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Business, Bourbon & Cigars
How Smart Business Owners Make More Money by Talking Less About Money
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I've seen it happen repeatedly. Two operators, they meet in an event, they exchange business cards, they have some type of surface level conversation about what they do, and within the first one or two minutes, they've already decided whether this person is useful or not. You know, if the answer is no, they just move on. And if the answer is yes, they immediately start positioning. Either way, the relationship never has a real chance, you know, to become something real. Because both people were running the same algorithm. And that's what can this person do for me right now? That algorithm, it doesn't work. And it's costing operators at every level more than they can measure. Because all the deals and partnerships and introductions that actually change the trajectory of your company, they almost never come from the relationship you went looking for. They come from the one you invested in without a reason to. Today, I'm going to challenge you how you think about every business relationship you have. I'm going to show you why the operators who treat relationships like compounding assets instead of these one time transactions always end up in a fundamentally different position than everyone else. And I'm going to give you a way to evaluate whether you've been running your relationship strategy in a mode that's quietly limiting what's possible for your business. By the end of this conversation, you're going to rethink at least one relationship that you've been neglecting. And you're going to understand exactly why it matters more than you think. Welcome to business. Bourbon and cigars. I'm Scott Joseph. I've spent over three decades building and acquiring companies and learning, mostly the hard way. You know that the most valuable asset in any business isn't your product. It's not your team, it's not your strategy. It's the quality of the relationship sitting underneath all of it. I built. You know me plus ultra because I've watched what happens when the right people end up in the same room with the right intentions. Not networking intentions or sales intentions, real ones. The kind where people invest in each other without keeping score. And the compounding effect of that investment creates opportunities nobody saw coming. You know, I've seen it produce nine figure exits, multi million dollar tax saves. Acquisitions that bypass years of grinding and partnerships that transform companies overnight. None of those outcomes started with someone you know trying to close a deal. Every single one started with a conversation that looked on the surface like it had no obvious payoff. Here's where we're going. I'm going to tell you about two very different relationship stories. You know, one started with A three dollar cup of coffee and ended in a nine figure exit. Another that started with a sponsorship and ended with a client saving $9 million in taxes. Both of them are going to illustrate the same principle, but they're going to come from completely different angles. Then I want to walk you through something that I've been thinking about for a while. The three modes that operators run their relationships in and why most people are stuck in the one really just produces the least will close with a practical diagnostic that you can apply to your own network this week. Now, I have a friend who collected vintage Porsches, already had money, already had success. But he was ready for the second chapter, that second mountain. And he called me one day and asked, you know, if I had time for coffee at that point. You know, I own multiple dealerships and had spent years in automotive retail. And he wanted to pick my brain about buying a Porsche store. We met at Starbucks for just a cup of coffee. That's it. You know, he told me the situation, you know, where he had an opportunity to buy. It was a low volume, at the time, Porsche dealership should have been a high volume store. It's a classic opportunity that most car dealers look for and that's an underperforming store because they can turn it around quick. And he asked me what he needed to know going in and I gave him everything I could in terms of what I really liked about the industry and what he needs to look out for. And the one piece of advice I felt the strongest about the single most important hire that he could make was the right general manager. Get that person right and the rest of the business becomes dramatically easier. You know, he listened and when it was time to act, he hired an exceptional GM who's still overseeing those stores today. He also hired a very competent director of Finance. Within 10 years, that one store went from selling 90 Porsches a year to over 900. He expanded into Lamborghini, BMW, Rolls, Bentley. He created his own brand in the ultra luxury automotive space, built it to 19 stores, exited nine figures. Now here's what I want you to notice about that story. He didn't come to that coffee shop looking for a deal. I didn't go to that coffee shop looking for a return. There was no transaction on the table for either of us. It was two people who knew each other well enough that it could have an honest conversation. And one of them needed something the other had experience with. That's a two person mastermind. And it started with a relationship that had been invested a long time before. There was any obvious reason to invest in it. If you break that Starbucks, you know, conversation down, it had every element of a structured mastermind session. He gave me background, you know, he told me what he wanted to achieve. I started asking clarifying questions though, at that time, you know, I just thought of it as a normal conversation. I look back and see that. And then I started offering opinions and ideas and solutions based on the clarity we were getting together. Neither of us scheduled it thinking this would lead to a nine figure outcome. We scheduled it because that's what you do when someone you respects asks for your time. Because the moment that you start filtering who gets your time based on what they can give you back, you close the door on exactly the kind of conversation that changes trajectories. Now let me give you a completely different version, same principle, because it's important to see how this works at scale, not just a one on one. We have a member of ours with Me Plus Ultra. His name is Claudio Gamdon, runs a wealth management firm. You know, I met Claudio through another friend, Scott Simon. Scott was helping me after I reached out to him to get his opinion on some wealth management. And that's when he referred me to Claudia. The relationship started pretty simple. You know, he went over what he could do for me, and I make pretty quick decisions. We move forward. I loved his creativity and what he was able to do for me in terms of tax, savings and wealth management. Basically taking all these moving parts and making sure I was optimizing all of it cheap pluggies with GFG solutions. But over time, he became, you know, both a sponsor and a founding member of Me Plus Ultra. He wasn't there to just sell. He participated in sessions. You know, he shared his own challenges. He brought his full ecosystem to the table. Claudio's network includes high level executives, investors, deal makers across multiple industries. That ecosystem didn't benefit just Claudio. It benefited everyone around him who was willing to engage without an agenda. I think back at one of our retreats and Claudio was having a side conversation with John Garcia. He's a founder of Salico Capital. And John had come to the retreat, you know, after I had mentioned it during a phone call. And he was genuinely curious. He wasn't pitching anything. And during the event, Claudio and John, they're sitting together during lunch and Claudio mentions that he has a client who had just sold a real estate asset and was staring down a $9 million capital gains tax bill. John's listening for a moment. He asked a few clarifying questions and mentioned a Building that was owned by one of their companies, you know, in the Salico portfolio. Claudio's client ended up purchasing that building through a 1031 exchange. The entire $9 million tax liability disappeared. Claudio comes up to me afterwards, genuinely stunned, and said, you know, wow, we just saved a client $9 million. That did not happen because someone networked effectively. It happened because a chain of relationships, each one built without some specific transactional goal, created proximity between people whose expertise overlapped in a way nobody could have predicted. You know, Scott Simon introduced me to Claudio. I introduced Claudio to our events, and our events had connected Claudio with John. And John's ecosystem contained the exact asset that solved a problem worth $9 million. You cannot engineer that. You can only create the conditions where it becomes possible, and the conditions this. People investing in relationships without demanding a return on every single conversation. I want to put a finer point on this because the math is important. In a traditional networking approach, every relationship is a single line between two people. You meet someone, they help you or they don't. And the value of that connection is limited to what the two of you can do together. It's linear. In a compounding model, every relationship connects to every other relationship. You know, Claudio's connection to John didn't just help Claudio's client. It strengthened John's position in the group. It validated the kind of ecosystem that we were building. It gave me a story I could tell that attracted the next wave of people who wanted to be part of something real. And each of those new people, you know, brought their own ecosystems which created new overlaps. Nobody predicted. That's not addition. That's multiplication, you know, and it only. It only works when the relationships feeding the system were built without a transactional filter. So let me give you the framework that I use, you know, to think about this, because I've watched enough operators navigate relationships to see a very clear pattern in how they approach them. There are basically three modes, and the most people are, you know, that I see are stuck in the first one, and they don't even realize it, you know, and that first mode is extractive. This is the operator who enters every relationship already scanning for what they can get. You know, every introduction gets evaluated through a single lens. You know, is this person useful to me right now? If the answer is yes, they engage. If no, you know, they move on. They attend all these events, you know, usually have a target list. They follow up only with people who have something they want. You know, they're efficient, and they think that efficiency is a strength it's not a strength, it's ceiling. Because extractive operators, they never get access to the best opportunities. The best opportunities come from people who don't need to give you anything, people who share because they trust you, because they've seen how you operate when there's nothing on the table. You know, extractive operators, they never earn that trust because everyone around them, they can feel the calculation running in the background. I've watched people do this at events or conferences my entire career. You know, they show up, scan the room for the biggest name, position themselves, you know, next to that person, and spend the entire event trying to get something. Meanwhile, the person you know, two tables over, the one that they didn't bother talking to, that was the one who could have opened a door they didn't even know existed. You know, the second mode is really just. It's transaction, you know, transactional. This is where most experienced operators live. And it's more sophisticated than the extraction mode, but it's really got the same limitation. Transactional operators, they understand reciprocity. They give and they expect to receive. They make introductions, but they're tracking. You know, they sponsor events, but they're measuring ROI on every dollar. They maintain relationships, but the maintenance is correlated to perceived value. Hey, transactional operators, they build decent networks, they close deals, and they get invited to good rooms. The problem is that their relationships kind of have a shelf life. When the transaction potentially runs out, so does the relationship. And that means they're constantly rebuilding, constantly re earning access, constantly starting over with new people because the old ones stopped being useful. I know this mode really well because I ran it for years. Every handshake had a mental, you know, ROI calculation behind it. I was polite about it. I think most people are. But the calculation was always there. And the result was a network that looked impressive on paper, you know, but didn't really produce anything close to what became possible once I stopped operating that way. Which brings us really to our third mode, which is compounding. This is where the operators I respect the most live, and it looks inefficient from the outside. You know, compounding operators, they invest in people without a timeline for return. They show up to help before being asked. They make introductions because the connection makes sense, not because they'll get credit. They stay engaged with people who can't do anything for them today, you know, because they've learned that the people who couldn't help them today usually are the ones who change everything three years from now. You know, the relationship that changes your business won't look like an opportunity when it starts? Yeah, it's going to look like a conversation that has no obvious payoff have you ever felt stuck trying to solve your toughest business challenges? Maybe you're juggling too many priorities, struggling to scale, or you're trying to grow without clarity. It's frustrating to work hard and to feel like nothing is moving the needle. The Business Bourbon and Cigars workbook gives you access to the same tools, frameworks and processes that Me plus Ultra members use at our retreats to tackle real business challenges. You're going to learn how to use SMACK mastermind style collaboration techniques and structured problem solving methods to identify critical obstacles, create actionable plans, and drive smarter growth. Even if you're not attending the retreat, this workbook lets you experience the same high level thinking and frameworks that top entrepreneurs use to accelerate results. Download your free copy today at me+rainra.com workbook and start applying the exact strategies that help businesses scale smarter, solve complex challenges, and make faster, more informed decisions. I think back my friend with the the Highline stores. He didn't represent an opportunity when he called me for coffee. Claudio didn't represent a $9 million tax save when he showed up at our Business Bourbon and Cigars event. John Garcia didn't represent a deal pipeline when he asked to attend a retreat. In every case, the relationship was invested in before the return materialized. And in every case, the return was, you know, orders of magnitude larger than anything a transactional approach could have produced. So here's the diagnostic. Look at the last 10 business relationships where you invested meaningful time in over, let's just say the past six months. How many of those were with people who could help you right now, you know? And how many were with people where the payoff wasn't obvious? If that ratio is heavily skewed towards immediate utility, you're running transactional. And transactional relationships compound at a rate of zero. Operators who measure every relationship by what it produces this quarter are optimizing for pennies while the dollars are just walking past them unnoticed, basically Pennywise and dollar foolish. The second question It's a little bit harder. Think about the last time you went out of your way to help someone in your network, not because they asked, and especially not because you expected something back, you were sincere in helping, but because you saw an an opportunity to create value and acted on it. If that doesn't come to mind quickly, the compounding engine, it's not running. It's stalled. And so the third question I want you to ask yourself who in your network right now is someone you almost didn't engage with, someone who didn't match your criteria for useful or at your level. Go back to that person, because the history of every significant relationship I've built tells me the same thing. The ones that mattered most didn't look like they would. Your most valuable connection right now is someone you almost didn't talk to because they didn't look like they could help you yet. I want to close with something that ties all this together. When I look back at the relationships that shaped Me Plus Ultra, you know, that that shaped my businesses, that shaped how I think about leadership entirely. Not one of them started with a pitch. Not one of them started with someone trying to sell me something or me trying to sell them something. You know, Sandy Cerami became one of my closest friends and business partners, all after a dinner that was supposed to just be a quick pre podcast meet. Claudio became a founding member after showing up as a sponsor and choosing to actually participate instead of just collecting leads. John Garcia asked to attend a retreat because the energy sounded real. No ask, no angle. Every one of those relationships compounded into something that none of us could have built alone. And the only reason they compounded is that nobody was trying to force a return. The operators who understand this, who operate in the compounding mode, they don't just build better businesses. They build better ecosystems around themselves. You know, ecosystems where the next introduction, the next partnership, the next idea that changes everything can actually reach them because they haven't walled themselves off behind some filter that only lets in people who look like they can help you. Right now, if you're listening to this and you recognize the transactional pattern in how you've been operating, that's not failure. It's awareness. You know, and awareness is the first step toward building something fundamentally different. That shift. It doesn't require overhauling your entire network. It requires changing how you show up in the relationships you already have. Let that sink in. Stop evaluating and start investing. You know, stop filtering and start being the person who creates value without a receipt. If you're ready to stop doing this alone and start surrounding yourself with operators who actually invest in each other, not in theory, but in practice. That's exactly what Me plus Ultra was built for. It's a mastermind community for experienced business leaders and owners who understand that the real returns come from relationships that aren't measured on a spreadsheet. These aren't networking events. They're environments that are designed for the kind of compounding that I've been talking about today, where people show up ready to help, ready to be challenged, and ready to build something that outlasts any single transaction. I want you to visit me+Ultra.com and you can learn more and apply for membership. Spaces are intentionally limited because the quality of the room depends on who's in it. That's why we only bring in people who are referred or nominated. I'm Scott Joseph. This is business. Bourbon and cigars. I'll see you in the next episode. Cheers, everyone.