Cody Sanchez (0:00)

The one word that encapsulates my entire message is ownership. You are going to have a hard time getting rich with only salary. So the smartest people in the world know that it is something else. We know that if you want that, like fuck you, high level of money, that 88% of all people worth 30 million plus or above own a business. And so the data tells us that if we want to be worth a lot of money, the highest likelihood to get there is through ownership. This is the Big Deal podcast and I'm Cody Sanchez. Today I want to talk about why I think procrastination is the worst form of self abuse. How to actually achieve the things you want in 2025 if Small has infected your thinking. What it takes to hit millionaire status. And then 10 and 20 and 30 millionaire status. This podcast today answers the most often asked questions, all about living big lives with big bank accounts and liking it along the way. I think you're gonna like it. First question, playing the role of a 25 year old. I want to get where you are, but I only have 7k in the bank. What's my first step? There's four stages to making money. The first stage is your learning stage where you're just figuring out not only what do I not know, but what do I think I know that I really don't. This is called conscious incompetence as opposed to unconscious competence. So what you want to do when you're young is not really obsess so much on how to make your first million from your earnings going to your job, but how do you make it from Lear? So that's step one. Step two is earning. So after you've, you know, started to get in that learning phase of your career, you want to start maximizing earnings. I really don't think that starts happening until you're like three, four, five of you being in the business world or having a job. Step three is where you start investing. So you take some of your earnings, some of your learnings, and you start putting it into something that can pay you even when you're sleeping. And then step four is mastery. This is where you start getting paid and earning even without you investing any money in it. And that step four is one that most people never get to. Most people, well, really most people don't even learn. But most people only obsess on two things. Earning and then very marginally investing. But you're not going to be most people. So what I want you to do, if you're only 25 years old, is obsess on one thing. How can I get around people that make me smarter, that make me learn more consistently, and then how can I take those learnings and apply them to put more in my pocket, AKA earnings? That's what I would do. The follow up question that you had here was, how do I become you? One thing that's very true about mentors or people that you aspire to be, overall, no such thing as a perfect human. So the real question is, what part of me do you want to become? Or what part of anybody that you see do you want to become? Maybe what you really mean by this is, Cody, I want to have a bank account as big as you. Cody, I want to own as many businesses as you. And if that's the case, then that's a very different outcome. Right. And what you're trying to say is, okay, by the time I'm in my mid-30s, I want to be able to have x millions of dollars in the bank. How do I reverse engineer that? I think the first place that you want to start is you want to go back and steal other people's 10,000 hours. So why would I recreate the wheel when I already have a blueprint and a framework for how to do it? So what would I do if I was you? I would probably go to my LinkedIn or whoever's LinkedIn that you want to look at and see what different jobs that they did, they have, what were the titles, what were the locations, what were the companies that allowed them to grow this sort of bank account. Then I might want to say, okay, inside of those companies, what are the steps I can find that allowed those companies to get to the next level and thus allowed her to get to the next level. So for somebody like me, you could basically look at my career and say, okay, I want to reverse engineer Cody Sanchez, which means I want to figure out the playbook that she used so I could see if it's applicable to today. So you might go, okay, well, up until this point, Cody obsessed on learning, finance and money. That took her like 10 years. But it looks like she left a job about every year and a half, which I did. And during that, I'm assuming she's leaving because she's getting a bigger payout, more money from another job, and more learnings, a different type of learning, plus earning. And then what I'm going to want to do is I'm going to want to see inside of Cody's growth trajectory. When did she first own her own company? Can I find out when she first started investing and how did she grow that first company? And a lot of that's on the Internet too. So you can very easily go and look and say, huh, it looks like she first started owning her own company in I don't remember what year, but let's say 2018. And in that company it looks like she launched a new. And then it looks like she took that newsletter and she made it paid. And then the next step was this. Most people think that they want to learn tactics or tools. I think the best way to learn is case studies. That's why Harvard, for instance, has the biggest library in the world of business case studies. Because once you've seen somebody else's playbook, you can figure out how to re engineer it. That's what I would do. If you want to have, let's say, my bank account. I don't think anybody wants to become somebody else totally. The next question you guys asked, why do you think most people never reach financial freedom in their lives? It's a big question, isn't it? You know, they say that 1 in 10Americans will die broke, that most Americans will never be able to afford $1,000 health care expense more than 50% of Americans. They say that most Americans will filter in and out of their band economically. They won't actually progress up and make more money over time. So one thing I know for sure is you don't want to be the average American, which is tough to say because the average American dies broke and alone. And so if that's the case, then what do we want to do? We want to do the opposite. I think most people don't achieve financial freedom because if you want to be extraordinary, you have to be around extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. So the fastest way to get financial freedom or change your life is to change where you are. I call this the power of place. So let's say right now you're around a group of friends and you're in a city in which you don't know anybody who's making a million doll plus or multiple millions of dollars or building the next big tech company. The easiest thing to do is simply move, is to get where the game is played that you want to play. Because I truly think that success is contagious. And actually the data really shows that. The data shows, and I pulled a little bit of this for you guys. The data shows a couple things that one, if you sit next to a high performer, you have a 15% higher likelihood of high performance yourself. So their performance rubs off on you. If you're next to a performer or an Underperformer, you have 30% lower performance on average. So if you're making 100 grand a year and you sit next to a high performer, maybe you're making 115k. If you're sitting next to an underperformer, they just took $30,000 from your pocket. At least that's how I like to think about it because it makes it really, really material. So your friends and your co workers really matter. What does that mean? I think if you want financial freedom, you got to get at a company where other people are strivers and they are exceptional because talent breeds more tal. I think what's also really interesting is that as of the fourth quarter of 2021, the top 1% of households in the US held 30.9% of the nation's wealth. The top 1%, while the bottom 50% only owned 2.6%. So over the past five decades, the top 1% of American earners have nearly doubled their share of national income, which leads us to believe, and there's a lot of studies that prove it, that your socioeconomic status in the US is actually harder changed now than it was in the last 150 years. And we'll have all of these linked in the show notes on the YouTube video if you want to go and see the studies and see if you can poke any holes in them. So what that tells me is that we have to change the people that we are around. I think that is first and foremost. And then the second thing that we've got to do is we've got to change the ideas that are in our head. And so thankfully, a lot of success. There's actually, there is actually you guys, which is fascinating. There is little to no research that high IQ leads to higher income. Now there is research that shows really low IQ or very like lower mid IQ and below does materially show that you're going to make less money. Lots of research showing that. But there's not a lot of research, research that says high IQ leads to income. In fact, at the highest levels of iq, they actually have a lower income. Why is that? Because they are not able to do what's eq, what's called eq, Right. Emotional intelligence. And a lot of success actually is driven by two things that have nothing to do with you having money or with you being really smart. And the first one is your eq. How do you engage with people? Can you get people to do things that you want? Can you get people to trust you. How do you present yourself as a human? And the second part has to do with grit. One of my favorite studies by Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania, I believe. I believe it was at Penn, but you guys will tell me if it's a different one. She basically showed that the number one indicator for success over was grit. How hard are people willing to work? That is the biggest reason why you will be successful one way or the other. The second reason why you'll be successful one way or the other, the highest indicator, besides just how hardworking you are, is actually from another study called the Marshmallow Study or the Cookie Study. There were two sort of famous studies done. And what they realized is they tracked. It's one of. It's called a longitudinal study. So it's one of the longest done studies over time. And what they basically did is from a young age, they tracked children and saw if one group of childs. One group of children, they were told, hey, if you don't eat that cookie in front of you right now, when I come back, you can have two. And if you eat that cookie now, you get the cookie, but you don't get the second one. So they did this to a bunch of children. And what happened? Well, they found that a bunch of kids actually did eat the cookie and a bunch didn't eat the cookie. So they took them into two control groups. The group of kids that didn't eat the cookie over time, we're more successful than the ones that did eat the cookie. And so what does that show you? It shows you that over time, it's not just grit that you have to have, but it's delayed satisfaction. So if you could optimize for two things to make you richer than almost anything else, it would be, can I work hard, like really hard, consistently over time. Think marathon, not sprint. And then simultaneously, can I delay gratification in order to achieve more over time? And if you can do those two things, you're more likely to succeed. Succeed than somebody who is really rich and somebody who has a really high iq, which is good for us normal people. Another question you guys asked. If you could encapsulate your message into one sentence, what would that sentence be, but also, who exactly would that sentence be for? Cool question. The one word that encapsulates my entire message is ownership. And you guys might have heard me say this, but I want to make sure you understand. So the difference between somebody who has a big bank account and somebody who has a big bank account but freedom is really just one word, ownership. We don't actually want millions of dollars to sit on them, right? We don't want to. We don't want to Scrooge McDucket in this silo filled with all of our coins. That's actually not that interesting to us. Although it'd be kind of fun to do for a second. But anyway, like, that's not why we want money. We don't want money to just hold it in our hands. We want money for things, right? We want money for status. We want money to project strength. We want money for security. We want money to assert our will. So when you think about it, the only way to have real wealth over time is to have ownership. And what do I mean by that? Well, we know that 60% of all millionaires own a small business. We know that if you want that like you high level of money, that 88% of all people worth 30 million plus or above own a business. And so the data tells us that if we want to be worth a lot of money, the highest likelihood to get there is through ownership. That's why I'm kind of obsessed with this idea of teaching people to buy businesses. Doesn't mean you have to leave your job, it doesn't mean you have to buy a business outright. But getting some skin in the game and some ownership is the pre indicator for wealth. In fact, we're doing an entire three day event in February that I've never done before, I don't know if I'll ever do again, where we teach people how to buy businesses. Why? Because I think that is the biggest lever for freedom. And so if you are a person that doesn't feel like you have enough money, you have enough time, you know, you have enough security, you have an ability to grow your business as fast as you want, then you should learn how to do ownership or deal making. And that's why we're teaching this live. And you guys can actually go to codysanchez.com or go to contrarianthinking co and at either one there'll be a pop up on there that gives you the three day live event. We've never done anything like it and I think it's going to be pretty incredible. Your next question is who would your message not resonate with? Really? There's three types of people that are not going to be good owners. And you should not buy a business if you are this type of human. One, if you're not willing to choose hard, you know, I wish I Could tell you a way to make money that was super easy. No work, not going to happen. In fact, I giggled because the way we're titling this podcast is this question mark, can you make money with no work and no money and no time? And I think this episode is going to answer that for you. Then the answer is that no. If you don't choose hard, then hard gets chosen for you. If you do not try to get fit, then what are you likely going to try? Or then what's going to likely try you? Being fat, you know, being broke is hard. Being rich is also hard. It's hard to get there. You know, being married, hard. Being single, also hard. So I think you have to choose what kind of life you want. The. The fallacy is that if you don't want to work hard and you don't choose hard, then you won't ever get it. And I just think that's not true. You know, there are these people these days that are like, there's this hustle porn that's happening in the world. We've got this hustle culture. Yeah, maybe. But I think the truth of the matter is, is that either way, life's hard. Unfortunately, that's just what it is. It's a journey, and it's hard no matter which way you go. The question is, are you trying to set yourself up for a life that, although hard, is worth it? And that's why our mission here is choose your heart. So, one, if you don't want to choose hard things, you. You shouldn't try to get ownership in a business. It is hard up front, although worth it. Two, is that if you are a type of person who wants things really fast. So one of the things that's true is if you go to Robinhood right now, you double click on a stock, you get like a little bunch of confetti that blows up in your face. You know, you get to tell your friends you bought it. You get to watch a thing track up and down, up and down every single day. You don't actually have to do any work besides clicking the buttons. If that's you, if that's what you get off on, you're a speculative trader who, over time will lose money. Go and look up the statistics. Something like 95% of all speculative investors lose money over time. They are the same thing as gamblers. Poker players always tell you about their winnings. They conveniently dismiss their losses. And poker has the best odds of any game that exists. It's like the only casino gambling game that theoretically you can win over time and you actually could make a profit and income off of it. But even that is gambling. And so if it worked all the time, the casinos wouldn't have all the money. And that is the same thing with speculative stock trading, with trying to do get rich quick schemes. And so you shouldn't try to be an owner if you are into get rich quick schemes because those don't actually work over time. And the way you know they don't work is that those people don't actually do them consistently that try to teach you about them. Them. I mean, I buy businesses. I buy businesses like Biz Scout, which you can see behind me, like Pinks, which you can see here. This is, this is how we started our business and what we do every single month, day and year. And why do we keep doing that? Because it actually works. And that's the process that we have. Whereas a lot of people who talk about things on the Internet, it doesn't work. So they end up teaching other people about it. This is a sweet question. Why do you think your message is so popular right now? Instead, I would ask this question. Why do you feel deep down in your gut that you're not doing enough? Why is there a part of you that says, man, I'm capable of more but I'm not doing it right now? Why is there a part of you that's tried side hustle after side hustle after this, after that, and none of it's really worked and you feel a little lost, but you know that you're capable of more? Well, that's the reason our message resonates, because we've been sort of told a bunch of lies about making money and about learning and about work. Work. We've been told over time that you are a good little boy or girl, you climb the ladder in school, you get good grades, you routinely repeat things. You score on some test about amoebas that you're never going to use again. Then you get into a university unless you're at the tippy top universities. The university costs you a ton of money, but doesn't actually ROI for you. Nobody will ever ask you for your GPA ever again in your entire life. The entire thing is just a proxy or symbol for how hard you work. And are you competent at all? There's an indicator that if you get into a better school, you're hardworking and competent and so you do it. But you're basically paying hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime for a certification that says, yeah, I'M kind of smart and I'm hard working. And then you'll have to interview me more than that. You know, I went to Georgetown for my grad school and I went to Arizona State for undergrad. I have been. I can't remember my first three jobs, they asked where I went to school. Never again after that. Maybe my first three jobs, they asked what my GPA was. Never again that people don't care about where you went to school anymore or what you think they're good at. Show me. Don't tell me. And so the message is resonating because we were lied to about how to actually get ahead. And then we invested all our time and money into these things that were supposed to project us into a better future. And we're realizing over time, holy hell, they don't. And you know, there's this graph that we'll put on here. If you're on YouTube, you can look at it that basically shows you over time, university have increased by double digits every single year their cost. So we have this linear graph that looks like this for how much university this have cost, the problem, the ROI on them. So the return that you get for going to a university has gone down. What do I mean by that? Well, you don't actually make the same amount more money by going to university as the increase in the cost of university. So that means the value has gone down. You know how you go to buy like a bag of Liz chips lately or something, then you go to open the bag and the bag feels like big and fluffy. And then you open the thing, you're like, motherfucker, this is like. This is like a third. I paid for three chips. Like, what happened? So that's what's happening with university. We go there with all these ideas of, like, once I get in, I'll have made it. And then when we go to leave, we realize, wait a second, I don't actually make more money because I went to this school that cost me six figures. And you can see that in the price of some of these higher levels colleges now. And it's a scary thing for our future. And why I think the message is pushing back that. Show me what you're capable. I think in the future we're gonna have two types of people. We're gonna have people who are stuck in a legacy industry in which they think that certifications, names of companies that they worked for, and resumes are the way that you get jobs. And then increasingly we're gonna have a growing segment of people. And I Call these decentralized. So these are centralized, permissioned individuals on the left, AKA I went to Harvard, here's my resume from Goldman Sachs. You know, I've, I worked at Uber, Facebook, et cetera. Those are big signals, permissioned individuals. And then over here on the right, we're going to have decentralized, credentialless individuals who are like, I built my startup, but I dropped out of Harvard. Look at this, you know, piece of copywriting that I did right here. Do you like this individually? Here's seven deals that I closed over time. Do you want to see those? And increasingly we're going to be able to like prove, as one would on the blockchain, your work. You're going to have proof of work. And that proof of work will be the thing that drives people forward on a go forward basis. So if you want to get a job, you won't be able to explain your way in an interview and say, this is why you should hire me. You're going to actually have to say, let me show you, let me show you live. Here's my proof of work. And you can tell me if this proof of work is up to your standard. You know, there was a guy the other day that wanted to produce this podcast. This is a real story. And he interviewed really well and he had a good story and we liked him. It was kind of a decent culture fit. And then we were like, show us your work. Show me the best podcast work that you've done. And he showed us. And it was like a bad camera angle, like not good lighting. The sound was kind of awesome. There weren't very many views. The ultimate quantitative indicator of good versus bad in this world. And so we were like, well, I'm confused. You say all these other things, but yet your work product has been subpar. So what happened? And he's like, well, you know, we couldn't do this. We're kind of figuring it out. There were all these limitations and we're like, unfortunately, this isn't a fit. If you can go somewhere and show us that you can have, have executed on this, then you can come or you can be junior and new in a role, but you can't come head something that you haven't actually done before. And this is really hard because a lot of times when we're young were like, well, you need the experience to get the experience. How does that work? And I remember that. But the way that you get the experience is by apprenticing, is by taking junior roles, is by side hustling and is by doing your own proof of work and not asking for permission from others. If he would have shot his own little podcast and said, listen, I don't have any views, but look at this camera angle that I used. And then I had them edit it like this. And I actually used AI in the copy. And I think our thumbnail could be better, but here's how we did it. Amazing. Probably would have hired that guy. This is kind of interesting. Do you think money is seen as a masculine thing? Wealth creation, investing, all masculine. Well, I pulled some stats for you guys. Is money a male thing? Let's look at it. Investment banking is made up of 87.6% men. The finance industry overall is about 65% male. So in a way, money has historically been dominated by men. Now, I don't think there's a conspiracy theory of like men not hiring women. That's not what I'm saying. We're not looking for victim mentality here. But I actually do see it firsthand that men are better at negotiating than women. That men make more than women, often even with a similar skill set that's partial negotiation. And that men, when they are in a deal, let's say arguing for a business to buy, they typically close the deal faster and at better terms than women. Now, these are gross generalizations, but we've put 5,000 people through business buying content. And this is what I have seen these business buyers that we have. Over time, the women need a little bit more co coaching to how to push back. One of the most important things if you guys are ever going to do a deal or buy a business is you've got to actually be tough. Just today I was on the phone with this company that we're doing a deal with. It's driving me up the wall. And I think maybe one of the reasons I've been successful as a woman in business is really just, just this. I'm a little tough. So you like a news article comes out that says, like, Cody's tough on employees and at this company they work a lot. I'd be like, yeah, that is all true. I don't try to hide any of that and pretend it's this touchy feely place. It's not. This company is here for you to get better. And people who are here leave and they say, I'm so glad I came, I got better. Or they stay forever because they want to keep getting better. But people don't come here because they want to chill. This is not a chill place. And so, so this person that we are doing a deal with, like, is delaying, is delaying, is delaying. And I finally. Which happens often in deals, I finally had to go to my guy who's negotiating this deal for us and kind of read him the riot act and said like, give them a timeline. This creates timeliness. So a constraint. You have 24 hours to sign this deal or we're pulling it. Second, give them a reason why you're unhappy about what happened. We've done X, Y and Z for you. You can't sign this one document as a show of good faith. If you can't sign this one document as a good show of faith for everything we've done for you, we gotta walk. You understand that, right? We've met you more than halfway and you're still staying at the starting line. Opt out. Number three. Be direct. No, like. Well, do you see? I kind of think how I feel is maybe if I. No, it's. This is what we said the deal terms were. This is when the date needs to be signed by you either do this or we're out. Wish you well, but not with us. And that is really hard for people to do. I was fighting with the guys on my team. I'm like, go harder or I'll call them. And if you want to make money, you got to be tough. And so I think a lot of times as women we're taught to be soft and kind as that's a more feminine trait, like flowing, you know, more creative. And truthfully, in business, that's just not how it works. And there are going to be many times where you have to have incredibly difficult conversations. And I think as women we got to get way better that and dudes are already pretty good at that. Okay, next question. How do you manipulate Cody so me into giving me a shot? How do you ask a rich person to take a chance on you? Real secret hack. If you want to get a rich person or a famous person to take you under their wing, teach you everything that they know and steal all their homework, go for the rich person, not the famous person. Famous people have too much time, too much attention. They're the super hot girl at the bar surrounded by a bunch of dudes. Forget them. Don't try to go to Cody. Go to the guy on your street who has the biggest house, knock on his door, introduce yourself and say, I'm young and trying to figure out my career. You have an incredible looking house. I would love to like take you to coffee and talk to you about how you became so successful. You're gonna have way more success with that guy than the famous person. Also, the thing about famous people is typically they're at a stage of their career where they are still in it. They're still trying to build themselves. Once you get to somebody who's a little bit older, who's been in the game a long time, they're starting to think about legacy, not income. You want to find your mentors when they're focused on legacy. So if you come to 65 year old Cody or maybe 70 year old Cody, I'll probably be slowing down. I'm not going to be running so much. I'm not going to have so many meetings. I'm probably not doing more deals. I'm like managing the deals that I got. You could come to me at that stage and be like, can you teach me about xyz? And I might be less relevant and less people are asking me. So that feels really good to me. So your target market for a rich mentor to teach you everything is older, quiet, non famous, and probably doing something kind of boring. You're looking for the guy who owns the sprinkler company. You're looking for the guy who owns, you know, the cattle company. They're not on the Internet, they're not on Twitter, but they want to leave a legacy and that's what you would do. Now here's how to really not get a response from somebody famous that you really want to get to online. You want to know how to not get a response? It's this. Hey, Cody, I would love to do anything you need, you know. Please tell me how I can help now. Why? Because what are you actually doing? You're giving me homework? I don't know you. I don't know what you're good at. I don't know if I should trust you and you're asking me what you can do for me and I got to go figure it out. Out already a bad idea. Instead what you'd want to do is you'd want to reach out and say, hey, I noticed on your website that you had these three errors. I like highlighted them, cleaned them up. I shot them to your team. The website looks great, by the way. The rest of it looks great. Just sending you these three things. Small little interaction. Oh, that's, that's nice. The guy didn't even ask me for anything, but he cleaned up three things on the website. Perfect. Then I might, when I respond and say thank you, I might, might then ask something and say, hey, I also noticed X, you're going to do another thing for them. I noticed this news article that I thought would be relevant for you. This graph would probably be great for an Instagram reel for you, man. I found this boring business. Is this something that you guys like to buy? Just one thing and. And then when you do that, you might say, also, is there a book that you like for somebody who's young or hungry or hasn't figured out money yet? Is there like one book that you think I should read? Then you're going to do the rarest of things. You're going to read the book, you're going to read the article, or whatever the person tells you to do. And after you do, you're going to reach out again. Super light touch. Hey, I read that book. It was amazing. Here are my three favorite parts. I had one question about this. Now what are you doing? This is like how you slowly start to date a woman, right? You don't come in guns blazing, asking her to marry you or sleep with you, you dirty dogs. What do you do? You go like, slow and steady. Okay, so, you know, hey, how are you? It's nice to meet you. Tell me about you. That's what you're doing here. You're soft selling your way to them, caring about you. And after you do that, a period of time, I usually like to have the 10x rule, which means that I give 10 times before I ask for anything real in return. 10 to 1 ratio. So after you've given 10 times, you might say, hey, you know, I've noticed that copywriting looks like something you guys need more of. Would you be open to me sending you a few projects? I could send it to somebody on your team and seeing if I could be a good copywriting fit for you. And I might say, yes. Or if you want to do even better, you go. Here is a coffee copywriting project for you that I did explicitly for you. Let me know if you think this is good. I'm happy to do more for you. That's what I would do. This is one. When you're interviewing people, what are the red flags and what are the best things I can do to get your attention? Three red flags when you're interviewing. Do not do this or you will not get hired. 1. Say that something was everybody else's fault and not yours. This is called victim mentality. Even if your last boss was a sadist who you hated, who was a complete idiot, here's what I want you to do instead. Say, you know what? I left last company because I wanted to keep growing, and I had reached the limit on the ideas that I could generate there and get them heard up the ladder. So what I'm looking for in my next space is somewhere I can learn ton that I can give some input and that I can get feedback from. So what are you saying under the table there? Well, if you're listening, it's like, oh, she wasn't getting listened to. That annoyed her. She wasn't get feedback. Getting feedback to be better, and she wasn't continuing to learn. So I am, I am, again, I'm asserting the reasons why you left, but you're not saying. I really disagreed with my boss. I didn't like how the CEO ran the business. You know, he was a dick. This happened. No, no, no. Not going to do that. That's one. Don't play victim. Instead said, be positive about your last place, even if it was a hellhole. Second, red flag is not knowing anything about my company that you're interviewing for. Please do some homework. Your questions, even if you don't want to ask them, should be something like, hey, I noticed that you guys just bought a couple of window cleaning companies, specifically pinks. Why did you buy that business? What are you showing me that there? One, you're paying attention to what we're doing. Two, you're trying to find out how we work and what type of businesses to look for for us. Great question. The third thing that you should never do in an interview is come without something to give. So even when you're in an interview and you're not getting paid, you might not get the job. I love when people bring me an idea. And so you should come into the interview and say, hey, I don't know if this is useful, but I was starting to think about the business and what I might add or do differently. And I wanted to bring you the these two or three ideas. This was famously popularized by James Aler, who used to do these little diner takeout notes. And every single time that he got a chance, if he got to engage with the CEO of Google, he. He might even go to the CEO of Google and say, Hey, I wrote 10 ideas down that I thought would be cool for Google. I don't know, use these or don't, but I have some for you. And so I love that. It actually doesn't take much time and it shows something really positive. One, you're a giveaway. Two, you have an abundance mindset. You're like, I got so many ideas, I'm just gonna give them to you for free. And then three, it also shows that you care about this. You're like, no matter what, even if I don't get this job, I want you guys to do better. And so you're showing that live. I love that. How do you get ownership in the company you work for? If you perform, how do you get a piece of the pie? I learned firsthand from the CEO that I used to work for, Jim Bowen at First. Trust that. But almost any company will give employees a percentage of the business if they're valuable enough. If you're not getting a percentage of the business right now, you're not valuable enough. What does that mean? It means that the company can continue to run and grow without you. It means that you are replaceable in the business. And it means you don't actually understand your value or how much money you make the company. Because if you understood that, you could negotiate for a piece of the company or a piece of other companies in the ecosystem. This should be really freeing because what you're basically saying is, if I do these three things, I can position myself in order to get equity in this business. And even the biggest businesses in the world, Goldman Sachs Vanguard, they offer profit sharing or they offer equity deals or they offer warrants. Small businesses offer equity. They offer warrants, they offer an ability to invest in the company. So if you hear a little voice in the back of your mind saying, I could never get equity at my company ever, there's two things that aren't true. One, you're not valuable enough yet you can become valuable enough. And then two, you might be at the wrong company. At which point you should change. Every single employee at my companies will have an ability to earn in or invest into one of our companies, but they don't get it for an entire year. So your entire first year here, we're not even talking about it. Would you marry somebody before a first year of knowing them? I hope not. Not. So I don't marry any of my employees either. Two, the every employee at the company, if they are valuable enough, has a potential for it, but they've got to make sure that they actually are valuable and they are going to travel through time with me. One of the cool things too, if you have a company that I like to do, is really celebrate when people get equity, like make a big deal about it, because it is a big deal that is showing that I am tied for you the entire time we run this company. So Jim at First Trust used to do this entire presentation where it would be like all about how great this person is, all about the stuff that they've done for the business, all about the value that they've provided for the business. And then a big congratulation. And it was an also expectation that not everybody gets that why? Because the CEO has the ultimate skin in the game. They're the ones putting in the cash. They're the ones on the line and can lose everything if the business goes sideways. So equity is never an expectation. Equity is earned. How about this one? Can I get rich if I just have a salary? Yes, you can get rich if you just have a salary. But there's a caveat. You are going to have a hard time getting rich with only salary. So the smartest people in the world know that it is something else. Sundar Pichai at Google did not become worth hundreds of millions of dollars from his Google salary. What did he become worth hundreds of millions of dollars from his stock options and his distributions. So this is a really important caveat. Salary is taxed at the highest level. The government loves when you're salaried and you make a ton of money. Money. If you get stock options and distributions, those are taxed at a lower level. It's called long term capital gains. And so over time, the smartest, richest people move their salary so they take less money every single year, guaranteed, and they take more money in the form of bonuses. So if you are smart and you love your job and you want to stay at your job, start trying to figure out how to move straight salary to bonus equity or distribution. That's the key. Somebody asked me, okay, what can I do if I want to buy a business, but I have no money? There's four things you can do. One, you can get other people's money, right? So this is a cash transaction, but not with your own. That could be loans, that could be sba, that could be raising third party capital. So that's one leg of the table. Two is expertise. You could actually know a lot about podcast producing. And so if you came onto a podcast, you asked for a little cut of the upside, you ask for a little cut of profits or revenue, you ask for equity in the business, you're a pro, you're going to materially affect the outcome for the podcast. So they're going to give you some equity in the business. So that's expertise. The third is sweat equity, which is just like, I am going to beat my head against the wall, I'm going to do all the work, I'm going to take off all the tasks. You don't want to. And for that, I want to be compensated for my time and effort. That is for lower level, if you don't have any cash and you don't have any expertise. And the fourth that not enough people talk about is structuring. This is knowledge. So structuring means, do I know how to deal, make enough that I can structure a transaction that allows me to get part of a business without anything else. And that is really how the smartest deal makers do it. We also are going to teach that in the three day. If you guys come. I think the difference between a good deal and a bad deal is two things. You can't do a good deal with a bad guy, so it's got to be a good guy that you're doing to deal with. And second, it's really hard to control the price if you don't control the terms, which means structuring is ultimately how you make money. And we're going to dive more into that. It's super, super important. This question, what do you do if you're lost and you don't know how to get to the next level of the game? The number one reason why people fail is they don't move fast enough. And I don't mean that you have to sprint continuously. I mean, you have to start taking action. For instance, right now, I really don't have a lot of time on my calendar. And for Basically the last three months of 2024, I was SL on going to the gym. I just had every excuse in the book for why I couldn't get in there for an hour. And that was bothering me. So my husband Chris said something to me that stuck. Finally he said, what if you were the type of person who brushed their teeth every day? And I was like, I do brush my teeth every day. That sounds disgusting. Why would I not do that? He goes, exactly. Brushing your teeth is part of who you are. You don't even think about it. It's a habit. It's ingrained with you. You brush your teeth every day. I'm like, yes, I do. He's like, what if you did that exact same thing with working out? What if you were just the type of person that worked out every single day and you couldn't imagine a day in which you didn't work out? And then I said, well, I have, like, you know, two minutes to brush my teeth, but two minutes of working out is not gonna be sufficient. And he said, what happens if you just get there? Like, just get there every single day. And so I started to, I speed to acted every single day. First thing in the morning, I get up, I go to the gym. Even if I only have 20 minutes at the gym, I go, even with if I only wanna do five minutes at the gym, I go, now what ends up happening once you get there? Usually you have a little bit more time to do more. But there have been multiple days where I'm like, fuck it, I got 10 minutes. Minutes. But I'm the type of person that brushes my teeth every day and that speed to action or movement is so important. So I think if you're not where you want to be, it's probably because you're not moving fast enough in the direction of the thing that you want. And the cool thing about that is speed is it's equal. All of us can move at the same speed. All of us have inherently the same speed inside of us. It's just, do we choose to use it or not? Where do you find businesses to buy? There's three places to find businesses to buy. There's on market deals. That's where you go to a website like Biz Scout and you go and search businesses that are available for sales right now. Just like Zillow or mls. You go on there and you comb through all businesses available to buy. Then there's off market deals, which means that you either scrape the website, we also have that at Biscout, but you scrape websites, you go and Google search these businesses individually and you find businesses that aren't listed and you start cold calling them. Right. Just like you would somebody you're trying to sell sell something. The third way that you find businesses to buy is what I call your center of influence strategy. So basically you're looking like, who do I know? Who am I around who has a business that's small enough that I might want to own? Can I talk to them? And this is really just like a door knocking strategy. Like every time you go to your ice cream shop, every time you go to your corner store, every time you go to your local coffee shop, you're talking to the owner and seeing what's up and seeing if they'd ever consider buying. Those are the three ways ways to buy a business, at least in my mind. How do you have a product that people keep buying again and again? This is also how Chamath Palihapatiya became a billionaire. He became a billionaire off of one thing. It was called the seven friends rule. So Chamath Palihapatiya was at Facebook and he was trying to Figure out this problem, which is when we get people at Facebook in the early days, how do we get them to stay forever? How do we have zero churn or high retention? And they were going through this problem and he found this one thing that changed everything thing. He was like, wait a second. If I get somebody to come to Facebook and they find seven of their friends or they bring seven other friends with them, but they connect with seven people in one week, they never leave. So all I have to do is focus on little mini spheres and making sure if I find one person, I bring their friends along with them. This single thing made Chamath a billionaire. This is true in almost every business. Almost every business has what I call the one data point. There's one data point that if you could figure this out, everything else would be easier. Truth of the matter, when you're building a business, it's almost always referrals. It's called product led growth as opposed to marketing led growth. Typical businesses, they grow because they market. I have a lot of businesses like this, by the way, guys. And it's really hard to change from one to the other. I have a lot of businesses where we do a lot of marketing and sales for them. Because we don't have our retention loop nailed. We haven't found our one data point yet. And so we haven't built into the product the ability to refer people a reason why to refer people a reason why people never want to leave. But the problem with that is essentially if you're a marketing or sales led company, what are you? You're a leaky bucket. You're just like, you're like constantly leaking out users. Instead, you kind of want to act like your first customer might be the only customer you ever get. How do you get somebody great to partner with you in business or in life? I think we're constantly being interviewed by potential partners. We're being interviewed by friends who know somebody great but they're not sure they should introduce us. We're being interviewed by colleagues who are going to go to a new company and dec to three or four people that they're gonna take with them. And whether you're a badass or not will determine if they grab you or not. We're getting interviewed by potential people we want to do deals with as they find a great deal, but aren't sure that you're the one because you're kind of a taker or you're not doing enough. I think every interaction we have is a little interview for a future opportunity. We don't even realize is coming. And so the way I try to show up in the world is really, honestly and really with a lot of hard work showing at all times. The number one reason why startups fail isn't that they don' find product market fit or they run out of cash. It's that the founders give up. And so if you're thinking about how to find somebody who's great, show them that you're not a person that gives up. Show a consistency of keeping after something and winning. And that's how you get a great partner, whether that be a partner in love or a partner in business. All right, let's do one more question here. Actually, let's do two. What was the moment you were most afraid and how did you get over it? It my biggest fear in life is that I won't achieve what I want to achieve in life. That I'm not as capable as I think that I am, that I might fail publicly and everybody gets to go, I told you so. That I'm not as smart as I think that I am. It's all about, like, self worth and I'm. Am I able to achieve these things. It's not death, it's not pain, it's not struggle, it's not not finding love. It's like, am I good enough at whatever game I'm trying to play? That's when I get most scared. And so, you know, the scariest thing for me sometimes is like, man, what if all my businesses fail? Here I am on the Internet talking all the time about all this stuff I know in business. What if one of them fails? What if they fail publicly? What if I was a super wrong and then I get it rubbed in my face? That really scares me for some reason. It's like a core visceral fear. When I wake up in the middle of the night and I have those dreams that we all have that are our biggest numbers, nightmares. That's it. It's like, oh man, what if this doesn't work? And because I know that's my fear, I've really only been able to get over it two ways. And that is every time I have that big fear in front of me, I ask myself one what would I do to remedy this? So I immediately write out actions because actions make me feel safe. They're like a little blanket against the cold. So I go, well, if this wasn't working, here's what I'd do. Here's who I talk to, here's how I'd hire Here's whatever. So I write down a list of like 10 or 15. And then the second thing that I do is I ask myself, how reasonable is that? And then I write down like, well, it's probably not reasonable because we have all these businesses and this would have to happen, and then this would have to happen. And so I start making sure that my body and mind knows, hey, I'm listening to you. I'm aware there's risks in what we do, but I have a plan if it goes sideways. And that's not really that reasonable of a thing to say. And so when you have action plus, you have reality check, I think you end up stressing a lot less. Let's end with this. Why did I become a content creator or come online? And why is that something that might be worth it for you? I think that there's four types of leverage. The original form of leverage was labor. This is workers slaves back in the day. The second form of leverage was capital. So this is when the banking institutions were created. That's when all the Rothschilds and the big titans of industry were created. Three is code. That's how Elon and Jeff Bezos and everybody standing behind Trump in the election day, they made most of their money through labor. The least capital, the second least and code foremost. And then I think the fourth type of leverage today is attention. And if you see those people today, why would Elon buy Twitter or X now? One, I think he truly believes that he was saving free speech, but also because he is now the news, he is now our attention, he is our audience. Think about it. The other guy standing up there was who? Zuckerberg, who owns Instagram and Facebook, our time, our attention. Who else was standing up there? Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. Why? Because they own our attention. When we search for things online and they get to direct us to the answers to our question, who, who else was a part of the inauguration? Sam Altman, who is the 21st century version of Google with OpenAI, which now we're going into, to ask things to who else owns our attention? Well, that would be Jeff Bezos, because when we go to search for things that we need and take action on buying them, where do we do that? Oh, well, that's Amazon. And so all of them have labor capital, code and attention. And today more than ever, I think attention is critical. And so one of the reasons I got online is because our businesses need the Lifeblood of the 21st century Highest form of leverage, which is attention. That's why I think it's very silly when people say, well, if you were really good at buying businesses, you wouldn't be on the Internet. Well, if, I don't know, Oprah was really good at psychology, she wouldn't have made the O network. That's silly. Well, if. If Elon was really good at building rockets, he wouldn't have spent time on X. What? That's dumb. Why do we do these, these things? Because this is the highest form of leverage that there is. And because. And you should pay a lot of attention to this. Our most precious thing that you and I have, like deeper than anything else, is our time. Unless Brian Johnson figures out how to not have us die, and he might, we don't get it back. And so because of that, we got to be really careful around who we let into our earbuds, who we let into our brains, because they infect us with their beliefs and their contagion. That's why I think it's so critical that you listen to people who help you believe you can do things as opposed to people who tell you why you can't and put you down. Get away from those people. They are cancerous and they're everywhere. And they sound smart because pessimists sound smart and optimists make money. And so part of the reason I am on the Internet too, is to get to people like you, for us to have a conversation and me to say, don't listen to these fox. You're capable of more than you think. If you work harder than you feel you want to for longer than you think you need to, you can probably have a totally different life this year than you did last year. And if any of that is in interesting, you should join us at the three day event at contrarianthinking.co. i want to create more owners in this country and I think it starts with you. All right, until next time.