Do You Have a Number?

You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the current episode of Business Lunch. It is Roland Fraser here, and with me is the inimitable Ryan Deiss.

Ryan Dice. That's my name. That's who I be.

And what's really cool is this is a special business lunch because it is the second time that we have recorded this because we have discovered that one standard operating procedure that's good to have is to be sure that you're recording when you record a podcast. Cause otherwise you're not recording, and it isn't the same.

It's a fun conversation.

It's a fun conversation.

Other people can't necessarily participate. Yes. The good news is that this episode. Yeah, I've had a good number of beachside tequilas and a sunburn since then, so I've forgotten literally everything we talked about. So it'll be just like the first time.

It's cool. Were you, like, scuba diving? Because it looks like it's a broader. More of a, like, a goggle tan than a sunglass tan.

No, no. I'm just really terrible at applying sunscreen. Yeah. I truly just missed the top of my forehead. I don't. Yeah, I've got. There is no.

Yeah, there's.

There's no excuse for it. It's. It's humiliating. Okay.

All right, awesome. Well. Well, thanks for being here despite being on vacation. That's kind of cool. Which we screwed up the first time. So, anyway, we have a couple of fun things to talk with you guys about this time. The first thing that I would ask you to do, though, is be sure that you subscribe so that you don't miss, like, we did any episodes of Business Lunch. And if you like the show, please rate it. If you don't like it, then please keep your opinions to yourself. And we got a couple cool things to talk about today. Ryan sent me an article from Reddit. You want to tell them a little bit about what that was?

Yeah, well, I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about just kind of, what does it mean to have a number? Right. This idea. And people will call it, like, a screw you number or an FU number or whatever. Like, but. But hitting that. That number. I was having this conversation with another buddy of mine. He asked me, like, hey, what's your number? And I realized I didn't have one. And so I was gonna ask you, like, do you. Do you have a number? Like, is there a number in your mind that. That is a number? Maybe. Have you had one in the past?

Yeah, I always have a number, and it is always going up. My wife always used to, when we first got together, give me a hard time about, well, you hit your goal, so you can chill out. And I was like, no, now I have a higher goal. So my number right now is a billion. And when I hit that, it'll be five or 10, and when I hit that, it'll be more. So not because I'm a greedy son of a gun. It's more because it's a thing that motivates me to move towards something, and I think that's a good place to be. But I'll never stop. I love what I do. I would do it for free if I didn't get paid for it. How about you? You got a number in mind?

Yeah, I guess that was my realization, is I haven't. I don't right now, and I haven't for a really long time. I kind of realized. And I remember my first number I just wanted to make. I remember thinking, if I could just make $6,000 a month, I will never need to make another dollar again. I remember thinking that when I was in college starting my company, and then it was like, okay, if I can make 100 grand a year, and then it was, okay if I have a million in the bank. And what I found is that we're now at a point, thankfully, we've had enough, done enough that I know I'm good, right? I know I'm good, and I know I don't want to stop working. But I also know that I'm not. I don't know. I don't know if it's like a hunger thing. Like, I'm still hungry. I still want to work and do good work. And we obviously still, you know, work our tails off when we, you know, we need to. It's not like we're sitting here retired. But, yeah, I don't really have a number. And so maybe my hope. So I saw this article and I read it, and I want to. I want to, you know, get your thoughts on it to see if maybe this could help me come up with a new number and maybe help other people come up with a number two or decide, screw it, I don't want a number either, and maybe I stay that way, too. Does that sound fair?

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just say, before we get into it, I think whenever you're at the point where more money won't change your life in a way that you really want it to change to, then the number doesn't really matter. It's just a. It becomes a game. It becomes something to motivate yourself or even just a measuring stick of, you know, kind of like a scorecard. But I think if you are at that point, then it becomes quality of life. Because I know for you guys, for you and Emily, and for me and my wife, we, no deal that comes through is going to change our lives meaningfully. And so the article that you have is perhaps a way to say, could it change your life meaningfully using these four categories that he lays out? But I think the answer ultimately is not that much. Certainly not in the ability to do any of the things that you want to do. But let's see what he said, and then we'll chat through it.

Yeah, so the article is. And we'll drop in the show notes. So, but if you want to just Google it, it's what do insanely wealthy people buy that ordinary people know nothing about? So that was the question that was asked and posed on Quora. And then there was this user, a1988, Eli. I'm guessing this guy's name is Eli or last name as Eli, first initial A. Probably born in the year of our Lord 1988.

Could be his prison number also. You never know.

It could also be a prison number. You never know. Maybe the license plate to his first car.

I like it.

Think about that. I know I didn't until just now. All right, so anyway, whoever this person is, it was a great reply. I thought it was thoughtful. And what I love about this, he's like, funny enough, I know a lot of billionaires, which is a weird thing. But his reply was so good, I'm inclined to believe him. He's like, yeah, I dated this girl whose dad was a billionaire. So it's like, all right, that's cool. But he lays out these 4 billion kind of categories of rich, like these four sort of tranches of wealth. And so he talks about basically when you're. When you're worth your liquid worth. So not basically taking out your house. I'm guessing he'll kind of throw in maybe, you know, if you sold your company or something like that, but your liquid worth 10 million to 30 million, that's the first level. Okay, 10 million to 30 million. So I guess if you got less than 10, then you know, you're not really rich yet. Right? So maybe 10 million would be a good number. We come back to that. So level one, 10 million to 30 million. He said at this level, your needs are met. You can basically stay at any five star resort. You can book $2,000 suites, you can fly first class internationally. You know, you got all the health care. There's no emergency financial situation that'll destroy your life, right? And I've been there. Like we were having this conversation where I had like a water leak at my, at our vacation home and it's like, this is going to cost me with all in, all done is going to be like 30 grand. And when it's done, I will still have the same house. Like I don't get anything new for that. Like that sucks. And I was really bummed. But like the nice thing is it's like, okay, at least I'm not broke, right? I'm not having to sell the house or sell a car or anything like that to do it. So, you know, there you go. You're generally insulated from financial stress. Business is all there. You're still not ultra high, high net worth, right? So that's 10 to 30. Then the next level is 30 million to 100 million. He's like, at this point you're playing with big boys. You know, you can fly private. You know, you're usually chartering though you don't have your own jet, which I can relate to because Roland wouldn't let me have a jet. May we talk about that? You know, you're, you're a pretty significant player. You're, you're yucking it up with, with celebrities and things like that. You can travel anywhere, any style. Pretty much buy anything that any sort of normal ish rich person would want. Whether it's, you know, a really expensive, you know, car or like the nicest handbag, whatever. That's 30 million to 100 million. Then he's got 100 million to a billion. And I saw that, I was like, that's a giant range. Literally. The first line is, I know it's a wide range, but life doesn't change that much when you go from being worth 200 million to 900 million, right? And I thought that was interesting, right? There really isn't a dramatic increase in lifestyle from like 100 million to a billion. Because, you know, you probably still own your jet. You probably have residence. You're, you're hobnobbing with whoever you want to hobnob with. You're buying the fancy art. You know, you got a multiple vacation homes. He talks all like the women. Did I mention women? Like, okay, not like he's hanging with.

Like the rapper crowd. I don't know.

Right? Yeah, he's not, like. Not hanging, like, the only. Yeah, we got our wives and my daughters, but. And so that's basically when you're true. Legitimately. Big balling. He said, the downside is, at this point, you really don't know who your true friends are. And then he said, at a billion, that's when you're just. You can get anybody you want on the phone. You know, you can basically get anything done. You can buy influence. You can, you know, change world policy if you want to. You can basically do whatever the heck you want to do. So those are the levels you basically have.

One of my favorite things that he said was, he said, you like your Ferrari. Your friend hates the way the brakes work, and has one of only five ever made cars. It's like five, five of a kind ever made that you do see, which is kind of funny. It's like, people come in. It's like, you know, I really love my. Whatever. It's like, well, I just had the Hermes people do a custom design on my, you know, McLaren, blah, blah, blah. Or my. No, it was a Bugatti Chiron. Is that the one with Johnny Quayra?

Quayra.

A car I don't even know about. So it's funny, though. Really funny. It's how that works. And some people say that pompously, but the people that are cool are the people that are just saying that. It's like, oh, yeah, I had one, it was okay. But I really like this thing. And I got it all decked out.

By.

That just happened. That's pretty funny.

So that's kind of at the billion. So going back, the ranges are 10 to 30, 30 to 100, 100 to a billion and a billion plus. So what do you generally think about that? What do you think about these ranges? And do you think that this would help maybe establish a number?

Yeah, I thought it was pretty accurate as far as he talked about. As you go up the levels, you get further removed from direct contact with a lot of people because you have people who are helping you. And I think you have a VA that schedules stuff for you, but you still stay in touch with the people that you want to have relationships with. And as you get more and more things going on, it's very common that you get people to help make your life easier to do the things that are less important to you, and that that kind of can distance you from people as you go up that. And I have seen that in our lives, and I have seen that in the Lives of other folks that are. That are in that B range as well. And so I think that's pretty accurate. The. Some of the things that he talks about, like, one of the things was at. And I think it might have been at the 30 to 100 level. He's like, you can get in the best restaurant in town, and the, you know, a driver takes you and lets you out and waits for you until you're done with dinner, and then you come out and the chef prepares a special meal just for you, and you have the best table, etc. And. And the truth is, like, you can do that when you're in high school. You can do that for a few hundred bucks paid to a limo driver and have them do that, which is kind of smart if you're gonna drink anyway. And then if you reserve far enough in advance, you probably got the best table. And I don't know about this chef cooking a special meal for you, but here's how you do that, because we do this all the time, and I never really thought about it until you sent that article over, but we usually go in and say to the waiter or the server, we say, you know, can the chef just make us cool stuff? Can you just bring us fun stuff? That chef thinks he or she is excited to cook tonight, and they usually get very excited to do that. So it's not that they're like, we have to cook you this amazing meal that only, you know, because you only eat panda and roasted brontosaurus. It's, you know, it's that they actually have that panda. Fun.

Tastes so adorable.

What do you feed it, though? What do you feed it? Um, so, like, that. That happens.

And.

And you know, I've been like, I said that. That you can do for not a lot of money. Um, we just did.

You were telling me about an experience. Talk about that. Because, you know, a lot of what they would describe as like kind of the billion dollar life. And you said billion. You know, your number. So safe to say not a billionaire yet, but a lot of what's there. Like, I feel like you had a billion dollar kind of experience recently, and it certainly doesn't again, it's the kind of thing that almost anybody could go and do. So can you kind of talk through that?

Yeah. So we have a chef that comes to our house to cook. You can do that without being a billionaire. You guys have had it, which is awesome, particularly in Ryan's situation. I don't have any children living at home. Ryan's got four kids that are living at home. So they had a chef that.

We had a chef come and start cooking for us long before we could, quote, unquote, afford it. Right. That was long before you were a billionaire. Yeah, I mean, well, before. Yeah, before any of that stuff. You know, it was one of those things where my wife was like, frankly, trying to prepare a meal while there's four kids, like, this is awful. And I get home and it was stressful, and it's like, how much would it cost to have somebody come and cook for us? And it was remarkably not that expensive. You know, it was great food. And so that was. There's a lot of these little luxuries that don't cost as much, but these little luxuries can lead to other things. Because I know your chef. Yeah. So talk through that. Because you find good people, they know other good people.

Yes. So that was. What was really cool, is that our chef was saying just in passing one night when he cooked dinner for us, he said, and by the way, we turned that into a business thing. So every time that chef cooks, there's business stuff going on, not only so we can write it off, but also because it's a fantastic way to share with other cool people that then can lead to other things. So to me, that's a really smart investment. A lot of this stuff can be really smart investments to make. But anyway, so he happened to say, oh, I'm really excited. I'm going to the best restaurant in town. My buddy is executive chef there. And they're just doing things on a whole nother level. And that was really cool. And I was like, well, that sounds cool. I think I'm going to make a reservation. I didn't say anything else to him. And then I talked to some other friends that we have, and they said. I said, yeah, I think we're going to go down to this place here in San Diego and have dinner. And it's downtown, which we're about 45 minutes away from, by the way. And so they said, oh, you know what? One of our best friends is the head waiter there. And so if you're going, that's great. And would you mind if we went, too? And we were like, yeah, we'd love to have you guys go. So anyway, what happened then is that the chef talked with the waiter friend, and then he said to me, hey, you guys are going down there. My buddy, the chef, I told him you're coming, and he's super excited, and he's going to make something great for you. And the head waiter guy got us the best table. And so not wanting to drink and drive, because one of the things is there's this world class Mai Tai cocktail maker down there, and we've never said no to a Mai Tai, so we wanted to have that without having to drive back in a very challenging way. So I called another guy that Ryan knows who drives for us. And so he's somebody that's become a friend, and we've given him business advice and helped him out and everything. And so he's like, I'll come up, I'll pick you up and drive you down in your fancy car. And I will. I'll hang out there and drop you off at the door so you don't have to park and everything because parking's a real pain and there's no valet there. And I'll just. I'll cruise around and pick you up. When you're done, just text me. And we walk. So we have the driver that takes us down, that lets us out at the door. We get out, go in. They take us right up to the best table in the place because the relationships that we have have allowed that. We sit down, the cocktail guy comes up and says, here's the special cocktail that I've made for you because I designed this at this place that you've been hearing about, and I know you wanted to try it, so we made this just for you. The chef comes out and says, okay, you know your chef. My chef's name is Adam. Adam told us that you will really appreciate stuff. So we've got this amazing thing laid out for you. Do you want to hear what it is? I said, absolutely not. I want you to do whatever you want to do. Have fun, share it with us. Tell us about it as it comes. And then we got some wine and some more whiskey and had a great time. Walked out, car was waiting for us. No wait, no walk, no hassles, no risk driving home. Easy experience. And then just yesterday, too, I'll add this in. Yesterday, my son had told me, he said, there's this great new movie, A Quiet Place 2. I'd like to see it if you guys would like to see it. And it'd be really cool because right now you can rent whole theaters for not a whole lot of money. So I was like, yeah, that's cool. Let's rent the theater. So we went online, rented. The whole theater was $350 for the entire super luxe, layback and fall asleep seats and everything with $150 minimum. So it's $500 to have the whole theater. And then we just invited him and his girlfriend and some other friends of ours, and we went and we had a private theater experience. These are things that are in the billionaire lifestyle description that cost 500 bucks, you know, 300 bucks for the guy to wait the whole time for the car. No money, because we, you know, to rent a car because we used hours. The restaurant was all relationships, every bit of that. And. And I think you can get that without having to have hundreds of millions of dollars liquid.

Yeah, I think. And I think the lesson in that is, I think the difference is if you're a billionaire, you know, or hundreds of millions, then what you can do is have all of that stuff without having to invest in any other people. Yes, right. I think you can have all that just through buying it. You're essentially paying retail. And I think if you're willing to. You know, when I see, like, at that kind of 10 to 30 million dollars level. Well, that level, you can easily have access to the people who will get you access to these things if you're willing to just invest a little bit. So, like, you invest a little bit. I would say a little bit. You know, you invest. What would. What a lot of. Of successful people could. Could invest who are not worth 10, 30, $100 million in a private chef, you know, and this is not somebody that needs to come literally every single day and be your butler. Right. They should come a couple nights a week. Yeah, right.

It becomes kind of intrusive if they're there every day.

Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, so you got this person coming, but if you. If you invest in somebody who's really exceptional, who is dialed into the industry now, you make that investment in them, you get to know them, and guess what? They open doors for you. Yep. A little investment on the front can open a lot of doors in the back. The problem is most people are very binary about this. They're either saying, like, well, I got to get to a point where I can just pay retail, or if I don't have any money, then I just need to be like, Mr. Finger Guns.

Like, boo boo Boo.

I'm going to get to know everybody, and I'm going to be. I'm going to kind of stack up all these relationships so that I can get all these things for free. What people don't realize is the barrier to just open that first door is usually so much lower than you think it is. So I hear people wonder, how do you know? How did you get to be. Have a, you know, relationship with, like, these business celebrities and, like, real celebrities in most cases. We paid them. The first time we paid them to come out to an event, we paid them to come and do an appearance. And then we weren't freaking weirdos.

Exactly.

And it's like. And when you're there in that context, now you have the opportunity to have a business conversation instead. What people want to do is they want to accost somebody at an airport. You know, they see Gary Vaynerchuk at an airport. They want to accost them, you know, and ask them 15 billion questions so they can try to become best friends with them in 20 seconds. Will you be my mentor?

They lead with the ask. Also, I think one thing that we do a good job of, I believe, is that we find a paid channel for access if somebody offers. If somebody you want to get to know. We wanted to get to know Richard Branson. We found a paid channel for access. If you donate a bunch of money to his charity, he'll come and speak at your event. The event effectively paid for him to come out. We got to meet him and have a conversation with him, and if we want to follow up and pursue something with him, we can. You know, we had that with Marcus Lemonis and actually got offered a deal while we were talking with him and doing the inter. Not doing the interview, but doing the, you know, after the interview was done. And, you know, we started by saying, how much does it cost to have you speak at our event? And then we stepped up with that, showing that we could do it. And neither Ryan nor I nor any of our other partners came out into our pockets to pay those people, by the way. We found a way to make it happen. So the difference would be if you want to play tennis with Pete Sampras, they said, or have Blink182 play at your. You know, at your party or whatever, you can just reach into your pocket and do that. And that's true. You can. You have access to that. We all do, though. So maybe you can't do it every night, but that would also get old. You know, I had a chance to meet Tom DeLonge and play golf with him, and I like him and everything, but I don't think that he or I would want to have him playing at our house every single night. Right. That's. These are. A lot of. These things are just kind of things you do ever so often, and you can make it happen whether you've got that money or not. So I like the stratas that he painted. And at the same time, I think that you can design kind of a billionaire lifestyle with significantly less. I mean, and if I go to like our private chef and our chef is amazing, some of the best food that I know Ryan or we have ever had and he cooks for military families who rent him for Valentine's Day and stuff like that. Like, it's not, this isn't something that only even millionaires do. Right. So it's really just I think, imagining what you want to do and then making it happen and not feeling that it's out of reach, that would be to me the big message for everybody to take away here is that like a billionaire 100 millionaire lifestyle is not out of reach for you on an occasional basis almost wherever you are on the spectrum. Certainly if you, if you're having a hard time eating, that's, that's different. But, but you know, if you're, if you're doing okay enough to be able to have a couple thousand dollars to spend every three months, you could create a quarterly billionaire type experience. I think.

Yeah. My takeaway from this was if you're willing to invest a little bit in relationships and what that, what that means is literally investing on the front end, meaning perhaps paying somebody.

Right.

Coming in and being the customer, being the client, and then not being a total weirdo, which is what you're doing with your chef. Right. I mean, just if you're willing to invest a little bit more on the front end, it's what my family does when we go to Disney or to Universal. The tickets to be able to cut in all the lines in the grand scheme of things, when you've incurred all the costs to get out there and buy the normal tickets in the hotel to have a 10x level experience for, you know, a little bit more, it's just not that much right. In the grand, you know, in the grand scheme of things. But you have such a better experience. So if you're willing to make that little bit more of an investment. When I was looking at this, it seems like you can have kind of a lifestyle of the 30 to 100 million range, easily in the 10 to 30 range. If not in the 1 to $3 million range, you're not going to have it. Like you said, if you're, you know, if you're really, really struggling to make ends meet. But I don't think that things don't become all that better, you know. Yeah, I guess you're dabbling in politics. That sounds terrible.

Sounds awful to Me? Yeah, that was a big thing that he talked about. So if you're into that, then you can spend infinite dollars.

Yeah, I mean if like, oh, you can buy power, it's like, I don't. I'm just in this for the money and the freedom. Power sounds terrible, but if you're not going for the political power and being able to push your weight around. My read was, frankly, if you can get to 10 million, you can have 100 million and do the occasional billion dollar kind of experience.

And now let's talk about jets for a minute. Right?

Yeah. Because you told me I couldn't have one. Well, which I'm still mad at you about.

I might be changing my mind. So Friday, uh, really day after tomorrow, we're gonna go look at a Pilatus PC24. So check that out and see what you think. Pilatus makes a cool plane called a PC12, which is a prop turboprop, but this is a jet version of it. And it's pretty inexpensive as, you know, as compared to some of the things that we were looking at before. And it has a lot of really cool options to it. So I'm going to take a look at it and see. I just randomly got an invitation to do that. Now we do. Ryan and I both spend money and our company spends money to fly private. And I think both of us had the same goal of not flying domestically, anything but private, but internationally, the truth be told, even in a bigger plane like a G4, that's a long time to sit in a little plane like that. And I think if it goes down, nobody cares. Whereas if you're in one of the bigger planes.

Coast guards, to like, oh, a bunch of rich people went down over the Atlantic, it's like, oh, but.

A whole bunch of people went down. They're going to look so. So I think we're still on the. It makes it seems like it's a more pleasant experience to do that. And that experience can be pretty amazing. And by the way, talking about value, round trip tickets, first class, London to San Diego to London. I just got two of them, two together for 10,500, which sounds like a ton of money. But to fly first class to Europe and back, that's shockingly affordable. And certainly you don't have to be even a millionaire to be able to decide that you wanted to treat yourself to that. And one thing that you said, Ryan and I want to get back to the jets, but one thing that you said that I don't want to forget to Tell people is what your dad told you about the camping spot. Will you say that real quick?

I just think that this is a decision that you've got to make. Either you want to do everything on the cheap, in which case you're kind of identifying around that, or you want to try to have whatever experience you're going to have be the best that it possibly can, within reason. And so I remember my dad, you know, I certainly did not grow up wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. You know, our family trips would be camping trips. But what my dad would always say, we'd go out with friends and, you know, he would always pay a little bit more to get the better camping spot down by the river, you know, whereas everybody else is up on the hill and they're having to walk down. He's like, I don't understand, you know, why these guys won't pay an extra $20. Because they're like, oh, that's. That's double this other spot over here. He's like, what do you care? We can have such a better experience down here. And what my dad told me, and again, never a rich man. He said, if you gotta invest in experience, just be willing to pay a little bit more to have, you know, a much better one. And that stuck with me. And I think that you have folks who, you know, their feeling is like, I'm always just going to do the cheapest possible. And you have other folks who say, well, if I can't own the jet, then I'll never fly in a jet. And the reality is you typically, you can have an order of magnitude better experience, a 10x better experience, for sometimes 20%, 50%, even if it costs double, triple. It is such a great investment when you figure how short our time on this earth is.

Yes. And so. So that. That goes.

So why can't I have a jet? Because I guess the lesson is you.

Have a hard time ever not doing that, because it's pretty amazing.

But the lesson, like, we realized, we did the math, right? We're like, for as much as we travel, it makes a lot more sense just to continue chartering, right? Because we just don't go enough to justify owning. And the difference is, it's the same thing with vacation homes, right? I mean, a lot of people own vacation homes. As somebody who does, I can tell you there's plenty of times I wish I just rented the dang thing instead of having to deal with the water heater going out when I'm not there.

Because you can go to different Places. Right. You're not tied to the same place. And it's kind of the same thing with the jet, because for the jet that we would want, that would take us all the places we wanted to go. You know, you're talking about a larger jet. There's, you know, Challenger or a Falcon, you know, that level. Probably not a G4 so much because we're not doing the overseas stuff, but, you know, something nice and big and comfortable that has a bathroom that you can go in and not hold a curtain up and that there's a story there, typically about, you know, a $3 million investment. And that 3 million is going to happen every, you know, every seven years, I think it was, because that's how long the engines last. So you have this giant expense, and then on top of that, you've got another. I think it was a million, roughly, or so about $100,000 a month of operating expenses for pilots salaries and hangering the plane and taxes and all this other stuff. And then you have gas that's going to run a couple thousand bucks an hour. I think it was like 2,800 an hour on the jets we were looking at. And if you think about that, you can charter a really nice plane like the one we were looking at buying for about. Let's look on the high side and also figure in round trip, because sometimes you want to go to a place and they'll charge you basically for two round trips because you have enough days that they can't leave the jet not used there. So let's just fully load it out and say. So you're talking about maybe as much as $10,000 an hour, right?

So we've never. I think the high side, we've been more at like 4550, 500 an hour.

I'm just saying, like. Like, if you went someplace and stayed, you know, like, you stayed long enough that they flew the jet back and you had to fly there again and fly it back. But let's. Let's use that just to be on the extreme. So, you know, if you're flying, what, 10 hours a month would be a hundred grand. I guess you're right, ryan. Let's use 5,000, because it's probably a better. 20 hours a month is 100 grand a month, and that's basically what it just costs to have the pilots and have the plane hangered without having put out $3 million in cash. And the fuel, because that includes the fuel. So, like, it was hard for us. And I guess if we were flying 50 or 60 hours a month, every month, maybe then it would get to the point where it amortize out and make sense. But it just really didn't pencil for us. So we're kind of sticking right now with the charter. Although this plane seems interesting. It seems like it's kind of a. It might be an answer. It has the enclosed lav, it has comfortable seats. It's a mid, light mid I think they call it, and seats eight people plus, you know, the other comfortable. And has a 20. I think it was a 20, 200 or 2400 mile range. So pretty good range and you know, and it goes fast. So we'll take a look and see if that one makes more sense. But I think we're on the cusp of figuring what we're doing is trying right now, guys, to rationalize getting a jet.

Yeah. And there is. And there almost certainly is none until you're probably at. And I think that's the difference. Right. And so you're at probably about $100 million, you know, and traveling a ton.

It's more than that though, because it's, it's probably, you know, like for it to make sense, it's probably 4 or 500 million because those jets are 40, $50 million, you know, if you're going to buy it. And yeah, there's, that's, that's a, that's, that's a different kind of expense to want to want to incur. Also you have to want to be, you have to be willing to want to invest that much in that experience. And I don't think we're quite to the place where we want to do that.

You gotta, you gotta just be traveling a lot. And I still like where I live and my family and friends. So here's. So I got a number. I'm ready to write a number.

All right.

You want to hear it?

I do.

Based on what we talked about, I think a really good goal. And some people may be like, I'm already past this or whatever, but I mean, I think if you're there and you're looking for a really aspirational goal that would allow you to check just about every single box that is on here. I think 10 million does it? Yeah, I think if you're a 10 million, you're, you're basically, you're there. Right. I won't say that you've arrived or that you should be done, but if you're looking for a number and a goal that, that when you hit, you know, that it seems like, you're there. I've heard other people kind of run numbers, like math about, like, how much. If I were to stop working, you know, could I make an interest? I don't like that because it's like, why are you going to stop? Like, find something you love doing and keep getting paid. So I don't like that as necessarily a thing. But if you're looking for just an amount to shoot for, that can allow you to have pretty much any lifestyle you want. Maybe you don't own it, but at least be able to have access to it. 10 seems like a good one.

I think if it's 10 and you're excluding your businesses from it, then I'd say that's true. But the challenge is, and this is true of us, is that we have a lot of money tied up in business.

We have a lot of money, I'm assuming. Yeah, business too, I think not necessarily just 10 in cash. I think if you've got a business that's paying you well and a business that can do this stuff, because you got a business that's worth at least 10 million as well, it can afford to fly you somewhere every now and then. Right. Like so, yeah, that's hard then.

Okay. Yeah, I, I think it's probably higher for. If we're looking at that, probably it's probably 30. It probably is like that, like once you get there. But it also depends on what your income because if you, if you've got a $4 million a year income, you can do a lot more than, you know, with a $30 million net worth, you can do a lot more than if you have a 30, $50 million net worth and $1 million year income. Right.

So I think we're coming maybe, which is if you're going to have a number, have a number because it's a score. But decide and be intentional about the life that you want and maybe, just maybe don't attach kind of your lifestyle ambitions to all of your business goals. At some point you got to want to grow because you believe in what you're doing, grow because you are enjoying the game, grow because it's fun and. And then frankly figure out ways to get the life that you want. Yeah, your business should support that for sure, but you probably shouldn't. Your sole motivator around building a company probably shouldn't be buying it yet. Safe to say.

Yeah, but it should be for the experiences. Don't work for work's sake. I see so many people that are married to their business and every dollar they make, they put back into the business. And remember, the business is there to serve you. So if at some point you find that it's not allowing you to live the kind of life you want, then consider adapting or pivoting or doing something different. And definitely, you know, I think was my son said this is that basically it costs not that much different to have a lunch at a five star resort with this amazing view and service and atmosphere than it does to have the same thing at a, you know, at a Chili's or Fridays or one of those kinds of restaurants. Because the things are pretty doggone expensive at those places, right? So for not much more, you can have this whole different level. And if you ever want to have a fun experiment, go to a business hub. Like if you go to the Four Seasons in Palo Alto and you just go to lunch at that restaurant and ear hustle the conversations that are going on, it's super fun. The things that are going on around you will motivate the heck out of you. The environment will inspire you and you will end up doing more. So I think a lot of it is, you know, give yourself a taste of the billionaire lifestyle so that you are motivated to really pursue it and the experiences that it will provide you and your family and the people you care about, you know, with more frequency.

I like it. All right, I think we beat that. You got anything else that you want to chat about?

We were talking about value ladders last time and so just so I had a couple of consults that I did in the last week. And two of them were situations where one was where the business had really great lead flow. They had almost 5,000 people a month that were coming into this and they were selling a product that was a SaaS, a software, as a service. But they only had two levels. One was approximately $39 a month, or you could pay annually. I think it was $216, which I believe works out to $18 a month. And then after that they didn't have anything else they could sell them. And so they were doing about, you know, 3 million or so in business and losing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. And so they came in and they were like, you know, we're not sure what's going on. We've tried. We sell advertising and we sell our leads and we, you know, so they had done a really good job of like, lots of the things that we find that can generate extra income. But the real problem was that they didn't have anything that was more expensive to sell. So they couldn't, they didn't have any, you know, slack adjuster, profit maximizer thing that would help them get to where they wanted. And they had tried and so they didn't know what to do. And the other one was, was a similar thing where a gentleman, we had created a business model for him where he effectively had outsourced his lead cost and he was co regging, meaning that he got effectively, anytime a lead came into the business that was paying for the lead generation expense through the ads, he was getting a copy of that lead for free. And so both of them were, how do we monetize this and make money? How do we stop losing money? How do we get this? And so I know we teach this at Digital Marketer and scalable, but it's really instructive because we also found ourselves guilty of this at Digital Marketer. We had a low cost thing that was, you know, great and we had lots of people involved in it, but we didn't have anything that was more expensive. So I'd like to just chat for a minute about that. You want to kind of talk about what we did at Digital Marketer and what we realized and kind of how we fixed that there and then I can talk about some of these other guys.

Yeah, I mean, we did. The mistake that you describe a lot of people doing, which is when you're having a difficult time. And this happened as acquisition costs go up, as they often do, right. You'll have a model that works pretty well. And so you're like, all right, let's scale, let's expand, expand. And you're like, ah, as we scale and expand, you know, these traffic costs, acquisition costs are high. So let's figure out some ways to, you know, increase our average order value, increase our ltv, you know, all these things that we can afford to go out there and invest more to acquire. And what most folks do is they say, all right, let's test like button colors and stuff like that to see if we can improve conversion rates.

And it was so funny that you said that. You said that last time too. And it was like that they were like, and we've tested the button colors and this and this.

That'll never be the difference maker. Just never. Is that the difference maker? But what they'll also do is look for little iterative ways to increase the value like 10%. So it's like, oh, let's add this additional bolt on. Or like you said, let's co reg the leads or sell some advertising. All of this can be good, but none of it is going to be the difference maker. Right? You got to look at what is the thing that can double our average order value? What's the thing that can double our 90 day customer value? That's got to be the question that you ask or you're never going to get to anything significant. At least double. And so the question that I like to ask in kind of the scenario that we pose is what is the 10% of our audience that will pay 10x what the average customer is paying now? This is really easy to figure out math wise. You just go and look at what's your current average customer value, right? Figure out how much revenue did you generate in the last 90 days? How many customers did you generate in the last 90 days? Divide one by the other and congratulations, you got your 90 day customer value. Right. That's a good kind of general analog of figuring out what is a customer worth. Now say, okay, 10 exit, add a zero to that. What's something we can offer that just the top 10% of our audience would pay? 10 would pay this amount for. So if the average was 500, what's a $5,000 offer? Because if you can get 10% to buy this, to upgrade to this, then you've just doubled the average order value. And generally it is way easier to sell 10% of your audience something that's 10x than it is to figure out how to do 17,000 little things to double your customer value. And another way is just say, okay, what about 1% to buy something that's, you know, 100x right, like, or something in between. So I think that that's a good way to just a good question to ask and a good general thought experiment. I think if you do that, you'll find that you come up with much bigger needle movers than if you just do all these little kind of small shrimpy little tests.

Yeah, and some of the ways to do that that I think we've talked about before are you can do it with access. And access can be through some sort of VIP thing where people are not paying for the people who aren't in the room. They're paying for the exclusivity. You know, used truly like you're excluding other people and so they get more time with you. You can do masterminds where people get with community. That's a big one that I think people like the ability to network with other people who have similar interests and that they can relate to. You can do speed and automation, speed.

Access Automation, those are the three. Right. So I mean if you say okay, we want to do 10 access and.

Status, I would put in there also.

Yeah, I kind of lump status and access generally they're in the same kind of thing. But yeah, I mean, so Speed Access. Status, Speed Access, I'm sorry, Speed, Automation, Access. I think all of those are in the same, all those are in the same general category. But yeah, if you take those categories, if you got a goal of 10xing, I think you've got a pretty solid formula.

Yep. And think about also the challenge with the one. The folks that were losing a couple hundred thousand dollars was that they had tried. They were like, well we've tested our price, we can't raise our price and certainly not enough to meaningfully get to that 10x level. And we have tried other people's products. We even sell like we have our list that we maintain and part of how we monetize is we sell about a half million dollars of affiliate products a year. They had done a good job. They had I think 400,000 in sponsorships, 500,000 in affiliates. They had really done a good job of looking at everything. And they said we just don't have anything else that they need to sell them. And then one of the things that I like to look at is BDA products to build it. So what are they buying before, during and after the time that they're buying from you? And we were able to identify a couple of things that they needed and then reach out actually while we were in the consulting session, reach out to someone who had one of those products that people would need. And he was able to give us his conversion numbers and he said with those leads I absolutely conservatively can deliver $300,000 a month to you. And that was like, that takes them from a loss of 200k to a profit of 3.4 million. And that's a life changer. So like just. And they're already doing it now. Like we set up the call that day, got him on the phone, said can we plug you in? Can we get these things over? And we made it happen. And so like that's, that's a huge deal. It's, it was a huge deal for digital marketer. It's a huge deal for these guys and it can be a huge deal for you. So wherever you are, even if you feel like you've got those high end products, be thinking about what is the next fractal up, what's the Next thing? If 10 or 20% of your buyers of your highest end thing were willing to spend more, 10 times more to have something, even if that's only one person that can make a huge difference to you. Because it's like having 10 of the, of the highest thing you're already selling. That's pretty cool. So that's something I just wanted to leave with people because it happens to. Even though we know that it happens to us.

Right.

Because you get busy and you're distracted. And that's something that I would encourage all of you guys to think about as you are looking at your, at your overall product offerings. What's your value ladder and does it go high enough?

That is the game now, right? I mean, going out there, what too many people are trying to do is say how do I get traffic and awareness cheaper, right. And that is the same as saying how do I find a Ferrari for $10,000?

Right.

The answer is you can't.

Right.

Ferraris just cost more than that. And if somebody's willing to sell you one for ten grand, you probably don't want to buy it. It's either a broken down thing or they're a liar, right? So Ferraris cost what they cost, traffic costs what it costs. The name of the game is not how do I get this stuff cheaper, it's how do I structure the economics of my business such that I can pay what it costs willingly and delightfully because that's how I know that I'm going to be able to win. And the way that you do that. Yeah. Is not through little acts, random acts of optimization. The way that you do that is by just increasing your average customer value by adding some type of speed, automation, access, status driven upsell. And the key is they want to buy it, they actually want it. Your best people are looking for that. If you don't give it to them, they're going to go somewhere else. So for all the reasons you got to do it.

Exactly.

Awesome.

Well, I think that we were keeping this one purposefully short today because normally we talk about three or four things. Today we're going to talk about two. In the spirit of the holidays that are going on right now as we.

Record this also I got to get to. We're doing a kai and by the time people hear this, this will happen. But we are launching our brand new accelerator over at Scalable.

So the Scalable is that shameless plug.

The Scalable growth accelerator. So it's all about ways that you can build these growth flywheels, break through that seven figure barrier. If you're already through it, then get another one. So this is kind of our our systems, our processes on how do we really automate and scale growth beyond just kind of the tactics of marketing. So I'm excited.

Where would one go if one wanted to learn more information about such a thing?

You could go to getscalable.com growth probably by the time you hear this it will be closed, but if you want to know more about it, hit us up. You can probably hit up programs at Scalable Co co and maybe we can sneak you in at the end if you happen to be listening at this point.

Or you can get on the waitlist.

For the next one or that we're good but I'm going over, we're doing a little coffee virtual coffee and cocktails judgment free meet and greet. So I'm going to head on over to that right now.

Very cool. Well enjoy. Thank you guys. Be sure that you like subscribe and leave us reviews if you like what you heard. Again, if you don't like it, wait until you find something you do like and then leave a review immediately at that time. And thanks for listening or watching and we will see you next time.

You'Ve.

Been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. And for more information go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening. Ever wondered how some people build real wealth through acquisitions while others just sit on the sidelines? Well, I'm here to tell you it's not about luck. It's about having the right system, the right deals and the right guidance. And that's exactly what we give you in the EPIC Deal Fast Track. If you've been thinking about buying a business, but you keep getting stuck, whether it's finding the right deal, structuring the financing, or negotiating with sellers, you are not alone. Too many people waste months, even years just thinking about acquiring a business while the real opportunities pass them by. The EPIC Deal Fast Track is not another course. It's actually an implementation program and it's designed to get you from the idea to the acquisition in just 16 weeks or less. We work with you one on one to help you find, fund and close your first or or next deal. And once you do, we're going to plug you into our elite EPIC board community so that you can keep scaling through acquisitions. We install three powerful systems in your business. The first is the Deal Flow Engine so you always have high quality off market deals coming to you. Number two, we give you our offer and funding system so that you can structure offers that get accepted and fund them creatively many times with no money out of your own pocket. And number three are closing and integration systems so that you don't just buy a business, you actually successfully run and scale it once you have acquired it. Plus you'll have direct one on one support from an epic deal advisor every step of the way and that's people that have actually come up through the system and done these deals themselves. That's the only way to become an epic deal advisor. And if you're serious about acquiring a business this year don't just sit on the sidelines. Just text I'm in to 334-458-9034 and we'll get you in. So text I'm in to 334-458-9034 will get you in. No fluff, no wasted time, just real deal making from people that are actually out there doing deals right now. I'll see you there.