The Investor Mindset for Business Mastery

I want you to totally understand and buy into the fact that you are an investor whether you've got a bunch of cash or not. And the truth is that most savvy investors don't bring a bunch of cash to a deal. Right. The easiest thing you can do is bring cash to a deal, but that's also the riskiest thing you can do because your cash could be lost. Okay, so step one is going to kind of little bit be a review of something I talked about before in the program. But it's very. It really sets everything up for you to do these kinds of deals. So step one is where you are going to position yourself as an investor. Position yourself as an investor. So what does that look like? Okay, what it looks like is the first thing that you want to do is you want to say, what is it that I could do that I could be the most attractive alternative as possible to a company that wants to sell or a company that's looking for some sort of funding or something like that. And the answer is I could position myself as an investor. So what I want you to do is I want you to think about everything that you do when you're in this world of trying to create deals, trying to source deals, trying to find these businesses that you can acquire is I want you to position yourself as an investor. If you remember back to our discussion earlier in the program I talked about, you are an investor as long as you are someone who brings capital to a company. So capital is not just cash. Don't have to have a big pool of cash to be an investor or to bring capital. Capital also means other resources that companies want and need. So anything that you can bring that might be your network, just the connections that you have. And I know I've got friends that have all kinds of equity and deals and get consulting fees simply because they're very well connected and they're able to introduce businesses to other people. So your network is a very, very valuable resource that you can bring to companies. That is capital. Cash is capital too, but also connections to, excuse me, your ability to provide them with advice. That is something that is a form of capital. That's a resource that they need. Or maybe you can bring operational skills because you've got the ability to do that or you have those resources in your group of things that you can bring to the table. So operational marketing services, marketing skills, financial skills. Right. Other third party investors, the ability to connect to that, all of those things are very, very valuable resources that you can bring to a company. So all of those things qualify as capital. And if you're someone who can bring those resources, that capital to a company, you are an investor. So I go through this really in detail because I want, it's very, very important. And I want you to totally understand and buy into the fact that you are an investor whether you've got a bunch of cash or not. And the truth is the, that most savvy investors don't bring a bunch of cash to a deal. Right? The easiest thing you can do is bring cash to a deal, but that's also the riskiest thing you can do because your cash could be lost. Right? So what we're interested in doing here is positioning ourselves as investors, positioning yourself as an investor, so that as you go out into the world looking for deals, you are the thing that most companies feel is the most important to them. And one thing that's very helpful too is don't forget that while most companies and sellers think they want cash, the truth is, is that they're not typically looking just to have a pile of cash or a bank balance that shows a bunch of money in it. What they're really interested in is the things that that money will do for them. So if it's an operating company and they're looking for an investor and they're not looking to exit, they're probably looking to take money to turn that into inventory, advertising, equipment for the company, the ability to hire, better labor, the ability to expand markets, those kinds of things. So if you can just bring those things and skip the middle person, skip the cash, then that's tremendous value that you can bring to a company. When the seller is selling, they also are generally looking for the ability to take that money that they're going to receive, that cash they're going to receive and then do something with it. Whether it's to the trip to Antarctica or go around the world, or buy the new house that they want, or move or relocate, there's something that they typically want. And so if we can identify what those things are, then we can just again, cut out the middle person, skip the cash part, and see what we can do to find them the things that they want to do with the money. That's a really, really big, important thing for us to be thinking about as we go into these deals. So what I had mentioned before, and hopefully you've already done this, but if you hadn't, now is a great time. All of your presence out in the world, all of the things that you do out there on social media, on your website, on your business card, if you have those in your phone, in your email, signature, in your thing that says sent from my iPhone or my Google phone or whatever, the message is at the bottom. Every interaction that you've got with the rest of the world that reinforces that you are in fact an investor, the better you're going to be positioned to receive deal flow. So if you check out my social media, you can look and you'll see that my Twitter account says I'm an investor, right? My LinkedIn profile says that I'm an investor, my Instagram says I'm an investor, my Facebook, my TikTok, my YouTube, all of those say I'm an investor. And generally when you Google somebody, those social media profiles will come up very, very high and they've got great search engine optimization ranking. So when somebody Googles your name, ideally, because invariably people will check you out, you want your face to the world to represent you in a way that you are representing yourself to these people you're talking to. So if you go out and talk to a potential plastics manufacturing company and you're thinking about acquiring that company, they're probably going to Google you. When they do, they're going to see your social profiles and they're going to go on. And if it's just cat pictures, that's probably not going to position you very well. But if instead they go on and they see that all the results are social media and maybe you've got a website too, and it's each one of those that they go to. Then right up front, like you see now on the screen with my profiles, says that you're an investor. That's gonna be invaluable to you in reinforcing your credibility. You don't need a big credibility kit, you don't need a fancy website. You only need a bunch of social profiles that you position yourself as an investor on. The next thing that I wanna talk about is also really important. So there's a very good book called the E Myth Revisited. The author's name is Gerber. And and I would highly recommend that you check that out. It's a great book and it's very easy to understand, but it talks about the entrepreneurial journey and how most people go into business because they are good at something. So they are good. In his case, the example is a pie maker, somebody that made pies with her mother or aunt and she got really good at it and she was like, I make pies and so I should open a business doing pies. And I can't tell you how many people do that, right, that most business owners start with being technically proficient as a provider of a service or a product. And they're not really business people. They're good at doing the thing that they do. So they open a business and then they find that they're spending all of their time doing that skill, creating that thing that they had the skill at, that they decided to sell to the public. Now the challenge with that is that they don't really know anything about business. And so what they end up doing, according to Gerber, is that they're working in their business. They're sweeping the floors, baking the pies, opening the doors, all of that kind of stuff, doing the checkbooks, wearing all the hats of the different functions of a business. And his concept is that that's really a mistake, that if you want to grow a business and you want to actually have a business working for you, you need to work on the business, not in it. And his explanation of that is that you should really create systems that allow you to hire other people so that those people can do the day to day operations of the business and you'll be able to think about bigger things. Now there's another step beyond that that he doesn't talk about. And this is kind of where I want us to all live. And that is working above the business. So working above the business. And you can see this little graphic here, right? If you're in the business, working in the business, which is what most people do, you're opening the store, making the coffee, et cetera. If you're working on it, you're installing systems, you're creating processes, automating tasks and that kind of thing. But where I really want you to be is above it. And this is a place that very, very few people get to. It's a place that very, very few people actually even know exists. Working above the business is when you are no longer thinking about how do I sell the product or service that the business sells. You're thinking of the business itself as your product. The business, your, the business becomes your product. And here's what's cool about that. Because at that point you're thinking about how am I going to build this product, this business, in a way that it's going to be marketable and saleable to other people. And that's a really important mind shift because a lot of people that are working on their businesses don't have businesses that they can sell. Positioning yourself above the business and saying, how can I hire operators who run the business. Not how can I delegate tasks like making the pies to somebody, but how do I actually hire an operator that runs the whole business? How do I do that? That removes me from the business. One of my mantras is that I don't want to be on the org chart. So in businesses, there are lines that indicate the relationships between all the people that work in the business. And there are boxes, and the box starts with CEO or president or head, person or owner. And then under that are the people that report to them. So there's more boxes under that that might be marketing person, head of sales, head of manufacturing, et cetera. And there's little lines that connect up to the owner. And in each box, there's a job title. And in each job title leads to a job description. So if you show up on that organizational chart, which is what we call the collection of all those boxes and lines of the people that are working in the company, if you show up on there, you have a job by definition, because you have a job title and you have a job description. So my goal to work above the business is to say, I don't want to be on that chart at all. And if I'm on that chart, I am working in or on the business, but I'm definitely not working above it. When we get above it, we're above the organizational chart. We're the owner. We're saying, okay, now this is our product or service that we want to sell. And again, we're going to be hiring operators to run the company for us. We're going to be thinking about how can we secure investors, how can we find good mentors for our people and for us? Can we build an advisory board? How? How can we get into new verticals? How can we integrate our supply and distribution chain? How can we go out and acquire intellectual property in other businesses? These are the things that we're gonna be thinking about, working above the business. And ultimately, remember, our product is the business itself. And so we're ultimately really thinking about how do we build value in this product that we have to sell, make it attractive to buyers, find the buyers, and then sell the business to those people. So that's working above the business. And that is the end of step one.

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