How I Built 12 Income Streams Without Tons of Cash

Summary

BigDeal Podcast Episode Summary
Title: How I Built 12 Income Streams Without Tons of Cash
Host: Codie Sanchez
Release Date: June 23, 2025

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Introduction: The Power of Multiple Income Streams

In the opening segment of this episode, Codie Sanchez and co-host Cameron delve into the significance of having multiple income streams as a pathway to financial success. They highlight a compelling statistic: “65% of self-made millionaires have three or more income streams” (00:07). This sets the stage for their exploration of strategic income diversification beyond merely starting additional businesses.

Passive vs. Horizontal Income Streams

Codie distinguishes between passive income and what she terms horizontal income. She critiques the conventional notion of passive income, often marketed through online schemes like drop shipping, stating, “I've never met passive income” (00:25). Instead, she introduces horizontal income, which involves creating revenue streams that are not directly tied to the traditional 8-to-10-hour workday, allowing for greater flexibility and scalability.

Learning from Adversity: Codie's Argentina Experience

A pivotal moment in the discussion arises when Codie recounts her experience with a business in Argentina. “Within one month of her being in charge, our business became illegal” (00:26), she explains, leading to the dissolution of a venture that managed hundreds of millions in assets. This adversity reinforced her commitment to diversifying income streams to safeguard against unforeseen disruptions, emphasizing the importance of “decentralized revenue and income sources” (00:43).

Decentralization as a Strategy for Resilience and Freedom

Codie advocates for viewing one’s business as a multifaceted entity with multiple income channels, analogous to how individuals manage personal finances. By “decentralizing income streams”, entrepreneurs can achieve greater autonomy and resilience. She illustrates this philosophy by referencing global magnates like Carlos Slim and Charles Koch, who have amassed wealth not by creating numerous startups but by acquiring existing businesses to diversify their portfolios.

Case Study: Building Income Streams through Business Acquisitions

A detailed case study underscores Codie's methodology for building multiple income streams with minimal initial capital. She narrates the step-by-step acquisition of a laundromat, transforming it from a single income source into a multifaceted revenue-generating machine:

1. Initial Acquisition: Purchased a laundromat for $100K with minimal down payment (06:54).
2. Adding Vending Machines: Introduced vending machines within a mile radius, boosting revenue from $67K to $117K without acquiring new customers (07:48).
3. Acquiring Competitors: Bought a competing laundromat owned by a veteran in the industry, adding another income stream.
4. Expanding Services: Introduced wash and fold services through a van delivery fleet, elevating income to $717K.
5. Cost Optimization: Created a proprietary soap brand to reduce expenses and generate additional revenue.
6. Real Estate Acquisition: Purchased the laundromat’s property, leveraging tax benefits and enhancing asset value.

Codie emphasizes that “you have one business. We've acquired no new customers. We've grown the business zero, except through acquisition” (38:29), showcasing the effectiveness of strategic acquisitions over organic growth.

The Contrarian Approach to Business Buying

Codie introduces the Contrarian Community, a platform designed to equip aspiring entrepreneurs with the tools and knowledge to acquire businesses using methods akin to private equity:

• Advisory Team: Building a team of experts to guide acquisition strategies.
• Investment Committee: Collaborating with a group to evaluate and approve deals.
• Deal Team: Engaging with professionals to execute transactions.

She shares success stories from the community, noting that members have collectively purchased $266 million in small businesses within a year and a half, illustrating the accessibility and feasibility of her approach.

Navigating Seller Financing and Deal Structuring

A substantial portion of the discussion revolves around seller financing, a pivotal component of Codie's acquisition strategy. She explains how seller financing benefits both buyers and sellers by:

• Allowing sellers to receive a premium and better tax treatment through structured payments.
• Enabling buyers to acquire businesses with minimal upfront capital by leveraging future cash flows.

Codie addresses common misconceptions, such as why sellers would opt for financing their business to buyers, highlighting mutual benefits like increased total sale value and reduced tax burdens.

Practical Steps to Acquire a Small Business

Codie outlines a 10-step process for purchasing a business, simplifying complex private equity practices into actionable steps:

1. Deal Clarity: Identifying the right business fit.
2. Origination: Sourcing potential acquisition targets.
3. Outreach: Engaging with sellers effectively.
4. Evaluation: Assessing the true value of the business.
5. Offer & Negotiation: Crafting and negotiating favorable deals.
6. Due Diligence: Ensuring the business’s legitimacy and uncovering any hidden issues.
7. Financing: Securing funds through various methods.
8. Closing the Deal: Finalizing the acquisition.
9. Post-Closing Operations: Managing the first 90 days effectively.

Additionally, Codie emphasizes the importance of assembling a competent deal team, comprising an accountant, attorney, and subject matter expert, to navigate the complexities of acquisitions.

Community and Mentorship: The Role of Collaboration

Highlighting the significance of community support and mentorship, Codie shares her interactions with mentors like Bill Perkins, a former hedge fund manager and author. These relationships provide crucial insights and encouragement, fostering a mindset geared towards relentless growth and strategic risk-taking.

Call to Action: Empowering the Listener to Act

Codie concludes with a powerful call to action, urging listeners to “go out and buy some businesses” and to “help one other human get equity” (38:29). She envisions a nation of empowered business owners who collectively push back against centralized power structures, fostering economic freedom and resilience.

Key Takeaways and Notable Quotes

• Multiple Income Streams as Wealth Builders:
  “65% of self-made millionaires have three or more income streams.” (00:07)

• Critique of Passive Income:
  “I've never met passive income.” (00:25)

• Importance of Decentralization:
  “If you have decentralized revenue and income sources, you're harder to contain and you have more freedom.” (00:43)

• Strategic Acquisitions Over Startups:
  “The world's biggest holding company owns Dior and Louis Vuitton because they bought them for pennies on the dollar.” (07:46)

• Benefits of Seller Financing:
  “Do you want to make more money if you sell your business? Yes.” (22:15)

• Community Success:
  “Our community has bought $266 million in small businesses since we started tracking this about a year and a half ago.” (15:30)

• Empowering Others:
  “Help one other human get equity. Just one.” (38:29)

Conclusion

This episode of BigDeal masterfully intertwines strategic financial advice with personal anecdotes, providing listeners with a comprehensive roadmap to building substantial wealth through business acquisitions and income diversification. Codie Sanchez empowers her audience to break free from conventional financial limitations, advocating for a proactive and educated approach to entrepreneurship.

For those seeking to transform their financial landscape without substantial initial capital, this episode offers invaluable insights and practical steps to embark on the journey of becoming a multifaceted business owner.

Transcript

[Cody]

You guys, there is clear data that shows the most likely way to get rich, yet over 97% of people ignore it.

[Cameron]

Look at this statistic.

[Cody]

65% of self made millionaires have three or more income streams.

[Cameron]

So the obvious advice is start more businesses, right? Wrong. The richest people in the world figured out a smarter way.

[Cody]

One that stacks the odds of success.

[Cameron]

Higher in their favor. So they don't start more businesses, they buy them.

[Cody]

Because buying a business means you skip.

[Cameron]

The hardest part from building from zero.

[Cody]

And start with cash flow from day one. So if you want to stack income.

[Cameron]

Streams like the top 1%, but you.

[Cody]

Don'T have a mountain of money to do it, then this video is going.

[Cameron]

To be for you. I'm going to talk about how you.

[Cody]

Can take one business, use acquisitions using creative financing in order to get you.

[Cameron]

Guys 12 income streams today without distractions. This is the stuff the really rich think about. Now we're going to seal their homework. My ability to earn is my ultimate freedom. Unemployables who are unwilling to listen to the status quo and we should push back with our profits. And I think if we do that, we change this country, we make a ton of money and we don't have to be told what to do again. Money, the only language everybody speaks. It is the only language the powerful speak. So they told us a lie back in the day that what? What is the root of all evil? Why would they tell us that? Because it's the only way they can control us. You don't want your kid to get medical xyz. Well, go pay for a private school. You can't. Okay, I'm going to do what I want with your kid. You don't want to work in this job any longer. Oh, you don't have any money. You're going to have to work in this job. This is how we push back as we become so wealthy. We have a you fund, we have a way to push back. So you know how you guys talk about how the average millionaire has 7 to 12 income streams? Everybody's heard that before, right? I'm going to talk about that in a different way, a way that I wish somebody had told me about it earlier. As to why it's so important that you diversify your revenue and your income streams and how to do it in a 21st century version. What's fascinating is most people who are worth seven figures minus their house make money in lots of different ways. The more money you have, the more ways you make money. Typically this is just math, but the problem is most people in the US don't have that. They have one. So how do we change that? The idea is simply this is that we put the odds in your favor. And the way we put your odds in your favor is this idea of passive versus horizontal income. I think passive income is something sold to you on people buy online that want to tell you how to do, I don't know, drop shipping or something like that. I've never met passive income. If you guys have any for me, I'll be happy to take it. But horizontal income is a little bit different. It basically means your, your time isn't tied to that exact dollar that instead, instead you have revenue streams that you can stack non related to the 8 hour days or 10 hour days you want to work. But the way I think about this is different. And the reason why is this is me back in the day. At this point I was running a business in Chile. Something kind of crazy happened. We went from Chile to Argentina. In Argentina I started selling these offshore funds. So a way for people in Argentina to invest in US dollar offshore. The business is going great. We were motoring and then this woman called Christina Fernandez became president. And within one month of her being in charge, our business became illegal. We got kicked out of the country. We had to give up our entirety of our business. And we've never worked in Argentina again. This is a business that had hundreds of millions of dollars in assets under management. The sad part was that I had, I was a one trick pony. I had put all this money into Argentina, into this one type of investment and they had taken it away from me. And so I swore to never let that happen again. So I like to think of my income streams almost like the bitcoiners think about bitcoin. They don't like fiat currency because one person can control it. They can inflate your income. And I think about the same with my income sources. If you have decentralized revenue and income sources, you're harder to contain and you have more freedom. And so everything we want to do is to get more jobs, clients, et cetera, into decentralized income streams. And we'll break down how exactly that is. But the main idea is I want you to think about your business as a human. And just like you want a rich human to have multiple income streams, that's typically how people talk about this. I want you to think about your business as a human that has multiple income streams to it. I want your business to become really hard to kill. Now these guys, anybody Know who some of these guys are? Want to yell out a name? Carlos Slim. We got some Latinos in the house, huh? You guys know he runs Mexico? That's the president of Mexico. Shadow President. He's actually just the richest guy in Mexico. Carlos Slim. We've got the richest man in India. To the far left, we've got one of the richest guys in the U.S. charles Koch. And over there on the right is the richest man in the world. Think about this for a second. The richest man in the world. And one of you in here knows who he is. The people who control us, they get rich quietly and they centralize power. But what's fascinating about these guys, he's a great example. Does that little reptilian man look like a fashion icon? Does it look like he comes up with the lines for Dior and Louis Vuitton? No, he doesn't. And yet he owns those. How? He bought them for pennies on the dollar. He used acquisitions in order to diversify. Now, the world's biggest holding company, which owns those two entities, because the truth those guys know is that it's actually far easier to buy profits than it is to grow them. And yet we sell this dream that startups are the way to go and that we should start from zero, even though 90% of them fail. Most entrepreneurs only make $67,000 a year that start a startup. And the first three to four years are unprecedented profitable. Why? Why would I just have one company as a centralized income stream when I could have 10? And. And what if I could use other people's money to do it in a creative way that takes out the middlemen, that takes out banks, that take out traditional systems? That's what we're going to talk about today. This is why we're here. We're here to do kind of what most people will never do. Do you know how many Americans own a business? What percentage? 3%. So we've got 3%. And then of the 3%, you guys are the top 10%. And then of the 3%, YOU guys are the top point 4%.

[Cody]

Hey, guys, if you've ever thought about buying a business, we've built what I think is the best acquisitions in business buying, community and education curriculum in the world. If you've ever thought about wanting to buy or own a business, or if you want to add more businesses to the mix, it's called the contrarian community. And what this is, is the goal is we give you the three things that best business buyers use. Your own advisory team, your own Investment committee and a deal team. We get together each week to review deals live and beat up all the deals that you're currently looking at while you simultaneously learn the best way possible, which is called modeling, by seeing other.

[Cameron]

People put together deals.

[Cody]

This is how private equity buys businesses. This is how investment teams work. And we're stealing the methods from Wall street and giving them to you. If this is interesting to you, go to click the link and you can actually talk to my team direct about if this is a fit or not. We can help guide you. The link is in the description.

[Cameron]

And I tell you this not to tell you anything you don't know or that you're special, but you kind of are. And there's not that many of us. There is a whole world of consumers and there are very few builders. And that's a beautiful thing in some ways, but it's also a huge responsibility. And so I think we have to become not just owners, but empire builders. And that in a world where increasingly the few own everything, I think more of us should own more. And I think it's actually possible for the first time ever. Now, if you guys don't know me, I like to put my money where my mouth is. I've owned a bunch of businesses. We buy businesses. And I'm going to teach you the things that I learned at Goldman Sachs at some of the biggest companies out there and in private equity. So you guys want to learn some Warren Buffett level. You guys know this, the sage. Yeah. Okay, let's do it. So. Oh, this is fun. So if you guys like the slides, everybody always asks afterwards, you can take a screenshot of this and they'll send you the slides after. Afterwards, they'll also send you some of the resources in here. Like there's a deal calculator if you guys want to analyze businesses. Okay, so that's thanks to your guys here. We'll make sure you guys get hooked up. So I've done this exact same process and I want to show you what I've done so that you can question everything, including me. I think that's a good idea. We've used this process to buy a SaaS company, in fact, multiple, to buy online businesses. We've used this process to buy service based businesses. We've used this process to buy laundromats. Anybody in here on a laundromat? Is it just me? Okay, Just me. Fine. And we've used this process to buy one of the biggest trades and service businesses in the country. Maybe you guys saw our Acquisition of Resi Brands. The idea is in just about every single sector, we have now done this. And I think we're in a unique opportunity for you guys to steal my homework. I don't want BlackRock, Vanguard, or for that matter, me to be the people that own everything. I think more of us should touch our local communities. Anybody been in a Starbucks lately? How is that place, huh? They like, you know, the. The little barista's mad at you. You know, she's angry you came in. You can't call her she, because who knows? You know, you don't know the owner of the place. The CEOs never been in the building ever. And you compare that to a local coffee shop. So different. And yet it's happening to our country all around us. I think the interesting part is, I'm sure you feel it. We're in a recession right now, but I think there's a huge opportunity to buy things on sale when the market's tough. And why do I know that? It's because we have this huge wealth transfer, like, kind of hanging over our heads. I've talked about this a lot. The numbers are between somewhere between five and $10 trillion worth of businesses are going to be transferred from baby boomer generation to our generation. Here's the problem. Do you guys know the average percent that an owner has of their net worth in their business? 90%. 90% of a business owner's wealth is in their business. Well, what does that mean to that $5 trillion? Is that sitting in bank accounts? No, that is wrapped up in businesses. And if those businesses don't get transferred, what happens?

[Experian Ad Voice]

You know that one friend who somehow knows everything about money? Yeah. Now imagine they live in your phone. Say hey to Experian, your big financial friend. It's the app that helps you check your FICO score, find ways to save, and basically feel like a financial genius. And guess what? It's totally free. So go on, download the Experian app. Trust me, having a BFF like this is a total game changer.

[Cameron]

Or BlackRock buys them all, and we're stuck in a world of Starbucks and angry baristas. And I just like coffee too much for that. So I don't want that to happen. And what we're seeing happen, though, is massive retirement by baby boomers who own small businesses. They had Covid happen, and they were like, God, I don't want to keep doing this anymore. And we're going to see this more and more. And so I think the opportunity for you guys today is to buy these small businesses. And I'm going to tell you how I think we can do it. But I want to get into the why real quick. I think the world kind of needs us to go small. This is Frisco, basically. It's not actually Frisco, but this image might as well be. It's big, huge corporations, no local businesses, no local signage. And what's fascinating is we're seeing this accelerate across industry. In fact, we did a study where 25% of every single sector in the US economy and 90% of subsectors.

[Cody]

The.

[Cameron]

Top 10 companies own 25% of the industry. Think about that for a second. So the big guys are owning everything, and this is our chance to push back. Now, what's going to happen when the recession gets a little bit more aggressive? Well, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, right? I think Mark Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Look what happened to businesses that closed during COVID 60% of them closed and never reopened ever again. That will be the same thing that happens in the next recessionary period. And so for you all who already own a business, that should sound like a sale. The second that you have people closing down shop and spending on average $100,000 to close a small business is the second that you have an opportunity to buy that bad boy. And I want to stick this in your head because this statistic lives in my mind rent free. Most small business owners can't afford more than 30 days of no cash flow. They don't have enough cash to sustain it. And I think you can be their legacy aspect for this. You can be the person that takes over that small business. So if you want to grow your business, there's lots of ways to do it. I'm sure they've talked to you about it today, But I actually am pretty lazy and not that smart. And so I want to steal other people's homework as much as possible. I think one of the easiest ways to steal other people's homework is to literally buy their business and all of their processes inside of it. So the idea is, let's go through live how we could take one little business. This is one of the first businesses I bought from $67,000 in profit all the way to a million. So you guys can kind of see the process live. And then this is called the Socratic method. So it's a case study and you can apply it to your business. What I'd like you to think about while you're listening to this is, if I didn't have a business, but I was to start or buy one, how could I implement this in my current business today? Where could I buy my profits and revenue as opposed to being build them? That's what I want you to think about. So let's go through this. You guys ready for some Jeff Bezos level? Not this Jeff Bezos. I'm talking this mother. You know what I'm talking about. This is how you know you're a billionaire. You turn in from the former guy to this. All right, let's start with this example. So this is one of my first laundromats that I bought. $67,000 a year profit, 100k price, which a lot of people are like, oh my God, what a good deal. I'm like, well, the catch is you got to work in a laundromat for 67k a year. So it's like not the greatest deal of all time. How did I do the deal? Well, I put somewhere between 0 and 15% down for the business. I use seller financing for the business, and I finance down payment with investors. And I talked to you about this process as opposed to what I really did in this business is I paid the full 100k because I had the cash. But I'm smarter now, so I wouldn't do that again. So we buy a laundromat, we use seller financing. On top of it, we've acquired one income stream. Right, 67K. What do we do next? We buy our next income stream. How? Well, in this case, we added vending machines to it. So we buy a series of vending machines, we push them within a 1 mile radius of the location, and we add another revenue stream to the business. What does that get us? Well, that gets us almost to $117,000 in revenue. How many new clients have we had to get by getting to 117k? 0. We just sell more things to our current customers. Okay, I like that. What's step three? Well, how many of you guys have competitors? Everybody. Your competitors now are actually not somebody you compete against. You buy them. How do you do that? Well, in this case, this was a guy by the name of Bob. Name changed to protect the innocent. But Bob was in the business for a long time. 20 years. Right. He was ready to roll. He hadn't optimized the business, but the business was bigger than mine. He was in Austin. So he was like, all those weirdos from California are coming in. We want out. And I said, okay, Bob, what if we bought Your business, We buy the business, $417,000 in profit. Now we have our third income stream. Next. What do we do? Well, we realized that we were operating at less capacity than we could. We had more space. But I didn't want to go out and buy machines for the laundromats. Machines are kind of expensive, so I didn't want to buy them outright. I was like, wait a second. Could I go into laundromats that are kind of struggling, maybe going to go out of business? Could I do an asset sale so I could use other people's money in order to buy the machines, insert them, and increase the total amount of customers I could serve in my location? Which is exactly what we did. So now we're at income stream number four. Then we do what's called a satellite acquisition. So here I'm like, all right, the average user of a laundromat, I don't know, maybe they're going to spend 10, 15 bucks a month with me. If they're a good client, how could I double, triple, or how could I 50x that? Well, what if I bought, in this case, a van delivery fleet so I can provide wash and fold service and I can deliver more higher end customers? And so we did. This gets us to $717,000 in income, same business. Now I go, God, what are the biggest expenses in my business right now? Like what? On my p. L. You guys like that? You like that soap? People say laundromats aren't sexy. They've never really been in my laundromats. Okay. I look at my costs and I realize that I would like to turn some liabilities into assets. My God, we spend so much money on soap. So I'm like, wait a second. What if we create our own soap brand? Or what if we buy our own soap brand and then we sell it to other people? Great. Income stream number six. And then finally, also, this is a real book, which kills me that somebody would put that on the COVID of their book. I don't know. Hopefully he's not here in the crowd, but that's something else. So then I realized our really biggest cost is actually our lease. It's expensive for us to be in this location. What if I acquired the real estate that I work, that my business works out of right now, and then on top of it, man, that'd be great for my taxes, which we were talking about previously, right? So I could actually decrease my tax bill. I could increase my income. I could even clean up the area a little bit, raise Prices for other people. And now I have my seventh income. Income stream. We have one business. We've acquired no new customers. We've grown the business zero, except through acquisition. This is how the really rich work. They are lazy. They use other people's money and they tell you that you can't. And I think we've proven again and again that you actually can. And let me tell you what I mean by this. At first I was like, well, maybe I just got lucky. Am I the only one that could do this? So we created a community for people that buy small businesses. And I was like, let's see how this goes. Then it turns out our community has bought $266 million in small businesses since we started tracking this about a year and a half ago. These are teachers, These are firefighters. These are some finance people, software engineers. But all this slide is to show you that it's totally feasible for average people. Is it easy? No. Everybody in here that runs a small business. The only thing I know about you for certain, you're a little bit of a masochist, right? You hate yourself a little bit sometimes. You're a sucker for punishment. And for some reason, you're probably totally unemployable also, Right? Just me. Why does dogging myself up here. Okay, so yes, it is hard, but I don't think it's nearly as hard as they make us think. And the reason I know that is because I've done it in all these industries. We've got business after business we've bought a part of or all of. And if I can do this, I'm pretty damn sure you guys can too. So what I will say is it's not as hard as they told us. And I want you to just ruminate on this for a second. I really want you to let this hit. This is what your competition is. This is a real article, by the way. Gen Z is so allergic to work that they're using tarot cards to invest in the stock market. As opposed to do what you guys do. This is what you're competing against. And I think every time you get pissed because you see some idiot on the Internet talking about some nonsense, I just want you to picture this and go, thanks, guys. Thanks. Because when everybody else gets weak and soft, that means that those of us that like a little pain are going to have way more profit. And I remind this to my husband often because he really loses it watching people on the Internet. Now about this time, people go to me, okay, Cody, this all sounds good, but didn't you have millions or tens of millions to invest in businesses? And sometimes that was true. Now that I have some money, I like to use money where I can instead of time. But you don't actually have to have cash like this. Poor, sad, pathetic. What a story, huh, Sam? Bankman fried. You can buy a business with three things. You can bring the money, you could bring the experience, or you can bring the sweat. And so you really got no excuse. There's three ways I like to buy small businesses using the sba, which is the Small Business Association. They provide loans with some government incentives that banks can utilize. Seller financing, where the owner of the business will sell you the business using future profits and then also other people's money, meaning you get investors to help you fund the deal. Now, this is technical. Everybody okay with an Excel spreadsheet. I know it's late in the day. All right, here's what we're looking at. I want you to look at this so you can see it behind me, okay? So let's. Why would anybody sell you a business using seller financing? This is what usually people say to me, like, there's no way. Why would they do that? Are they idiots or are you taking advantage? Let me show you why. Purchase price of a business. A million bucks, right? This is what the seller wants. Here's the story. We catch an owner on a bad day. We don't take advantage of them. We actually help them help themselves. How they want a million bucks for their business. And I say, well, here's the problem, which is usually the situation. Business owners are terrible at taxes. QuickBooks financials overall, especially baby boomer business owners. They've been doing it a lot time. So I say, the problem is your business is only worth $750,000 to the bank. The interest rate that they're going to give me is going to mean I pay somewhere around, let's say, $80,000 a year for the loan, which means that I can pay you 750,000, but I actually pay more than that for the business overall. Or if you finance the business for me, Mr. Business Owner, I can buy the business for 1.15 million. So I can give you a premium for your business. You actually give me a smaller percentage interest rate and look at what the final amount is because I'm paying you interest as an annuity year over year throughout the loan instead of the bank. Do you want to make more money if you sell your business? Give me a yes. Do you want to also get paid an interest rate? Yes, of course. You do? Okay, great. So, Mr. Owner, you might sell your business to me because you're going to pay. Because I'm going to pay more for. For. It makes sense. How about, do you want to pay the IRS less? Yes, of course we do. We're in Texas. That's the only reason we live here. Right? Freedom, Less taxes. How about if you pay a small business owner upfront with an SBA loan, you got to pay all the taxes up front. If you pay them with a seller financing, you can structure this thing six ways from sideways. You can structure the payments out over time, which means that they can become long term capital gains. You could do it as distributions, which means that they'd be at one of the lowest tax rates out there. You could do it as distributions to their llc, which means that they could do write offs against the amount that you pay them. You can't do that if you do a one time big chunk payout. So, Mr. Small Business Owner, do you want to make more money up front and do you want to pay less in taxes? Okay, how about this? You want to sell it faster or do you want to sit in just the pain of your small business for 120 days, which is the average time that a small business loan takes. Or if we do seller financing, I don't know if we can move in a week. That's pretty fast. We've done it before, but that's fast. But certainly within 30 days. Would you like to sell your business for more, pay the IRS less and move faster? Yes, of course you would. And that is why seller financing works. So how do we find deals? Is the next question that I get. I'm going to tell you a quick story. I have an Uncle E.B. who's since passed away. And he's one of the main reasons I even started thinking about talking about this on the Internet because I got so mad. And I think oftentimes our business comes from our biggest pain. Uncle Eb. He was his. His family came from sharecroppers in Arkansas. He grew up with like 12 brothers and sisters. Only eight of them survived. He was a hard mother. And he started this business called EB Homes Plumbing in Phoenix, Arizona. He ran it for years. Finally, later on in life, he gets the phone call with the six letter word. None of us want to hear cancer. And so what does he do? His business does millions of dollars a year in revenue, millions of dollars a year in profit. What do you think he does? Sells it, right? Wrong. He shuts it down. Why? He had no Idea that there existed this option. Like most small business owners, if there are 11 small businesses for sale on a street, just picture like houses, one in 11 will sell in any one year period. He was like, I don't have a lot of time left. I don't want to spend the next year trying to get a deal done. I want to spend it with my family. And so because you guys and I didn't know how to buy small businesses, this business died. And what popped up instead? A big corporation takes all his clients for $0. His family gets nothing for it, and it costs them money to shut it down. This happens all around us. So I think it is our moral imperative to figure out, how do we buy them instead? So if you're going, where do I find these businesses to buy? It's the businesses you work in pay right now that you compete with and that you get paid by. It's literally everything that you make money on, your P and L from everything that you spend money on your P and L from, everything on your credit card statement, everything in your Venmo. Those are the businesses you want to buy, and they're all around you, and you already know them. Now, there's two specific ways that I buy businesses that I'll talk to you about really quick. I call the first the sows method. I want it to be stale, old, weak, and simple. Business is hard, right? Do we need to make it harder by having intellectual property rights across multiple continents? Do we need to do biotechnology and things that we can't explain to our grandmother? Absolutely not. We buy businesses that haven't changed a lot, that have been around more than five years, that have weak competitors and that are simple business models. That's what a sales business is. Here's a quick example. Approachment sale. Revenue hadn't grown in three years. 12 years old, business owner hadn't marketed it. It was like an outsourced chat group. So basically, we layer it over all of our small businesses. So immediately respond to leads, because what's the number one reason why somebody hires one small business over another? You're the first to respond. That is how low the floor is in small business. Everybody's like, I want more leads. I'm like, how fast you respond to the ones you get? Because the fastest to respond is the fastest to close. That is the simplest way to grow your business. So I go, okay, this is a good business. Let's buy it. So I bought the business for 75K, integrated into our businesses. Now an operator runs it. I'm Trying to make it a million dollar a year business. We'll see if we can do it. That is a sows business. The point is you want to buy a boring business. So been around for 17 years. You want to do it in a recession resistant sector. So if the economy goes to hell, I still am going to call a plumber when I need one. You want to raise prices. Did you raise prices in your business when you took it over? Great. And then you want to add tech to it. Brrt. That's the process. A lot of people fancy this up, but this is the straightforward first way to steal the homework from people who have run private equity companies for decades. They use big words because they don't want us to realize private equity ain't that hard. If those guys were good, they'd start businesses. The thing that they're best at is financial arbitrage and we can steal their homework on it. Here is the process. 10 Steps to Buy a business. It starts with what you guys already know today. Oh, wait a second. It's possible to buy a business. Then we go to deal clarity, which is what's the right business for me. Then we go to origination. How do I find a business to buy? Then we go to outreach. How do I talk to a seller so they sell their small business to me? Then we go to evaluation. How do I determine what the business is worth one way or the other? Then we go to offer a negotiation. How do I talk to them so that I get the best deal? Then we go to due diligence. How do I make sure they're not lying to me? How about financing? How do we get money? We close the deal and now congratulations, you own a small business. How do we run the first 90 days? I think a lot of people make this seem more complex than it needs to be. There's five steps for you to be better looking. Younger versions of Warren Buffett. And these are them you want to figure out like Warren does. How do you use other people's money to do deals? Who's the team that you need to get it done? Let me give you a secret. It's three people. Who do you think are on your deal team when you want to buy a small business? Accountant. Who else? Attorney. Your subject matter expert. So one way that a lot of people go wrong in buying businesses is they go, this plumber's been doing this for 20 years. Guy. Guy had no idea about tech. He's not as classy as this guy in front. He says he's shitty at this, he's shitty at that. And then they go and they try to run a plumbing company. What do you think happens? Yeah, they're like, oh, they didn't teach me this at McKinsey. This isn't how search works. And so what we need to make sure we have is a human who's actually done this before. The cool part about it is they're on Reddit, they're all over the Internet. You can pay them 100, 200 bucks, and people will help you in an industry that most people don't talk about. So that's your deal team. Then we got to find operators, right? Somebody to run the thing. Then we narrow down your deal criteria so you're not looking for everything. Everything is hard to find. And then finally, what do you do once you to buy the bad boy? How do you become an owner? You have people that make sure that people are doing things they say they're going to do. That is the process. I thought I'd kind of close out here with a couple little stories. So anybody know who this guy is? This is Bill Perkins. He's become a mentor of mine. He wrote the book called Die with Zero. Now, Bill's a brilliant guy. He's a former hedge fund manager. Current hedge fund manager. He's fascinating because I was walking along his, like, giant mansion in Austin. Austin. And we're walking along the lake together. And you guys ever go home to tell your spouse, like, something you're really excited about, and you're like, guess what? I'm gonna do this, and this is gonna happen, and then we're gonna do this, and what does your spouse do? Get all over it, right? It's like, that idea is awful. Terrible. My husband sometimes calls me Captain. No. So, you know, I feel it. So, anyway, so I'm talking to Bill, and I'm like, this is what we're gonna build, and it's gonna be amazing. And Bill looks at me and he goes, do you think that you've been around small business for so long that small has infected your thinking? Yikes. Ouch. Ouch. And yet, as I sat there with him, I realized he'd given me the biggest gift imaginable. People will tell you all day why you can't, why you won't, why it's not going to work. How many people will look at you and say, I think you're capable of more. I think you got one more rep in you. I think you're lifting too light. People don't do that in life, especially in this Society, they instead go, yes, Queen, you look great. You're like, you don't. We should wear a new dress. It's not okay. He gave me one of the biggest gifts imaginable. And here I see so many of you are here with your partners, friends, wives, husbands. I think that is the job of the people that we choose to do life with. It's not to just be there through thick and thin. It's to make sure that when we stand before God at the end of our days, we can say, I use everything you gave me. I don't have one drop left. I left it all in the field. And I want you to do that for your human that you're here with today. And I want them to do it back to for you. And that's what Bill did for me. And I think that's what it takes in this world today. Because I do think that we should buy when there's blood in the streets and there is about to be. I told you about Argentina, money markets, Brazil and cannabis. What else do those have in common? In every one of those markets, the government changed regulations and they ruined my business. I had a business in Argentina, business folded. I had a business in money markets. Change one regulation made the company unprofitable. I had a business In Brazil, the 51% owner, because you have to have that locally there, took over the small business through new regulation was allowed to steal the entire asset. And in cannabis, they were supposed to unenact Something called 280E. They didn't. And so it was never a profitable entity. My point here is this, that I think a lot of times business owners do not realize something you are fighting, you are fighters. And the way we fight against an asymmetric risk, which means that is something that can crush your business is by making money. A lot of people don't realize that your only job as a CEO is this, that you have one job as a CEO. And this is what I tell all my teams. I am here to protect our ability to persevere. I'm here to make sure we survive. That's it. Everything else doesn't matter. And there is an asymmetric risk around every corner of capitalism today. And that is us not leaning in to a little bit more than just profits, leaning in a little bit more to maybe the political sphere that we don't want to. Because I do think this for sure, that no matter who the president is, one side or the other, nobody's coming to save us. Even if your person gets elected, they're not coming to save us. Even if the other person gets elected, they're not coming to save us. So what does that mean? That means it's up to you. And I, I feel pretty good about it because I've been around this country and I have seen the builders and they do not quite realize who they're with yet. And I think there's a lot of humans just like you starting to wake up a little bit and starting to say, you will not impact my ability to earn because my ability to earn is my ultimate freedom. I watched this thing the other day about voting and how kind of beautiful it is in a way, because you can have a billion dollars or you can have no dollars, but you get the same thing, right? You get one vote in this country, which is kind of cool. And I think as business owners, we realize that we are not on a level playing field, that our little vote to a world that's better than what we grew up in, that hopefully we get to transfer to our kids, to the next generation, depends on the actions that you take today. I want you guys to do something for me. My homework for you guys today is this. I want you guys to go out and buy some businesses, okay? And when you buy the business, I want you to tell me. And then I want you to do something that the guys at Starbucks never are going to do. And that is I want you to help one other human get equity. Just one. I want you to help your CEO that you input. Your coo, that you input. I want you to help one other human get skin in the game. Because guess what? People do who have skin in the game. You don't burn down the house you built, do you? You keep building it. And so as much as we want to lock down, we want to not help our competitors. We know that the best part of business is employees. And the worst part of business is employees. We know that. And yet if we become some of the few who actually help others elevate to equity, our world looks completely different. A nation of owners is impossible to contain because you can't tell unemployable owners what to do. Remember when they called people who liked one candidate or another deplorables. You guys remember that? I kind of think that we should label ourselves unemployables. Unemployables who are unwilling to listen to the status quo, and we should push back with our profits. And I think if we do that, we change this country, we make a ton of money, and we don't have to be told what to do again. You guys with me. In a nation where they do not want you to own anything, where they want you to be on the street corner asking for permission, where they want to take away your hard earned dollars and have little mass Moscows by the Pacific everywhere, I want you guys to be owners.

[Unknown Speaker]

Wonder why so many young people don't trust the system. It's because this is America 2.0 where we brainwash kids for eight hours a day until they're 18, tell them they have to go to college and go 100k in debt or they'll never succeed. Make student loan debt unforgivable, more expensive yearly, and yet their parents tax dollars go to those same schools. Make it illegal to have unpaid internships where you actually learn rather than just theorize. Pressure the top performers to go into two of the most uncreative jobs out there, Wall street and consulting. Or idealize startups that will require sleeping on floors, Rack up massive debt from VC so 1 out of 10 of them end up on the COVID of Fortune. Then get mad at these young people for not working hard enough for quiet quitting when they can't afford houses. They hate their jobs and their loans keep stacking. And if that doesn't keep their heads down, then send them to war in a foreign land. We have to Fix America 2.0. This is why kids don't want to keep playing the game. Let's fix this. This is Main Street Millionaire out now.

[Cody]

Hey crew.

[Cameron]

This is so cool.

[Cody]

The podcast is growing like crazy and it's only actually because of one thing. You. I don't know if you know this, but the only way the big deal pod grows is when you share it with somebody else. We don't do ads, we don't do pay for play. We don't go on other people's podcasts and talk about it. So if you think there was something helpful here, if we made you money, we made you think about your business or life differently. The most beautiful thing you can do for is share it. And the most beautiful thing you can do for someone that you care about is to share it with them. Help them grow alongside you. So please share the pod. That's how we grow. And also tag me on anything you share. I love resharing other builders across Instagram, Twitter and all other platforms. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You're super important to me.