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Action Academy | Millionaire Mentorship For Your Life & Business
I Stole Walt Disney’s $200B Business Strategy (Now We’re Doing $15M/Year)
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In 1957, Walt Disney drew a sketch that quietly became one of the greatest business blueprints in history. And almost nobody talks about it. This single diagram eventually became Movies, Merchandise, tv, Disneyland, hotels, licensing, publishing, and a company that now does over $200 billion in revenue per year. But here's the crazy part. Walt wasn't building random businesses. He was building an ecosystem. And in 2023, before I started my company, Action Academy, I. I found Walt Disney's mind map. And it completely changed how I thought about entrepreneurship. So instead of building random businesses and chasing random opportunities 24 7, I sat down and designed my entire company around this exact same philosophy. Today, just three years later, we're doing over $15 million per year across our portfolio of companies, on our way towards a $50 million per year vision. And in this video, I want to break down the exact shift in thinking that changed everything for me, because I believe most entrepreneurs build businesses completely backwards. Walt Disney didn't just build random companies. He built a world. And once I understood this, everything changed. So most people think Walt Disney became successful because of movies. But movies were never the real business. They were never the real product. The real business was the ecosystem, the world that he built. Movies create characters. Characters sold merchandise. Merchandise marketed Disneyland. Disneyland deepened emotional connection. Emotional connection sold future movies. TV tied the entire thing together. Infinite loop. Today, in 2026, there's essentially two labels that people put on entrepreneurs. You have visionaries and you have integrators. And this was made popular by this book, Rocket Fuel by Gina Wickman. And so when you're talking about visionaries and integrators, the visionary is the kind of hard charging CEO, the Steve Jobs of the world, that create the vision and the direction and the brand and the vibe and the tone of what the company is. And this is a very pie in the sky, like creative person, normally a sales and marketing character, versus the integrator is person that comes in and actually helps the visionary build the thing. So in Walt Disney's instance, this was Disney creating all of the visions for what the company would be. And it was Roy, his brother, that was actually the one that helped integrate all of these and make them come to life. Now, what's so cool about this? And when I saw this mind map, what like, really lit a spark for me was that the biggest issue that people have being a visionary now, which everybody labels themselves as, is you get lost in kind of, you kind of float away into the stratosphere and you never actually tactically put things on paper and show how things connect with each other. So when I was able to start this mind map process, everything clicked for me. Because for the first time, my freaking visionary ADHD brain was able to sequentially put pieces on a paper that showed where all of my business ideas could live and breathe and interact with each other like Disney did. Because before all of this existed decades later, this took decades for Disney to build. It existed on this one freaking sheet of paper. It's so infinitely cool because here's what I want you guys to remember. Disney didn't sell movies. Disney sold worlds. And this is when I realized something. Most entrepreneurs don't build ecosystems. They don't build worlds. They build distractions, Random side hustles, random investments, random opportunities. And eventually every business starts competing for your attention. And so later in this video, I'm going to go over how I created my own mind map for my businesses. That where I used Walt Disney's mind map as kind of the example. And I stole his way of thinking, but I applied it to mine. What you guys to understand first is how I sequentially think about the different businesses. Because what most people do wrong here is entrepreneurs take every single idea and act on them because you're bored and you have shiny object syndrome. So you're doing one thing and you see your friend Bob over here doing another thing, and you're like, wow, I want to go try that. And then I want to try what Eric's doing, I want to try what Ashley's doing. All of a sudden you've got an entrepreneur that's got 20 different side hustles and 20 different income streams and 200 different focuses. When I was poor, I respected and looked up to the guy or girl that said, I'm flipping houses and I've got a mobile home park and I've got this hotel and I'm doing private money lending, and I've got this side hustle and I bought a garage door repair company. That person looked awesome to me because why they're doing all this money, They've got all this passive Inc coming in, right? They're going to be so successful. Wrong. That person is so scattered. Now that I'm rich and I have a little bit more experience under my belt, I much more respect the guy or a girl that's 40 years deep with one company. Now, why this mind map matters is because this is one world that Walt was building. He wasn't building 20 different things, and most importantly, he wasn't building 20 different things at the same time. And so when I Get into my mind map. In a little bit, you guys will understand how I sequentially think of things. A really helpful piece of advice. Here is a piece of advice I got from, not Walt Disney, but from one of my personal mentors here in Austin, Texas. It was this guy that was worth $250 million. And he taught me this idea. Plant trees, manage orchards. And it's how business works. So when you think of business, you think about it like fertile soil in the ground, right? And you're planting seeds. So every rental property that you buy, every business that you buy or build or do or anything, every side hustle is a new seed that you plant into the soil. And so when you plant the seed in the soil, you want to cover it up with the soil, you want to water it, and then you want to make sure to watch over it until it sprouts. When it sprouts and it turns into a sapling, that tree is not able to stand on its own yet. You need to shield it from the wind, the weather, the rain, any animals that are going to come up and dig it. So what this means in real life is you want to shield your business and shield your side hustle, and shield your investment from any distractions, bad actors, bad economic environments, bad partnerships, bad deals, all the different stuff. You have to watch over your tree as it grows into an adult tree. And once it's a full grown tree, from sapling to tree, and the tree begins to branch out and bear fruit, at that point where the tree is now on its own, standing, which means that your business is generating money, producing fruit and standing on its own at that point. You can then pick the apples from the tree, get the seeds from those apples, and then go start planting other seeds elsewhere. But you have to watch the freaking tree. You can't plant five trees at one time. So that's called plant trees, managed orchards. Because eventually you have enough trees built across this plot of land, then you could take all the apples and go hire somebody and pay them in all of your apples that you just produced to watch over the entire orchard. And that's where you get your coo. That's where you get your family office, that's where you get your investment portfolio. That is how scale works. So when you think of this, think of planning each seed sequentially, not all at the same time. When we're doing this mind map together, which I'm going to do this with you guys, and I'm going to teach you how to do this one primary business, one primary avenue which then branches off into the other avenues. Okay. Because complexity destroys execution. Simple skills fancy fails. Concentration builds wealth, Diversification keeps wealth. Most people diversify too early because they're impatient. So what happens next is, before I launched Action Academy in 2023, I sat down with the whiteboard and I asked myself, if I built this fricking thing like Disney, what would it look like? All right, here's my mind map that I created. As the camera zooms in and focuses on it, very difficult to read. So I'm going to come over here on this side of the frame, and then I'll have my editing team post my mind map, their copy right here for you guys to see, and we'll highlight different sections as I talk about it. So I'm going to verbally read out my mind map and how I thought about things, and then you guys can kind of follow along on the screen for my mind map. The number one tree that I had to build first was Action Academy Podcast. So how I thought about this was, okay, I need my creative studio, because Disney built everything based off of his characters first, so he built it off of the content first. Everything revolved around the center body of work, which is Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Goofy, all of the characters, right? So the characters created all the businesses. So for me, Action Academy Podcast, the podcast that Created with this $279Mike that's made me millions of dollars and built my company in my my world later on, started as a free podcast. And I've been doing this podcast for the last four years. So I started with Action Academy Podcast in the center of my page. And so whenever you're doing your mind map, start with in the very center, be like, what is my primary core business? What is my core avenue? Right? And then on your four corners of the page on each side, the top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right. Those are going to be your ancillary pillars and that support the core business. So everything should feed into each other. Okay? So I started with Action Academy Podcast, and what I did next was I went down into our Action Academy community. So that's our Mastermind. With over 650 active members, we've done over a billion dollars in real estate and small business acquisitions. $428 million in 2025 alone. For the last three years, that's all I've focused on primarily is building Action Academy the mastermind, right? So that came as the first way to monetize the body that of work that I was giving. So my creative studio of my Mickey My mini All this was the free content in the free podcast, right? So that goes into Action Academy community. And then from that I started to think, okay, well if I build a community, the community is going to want to throw events, right? And remember, this was before I had ever done an event. We had never done an event before. This was before it. So I was like, we're going to do events though. We're probably going to do events around the world. And then I thought, well, wouldn't it be freaking cool if we owned the places that we're hosting events at? Wouldn't it be cool if we owned really cool airbnbs or hotels or conference centers or convention centers, resorts, Right? What if we owned a freaking island? Like these were all in my vision. And I was like, well, that would go and coincide with the events, right? And so when you see these lines going to and from those are the different ways that the businesses interact with each other. This is how my brain works. This is what like a visionary entrepreneur, like, this is how we work. This is how we think we go from the international events up to the top. That's my company, Sexton World, and that became a seven figure company within 12 months. Action Academy is now an eight figure company this year. So three, it'll take almost about four years deep in Action Academy for the mastermind to become an eight figure company. Sex in the World or travel and events company will be a seven figure company. Then that goes down to our Action Academy. I called it latam Luxury. So Latin America luxury, where I'm buying hotels in Mexico, down in Central and South America, that transitioned a little bit to just a hospitality company. So that is Sexton Hospitality. So the first hotel that I'm building in that portfolio is Baya. The hotel that we're doing is $14.2 million in South Florida. And I'm going to be hosting a lot of our Action Academy events there. We can throw events there and then now the hotel goes back to the events. Those both fuel each other. And then if you go to the bottom left, our Action Academy business and real estate fund. So that's what's going to come next. Right now I'm running it as basically a personal family office. So it's my personal profit from the events company and from the Mastermind that and from the hotel that now goes into my own bank of capital that I use to buy other companies. And so far we've bought five companies now and now we're under contract on our sixth. So we're equity partners and Five under contract, our sixth right now. So that's super cool. And then you can see beneath Action Academy community, I've got like different ancillary businesses that I thought that would be really good vertical integrations for our community. And so when you think about vertical integration, how I think about that is you want to basically own every single expense line item that you have and you want to create it into a profit center. And so for me, I was like, well, legal and cpa, why don't we buy CPA firms? Why don't we buy bookkeeping companies? Why buy short form media companies and build each one of these into a profit center? And so that's what we're actively working on right now. Then we bought some ancillary companies as well that aren't kind of vertically integrated, but we did them passively. So it's different to own them actively versus passively. So eventually I'll do the Action Academy business and real estate fund. That will yield all the capital from the community, from all of the other media that I created from the podcast. All of that will get collected into the business real estate fund to where that will channel into the hotels and into more businesses. And then now all that cycles back up to the top left corner, which is eyeballs, which is YouTube. So all of these little, if you see for people listening, I have each one of these highlighted with and like circled with different little numbers next to them. So I've got sevens, I've got sixes and I've got eights. Anything with an 8 around it, I was like, this is going to be an eight figure company for sure. Anything with a seven next to it is a seven figure company for sure. And if you look down at the very, very bottom, I signed this in 2023. This is before I made my first dollar in business. And now three years later, not even three full years later, I'm recording this in May 2026. We're doing $15 million a year. So if you look over to the right too. I'm sorry, I'm trying to narrate this for people that are listening. The goal was $50 million a year across all the different companies that we have here. And so when I think of this, I think of this as your core businesses, your core tree trunk and branches of the tree trunk. That's kind of how I think about things. It's pretty difficult to explain, but for my visionary freaks like you guys understand this with me now, what's really important is I run the podcast. I am in charge of the YouTube, I'm in charge of the community. But like my primary business is Action Academy, right? So I have operating partners and people that run my companies. For the events company, I've got Brandon and Shelby who run my events company, I've got Ben and Steve that run my hospitality company, I've got Ryan that's helping with my YouTube. And for the fund, the fund doesn't exist yet, that's just me. But I've got different people that are either running or equity partners in each one of these things. And so that's what's super important too is you can't do it all on your own. You need to be able to have your focus. And so for me, I just, for the last three and a half years, I've only been focused on Action Academy. And as I grew Action Academy, I was able to just take the distributions from that and then passively start distributing them across all the rest of these. And then that's what created this. Not saying that this is the right way to do things, it's just how my brain works. And a lot of people, thousands of people are asking me how it works and for me to cover this. And so this is me covering it. Everything basically started with Attention because I didn't have capital, so I needed to start with attention. So the YouTube, podcast, social media, email, all of it. Media creates trust at scale. Same thing that Walt Disney did is he started with media because he understood this in 1957, but in 2026 is even more important. Attention is the ultimate leverage. It's basically the new oil. So if you're looking at all of this stuff that I have and you're like, well, shit, Brian, like well heck, Brian, I don't understand where to get started. I don't have any capital. You gotta build Media first. So I started with Media first back three years ago and I highly recommend that you guys start with Media first because when you have a brand, everything compounds from brand. So if you really think about it, brand is my ultimate tree trunk. And that's why my primary focus has been on Community and our Mastermind. Because Now I've got 650 operators, capital partners and business partners in that group to where every single time one of you guys joins Action Academy, I have additional capital, I have additional deal flow, I have additional partners. So it's like I have an unfair advantage. And as time goes on, it only grows. That's the game. So what I want you to guys to remember from this is the Internet rewards people who own Attention, okay, But attention alone isn't enough. You need to actually be in person with this attention. And that's where community comes in. Like I just talked about, community is the center of everything because information can change your income, but relationships can change your life. To speak specifically on our Action Academy community, like the economics and the business behind it, I sincerely think that online courses are going to be dead here. If they're not already. They're going to be in the dead in the next three years because you can just find everything that you need to find through chat, GPT and Claude. And so I think that right now, especially like in person or curated memberships in Masterminds, where people. There's like a barrier to entry and not anybody with a credit card and a pulse can join, are more important than ever. People want to be in person with these people. And like, for Action Academy, that's what's so important for us. And that's why we have the events companies, so we can literally travel around the world together and do these events. That's what's so important. So think about all of this like a flywheel that all kind of feeds into each other. So what I want you to remember from this is the greatest businesses in the world are communities disguised as companies. Same thing that Disney did back in the day with Disneyland. Action Academy is my Disneyland. So he took the content, my podcast, and he made it into Disneyland Action Academy. So now to kind of tie everything up with a bow. Once you have audience trust, relationships, operators, deal flow, opportunities kind of naturally start appearing. They're not forced, they're organic. And so for the investment side of this, I think nobody's doing it better than Alex Hormozi right now, where he's just giving away the best stuff for free. So he's like, if you make your free stuff better than everybody else's paid stuff, people are going to want to learn more about what your paid stuff is because they're going to be naturally curious, right? So like I just said, like, the community is more important with the flow of deals, operators and capital than anything that I create. And so you have to remember, like, what is the core tree trunk of your business versus where the branches. Sometimes it's okay to cut off a branch or for a branch to fall off on its own because it's dead. It's not okay for the core tree trunk to be infected. You want to make sure that the roots are very strong, the core tree trunk is strong, and your focus is on there. I'm not building all of these businesses just to make more money, I'm building all of these businesses to improve life itself. This vision works for me because my vision and what's important for me of my big, exciting, rich life is a world where I can do what I want, when I want, with who I want. I'm staying in the nicest luxury places on earth. I'm traveling around with awesome people, and I have a constant, steady flow of new connections and also deepening old connections that I have. And I'm just around people that I love. So if I'm doing things I love, around people that I love, in places and locations that I love, and I'm seeing all the most amazing parts of the world, that's what builds my big, exciting life. And so when you guys are doing your pillars, when it comes to your mind map for your vision for your companies, take that into account. Don't just do it just to do it. Do it to be like, how am I building a life by design? How am I building a life that I don't need a vacation from? I don't want to build businesses that extract from my life. I want to build businesses that enhance my life. So when I first saw Walt Disney's mind map, I thought I was looking at a business strategy, but I wasn't. I was looking at a core philosophy, a way of thinking, a way of life, a way of living, a way of building. Walt understood that the most powerful companies in the world are ecosystems. They're worlds. Every piece strengthens the other pieces. Every relationship compounds. Every product deepens the world. And over the last few years, I've tried to build my life the exact same way. Not just businesses, but a world. A world where media creates opportunities. Opportunities create community. Community creates transformation. Transformation creates stories. Stories create more media. And the cycle continues. That single shift in thinking changed everything for me. And honestly, I think it can change everything for you too.