Loading summary
Transcript160 lines
- [00:00]
Neil Twa
Needed that breaking point to get me out of that reality and into a new one. And the new reality was money is a tool. Money is just an object of use. Finances are the thing that allow you, obviously, to power your life, build a business, make profit, employ others, help other people and do things. I think so many people, when they hear the word profits, they immediately jump to financial and institutional and capitalization and this kind of stuff. What they should jump to is the realization that profits are relationships. Profits are life, Our faith, their family, their intrinsic things that you can touch.
- [00:35]
Podcast Host
Technology is a thing that compresses time. It's a thing that makes life simpler. Technology is living in a home instead of a cave. Okay? Like, technology is any type of thing that makes life better. You can have a technology that makes you slightly more efficient without being a tech company. Welcome back to Problems to Profit. I have an exciting guest today. He's exciting enough that we've been sitting here chatting for the last 20 minutes before launching the show. And I think my girls might even get some really cool, like, ad copy that they're gonna be able to leverage from the conversation. Because my mind was sitting here blown to the point that I literally. I'm gonna pull my camera off here, have my chief technology, that handsome SOB right there sitting in just to listen to him. And just so you know, Neil, this is the first time that's happened, so kind of cool little piece.
- [01:24]
Neil Twa
Trying to let my head get too big.
- [01:25]
Podcast Host
Yeah. Hey, you know what? I have a giant head, tiny shoulders. It works for me. I mean, the way center of gravity goes with it, you know, it works.
- [01:33]
Neil Twa
Big brain.
- [01:34]
Podcast Host
I'm pro, big head. But you. Problems to profit, Neil, we like to bring on amazing people that are doing amazing things. Our belief in life and in business and everything else is our problems are our gifts and our guides. Everybody hears the story at the ending. Like, you know, I heard a comment today, people are jealous of what you have until they find out what it took to get you there.
- [01:59]
Neil Twa
And that's.
- [01:59]
Podcast Host
And I liked that thought. And so I don't want just the story from the ending, even though I know we'll get there and there'll be some wow stuff to it. I'd like to hear a little bit the snippet of the end. And then let's go from beginning to the end.
- [02:14]
Neil Twa
Well, I mean, in simple terms, let's keep it real because I'm a public school college dropout. So take this for what it's worth, right? I've also failed one marriage, which was terrible. And I've been bankrupt and so I've also made millions. So we'll scope this into a life learning lesson. Conversation about the power of tenacity and perseverance, but also just pig headed stubbornness, arrogance and pride, which is it says cometh before the fall. And so I've had pretty good falls because I've allowed my pride to overtake my. And my ego and other things get too much out of check. So with, with that, you know, I got into technology when I was in this, you know, 16, 17 because my friend had a computer. He was dialing into CompuServe and AOL and we were on boards and we were too poor to have a computer. Money in our house was a four letter word. You don't talk about it because you would disrespect hard working dad. And he was a good guy. 83, still kicking it up here. Two tour Vietnam vet. He used to kick my butt all the time, sucking up buttercup, his language of love. But he softened a lot because he had four granddaughters. So with four granddaughters he turned into a soft old guy now, which I love to. I love it a lot. He's not the guy that used to kick my butt. I'm like, who are you, man? Like, this is not. You treat my daughter so differently than you treated me growing up. But, you know, he was a hard working guy, you know, taught me about the tenacity of getting in and getting your hands dirty and being a hard worker and spent, you know, almost 30 years at the same job in a mechanical job in a plant out in Oregon and taught me about that. But he didn't teach me about money and finance. I had to learn that the hard way. And as I went through that process and sort of discovered my way through it, I met my rich dad, which is actually my uncle, who turned out to be more of an entrepreneur from a family of entrepreneurs who built a boat company out of California and really taught me how to think differently. In fact, the conversations we had prior to his death in 2005 was something that I still replay in my head as I learn and have gathered information and got more experience. And I'm like, dang, that's what he meant. Like, it just kind of kicks in later on. And I never got it because when he told it to me, I wasn't in the right frame of mind. I was running the corporate ladder. I'd gotten into a startup company called Sprint PCs when the first mobile phones launched. I was on the first team to launch the first mobile phone. Still have that phone number 20 something years later. Same phone number I got when we launched those phones. And that eventually worked my way out of that startup. I was a 5,000th employee badge. We went to 80,000 employees in five years. And I was leading the internal knowledge management team that was implementing latent semantic search engines within an enterprise. And we were the first to ever do that. And that technology, oh, it was fascinating, right? And so while the team that was trying to develop all the systems and information, we were the knowledge base and information that translated it. And I discovered my best position was like, in the middle. I could speak the business, I understood the business, but I also understood the technology. And I sort of found my place being in the middle. So whenever we were there, I got called in to be the guy that solved the problems because the teams weren't connecting, we weren't getting, getting it done. And my job was to parachute in there and fix everything. And I did that really well, as it turns out. So IBM picked me up and said, hey, why don't you come do this for all of our clients? So I got to fly around the world with IBM and hang out in some boardrooms, hang out on Wall street, go into Seattle and hang out into the top end of Verizon. I got to be in oil and gas and industry and high tech and mobile and the power grid and all kinds of cool stuff, which was a lot of fun, but it's never where I wanted to be. I dropped out of college to get into the Internet and hit that startup, and corporate was just where I went to get the knowledge and the money until everything else caught up. Because when I got on the Internet, nobody knew what the hell they were doing. Like, there's nothing in academia. They were putting computers on for the first time and the corporations were just paying people stupid money to figure it out. So I just rode that wave. I never wanted to be there. In fact, I wanted to be a fire pilot. I was really? Yeah, I went and I was in High School, 12th grade. They're like, what do you want to.
- [06:00]
Podcast Host
Be when you grow up?
- [06:01]
Neil Twa
I'm like, I don't know what the hell I want to be. I want to fly planes. They're like, you can't fly planes. No one flies planes. And I'm like, well, I'll just go into the Air Force. So I go to the Air Force, and they're like, yeah, cool, we'll give you a shot. And they set me in the F16E cockpit, and they can't close the canopy because I'm 6 foot 5 and all my heights from my waist up and when they put the helmet on, they couldn't close the cockpit and they're like, you're out. Like what the hell? So no military for me.
- [06:23]
Podcast Host
Qualified by God.
- [06:25]
Neil Twa
Well, it actually turned out just okay because what happened is by the time that if I had been able to go through there and gone through the full training and everything, literally within 30 days after graduating from the flight school, I would have gone straight into Desert Storm, I would have gone straight into war. So that would have been a whole different timeline in my life. Right. And I'm actually kind of glad that didn't happen because I knew a few friends that went to that war and they didn't turn out so well. So with that, you know, my, my lot in life was to go figure it out. And I just figured it out. I ended up at IBM hanging out with double docs and Harvard grads and guys who couldn't even hold a conversation at lunch because they were so smart, they were intellectually stupid. And so at that point, you know, I just found my way through it until I, you know, got to the point where I wanted to really do my own business. I had a little side hustle going at IBM. I had about 20,000 people on a game server platform I developed out of Texas where I had written codecs for Audio Trans so they could, you know, do multiplayer online gaming. And my system was, you know, allowing them to talk while they did multiplayer online gaming before EA and other companies implemented it as a normal part of what we do today in games, which I don't do anymore. And so I got really good at gaming every night and playing up to like 2 or 3 in the morning and I was running the leaderboards and every time I do that I would just tell them, hey, go check out my game service. So while playing that I was organically growing and that was kind of my exit strategy. Turns out I spent too much time gaming and not enough time on my wife. And so when she was out flying to San Francisco to meet 19 year old boys, I didn't realize that's what she was doing. So that kind of wrecked the marriage, right?
- [07:59]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [07:59]
Neil Twa
And that was a tough learning lesson.
- [08:01]
Podcast Host
About do you think it was the games or the 19 year old boys?
- [08:03]
Neil Twa
Yeah, all of that. I don't really, I don't really get into 19 year old boys myself. But you know, the gaming was cool.
- [08:10]
Podcast Host
Wow. Yeah, you know, I, I, I was at the almost divorce point.
- [08:14]
Neil Twa
Oh, yeah.
- [08:15]
Podcast Host
And we were able to save it.
- [08:17]
Neil Twa
That's cool.
- [08:19]
Podcast Host
I'll tell you what, that was one of the hardest points of my life. And so I can't imagine had it gone further south. I mean, so here you are, you have this good. This entrepreneurial bug, right. You've built a platform that 20,000 people are using.
- [08:35]
Neil Twa
Yes.
- [08:36]
Podcast Host
And the divorce throws it off, completely destroys it.
- [08:39]
Neil Twa
You know what happened? It really was. It was going to be okay because we kind of split stuff up and we were on our way out and, you know, went through the first six months and the legal stuff. Turns out we get in front of a judge, we're about to do the whole thing, and he pulls up a piece of paper and he says, who is. Gosh, what the hell did she call herself? Peyton something. Or else. And I'm. Or yeah, something like that. I forget the name and I'm like, looking around, I'm like, who's he talking about? And my current. My ex wife raises her hand and he said, you changed your name? And she goes, yes. He goes, you have a different Social Security number. And he's like, yeah. He goes. He looks at me and goes, did you know this? Like, I don't have any freaking clue. So he had to throw the divorce out, and I had to re divorce a new person, which I learned in the middle of the court that she had changed her name, Social Security number, had credit cards. That's what she. And I didn't see she was using while she was playing the Sims online games to go meet other men around the country. When I was flying with IBM out, she'd be flying out different directions. I didn't even know it. So what happened was to lead to that. Part of the divorce is I came home from a flight one day, found my car in the parking lot at Kansas City International. Not the one that I parked, but the other one. And I'm like, what the hell is my car doing here? And that's when things sort of unraveled, Right. I couldn't see the force through the trees. I was a terrible husband. I was not paying attention. Oh, she had her 50%, but I definitely had my 50% of the problem. And that led to a very difficult situation where I started over. I ended up taking all the debt. She screwed the business out because when she got discovered in this identity, she went on the war path. So she went on the warpath to take everything. So we had to shut down everything, clear out my 401k, I walked away with $70,000 in credit card debt she'd racked up, along with a car I didn't own, an expired license, and a decision to move from Kansas City to Oregon. So I just got in the car and drove for 30 hours, which was a hell of an experience. Straight across.
- [10:23]
Podcast Host
Compliments, real quick, not to interrupt, because I'm loving the story and I know the listeners will as well, but I, I often hear people tell their problems. Yeah, I don't often hear people take responsibility.
- [10:34]
Neil Twa
Oh, I was doing it. Part of the problem.
- [10:36]
Podcast Host
And, and when, when there's infidelity, unfaithfulness in a marriage like, I, you know, it's. It's actually really cool to, for someone to say, you know what, I had my part in, in the failure as well. So big kudos because, you know, you, you add responsibility to any circumstance and that's where you actually get true leadership. So anyway, just quick, quick interlude there. Pause. Because I want to give credit.
- [10:58]
Neil Twa
Well, get into the rest of that, but, yeah, thank you. And at the end of the day, you know, it took me a few years to kind of reconcile that and come to the realization that, you know, there were things that I didn't do great, there were things I needed to do better as a person and a husband and as a, As a, you know, a leader and just, frankly, just as a better person than I was acting. And that really helped me through the next stages, you know, as he, as my uncle and mentor ended up dying in an ultralight aircraft. That was the catalyst of his death that led me to exit IBM In 2007, I was ready to go. And so by the time I had found my wife, now 18 years, love her to death, my soulmate, my ride or die, who understood all that stuff about me and didn't judge me for it and, you know, fell in love with me under all those circumstances, which I didn't deserve. We got married in March of 2007, and by June, IBM was like, hey, go to Argentina or take an early retirement. And I'm like, I'm out. This is it. Let's go. So I took the early retirement, I burned the boats and left and never looked back and have started a series of online and offline companies that have done both well. And one completely crashed in a really fun bankruptcy. You know, bankruptcies can be fun when you think about it. They can also be very devastating because I remember the 24 other souls that were sucked into that down in the basement of Tulsa when we went down there with my pregnant wife to do our, you know, bankruptcy Proceedings that sucked. But that also built fortitude, that built boundaries, that built understanding of how far I could push things. The system, the control, the money, the outcome. All of this was just a great awakening for me, right. To see money very differently than I had ever seen it before. I needed that breaking point to get me out of that reality and into a new one. And the new reality was money is a tool. Money is just an object of use. Yeah. It is not meant to be hoarded or kept. It is meant to be deployed. It is meant to be utilized. It is like a hammer that if you don't let it, if you just set it on a shelf and you call it, look at my beautiful hammer. It's not doing anything, it's not building anything, it's not creating anything. It's not helping other people. And I went bankrupt because all I was trying to do is help myself.
- [13:03]
Podcast Host
The most successful entrepreneurs I ever had the opportunity to interview will tell you their stories of failure. And I'm loving how you're going through the bankruptcy. I'm loving how you're going through the divorce. I mean, if you have success and you're that like overnight genius, right. You're going to have this ego that gets out of control. You're going to take yourself to the people. Well, and I never want to be. They're the flash in the pan.
- [13:32]
Neil Twa
Yeah. And they can't recreate it. And one of the things about this process that I learned was, you know, how to change the idea of a pure profit play in business. And get me, don't get me wrong, I talk more about profit than I will ever talk about revenues. Because you can't run a business on gut feel. We gotta have the profits. But at the end of the day, if there's no purpose and value leading the profits, your equation is out of balance. Purpose and value have to lead over profits. And that is a major, you know, life changing moment for me that put me on a completely different trajectory after that. And through that, you know, that situation, I lost friends, I lost family. I don't know if it's Trump or somebody famous. He said, if you want to find out who your friends and family are, go bankrupt. That is certainly a way to do it. Don't recommend it. But there are worse things in life, like never having lived at all, which I can say that I've lived a lot in 49 years. We haven't even got to the point where my wife died twice on a medical bed in front of me when I have four small Children under the age of five. We can go there.
- [14:28]
Podcast Host
Let's go there.
- [14:29]
Neil Twa
Yeah, it was crazy. So we go through this process. She's like, hey, she doesn't judge, she doesn't hate. She's like, I got the kids. I would rather stay home. She was an rn, bsn, on her way to become a nurse practitioner, decided to derail all that for motherhood, which I am super grateful that she did. That is probably the most impactful job of anything you and I or anybody would talk about is the way that she's raising the children, the way we now homeschool them since they've been going the way they're turning into young entrepreneurs. My 17 year old is running the AI management ad campaigns for our company and how each of them are learning how to become unique in their skill sets, which I find very, very amazing as we train them up to become good citizens and people of entrepreneurial nature. But she's a huge component of that success. I get to be the power and the protection around it, but she's the engine that's leading them. And with that, she never looked down on me with bankruptcy or any situation for my divorce. She has always been there supporting me. You do what you need to do. I got the home thing. You go conquer the world. Whatever you need to do, we do it. If we sell the house, we sell the house. If we get rid of the cars, we get rid of the cars. And she's been through that entire process. And without that support, it is something I think so many people miss. It is now my number two rule for my children. The first one is control the controllables because dad learned how to figure that out in very difficult ways. I would rather you don't reproduce. The second one is who you marry is the most important decision you'll ever make in your life. So don't slack on that decision. If you want to become successful in life, the person that's your closest ally can also be your closest enemy, as I have known is the person you marry. So choose extremely wisely and look for the relationship and that structure to be based on friendship first or the rest of it will never survive. With that, you know, I had a lady who did just an amazing job and she ran into some medical issues, high risk pregnancies, and in one instance with our fourth daughter, she had to have a hysterectomy and the cauterizing machine failed. She ended up with 2 liters of blood in her cavity. She ended up getting overdosed by a very stupid ER doctor. Who wasn't paying attention and overdosed her on morphine. And she put it out in front of me. And when that happened, they raced in blue, coated and got her back, hit her with Narcan and resuscitated her and brought her back, took her into two surgeries. She died on the table one time, and they resuscitated her again while they were trying to get rid of the figure out where the bleed was coming from. 14 hours later, on the second surgery. We're 36 hours into this, and they finally figure it out after they called in like three other doctors. And it took her over a year to recover. So in that year, after recovery, post bankruptcy, I'm figuring out at the same time, I go bankrupt and finish that off in December. This happens in April, and then by June, she's now in, like, a fight for her life and then spending a year recovering. So from the bankruptcy straight into that, it was everything I could do to just keep the family together. Right. We had small kids. Parents helped out. I was both the dad, I was the husband, I was the caregiver, I was the provider. I was everything. And this is where the principles of my life have actually kicked in. And the first one was faith. I could never have done all that without my faith.
- [17:36]
Podcast Host
Before we go into all the principles which I do want to get from.
- [17:38]
Neil Twa
You.
- [17:42]
Podcast Host
You have one company that's going bankrupt or has gone bankrupt.
- [17:45]
Neil Twa
It went bankrupt, and we were dealing with that crap.
- [17:48]
Podcast Host
You have spouse in recovery, died twice on the operating table.
- [17:51]
Neil Twa
Yep.
- [17:53]
Podcast Host
You have how many children?
- [17:54]
Neil Twa
Four girls under the age of five. Four.
- [17:58]
Podcast Host
Not just children. Girls. So, I mean, four little girls. I've got a daughter, I've got a son. They both need a lot. The daughter needs more, you know. Yeah, girls, four little princesses.
- [18:09]
Neil Twa
They're special.
- [18:10]
Podcast Host
But you also have other businesses. You're now an entrepreneur. You do not have a corporate job anymore. You have other businesses that you're having to keep going while this is going on.
- [18:18]
Neil Twa
No, they all crashed. I had to bankruptcy. That was a business strategy. It was my way to indemnify myself, because the partners in that business took investment firms into the company. So they were under SEC regulations, and they. They misappropriated the money. And when I discovered that process, I got a lawyer. I lawyered up fast. We got indemnified in that process. And the bankruptcy was the strategy to keep me from becoming part of the focus of something I had no understanding occurred. And I discovered it. So I became the whistleblower.
- [18:52]
Podcast Host
And then there's A lesson in taking.
- [18:53]
Neil Twa
On wrong investors, bankruptcy, and literally use all my assets to protect myself. Down to when I walked out of the bankruptcy court, which everybody thinks it's a court, it was really just 12 or 20. I forget how many judges setting a bunch of, in a bunch of, you know, tables and chairs in the middle of a conference area that we went into. And they assigned us one of these judges behind a white folding table, along with 20 other poor souls that were in there. And he just decided to judge our life. Thankfully, by the grace of God, he swiped a pin and wrote off our debt. We had made every effort to reconcile that, used all of our finances to kind of start paying back the debt. And you know, we were like in a plan to reconcile it. And he saw what we were doing and he just wiped the debt out. He's like, you need to help and you can figure this out. So I walked out of there with no credit score, no debt, but no money either. I had $567 in my bank account.
- [19:44]
Podcast Host
A recovering wife, four kids. But major turning point in life, because this is where you're establishing.
- [19:50]
Neil Twa
Well, she actually started right after that. So it was within a couple months after that happened that she went into the surgery and then she fell apart.
- [19:58]
Podcast Host
While this is going on, this is where you actually have that turning point where you're like, I need to live by a set of values, need to live by a set of rules. I hit my knees one day every.
- [20:06]
Neil Twa
Morning and I gave my entire business to God. And I said, I have tried to do this. I can no longer do it on myself. I am clearly a complete failure at this and life. And so I just gave it all to Jesus Christ and walked away and let it go.
- [20:18]
Podcast Host
Beautiful. Thank you for like, I just wanted to capture that whole situation because I've been through similar circumstance, but I wanted to make sure that that picture was well painted for anybody listening. And if you haven't felt it, you know, I wish it on you and don't.
- [20:32]
Neil Twa
Right? So I want that turning moment for people who need that moment. I hope I won't go through that much difficulty to get to it. But I was a pig headed, stubborn, arrogant, prideful man. I needed that moment in order to surrender my ego and pride and take a step back and turn my value and core values around. And with that faith based.
- [20:52]
Podcast Host
So now we're at value number one, which is faith.
- [20:56]
Neil Twa
You can't walk in this world without it. You just. I don't know how people operate on a daily basis without faith. Faith in something bigger, something greater, something that has a control, something that you can relax and sleep in. Knowing that I don't have to have everything, I don't have to understand everything, I don't have to control everything. I can let it go. I can let it go to something that I believe is larger than and greater, that has an eternal purpose, not just an earthly purpose. And for that, I can sleep very well at night. I love that.
- [21:25]
Podcast Host
What's value number two?
- [21:26]
Neil Twa
Family. You'll find out who your real family is when things get difficult. Remember I told you some of them decided they weren't really wanting to be family with me anymore because I was a liability. Yeah. They didn't really want to be my family. So that led to number three. Because friends, number three can sometimes be greater than family. They can be the ones that step up, the ones you don't recognize, the ones that can leave. Because we had a lot of friends we thought were, you know, really close to us, decided that again, we were liability. And then we had friends that we didn't realize, felt certain ways about us. And then when we needed things, they showed up, they knocked on the door, they said, hey, do you need food? Do you need money? We saw they repoed your car out of the garage. Do you need another car? Because that happened. And they stepped into a position and they stepped in to fill that gap where others could not handle it. And that meant that friends and family became the balance of that purpose and.
- [22:16]
Podcast Host
Value at this stage of life. How old were you?
- [22:19]
Neil Twa
Which part?
- [22:19]
Podcast Host
The bankruptcy part bankruptcy.
- [22:22]
Neil Twa
32.
- [22:23]
Podcast Host
Two months later, wife dies on the table, resuscitates 32 years old. Wow, this is a lot for a 32 year old.
- [22:30]
Neil Twa
Yeah, well, I tend to race hard, I tend to push hard. And boundari were pushed a lot in those first couple decades of life. And I don't regret that because now that things have sort of settled down and I've gained some of that experience and you know, by proxy, a little bit of wisdom in life. Now that I'm 49, I can see the way through the path, I can see the way through things. I can see the structure of the way things are going now because of that experience. I know where the boundaries are. And my boundaries are very different than other people.
- [23:04]
Podcast Host
So is boundaries value number four?
- [23:06]
Neil Twa
No, it's actually finance. Finance finances are the thing that allow you obviously to power your life, build a business, make profit, employ others, help other people and do things. But it's number four shouldn't be number one. And I Think so many people, when they hear the word profits, they immediately jump to financial and institutional and capitalization and this kinds of stuff. What they should jump to is the realization that profits are relationships. Profits are life. Profits are faith. They're family. They're intrinsic things that you can touch. I'm profiting from this relationship today when I hope others that are listening are as well. This is profit by association, is profit that goes beyond the money. The money can come as a side effect of those relationships when you're driving with that purpose and value first. That's why finances are fourth. Finances are obviously very big. You can't run a company on gut feel. And by the way, you know, bankruptcies happen to everybody. They're not the worst thing that can happen. And if you're trying to avoid that pain in your life, you're probably not risking opportunities to gain that risk reward that you could get if you simply just let go of some of your finances.
- [24:14]
Podcast Host
You're in alignment there. Are there any more values or have.
- [24:16]
Neil Twa
I captured all 5th F, which is not, you know, to F off, but it sort of could be because it's freedom. And at this point, the fifth F of freedom, I can tell a lot of people F off now because frankly, freedom is the power by which you and I have this conversation. We interact, we do business at different levels. We have communications, we have a structure within our country that allows freedoms that others seem to think are more restrictive or constrictive than they actually are. And they seem to misalign. The idea that my freedom could be your freedom and yours is your freedom, and it can be different, but we can coexist truly in those freedoms by not overrunning each other. And I think there's this whole idea that I can't have freedom if you don't get yours in the way you want it, but I have to get mine the way I want it. And there's no compromise in that. And that's not true freedom. Because now we're subjected, objecting each other to our definition of freedom. If we come up with a common consensus, which thankfully was what the Constitution allowed along with the Bill of Rights and everybody's free man opportunity, we need to actually forcibly put ourselves back in a position where those freedoms are there. And I mean freedoms from not being taxed, freedoms from not being licensed, freedoms from a free man position. Right? Which is where our Constitution actually allows us and we've compromised those freedoms to the point that, that we're allowing others to kill us in the name of freedom. By simply stating that we are free men and that simply isn't going to fly anymore.
- [25:41]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I think we'll have a lot of alignment and agreement from our community on some of those things because it is a large entrepreneur community that's listening. And so I want to bring this up because it's interesting without going through my story because most folks that listen to this have heard it, but the values I came up with are what I call my four cores. Faith, Family, Fitness, Finance. And I train my highest level clients. Clients like you know, because I, I teach finance, I teach finance, I teach business, I teach economics to my clients. And, and if you go on my social media, that's what people see.
- [26:14]
Neil Twa
Yep.
- [26:14]
Podcast Host
Now when, when you're getting close, we're going to talk far less about business like, because Faith, Family, Fitness, Finance is in the proper order. You know, I teach it on social media finance first because that's the thing that's going to give you the most effect, the quickest but the thing that's going to give you the largest effect and the most great and empowering way is faith. Well, and so if you look at like hold four fingers up on a hand, these fingers may not be the same, but they're tethered to one another by the hand. Right. If progress equals happiness and you can imagine the hand rising, where's the anchor? And so what we have to deal with is the greatest anchor and then you'll naturally oscillate up. But I love you. Have faith, family, friends, finance, freedom. There's so much alignment there and it's just, it's a common theme. When I'm doing these interviews that we find with so many people there is some level of common theme. It's not always Fs.
- [27:04]
Neil Twa
And I really think this is a bonus. I mean I try to walk four or five miles a day with my wife. We try to go every day. Plus I live on 65 acres. So out here we chainsaw, we do wood, we do real stuff. We have a lot to do on this property as a hobby farm. So I love it in some fitness area of just flat out working the property.
- [27:23]
Podcast Host
Jumping from this point, 32 years old, life has crashed. This is where I think start things to start to take off for you. Yeah, I got you start having some successes.
- [27:35]
Neil Twa
It does some of my core competencies. One of them was I understood how to manage difficult situations and where there needed to be a leadership structure in place and I was good at that. So I got called back to some projects at IBM actually Said, hey, we need you to come fix the projects that were falling apart two years ago. Would you parachute back in here and fix these? And I remember the partner calling me and I was like, well, sure man. Like, where do I have to go? And he's like, you're going to Columbus, Ohio. I'm like, well that's not far away, I can do that. And he goes, what do you need? And I said, I need X per diem per day and I need X money per an hour or I'm not in. And he's like, well, when are you going to be here? So I shot the moon, right? I'm like, I want $1,000 a day per diem and 250 bucks an hour. And he's like, okay, when can you be here? So I'm like, okay, cool. So I know how to make money and I know how to negotiate. So I went back to that. And in the process of that I also know about Legion and online and mobile because I grew up in the mobile when it grew up. So I started to launch mobile campaigns which were just spreadsheet based affiliate campaigns for downloads and installs and apps and all kinds of stuff because that's where I'd come from in the past. And so I launched affiliate campaigns. It took me about 299 campaigns of failing and about 30, $40,000 in credit card debt before I hit the first ringer campaign, making 50 bucks a day. And when I hit that, I was in 500 and 1,000 a day. And it all came, you know, coming back raging. And so I got involved in the realization that I was still an individual contributor, contributor. And I'm like, what the hell dude? I'm right back to, kind of back to the being the guy who has to do everything. I know how to build a business, so what am I going to do? And that's what led me to physical products because I connected the marketing lead generation to the physical product private label world. And I became a business owner who now had a brand, a strategy, 24, 7 sales when I slept and I didn't have to micromanage every part of it. And I ran into a guy who's operationally focused at the micro level, which if you can understand, that's not me. And because of that we had an hour long conversation and said, I think we can do something together here. And that was 12 plus years ago. He's still my partner today and we've done a lot of business together. He is very much the coo, cfo, mindset and financial organizer. I'm very much that guy who jumps off the bridge and builds it on the way down. And with that, I push his boundaries. And with him, he pulls me back when he's like, hey, that's not gonna work. And I'm like, though, let's see what we can figure out. Because everything for me is a K, N O W. You can't tell me no because everything's a K and O W. It just means I didn't explain it right. Or you don't get it because you're too stupid or I'm too dumb to understand what's going on. But one way or another, we'll figure our way out through it until it's a literal hell no. Leave me alone.
- [30:11]
Podcast Host
I want to start diving in to some of what running on values led to. I mean, you made a comment before the show started. We got one business that we acquired that's doing 14 million in revenue this year. And you have how many businesses? And not just regular businesses, these are not service based businesses. These are manufacturing companies where you are generating, creating, producing and distributing a product to consumers that I'm assuming are buying online based on your skill set.
- [30:36]
Neil Twa
Is that accurate on Amazon, TikTok retail and Shopify? Right. Those are our primary channels. We start on Amazon FBA because it's an incubator. It's an incubator of a sales machine that generates 700 billion a year because everybody's buying something in 30 seconds or less and I don't have to question whether or not that was their intent. So I take the product to Amazon first as almost a crowdfunding, if you will, kind of way to look into the potential upside of that since Amazon's 49% of the market share. If I can prove it on Amazon to six figures, I can sell it to eight figures across all the additional channels. So we take it to Amazon and we grow. And yeah, we have exclusive relationships with the manufacturers. They create, build and help us design the products that we take to market it. We use existing Amazon data that we get now from what's called their product Opportunity Explorer and a couple of other data sources where I pull Amazon's exact data from so I know exactly what they have and how it's selling. And then we massage that data in our engine, which gives us a pipeline of products that are currently in demand in the market. And then we simply go in, look at the data and say, where's the opportunity for a high demand, high net profit product? And we go test, launch, it, we take it to the market and we find out how much they want to get. We launch 100, 300, 500 units based on the scope open size of the market to do a market test. We run all the data and the numbers that come back. We look at the sales velocity, the upside potential, the 12 month run rates and if all of that green light, it's called our green light system, really complicated, right. Then we launch a thousand or two thousand units once we know that that product has proven its metric and sometimes we get on the radar. We literally had a call this week from Amazon rep inside for brand management who called up and said, hey, your, your product just came across my desktop. I want to do anything possible to see what we can do to help you go. Because we just hit all these metrics inside the system in the first 30 days of launches and it went on their radar. So now they're going to help us with brand and launching and they're going to help us with coupons and Amazon prime deals and they're going to make sure we don't get suppressed and if we have any issues, we call them directly. And so this is a, you know, an eight figure brand and now it's just going to take the time to get there.
- [32:43]
Podcast Host
An eight figure brand. And this is one brand and you're working with that's just one brand.
- [32:47]
Neil Twa
We have 12 that we own in control and we have another 12 that we're in direct control and management over. Yeah.
- [32:55]
Podcast Host
And so you talk 24 brands effectively, 12 that you own and control, 12 that you manage for others that own them. Okay. Which, that's epic. So like, what are we talking, like revenue here? And I'm painting a picture that I want the audience to hear.
- [33:09]
Neil Twa
Yeah.
- [33:10]
Podcast Host
What are we talking on a revenue here?
- [33:14]
Neil Twa
We're probably on our way towards 30 in total management. And by the end of this year we've got two more acquisitions we're very interested in and that'll put us close to 50 million a year under management.
- [33:25]
Podcast Host
So 50 million in revenue annually under management.
- [33:28]
Neil Twa
Correct.
- [33:29]
Podcast Host
Okay. From a business that is now run with values that you selected.
- [33:35]
Neil Twa
Yeah. Here's the fascinating part, right. That the business we acquired has one employee and businesses we control now have no employees. So how do we get there?
- [33:44]
Podcast Host
But I want to paint this picture because this is what I want people to hear. If you don't have a set of values you live by, you live by external values that somebody else is projecting onto you, that's 100% you're not thinking for yourself. And so this is why a guy who's highly talented like you, okay, you can start with sprint PCs and go launch something and be part of this startup, but you're living within their values. And it's why when you start going on your own, you're going to go into an epic downturn and failure. Because nobody trained you to build, select and create your own value. So you had all the talent without the values built in. When you have the crash, when you go through the hellscape, when you go through the fire and get forged, this is when you design the values, you relaunch the exact same talents, maybe honed a bit, but from the same fucking source, pretty much with the values. And I mean, like, we're talking 32 to 49, okay? So this is not a huge percentage of somebody's life. I mean, like, we're talking what, like 15 years, right? 16 years, 17 years, whatever. Yeah, yeah, okay, so 17, 18 years. Which if somebody were to get out of high school and they were like, okay, well, now I'm 35, if they could learn this at 18, have the same 17 years at 35 and be doing 20 million in revenue. I don't even want to assume profit margins, but like a lot of times, manufacturing has a very decent profit margin. Especially if you're dialing in the data the way you're doing. Well, you might find a 40, 50, 60% margin.
- [35:10]
Neil Twa
Transparency. I don't own the manufacturers. I have exclusivity with the manufacturers. My profit margin comes off of the sales. And that net profit must maintain more than 20% at the bottom line or I don't put products in there that drive the net profit of the company down. So it must be products that are greater than 50% ROI have more than $12 in net profit per unit. Typically, we're going to see 75 to 150 in net profit for every unit sold. And that rolls my P and L up to a brand, which is where the value of what we're talking about actually comes from. And we do have a manufacturer we actually were interested in acquiring in the United States for the pure manufacturing purpose of that company that has no brand E commerce value at this moment. It is just pure manufacturing because I see the trillions of dollars that are coming back into America and the possibility that that manufacturing company could explode. So we're actually intrusively talking to a manufacturing company for the purpose of just owning the manufacturing company.
- [36:06]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I mean, I'm in manufacturing myself and I the picture I want to Paint one, which I think people got, was the difference in running a business with your own values and nothing external, but what you have internally versus not okay. Anyone can take talent and project that talent into their direction. That's called hiring an employee and managing. Yeah, but when you're going to build the company up to have the values, the next thing that I want to dive into, because I think you have a lot to teach here. And so I hope you don't mind me because I love that we got through a lot of your story. I know there's probably more, but I want to pull some of the gold nuggets out of you, if that's all right. I want to talk about some of the benefits of leveraging. Like what you're doing is you're doing marketing, technology, target customer. What are some of the benefits, if you could talk about it, of being on both sides of business and tech. You mentioned that when you were working within, like Sprint, you went to IBM. Like you were kind of in this merger marriage between like, you know, I'm not here and I'm not here. I'm in this, this overlap, which I found enormous opportunity for myself and my companies in that overlap. But I didn't know that overlap existed. I was the idiot that went out and hired all the tech firms that made all the big promises, that had this sales douchebag that took my money, that had never been part of building anything other than tech. And so they didn't know shit about my industry. And I kept giving the money, giving the money, giving the money until I brought my own in house tech, which it sounds like you might have some of the answers to. And maybe we could save people tens of millions, maybe more, just by them hearing these next few sentences that are going to come out of your mouth.
- [37:45]
Neil Twa
So the primary components of what you're just you're describing. In my world, we call people process and technology. Okay? People who are in a specific area of focus, what is known as a subject matter, expertise, and that is the vertical and the lane they stay in. And I would look at B players typically who can understand the concept of an A player, but are not there yet because a mentoring or discipleship is required to move them from a B to an A player. The drive, the intent and everything is there, but the experience and wisdom is not there yet. But I see that with time and fortitude and dedication to that individual, they can reach that place. And in that understanding then supporting any processes we have that could be basically translated to them, they can use those Processes as a B player to understand how to learn and grow and adapt and change themselves, and then learn how to discover the experience required for them to become an A player themselves and how they change and adapt that outcome. Not how I force them to do it, but how they find themselves fitting into it. And the technology is this a support backbone that enables us to compress time and to create force multipliers out of every person or system we have. And AI has been a way to do that. Technology has always been a way to do that. Just expands the micro aspect of the people in process to success. Everyone sees it right now at the macro level because they think of it at the big picture. Look at all these things people are doing. It's a sorrow here now to today. And Yesterday it was VO3 and it's this AI. Now it's agentic and it's like it's all this stuff, and it's a giant cloud of keywords that everybody's confused by, and they don't really know where to go or what system to use because there's so many moving so fast, it's so confusing. Amazing.
- [39:27]
Podcast Host
You said something genius right there. And I want to make sure to have people fully understand what that means. And I want to give a quick definition of technology before we really move further, because a lot of people think technology is just tech, okay? And technology is not just tech. Technology historically was the wheel. Technology was fire. You said technology is a thing that compresses time. It's the thing that makes life. Life simpler. Technology is living in a home instead of a cave. Okay? Like, technology is any type of thing that makes life better. You can have a technology that makes you slightly more efficient without being a tech company like Google or Facebook or, you know, Amazon or whatever. Right? And so, like, a good question that if you're listening, because Neil is dropping some bombs here, and they're. Gold is what is the core technology I have in my business? It doesn't have to be that you're leveraging AI if you're a startup or something, right? What is the core technology that gives me an advantage over my competitors? If you're not asking that question right now, you missed something gold that came out of his mouth. Neal. Sorry for pausing you, but I needed to. I mean, I needed to drag that in and just.
- [40:36]
Neil Twa
Let's focus it to an example, right? So in the world I live in, market research for a product also brings about product discovery as part of a product research process. It's something that we had five VAs working on with a monster spreadsheet we developed and called our green light process to go go in and analyze all these data points that would then come back and give us as the management a picture of the product upside potential of one product versus another. And they would massage all this data and put it in there. That was a micro process to reach a macro brand level. So what we ended up doing, and I think this is where people get caught up a little bit and I hope you're listening to this when I say this, the micro level optimization is where AI is the most important impactful right now. So when we took that research process and then we defined it into system, we said how do we replicate this process and remove the manpower required? It's taking us weeks to get to the answer and compress that down into days or even hours if at all possible. So when we came to that conclusion and directed the tech team, it was a specific micro outcome and they understood it it because that's what tech people can get. If you come at them with the macro overview and expect them to get to the micro, you lost them already. Because most tech engineering people, no offense, I know your ctos in the room, but this falls into a lot of CTO level people, they think that they have to macro solve that solution when the micro is setting in front of them and they need to work from the micro to the macro and not the other way around. So when you give them that individual process and said I want, you know, know, data and technology to be implemented, that allows me to take a two week, you know, spreadsheet of five VAs down to a system that pulls that data, analyzes it and compresses it to an outcome either red, yellow or green. And that's what I want. That's exactly what they gave us. And when they got stuck, we had this huge spreadsheet of data we pulled down and there was some discrepancies in it. Well, I set my 15 year old analytical daughter on it who likes to look at the details and she went line by line through this spreadsheet until she came up with a series of questions that couldn't be answered. And we gave it to the dev team and the dev team who heard the answer questions go what the heck? So they went in and came up with the answer. They came up with the solution. They said we can actually get the answer to that question. And it was something we hadn't even thought of yet. And so she worked herself out of a job because no longer. Right. She's like well crap, now what do I do? So like, well, we'll just give it to the text team. Out of that came a very clear understanding of a particular way of looking at the data we hadn't even considered. And in the way we looked at that data, the tech could actually meet that micro requirement we were asking. We just didn't know the right questions to ask yet. And when those questions came up, the technology appeared and the answer produced itself. So what it did for us is it took millions and billions of keyword based, analytic driven stuff in the old system of online Amazon into the new system that's AI driven. And it basically said there are 103,000 customer needs and intent that make up all of those billion keywords. We now identified exactly the 103,000 customer needs that power their AI system that tied to those keywords. And so if we need a customer need or a customer intent, I know exactly which customer need and intent that AI system is serving now and I don't need billions of keywords to do it. So with that we then looked at the next step in the process and said, okay, it takes us two weeks to write a listing to get copy and stuff correct and understand the avatar. So we actually built a, a, a GPT, trained it on 10 years worth of training and then had it come back and tell me exactly the avatar of that customer need and attempt. And so when it came back and said okay, a customer who intends to buy this product or needs this product based on their current search in Amazon, here's who they are. They're a 27 year old female who's a homemaker, who likes baking, who da da da da and has this, and has this income. And it literally produced a report that told me a profile. And when we looked at our original research and the profile it was 99.9% accurate. We're like, holy hell. So we took that GPT, how long.
- [44:57]
Podcast Host
Did it take the AI to generate that?
- [44:59]
Neil Twa
About 10 seconds. Yeah, so we take that and we feed that back into the system. All right. And we use a, a natural language query. It's backed by Claude 4 or 5 Sonnet and it basically takes that avatar, it takes the customer need and Amazon intent and it writes the listing for me, and it writes the listing for me so that it's formatted towards Amazon's AI ranking engine for product. And it aligns exactly with the customer language and intent. Give me, when I say this, that tells the engine basically programs it through prompting in the copy of the listing to Understand exactly the avatar that was intended from the report. So the AI engine matches the report. So when everybody thinks I'm selling products and developing, you know, with manufacturing products and physical brands, that's not actually what I'm doing. Right. I'm brokering data intelligence to an AI engine that's intent is to move a person in front of a product in 30 seconds or less, sell it to them through that mechanism, deliver it to them, handle their customer support, handle their returns and do all of that work, which is what it's intending to do. And all I'm doing then is brokering the data. I want the AI engine to know exactly that my product, okay, that is brand new, that no one's ever heard of is the Pepsi to a Coke that's already in the system. I want it to go, oh, people who like Coke would also like Pepsi and I'm the Pepsi, okay. In this scenario. And it goes, oh, they must want one of those too. So the engine goes, I know exactly who you're looking for. You're looking for 14.9 million of these people. So those are exactly the people I'm going to put in front of your product. And if I did a great job from the beginning, those are exactly the matching profile and avatar of that product. And the organic ranking engine kicks in my data broker.
- [46:45]
Podcast Host
It's effectively you're the communication process.
- [46:49]
Neil Twa
Yep.
- [46:50]
Podcast Host
Of this giant, call it a retailer, online retailer, that's showing them how to find the right customer and showing the customer how to find the right product. And what you're doing is you're making Amazon's life easier and the customer's life easier.
- [47:06]
Neil Twa
That's right.
- [47:07]
Podcast Host
You know, I teach my clients that business is about communication, like every business. I mean, I'm not building homes to live in.
- [47:15]
Neil Twa
No.
- [47:16]
Podcast Host
I'm not building these products to buy.
- [47:17]
Neil Twa
Them myself, although I really enjoy them. If you love ice cream, you're going to love the Blizzy because that thing is self selling like crazy. On Amazon it's called the Blizzy, but.
- [47:24]
Podcast Host
You could only buy one. It's, it's like how many do you need? You need one product right now, right.
- [47:29]
Neil Twa
You just want to tell us about.
- [47:31]
Podcast Host
Those, but like, let's cover that too.
- [47:33]
Neil Twa
We call it your hero product. And once you have your hero product, there are 50 to 100 variations of that product that I will dial that niche into and I will keep launching every variation that product on that product roadmap for the next two, three years until I hit scale. Okay. And here's the point. These analytic engines are trained now over 12 months of data. So in 12 months of launching that product, I have trained not just that engine, but every engine it ties to online that now understands the avatar target of that product. And it's all cross platform now. Right. So with that halo effect occurring in year two and three, I can see growth of market share from 5 to 20% in year two to 40% in year three. If I do a great job, which puts me into scale in years three through five, shoots for the $5 million in revenue with more than a million dollars in EBITDA and becomes a salable asset, I can now exit to the private equity group that we help fund called Patriot Growth Capital, where we're going to acquire that company and then Voltage will have it under management for growth into the second exit.
- [48:43]
Podcast Host
Love it.
- [48:44]
Neil Twa
Yep.
- [48:44]
Podcast Host
How exciting. And you know, I, I gotta, I gotta challenge you a little bit.
- [48:51]
Neil Twa
Sure.
- [48:51]
Podcast Host
If I'm listening to this and I want to do what you're doing, you know, because people listen to the show and they're like, wow, I wanna, I wanna do that too.
- [48:58]
Neil Twa
Ecom's a curiosity, no doubt about it.
- [49:00]
Podcast Host
I'm, I'm, I'm gonna be real. You're so far ahead of what most people are doing that it almost makes it impossible to catch up.
- [49:08]
Neil Twa
Might as well join us if you can't beat us. So in the market, how do you do that? Yeah. Well, if you want to go into a mentoring and discipleship, you can work with us one on one for 12 months to do exactly that. That eventually I want to acquire. If you build it the way I show you how to build it. So I become the process and analytic engine of experience that leads to your wisdom and growth in the business. And then when the time comes to sell it, I have a first right of refusal to broker the business acquisition off market. So I am both your beginning and the end. And let's keep it very clean. You build these businesses to an exit, they are worth more in the end than at any time during the business building phase. The profitability, growth and generational outcome can look like this. One of my clients is going to an exit right now. After five years, he got a $29 million offer on his business. Okay, that's possible. He's not even the biggest case study I have, the biggest case that I have is one of the fastest growing on Amazon. Started in 2015, we hit 5 million a month. In eight months that business went on to do an additional 100 million in DTC sales through Shopify and then he sold that business in 2022 and he cleared out $72 million in sales sales. So the business opportunity and growth with AI and systems is moving at such a great pace that most people can't keep up. They don't know the opportunity cost and they don't understand the real time, energy, attention and money or the team effort required. Now, this is not an individual contributor platform.
- [50:32]
Podcast Host
I was going to say this is. This is not a spectator sport.
- [50:35]
Neil Twa
It is not a spectator sport. If you're coming to the table, you're going to know you're going to deploy 50 to 100k first year into the business. That's your growth year. To plow profits back into the business to accelerate market share in year two, where growth can go really fast if you're doing a great job. Could happen in year one like these other guys, but it most likely will happen in year two. Why? The market share penetration of these algorithms is built into the cake. It's baked into the cake. So when we understood these launches, and we've done like a thousand in 12 years, we came up with an understanding of a launch process over 90 days that, I mean, Amazon itself looked at. And once we got on a call with one of their VPs, they're like, yeah, I can tell you something because you shared this that I don't normally tell other people. And that's. You can penetrate 5% of the market year1 with this algorithm and then it will allow you to penetrate up to 20% year two and 40% in year three. So if you follow your launch process, the algorithmic engine itself is going to reward you like a snowball rolling downhill into an avalanche. It's a three year process of these engines, but in three to five years, as the E myth says, you can do something no one else can. Then you can live like nobody else can afterwards.
- [51:43]
Podcast Host
Words.
- [51:44]
Neil Twa
And he's going to have a generational wealth moment when he exits his company. Right. And this was a guy who was a golf course manager, has a theology degree and never ran an E commerce business his entire life. We trained him one on one how to do that. Now, opportunity costs capitalization. Where's the real risk in this? It isn't getting started. I will show you exactly what the hell to sell I will give you because I want you to be successful. So I don't want you to choose a product or brand opportunity.
- [52:07]
Podcast Host
And let's frame that a guy like you, who doesn't mind doing that because you actually can't do it all.
- [52:14]
Neil Twa
And here's the thing. I have a whole really awesome team behind me and I cannot do it all. I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I have amazing operators behind me, market.
- [52:22]
Podcast Host
And manufacture every product like it's, it's, it's not realistic. You can build a system that would work for every product.
- [52:30]
Neil Twa
Yes.
- [52:30]
Podcast Host
But if you want to scale, you actually need the players that are going to come in.
- [52:34]
Neil Twa
So here's what I did. I started training them in 2019 on how to build their own companies and those in the since 2019 who have become the most successful in my business builder group. I said, who wants to share profit with me and come be an operator in my companies or my new, my new acquisitions and the ones that I'm building. And I had six people raise their hand. We chose the first three. We have a fourth one now. And those four business CEO operators who were trained successfully and run successful businesses now help me run the other companies. Right. So all 24 of those companies are ran by five guys who were all trained. Now CEO operators run their own businesses and also run the operations of these additional companies. They're not employees and I don't need to micromanage them. I don't need to give them their SOPs. I don't need their OKRs. They are go getter tenacious. Don't hold me back. Give me a Runway. Give me the capital I need and I will crush this thing because they're going to get a 10% ownership of that business and that can make them pretty good money, Especially if you're doing.
- [53:29]
Podcast Host
A 5, 10, $25 million exit. We're going half a million bucks.
- [53:33]
Neil Twa
This is well worth their effort, right? They get paid along the way if they choose to take a little payment and a smaller amount of profit, or they choose no payment and they get a larger amount of profit and they grow with us to the exit. And these guys are deploying, you know, 200,000 minimum in year one into the company. So with that, we know we're going after serious business. The results. For anybody listening, if you want to know the real results and follow along, go on my Facebook page. Go to facebook.com, look for Neil Twa. I can't miss me Twa. I'm like the only one that pops up. And you will find that the latest three case studies of three brands that just went to market, they're all between 1,000 and 7,000 a day in the last last four weeks. And I show you on My Facebook, exactly how they're playing this game. But if you show up and you want to work with me, it's going to cost. I'm sorry, we don't do things for free. I've actually given like five people a free opportunity to work with me in 10 years and you know how many have actually taken it to success?
- [54:26]
Podcast Host
0. 0.
- [54:27]
Neil Twa
1.
- [54:27]
Podcast Host
You give it.
- [54:28]
Neil Twa
I have really got to give him a shout out because good on him for doing what the other six, five, whatever it was didn't do do. Right. When there's no skin in the game, you will not get any rewards. So don't expect to show up and not pay to work with us for a year. But I will tell you, this is the most fun I've ever had in business. I. I will do this for the next. I am like my creative HD brain, as you can probably tell, goes a thousand miles a minute and I'm always coming up with ideas and I'm throwing things to the team and I'm like, this is great, let's try this. Let's do that. They're like, sure man, we'll get to it. Hold on. We're still on this thing. And, and I get to push the boundaries of creative and fun and conversation and that's where I thrive. That's my A game. Right? Right.
- [55:06]
Podcast Host
Managing 24 companies, how many exits are you seeing per year?
- [55:11]
Neil Twa
We just acquired those two and I have two more in the hopper for client brands that are now matured and ready for an exit and then we're acquiring three more through Patriot Growth Capital. It won't be by the end of this year, but that was our original goal. We've got two more that we're talking to. Seriously. We've kissed about 700 companies in the outside world, but I've got a higher percentage raising up in my business builder group right now that are going to be going to an equipment exit.
- [55:36]
Podcast Host
Okay, so what percentage would you say should exit?
- [55:40]
Neil Twa
Oh, annually the goal is 100% but really it's going to be where and when. So some of them get past the five years.
- [55:47]
Podcast Host
If you're managing 24 and it sounds like you're acquiring more and you're bringing on more team members and, and more. More folks that you're either managing. You've got a little bit of an incubator. So here's my five year old. Okay, so five year goal, all of them, 50 companies at some point the goals know all will sell up.
- [56:06]
Neil Twa
If some of them don't reach that goal within Five years. But they can be put into a rollup. They'll be moved into a rollup because one way or another we want to exit the entire brand portfolio within five years. That's our exit strategy. My partner's 56 and he's like, you know, I think the next five years I'm going to push really hard. And I'm like, well you know, at 49, I don't mind retiring at 54. So I'm cool with that. I'm not really going to retire and I don't think he will either either because we're not golfing guys, we just move too quick. We'll probably try, you know, something different. Actually we were talking a lot about flex space recently in the growth of the flex space side. So we are looking at deploying some capital in the startup block of the flex space. He actually did that before I met him. He had about 600,000 square foot under control in flex space and he wants to get back into that. And I'm like, okay, real estate, business and real estate, two ways to become a millionaire, right?
- [56:54]
Podcast Host
I'm in the business of real estate and I can tell you it works. Yeah, I mean it doesn't work for a lot because they, they don't understand one of those two components. But you know, and if you can bring like business, real estate and technology, the overlap there is, here's where I'm.
- [57:13]
Neil Twa
Going to stay in my lane. So flex space, which you know is a office space with, with or it could be retail or just straight up office with warehousing. Well, I'm in the e commerce market, right. So who needs flex space the most most in the growth economy of E commerce? When the companies are raising up or when they're needing to downsize in any up or down economic turn, they need flex space. So as we build out these flex spaces and we acquire these companies, we're actually moving in tandem. So I'm sort of still in my lane, if it makes sense to say it this way because I'm going to be targeting e commerce companies for my flex spaces and some of the ones are the companies we acquire, we'll go into.
- [57:51]
Podcast Host
I will give you a little tip just, just now, now, friend to friend. Yeah, that is working for me. Not necessarily a profitable thing. Decent write off but not profitable. I've acquired three planes in the last few years and of course one of them was so nice I can't fly it and probably won't be able to for years. But you know, I bought two other smaller Ones that, you know, I can. One's like a little beater for around town and learning, but. And the other one's for kind of around Texas, New Mexico, Colorado. The other ones if I want. Want to, you know, cross the country or something. But flight school for a guy like you, a, you turn everything off except that, which is a great reboot, and. And B, I think it's something in alignment with something you were looking at at a younger stage.
- [58:36]
Neil Twa
It's so funny you should mention that because I actually have an agreement with my wife that when our youngest daughter, who's 12, turns 18, I can go back and get my pilot's license. That was our compromise. She's like, I don't want you flying when all the girls are young. So by the time the 12 hits 18, I'll be back on the deck finishing my P license.
- [58:53]
Podcast Host
Oh, and you know what? She's going to tell you a year or two in. She's going to tell you, man, why didn't you do this 10 years ago?
- [58:59]
Neil Twa
Yeah, because I have four daughters, and I'm not naive. I'd love for them to stay around and we have enough property to build houses on our property, but I'm not naive. They're not going to find some guy and he's going to be off somewhere, and it's like, okay, how do we get there? Well, dad and mom are just going to hop in the plane and fly out and see him. Right? That's the game plan.
- [59:14]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [59:15]
Neil Twa
I wish they would all stay close, but again, I'm not naive. There's a good.
- [59:18]
Podcast Host
Neil, you have dropped so many gold nuggets and bombs here that I really appreciate it. But you also are doing something really nice for our audience, which we're going to put in the show notes.
- [59:29]
Neil Twa
Yes, sir.
- [59:31]
Podcast Host
You've offered to give away 10 free copies of the book to the first 10 folks that asked. We'll put in the show notes. Can you give us a little brief on the book you wrote?
- [59:38]
Neil Twa
So the book was written to kind of compress all the strategy we talked today down into a readable format with resources and case studies and things that can kind of help you along the way. So if you're a reader who wants to kind of understand the strategy of the business of e commerce, that's what this book is about. It's not tactical, so don't get it. If you want, like, a tutorial, there's enough of that crap. And what people get in the tactical usually ends up being a missed strategy. That doesn't actually really apply itself itself. So I went for the strategy 15 chapters, 15 interviews from my podcast. Each interview was selected because the subject matter expert was in the area of the vertical of our playbook, from finance to research to market to ads and other areas. And those interviews are encapsulated in those 15 chapters with each of those experts and myself conversing about those areas of focus within our playbook for launching and discovering and building and optimizing these companies. And that's what it is. And my good friend Kevin Harrington, who's from the original Shark and Shark Tank and As Seen on tv, wrote the forward. It's part of what we had as our as seen on TV strategy. As one of my first brands that hit seven figures in 2015, I actually got it off an infomercial. And so when I had a chance to meet him in 2016, I told him the story and we made fast friends and have kind of stuck together ever since. And he wrote the forward to the book. And we have a little training and free video you can watch about our as Seen on TV strategy for finding, discovering and building these across the plane. But we've made it even a little simpler now with that software that's coming out soon that really just makes it really easy to look exactly and see what's in demand.
- [61:12]
Podcast Host
Let's dive into that because I know you have a software that you're actually launching. That's one of the things we were bonding on before the show started. So I think you said you're two, three weeks from launching this?
- [61:23]
Neil Twa
Thereabouts, yeah. It's October right now. So between now and the end of October of 2025, I had to slow that down because I wasn't sure it was 2025. The year has been so messed up, man. I can't believe we're headed for 26. And my brain's like, what year is it? I get it.
- [61:41]
Podcast Host
So this software is going to take customers and clients where from?
- [61:46]
Neil Twa
The discovery phase. So if you're an aspiring entrepreneur or even if you've started down the process and you still are trying to answer the question, what the hell do I say sell? Our need scanner software tied to Amazon's exact data will tell you exactly one of the customer needs that is currently in demand for a high demand, high profitability product. And when it green lights, it's time for you to build. And since it's a product development platform, not a research tool, there's so many of those out there and I was actually one of the ones that developed one of the first research tool in the market a long time ago. This is a product platform to not just discover what is greenlit and opportunity but to build it using time compressing AI steps that we built into the platform. And with that there's an activity tracker that rewards you by going through each of those steps in a timely manner. And then you have community support and different levels of access which will allow bonuses and gamification as you step through the build process using the AI tools to get your listings and images and graphics and copy all aligned perfectly with that AI ranking engine on Amazon to ensure your highest opportunity for that product to be rewarded by that engine. And then optimized features within there in the AI tools and tracking to make sure that you know the launch is going successfully, that you should order more product confidently and that you've got a great tiger by the tail and you can optimize that business up to eight figures. So the platform really is for aspiring entrepreneurs to get started supporting tutorials. We have community based support rem my coaches are in there who are running companies today, giving heads down information. And then we're gonna have a full training program coming out right behind that to step you through the entire training process as you walk through building your company.
- [63:30]
Podcast Host
That's the. I mean if, if you're one of those entrepreneurs that's looking for a way to start and you don't know what to do, you know you've got the entrepreneurial bug and, and, and you need something to kind of test your skills at. Brings data and tech to the forefront.
- [63:43]
Neil Twa
You don't know what the heck to sell. I'll answer that question for you. If you don't know how and who to sell it to, we'll answer that question and then we'll be there to support you until it becomes a very profitable venture for your family. And then hey, guess what? We'll be there to help you capitalize it because we'll have capital partners in there too who can help you with inventory capitalization and growth which is extremely important in a physical based world. Same as real estate, right? We have to capitalize that upside potential so we can get our cash on cash value. For us, it's capitalizing your business to the point where you can do four inventory turns a year. If I have a product that is a 50% return on investment and I turn it over four times a year, I have a 200% ROI on that product. And that's when things start to look really sexy. So we focus a lot on net profit and you would understand that as you go. And then, by the way, I am also the exit. So if you build with my platform and your business gets to a successful position, you can apply for your business to be purchased by us. And if the process works great, we might buy your company. So we are again, the platform of beginning and end.
- [64:39]
Podcast Host
Sounds a lot like the McDonald's stress strategy.
- [64:41]
Neil Twa
Yeah, I'm going to own the land underneath it, Right?
- [64:43]
Podcast Host
Right. Yeah. And they want to buy you out when you exit. They want the first rider refusal. So I love that. Neil. Neil twa, everybody. This is amazing. I appreciate you coming on today. These were gems and bombs you've dropped, helping everybody understand a little bit about some of the merger between business and technology. And I think the importance of building a business based on your values. Like you. You bring the cult into the culture, if you will.
- [65:08]
Neil Twa
Will.
- [65:08]
Podcast Host
Right. So like I, I, I, I, I'm grateful. I appreciate it. Where can people find you to get a dose of this daily? If they're, if they're looking.
- [65:16]
Neil Twa
If you're interested in the book, there'll be a link below. I Believe it is voltagedm.com forward/freecopy. There will be a code where the first people, 10 people can enter that. The book is 4.99. If you end up having to buy it, so that's not too big or go to Amazon, get it for 19.99, it'll be shipped to your house as a, as a paperback copy in like two days or less. If you decide to do that. Voltage DM.com Go check it out. If you get involved in our newsletter or anything like that or on my social medias. Again, twa, you can't miss me. If you Google or search me or Chad GTP me, you'll get. And there's not a whole lot of other Neil Twas out there where you can follow along on social media for when we launch the platform. If you might be interested in joining. That's going to be coming out soon.
- [65:54]
Podcast Host
All right, ladies and gentlemen, problem to profit. Another man that has shown us how to turn your problems into your profit by becoming the prophet in your space. Thank you all and I hope you have an amazing day on purpose. Tune in next time for more.