Why Billionaires Work Harder Than Anyone and Why "Work Smart" Is a Trap

Everyone says you should work smart and not hard, and you can get to a $5 or $10 million net worth by just working hard a little bit and then being smart or just being super, super smart. But a lot, a very high percentage of people that get to $30, $50 million or hundreds of millions, they work hard and smart and they're always working on how to be smarter while still working just as hard because that's just in their DNA. Like it's their work like, is part of who they are, and they love it, and it's fun, and it's a game.

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. Hello everyone, we've got a treat today. We're talking with Richard Wilson. Richard, welcome to Big Hitters.

Thanks for having me here, Larry.

Richard, we like to talk about winning. We like to pick the brains of people that have done big things, and preferably from the ground up like yourself, because you learn from the real-world experiences life teaches. You know, the reality is the greatest thing teacher about, you know, if we're standing on solid ground with our assumptions or not. And then as you climb the ladder, you demonstrate the fact that you've been perfect, but you made more right choices than wrong ones, as in addition to working like a dog along the way. So from that, you carry with you lessons you're carrying forward. We want to pick that, see what we can learn from, you know, trial and error is the greatest teacher, but it's great if you can learn from other people's trial and errors. And not, not have to make all the mistakes yourself. So let's get in, folks. We don't get into this subject all that frequently, just occasionally. But the world of the family office, let's talk about that. Because if you're an entrepreneur, you know, you have— you ought to think at least maybe it's a goal of accumulating net worth to where you're going to have to bring in the services of a family office. And you need to know they're available. You know how much easier they can make your life. But every entrepreneur needs to plan for success. We all plan for failure, but you ought to plan for success. Don't believe the hype that the world is full of everybody's poor and everybody's broke. I remember the first time, Richard, we— our convention had a— I mean, our company had a convention in Hawaii. We were down there and on the beach and there's a couple of towers down there. The early '80s, I think they'd just been built and I'm checking in. And I'm looking around and I said, you know, there's an awful lot of families here checking in and they seem to be young. You know, it's not like everybody's old. And the place seemed to be full. And the light bulb went on my mind. It's like, there's a lot of people doing well in the world that can afford vacations like this. And so you cannot let yourself be, you know, folks think past, you know, where you are right now. Think long-term. That's what I like about the family office idea is, get yourself considering the idea of the long-term payoff for you and positioning that can come from doing it big. And, and you do that by getting some of these, you know, garbage ideas out of your head, inefficiencies out of your schedule, and, uh, not only get— getting a, uh, a useful idea, but then turning it into something really big. And you do it step by step. There's no shortcuts on that. But the, uh, You know, where what's great about Richard is a guy who intersects with billionaires, millionaires. I think, what did you just say, sit to billionaires or something like that? You know, they're human beings and they've got problems. You know, they, they, they've got situ— they got confused, they got decisions, you know, they, they have bad days, they have good days, just like the rest of us. And Richard's in the position, he's earned the right to move himself into that world where he can talk and not only know these people, but be an advisor and be a help to them. And, you know, it's a tremendous achievement, Richard. So more power to you. Congratulations. And people should know that he's— he took this now, this concept of the family office and made it accessible to a wider variety of people by creating basically a community, a club, and the family office, you know, largest investor club in the world, 16+ million people are members and a global network. And so let's hear that. I want to hear that story. But really, what motivated you when you were getting started before you got into this world? How far out of this world did you start or did you start? Did you get a head start being inside this world? Where did you start? Because, you know, you worked your way up into the upper tier. How, how far out were you when you started?

I mean, I grew up in kind of a middle-class family. I grew up around my dad raising capital for nonprofits. So he raised a billion dollars for nonprofits, but I went to Oregon State University for my undergrad. Wasn't exactly Harvard. I paid for my own MBA by doing consulting out of my undergrad. And then I looked around after starting half a dozen businesses through grade school, middle school, high school, and said, Who's going to pay me as a 21-year-old 6 figures a year? Not many people. But if I worked in commercial real estate or raised capital for hedge funds, it's eat what you kill. So I went and got a job raising capital for hedge funds. I had to work for free until they wanted to pay me. And when I got in there, I looked around and said, it's like the saying, why did you rob the bank? Like, that's where all the money was. I looked around raising capital for hedge funds and I was like, well, family offices are all the ultra wealthy. Let me only focus on them. And nobody was being helpful to me in doing so. So I started a blog, started writing about it, and the whole thing took off from there.

And so how did you— you know, I'm going to get inside your thought processes here. Growing up, you said you started a half a dozen businesses. What— how did you look at life and look at things and say, you know, I'm going to start businesses? And what attracted you? You know, how did you get yourself going in that direction?

Well, I was reading Inc. magazine in grade school. My dad had his own business. They paid me me a penny per page to read books. They paid me a penny per pine cone to pick up pine cones. I started mowing people's lawns. I sold Christmas wreaths for the Boy Scouts. I started selling pizza places to put magnets on the sides of cars. That business worked horribly. I had a used textbook business, had 8,000 textbooks in my inventory, and my dad bought me a multi-level marketing business where I cold called everybody at my high school trying to sell them long-distance telephone service. And the only people that bought it was the parents of my girlfriend back then. And so a lot of it was just trial and error of just like wanting to figure out how to do stuff on my own and not just sit around and make stuff happen.

One thing to learn is your, your parents or your father there triggered a lot of that thinking by putting incentives in there, getting your mind on that rather than, you know, playing the guitar or something. The thing is that, you know, a lot of people have done well playing the guitar, but, you know, I think there's more entrepreneurs out there that are successful. So as you got out in In the financial world, there's a strong one to tell you a story to set, to frame what you did. A friend, one of the most gung-ho guys that worked for me early on came in and he was telling me about when he had gotten started in business. He was worked at a home finance place way back, you know, when they had the beneficial and all those little, and he worked, he was the assistant manager. He was a bubbly guy, gung-ho, and brought in all kind of business. Really made the whole location a hub. So one day he went into his manager, he said, we got to talk, you know, first thing in the morning, we got to talk. He said to his manager, how much money do you make? And the guy said, I'm not going to tell you how much money I make. He said, oh yes, you are. And he said, because I'm going to bust my rear. I'm going to knock myself out because one day I want a job like yours. And I need to have something in my mind that keeps me driving forward. And the guy thought about it for a minute. He said, okay. He took out a piece of paper. He wrote down a number, shoved it across the desk. My guy looked at it. He said, I quit. And he walked out the door. But see, it's amazing, Richard, how many people don't look down the road and say, I'm on this road. Where is it taking me? That's what you did. And that's a smart thing to do, isn't it?

I mean, it sounds strange, but, you know, when you're a in your teens and you're in college, there's only so many priorities on your mind, right? And like, I specifically remember being so broke in college and that one day I leaned back in my chair at lunch and I got the phone number of a cheerleader that I wanted to call and I didn't have $3 in my bank account to ask her out for a cup of Starbucks coffee. I was so broke. And meanwhile, the football players walk around campus like royalty. They get to skip a class, they get to travel for sports, their tuition's free, their dorm is free. And I thought to myself, I really messed this up. What am I doing here as a non-football player? Like, I really screwed up my life up to this point. And I thought, you know what, in the next stage of life, I'm going to position myself a bit better and I'm going to get positioned even better than the football players are now. As juvenile as that sounds, I just put my brain into like a positioning mode and I just thought like, how do I position myself for like, and so that I'm not looking back, not liking my position a decade from now. And that That was like one of 20 things that influenced me just to be like, yeah, this is not good. Like, let me, let me switch this around.

You know, a brilliant move on your part. In fact, that's, that's, that's what I like to try and get, get on the table as we start, we move through, because those, that kind of thinking, that way of looking at stuff will kind of influence and direct you forward is when you get into investments, get into situations, say, where's all this going to lead? And And again, if you've got someone advising you, Richard, you know, you're, you're one of these billionaires, you know, you're looking for advice, you're going to feel better about somebody who's advising you who thinks that way. And rather than giving a short-term type solution or, you know, an average, you know, yeah.

Also like with any business owner or any business person or anyone as an investor, one of the most important things is that your business IQ and your financial IQ must be much higher than the opportunity set in front of you and much higher than your current revenue or net worth. Because if your financial IQ is not higher than your net worth, the world around you will correct that very quickly and your net worth will come right back down to wherever your IQ is. And so you always have to be in close proximity of wealthy folks. You have to listen to Deca Millionaires and Centi Millionaires and ignore most people in the world. So I think that that's been a key to a lot of our success as well, is just studying these people, interviewing them, just like you do on this show, honestly. Right? It's the same, same motivation.

Let's talk about, you got the idea of the blog, you're a nobody, but you became a big somebody. And how did you go through that transition?

Yeah, it was interesting. I just thought to myself, okay, well, if the ultra wealthy have family offices, so if you are a family office, you are ultra wealthy, or you have many ultra wealthy clients in your multifamily office, Then why don't I just only focus on calling upon them? And it turned out to be harder than I thought. You know, the only trail guides on planet Earth were a Bloomberg journalist who had never worked a day in his life in the industry and some Financial Times journalist who wrote on it twice a year. I said, okay, well, there's no trail guide. I'm just going to study anything I can find, call on these folks, and then share what I'm learning along the way. And I wrote on hedge funds, capital raising, and family offices. People cared about family offices the most, you know, and from 10 hits to 100 hits to 1,000 hits a day. And I got on the front page of the Boston Globe and then spoke a couple hundred times in 17 countries from the blog taking off to 5,000 and 8,000 hits a day.

And what length of time is this, this progression?

It took about 3 to 6 months to go from nothing to, uh, probably 50 to 100 hits a day. It took another 6 months to go to 1,000 hits a day. And importantly, SEO was just becoming a thing back then in 2007, like more mainstream. And I read one book on it from Perry Marshall on, um, SEO and AdWords. And basically, figured out there's 500 keywords that people look for related to my niche. And I just did the hard work of writing 2 blog posts. You can rank twice on Google organically, 2 blog posts for every single one of those keywords. And just went from writing 1 blog post a week to writing 5 to 10 blog posts per day. And the whole thing just took off.

You probably found that the ultra-wealthy are pretty busy, pretty tight in their schedule. They have their defenses set up around them to where you've, you know, people, people you've gotta go through later, they've Better security than President Trump had at the White House Correspondents' Dinner the other night. So talk about your experiences with that breaking through.

It took me 13 emails to get Mark Cuban to reply to my cold email for my billionaires.com interview I did with him. So I just keep after people. I emailed the owners of billionaires.com for 12 years until they sold it to me. Every 3 months I followed up till they sold it to me with other folks. I'll just try unique approaches, try having a sense of humor, try referring a client to them, try helping them in some way. Everybody is getting 1,000 messages a day on all these platforms, right? And so you want to be the number one most valuable thing where you are giving them clear, obvious, huge value and you're not asking for anything. And then you might deserve a response. Otherwise, like you'll get lost in the, in the mix of everything.

What's your biggest memory of that other than the Mark Cuban?

One is Tony Robbins. You know, like we got access to Tony by adding value to the CEO of a company that he's on the board of. A lot of it just comes down to reciprocation, adding value first, building a real relationship. And a lot of people get it wrong. They think that whoever offers the biggest ROI or the biggest return wins the relationship, but it's really who somebody trusts most. Nowadays, anybody can fake anything. So it's all about meeting in person. Adding value first. And, you know, people want to do long-term business with long-term partners. They don't want to waste time doing a deal one time with somebody, right? So it's, it's all about proximity and who you're around and learning and connecting in person with the ultra-wealthy.

Tell me how this thing evolved as you got more and more people clicking on you on a daily basis, how that opened, opened up your exposure and opened up opportunities like the speaking.

So after speaking a couple hundred times in different countries, people started asking for things. We started listening to built out a data product, a certification product, and then started hosting our own events. And after we started hosting our own events, we helped set up some family offices for ultra-wealthy families, like a Shark from Shark Tank, Kevin Harrington helped formalize his family office, and he's done a few deals through our club now. And essentially we turned it into a membership. So instead of selling conference tickets, we have a real sense of community. And there's basically two layers to our community. Like we were chatting about this before we went live today. There are 240 different social media communities that we run that have 16 million members in them, and there's like 30,000 posts a month that get posted there in all these different communities. And those posts get about 100 million views a month. But the closer-knit community is when you actually meet someone in person, right? And so we do 30 events a year where you can hear from investors on stage, Deca Millionaires who had exits, Centi Millionaire, a billionaire fireside chat, and it's at those 30 in-person events is where the real business gets done. The rest of it is almost like an exposure net. We spread our education, we spread interviews like this, you know, we try to be as helpful as possible because that's just, you create good karma the more that you just spread best practices out there for everybody to benefit from.

You've covered a lot of ground and you tend to collapse these things. You know, I do the same thing. You know, when you've been in it for lo these many years, you know, you can't explain every detail, but when you go back and analyze the first steps, you know, you see the seeds of multiplication are kind of set in place, you know, like there's a reason why it turned into stuff like that. And so let's talk about— because there's a lot of people that like the idea of following these footsteps. And of course, that's, you know, the things change and social media has changed and the posting. And the one thing that's not changed is the secret world of the family office. This is a secretive world, right? There's not a lot of— when you go through your scrolling, you're not going to see endless things, articles about relating to that world. You know, that's one thing that hasn't changed. But from you, from you getting going on this, how did you get your first speaking? Who was after, after you for that?

That was like the funniest one, honestly, because I was only 26 and the European Business Summit recruited me to come speak on a hedge fund discussion panel. And at 26 years old, they flew me out there and I arrived and they probably thought I was somebody's son because there was like, it was a 6-day event and there were 2 prime ministers of countries speaking on stage at different parts of the event. And then I'm here in my 20s and I couldn't even eat that day. I was so nervous to speak and I just had to talk for a couple minutes. Wasn't a big deal, but that was the first time and it came, it, a light bulb went off in my head when I spoke there and I spoke at Monaco at a game conference soon after. And basically I realized that even though I was talking about hedge funds, capital raising, and family offices, people were referring to me as like the hedge fund blogger because I had this hedge fund blog. And I was like, well, that's one's about like the stupidest position I could have ever designed for myself. And I realized at age 26, they hired me because I had written 500 blog posts on hedge funds and capital raising and family offices. And so that's when I switched and created Family Office Club, bought familyoffices.com and said, you know what, I want the positioning of Family Office Club and being very well connected in the family office industry. And, and that's why we bought billionaires.com, et cetera, as well, because that positioning will always be powerful, whether hedge funds come in and out of favor. And I don't see that ever going outta style. And the hedge fund blogger just sounds dumb. So let me like change that positioning.

There's a funny thing about when you speak at these, I don't know if you found it, I don't know if it happened that early, but when you're in the green room, it's a funny thing. It's kinda like being at a golf club. You know, if you're a private ultra-exclusive golf club, and you're there and you go play. I mean, you might be playing with two prime ministers of other countries or something like, and you're just one of the guys, you know, it's just like, is if you're back there, you're one of them.

And I think that back to your comment earlier, one thing that's attracted a lot of $100 million plus net worth to me and $30 to $50 million is that they're almost all entrepreneurs. They're almost all just super founders. And it's like there's founders Some of them need capital. Some are just looking to grow their mental models and strategies. And then there's super founders who have had an exit or make 7 or 8 figures a year. And the fact that I share with others that I'm not just a stiff suit in a cubicle somewhere, I'm not a journalist, I am an entrepreneur and built this from scratch, attracts people because they're like, oh, I'm just like you, Richard. I just happened to be a little bit further down the road and sold my platform. Or, oh, like I could learn that from you, Richard, and, and here's something that I could help you with. And like, and so it becomes a little bit more of that peer interaction because like we are We're cut from the same cloth.

Yeah. And as such, you can relate to what they're doing. You're not— it's not institutional type personnel or structure. And so it's easy for them to let their, their hair down. They have to keep up an act. You know, what kind of things have you— what surprised you about getting into that community and working with people like that?

Yeah. I mean, the first thing that surprised me is that a lot of them were asking me for questions when I was 27 years old because they only speak for 5 or 10 of their peers and I was speaking to a couple hundred of them. So that surprised me that they would even ask me questions. The next thing that was surprising is everyone says you should work smart and not hard, and you can get to a $5 or $10 million net worth by just working hard a little bit and then being smart or just being super, super smart. But a lot, a very high percentage of people that get to $30, $50 million or hundreds of millions, they work hard and smart and they're always working on how to be smarter while still working just as hard because that's just in their DNA. Like it's their work, like as part of who they are and they love it and it's fun and it's a game. It doesn't mean you have to ignore your family. It doesn't mean you get divorced and abuse alcohol. It just means like you're industrious and your foot stays down in that gas pedal, whether you've already made your $5 or $10 million that you would need to go retire in Nebraska or not. Like that's not what they're aiming for, you know?

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. Side. You know, I've got a theory on that. I don't know if you play musical instruments. Yeah, yeah, I waste a lot of time in a lot of different areas, you know, but, uh, but one of, one of his musical instruments, you know, plus I get obsessed about it, you know, like I, you know, I've always played the guitar, then start collecting. Now before you know, you have 110 guitars. Then play the banjo, you know, I like Foggy Mountain Breakdown, so Now, now I've got 10 banjos, you know, but I took lessons from a Grammy Award-winning banjo player. And he told me one of the things he told me was he said, if you get one song, he said, the first thing is, you know, because usually your thing is you get a little of this and a little of that. You could play the leads for different things. But the— he said, you got to get one song you could play like a pro performance. You've learned it at a performance level. You could play it at tempo without thinking, without mistakes. You know, then that sets it up in your mind like, okay, this is what learning a song is like. And I really think there's that— there is a parallel to people who are super successful. They like learn how to work. You know what I'm saying? Like, no, go for it. You know what I'm saying? Go. And then, and they have, they see the results from that. And then everything they do, I think that's why I got 100 guitars and everything.

It's gonna, in my mind, it was like, you know, and there's about 5 or 6 videos I watch every morning to start my day. And one of them is from David Goggins. And like, he starts out saying, like, if you don't have self-discipline, you know, I don't look at you right, because I know you're capable of so much more. You know, and like people that have not played competitive sports, people that have not trained super hard and done physically very hard things, and people who have not ran a business for a decade or two and scaled it, like they may think they're working hard and they're really not. Right. And, and so I think that is being around people like many billionaires say, who you spend time with matters more than what you set out to do. And when we tell others, Like some people look at us like, oh, Family Office Club, like, don't need to raise money right now. I don't know if I should go to their events and like, but really it's all about proximity, being around super smart, super wealthy entrepreneurs, super intelligence, using artificial intelligence, um, in today's world is needed and accessing the intelligence of a community and then scale. How do you really grow your platform, grow what you're doing? And that might be with capital. It might be with deal structures. It might be through joint ventures. That combination of proximity, super intelligence, and scale is really what we go back to all the time on how we try to add value to others and what's made us successful.

You know, the thing is, most people have, if they're in a salary job or they're not really in a structure where they're gonna learn to go balls to the wall, you know what I'm saying? They're the, the idea of I'm a salaried person and I work like a monomaniac on a mission that just really, that, that, that's not gonna happen.

You might get chastised if you do, right? Like I worked at a publicly traded company doing consulting and we had to implement Sarbanes-Oxley across like all these divisions and I was assigned a couple departments. And so to make it easy, I created binders, I created checklists. I made it very simple, very systematic. And I got chastised by the head project manager and said, don't do that. Now we all have to do that. That is such a, so obnoxious. And I was like, yeah, but it makes it so easy for them. They'll actually do it now. And like, I got in trouble for being industrious. And like my professors told me, don't graduate a year early. Take your time, Richard. And then the next month, I was making more money than my professors were who told me to take it easy and enjoy the frat life of Oregon State University. And it's like, see you later. You know, enjoy, enjoy being a professor your whole life because there's nothing wrong with that. But a lot of people just have a sedentary, lazy attitude on life. And if you work your butt off and laser focus, you'll probably be very successful.

Well, I'm glad you laid that out there because that's, you know, it's easy to gloss, you know, like you, We were talking earlier, like, it's easy to like take 10 years of your life and put it into a sentence. But, you know, the thing is of learning how to work hard and things like that. No, that's a big deal. Like, I was watching this video on YouTube about Lee Trevino, and I really didn't want to watch it or whatever, but it came— I saw it so many times I said, okay, I'm going to watch it. Amazingly fascinating because he was like the first Mexican to play on the PGA Tour. And back then it was kind of like the country club guys where, you know, we don't want a Mexican Mexican in here, you know, and, uh, it's not, not the image of the PGA where they're a bunch of stuffed shirts. This is not the image we want, you know. And, uh, he said, well, he said, you got me anyway, you know. And when he, he won the tournament, he said, I hate to tell you, but a Mexican just won your tournament, you know. And he was like 5'7". Uh, he wasn't the shortest, he wasn't the shortest like Gary Player is, is, uh, 5'6", but he was a shorter guy, wasn't as tall a little burly, but they said he would go out there and his— here was his standard day. Go, go to the golf course, hit 1,000 balls. I don't know if you play golf or whatever. That's a, that's, that's a lot of swinging the club. 1,000 balls. Then he'd go out and putt for an hour, practice putting for an hour. Then he'd go play 18 holes of golf. That was, that was like an average day. Okay.

Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, I think you have to be passionate about what you're doing or you're just not going to make it at the highest level. Like at the highest level, everybody is pretty good or excellent. So you have to be like top 0.1%. And like Metta World Peace is an LA Lakers NBA world champion, and he spoke at our event last week and he's spoken at our events many times. And I've interviewed Mike Tyson. Over 50 pro athlete investors have spoken at our events and they all say that when we talk to like Navy SEALs, like one we featured on stage last week, or centi-millionaire billionaires, billionaires, they all take things to an extreme. Like Warren Buffett says, if it's pouring rain outside, if the opportunity, you don't get a thimble out, you get a bucket. And like you have to realize when you're getting lucky and then go like really hard. And so I think that one of my favorite athletes is Matt Fraser, who's won the CrossFit World Championships 5 times. He retired on top because he was beating everybody by 20% or more each year. And I think that the sport paid him to retire because it was making the championships boring. He just slaughtered everybody. And he has a saying that says, hard work pays off. And I have 3 of his shirts that I wear anytime I travel. I wear it when I feel like it. I wear it. And he said the people who win at CrossFit, because he's a short guy too, which made me think about it. The people that win like him, he said, everybody's trained hard. Everybody's talented. Everybody's gifted. They all have deep work ethics. But it's a person that keeps on going and pushing beyond what they think is physically capable. That's the person who wins. And that's why he was a champion.

The thing is, most people are geared for, you know, I want to put in my 40 years or whatever, and then I'll retire or whatever. And so most people are pacing themselves. High achievers go like, you know, a house afire. And, you know, because they know it's kind of a privilege. To be able to find something that you can go like a mad dog and you're not going to stay there forever. What, you know, because life changes, you know, you go through different phases, you go, the industries change, you might sell the company or whatever. But while you got, you know, I used to tell people, put it, when I put on events, I used to tell them, I'd look them in the eyes, especially the first time I look them in the eyes. I said, shoot bullets, you know, not blanks, you know, and just have that in your mind. I'm going out here. And I'm going on the attack mode. I'm not going to go out there apologizing and backing up. And, and so the thing is that when you get your, your moment to shine, I think the high achievers recognize it, you know, like this can be special. This is fun. But like even top, like with Tom Brady now, 7 times World Super Bowl MVP, he's got all of those things. Now he's just a guy in a cap, you know, playing golf and going to speak in here and there and You know, he's on TV, but, you know, he's got a whole different life. You know, you don't have to be the Mad Dog, Tom Brady to live the life he is now, although I'm sure he, you know, he's on full attack mode all the time. But, you know, it's not like he's, he's in the countdown to the Super Bowl right now. So you're— these phases in your life changes. And even with, even with Elon Musk, you know, he had this downtime where he took, he just took time off and he was with over here at Mar-a-Lago, you know, and one or two of the boys with him, you know, the boys swinging on the swings out out there. You know, there comes time where, you know, there are seasons. And I think the high achievers recognize when they get the opportunity to go on attack mode to go, you know, there'll be plenty of time for other stuff.

Yeah. Like Tom Brady said when he got inducted in the Hall of Fame, that is quite simple. If you want to be the best, you just have to show up every day and work very hard and do everything that nobody wants to do. And because you showed up and did that, then you'll get inducted in the Hall of Fame. So it's hard to do, but it's very simple. And so I think that is the hunger you really need to be ultra successful. Like if I see a path to do something that's going to improve our club, I'll do whatever hard work it takes and do far more hard work than anyone else around me because I enjoy the process and I'm laser focused on it. Like I'm not afraid of hard work. I'm, if that creates more of a moat, like MrBeast says, the reason he's a billionaire and his chocolate company Feastables alone is worth over $5 billion now and does a billion in revenue. He says that he's willing to do what nobody else was willing to do and bury himself alive for 7 days. He would do this for 7 days. He'd fly around the world 220 days a year, and no one in their right mind would do that once you're worth $10 million. But it's because he is willing to do that, that no one will ever catch him. That is his moat.

I knew, and I, I, it stuck out to me, his Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame speech. And he said, I know a lot of y'all think that I've been too tough on my teammates and, you know, you know, too, too rough and this and the other. And, and he said, and I know why you feel that way and I understand. He said, it's because you never won anything. And just boom, you know, to drop the hammer on him. Since that, I've heard interviews of some of the people who played with him for a long time, and they said he never— every practice they would have sprints. You know, they would have suicide drills. You know, you run till you drop. He never lost a suicide run in practice. Every time they're racing from one end of the court to the other, he was always first because he didn't want— he didn't want anyone to hold it over him. You know, he earned the right in practice and putting the effort into practice to where he could be that way. And they would take it, you know?

Yeah, that's incredible. He's willing to do what he's asking them to do, right? It's like I ask my team to work hard, but I'll also get up at 2:30 AM, like last month, every day I was in Fiji on vacation and work for 5 hours before my family's awake. But I don't work while they're awake. I don't ruin the vacation. I just go to bed like a child at 8:00 PM and, and then like, you know, it works out. But like, I don't ask my team to work hard while I'm lazy. Right? Like, so that's important.

So when you started, talk about starting this club, this community, how did that take off?

Yeah. Well, at first it was me speaking at other people's events across couple hundred times and I realized most of them didn't really know what they were doing and didn't really work in the industry. They're just a media company or they're just some like nameless, faceless conglomerate offering live events. And so I was like, okay, why don't I host my own cocktail hour? Why don't I host my own half-day event? And then that went well. So we started doing full-day events with 5 to 10 speakers on stage and would sell event tickets. Then we started hosting conferences and capital raising bootcamps and programs for founders to grow their platforms. And as that took off, I realized that some months we brought in a lot of money, other months we were a nonprofit. So I wanted to change that and I turned it into a subscription model. And the real change was realizing one, that being a member built real relationships and real community. So it was better to have a subscription model, made our cash flow steady, and it made me realize the real value is in providing the proximity to wealth and having 75 to 125 speakers on stage in 2 to 3 days. Is so much information, so many inputs, and so many potential networking connections that we're the fastest-paced investment event series. So like, we're like an F1 race where some conferences you have to sit there for 45 minutes listening to some gold hedge fund because he sponsored the event and everyone falls asleep, or some professor from Oxford. No one cares about your research, honestly. No one cares, right? So we have all practical, fast-paced entrepreneurs on stage.

And so how long would they— so these, the— what have you found is the ideal period of time to have a live event?

So we do 1 to 3 days. We only do a 3-day event once a year. We usually do 1 to 2-day events, but the ideal amount of time for someone to be on stage is 5 to 15 minutes. If somebody sponsors our events, it's called Deal Flow Talk. They just get 5 minutes to talk about what they're doing. If somebody's interested, they can go and find you. They don't need to hear the whole life story, right? If they're on a discussion panel and we have 5 or 6 people up there for 35 minutes chatting about a topic, If we have a billionaire or a centimillionaire or somebody who's sold many businesses, then we'll do a fireside chat. And that might last for 20 minutes, maybe 22 minutes at the most, but like nothing lasts for 45 minutes. Nothing lasts for an hour. And I would just fall asleep at these other events because they're created by cubicle jockeys, not by entrepreneurs. Like entrepreneurs are like ADHD, fast moving, like, all right, what do I need from this? What do I do? Let me go outside network. Let me do this. Like, so you have to be fast-paced to keep their attention.

Appreciate this. My cousin who's no longer with us, my oldest cousin was H. Edward Roberts, and he's the inventor of the personal computer. That's where Bill Gates and Paul Allen left Boston and went to New Mexico, Albuquerque, and went to work for him doing the software for the company. But so he was a smart guy. In fact, before he died, both called him on a joint call and told him that they wanted him to know before he passed that he was the smartest guy either one of them had met in their life. And so, so this is my cousin that I grew up with who most of the time I knew him as somebody who loved to torment me and tried to kill me every time we got together. But he's, he's, he had this phrase. He said, he said, all entrepreneurs are manic depressive to one degree or another. And, you know, short attention span, super excited. Super pissed. You have to have that element inside you if you're going to be able to throw yourself into things and also to change, you know, make decisions that are tough decisions. You know, you gotta be able to get emotional about things, I think.

Yeah. Like Alex Honnold climbed Yosemite without a rope, right? And like some part of his brain is not fully activated to like have no fear in doing that. But I also think like in business, you have to have the ability to obsess over something, go super deep, have crazy extreme focus, and really not care what anyone else around you thinks, or not care about criticism, people telling you you're dead wrong, or you'll never create any value in the world. So you have to have some things that are abnormal and be just like a little bit autistic or a little bit ADD or a little bit obsessive compulsive or all of the above. You know, it's like Elon says, he doesn't have the weakness of caring what other people think about him. If he dies and he notes he did good, he doesn't care if the perception is that he didn't do good. He knows he really did good.

Yeah, I think one of the most useless questions is when they come up and they say, how do you want to be remembered? Who cares? You know what I'm saying? You know, it's like, you got to live with yourself while you're here. You know, why don't you care about what people think of you while you're here? And then when you're gone, you know, opinions change up and down. You know, you're a hero one day, a zero another. Robert E. Lee, one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, you know, they're trying to tear down his— you know, you know, the woke thing comes in, they're tearing down his statues and this and the other. So you think he's— do you think he's on the other side of eternity saying, they ruined my statue?

You know, if you're a good person, you know what you did, then the opinions of random journalists are like— there'll always be some defectors who say something negative. Like one of the famous billionaires out there, the founder of Oracle. You know, somebody in the audience said something about how Elon's an idiot and he said, well, excuse me, who are you, journalist? Have you landed a rocket on the row raft in the middle of the ocean? What have you done?

Nothing.

You've written articles.

Yeah. It's always important to know who's, who's the experience of the people that are pontificating, you know, in print or on the, on the TV. Let me, how do people get into your, your conferences? Where do you have them and how do people get into them? They sound like a lot of fun.

Yeah. So, yeah, we'd love for you to come to one as our guest just to check it out. For having me on here, I appreciate you having me here. So basically—

Yeah, let me, let me interrupt you and just say you've done the impossible. Okay? I don't know if you know, but you've actually done the impossible. You got me interested in attending an event where I have sworn off events like 20 years ago. I've spoken so much. I put on, you know, I put on thousands of 3-day events. It's like, I'm done with that, you know, done. And, you know, I love to work with things, you know, and sitting in a room, you know, my nervous system, you just can't— the idea of just sitting to listen to— unless they're funny, you know, then I— then, then they've— but your event really sounds like fun, believe it or not. Congratulations.

One thing is we start at 10 a.m. so you can go to the gym, get your emails done, have breakfast, and then come into the event. With your day clean. So that's one thing we do for entrepreneurs. It also allows you to fly into the city that morning if you need to, so you're not away from family more. But basically our 30 events a year are all in Dallas, Los Angeles, Fort Lauderdale, and New York City. So for you, Fort Lauderdale will be in your backyard. Our next big event is in New York City, but we also do a monthly webinar. And most importantly, our member portal has over 2,000 investor talks. So So when you go into our portal, if you click on Video Vault, then you could go and say, okay, well, I just want to stream videos, let's say from Billionaires, and you can push on Billionaires. I want to stream videos on capital raising or deal structuring or CentiMillionaires. And also all of our AI tools are in there. So even if you only come to one event a year, every day you could be using our AI tools. You could be streaming talks from CentiMillionaires, like the proximity is still like the inputs into your brain are still changing what your outputs are going to be. Most of our members come to 3 to 5 events a year out of our 30. Like they don't have time to come to 15 events or even 10 events a year.

You know, this is like inside your community and is the— are the events just for your community? Is that how you said subscription model?

If you go to familyoffices.com, we do have an offer to get our billionaire AI tool and our guest pass to our portal. The guest pass will show you all the pictures of our events, my welcome letter. You'll get a couple of AI tools for free. You'll get some of my books for free, a couple of fireside chats with some millionaires for free. But it's like 1.5% of the portal for free, just so you can see what we're all about and make sure like it's all real and everything. And then basically if you want to actually get access to the events, it's members only, because otherwise we'll have a bunch of high school students and stuff there.

Familyoffice.com, correct?

Family Offices with an S. Family Offices.

Okay, fantastic. Well, time has flown and we've got— I've got to wrap up this portion of our interview. So as customary, I want to give you a final word, shout out for the people who stayed with us up to this point. And I know people, a lot of people are going to want to follow up. With your, at your website and your community.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think the only final word would be just emphasizing that who you spend time with matters more than what you try to do. And if anybody wants a link to our free newsletter, our free YouTube channel, our free podcast, or you just have a question and you need help with something, just shoot me an email, just richard@familyoffices.com, and be happy to be helpful to you.

The one thing we didn't get into that I want is your phrase proximity. You know, what is that? What— how does that phrase go?

The proximity is power.

There. Proximity is power. And that's one of the themes of your live events and everything. And, folks, I believe the same thing. And, you know, greatness is caught and not taught. And so if you're not exposed to it, how can you catch it? So put your, you know, one of the great things to go back to the first of this deal is you position yourself for greatness. You know, you, you and when you get in, you know, we feel the same way about the Big Hitter world. You know, when you come into our world, you know, it's, you know, things are going to happen you can't even imagine. You know, you're going to learn things you didn't know you need to learn. And the things, if you, and I'm sure that's happening inside your world. People come in and they're just getting bombarded with all kinds of useful ideas that they had no idea were out there, that they needed to know about it. And so that's what you want to, that's the idea behind your group, my group, you know, the Big Hitter Group. It's like position yourself around people that are going to allow you to explode your potential and reach your max. Because it's moving forward, folks, that it's the real adrenaline and excitement of life. And you can feel, you know, just in hearing Richard talk, you know, that he's, you know, he's successful. He knows all these people, but he's living a life that's exciting to him. And that's, that's what we want for you. Thanks, Richard. This is great.

Appreciate it. Appreciate you having me on here.

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.