The 30-Year Rule: Why the Best Opportunities Take Decades

If you think you're doing the right thing, be patient, never give up. If door A is closed, go to door B. And the best thing that anybody ever said to me, and a lot of entrepreneurs like myself doing kind of oddball off the main— doing oddball off the mainstream things, is he never gives up.

Welcome to Big Hitters. I'm Larry Weidel, and this show is for people who are done playing small. Each week we break down what it actually takes to win at a high level— the decisions, the discipline, the adjustments that separate those who almost do it from those who do it. No theory, no fluff, just straight talk from someone who spent 50 years building winners. If you're serious about momentum, You're in the right place. Let's get into it. This is Richard Foose, folks, and Richard is a dynamic individual and he's got— we're in a countdown to a pickleball game on Saturday. Is that what you said, Richard?

That's right. I only have a few days to do this. Well, hopefully I can get around.

Richard, appreciate you getting on today. Tell me, what's the main thing you'd like for people to walk away from this? How can we help you today?

The main thing and How I live my life is basically to try to make, you know, I came of age with the '60s and I work on just my own way of trying to make the world a happier, more peaceful place, because that's what we thought about in the '60s. And, you know, I want to, you know, I can talk about how music plays a part in that and why I got so into music. Because it was kind of truly the soundtrack of our generation.

We're going to have fun today, Richard, because we're going to talk about winning and helping people win. What this is all about, the point of all this, Richard, and why it's such a treat to have you on is that people read books, listen to podcasts, go to conventions, and try and figure out how to get ahead in life, be an entrepreneur, Build a business, become special, do special things. But they leave the event or they leave the podcast and then it never gets applied. Even if they go to a mastermind thing like, hey, I met 5 billionaires. Great. Yeah. But you're back home and you got 15 things to do. Take out the trash. By the end of the day, you forgot all the billionaires that you met and all the great ideas that you heard. So it comes into how do you apply these things? And that's why it's so much fun Talking to you because you know that journey and you know the thought process of taking ideas and sorting it out of your mind. And then what you've done is make such many amazing things happen, you know, behind, you know, with Rhino Records and what you, you know, kind of reenergized the whole music industry and going on from that and doing the charitable works and the things that I'll let you tell the story real quick, but what stands out to me is what you did was you took— this is like, you don't have to be an Elon Musk to kind of invent Tesla or SpaceX to do something great with your life. You don't have to come up with Facebook or something. The world is full of people, ideas, and money, and where the opportunity is, come along and put those things together, do something special. And that's what you did with Rhino Records. And you saw, you started with a little small operation there. You had some ideas and you built an empire. The other thing that stands out, Richard, I'm giving you my mindset, is like you kept winning. You know, the thing is you started winning early on and you kept winning. You went from, you know, I wrote a book on this, Serial Winning, you know, and like what's inside the mind of somebody who does what Richard Foose does? And that is he goes, has a success, does something great with his life, but then goes on and says, oh, there's bigger things out here. I can't keep doing— I like the taste of winning. I'm going to keep winning. And then you turn that over to where you spread that winning and that success into other people's lives with your philanthropy and things like that. You've kept winning, kept going on winning your whole life. There's a lot for us to learn from that. You know, you're thinking on that. So tell us how you got started.

I got started because I was a sociology major in college. I had no idea, you know, what I wanted to do. And I was doing, I had started my own community organization and I realized, you know, I gotta at least make rent. So I, and just a few things pointed me to, hey, I can get a bunch of used records. And had a friend's family owned a little surplus electronic, no, big electronic, surplus electronics store in the Santa Monica Mall, which was completely dead at the time. It then became the biggest mall in the country, and now it's kind of dead again. But anyway, so I had some used records in the store and I was eking out a living, and then, but I really wanted my own record store. And in those days, and I think it's parallel Today, because in those days you could start a record store for literally a couple thousand dollars. Rent, this is in Westwood, not Westwood Village. Rent was $150 a month. You know, you didn't really have to sell that many records to, to then to make your $150. Anyway, so I had the record store and it was very slow going. At first, but I thought it was unique in that we were the only used record store in West LA. So we were near the UCLA campus. What I didn't realize was UCLA students didn't have cars, so they had a hard time making it down to our store. But we eventually slowly built an audience and I could make a living from it. In terms of, I love what you said. And my advice and how my career has gone is have an idea, just do it and have a lot of confidence in it. And eventually, if you're doing the right thing, things will happen, but it sure could take a long time and you have to have, work hard, have a lot of patience. You know, never give up.

And let's talk about that. It takes a while to get going in the beginning. You know, you start with a record store. Now what this turned into, this tornado it turned into, or this tidal wave of success, Rhino Records, it turned into eventually you built Rhino Records. You got in the idea of, you know, selling, you know, resurrecting music history. I think you said you went in at one time and James Brown in the '78, '79, all his music was pretty much out of print and not available. And you went in there and got to the record label, got the rights, and became your biggest seller ever. And the thing is, just going back in, you know, a lot of times all of us get away from the basics, you know, but like this, you found that people, there was still a, that music that made it special when it came out was still, still a demand for that. You know, like now, now we do that, you know, we don't like forget the early Beatles, you know, or the early Bob Dylan or something. We're still, but I think You're the one who made music history, you know, current. And from that, you know, you sold it a quickly thing. You know, you you have 100 million sellouts. You have, you know, you do all these things. You get into record producing. I mean, movie producing. And the big thing, just just to kind of, you know, if we drop names, I mean, you're you're the guy who can drop names with anybody on the planet in terms of all the rock groups and all the movie stars and all of the places. You know, Richard Foose has been there. You I'm just reading there, with world-famous musicians, The Monkees, Eric Burdon, The Ramones, Grateful Dead, Emerson, Lake& Palmer, Beach Boys, Yes, Doobie Brothers, Cars, Chicago, Tom Paxton, Third Eye Blind, The Doors, War, and then all these movies. And one thing, since our producer Joe is a big fan of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I believe the movie he watched, and Hunter Thompson, which by the way, I'm interviewing you from The middle of Aspen, Colorado. And I'll probably go down and have lunch down at the Woody Creek Tavern where Hunter Thompson lived right down there. Joe's a big fan of that. How about giving Joe a couple of minutes of insights of what it was like to be involved in that movie?

You know what's amazing is I've been talking a lot about it recently, and I think a much better— as great as the story of Fear and Loathing is and Hunter's career, the greatest story never told is how Fear and Loathing finally got made and the odyssey of virtually every superstar director, actor was involved in trying to get Fear and Loathing made for 30 years. And somehow we finally did it, but it sure was difficult and hard. And one I only met Hunter. I wasn't the most involved of, you know, between my partner was much more involved. But I don't know, one really funny story was we were meeting Hunter at a hotel and he's, you know, we're putting him up at the hotel. Well, we go to meet him. He keeps us waiting 2 hours. He's in his hotel room. Well, I think just because he was Hunter and could screw as he did, So we go into the restaurant and he puts this bowl of white powder on the table and he's doing blow on the table in the middle of the restaurant. And I think nobody in their right mind from the restaurant would think that nobody would do that. Nobody would think that he was doing that. And I just— and he was just out of his mind crazy. He was like the character Sure. If you've read of him, you know, the whole talk, the whole— That's the only time I met him, but he was— we rented a car for him and we get a notice from the car company, where's the car? And we trace it down. It's in a parking lot 30 miles from anywhere. He just abandoned the car at some point. So he was— Hunter was Hunter. But I want to tell the— I just think the great— whether it's a documentary or narrative film about just the making of Fear and Loathing, it is absolutely amazing.

What was the surprise for you about the fact of how it got made? What about that process sticks out that you think that the big, kind of one of the turning points for it?

Finally found a director that Hunter liked, Alex Cox. And we got Johnny Depp to star. And in the first meeting, Johnny Depp decides he hates Alex Cox. So we had, you know, a more famous director, Terry Gilliam. And by the first or second meeting, Terry Gilliam just decides he hates us. And Terry Gilliam energizes him as hating the producers. So we make a deal with Universal and we're pretty much out of it, but he hates us so much, even though we had no interaction with him, that we're banned from the premiere. The whole thing was exactly like it should have been. It's fear and loathing. Highly dysfunctional. The amazing thing is the movie bombed, but I thought they did as good a job as you can How do you make a movie about a drunk trip? And it's become like your producer, it's become a big cult classic discovered by new generations, et cetera.

Now, the thing about that, Richard, you brought into that project the same kind of mentality and the same kind of problem-solving skills that were developed for the, basically the core of that. That's the thing you have. You get ahead in life by solving problems. Not by having the easy road or like someone you knew, somebody who had a special advantage. It's like, oh, that's great for like day one. But after that, the clouds come in and everything goes wrong. You gotta have some problem-solving skills and you gotta have high-level problem-solving skills. You brought those things into that project, but probably all of those projects. How did you develop those things? Where were the biggest challenges you run into?

I think it was from The record store doing so mediocre for many years. I just know how we, I just learned persistence, patience and persistence and keeping on problem solving and never giving up. You know, there were many projects of Rhino took us 10 years and they weren't even like a commercial project, like a band that we loved. That we kept going back to the owners of the recordings time and time and time again. And same with Fear and Loathing. It took us a few years to get it done, but it took the world 30 years to get it done. So it's just supreme patience and persistence. Yeah.

I think it's very enlightening for people that are out there struggling with things to realize that People who have the success that you've had, there's had to be compounding beyond what you could put a checklist and say, here's his bio, his Wikipedia thing would go on for pages. But in the beginning, to get the ball rolling, it comes slow. And people who have those kind of lifetime achievements, a lifetime of winning, go through a lot of delays along the way, go through a lot of frustrations. And I always say to people, if you ever hear That a billionaire does not get depressed, or somebody who is like, if you feel like Elon Musk never complained, or you feel like the people at the top don't have bad days, you obviously don't know any of them. But the thing is, they don't complain long. They don't, like billionaires do bitch. That's the thing. But they don't bitch long because what they'll do is they get frustrated and then they'll come up with a solution. They'll keep fighting back. Or if they're The thing is, they might go through a 1-year, 2-year, 3-year, 5-year delay problem, or 30 years or whatever, but they're not just sitting there on their couch going through it. They're fighting the whole time. You don't see it, but while you were in that thing going through that frustration you had inside, you were wanting to bust out. You were trying things to bust out, and you were learning lessons even though maybe it took a while to show up. Is that a correct assessment?

Really smart what you're saying. I agree 100%. I certainly would complain all the time. I still do. Now with a nonprofit. So the nonprofit world is totally different. I haven't cracked it yet, but I, uh, you know, I just never give up. So, and by the way, everything I've always done, if it can work on a small scale. So at first we were selling, you know, a few thousand records and, you know, break even, make a little bit. But, you know, the people who like the records, We helped and they had a great experience buying those records. So I believe in doing things really small that work. And then—

Talk about that for a minute, Richard.

Just everything I've ever done is selling a few used records and eking out a living to start with the first few years. And I said, with our— until we had the James Brown record, our records would sell a few You know, a few thousand records, but we knew we were doing, putting out good product that people enjoyed. And we were, if it never got bigger and we made a living, that would've been okay. And the same with, you know, right from the very, the first thing I ever did was something called the Free Store. And I collected clothing and, you know, household items and gave it to people in need. I figured if I help 5 people, that's good. It's better than none. Sell 1,000 records, it's better than selling none. So it's been my philosophy.

By the way, if you're still listening right now, you're different. You don't just consume content, you're actively looking for an edge. And that's who I built the Big Hitter Community for. Not people chasing motivation, people chasing momentum. Not theory, proximity. Proximity to operators who are actually in the arena making Real decisions and winning at a high level. Inside Big Hitter, you get conversations we don't have on the podcast, direct access to people who build what you're trying to build in a room that holds you to a higher standard every single week. This isn't a hype group. It's not networking for the sake of networking. It's where serious people go to sharpen their thinking and compress their timeline. If you're done just listening and you're ready to be in the room where it actually happens, head to joinbighitters.com or click the link in the show notes. The right room changes everything. I'll see you inside. Well, one thing I learned early in sales, you know, 'cause when you start off, you think everything's gotta be perfect. I can tell you, it's gotta go this way, it's gotta go that way. And you can be very rigid when you're young. But I soon learned, take what you can get, son. You know, you get an opportunity to get a little sale here or a little thing here, and you say, no, I'm gonna hold out for the big thing. And this, that, the other. So like, if you get a chance to make some forward progress, take advantage of it because that might not come again.

We had a saying at Rhino, more is more. And what it meant is we have the rights, we got the rights to the musician Jerry Lee Lewis. We put out a budget album, we put out a box set, we put out a mid-price album, and it They all sold. We weren't too precious that, no, we can only do it this way. Or, you know, we have the opposite. The record companies made a huge mistake historically, and they would have, they'd be very precious with their artists. So just name any, you know, big artist, Neil Young. They, in their mindset was, okay, We'll do an album every 2 years for Neil Young, and we want, and we'll make a great album, but there's, there'd be no ancillary things with it. So if you love Neil Young, you only had the opportunity to spend $7 on Neil Young every 2 or 3 years when a young fan would've bought, you know, every album, every iteration of the album, every Every live recording, we really, we super served the fan. And today, you know, the albums come out and you can buy the green vinyl, the red vinyl, the different iterations. Now they understand that, but it took them, you know, 50 years.

Well, even things like the greatest hits, you know, you add an extra song on there or something, but, you know, it's like greatest hits and then they, you know, early years and this, that, the other, but But fans are fans. They want to buy. And, you know, you saw those opportunities. But I know, like, even in the— and I know you know this, like bands, there are bands out there that are there in terms of being precious. No, I don't want you to use my song on a TV show or, you know, no, I'm in a restaurant. I know I don't want to be— I, you know, I'm pure. You know, I don't want to sell out to the commercial interests. Yet on the other hand, the Rolling Stones, I don't think anybody has— somehow they still have their credibility. They sold their song Start Me Up as the thing for Word, Microsoft Word, like what, 30 years ago? They made more off that one stupid song or one great song. And just that because they weren't precious, they had an opportunity, take it. And it's still great when they play it in there. It didn't ruin the song. Because when they'll play every concert, they'll play Start Me Up and everybody's into it. You know, the idea is take advantage of opportunities when they show up.

You know, I can understand like a band, you know, like The Doors didn't want to have their, you know, they were political, they're environmentalists. They didn't want to have their song for Cadillac. And, uh, you know, so things like that I understand. But other than that, you know, the record company, They've always been too precious. And as you said, the more that you get the songs out there, and now you have no choice. Anybody can make any of their own compilations. So if they want to put a Neil Young song on with an X-rated rap song on their own compilation, there's no one can stop.

Let's talk about transitions because, you know, the time flies, you know, when we're talking here. But, you know, let's talk about transition. You know, in the beginning you have to fight your way through. It takes forever and everything. But eventually, if you're fortunate and you're, you know, you're making the good decisions and there's a demand for what you're offering, you got to make sure there is a market. You knew there's a demand for music. And so it was just a matter of cultivating, giving it time. But now things started to pick up for you. The pace of it picked up and you went from that to where eventually you sold Rhino Records, which I always thought of as the cool record store. Rhino Records was like, everything kept coming back to Rhino Records, but eventually you sold that $100 million. That's more than going from like a $150 a month record store starting in West LA.

At some point we made a joint venture with Atlantic Records, and Atlantic Records was Our favorite record label growing up. They had all the great R&B groups and soul bands. And so we were— and they hadn't done anything with their catalog, including, believe it or not, Aretha Franklin. They had maybe one greatest hits album they put out after she left Atlantic for Arista. And so we went and made a joint venture with them, and they had an option eventually We were part of Warner Music, and eventually they had an option to buy the other half of the company, you know, many years later, but we had really a great run. And Rhino is still the best reissue label today. It's still, you know, part of the Warner Music Group, but it's still probably better than ever. You know, with the resurgence of vinyl, they're just doing amazing stuff. So they, that makes me really proud. They just keep going on and doing wonderful things and even growing our vision.

Talk about that transition, the kind of things on a day-to-day basis, the kind of issues you felt with, how you dealt with it, how you kept from getting overwhelmed, how your expansion went.

Because luckily enough that there was such a pent-up demand for older music, the music that we grew up on, music we knew, was great and new generations, you know, learning it. It was sort of hard to make a mistake because there was all, you know, if it was a band that, you know, we were smart enough not to do obscure bands or, you know, bands that nobody, you know, cared about. So what I intuited was very hard if we put out a Turtles, my partner was friends with in high school. And they luckily ended up owning their own recordings. But if we put out, nobody's, you know, like, uh, MTV's not doing like a feature on the Turtles. 60 Minutes isn't going to, there's not that much you can do to market, market the band. It's just put the music out there and hope that they, so all these bands, there wasn't, you know, any big marketing plan, just Get it out there and let people, you know, let people buy it. So that was the secret. We, you know, the company that, you know, I transitioned to, Shout Factory, we actually thought of it as a factory. We're a factory putting out these great shows of the past, doing them in a very, a way that really honors the art.

Mm-hmm.

Same at Rhino. Yeah.

Now, who was we when you got started, and who is we when you get up to the size where you make the sale of $100 million and you're at Shout Records? And then who is the we that's involved in all of this deciding?

So at Rhino, my partner was the manager of the record store, Harold Bronson. And then at my next company, Shout Factory, it was my brother, who was head of marketing at Lionel and Bob Evers. So it was, you know, 3 partners and we sold a majority of the company to a shop— to a private equity company a few years ago, merged with a bigger company, and now we're called Radial Entertainment. And I'm, at this point, I'm just a part-time consultant, but we're still putting out You know, great stuff, you know, from the, and, you know, reissuing, putting out great film and TV.

Where did you put your time? How did you see the thing of what occupied your time and what you spent your time on? From the beginning, you were doing everything. And what would you wind up spending your time on at the time you sold out and you moved up to where you're more in an executive decision-making level, and you got a lot of people.

I'm wondering if you've heard this from other entrepreneurs, but a friend who ran companies said, let's face it, once you have more than 20 people working at the company, you're just a glorified human resource director. It really was finding good people and just making sure they were okay, seeing if there was anything you could do to help them. And then getting involved, having ideas and getting involved in some of the bigger projects.

You seem to have an approach to where you don't let things overwhelm you because you had to have some amazing challenges. You're talking about what, a very tough industry. You're talking about very hyper-prickly type people in the music business and the movie business and the actors and navigating that successfully, which is what you've done, you come across as someone who doesn't get that bothered. It's just like, okay, what can we do? How can we adjust here? You come across as somebody who doesn't look for a fight, looks for a solution when you get in these situations.

Yeah, absolutely. And you got to remember when we're talking to actors or directors or artists, We're honoring— they know that we love what they did. So there, it's not a contentious relationship like it would be for a traditional studio. It's really the opposite. We're here to make sure that your— the work that you did and love is presented in the best possible way. So once we have a deal, they're all in and working with us and— We rarely had a contentious relationship, Bruce.

How did you keep yourself on track while you're going through that though? Because it seems like it's a whirlwind of complexity. I know, like making a movie, you know, the complexity of the people and the actors and the locations and the crews and, you know, the financial people and, you know, it just seems like a, you know, a whirlwind and none of it goes together smoothly, it doesn't seem like. So how did you keep yourself on track? And how did you keep yourself centered? Like where I'm not going to let this tear me apart. I'm going to stay myself.

We certainly had a few things then when they happened. I went through bad emotional periods. One that at the record store, very early on in the record store, this is a moral of how, like a friend says, everything bad is good. So here's a story of how every, the worst thing that could happen, it turned out to be the best. So at the record store, there was a, the biggest chain in LA was called Warehouse Records. They were gigantic. And the way that they succeeded was, you know, every little area in LA had a hippie record store. They'd go into this, they'd go into the record, into the area, Open a warehouse and sell records for a dollar, which when they, you know, records were what, $6 list. So they drove the record store out of business. Then they raised the prices to, you know, regular retail. The state of California passed a fair trade law to stop Warehouse from doing that. We naively were selling our records for sale too cheap. Warehouse sued us using all that And it was made to stop them. Anyway, they sued us and I thought, that's the end. How are we going to like go through a lawsuit with them? Anyway, the manager became my partner. Harold was a rock, part-time rock writer. He gets a story in the alternative newspaper then, it was called the LA Free Press, about how big corporate America is trying to drive out the poor Little hippie record store. Our business quadruples overnight. We have a settlement conference with the owner of Warehouse. I'm like, and the biggest law firm, music law firm in LA is representing them. And I have like a pro bono friend who's doing it for us.

However, Right.

Who had just started practicing, you know, as my attorney. And anyway, I had, we had to pay them a token amount of money, but, you know, our business had tripled, so I didn't care. And the funniest thing was the owner of Warehouse, as we are leaving, says one more thing and he throws down the article and he says, this is the worst commie trash I've ever read in my life. And I go, well, isn't there freedom of the press? That was the beginning of the success of our store. And that happened like a few times where something horrible, and I certainly had, you know, many sleepless nights and, you know, PTSD over some of the bad things that happened. But I think in general, I'd argue that if you do right and run your business, you know, ethically, you do the people who work with you. Right. That it's not a litigious society.

What do you remember about keeping the peace in your company and running your company? What are, what were the, some of the best techniques that you used to set yourself up for success with your staff?

I wasn't like an expert in finance or I just never felt that I was all that great and knew everything. So I just kind of let, I wanted to give the staff as much autonomy as possible, you know, let them run it and, you know, be kind and have an employee-oriented company. You know, people marveled at how, you know, that worked there and had worked at big companies, how they were, you know, they said, I don't understand why there's no politics and whatnot. But I didn't know how to do the politics. Way to do it, you know, especially if you're starting at, you know, right from the beginning. You know, I, our first 5 employees who mostly were in high school at the Rhino store, you know, one of them's the guitarist in Wilco. One of them became a general manager of Warner Records, is now the largest single operator rock memorabilia dealer. Another one owns by far the best bookstore in LA. The other was my partner. So from the beginning I just said, you got to run the store. So that's how I always approach.

That works when it goes well. Do you remember one case when it doesn't go well, when you have someone comes in and takes advantage? And it's a great thing if you got the right people in there, but that's also a great opportunity, like for many of us, to have someone who works underneath you that smiles, Very agreeable, everyone loves, and then they embezzle a couple of million dollars right from under your nose. And they bring you cookies every week too.

Luckily, this was towards the end of Rhino that we did have one, a guy come in in an executive position who had great personality, long hair, and he said, I'm here to take over the company. He said right away. And so he was able to create a little bit of havoc. It was towards the end of Rhino, so in the end it didn't really matter. But yes, you're right. A really smart operator could have figured out how to—

You can trust, but you got to keep your eyes on them.

Yeah, exactly.

I got to wrap this up. How did you make the transition into the movie business and what was the big surprise and what's the big fun for Richard in the movie business?

In terms of making our own films, We did very few. And Fear and Loathing, to be honest, we were booted out once Terry Gilliam took over. So we didn't have to figure all that out. I learned from doing it, I don't want to do it.

All that glitters is not gold, in other words.

Yeah, but the gold is in helping, just very briefly, for Shop Factory, similar to Rhino, but because it was film and TV, it was much more complex. But we took all these great shows that nobody could, that weren't released on DVD or even visually because the rights were so perilous. So the first thing we did was the show Freaks and Geeks, one of, you know, certainly in the top 10 most favorite cult TV shows of all time. Never been out after the initial broadcast because they had 80 gigantic hit songs. Nobody in their right mind would try to clear all those songs. We did Mystery Science Theater and, you know, the Johnny Carson Tonight Show. All, you know, all things that were impossible to clear, so nobody was doing them. We did it. And that was fun. Like, you know, working with Judd Apatow on, uh, Freaks and Geeks, and he was our partner in it and helped us move mountains to get, to get it cleared.

What would you say is the The best thing you did about moving mountains and doing the things everybody was, you know, everybody says it can't be done. 'Cause I mean, we're all facing that in our lives that, you know, it'd be great if we did this, but it can't be done. Don't even try that. Don't go there. But I mean, you went there and you made it through. What would you advise people about that? What'd you learn about doing that? Getting the rights to 80 songs like that?

It's just the same thing. If you think you're doing the right thing, Be patient, never give up. If door A is closed, go to door B. And the best thing that anybody ever said to me, and a lot of entrepreneurs like myself doing kind of oddball off the main— doing oddball off the mainstream things, is he never gives up. And it's not necessarily a compliment. Or I read the a book about Ben and Jerry's. Ben would drive his staff crazy with new ideas. You know, the staff settles down and says, we're doing A, B, C, and then the eccentric leader comes in and says, today we're doing D. So that never giving up would kind of drive everybody a little crazy. But—

This has been a lot of fun, Richard, and congratulations on such an incredibly productive life and congratulations on Finding a way to win and move forward all the way through your life and keeping that enthusiasm, and as a result, build momentum to where you're able to pass it on to others. You're on the boards of some of these charitable organizations. You're a huge philanthropist. And so you're able, because if you're winning, you're able to enjoy seeing this passed on to other people and see them experience the same thing. That's got to be incredibly rewarding. What is a sendoff you could give for people who stayed with us the whole time and kind of lessons from your life that you would pass on that will allow them to experience the kind of winning that you've done in your life?

When I started in the early '70s, you could start a business for a few thousand dollars until I don't know, 7 or 8 years ago, that was not true anymore. No, it's true again. Anybody can start a business for nothing with an Amazon store or millions of ways you can have a successful business on the internet that doesn't cost— you don't have to pay any rent for your computer. I would just suggest people have an idea and stick with it. And if you're just, you know, if you're breaking even or Just stick with it and do all the things, tips that we went, follow all the tips that someone would get from people like myself and listening to your show and just keep doing it and eventually you'll have great success.

What you've shown is don't be afraid to start with something small because it can compound. And the main thing is start winning. You know, get something and start selling something. Get some revenue coming in, right?

So much. Yeah. Just tiny little wins. And if you have to do another job while you're doing this, do it, but just do it.

Fantastic, Richard. This has been so much fun and I wish you the best and good luck on the pickleball game this weekend. All right. Thanks so much. You got it. That's it for this episode. If this resonated with you, do me a favor, share it with someone who's ready to level up. Winners find winners, and the right conversation at the right time can change everything. Want to go deeper? Join us inside the Big Hitter Community at joinbighitters.com. That's where the real work happens. And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Remember that you're either growing or dying, and there's no standing still. Keep winning, and I'll see you next week.