How I'm Building A $1B Business In My 20's

All right, so I'm scaling a business to $1 billion in my 20s, and in this video I'm going to break down the exact game plan and roadmap of how I'm planning to do it so that hopefully you can learn something or get inspired in your own business and get a piece of advice or a little nugget that ultimately makes you more money. So to give you guys some context, I scaled a marketing agency from $0 to $500K per month, shut that down, and then scaled a lead gen agency from $0 to $700K per month. And my plan is to basically parlay that into building a wealth management firm and a fintech platform that I'm going to sell for a billion dollars. Now I know that's a lot. I'll cover it all. I'm going to break it down as simple as possible so you guys can follow along and understand the exact game plan of what I want to do. So let's get started. First and foremost, let me kind of give you guys some background on what we're doing currently. I mentioned the marketing agency, the Legion agency. I want to kind of break that in break that down, uh, because that ultimately kind of is the first step in terms of how we get to $1 billion. So what we were basically doing, uh, probably about a year ago is we were doing a retainer-based marketing agency, right? So I'm gonna draw 3 little different things here. So retainer-based marketing agency, the way that this works is essentially you charge a flat fee per month. So what we were doing is we were running ads for insurance agents. We charged a flat fee, if I can actually write, of $5K per month, right? Now, this is a great business model for beginners. It's great for learning a skill, which, I mean, the skill that we learned here is ultimately going to help us scale a company to a billion dollars. So it's obviously very viable. Um, but there's a cap on this, right? When you charge a flat retainer, what happens is Basically, so the way that this is work— that this works is like, think of it like if you have like a phone, a phone bill, and you pay for unlimited data, that's kind of the same way that a retainer works, right? So if I pay $50 a month and I get unlimited data, the cell phone company is not making more based off of my usage. I'm only paying $50 a month. And the thing is, when you first start using that service, if you haven't used it at all, I'll draw a little graph here so you can understand. The value that you've received is zero, but the pricing is here, right? So let's say this is the price, this is the value. When you first start off— get my camera back in focus— there we go. When you first start off, you've received no value, but the price is high. But then eventually the value that you're receiving is more than the price, but the company's not making any more money, right? So this is the problem with the retainer-based model, is we charge our clients $5K per month, and the most that we can ever earn, the most value we can get, is $5K per month. But in the beginning, there's a value discrepancy, so it's harder to sell. But then once they're actually getting results, you don't really earn what you're worth. So that's kind of the issue that we realized here. Hard to sell up front. Hard to sell, cap on upside. Okay, so we scaled this to about $500,000 a month. We realized that there were, you know, a lot of issues with this model, and then we decided to go into pay per X. All right, so pay per X is essentially a way of charging where— I'll go back to the cell phone company analogy— instead of paying for unlimited data, you pay per minute, right? So if you think about that, people that are barely using any minutes, they're barely paying anything. But if you're using a lot of minutes, your price goes up. So the company is earning more from their highest value customers, so they have higher upside, right? The other thing too is it's easier to sell on the front end because they don't do anything, if they don't use it, they're not having to pay anything out of pocket, right? So basically, the way that we do this now is we charge per appointment, okay? So essentially what we do is for wealth advisors, we run ads, we have a team of about 15 setters that call the leads and then book appointments directly on the calendar, and we charge per showed qualified appointment. Now, the cool thing about this is it's easier to sell, it's harder to fulfill for sure, easier to sell, and unlimited upside, right? So we have certain clients that are like, hey, I want to pay you guys $100K a month and I want, you know, however many appointments that gets me. And so here the max you can earn is $5K a month. With here, per client, there's an unlimited upside, right? So if we draw that same graph, At the beginning, they're paying nothing, and then the value that they get is directly proportional to what we charge, right? So that is the per— pay per X model. I'll draw this other graph so you guys can kind of see the differences. Now, why do I explain marketing agency pay per X model? This is what we scaled to $700K per month. Well, the reason why is because— I'm actually gonna use a different color for value. So black is the price, let's say blue is the value that you're delivering. Here it's going to be— the value's always gonna be a little higher, but they trace closer. What we realized is that our clients were making really good money from the services that we were delivering. And so the next evolution of this is instead of selling leads or selling marketing services, well, we basically just become the entire pipeline, right? So people call this owning the supply chain, right? Own supply chain. And this is kind of the next evolution. So A perfect example of this is if you look at what Amazon did, right? So Amazon, they basically started off as like a marketplace for books, right? And then eventually they started selling other products. And now the way that Amazon works is you go on Amazon and it's a bunch of third-party sellers that are putting their products on the platform. And what Amazon realized is they could just basically see what's selling best on their platform and then make their own version of it they just sell, right? So if you've ever gone on Amazon and you see something sold by AmazonBasics, essentially all they did is they saw that somebody else was making a ton of money selling, um, a Rubik's Cube, right? For example, it could be any product, and then they decided to just basically make their own Rubik's Cube and then sell it. So now they own the supply chain. They own the acquisition of the customer, and then they're also selling and fulfilling the product. Now, the advantages of this is you get way more profit, and you actually own a real business outside of just selling marketing services. So owning the supply chain, max profit. And control. So the way that this works is because you're not actually selling the product, because you're not selling the lead, you're extracting all of the value, right? So if I were to map this out, there's no price because you're not selling it, and the value is basically just infinite. All right. So this is kind of the evolution of a marketing agency or of a marketer. It's like you start off, you charge a retainer-based model, then you realize, hey, I'm delivering a lot of results for people, I should be getting paid more. Then you go into pay per X and then you realize, hey, my clients are making way more money than I am. What if I just did what they did? Right. And that's kind of brought us to owning the supply chain. So let me explain the industry. That we're actually doing this in and why we picked that industry. All right, so there's tons of different things that you can do nowadays. There's tons of different business opportunities. You know, you can get into e-commerce, you can get into crypto. I mean, I saw a supplement company just the other day that sells gummy bears. It's called Groonze, and they sold for over $1 billion to, I believe, Unilever. So there's all these industries that there's a ton of money in, right? But, uh, I basically came up with this concept called Stadium Theory, right? And the whole idea is like, if you want to make a lot of money, you should probably go where the money is, right? And what Stadium Theory basically is, is think about how much money you have to have in order to sponsor a stadium like a professional sports team stadium, like an NBA or NFL or MLB or NHL stadium? Well, the companies that are paying, you know, a few hundred million dollars to put their name on the side of one of those buildings and sponsor it, they're obviously making some cash. And I don't really see too many supplement companies doing that. I don't really see too many marketing agencies doing that. But I looked it up and I did some research, and 30— or no, 40% of all stadiums are named after 3 different industries. All right, you have banking, you have finance, and then you have insurance, right? And the 3 of these combined, they basically make up what is called financial services. All right, financial services is the most lucrative industry in the world right now, maybe other than AI, right? But OpenAI almost went bankrupt, and I don't want to compete with those guys. So financial services is probably the most lucrative industry out there, um, and the reason why is because it's literally just the business of selling money. Like you're selling air. Um, the profits are insane, and a lot of the companies that are behind these, these different industries have been around for hundreds of years. There's banks that have been around for hundreds of years. There's financial institutions that have been around for hundreds of years, and there's definitely insurance companies that have— insurance companies are actually some of the oldest. There's certain— the first insurance company ever made in the U.S. is still around today. It was made by Benjamin Franklin. Right? So Stadium Theory. Well, because of the marketing agency that we had before, because we were doing it for insurance— we do it for financial advisors now— we've realized and kind of learned a lot about these different industries. And I'm going to break down the way that they actually charge so you can kind of understand this, because it's actually very, very similar to a software company. I think wealth management is like the OG software, basically. So basically, the way that these businesses work and their exit multiples are also very similar. So these companies, they exit from anywhere from 11x to 20x EBITDA. Right, so EBITDA is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Basically, in simple terms, EBITDA just means your profit, essentially, right? So they— these businesses sell for 11 to 20x EBITDA, which is similar to what software companies sell for, and it's a ridiculously high multiple, right? So this is why I think that I can get to a billion dollars, is because When you break this down, 11 to 20x EBITDA, to sell for a billion, you just need to be doing $50 million to $100 million per year in profit, right? Which sounds like a lot, right, if you're running like a $100K per month business or something. But in reality, like, there's so many businesses that do this. There's companies in your own city right now that are doing this that you've never even heard of. Like, there's so much wealth and so many businesses that are doing this out there. So this is essentially the target, right? And again, these companies have software-like multiples. The reason why is because the whole industry of wealth management is based upon recurring revenue. So I'm going to explain basically the way that these, these people charge and make money, right? So Essentially, there's a concept called AUM, which stands for assets under management. It basically means when you give a wealth management company your money, their goal is to help you grow it, right? So some examples of this is like, if you guys have heard of Edward Jones, they have like offices in every single city. Uh, Morgan Stanley. These are some of the, the most famous ones. There's another one called Fisher Investments. The guy who owns it is a billionaire, multi-billionaire, many times over. And basically what these companies do is you, you give them your money and they help you manage it and help you grow it, help you with retirement, right? So the way they charge is they charge you a percentage of your money every single year as a fee to help you manage it. Typically, that's gonna be 1%, right? So let's say you have $1 million, right? And you give it to a wealth manager to manage. They're gonna charge you $10,000 per year to manage your money. There's an extra zero in there. So $10,000 a year, every year that you keep your money with them. So you think about it, most people don't leave their wealth manager. If you get someone when they're 50 and they live to 80 and they have $1 million, assuming that this money doesn't even grow, which it will, so this number also will grow. You know, if you do— if you, uh, start working with them when you're 50 and you work with them until you're 85, That's 35 years. 35 times $10,000 is, I believe, $350,000. My math is wrong, pardon me, but I don't think that's wrong. I usually use calculators, but that's definitely right. So you would basically be making $350,000 from one single client that just has a million bucks. That is an insane LTV per customer. Right? There's— I don't know of any e-commerce business that has a $350,000 LTV. And what's crazy is there's also other products that you can sell them. You can sell them life insurance, you can sell them other, other things as well that add to this, right? So as you can see, like, there's a reason that these companies can slap their names on stadiums. It's because they make insane amounts of money. So again, for me to sell a company for a billion dollars we're talking 11x, 11x to 20x EBITDA. So doing $50 to $100 million a year. Well, you just saw one customer can be $350,000 over a lifetime. If you can consistently acquire customers and do it at scale, you can see how it gets pretty insane pretty fast, right? So that kind of leads me to the next thing. So I explained the marketing agency, I explained the business model. Let me explain our actual plan of how we get there and give you guys some examples of other people that have done it. So a universal law of business is he who controls the flow of customers controls everything, right? This is why I'll give you some perfect examples. We talked about Amazon before. If Amazon all of a sudden decided that they were gonna kick every single seller off of their platform and just create all the products themselves, you would still go to Amazon and you would still buy from them, right? Because Amazon has so much trust as a source to buy things. So all the other businesses, they have to play by Amazon's rules because they have all of the customers, right? Same thing with Meta, Facebook. Right now I pay Facebook about $15,000 a day and I'm continuing to give them even more money. And the reason why is because they own all the customers. Everyone's on Meta, right? So he who controls the flow of customers wins. Now, if Meta decided that they were just gonna basically sell everything and just sell it through their platform, well, they already have all the customers. They could easily do that. Meta could start any product, run ads on their platform for free, not charge themselves, and instantly create a billion-dollar business overnight, right? So he who controls the flow of customers wins. All other businesses are, for lack of a better term, sucking off of the teat of companies like Amazon, Meta, Google, right? And honestly, I'm no different. I'm right there sucking off the teat of these companies now. The key is this is, this is where all of the attention is. These are the platforms that people go, right? But within these companies, right, there's people that advertise on Meta that help to generate leads for other companies, right? So he who controls the flow of customers wins. Well, a perfect example of another business, obviously not nearly as big as these, um, but in terms of like the middleman, is a company called NerdWallet, right? I'm just gonna— there we go. We'll get a green marker because their logo is actually green. So this is a perfect example to kind of explain what I'm planning on doing. So NerdWallet is basically a blog website, right? And NerdWallet would be one of these middlemen that we were just talking about. So we'll do— NerdWallet is basically a website. They run ads on Google, Meta, and Amazon— or not Amazon, but Google and Meta. You get the point. So what NerdWallet basically does is they write blogs about credit cards. Uh, that's kind of how they started. And basically their whole business was people would come to their site from Google because they were right, putting out all this content, writing all these blogs. And then because they controlled the flow of customers, this was the trusted source for credit card information. They could then charge money to Visa, right? Amex, Chase, and they would basically charge these guys an affiliate fee for getting people to sign up for their credit cards, right? Very simple. So they started off literally just writing blogs about credit cards to own the flow and get the, the control of the customers. Then they started getting affiliates for those credit cards, so that's how they made their money. And eventually they kind of just became a go-to source for financial information. Now NerdWallet also gets affiliates for— move the mic a little bit— insurance. They also get affiliates for mortgages and all kinds of other things. They've basically just become like a platform for financial services and then they refer out. Well, imagine if NerdWallet decided tomorrow that, hey, instead of just selling all of these people and helping other people sign up for credit cards with Amex, Chase, Visa, etc., what if they just took a percentage of these people and they said, hey, we're gonna create our own NerdWallet credit card. Well, the only thing that would be stopping them is just figuring out the logistics behind this, but they already have the flow of customers, they already have the trust. Now all they would need to do is just do this. And NerdWallet, I mean, they're already a billion-dollar company just from their referral platform, but imagine if they added on a credit card. They would add a lot of money to their bottom line, right? So how does this kind of relate to what I'm talking about? Well, again, we talked about, uh, the marketing agency, we talked about wealth management. Basically my plan is I'm going to create the nerd wallet of retirement, right? So We'll just call this retirement site. Retirement site. And I'm not gonna be running ads on Amazon, but I'll be running ads on Meta and Google. I'll drive traffic here to my site. And currently, we are referring this out to other financial advisors. So we're selling appointments, selling leads. Right? But what we're in the process of doing and what we're going to set up is we're also going to take a percentage of these leads, we're going to direct them to our wealth management firm, which I just went over the math in terms of how much you can make with this. We just take that same flow of customers, and instead of only selling the leads, we now take them in ourselves. And then this assets under management compounds over time as we're continuing to get more and more customers, and we're able to scale from there. Now, um, $50 to $100 million a year in EBITDA, um, results in a billion-dollar exit. That's, that's not even factoring in if we had this retirement site, which most wealth management firms don't have. This— the way that most of these companies acquire customers is just simply through like old methods like referrals. So if we're able to have the flow of customers that we own directing them to our own company that we also own, realistically it could probably be more than a— than an 11 to 20x. Multiple and exit. So ladies and gentlemen, I try to make this as simple as possible. I know we're talking about a lot of complex things, but I think the whiteboard helps out quite a bit with doing that. Um, this is essentially my game plan. So to recap, take the skill set of marketing— I already know how to drive traffic, I already know how to generate leads for these industries— I developed my own nerd wallet of retirement, a trusted source for people to go to get information. While we're selling the leads. This helps us fund building this, and then in the meantime, we're also going to build this, which then compounds and grows and eventually can sell for a billion dollars. So ladies and gentlemen, if you guys want to follow along for the journey, I'm going to be documenting everything. I'm going to be explaining how I'm going to do this, um, the lessons that I learned along the way. Make sure to subscribe. I'm going to post more videos, um, but breaking down the strategy and everything else. And if you want to be a part of this business that we're building, we're looking for killers all the time. I'm definitely not gonna be able to do this alone. So if you are an absolute stud, a rock star in sales, marketing, or finance and wealth management, hit the link down below, um, to apply to work with us. And I look forward to seeing you guys in the next video. Take care.