn't meet.

Right.

But then I wrote the book Killing Sacred Cows, and someone sent it to Robin Robbins. She sent it to you. And then Dan happened to tell you about me that week. So we ended up connecting on the phone because of that. And on that first phone call, we were talking and I said, yeah, you know, Nightingale Conant was gonna do something with me, but they decided to go with the cheapskate millionaire because it tested better. You're like, let me make a phone call. The next thing I know, I'm doing Nightingale Conant program. So then you're like, hey, would you like to join my mastermind? And by the way, I don't know if you remember this, but I just written a check for $91,000 to plan television Arts. I just written a check to promote a book for $95,000. I just written a check for 66,000 revenant rate. It goes on to be $500,000 of checks. And then you're like, hey, do you want to join my mastermind? Well, I already listened to Piranha Marketing because I bought it at Strategic Coach. It was sitting out there.

Yeah.

So at the end, you're talking about the importance of mastermind, you marketing sob. You know, just getting me totally bought in, like, oh, God, I need to be in this mastermind. Then you're like, hey, do you want to be in. I said yes before I even KNEW it was 25 grand. I'm like, absolutely. I'm like, when is he.

Next week.

I'm like, great, I'll be there. You're like, cool, just send the $25,000 to Eunice. I'm like, oh, okay. I just wrote a bunch of checks, so let me figure this out. And I just, you know, I figured it out, and it was really kind of a tough thing because I didn't have the exact resources based on everything I was allocating towards the book. But I just knew that it was going to be a good thing for me. So I came out the next week when you introduced me to someone that helped me sell a thousand books. The first week my book was out, and someone that's been a longtime friend on that first session. And then, I mean, I came into that room and I kind of felt like the baby of the room. Like, I didn't know much about marketing. I felt a little bit out of my league. I was a little bit nervous.

Yeah.

And then now I feel like when I'm in the room, you call on me now, like one of the contributors. But that's where a lot of the background was. And so it was a pretty transformational thing for me to invest in myself. And I kind of figured. I was like, look, if I put all my money in this book, it wasn't all my money, but if I put a lot in this book, like, that's something I have a lot of ability to. Course. Correct. I have a lot of ability to influence. To me, it was a great investment. You know, going to the mastermind. I'm like, hey, an investment in relationships. I'm going to meet people that I never met before. And it was definitely an exponential thing for me, because all of a sudden, I mean, where you're brilliant and other people just don't do what you do is someone that you didn't know really well you met in New York, and they were going to Park City. So you just call them. Me. You're like, hey, this is Patrick. He's coming to Park City next week. Now, look like, I knew 10 people that knew me and knew Patrick. No one connected us. So I get on the phone with Patrick because you awkwardly hand your phone to him.

Yeah.

And then the next thing you know, he's in Park City. The next week we meet. I go to a thing for it that he's hosting the week after in Denver. Get seven clients, by the way, from a 10 minute talk. Not because it was a Joe Polish 10 minute talk. Just because that's all they had for me, and I was just there as a guest, transformed my son's health because it was all these health professionals, and we didn't know what to do. And so you just think about the power of an investment in yourself and all the peripheral things that come about from that. And I think in the world of investing, too many people think it's about a product. And there's no magic product out there. There is no, like, oh, cool, if I do this investment, then that's going to be the game changer. If that happened, we'd all call the 800 number, we'd all line up to buy that investment. But the bottom line is it's basically building your foundation. It's making sure that your money's safe so it can be sustainable, and then keeping your growth totally aligned with where you have expertise, where you have knowledge, and staying more in cash than almost anyone will tell you. Because real investors pounce when there's opportunity and stay in cash. Rookie investors constantly stay invested because they're indoctrinated to do that by the entire investment world, which is because of the system, the compensation, not because of the reality.

Interesting. Yeah. So when it comes time for them to have available cash flow, to put in cash, to put into any opportunity, it's just not there.

Right. A market they don't control starts to go down. Now they're going, well, I don't want to take those losses. Or they get burned by that loss. And then they don't want to invest. And then everyone else, like McDonald's goes, it's time to buy real estate. Apple goes, it's time to start acquiring businesses. Everyone else goes, now's the time. And then the other people were going, oh, the market's going up. I better jump in and get into this. And look, I believe real wealth is built through focus, not diversification. Diversification is admission that we don't know what we're doing. I don't know, diversify. Maybe this will work, maybe that'll work. And it actually spreads us thin and moves us further away from understanding the outcomes. So I believe diversification creates risk in some sense. Even though it might create more stability to your money, it creates more risk in it because you're further removed from the outcomes and the knowledge.

So you said diversification is the. Say that line again. Yes.

Diversification is admission of ignorance.

Admission of ignorance.

I don't know what I'm doing. Let's diversify. You see, Andrew Carnegie said, put all your eggs in one basket and watch it like a hawk. Look at the wealthiest people in the world. Did they get there from diversification or. Or did they get there from ultra focused with ideas, with business, with something that made an impact? And most people think investing is about ROI and numbers, but investing is actually about what kind of mental capital do you have that actually impacts other people? And the more people it impacts, the more wealth that could come about, or the deeper it impacts people, the more the wealth could come about. So when people wake up in the morning and want to know how they can make more money, that's not a good question. It's not powerful. The better question is, what mental capital do I have that's unique, that I can actually do something with? And marketing is one of the accelerators to business because it helps that bridge become more effective to reach more people. Right. So I think that people just have a faulty equation because Genius Network proved this for me. You're either one idea or one relationship away from the next level of prosperity. Right? So I showed you. You were that relationship that had an exponential growth. For me, Patrick was another relationship. Exponential growth. We can kind of, you know, tie that down the road. And my book brought a bunch of great relationships because I shared mental capital that the marketplace hadn't seen yet. So when people read it, they resonated and they wanted to talk.

Well, I mean, look, just like what we're doing here, just like putting out my podcast that I do on, you know, the Genius Network podcast, which, you know, just the time we're doing this interview, recently launched, you know, just what, a little over a month ago. And putting ideas out to the world like this is a way of just anyone, literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people will end up listening to this, and there's a small percentage that will actually do something with it, you know, and now when someone pays a large sum of money, their likelihood of doing something with ideas and relationships is greatly.

We pay attention to that which we pay for.

Exactly.

You know, you taught me, hey, the quickest way to build a relationship is write a check, right? And look. But the other thing is, I think people get so enamored, like leaders, visionaries, people that are up to something. They get caught in the details too often instead of the visions. So I have a kind of a philosophy of people over projects. So, for example, when you're like, dude, come to Vietnam. I was in the middle of a pretty big project at the time. I was like, man, this is kind of bad timing. But I went home, told Carrie, and she's like, you got to Go. That's going to be a good group of people. You know, you're going to like build something out of that.

Right.

So you immediately asked me, we're on the flight, hey, you should come speak at my event. Okay. You know, I meet some new people that I still have relationships with that have, you know, that it become valuable. But I think a lot of people, they want to build relationships without putting in the work, but they get that it takes work to build a company. They get that it takes work to finish a project, but they don't get the work that it takes to build a relationship. And that's where they miss most of the wealth. I think most wealth in the world right now that's under capitalized is relationship capital.

Right.

One thing I wanted to point out before I get started is that the final idea is the most valuable one. So I'm going to kind of rush through the first four, but obviously I'm happy to take any questions at the end. First of all, I have found that right now with Biden coming into administration, that tax efficiency is on top of a lot of investors minds. And if you're looking to raise capital or you're a high earner yourself, it's become more important recently because of upcoming tax changes have been promised by the administration. So just know that every deal that you invest in, or you prepare to invest in, or that you offer someone else to invest in can be made more tax efficient. A year ago, even after running our Investor Club for 13 years, I didn't know a lot about these strategies. So I started in Q4 last year doing a 100 tax expert interview series. And we've done 40 of those interviews now. And I've already seen a massive ROI on building relationships more quickly with investors on my tax efficiency and how we structure deals that we're trying to get done. The most recent example of this was a dental clinic I invested in last month. We were able to protect the same amount of income that put into the deal. So I put in $200,000, $200,000 of my income was protected from taxation on that income. So what that means is that you essentially only invested $130,000 or $110,000 because otherwise that money would have gone to the IRS. So you don't need as big of a return to get two times your money back on the investment. So for those of you that like cash flowing investments, conservative collateral investments that have assets behind them, securing your investment, this is a way to take a boring investment and make it a Lot better. The number two strategy is that when dealing with operating businesses, gross revenue royalty deals are king. We've closed on seven gross revenue royalty deals. We're looking to structure another four to five this year. And if you don't know what that means, it essentially means that instead of holding equity in a company or while holding equity, you get paid off the top line, not the bottom line. If you're an investor, that gets paid through a gross revenue royalty. So that means every $100 of revenue that's made, you get $2. If you have a 2% gross revenue royalty, this is great, because whether the business makes money or not, you're getting paid. You can usually get these paid out monthly or quarterly at the slowest. And the great thing about it is that many CEOs love their business and they think they're worth $8 million in their valuation. But investors look at it and they say, well, you only did a million in revenue. I think you're worth about 1.5 million, three times profits. And so to get past this, you could say, okay, well, let's agree on something in the middle. A $5 million valuation, set up a gross revenue royalty at 2%. And then once I get all my money off the table, my equity goes down from X to Y, or after I get double my money back from the royalty, my equity goes away. If you've seen Shark Tank a lot, you know, Mr. Wonderful is famous for setting up these types of deals, and we found these to be very successful in getting deals done. And probably 60 to 80% of any of the deals that we're involved with these days are set up as a gross revenue royalty on the operating business side of things. Number three, consider using equity warrants instead of equity. So when you invest in a company, you may or may not be getting that royalty. Obviously, I encourage you to do so. And then you could get an equity warrant. And in this way, you're getting a piece of the company that could be activated within a certain period of time or activated when the business is sold. And if you can combine tax efficiency with that and a royalty, it can be beneficial because, again, it can get past an argument on valuation, and then the CEO isn't paying out dividends. You're just waiting until that equity warrant is activated. Also, if you have an advisory board or board members, you need to compensate. Typically, giving people an equity warrant is not a security that holds current value until they activate the warrant. So I would not take tax advice over any event or zoom call you're ever on unless you figure out your exact situation. But most of the time you could do that as a way to reward somebody for helping you get to the finish line or having it be somewhat performance based and the warrant is triggered by meeting some sort of goal and then they get equity in the company or equity at the exit. The fourth strategy is making sure that if you are an investor and you're going to take a little bit more risk than a very conservative cash flowing real estate deal or something of that nature, that you really focus as an investor on what you know best, what is, as Dan Sullivan would say, what is your unique ability, what industry do you create your wealth in, where do you have an unfair advantage and where could you step in to be chairman, CEO or at least have the brain to know who you need to hire to run that company if things go sideways. Most investors get burned the hardest when they take something more than a very conservative cash flow and investment risk, or even when they do that sometimes and it's not in their industry and it can't add strategic value. Look at the flip side of that coin. If you're raising capital and you're not the investor, you should only be going after investors who know your industry. One, they're going to respect your intelligence and hard work. People who don't know your industry are not going to realize why your medical office building is a great investment if they're not familiar with that space, if they're not working in healthcare or a doctor, or it's gonna take them longer to understand that. So we talk about navigating the three trust curves in our investor club a lot. And the trust curves are trusting the team, trusting the industry, and then trusting the actual deal. Which means that's why everyone raises capital from friends and family. First they already trust you, the leader or the team. Then you go to people who are in your industry and you don't have to teach them what a medical office building is. You don't have to teach them what stem cells are. You don't have to teach a dentist why this dental clinic is a good investment. They're going to know more than you do potentially about why it is. Because they've already sold their dental clinic chain to a dso. So they're going to be able to add strategic value and take less of your time. And if you're not local to a deal, you better be pretty high on those other three trust curves or just wasting everybody's time. If you're going out there as an investor and you're looking at deals where you don't know the person, you don't know the industry, and you're not local to the deal, you're going to lose your money or you're just throwing a dart. And if you're raising capital, don't waste anyone's time going to them. If you don't have some sort of elevation on one of those three trust curves. The final strategy that I think is most important that's been most exciting that we've developed over the last few years has been emphasizing how to approach a deal where you save investor taxes, you save the CEO of a company equity, and as much as you can turn it into an income investment. And when you have that trifecta going in a deal, it makes everybody lean forward. Because even sophisticated investors see thousands of deals, only maybe 50 out of literally 1000 are going to be highly tax efficient. And if you can make it so that a company owner is not being diluted, they're much more likely to say yes. So I'm flying to two different cities this month with a manufacturing company, a chain of medical care facilities, and it might take us 11 months, it might take us three months to structure the deal. But we're using this exact same idea. It's the same idea we use in closing the dental clinic deal where somebody was going to give away 10, 15, 20, 35% of a retail location or 35% of their whole business to do a one time raise of a million dollars. But if they already have revenue and they're already doing several million a year, there's a way to structure it so that you give the investor no equity. The CEO of the company doesn't get diluted at all. And that gets them to lean forward. And listen, you go and you structure it because of bonus depreciation or NOLs or things we don't have time to go into. But there's different ways. If you're buying equipment or if you're in an R and D business or manufacturing or anything with medical equipment or real estate that you own, or you do tenant improvements on which are improvements on pieces of real estate, those are all chances to make a deal very tax efficient. So getting the investor to lean forward by making it very tax efficient, the most tax efficient investment they've seen all year, telling the CEO, hey, don't give away 25% of your company, you might regret that in 10 years when you go to sell it, and then structuring it as an income investment, as a gross revenue royalty or venture debt or some sort of debt with collateral behind it. If you can do that, then in my experience, you're going to close more deals more quickly. And it's a way to approach $30,100,000,000 plus net worth families and get them to respond to your otherwise cold LinkedIn message or email because nobody else is offering to save them 20% equity on every location they open or on their business. So I think that's just a little bit under 10 minutes. But that's what I wanted to convey today, which I know is a lot of information said pretty quickly. But thanks for your attention and happy to answer any questions you have.

Great job, Richard. We've got a lot of good love.

And chat and a lot of people were talking about just how clear you were speaking.

So this is complex stuff and just.

Being able to break this down and.

Tell it the way you told it is fabulous.

So let's bring in any comments, questions.

We got Jim do, he's going to.

Come up here and share some big ideas. Come up here, Dr. Jim Do.

I lost the jacket, so you can be in the jacket club. Great job, Richard. Amazing stuff. And just to piggyback on that is when you're doing any of these deals, there's so much opportunity if you have the right team in place. So just what Richard said about using warrants or you can use synthetic equity.

And if you have a financial expert.

Who knows how to value those, can value those way before the triggering event and they may not be worth much at all.

So we've helped clients do this, of.

Course, with the help of tax attorneys. Putting that into a Roth IRA that then could be 5 million, 10 million, $20 million in the future can be a huge way to even more maximize that idea of using warrants or synthetic equity. The other idea that I had that along the lines of what Richard said is when you're doing real estate investments, a lot of people are investing in syndicated real estate funds and they're not all created equal from the fees and the opportunities, but also from the tax planning. So there's a couple funds that I know of that have done very extensive planning so that they can qualify for something that's called 199 cap A, which is the qualified business deduction, 20% for pass through entities. And just by doing all the things they needed to do to qualify for that puts them head and shoulders above other syndicated funds just from the tax perspective. So what Richard said is amazing, really good stuff. And think about having a team together so that you can take those ideas and maximize Your after tax returns, I'm.

Just going to ask you how should.

Business owners be thinking about this crisis in terms of risk and opportunities?

Okay, so I'll share with you five or six really cool distinctions that I've talked about a little bit. So people might have heard it in some other forums, but they're really unique perspectives on what I'll call mental arbitrage. So the first thing is, I mean this is very, very trite, but I think in terms of dyads and triplets. So dyads mean I want to divide and conquer. So there's two types of attitudes. There's reactive defensive readiness and then there's proactive strategic, opportunistic, ethical, opportunistic preparedness. So let's assume that everybody we're talking to is in the latter, not the former. So what I look at are opportunities, correlations, implications, anomalies nobody else is receiving. So I think I'll go through this very quick, what I'll call five part distillation. Number one, I don't think there will ever be another window of opportunity. By the way, if I look up, I'm just accessing my thinking. I'm not trying to be rude to anybody. I don't think there will ever be another window of opportunity as wide, deep and receptive as there is right now for doing collaborations, joint ventures, strategic alliances, endorsements, co branding, referrals of the most wide magnitude. You can take me deep, anything you want. And I'm not talking about, and no disrespect, a typical affiliate deal. I'm talking about much richer, deeper, much more involved and sustainable. Number two, there's never going to be as many companies that have been as ill prepared financially and are going to be against the ropes and in dire probability of either having to very barely make it or go broke. And they'll never be as big an opportunity to acquire. Not businesses, you don't need the yoke of liability, but the assets, the buyers, the prospects, the distribution channel, the URL, the phone numbers, any key personnel. Number three, and this is really interesting, is that there now are, I think 22 million people unemployed. If you look at it, Joe, it's polarized top and bottom. There's a large number, pardon me one second, there's a large number of unskilled people which for this discussion are irrelevant. But they're very relevant human beings, men and women, fathers, mothers, husbands, et cetera. But on the upper end they're super skilled. And why that's important is these are people that had hard Won very deep relationships with key decision makers for their very, very recently previous employer for very significant things. If you can identify them on LinkedIn, which you can, because I've already done this for clients and we've done tests that validated it and you can prove that your company, your product service is superior. If they do not have a non compete or if it's not a competitive product, they will never. Because these people were making 2, 3, 4, 500,000 more and now they're sitting hoping to get unemployment which couldn't come close to paying their car payments. So if you can contact them, persuade them that your company product service is warrantable, they have these relationships that they can feed to you. And they'll never be receptive any other time in their life to doing something on a performance. And if they do well, they can earn themselves a career opportunity. Finally. And there's one more after this. Finally. But finally, in these categories, there's a million and a half or so salespeople that can't sell something. You can recruit them right now to do any of the three things I just talked about or anything else imaginable on a pure performance and that'll never be available to you in that way again. Finally, there's something that I call options trading, but it's not options trading like stocks. It's getting control of assets and access. I got a lot more things, but these are the five big ones. For example, if you came to me and said, Jay, I got this great idea, I want to do a Jay Abraham advisory letter. You don't do one and I'll take it out and I'll give you a fee when I started backs and I'll give you so much percentage and I'll give you a piece of the back end. You can literally take that, right. And flip it to somebody in the advisory business for a bigger amount and a bigger override. And there's all kinds of stuff like that, Joe. And that's the kind of things that I sort of function on which are a little different than most people. I don't know if that makes sense.

Yeah, no, that helps. And by the way, how you're looking at me right now, if you could gaze into the eyes of everyone through their screen the rest of the time, I think there'd be a much deeper.

Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, absolutely. Pardon me.

No, no, I'm just, I'm sort of messing with you. But then it's okay.

Now I tend to be a little bit, not intentionally distance. I was just trying to remember what I wanted to talk about. I'm going to. I'll be deeply focusing on the camera.

Okay, that's perfect. So, like, you've spoken in front of. What's the largest audience that you have ever spoken in front of?

I don't know, 15,000.

15,000. Okay. I'm just trying to check, like, on an arrogance level, how arrogant do you think you are? Just because, you know, so many people all over the world think you're, like, just this amazing genius.

I don't think I'm arrogant as an ego. I think I'm arrogant about the concepts.

Yeah, Yeah.

I think it's a different. I think I'm misperceived. I really do. I've known Jay. I've known Jay for, like, I don't know, 25, 30 years, and he. He's. He's mellow. He's, you know, he. He wants to be arrogant even about his ideas.

And he's.

He's a. He's a pussycat.

No, no, actually, I. I've gotten to know Jay very well. I think he's a really incredibly kind, cool, awesome guy. So, yeah, I wanted to just.

I just want to add one, like, specific, like when Jay was talking about his number one, where you've got, you know, the companies, like a chiropractor, for example, who has an office and he can't take patients, or he can. If he wanted to go one. One patient at a time, and he wanted to fumigate the office and he wanted to, you know, he could get away with it. But while he's doing that, slowly but surely, what Jay is, you know, one of the things that I was thinking about, because it was a chiropractor in my group that you coached Jay, and he wants to drop ship supplements for their pain. So he can't crack their back today. He can crack their back maybe a few months from now. So he free visit three months from now, but he drop ship supplements, pain supplements, or even more. There are companies, like, with lasers and all this kind of stuff that don't know what to do. I mean, they can sell stuff online, but if they can partner with a guy like this, who's got the network, who's got the funnel, so to speak, of all of what he's doing. I mean, partnerships are. I agree with you 100%, Jay. This is the best time to buy, as opposed to make everything, and you get to test all these different things that you might not go into those businesses anyway. It's brilliant. Yeah, it's Great. But thank you. And I like your beard. You look very distinguished. Joe, if you think about it, very interesting that everyone needs money and people are rudderless and they're trying to figure it out. I mean, there's a real sleeper that people don't think about. All these restaurants that are on the ropes, that are closed, the independent ones, not the chains, but the independent ones, have very rich, deep relationships with their clientele. And the more upscale have much more sophisticated clientele. They are great influencers you could contact to introduce all kinds of different products or services. And that's just. Just a singular idea. And I mean, I want to be very supportive and I want to bring to your audience as much as I possibly can. I was thinking about something, if you'll let me, that I would love to share about distinguishing between a superficial partnership and something very deep. And I can tell a couple stories when you want, if you want. And if not, I will shut my.

No, no. Do it right now. Because there are so many people that are viewed as influencers, as experts that present themselves as actually having deep relationships with people when it's just a manipulative setup sort of game. So I'd love for have you make the distinction between superficial.

Okay, we'll soak. Let me start by telling you how we used to do what you would call an affiliate before the advent. And again, I go back, everybody knows that. Brian knows that when there were a lot of newsletters that were physical, but when we would set up a deal, and the one that I'll use as a reference is I had a very large gold brokerage company when the newsletter business was very high and most people would just try to get the. The editor, the personality to recommend them in a letter or a little blurb in the newsletter. I did not do that. The first thing I did was set us up as the recommended provider. And every time anyone ever became a new subscriber, they got in their new subscriber welcome package. A collection of materials we created. All about hard assets, all about gold, silver, the case for it, and even the case against it. So it was balanced. Number two. Four times a year, we underwrote the cost of special edition newsletters that basically focused on hard assets. The outlook had epic, iconic people. Sorry, I'm looking up again, forgive me, people that would write, and they were really cool. Third is, we funded quarterly regional events where we would bring an icon, we would bring the editor, we paid for everything, and then we would bring our person. Fifth is a lot of people back then would keep Mailing, Brian knows this until they hit breakeven and breakeven would be two different things. For some it was imputing fulfillment, which wasn't that much, $10 a year for a 2, 3, $500 newsletter. Sometimes it wasn't. When they stopped, we would take over funding it because we got joint tenancy of all the names. I would change the headline, the bonuses, the risk reversal, make it a little tighter and we would basically turn it into viable and make money on it. We'd get joint tenancy of the name when it stopped working because most newsletter promotions then I think Brian would affirm, and maybe today too, they were based on the bonuses. And we were in the gold business, which was lead generating and lead generating would cost us sometimes $150 a lead before it was a deferred investment, we wouldn't recoup or a month or two. So we would use the mailing piece for the newsletter stripped down to just the bonus, just to get leads at a lower cost. But we basically was sort of like the concept, the integrated concept of becoming an integral part of the relationship. But that didn't happen until we won very, very deeply the trust of the partner and that we protected them on everything. And we. I was very good and I think I still am pretty good preemptively thinking through all the negatives, all the concerns, not just overcoming them, but blatantly bringing them up to show that we have already protected them. I can go on and on, but that's just one example.

Michael Middleton sent me a private question and I said, you know what, why don't you just bring this up and ask Jay directly. So Michael, if you want to unmute yourself and ask that question, let's do it.

And when he does it, I have three or four points that I think would be fun to share sometime if you'll let me before I am thrown off. Okay.

Okay.

Thanks, Joe. Jay, you just mentioned something about restaurants which struck a chord with me, but I've been struggling to think about how to use this. But some of the high end restaurants in London have been sending out to.

Their mail lists, recipes and that kind.

Of thing, but then also linking out their food suppliers because the wholesale food suppliers, their businesses, all the hotels and restaurants. So in the world that some of the rest of us are in, I'm struggling to think of situations where I've maybe got clients or business connections where I could use the same kind of.

Thing where we can help them.

Can I ask, clarifying to make sure I hear, are we talking about restaurants. Are you just using restaurants as a springboard to some other industry application? Just as a springboard. I'm not in the restaurant business. I have a financial planning business and a retirement coaching business. Okay, and so your clients are whom? My clients are corporates with, so companies with sort of 4,000 employees and more, many of whom they're sort of furloughing staff and they're looking at redundancies.

They've got people that they're going to.

Be taking on to early retirement. It's a new business. We had a face to face workshop program which just got shot to bits. And Michael and Joe, I forgot. I'm embarrassed. I forgot a big part of the first element that I've been talking about and that is whatever you do now, you want to identify what else people buy before, during, after and instead. And I can go into instead. And you want to be able to make those products, services available to them also. Then you want to go to the next level, Michael, and think about this and think about what else they are buying decision makers for that the trust you create would be appropriate to introduce them to. And a lot of people are very vertical. They only think in terms of whatever they do and the transactional activity that they deal with. But if you think about the fact that that person in normal times is buying or influencing certain things, but in abnormal times, they're even new things. And most of them are indiscriminate. They don't know who to choose. They don't know who to who to go with. They don't know who to really pick as a choice or a provider. If you are in a position, you've earned their trust. That trust now can basically. It can what's the word? Not crescendo. It can basically expand fanned out to a multitude of different ways. You can very ethically monetize. And then there's two different ways to monetize now and in the future. If you know that it's only a matter of time between before certain types of products or services will be paid for, you can set them up. Now you're going, you're going to. Most everyone on this call is going to need money. Unless they're doing fabulous, which some are, they're going to need money. Worse than six days. It's going to be in 60 days than they do right now. I don't know if that helps or I gave you a headache.

No, no, no, it helps a lot.

Hopefully I can read my writing with the restaurants. Anybody here who might have a whole influence sort of chain to restaurante tours. I think you could go to a lot of them and introduce them to all kinds of qualitative people that they're upper level type clientele would be very receptive to and you have to realize one of the greatest and you guys know this because I watched some of the discussion with people that are doing the virtual events. You're never going to have also the high level decision makers captive in one place for such a period of time where they are able when you engage them to be very focused. I mean there's a lot of really interesting sort of adversity produces enormously unique opportunity if you understand how to first of all identify it and then and then seize it.

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.

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