Transforming M&A: Lessons in Culture, Growth, and Purpose with Ron 'Omani' Carson

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I'm your host Kisan Patel, Founder and CEO at Deal Room and Chief Scientist at M and A Science. Joining me today is Omani Carson, Founder and Chairman at Carson Group. Carson Group is a financial services firm that provides wealth management, coaching and partnership services to financial advisors and clients, aiming to help them achieve financial freedom through personalized planning and support. Today's episode is going to be a little different. We're going to switch things up. We want to hear from Imani about more of his entrepreneurial perspective and building the Carson Group. Since we got another interview with the VP of Corp Dev and we get to get insight in how they operationally do M and A. But we want to hear more from the founder perspective on building the organization. Talk more about leadership, talk more about culture, and talk more about what are the later eras of running a company and some of other Imani's passions and things that he's evolved to. So let's make this a fun, lighthearted conversation. Amani how are you doing?

Kisan I'm doing really well.

One thank you for hosting me World Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska.

Jeanne and I call it Houmaha.

Houmaha.

I like it. I'M excited for it. A lot of people don't know. I actually grew up in Nebraska from the age of 3 to 19. Even coming to the airport here, it's a bit nostalgic. So thanks for hosting and making this happen.

Thanks for making the trip.

Can we kick things off a little bit about your background?

I grew up just north of here about an hour and met my wife when we were 17. So we've been together it'll be 43 years this August 15th. We were both farm kids, so Jeanne and I grew up on farms, met, and have been together ever since. We have three kids, three grandchildren. We have three daughters and then two grandsons and a granddaughter. She's been my partner all along. We started Carson Group in 1983 out of my college dorm room on the 11th floor of Abel. So I was in the dormitory cold, calling out of a phone book. My parents had just gone broke and I had a negative net worth of $2,600. And that's where this all started a long time ago.

That's funny. Abel's a party dorm. I couldn't get in Abel. They didn't want to let me in there.

Yeah, it was a party dorm. Matter of fact, my roommate, who was my childhood best friend, actually works here at Carson Group. We partied every. I went down to play football, actually, but we did a fair amount of partying and I got injured my first year, and that gave me the time to actually start working. It has become Carson Group today.

This is so early. Like, how are you even thinking about starting a business? How'd that happen?

It started by accident. I had heard at the time Amoco Life had just come out with universal life. And someone said, if you sell it, you can sell insurance and you can make a lot of money. I thought, I need something. I remember my dad saying, there's no future in farming because I thought I was going to be a farmer when we. When he went broke. And someone said, you can sell life insurance and make a fair amount of money. So I didn't know anything about life insurance. I had a little bit of sales training from what they called the managing general agent here in Omaha. And I would go out and talk to farmers about why they needed life insurance. And you talk about just trying to sell something regardless of the need. But the thing I could do is I could relate to farmers. I could relate to them on equipment, weather, grain prices, herbicides, pesticides, because I knew it all. Because that's what we did. People would trust me, and I was truly what you would call an unconscious incompetent. I didn't know what I was doing, but I really didn't know what I was doing because I was being fed. Here's what you tell people and here's how you sell it. And actually the playback then was to replace whole life insurance. So a lot of people had this old inefficient whole life insurance and you could give them a lot more benefit and the cash values grew faster. And I did that for about six months. I just didn't enjoy it. One, I really didn't believe in the product, the more I became educated on it. And two, it's like I always wanted to have something to do with financial services. I was sitting in library shortly after this news from my parents and I looked at Money magazine. Had the top 10 professions of the future. And at the top of the list I said, become a cfp. Insurance I thought would be a good step towards that. But then I soon learned, you know, I wanted to sell stocks, bonds, mutual funds. So I started down the road of becoming a certified financial planner. And talk about small world. I was in an event in Napa, California at the Napa Valley Wine auction, which was an event my wife and I went to for many years. And there was a pre party and there's a lady there that I knew and she had a friend with her and we get to talk and she said, where are you from? Nebraska. What do you do? I said, I'm in financial services, I'm a wealth advisor. And I told her the story of how I got into it, about reading the article in Money magazine. And she looked at me and she said, I was with Money magazine and I wrote that article. What are the odds, right? You travel clear to the west coast to find the person literally responsible for putting the idea in my head to become a financial advisor.

That's so great story. It's so funny.

Yeah. The butterfly effect.

That's how it works.

That's how the world works.

So you started adding went from insurance, now you got more of a broader. The certified financial planner.

Yes. What drove me is pure fear. I know we'll talk about this a little later, but it's core to who I was and to who I became. That moment when my dad. The only time I had ever seen my dad cry was when he explained our financial situation. And it seared my soul. It hurt. It was painful being from a small town. It was especially for a 17 year old. I was so embarrassed by it. I vowed then and there I was never Going to be poor. And I set out on a sprint to be successful. And I work all the time. We were talking about it today, just the grind that we had. I would literally get up before the sun was up. I'd be in the office before the sun came up. I didn't get home until late at night. Thank God that she stayed with me all of that time because she raised the kids. I was really not around much. And no matter what level of success I had, I just kept grinding harder and harder because deep down, I didn't feel worthy. I didn't feel like I deserved the success. I felt like what happened with my parents, I could all be taken away in a second. And it was one of those things that I'll never forget. And it didn't allow me to enjoy any of the success I had. And that all changed when I was 50. I just turned 60. I'll be 61 August 28th of this year. From 17 to 50 was basically a sprint.

Wow, 17 to 50 is a sprint. You started independent, just one person, basically. How did it evolve? Like, how did you make it into a real business that grows?

Because I had no money and I had no contacts. I was down at Lincoln, Nebraska. I had the phone book. I got really creative. And I remember as I would call out of the phone book, and I had a little spiel that I would say, and people would let me come out and see them. Sometimes they would let me in the house, sometimes they wouldn't let me in the house. And I got really creative. And one of the things I came up with, here we are on Valentine's Day. On a Valentine's Day is I went to the drugstore and I bought a handful of these big candy hearts that had all the chocolate candies inside of them. And when I would show up at the door, I'd say, happy Valentine's Day, and give them this heart of candy. And everybody let me in. And everybody did business with me on that day. And truly that day, something was born that I later termed love affair marketing. And I didn't even know there was a thing called emotional reciprocity. Then when you make a deposit, you give something, someone, they want to reciprocate back. I started building upon this idea of love affair marketing. How do I make people feel so good about how I connect with them? So once I had this success, I started. Whenever I'd bring on a new client, I learned everything I could about them, like their goals or dreams or ambitions, their favorite restaurant where they travel to their kids names, their dog's names, their favorite movie, their favorite book. And I would look for all kinds of ways of randomly touching them and investing in the relationship. And that led to something else. There's three components to this systemization. I realized that I needed to have a process for managing this thing I called love affair marketing. And life was full of saying yes or no to all these different choices you have. And someone invited me, the wholesaler for Kemper Fund said, we've got this guy who's going to come to Colorado. We're only inviting a few people out. There was four of us to meet a guy by the name of Michael Gerber. Now Michael Gerber, he wrote a book called E Myth. And I remember him talking about systemization. He says, with great systems you can deliver extraordinary results of ordinary people. And without great systems, you need extraordinary people to deliver ordinary results. This whole aha around processes and systems, when I was able to combine that with love affair marketing and systemization, my business went from I think I did $30,000 a year to 900,000 literally in a two year period. That was my take home pay. I never had seen that kind of revenue. And then once I'd built on love affair marketing, marketing and systemization, then I developed a thing I then termed passion prospecting. Because there were a few things that I just love to do. And I thought, what if I could do these? And by the way, I really sincerely enjoyed my clients. I made house calls, I didn't have an office. When I first started off, I put 56,000 miles on my car. First year I was in business, I lost my driver's license. Cause I got 16 points. I got a ticket from the same patrolman on the same day, both going over a hundred miles an hour out around North Platte, going to North Platte and coming back from North Platte, Nebraska. This is how crazy. I would run out of gas all the time because I would push it. And it was a wild time. But the passion prospecting was in another thing. It's you know what? I love to golf. I love to collect and drink red wines. I'd learned to fly when I was 16, so I was a pilot. So I had these things that I really enjoyed doing. I started inviting my clients to do these things with them. And then that led to clients that had these passions. And then I realized that there was an infinite number when you started connecting people with passions. They all knew someone who knew someone who knew someone. So I started doing these events. So now I had love affair marketing, systemization passion, prospecting. I started building these together and my business was just skyrocketing. And then I started to really get burnout. The final factor and what really pushed that first 50 years of my success was something we developed in our coaching program called blueprint. And blueprinting was life. We say live your life by design, not by default. How do you get that? I always told people, if I could reach into your belly and figure out what your burning desire was, if you had it, then I could measure how far I think you're going to go. Because a lot of people know what to do. But do they have that fuel in the tank to truly propel them to greatness? Greatness, by my then definition was having a lot of money, having a lot of material success. This blueprinting, we still use it today, the blueprinting process, it's very effective. It's a process of setting goals, going out 30 years and then 20 and 15, 10, 5, 1, and then having a 6, most vital one every day that are tied to those short term goals, which are tied to those long term goals. I had all of this going in this perfect vortex. And I was number one advisor at LPL for almost every single year I was there. I was working all the time and I was burnout and I was had all this financial success and I remember thinking I was driving to Hastings, Nebraska. It's like, you know, if I could ever have $5,000 in the bank, I wouldn't have this awful feeling that I have. It would give me that security. I would feel content. I got to the 5,000 in the bank and then that didn't do it. And then I said, maybe it's a hundred thousand. I got there and didn't feel any different. And then I got to a million and I got to 10 million. I got to a hundred million. Didn't matter, matter. Then my mom died about that time and she was someone that was the one person that I could go to no matter what. Moms are the greatest because as a child you can, at least I could. Most people feel this way. You can just depend on your mom. And I just went into a real spiral. I felt like people perceived that I have this perfect life and I didn't really have any joy in my life. I drank a lot. Jeannie and I had a stressed relationship. Who was my partner at the time. I just think I was impossible to live with because I was grinding. And the people that worked with me, I was like a drill sergeant. I and everybody who worked at Carson, we Wore a suit and tie every single day. And I just tried to control every little thing that I could control. It led me to a life that I realized success wasn't what I thought it was. It wasn't a material things. I couldn't find what that thing was that was going to free me from this operating system of fear and scarcity.

We're going to dig into that.

Yeah.

I want to get a little bit more of the entrepreneur journey here.

Yes.

Because it sounds like you got some good elements that you realized that really got things going. I'm curious about the systemization. Was that sort of partly of taking your model and scaling it where you had the partner system? Is that what came about it? I guess. When did that sort of evolve from going just more of an independent person to building, you know, a model where you're starting to build all these different advisors?

Kusain Even to this day, I would tell any business every little thing. You should have processes and systems for. If someone leaves, they get sick, heaven forbid they die, someone else can step in and you're going to have the exact same result. I'll give you a good example of this on the asset management side, advisors, especially in those days, independent financial advisors, we were called on by wholesalers. Wholesalers would come in and they're someone that represented a company and their product. And if you looked at someone's book of business, it was based on whoever they had the best relationship with. And I remember having client events that I would because I knew all my clients were having such a different experience that I wanted to set people together that were having about the same experience because I didn't want one client having this incredible experience, someone else not having a great experience. And it really hit me when we were golfing one day. So I had this client, still a client to this day. He's 80 some years old. He's been with me a long time. And he had referred two guys with me, and the one guy had become a client where we're all golfing just right over the hill here. And there's a prospect that he had there as well. And the other guy's name was Ron. And we had Doug. We had this prospect and we all hit our shots. And the newer client said to me, my name was Ron at the time, Amani today. And he goes, man, he goes, thank you. We're having such a great year. I just calculated my portfolio and we're up like 38%. This was in the late 90s. And I'm thinking, oh, man, I wish he wouldn't have said that because Doug isn't having nearly that kind of year. So Doug gives me a funny look, and when we were walking to our ball because we had hit our balls constantly, he goes, how is Ron having such a great year? I don't think I'm having. I think I'm up like mid single digits. They were virtually identical people. They were the same age, they were in a similar industry. Like, there was no way to really spin this other than I said to Doug, listen, he's an XYZ product and you're on this product, and that one's doing a lot better than this one is doing. And he goes, okay, that feels kind of weird. We'd be having such a different experience. I thought you had a process. And the truth was we didn't. It was. Everybody had just a random series of decisions. So that's when I developed models. So I said, you know, I'm going to have a standardized model based on a risk profile. It's obvious today everybody has models, but almost nobody really had models in those days. And so that was a way I was able to scale the business. And people have an appropriate experience for the level of risk they were taking. And we scaled everything from events to prospects to onboarding a client. To follow up, we even systematized something we called random acts of kindness. They felt random to the client, but there was really a system behind it, and we systematized every little process within our business. And that was. I talk about S curve explosions. Every business will go through a time that they're going to build and then they're going to explode up and then they start to level off again. And this flat spot is either a period of time where you're reinventing yourself for the next acceleration of growth, or you just start this gradual decline because you defend the old what you're comfortable with. You don't break out of that prison of conventional thinking. And I can go back and look at my life and I've had a bunch of these S curve explosions because I used to tell advisors, if you're not growing, you're dying. There has to be a certain level of growth to have attract good people, to keep good people, to be able to reinvest back into the business. And I never wanted to have a lifestyle practice. I really wanted to build a business.

When did M and A come into this?

So M and A came a lot later.

Yeah, because it sounds like you did pretty good figuring a lot of good things out organically. We did like, how big were you when you did your first deal?

We were about $3 billion when we did our first deal. Our first acquisition was a lady in San Rafael, California, and she had been part of my coaching program. So I started the wealth business in 1983, started the coaching business in 1993. She was in my coaching business all the way up until when we acquired her, which was, I believe it was 2012 was when we did our first deal. And, man, was that a tough deal. I didn't realize it at the time. I wanted to do a deal so bad because I thought, this is going to be a lot faster way to grow the business. She was about $200 million in assets at the time than getting it one client at a time. And when I look back on the deal, the post mortem, her margins were like just a footnote. Here is when you go in, you're so green. All of her margins were phenomenal. And I'm looking at the people and what she's paying basically in San Francisco. And I said, this seems so reasonable. This is about what we pay people in Omaha, Nebraska. But I thought that, you know, standard of living was so much higher. And she goes, yeah, no, I go, is there any pressure for them to make more money? Little did I know that she was just wanting to get this deal done. I didn't even know to look at the turnover on her team. She was attracting people that this was basically the only job they could get. And then soon as we closed the deal, she was still going to stay and manage. That was a deal for a period of time. And now all of a sudden, everybody needed huge pay increases or they weren't going to stay. So, oh, boy, the economics didn't work out. The businesses today we have. She retired, we put new people in. The business has grown phenomenally organically. But on that original business, if I really put the time and my team's time and all the handholding we had to do and the hiring and the training, we didn't make any money on the deal. I'm sure we lost money on it because the business we have today was basically almost grown organically. And then she actually went on to leave us to take the clients that we had purchased with her to another firm. All these things that I didn't know to do and to protect ourselves, was.

It, hey, do you regret doing M and A in general? Or is it like, these are so many lessons learned that it helped us to build our M and A program?

That was it. We did the one M And a deal. And it hurt and stung for a long period of time. And we didn't really do one for a while, but I started doing minority deals. I was flying back. We had our partners program. This was an idea that I had one day on a hike out in Scottsdale, Arizona. I remember I stopped by this cactus. I just saw it the other day because I was out there doing the same hike. And I remember stocking by this cactus, get a little bit of shade on a hot day on this hike. And I left myself this 15 minute voicemail because our system was unlimited as far as how long the voicemail. And I go, you know what? I've got a really good team and systems. I've got this coaching group. We've got all these people that are part of our coaching program. What if I were able to create a platform that are all the things that I want that I'm not able to get from my current broker dealer, the service provider. I wonder how many people would join. So we hosted a meeting here in February, in 2012. It was so cold. I brought people in, I said, I've got this idea. What do you think about? And a few of them said, man, if you could create something like that, we would be in. And they didn't have to sell, we didn't have to buy them, they just would move onto the platform. We charge them basis points and we would do a lot of the stuff they didn't like to do. Because the truth is, a lot of advisors became accidental business owners. They were good advisor. The business grew. They were spending 80% of their time on client acquisition and client relationships. And then pretty soon they were spending 10% or 5% of their time. And now they're managing all this stuff that they weren't good at and they didn't enjoy. So what if we could take most that off your plate? That was my theory. We did it. Their growth rate skyrocketed and hence Carson Partners was born. I'm trying to sell a gentleman. His name's Eric Wishon. I hope he's listening to this. He's out in Oregon. We were at a conference in Florida and he wanted to fly back with me on the plane. We're going to have dinner here in Omaha. And he had never flown on a private jet before, so he wanted to fly with me. We're on the plane and I'm talking to him about becoming one of these platform partners. He said, no, I don't think it's for me. He said, but if there's any way I could get the Carson name, I might do it. I go, I'm not sure how that would work. And just right then and there, I said, what if we bought a minority because I didn't really want to buy them, and then give him a Carson name because I didn't want to have the same experience I had in San Rafael. But I thought, if minority interest, then they've got, and if we're truly partners, shoulder to shoulder, and we only own 25, they own 75%, then there's going to be a pure alignment of interest. They're going to run the business. If someone needs a pay increase, they're paying 75%, I'm paying 25% of it. And I said, what about if we acquire 25% of your firm? He goes, I would do that in a second. And on that moment, in that me being a salesman, it was born, the minority. So we did a lot of minority deals. And then over the years, the M and A has only ramped up, really, just in the last few years. Now they're getting up there in age and they need a full buyout and we own a minority interest now. We've, for those that want to completely sell, we've bought 100% of the business. We've got the bandwidth, the people, the technology to actually continue to drive strong organic growth, while at the same time developing through our coaching program and our business consulting group G2. And there's going to be a massive shortage of capacity in the advice space. We've been very aggressive on generating, growing the next generation of advisor, giving them career tracks and able to be able to place them in our offices.

I want to come back to how you evolved M and A, because I think your personal story sort of changes a bit of it. Going back to some of your revelations that you had, you mentioned around 50 years old. I want to hear a little bit more about that because one of the things that your team members highlighted was how the company culture has evolved. They said, hey, Moni's evolved. The name change is part of the story. A lot of personal revelations and that turnaround impacted the company culture, where they said, hey, we used to be super buttoned up suit and tie every day in this company. Now I look around and it feels like a tech startup in Silicon Valley over here. I wanted to talk a little bit more about your personal journey and the leadership because you set up a lot of stage, a lot of the biggest success stories. You kind of hear the Michael Dells and things like that of what they sort of did. And you got a lot of common elements there. But I'd love to hear about sort of what did that inflection look like when you mentioned around 50 years old.

By the way, there's a common. So I'm an investor with a group out of Boston and it's with a guy by the name of Mark Cassidy who used to be the CEO of LPL Financial, which where I was for a long time. And I knew Mark when he was back with Scudder and then he went to lpl. So Mark and I been friends for a long time and I've invested in his fund which has done really well. He was sharing with me the other day because I was talking to him about Omya, this new business I started and that I deal with a lot of people like myself. So I was operating under this fear and scarcity model. Today it's love and abundance into how did I get there? And I said, you know, Mark, I really embrace the ingredients of my past because it's what allowed me to be successful and to even have this option of being able to do some of the things that I want to do. I had a lot of childhood trauma. He says we have been looking at what are the most common traits and this will be really interesting for the M and A crowd. He said there are four common traits that people, leaders have that make their businesses really successful because of the drive they bring to it. And the number one trait is they had childhood trauma. If you think about that, it drives people to prove something, to just push. They're willing to push. Especially if you went through a really uncomfortable period in your life. Any kind of challenges you come up in a business seem like nothing compared to what you live through.

Yeah, I can relate personally because people have asked me, when I grew up, I went through some dramatic experience and that's why I'm a bit risk forward because they've already had to deal with a lot.

It's like, that's nothing compared to, yeah.

What are you going to do? Die? What's the big deal? Come on.

It allowed me to really examine my life. I met a gentleman, I call him my cosmic father. Today he works with me in this new business called Omnia. His name's Karosh and he was a talk. And I had lots of therapy and therapists. My mom was manic depressive. She was either manic or she was in mental hospitals and couldn't even function because she was being bad. I mean, it was. She was worried that my sister and I were going to have the same kind of thing. And she always had us tested or had us talking to people. Talk therapy never really helped me much. Jeannie and I were working with a therapist that was trying to help both of us through our stuff that we were going through. And I finally told her her name was Dr. Laura. She had a nationally syndicated radio show, and Jeannie still works with her to this day. And I said, you're just not helping me. And she goes, yeah, I don't think I am. She goes, I think I know somebody that could. And I was so done. I'm like, okay, give me the name. Maybe I'll work with them, maybe I won't. And she gives me the name. And I don't know. There's just something in me. She was so sure that he could help me. I reached out to him, and after a conversation, I'm like, there's something with this guy. I'm going to give him a try. And so he agreed to work with me, but I had to fly out to Venice, California, and spend a week. And he asked me to completely unplug, just work with him, read books, take walks, get massages, but just totally unplug. And then I met with him every single day. We did talk therapy. And he shifted my life. I remember leaving. I was getting ready to fly back to Omaha, Nebraska, on a Friday and getting ready to leave his office. I gave him the biggest hug. I'm like, man, I love you. Because no one's been able to give me the kind of tools and think about my life the way that you've gotten through to me. And that was really the start of just being able to have a life that I just love. And Bert White, our CEO here at Carson. And I've known Bert for a long time, probably about 15 years, because we worked together at LPL. He tells people all the time, I've never met anybody that protects their happiness more than Omani. And that's true because I felt like the balance of unhappiness was so present in my life for so long. Now it's just about joy. I was jolted to joy through this process that Karosh put me through. I've probably referred Hassan, over the years, a couple hundred people to him like me, and I've not had a single one, if not said. I never knew there was someone like that that could really dig deep, get to the issue. And even today with Karosh, he'll check in with me, and my whole family actually works with them. I'm Thinking, man, I am so good. Karosh, let's just talk about fun stuff and he'll pick up on something I said and it was like, okay, that was really amazing. He's just under. He's able to uncover stuff, elevate stuff and help you process and think about stuff in a way that, that I never thought about in my life in the past. And here's the beautiful thing. As successful as I was and that fear and scarcity and sprinting. Once I started to look at life differently, my relationship with my. We call them internal stakeholders. I don't have employees or staff here at Carson. My internal stakeholders. There was a shift there too. It became. It wasn't this just driving, driving, driving for results. It was a relationship. They started to become part of my family and it became a part of our extended family and my relationships outside of the office and partners. I didn't know it at the time that there was a term for this, but I started to run what I would call a conscious capitalist business. And we even called it conscious capitalism. And someone said, oh, you must be part of the conscious capitalism group. I didn't even know there was a group. John McKay out of Austin, he started Whole Foods Markets and then him and Raj Sisoda started this conscious capitalism, which today I'm a part of. Capitalism has done more to raise the standard of humanity worldwide than anything. If you just look at the history of capitalism, it's really powerful. Milton Friedman wrote a paper about capitalism in the 70s. It was published in the Wall Street Journal. And he said the sole focus of capitalism is to maximize profits. A lot of people jumped on that bandwagon and me being one of them. And it's not true. Conscious capitalism looks at profit is important, but investing in your stakeholders, investing in your partnerships, investing in your community, investing in the planet, the way that you just show up in that this balanced way allowed me to invite in abundance back to Karosh. I looked at the world completely different. And not only was I having a ball, I feel like a 9 year old on Christmas Eve every day because that was my favorite day of the year. My business accelerated at a pace I never thought possible. I started it. But instead of attracting stakeholders and partners that were operating, because when you're operating in fear and scarcity, you attract them and no one trusts anybody and everybody's pushing everybody for the best deal they can get. Now I'm attracting a totally different kind of energy. I'm attracting stakeholders and partners that are operating under this abundance model. And it has been an accelerator for all of us. Our philosophy at Carson and the Carson family office, which is a whole other topic, we have a lot of resources and we're investing our money and conscious leaders that have world changing ideas. These are people that are operating under this love and abundance model. And then people are seeing me going, I knew you then and now I know you now, and I want some of this now. Can you help me? And hence this omnia was born to where we help people have this activated life plan where we can architect it with coaching and advice and integrate it with a really powerful network and these amazing experiences. And it allows us to do things that I never thought possible in my life. But it really came from this shift that happened when I was 50 years old.

That whole life philosophy shifted.

It did 180 degrees.

When you went back to running the business, how did it impact the business?

The business accelerated. A lot of the deals that we're doing today, people that are coming to us today would not have been part of Carson before.

What that change look like? It's the way that your team mentioned it. It's like, whoa, I feel like a 180 flip. How did that transition? Was it sort of, you know, did you address it openly? Was it more incremental?

Yeah, I talk about it a lot. And something that might be a little controversial, I actually brought Karosh here. We have a big emphasis on within Carson family office and me then around mental wellness. I mean, it hit a home. It was a big part of my life with my childhood, with my mother and my father and my grandmother. It was everywhere. And the other piece of the story too, Kassan, was I did psychedelic therapy. At the end of that week with Karosh, he didn't even mention it. I had done a ton of reading and I said, what about psychedelics and the psychedelic therapy? And he says, it would really help you. And I'm like, where was that all week? Why am I bringing this up? As literally as I'm walking out of your office, he says, it'll call you when it's ready for you. And the fact that you're asking about it tells me that you're ready. And I won't go too deep into this, but I was terrified because the only thing I'd ever done in my life was maybe smoked a little bit of weed in college and drank a lot, which to me, that wasn't a drug. That was okay because it was legal. I went to Topanga Canyon with a doctor, an MD that was doing this work Underground at the time. And keep in mind this is 10 years ago. And my parents were atheists. I had no spirituality. And I did my first experience. My spirituality was born. There's something out there. And it just was so exciting for me. And that really fed my abundance. I become very believe in God. I believe that this isn't the end. That gave me an energy that I never expected openly. I shared this with my team with Kurosh was actually was there. And our Carson family office. We invest heavily in these companies that we have MDMA therapy that we think especially with RFK coming in. And they will be over the fda, it didn't get approved. We went through three trials. We had amazing results. But there's such a conflict of interest in Big Pharma not wanting these things because they're not patentable. There's not a lot of money to be made. But it's super exciting. What's going on. Matter of fact, a year ago in January, Stanford did a piece. My mom died of Alzheimer's. So this is also really important to me that there's another psychedelic called iboga, which is an African root you can consume. There's 30 some alkaloids in it. And then the key alkaloids are also called ibogaine. They extract them from the iboga plant. And Stanford did a study with this and it showed, literally it was the only thing they've ever seen that grew brain matter. And they believe it is the key to curing Alzheimer's, which would be huge for our society. And so there's a lot coming. We work with vets. We're doing a trial right now with the VA that we're funding. Carson family office is funding here in Omaha. And even in the study that we did with the fda, we got extraordinary results. And so you're gonna hear a lot more about this. Cause it's gonna help a lot of people. But back to my team. I openly shared that because I think there's a lot of misinformation out there about what's okay and what's not. We know alcohol is really toxic for the brain, toxic for the body. There's nothing good that comes from it yet that's socially acceptable. When a lot of these other. We call them sacred, ancient medicines that have been used by the indigenous people or hundreds and thousands of thousands of years. We have a relationship with the Caw Pie tribe in Ecuador. Sacopah tribe. We built a healing center down there so we can legally take people down there and have these incredible experiences. When I was down there about a year ago, the last two people to die in their tribe were 114 and 117. Never had access, never had any treatment of Western medicine. Everything is from the jungle. So I was down there and we needed something. And they're hunter gatherers, truly. They don't have zero material possessions, but they've been doing yahe, which is a plant, for a thousand years, and their kids do it, and mothers actually take it when they're pregnant. Can you only imagine if we were doing something like that in the US it's just part of. It's how they live. They get up at 4 o' clock in the morning and drink this plant that gives them. It's like having all kinds of energy from coffee, but it's also very medicinal for the body. There's just so much that we can learn from these beautiful compounds that are all over the world.

This is different from ayahuasca because I.

Feel like ayahuasca is one of them.

I think it's South America. Yeah, ayahuasca.

There's ayahuasca, there's a boga, there's wachuma. I could go on and on. The sacred peyote is another one.

So this kind of opened up on top of the journey you went with the therapist. This is another layer that kind of opened things up for you. Kind of give you a whole different view. You're pretty open about it with the team, so when they see some changes in you, they sort of understood because you're pretty transparent about it. How did that impact to the team come in place where all of a sudden they're like, kind of know, like, this is a different. The company culture is changing. Like, all of a sudden the way the company's operating is changing. Like, how did that sort of spread out?

Well, I tell you what it did is people love working here more than they ever had. And it allowed us to attract people we could never attract before. We had a reputation in the industry as like, you can go to Carson, but expect to work like a slave, because that's how hard I push people. And then the word got out that this is like the best place on the planet to work. Not only do we have freedom, we operate under the belief that, you know, if we have to tell you how to do your job, we have the wrong person. We want to give you flexibility to really be creative and be responsible for yourself. And I think people just crave that. The other thing that they notice is Jeanne and I started investing heavily in impact. They Love being a part of that. We started Dreamweaver 14 years ago and we do end of life worships for the terminally ill elderly. We have 20 some schools that we have funded and we'll serve our four millionth meal in Kenya, Africa through the schools that the company supports and Jeanne and I individually support Charity Water. But they got behind all of these causes because it's how we felt, it's where our heart was that we wanted to give back to the community. Thinking of the conscious capitalist model and to attract the best people you can find. They have so many choices today. There's so many places they can go. They're not just going to be somewhere because they get a paycheck. They want to be part of something much bigger than themselves. And that's truly what we're creating here just within Omia, which Omia exists because of Carson, because of the relationship with the people that we have. A lot of people joining Omia are becoming Carson client. So it's also feeding that. But my goal within Omia in the next 20 years is to create a trillion dollars of impact. And when you think about the fact that there's 80 some trillion that's going to transfer from one generation to the next, it's 100% doable, it'll exceed the goal and we already have. I could send you a press release on something. We're hosting the World cup of healing at the Omu Ranch in the summer of 26. All the top soccer players from all over the world there. And we're going to add a trillion years to humanity through having midwives for mothers. It's a program called FC Mother. We got the Vatican, we got Mayo Clinic, we got FIFA all behind this. Another program is through a guy by the name of Zach Bush that you talk about impact. We want to farming. Regenerative farming is a big deal for us. And he just shared with me last week that he met with the Royal family and they're going to fund a billion acres in Africa to regenerate the soil and the farming. And you think about this is also a big piece why impact is so important and stakeholders want to come to a company that supports it. We have ruined 97% of our top soil. It took four and a half billion years to create the top soil, 97% of it. We have raped the soil, we've taken the nutrients out, we have eroded the topsoil. Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois and the Ukraine have this 3% that's left and we're in big trouble if we don't take care of it. So again, we're some of the largest farmers in Nebraska today and we're leading the charge on regenerating the soil, creating better food. These are reasons why people want to be a part of something. And Jenny and I vowed a long time ago all of our profits from Carson Group. And I think this also resonates with clients. It's what's your why beyond just making money is all of our money is going. Our kids are getting a little bit. We took a Warren Buffett quote years ago. We're going to give our kids enough. They can do anything, but not so much. I can do nothing. All the rest of it's going to towards these causes which our kids will obviously be involved in. But we're attracting an energy and people because of the impact that we want to drive.

Supporting these impact. You mentioned water, mentioned Omia and then Dreamweavers, another initiative that you have as well.

Yes.

You sort of touched on them. You got a lot of initiatives going on.

We do. Omia is different. The impact will be driven out of the entrepreneurs and the people with resources that we're attracting that are wanting to go through this healing process. They want to explore themselves through their spirit and then through the mind. They want to get clear with what and how they want to show up in the world. And then there's the vitality of it when we work on their physical and medical longevity because we have doctors, therapists, coaches and we do have M and A people in this. And then play is big. You know how many people don't have a plan for joy, a plan for really cool experiences. We develop literally an activated network and an activated plan which then leads into legacy. It's like let's help people live their legacy. Now. Estate planning doesn't go far enough. So I have created Aaron Chabin, who's the CEO of the family office. We develop, co developed and implemented what we call the family constitution to where we are going to direct and have impact over many generations in the future. And even for my grandkids, they'll have very specific rites of passage starting when they're 10 and 12, 14, 16, 18 and a way of passing forward this really cool impact that we want to have and the energy that we want to have. And we're going to create this in many families and that's where we're going to drive towards a trillion dollar impact goal.

Awesome. I got a couple more areas I want to touch on both M and A and then personal here are you privately Held, privately held.

Jeannie and I, we own about 53% of Carson, and the rest is held by Bain, has a minority hold, and then our stakeholders have the rest of it all.

This cultural thing, really exciting, like, big transformation culturally.

Yeah.

When you look at coming back to M and A, how does that impact M and A in general? Do you think it kind of weeds people out? Like, only people, like, sort of like, are, you know, hey, I'm interested in this culture. They like it, or does it deter some things? Like, how did it impact M and A?

The perceived culture used to hurt us. Today, it's the biggest selling point that we have when we try to sell culture. Bert will tell you this. He said when he was at lpl, he heard about the incredible culture that we had, and he's like, yeah, everybody says that, and we have a really good culture at lpl. And then he comes here and he goes, oh, my God, I've never experienced anything like this. It's really something. If you were to come to we call it Partner Summit, and all of our partners come in, our CEO Summit, you would see people that are going out of their way. I love a Bill Belichick quote. He said, the reason I was successful because I put people on the team that were willing to give it their all, even when it wasn't convenient for them to do so. And that's the kind of partners and internal stakeholders we have. And it's a culture that is unique because people are friends. Most of our community views each other as their extended family, and because of that, they're willing and able to do things that most other companies won't for each other.

How does it impact on the culture of the companies you acquire? Does that change?

Yeah, it's the number one thing we look at when we're doing a deal. If there's not a cultural fit, well.

You have a pretty dramatically different culture than the whole industry.

Yes.

So you might say, hey, I could see them blending in and evolving to our culture. Or you might look at it and say, this is not going to change. They're way too stuffy or something.

If you look at where a lot of our deals have come from, they've come from our coaching group. These people have known us for a long time, and they've also evolved with the market, too. Yeah. Here's a great quote from one of our partners. He's gone full circle. He was our first partner. His name was Scott Ford, out of Maryland, Hagerstown, Maryland. And someone asked him, why did you go with Carson he goes, I didn't know who else I could do 12 years worth of due diligence on because he had been with us for 12 years. And if you think about it, today we're the largest coaching group in financial services. But we've had thousands in our program that have come in and out over the years. A lot of people have gotten to know us. We just did a deal with Brian Sweet. It's a billion dollar deal. We closed on it and I was listening to his podcast this morning and he was being interviewed on why did the deal with Carson. And culture is a big piece of that. Brian knew who we were. Brian was part of our coaching group for I don't know how many years. Maybe, maybe 12, 15 years.

Okay, so personal question. I'm in my 40s and I'm always thinking even part of the business, like it's opportunity to sell part of the company, all the company. There's this view of the financial view of okay, how do you sort of preserve and you know the outcome's going to be good, you know, you're going to have more money than you know what you're doing and then you're like, okay, then what? And there's part of me that's very, I guess my philanthropy interest is like with the kids. Like you lead a leadership development with children. It's always been mine, just raising three kids and sure you had perspective on that. I'm just curious on your view. I've already going through it because I haven't gotten to my 50s yet, into the 60s and well, keep your age off record.

I'm proud of my age.

Yeah, but how do you see it? How do you see your personal view? Just looking at me and just giving me advice of how to sort of think about that as I sort of get through the years. I'm obviously going to continue the entrepreneurial jury, but I feel like this is the commercial life. But after the commercial life, what you've sort of reached and I think that's why you stepped out of the CE role is to focus more on more of the other non commercial aspects of life. And I want to get a sense of, from your view of just trying to talk to me a little directly of what's ahead.

There's a few things I would share with you. One I'll never forget. I had an opportunity to go to Necker island and spend some time with Richard Branson and Richard made this comment, he said, I don't think is work is work and play is play, all of it is living. And if I had to give advice to people like immediately structure your life to where you don't know the difference and no one out on the outside looking in knows the difference. If it's not a heck yes, it's a heck no. I actually use a different phrase, but we'll keep it PG for this is I think people, they sacrifice, we have to make some sacrifices in life, but do it very intentionally and very purposely. And it's like, okay, I'm only get out and do something I don't really want to do. But I've been very, very thoughtful about it. Number one, just love what you do. There's no difference. It's just all life. There's no difference between work and play because they feel the same. The other piece is hire the best people you can find and get out of their way. It's easy to say, it's easy to hear, and it's easy to agree with. It's really hard to do.

It's true.

And Bert, I felt like I was doing a good job when Bert came in, he brought a whole other level of capability here and it's like, wow, there's no substitute for that, you know. One of my dear friends, by the time this runs, I don't even know if he'll be alive. He was a former business partner and he's about my age and he just found out 10 days ago that he's got 30 days to live. Another piece of advice is live every day like it's your last and one day you most certainly will be. Right. Our time on this planet is a flicker. Let's have a lot of fun. Let's not waste time being negative and not being the best version of ourselves that we can be. I love it.

I appreciate that. Hey, so you posted the other day about doing a seven day water fast.

Yeah.

I ask you because I'm always. I love trying these different diets more for like, it's kind of like a mental challenge. And it's also, it's just good. So I've tried everything, like all the keto, paleo, vegan, everything raw, vegan even, which is pretty, you know, I've done a couple day fasts.

Yes.

How is the seven day fast?

It's fantastic. I, I just literally last night I was in LA and I had this conversation with these people about they go, I can never do that long a water fast. I said, you can. It's a middle thing. Here's the data. 17 day water fast will reduce your chance of cancer. By two thirds, like 67%.

I saw that fact, but I didn't. Yeah.

And I believe it's true. Let me give you some anecdotal evidence here. Another good friend of mine had a buddy who was given six months to live and he had brain cancer. And he went with him to Seattle to support him and he went through a medically supervised 30 day fast because he had nothing to lose. He went into remission and is still alive years later. The medical community calls these spontaneous remissions. And there's really no reason and they're just really random. But that's not true. That we know you get into this deep stage of autophagy where you start to eat the flawed cells in your body, which is where some of these cellular diseases actually come from. The medical piece of it is there's a lot of great data out there, the practical piece, and if anybody's interested, they can reach out to me on WhatsApp or send me an email and I'll add you to our group. But we did it as a group, so I invited our community. About 35 people signed up. We had a check in every day on Zoom for 20 minutes. Just say, how you doing? I had my medical director from Omia actually on it. He supplied all kinds of information for people. We had about half the people make it all the way through the seven days. And the first day's the hardest. It really is. The second day also sucks, but the third day, you're starting to feel like you've got some momentum here. Yeah, you're hungry, but after you get beyond three days, your appetite disappears, your energy skyrockets, you need two or three hours of sleep a night. And you don't ever feel like, oh, I'm lagging. And then when you get into day five, six and seven, your body, your whole body feels amazing. I would have gone for 10 days, but I had lens replacement surgery in my eyes on Christmas Eve. And I thought I shouldn't probably be doing this fast. I called my doctor, he goes, no, I don't want you fasting into this surgery. It's just, I don't think it'd do anything. But I don't know. I've never had anybody be on. I would have been on like day nine for the surgery.

That's so exciting.

And it really reset my system, my body. You'll lose some weight, but you'll add that weight back on because you don't want to lose lean body mass. By the way, the leading indicator of future health is your lean body mass so you got to take care of your lean body mass but you are going to have very little. There's some things that you can drink and take that keep you in a ketosis that will retain your lean body mass without do you deteriorating that through this process.

Cool. Well look forward to learning more. Hey, before you wrap Omani, I gotta ask, what's the craziest thing you've seen in an M and A?

The craziest thing in M and A? Well, for me personally it was just the first deal we did. This being set up like didn't put anything in the agreement because I just trusted that this person had been in my coaching group for a long time and they're like oh yeah, yeah, that's fine, we'll do that. And soon as the literally the check cleared, everything we discussed and I thought was going to happen in good faith was out the window. So that to me was it hurt because I'm such a relational kind of person and I felt like I had really been duped.

That was a good story. Yeah, I like it. The first deal. That's the woozy I'll look forward to I had mentioned and working on ours. So I'll be sure to reach out for some more do's and don'ts.

All right.

Amani, I appreciate the time. Thank you so much. You've helped me become a better M and A scientist.

It's been fun.

Hey, if you listen this far, fellow many scientists, I'd love to hear what you think about this interview. I thought it was a trip to say the least. Hit me up for feedback on LinkedIn. I'm reachable, like to hear from folks, get feedback. Until next time. Here's to the deal.

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