Episode 11: The Best Business Moves that No One Even Knows About with Vignesh Kumar - Part 2

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Wydell, and let's get started. How about if you share, I'd be curious to hear you share the kinds of things people come to you when they're stalled out. You know, they've been successful, they've got some revenues, but they're stalled out and they need to get going. And one of the things you've told me is that people stop. They don't stay on track. They'll get to a certain point and then they'll just stop. And there's certain patterns that successful people run into. And just knowing a few of these things, being aware of them, can make all the difference in the world. And the thing about where I talked about, rather than do just one monster meeting and make a big or event and make a big killing, if you do it continually, you get the efforts. Your efforts can compound and grow. You can get better and better and better. You can get bigger and bigger and bigger. It's kind of like annual sales for Nike, you know how they went up. Why would they stop selling, you think Nike, after 25 years and getting up to 34 billion in sales from starting with under a billion 88. What was that? 877 million to 9.2 in 10 years, and now they're over 34 billion. You think, you think they're going to wake up next year and say, hey, we sold enough shoes. We're not going to sell any shoes anymore. We're going to. We're going to start selling flannel shirts. No, they're going to be selling shoes, folks. Apple's going to be selling iPhones. Google is going to be selling advertising. They're going to keep selling it because they get better and better at compounds. And they know if they stay on track, stay fresh, they're going to get the benefit of all that goodwill out there, all that brand name, all that expertise they've developed. And so that's why you want to keep on track and keep doing it. And you throw all that away when you stop. But talk about that for a minute.

Yeah, Larry, I will.

You and I have been frustrated about that for a long time. People are just getting going and then they get off track. They, like, lose their way.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest things that happens for people we work with. For example, they might have started a business, they may have worked really hard on it. And then what they do is for some reason or the other, maybe they just thought they were awesome now, or maybe because they have a successful business. I don't know what it is, Larry, but the point is, for some reason or the other, they get sidetracked. They lose focus on what made them great. What ends up happening is they stop doing what makes them great and what makes them successful. Eventually what happens is they slowly go down. One of the biggest things that we do for clients is we sit them down. We have like a day, two day meeting, whatever it takes, we figure out exactly what makes them successful. In some cases, they can't even tell us what makes them successful. They just subconsciously do it. Right now what happens is when they get subconsciously distracted by something else, they stop subconsciously doing the thing that made them successful. So what we do is we sit them down, we figure out what makes them successful, what gives them the value and the success and everything else, and we make sure that whatever that thing that they're doing that makes them successful is happening whether they want to do it or not, whether they want to do it themselves. Meaning some people are like, oh, yeah, I never realized this is what makes all the money. Okay, let me now focus on this. Or what we help them do is we help them find some people who are like, shall we say, employees. We create operational manuals and say, hey, listen, this thing right here that makes this business work and makes the business all this money, your job is to do this, make sure this happens every single day. The owner of the business or the founder may not be all that interested in doing that anymore. The best way I can explain that is it's like flipping burgers at McDonalds. The owner doesn't do that anymore, but he pretty much has a lot of people doing it for him because he knows it makes him money. So that's kind of the best way to explain that. So you operationalize the thing that makes the money for the business, and that's how we make sure that they're successful. Another thing also that really happens is a lot of people just lose focus. I don't know what it is. They might have an internal goal that they set for themselves, and once they reach it, they just forget all about what they did, and they put themselves in a way that is beyond them. I had a friend of mine who actually verbalized this and told me this, which was, I can't be asked to do that anymore. He does certain things, he does certain releases and certain marketing in a certain way that makes him revenue. But he's like, yeah, I cannot be asked to do that anymore. And guess what happened to him? Afterwards, well, fast forward two or three months, he ended up closing down the business. And the money that he made over the lifetime of that business sustained him for another couple years. But then now, guess what he's come back to doing. He's come back to doing the thing that he said he can't be asked to do a couple years before because he knows that's the only thing that works. You see what I mean? So the biggest thing that we do is to figure out what works. And no matter what, the thing that works needs to be done. It needs to be done every single day, whether you're the person doing it, or someone else is doing it, or someone's helping you. But that thing right there that makes the revenue come in and makes you successful needs to be done every single day without fail. And the moment you lose focus on that, the moment you lose conviction on that thing that works, well, that's kind of the beginning of the end. There's a reason why I hold marketing in the highest reverence that I do because it is a thing that sustains everything in my life and everything in my employees life and so on and so forth. So it matters a lot, you know, in terms of how it's done, how well it's executed, so on, so forth. So that's my thoughts on that. Larry, what do you think?

Well, the thing is that you, you know, of course you're going to get bored. One thing to realize, you're going to make a million dollars. You're going to have some repetitive function in there. You're going to have you basically find a niche skill or a niche product and you do it over and over and over and over again. That's the kind of the combo thread of similarity that runs through people that make, you know, are super successful, they have a niche and they do it over and over and over. But you can get tired of it. And so what the thing to do, the simple guideline that we've learned in our business is you can't move up and move away to a. You can't basically promote yourself up until you have seven to ten people that you have taught that skill to. But if you've got seven to 10 people in your McDonald's that they can flip hamburgers and they can run the register, then you kind of, that's the first step of training those people where you can say, now I'll move to another position because they won't all be working the same day. You know, you have to space it out, but you'll have two or three of them up there at all times and can do it. Now, for me, I like to hedge my bets. And so for every one solid person I needed, I tried to have three. So instead of seven to 10, I tried to have 20 to 30 so I could play the odds. You know, I like to overdo and. But the thing is, you don't have to do it yourself. You probably get sick, sick of repetitive function like milking the cows every day. But it's still got to be done. If you're in the dairy business, somebody's going to milk the cows. And so until you train people, break it down, like, how do I do this stuff? Let me get a system, let me teach some people that are reliable, get at least 7 to 10, I'm going to have to be doing it myself because otherwise I'm going to slide right back down that pole. And you know what? It's easy. When you let your grip get off what you're doing, you could slide down the flagpole back down to the bottom very, very quickly. And that's why one thing that's always principle in my book that you always gravitated to right from the beginning is the overdue principle. And after thinking about this for such a long time, why do you think that that overdue principle is so important?

I would say, Larry, I would just point out what you just mentioned a couple seconds ago, which was, okay, so let's take that for a second a moment ago. So you, Larry, are not, in my eyes, you're not a normal person. Right? Normal people cannot do what you do. That's just a fact. If they can, they'd be on this podcast, not you. I'd be talking to them, not you. There's not a lot of people I know who can say, oh Yeah, I have $4.6 billion under management. That's not a million dollars, that's 4.6 billion. Imagine that for a second. That's a lot of money. And that was built over time. It was not a one time thing that happened over a year. That's a lot of work that's happened over countless years, I would say over your life. But that's one thing that's really huge now. Second thing is what you mentioned earlier, which was, I'm going to teach people. I'm going to not only teach three people, if I need three people, I'm going to do it for seven. I'm going to teach seven people to do the thing that makes the money and brings in the revenue. That's the key, I think a lot of people, what they do, normal people that I've met, if they run a million dollar, your business, what they'll do is they'll try to do everything themselves or they'll probably hire one other person or two other people and teach them and then keep that going. But they will not hire seven people and say, listen, I only need three people to do this, but I need you guys, seven people, all of you, to overdo and basically put all of your time, effort, energy to do this thing that makes this business work. Right? A lot of people don't do that. And that I think is a big distinction that you just pointed out, which is in terms of why overdoing is important. That's why if it is important, it needs to be done. It's not done by one person or three people. It's better be done by seven people, eight people, even 10 people, heck, 20 people. You know what I mean? Like overdoing that thing that works is never going, never going to really hurt you. So that's number one. I think number two in terms of why overdoing is super important is a lot of people don't do anything. That's kind of the gist of that. They're so caught up in what other people are doing and what other people's scorecards are, what they're doing right now, or they're gossiping about their friends and xyz. But if you look at their own lives, they don't actually end up doing anything. So just by you doing anything at all, you kind of put yourself a couple points ahead of the people who don't do anything and just talk about stuff, then when you actually start figuring out what works and what doesn't and start focusing on things that do work and then overdoing those things, not as simply focus on them and do them. I'll do it four hours a day. No, no, no, you do it eight hours a day. Give someone else, bring someone else in to do it with you for 16, then bring four more people to do it with you and that 16 becomes whatever that is. It becomes like 80 hours. 80, but 20, 30 hours a day, give or take. On average. If they all overdo with you on the things that work and the things they need to be focusing on, that's what makes a business grow because you can add more people at any time you want depending on how and what works. So I think that is super important. Now, when you keep overdoing stuff over an extended period of time, people Outside of you. Like, people who are like, your friends and stuff, they won't really notice the noticeable difference. Like, they won't really notice the difference immediately. But over a year, two years, guess what? You will be like the 1% of your industry. You know what I mean? And at that point, you will get all the rewards. Life is, shall we say, a little bit unfair. The people who are at the 1% get 80, 90% of the reward. Some cases, in some markets. The rest of them get the table scraps, which is kind of bad. And that's why I think, Larry, overdoing is so important. And not only waking up and doing it with your hard half in it, it's better to do it with everything you got. Plus bring more people to do the thing with you and then get more people to help you out. And by doing that, you're going to end up with really superior results that other people just will not get, will not see at all. Like, for example, if a normal person comes into your business and they see it and they're like, oh, yeah, these people are working on some stuff. Just like in my office, they work on stuff, but little do they know that what you're working on and the intensity and the effort that you're putting in is completely different from what they do and how they do it. So, yeah.

And now the thing is, with life being unfair, the takeaway for that is people approach their business, their life. It's unfair in the sense of the disproportionate high returns that are given to the people at the top. One way of looking at that is life is perfectly fair because only one person out of 100 will drive themselves that much. And so the other side of it is you could say, you know, you gotta have the one person who like Tiger Woods. I've got a friend who is a club fitter for Tiger woods. And he just, you know, he'll spend days talking to Tiger woods and Tiger, Tiger. He'll look him in the eye and say, the reason I beat all those. I beat everybody when I started coming up was nobody else worked as hard. He said I would work. I would have six practice sessions a day. I get up before light in the morning, I work till dark at night. And I knew I was out working them. And he put, you know, he. He put meticulous detail in every single thing. And they talk about the things he did with to analyze how to get the best performance just out of a shoe. You know, he's got like 75 different modifications. He does on the shoes that Nike is not allowed to put on any shoes they make for the public, but they do for Tiger woods because he knows what gives him a little advantage. Same way when Lance Armstrong was winning all the Tour de France bicycle races, they got him on the steroids. But he was fanatical about having the bikes down to the lightest weight and the best material, most aerodynamic everything and the diet down, looking for 1/10 of 1% improvement because he knew those were the things that gave you over a 21, 22 day race that gave you that little extra foot of space to put you out in front of people. You know the margin, so they put the energy into it. So one way of looking at it, Vignesh, is that the people life is fair because most people not push themselves that to get that refined and that sharp and that focus, but it's exciting for the people who do that. That opportunity is available for you. If you'll make that effort, you'll push it. Then you've got the chance to cash in on all of that. So you know you can make yourself special by how you approach things. And that's the message of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast, is that you can control through your thinking and your activity, where you go in life. And that, that's pretty exciting once you get that concept down.

Mm, yeah. And one quick last thing I want to mention about this is really important, at least personally for me is one of the biggest people or the most successful people that I personally admire is Bill Gates. So if you look, he's been super successful for the last, what, 40 years now. So he's been there, he stayed on the top and he's given away like what, $40 billion to charity. That's pretty pretty epic in any way, shape or form if you look at it. Most people can't even make 40 billion. He's given away 40 billion, so that's pretty good. Now let's look at what he' done in his own life, how he's applied some of these principles in his own life. If you look, the first thing he did was he didn't just say, oh, you know what, I'm going to go and blindly get into software, see what's happening. He just didn't do that. He didn't just say, oh, I'm going to blindly drop out of college and then go start this business. I'm going to flounder around for a couple years and see what happens. If it doesn't work out, I'm going to come back to College. No, he didn't think like that. What he did was he, at 19 years old, saw the Altair 8080 on a. You know, a magazine. Right. And to Larry's distinction, the Altair was basically invented by cousin Ed. Right, Larry?

Yep. My cut.

My.

My older cousin Ed, he invented the personal computer, pretty much.

That's.

That's where Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft at 19, 20 years old, out in Albuquerque.

Yeah. Yeah. So that is a distinction not many people have either. Not only Larry successful, but his family has a really powerful lineage. Right. So there is that. Okay, going back to the story with Bill Gates here. So what happened was the Altair was powerful, but the thing is, the Altair did not have a programming language at that time. So what Bill Gates did and Paul Allen did was Paul Allen was like, yeah, let us build you a programming language for the Alt Hire. And that was Microsoft's first big project. That's when Microsoft actually started in 1975, and they pretty much created the programming language for the Alt hire. So that's kind of the first thing that they did. Now, this would not have happened if Bill Gates was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to try to do this software thing because I like it and it may work, may not work. No, he was really careful. You can even say opportunistic, but that's not the right word here. But he was really careful, and he saw the whole field of what was working in the marketplace, what did people really want at that point, and that's what he worked on. The second big project that he worked on was the soft card for Apple iis. Now, Apple one came out when Apple was just starting. Apple One failed miserably. And no one really wanted to work with Apple at all at that point. But then what they did was they looked at what was broken and they fixed it. And then they launched Apple ii. Now, one of the things that Apple II did was it was a great personal computer, personal user device. It was really great at doing that. The thing that it did not or cannot do was it couldn't run Office devices and documents and Excel and things like that. At that point, Excel was not even called Excel, by the way. So it was just called spreadsheets. So what Bill Gates did was he saw the field again. So he sat down, took a moment, and saw, okay, in this market right now, Apple is up and coming and they need to run Office applications. So what he did was he actually went and met with Steve Jobs. What ended up happening was they worked out A deal where Microsoft would supply what's called soft cards. Soft cards are basically now they call it plugins. Like a computer has a plugin, you plug something in and it just works. Well, soft card was a plugin for the Apple II exclusively. So much of Microsoft's initial revenue came from soft cards being sold to Apple users, Apple II users pretty much. And that built the company up to where they were making 2 to $2.5 million a year in revenue back in the 1980s. That was actually a significant chunk of money, not unlike where it is today. Now the third big move that they did, so they were doing really well selling soft cards to Apple users. What they ended up doing also was they had a meeting with IBM and this is the famed meeting that everyone likes to talk about. What they don't realize is this meeting came after six years of Bill Gates working 16 hour days to do those other two things I just mentioned. So it wasn't like he woke up one day and he did the alt hired magically just manifested with the programming language and magically just manifested with the soft card. No, he worked really hard to make that all happen. Right. So next came the IBM deal, the IBM deal where basically Bill Gates and sat in front of people on the IBM board and he was talking about his programming language for IBM clone PCs. And IBM basically said, no, we don't want a programming language, we want an operating system. So Bill Gates pretty much said, oh, I have one, which he actually didn't. So he went down the street in Seattle and actually bought an OS from someone named Greg. I forget his last name. We'll dig that up. But the point is he basically bought the first version of an operating system from greg for about $50,000. And what ended up happening was pretty much he finished it. So he didn't just take the operating system and just slap it into IBM. And no, he had to work like another year or two to kind of polish it up, make sure it worked. And that became Microsoft dos, right? And Microsoft dos. And he also did a really smart move here. So he didn't get caught up in the weeds and say, oh yeah, I'm going to sell this and this is the end of the biggest deal ever. I'm going to focus on this. No, what he did was he pretty much made a deal with IBM and said, I will sell Microsoft DOS to whoever I want. I won't just make an exclusive deal with you. Which then netted them, I believe, $340 million in wealth. Now Microsoft became wealthy as they Call it. And that is a really important thing. Now the next move came in when Windows was basically invented. So pretty much everyone knows Xerox invented the Alto. The Alto pretty much became Macintosh and Windows down the line. Now it didn't mean that they looked at the Alto and the Alto had everything perfect. Finishing the Alto took another couple years of work and, you know, and Microsoft came out with Windows and Windows was really successful out in the marketplace right now here's the thing that most people don't know about Windows either. Up until, you know, version number three of Windows, Windows was really just like, you can point and click a couple things, but didn't. It wouldn't even work really well. It was not even that useful, right? So up until version three, it didn't work so well. So what happened was there was a 12 year gap between him, you know, creating Windows and Windows being quote, unquote successful. So Windows version one came out and then Windows 95 came out. When 95 came out. So a 12 year gap when 95 came out. That's when everyone started hearing about it. Yeah, Windows is great. Everyone's using Windows, Windows is awesome. And then Bill Gates became like the richest person ever and so on and so forth. Now the thing is, he didn't stop there. He went on to take the same methodology and things that he did for not only the personal computer space, but he did it in the gaming space with Xbox, he did it in the Internet space with Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is the past version of Chrome right now. So if you were to kind of go back and look, that's what it is. So Google basically looked at what Internet Explorer was doing, Firefox was doing, and then made a lighter version of that and now became Chrome, which everyone uses today. But Internet Explorer kind of started all that, right? So that's one of the things. Now another thing that people don't know about Bill Gates, I guess in terms of how he overdoes stuff, is a lot of people think, oh yeah, Bill Gates made a lot of money. So what he did, and this is one of the best move business moves ever in history, but no one even knows that it happened. That's how awesome it is. So let's talk about this. Most people, what they think is, oh yeah, Bill Gates had this company, he sold all of his stocks in Microsoft, and then now he's using that money for philanthropy. So he started his philanthropic organization. Now he's spending all the money there. What they don't know is Bill didn't do that. What he actually did was he took all the money when Microsoft had about $5 billion in revenue, or actually, no, sorry about that. Bill Gates had a net worth of $5 billion. What he did was he took all the excess money he had and he created something called Cascade Investments. Cascade Investments is pretty much where a lot of Bill Gates current worth and past net worth resides in. So he took all the money that he had from selling Microsoft stock and dividends, and whatever his share was that he was getting from the company, he put it into Cascade. And what Cascade does, it's basically run by Michael Larson. He's CIO Chief Investment Officer. Bill Gates is chairperson of that company or chairman of the company. It was started in 1995. So right around, right around Windows 95 came out, he started an investment company. Now, he took all the money that he had and slowly converted a lot of his money over to Cascade. And by the time he retired in the early 2000s, what ended up happening was all of his net worth that he had from selling Microsoft stock went into Cascade. And now guess what happens if you look at the. And this is something that I discovered by accident, actually, but if you go and look, Bill Gates net worth goes up every single year, right? Every single year his net worth goes up. Actually, every single month it goes up. And I was like, how can his net worth keep going up when he actually sold all of his Microsoft stock? Yeah, I understand. If Microsoft stock goes up and his net worth tight to it, it makes perfect sense. But how does it keep going up when he owns less than 1% of Microsoft? Well, what happens at Cascade is Michael Larson makes Bill Gates so much money that he cannot give away money fast enough. Which is really interesting if you think about it. So Cascade owns the Four Seasons Hotel, part of Four Seasons Hotel. It owns Colab, Ecolab, it owns Berkshire Hathaway. It owns a lot of different shares in different companies. And the money and the revenue that's generated from those companies and investments pretty much goes to philanthropic organizations. So even though he's giving away a lot of money and he can't give away the money fast enough, he is still making money. And he will still remain one of the richest people even 100 years into the future, long after his death, I would say, because the way he set things up, the way he's thought about his life, the way he's thought about what works in the marketplace, how hard he has to work for it, and so on and so forth. And right within this time, I actually did some math with my staff members. A couple weeks ago, he actually worked for about 36 years to build all this, give or take. So it wasn't like he started something and it worked really well. All of this was built over a 36 year period. Now, people like Mark Zuckerberg and all these other folks, they've basically taken what Bill Gates has done and fast tracked it from 30 years to like maybe 15, 20 years or 10 years in some cases. But that is a really great example of how some of these concepts were implemented. Yes, Larry.

Yeah, and the thing is that that plays back into our theme here of thinking about what you're doing and setting yourself up for success. And I would imagine it's his good friend Warren Buffett that gave him a lot of that insight, that allowed him to set that thing up that way, don't you think?

I would say so, Larry. Yes. That would definitely have been a big, a big part of that, for sure.

And so he leveraged off of his friendship with Warren Buffett. You know, it's like, who are your friends? I mean, who do you, you know, what friends are you cultivating? And you might not have any real knowledgeable, influential friends now, but are you doing the kind of things where 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 years from now you're going to be in those circles? You know, are you working? Are you headed to be in a situation where you can have some of those kind of friends or some, that kind of influence and just something to think about. But also, you brought up a point about Zuckerberg and some of these other guys coming up behind him. And whereas Gates learned from Buffett, they're learning from Gates and compressing time frames. And so that's, that technique is available to all of us if we'll just take the time to think about what we really want out of our lives and see who has been able to do that, what techniques did they use, what was their thinking, what was their tools, what were their resources? And start to move yourself over to get in line with their winning pattern. Because winning follows certain strategies. Winning follows winning patterns.

Go ahead. In terms of summarizing this, Larry, I would say this is probably a really important point here. A lot of people that I know in my life, even though they're successful people, they don't even know any of the things we just talked about. Like even half of the things we just talked about, they don't really know. If you ask them, hey, can you tell me what are the movies that are coming in the next couple months? They know. They know when comic book Characters were invented. They know what's the next movie for that comic book character. When you ask them, hey, can you tell me what the next move of this billionaire can be? In most cases, they don't even know the billionaire. They don't even know what the billionaire did to be successful. They don't even know what the next move is. But they know all these irrelevant things about, oh, yeah, this celebrity right here is getting married and they're getting like, you know, XYZ and this, that and the other. And I'm like, is that going to help you in any way, shape or form? It's not. So if 70% of your life is going to be spent working and it's going to be in the pursuit of basically getting revenue and money in so you can sustain your life, it will be useful to look at people who have done that a thousand fold better than you have and learning from them. My logic has always been, if I can do 1, 1/10 of the percent of what bill has done, I would be pretty set for life, you know what I mean? Or what Mark has done for his life. Right. So I would. It would pay very well to, like, look at what these folks have done and do a little bit of what they've done. And it would be really useful for, you know, your entire life. And your life gets a lot easier because these people, some of these folks that we've been talking about, say Bill Gates is one of the smartest people to ever live. Like, his IQ is like off the charts. Right. And he's actually translated that into really great success. But, yeah, it's good to learn from people who are super successful and not to learn from people who don't have any clue what they're talking about, shall we say? So that would be my takeaway. Larry, your summary of the whole thing. Yeah.

The idea is to live your life with purpose. Once you decide what you really want, you can start steering yourself in that direction and you can use other people and other techniques and other systems people have done as your guidepost to get you in the right area. But the exciting thing is, even if you only improve each day by 1%, which wouldn't be a huge improvement over a week, that's going to add up over a month. You know, if you're pushing to improve, that's the Abi principle I talk about in chapter five, my book, Always Be Improving. And you have the, you have the attitude that things can always be better. Looking around, how can I, how can we get things better? How can we do things quicker, faster, better, and you only get a 1% improvement. That adds up. And over a week, month, year, it actually becomes a way of life. One year after another, all of a sudden you start to skyrocket past all of the people that you used to be even with, and they look around and say, what happened to this guy, this guy or this, this girl? How, how do they do it? Well, it's happening in plain view, but it's happening with a little bit more focus, a little bit more intensity, a little bit more thought about what's going on. And it's kind of like the Bible says, redeeming the time. You know, you're, you're not wasting, you're just using a little bit more of the time for, you know, your intended results and these things. Now if you steer your car to the left, you're going to go to the left. You steer your car to the right, you're going to go to the right. So if you steer your life in the direction of success, you get to have more success. And that's the message of what we're doing here. So, vignesh, thanks so much. Do you have a parting shot that you want to give everybody here?

I don't think so, Larry. I think I've passed on my parting shower already.

Okay, well, thanks so much, big Nesh, for being on and doing this. I'm, you know, I've wanted to do this for quite a while.

And thank you as well, Larry. Thank you for having me. It's been my highest honor to be on this podcast and help anyone who's listening. Yeah, I think you guys take care and I'll talk to you soon.

All right, thank you very much. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind with me, Larry Wydell, if I've helped you in any way, leave us a five star rating and review on Apple podcasts. For more information like this, listen to our other Million Dollar Mastermind episodes and check out my Widel Academy YouTube channel and visit us on wdl on winning.com I'm the Million Dooll Mastermind. And until next time, go, go, go.