Brandon Dawson: 9-Figure Founder Reveals the Real Reason Businesses Stop Scaling | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic

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young and profiting.com/deals 97% of businesses fail out of 34 million and most of them stay at 3 million or less. If the business is going to grow and scale, the person in charge of the business must grow and scale. Brandon Dawson is the co-founder and CEO of Cardone Ventures with Grant Cardone and he's a serial entrepreneur who's built not one but multiple companies into nine figure successes. I went and raised my first million. I made a hundred presentations. I was

laughed out of most of them. I bought my first business. I had no idea what I was doing between 26-27. You ended up selling your next company for a lot of money like 77 Eba da. Why do you think you were able to sell it for so much? You bootstrap your company. Be in control that you learn to force the company to make money and if the company doesn't make money. There's sort of like a

bottleneck or a plateau at 3-5 million that a lot of businesses hit. How do people get over this?

You shouldn't be trying to push your business by spending more money and by hiring more people

“and buying more assets. You should be trying. Hey young and profitors, there's a big difference”

between growing a business and actually scaling one because sometimes what looks like growth is really just more people, more expenses, more stress and a founder still carrying the whole business on their back. Today's the app classic is about what it really takes to stop chasing growth blindly and start building a business that can actually scale. We're bringing back my conversation with the brilliant Brandon Dawson, the co-founder and CEO of Cardone Ventures. Brandon went

from being voted least likely to succeed in high school to building a multiple nine figure company

and selling one for over $150 million. And in this episode he shows us why your business will

only grow as far as you do as a leader. So lock in the app fam. If you're ready to 10 extra leadership, your money and your mindset, it's time to think bigger with Brandon Dawson. Brandon, welcome to Young and profiting podcast. Yeah, thank you for having me on your show. Yeah, I'm super excited for this conversation and today you are a scaling expert, you know, you've scaled multiple companies to over $100 million to the CEO of Cardone Ventures. But when I was

doing research, I found out that in high school you were actually voted least likely to succeed, which is really surprising, considering how far you've gone in life, we're probably the most successful person that has come out of your high school. So talk to me about how that happened and what kind of a chip that put on your shoulder as you kind of grew up. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I don't think school has any determination on who somebody's ultimately going to

become. And the one thing I was in schools, I was very competitive in sports. In fact, it's the only reason I cared about school. My parents told me if I got less than a sea average, they would not

“let me play sports. So, I mean, honestly, the only reason I did anything to school was so I could play sports.”

But I graduated from a little tiny school in the middle of nowhere, Kvalas Oregon, and it was kind of a joke with my classmates. I mean, it was a small school, 35 of us in our class. We had all been going to school together, most of us since the seventh grade. I was kind of the the athlete/class Joker. And so it was kind of a running joke because I was the one with the worst grades. And so I didn't go to school because I love school. I want school, so I can play sports. And as soon as I was out of

school, I was out of that little town too. Yeah. And you didn't go to college. You just went straight to work. Well, I tried. You know, I hope for a few months until they told me I was going to fail

I'm excited about. And I moved up to Portland, Oregon and started inside sales and then very quickly

“moved to Atlanta. Georgia became an outside sales rep for device manufacturer. And that's where”

I really kind of grew up, realized I loved selling. I loved the randomity of traveling around to 11 different states at 18, 19 years old. And really just learned to grow up working with older people and then taught me a lot about how to communicate. And initially, you first started working with your family, right? Your family was in like the hearing aid business. You started working with them. And then you eventually got fired by your own family or kicked out of the business. So talk to us

about what that was like and then how you ended up starting your first business on your own. Yeah. So, you know, it's a long story. But when I was eight, my mom married a guy that invented the end of your hearing aid. And it was, it was a start-up. And so by the time I was 23, 24, we were the largest mini-factor in the world. And I had been inside sales. I had worked in every area of that business. And I was the youngest of all the kids. It was a mixed family. But by the time I was

24, 25, I was running North American sales. I was director of US sales. I had fired hired and fired all my older brothers. And my parents started going through a pretty vicious divorce that went on for like seven years. And by half way through that, the new family was coming in who my was very close to and then still very close to. But I just felt trapped between my mom and then being in the way of the new family. So I just removed myself from the situation

decided I was going to be an entrepreneur 26 years old. And so you took your skills from that industry and you started your own company and you ended up scaling it and selling it going public at 29 years old. Yes. Well, it wasn't such a great success story. I went and raised my first

million. I made 100 presentations. I was laughed out of most of them. I bought my first business.

And I was the only person ever at that point to consolidate the hearing care space. I had no idea what I was doing between 26, 27. Finally, Warburg pink us back me in at 29. I was the youngest person to ring the opening bell. The American stock exchange. It was phenomenal. The experience was unbelievable. But you know, trying to go from zero to 75 million in three years buying, you know, 130 businesses was not easy. It taught me a lot. I learned a lot about Wall Street. And then one

day, why did the point where I was going to be unbelievably valuable? They said we're selling your company. So I didn't get fired. They just sold it out from underneath me and I went and started it over. Yeah. So that was a company called Sonos, right? Sonos. Yeah. Sonos. So in U.S. Yeah. Okay. Well, you know, we've got a lot of entrepreneurs tuning in and you starting a company at such a young age. You raised money. You know, what are some of the lessons that you learned

“from that first experience, building a business? What are some of the key lessons that you learned”

that you were like, I'm never going to do that again if I started business. Yeah. Patience, perseverance,

and persistence. Because I mean, hundreds of presentations, I was laughed out of most of them to be honest with you. I tried it by I had a deal full of a half a billion of businesses. I couldn't I couldn't raise enough money fast enough to close on them. I couldn't integrate them fast enough. I couldn't systematize them. You know, this whole idea of creating a platform company where you, you know, 125 to 175 million. You have all the technology, all the systems, all the people,

all the leadership, all the marketing sales, everything's perfect. Everything's flawless. It sounds great, but it was a beast trying to shove it all together in five, six years. And about the time I shoved it together and we were in a global leader was in 2001 when a tech industry busted in my private equity group. I was in a fund. And they said, hey, we're liquidating the fund and we're going to turn all our equity to cash. And of course, getting flushed into that

“system was something I was very excited about. But I learned the most important thing is”

I was a victim of private equity for a year, too. And to I realized I kind of created my own conditions. And and I also was a victim of the time. I mean, 2001 there was a lot of happening. And then September 11 happened and and everything changed. The point here is the biggest lesson is I want

to be in control of my destiny. I didn't want to use anybody else's capital. I would never

wanted to be in a position where somebody could flex on me, tell me what to do. And certainly sell my company without me wanting it to be sold. So I decided I was going to reinvent how businesses were built for small businesses. And the marketplace was showing me a huge opportunity because 97% of businesses fail out of 34 million. And most of them stay at 3 million or last. So I just saw a massive opportunity to reinvent how small business can be scaled up.

Yeah, fam, if I had a dollar for every time a business leader came on the show and told me

right, hiring gives you leverage. But the wrong hire can weigh down your entire team. And I've seen

“this in my own business the App Media. So when I need to hire and right now at App Media,”

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heard about indeed on this podcast. Indie.com/podcast terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. Yeah, fam, if I had a dollar for every time a business leader came on the show and told me Hala hiring the right people is everything. I'd probably be retired by now and guys they're right. Hiring gives you leverage, but the wrong hire can weigh down your entire team. And I've seen

this in my own business the app media. So when I need to hire and right now at yet media we've got five open US roles. I use indeed sponsor jobs. Sponsor jobs posted directly on indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsor jobs. 95% yeah fam, that's the difference between hoping the right person sees your post and actually reaching the quality candidates that you need

“for your business. With sponsor jobs your post is boosted in the search results so you can reach”

people who match what you're looking for whether that skills, experience, certifications or location. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. And listeners of this show will get a 75 dollar sponsor job credits help give your jobs the premium status it deserves at ind.com/podcast.

Just go to ind.com/podcast right now and support our show young and profiting by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast. Indie.com/podcast terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero. This is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. Yeah fam, I built an app in 15 minutes. And before you ask, I didn't suddenly become a software engineer.

In fact, I've never written a line of code in my life. But now, I'm training out apps like it's

my day job. And that's because I learned how to do it through mindstone. It's an AI transformation company that helps close the gap between having access to AI and actually getting value from it. So this all started when I attended their breakthrough AI weekend. I learned about their platform rebel, which basically helps you use AI in a way that completely transforms the way that you do your work. I left that weekend thinking that I have to roll out mindstone to my entire team.

And we did. So we started with the four week AI competency program. You don't need code. And so I sent 60 people on my team to take this training. And with that training, you get access to this platform called rebel, where you can ingest your email, your slack messages. And then you can basically use it as a coach, as a tool. Before I hop on a meeting, I asked rebel, hey, what do I need to know for this meeting? And it will scan slack and even send me things that I didn't realize but was

going on in my company. It is amazing what you can do with this platform. I recommend you start

with their four week AI competency program. You can get access and get 10% off at experience.mindstone.com/yap. For 10% off there, four week AI competency program. I want to double tap on this because it's really interesting. One thing I didn't get to introduce myself properly when we first started, I'm an entrepreneur myself. I have two companies basically. I have a social media and podcast agency. And then I have the number one self improvement podcast network. So I get podcasts sales

for people like Russell Brunson and Neil Patel and John McCutcher and all these like really big like pots. Yeah, it's awesome. And I bootstrapped my company. I just, you know, sold what I was good at for myself like LinkedIn and podcast and getting sponsorships. And then I just started making money and kind of did it step by step and bootstrapped. Now I have a new boyfriend who is a VC entrepreneur and he raises money. And our experiences are totally different. His is not about being profitable.

me, I'm just like, you know, just making money. And that's all I'm focused about. And he's got

“way less equity than I do. And I have almost 100% of my company. And so it's just so interesting.”

The two different paths for entrepreneurs who haven't started yet just talked to us about like pros and cons of taking VC money versus just trying to bootstrapped yourself. And like when people should think about taking money if, if any time. Yeah, so look, I mean, obviously VC private equity, they all have their place. If you have something that you can time to introduce into the marketplace to reinvent a space that you need massive horsepower, you need great relationships.

And you need sophistication of people that understand how things are supposed to work along with their network of people venture capital and private equity is a perfect place for that. If you're a novice entrepreneur with an idea, most of you aren't going to access private equity or venture capital. So you've got to have something that a venture capitalists or a private

equity group really says, this looks amazing. So you could spend all your time pitching to never

get a deal. So you can waste any enormous amount of time with your concept to your business and never find funding for it. And you've got to remember 97% of all businesses fail. So if I'm into VC and I've got a hundred million dollars and I'm going to go put three million dollars into thirty three companies, I only need one of them to work and I can still get my returns marked at three four five hundred percent. Whereas if you're the entrepreneur and you're one of the

thirty three, the six seeds, that's great. But if you're one of the thirty two that fails, they also cut you off of the knees faster and you can blink. So so you know, it's not it's not

“for the faint apart. And you better have a solid plan and here's the thing about businesses”

and you'll know this more than most people understand. The way you do is only going to get you so far, it's who you do it with and how you do it that's going to scale and create value. And so you can have the greatest idea and be the smartest technician and be the greatest inventor. But most likely at some point, you're going to screw it all up because you don't understand leadership. You don't understand all the science behind actually finding, attracting, aligning and developing and keeping

great people. You don't understand how to actually properly one as sophisticated, financial organization that's responsible like a public company would need to be. And so all these things get learned through trial and error. And VC is not patient money. And private equity usually has a fuse on it, somewhere between four and seven years. And if you're trying to personally scale up and learn all these different things at the same time, you've got to create the product, deliver the product, make the

product work, make sure it's differentiated in the marketplace. That timing usually doesn't work out. So they start bringing new people in and they start cramming down and you need more funding. And next thing you know, you don't have control your company. They do. And they've got better choices because the thing you built worked, but they don't need you involved anymore. And you don't know how to handle the other aspects of the business, which is how and who. And you

end up getting replaced. And that's usually, and Steve Jobs even went through that cycle. So that's usually what happens. And if you don't have the stomach for that, and statistically, if you're going to be the 32 that fail versus the one that succeeds, then I think there's a different way to do it, which is the way you did it. And the way I've done it now four times over. Which is bootstrapping. And just yeah, yeah, I love that. Okay. So you ended up selling

your next company for a lot of money like 77 EBITDA when usually things sell for like 48X, right? Yes. Why do you think you were able to sell it for so much? And you know, did you do that intentionally, like where there's things that you did intentionally to ensure that you were going to sell. So so much. Yeah. So when I launched the business, first of all, is the first person to create a a what I call a reverse consolidation equity model. The problem with the consolidation is you go race

capital from VC or private equity, you go out and start acquiring a whole bunch of other people's

“problems. Then you got to systematize them. Then you need to build leadership and you need all this”

complexity. And so usually you go through a period of when you're buying, you go through devaluation

on your way there. So you're always trying to raise more capital. You're always trying, you're always

guy, you know, the idea you could be out of business anytime. Some more money, more money, more money, more money. Your story gets diluted. People stop believing in you. Every time you do a valuation, the next round of valuation, it gets less in value because you need more money. And so you go up to all this, what I call the devaluation cycle when you're using other people's money. And then you ultimately lose and give up control. And then it becomes is a really worth it with everybody

need to be prepared for, then the other option is, boost rap your company, be in control of it and

“learn to force the company and make money. And if the company doesn't make money, you don't have”

a lot of headaches because you don't have a lot of people. And if the company does make money, and you set up your reserves, you have enough money to invest in the next iteration. And if you make a mistake, you don't have somebody cutting your throat because you don't know what you're doing, and they're going to get rid of you. And so I would look at, when I was running around with my private equity groups, I was looking at what they would define as platform companies, the platform

companies between 125, 175 million, it has leadership, it has systems, it has processes, it's

profitable, it's predictable, it's got growth trajectory, and it's dependable because our private equity venture capital is entirely different. Private equity likes to invest in things that's predictable, it's consistent, and it has upside down. Otherwise, they're not interested in it, unless they're going to consolidate it into somebody else they like, and they're just investing

“in you to get rid of all you and the people around you. So you got to know who you are and what”

kind of target you are because a lot of people are excited, I'm going to do a deal with private equity, and then they close and then they're fired and their teams wiped out because they were a bolt on or they were a plug in or they were whatever, they just got rolled inside of somebody else's organization. So seeing all this, I was like, how can I in the small business space create multiple platform companies, and that gave me the idea of reverse consolidation, instead of me raising capital,

deluding my equity and going out and buying businesses and trying to turn owners into employees, which doesn't really work very well. Why don't I start platform company and go to owners who are struggling and say, I'll build marketing sales, leadership operations, finance, technology, you can offload all that to me and instead of me buying your company, I'll give you equity in my company and with the right to swap to buy into your company in a predetermined

“valuation and yeah, I was totally wouldn't work. The SEC said I couldn't do it. All this taxation”

issues franchise laws, I bumped up against all that, but I was able to create a workable model that I launched in 2006 with the idea that if I could build a prototype to consolidate a vertical, I could do it across hundreds of verticals. I launched that business boost strapped, built the rules and requirements of how I wanted to build a business without needing anybody else's capital. And red a lot of books to really become an expert in the things that I was not good

out the first time around. And then all of a sudden by eight, nine, ten, I was in five hundred ink, five thousand fastest growing this fastest growing that entrepreneur the year. And so I added a research firm when the market went to shit in 2009 because of the real estate space.

And I was able to hire FTI a billion dollar research firm and I looked at 10,000 verticals,

hired eight people inside from Morton and Stanford. And I wanted to understand what makes businesses work, what causes them to fails, what are the things that we could create from an infrastructure. And I built what I call now the transformational growth platform, which is taking belief, operational effectiveness and leadership. And in the center of all that, scaling it from zero to a billion. There's the 11 break points from startup to a billion dollars. We identified

seven from zero to 125 million. And just reverse engineered based on the businesses approved they could become a platform exactly what's involved with doing it. And I built, basically, 10 at all, meant 76 set by elements in 240 things. You got a master to get to 125 million. And then it

multiplies that to get to a billion. And I built it all off the research with the idea that when I

sold my business, I was going to start a new company, which is called omentures now. The one of my mentors told me in 2013, you came to start a whole bunch of new companies. If you don't prove this concept to work where you're using a shared equity model with your clients versus a crammed down acquiring model, you got to prove the cycle. So what I did is I looked at all the highest valuations paid for businesses with the same research company. And I said, why did some of these

businesses sell for 30, 40, 50, 100 XD beta? Like what did they have? And I took that, put it on top of the other model I created. And I had an idea in 2013. If I position my organization, like the highest valued companies that sold, and I sold it the way they sold, I could command one of the highest values for me and my partners. And I went and on 2015, I did a road show eight specific targeted potential buyers. And these are sophisticated, like EQT out of Europe, but you're a 56 billion

dollar PE group. Seaman's medical. These are not small companies. And I pitched them in my pitch was, I'm Brandon Dawson. I have a 35 million dollar company. It makes $2.2 million and EBITDA.

within 36 to 48 months. And I want 10 percent. That was my pitch. I was totally, I was totally

“would never fly. I had eight presentations. I had eight betters. It was a reported 151. It was an”

actual 189. It was better than 77 XEBITDA. And the company that acquired me was a billion and within

three years, they were four to half billion in value. Wow. That's really incredible. You're

so smart. I feel like you just think like so much differently. Yeah, Ben, we knew what makes me feel extra profiting, getting luxury quality without the luxury pricing. I'm trying to be smarter with my money these days, but I still love things that look expensive, or high quality, and actually last. And Quince has totally nailed this. Quince has become my new obsession. They make elevated essentials for women, men, and kids from clothing, and jewelry

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Quince.com/propheting for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Quince.com/propheting for free shipping and 365-day returns. QU-I-N-C-E.com/propheting. Quince.com/propheting. One of the things that you mentioned is that significant cash reserves

“were really important for you when you were, you know, growing your business. Talk to us about”

the importance of having cash reserves and how you think about it and what is a good amount of cash that we should have on hand. Yeah. And the reason that was a rule is because literally four years of my life in the previous company, I would be sweating by 10 o'clock in the morning.

Every other week because I had had payroll coming and I was always short 200 grand, 300 grand.

And I was good dialing for dollars and I was scrambling to try to get money and I was like, I am not going to live that way. I mean, it's so horrible. And for any entrepreneur that's living that way today, there is an alternative. The alternative that I decided I was going to create a rule for myself when I started my company. I turned the whole idea of revenue, profit, and cash into a game. And so what I did was when I launched my company, I had 90 days of cash and I told my team

for every two weeks, here's the target we have to hit in revenue and it buys us two more weeks of being in business. And when we launched that business, June 15th, 2005, I had literally 90 days of capital. My target was to generate 15,000 in the last two weeks of June. I generated 76,000. So then my goal was to get 30 days of cash reserves. So if I went to zero, I could live for 30 days. That was target one. Target two is 90. Target three was 180. Target four was a year. Target five

was 18 months of cash in my account. So I never had to think or worry about money. It showed

or disappointed in the business. Well, within 36 months, I had 18 months of cash in the business in the in the bank. I never once thought about money in that 14 year cycle. I was running events with $12,400 people. That what I would pay for millions of dollars money became zero issue.

“And that's the discipline. And that's how we teach business owners to grow and scale.”

Consequently, I launched this business with Grant Cardone six years ago. And I said to them, we're going to launch a business. We're not going to use any money. I don't want you to put any in. I'm not going to put any in. And I said in the first 60 months, we're going to go from dead stop to 125 million in revenue. And then the next 60 to a billion. And so we just finished our fifth full year. It's five and a half years. And last year, between Cardone mentors

and Tnik's health, which I bought Gary Breck is $1.5 million in business. And then turned it into $125 million in our business within 36 months. So between the two businesses, we own 99% of Tnik's health. And Cardone mentors last year, we did $240 million in revenue. We made $45 million of E. But, uh, and we've never bought a dime. We've never invested a dime. And we have cash reserves about $50 million. Wow. That's really awesome. So do you recommend 18 months to be like the

ultimate goal for entrepreneurs to have on hand? Look, it's all about people will say, you don't need

competitor and you had extra cash, that would just accelerate your growth cycle and you have confidence to be able to run it. But if you don't have 18 months and you've got one month,

you're never going to buy anything. You're never going to risk anything. You are going to,

you know this. I don't know how many people you probably hired thought they're going to save my life. And then you're firing them six or nine months later like they didn't do shit. They cost problems. If you were a young entrepreneur, as you go through the growth cycle for one to three million and three to eight million and eight to 15 and 50, everything dynamically changes with a multiplier. Because when you're three million or less, and you know this, you're doing everything.

When you go to eight to 15, you now have to do everything, but through other people. And if you're not skilled at finding and attracting, aligning, developing and keeping great people, how do you do it through other people without them degrading what you did the work? And if you can't, you end up breaking and going out of business. By the time you're 25 million on average, you've got somewhere around, I don't know, 25 million. You've got somewhere around 50 to 150 people working for you.

If you've never taken a leadership class or you've never taken a communications course,

or you didn't become an expert in personalities and communications and leadership,

“you're in big trouble. And so the things you need to evolve, if the business is going to grow”

and scale the person and charge the business must grow and scale. I've never seen an entrepreneur that built a $3 million business to stay to $3 million entrepreneur and grow to $100. So the business will follow the leader, 100% and then after 15 million, the business will follow the leaders, and then after 45 million, the business will be culturally the leader. And if you can't make those transformations, you're out of business. Let's go deeper on some of those concepts.

So one thing I want to talk about, we were just, you were just talking about teams. One last question on your sale of oddages. How you pronounce that business oddages? That's correct, yes. You actually shared some of the earnings of when you sold with your employees. When I started the model, I shared 45% of the equity with my customers on an innovative program I put together and my employees. Yeah. So your employees knew when you were hiring

them, that was like part of their compensation package. This is where most business owners, John Maxwell talks about in 21 year-reviewed was a leadership law of picture. Where there's no picture people get lost. They get confused. They don't know where they fit into the picture. So they start emotionally self-selecting in or out of certain things. And how many times do you think a business owner set back and said, man, I was just getting ready to promote that person,

then they quit. Well, because that owner did not pay a picture. There was no destination. The employee could not see themselves inside of the owner's bubble. They couldn't translate. If I'm here eight years or 12 years, what do I get out of it? How much could I put in my bank account? How wealthy could I become? Because no business owner generally starts their business with a 10-year plan showing valuation enhancements and increases and what it means to the individual.

Because they build it year by year, step by step, break by brick from the ground up until traditionally collapses, because at some point your best people fill overwhelmed overworked under appreciated and they have options. So if you can keep your good people, every person I hired, if at my president started first job, he ever had it. And I said, you're going to have seven to eight

“bosses. And if you want to quit at any time I put a boss in charge of you, then you're the wrong guy”

for me to let you run this company eventually. And he's like, but I don't like these guys. I'm like, yeah, but I have to hire him because they technically know how to do the work that you don't know how to do. And what makes you great is you culturally understand the organization and you represent the brand. But if you culturally operationally and financially don't learn to integrate those three things, you can't be in charge because you won't understand how to grow the people underneath you.

So you have to have the competency to do the job, not just the confidence to do the job. And so everyone understood it when I sold the business 65% of my leadership that got 15 million out of the business.

It was the first jobs they ever had in their career. Wow, that's incredible.

All right. So let's move on to like some of your scaling and leadership principles. First off, you always talk about the difference between the word scale and grow. Can you talk to us about the difference? Scale versus scaling. Yeah. People confuse those things. Scales maximizing what you have. So if you're a 10 million or revenue and you're making 15% profit,

“before you try to go to 25 million, you should try to go from 10 million or revenue to making”

3 million in profit. That would be scale maximizing what you have. Scaling is the rapid expansion of what you can prove work. So now once I'm 10 million and I move my 1.5 million to 2.5 million

just bank a bunch of revenues, I'm actually trying to increase the bottom line, create bigger cash reserves,

create discipline into the organization. And basically once you do that, and then you're like, okay, I'm going to hit the go button because I have safety. I have cash reserves. I have great people. We know what we're doing. We were able to improve the performance of the organization, not just Chase revenue, and now I'm going to bump to the next level. Because the thing is, is that each time you bump in 10 million increments, what got you to that 10 million isn't going to get you to the

20 and what got you the 20 is not going to get you to the 30. And if you're the main driver of the business, you have no idea what you're doing. And if you think you're going to hire anybody to come fix your problems between 25 million and start up, you're wrong. Most people you bring in will break your business because they're bringing in the context of their problems from their other jobs,

“and they're bringing them into your little business. So if you want to go from zero to 25 million,”

you're just going to have to concede that you have to home grow that team if you've never done

it before because you don't know what that team actually looks like. And you've got plenty of people that are like, oh, there's 6 million revenue. Here's my CEO. Here's my CEO. Here's my CEO. Here's my CEO. Here's my CEO. Here's my CEO. There ain't no CEO, CFO, CMO. That is worth their weight of anything you're paying them at 6 million a revenue. Those are 75 million to 125 million dollar jobs. Somebody considering their CFO and their CMO at 6 million in an organization like ours or yours

would be a directed level. Someone make an 80 to $150,000 a year. They don't know anything about a 25,500 million dollar business. So what happens is business owners hire these people in, they get close to them and then they're constrained by the competency, the skill set, the leadership abilities and the thinking of the person they gave a big title to, but they've never actually won a big company. And so now they're stuck and they're all the decisions they've ever been

made across the spectrum of five or six people are all going to be wrong because nobody's ever

“done it. And so you just have to own that. And if you want to build a 25 million dollar company,”

you have to say, day one, I have to grow into being the kind little leader and responsible business owner that knows how to build a 25 million dollar company. Once you make that commitment, you're like, what does a 25 million responsible, profitable, successful business look like? And if you don't go out and find that data, then you have to concede your building your business to trial and error. It's the slowest way to do it. It's the riskiest way to do it. And if you

let your ego get involved, you're going to go out of business. Hmm. Why don't we take my business as a case study? And you can kind of tell me, like, what do you think I should do? Or like, because I'm kind of at like a pivotal point. So my company made $7 million last year. How many employees do you have? I have about nine U.S. employees and like 40 international. So actually, our talent, we do a lot of international talent, lots of people in India, Nigeria, and then I have about

nine U.S. employees. In terms of my executives, I just have two. I have one girl Kate, who helps me run my social media agency, and then my business partner who helps me run my network, who's like, more of my COO. At your point, we don't have like, you know, fancy titles. We don't have to see it. We have like somebody who helps us with finances, but he's, you know, not a CFO. And I haven't really spent a lot of money hiring executives yet, because to your point, I feel like when I do hire

expensive U.S. hires, they don't do anything. They're not helpful. Especially at this stage, because to your point, they don't know enough. And I'd rather like, you know, Kate, for example, who's one of my highest paid employees, she was an intern that started with me seven years ago. Exactly. Yeah. So talk to me about like, what, you know, we want to get $2.30 million in the next three years. What do we do? Okay. Well, 0 to 3 million is just the thing that you do

it has to work. Now, you just mentioned that effectively, you have two different businesses doing 7 million. Yeah. I have two different business doing 7 million. My podcast itself makes a million dollars a year. It makes a million in the other business makes six. Six and a half. Okay. So now, so what you got to look at, those are two separate businesses. And so when you aggregate the revenue, and what you already said is you have a service leader, somebody who's wanting each of those businesses,

“is just what you'd defined, right? So you have a key stakeholder in each of those businesses,”

isn't it in your visionary? And then you hire and help for finances and things like that. So this is kind of how it's built. The way you do will get you to 3 million, who you do it with it's you to 8. So what's allowed you to get to where you're at is you've got a couple people you can rely on and

depend on. And I call this the rule of three. I've never seen a successful 8 to 15 million

our business that didn't have three stakeholders because no one person can do all the things that you need help doing. You can't run a podcast, plus an operating company, plus be the host, plus be this, plus be that, plus be doing the books in the middle of the night. You can't do all

The move to 8 million, there ultimately is always going to be three people involved,

“they were doing it. To get to 15 million, those three people need to evolve to critical positions”

in the organization. The visionary founder, you're going to be one of those. There's no question. But if you don't flank yourself with a controller level, finance, and show person, who is easy for you to communicate, easy for you to get along with, easy for you to trust because that does a big thing in these businesses. If you don't have that by your side, you're going to start making technical financial decisions that will break your

company eventually. The other side of you is you're going to need that operator. That person that you just talked about, but they're going to have to look, they're going to have to help you across both organizations. Now that move to 25 million by the time you get to 25 million, because you're going to be running your business on somewhere between 12 and 17 different systems to 25 million. You're going to have your CRM's probably different ones for different businesses.

You're going to have your technical teams. You're going to have your different automation. You're running on. You're going to be using your social media. You all this needs to get consolidated into something that you can look at and take action against. At 25 million, you're going to be having to switch your business from cash to a cruel somewhere in there. Which means you're going to start changing compensation structures. You're going to piss off people. You're going to start realizing

that the money you book is revenue is really deposits. So you're going to think about the context and the strategy, your business is a little different. You're going to need a different caliber person who can make that transformation financially for you. What should you do,

“I think you did the accrual already. There you go. So you go from cash to a hybrid cash accrual”

and then eventually you go full cruel. So these are all the things that for your business to mature. But at 25 million, you're going to need five people that are running your business alongside you. You're going to need a financial person. You're going to need some level of technology person. You're going to need your operating person. You're going to need your sales person to make sure you're closing and getting the money in and then you're going to need you. Set the

tones. Here's where we're going. That rock over there is where we're sailing to. There's no compromises. Now, we're going to do within the boundaries of how we structured and run the organization. You're going to be looking at cash collected daily against monthly targets divided by 30 days. Some people are saying, but we don't work 30 days. There's only 20 days in a work week. You're like, no, that's a rule that somebody else made up. We work. We take money in 30 days a week. So how

do we offer things where we can collect money or how do we run dual teams? So Saturdays and

“Sundays, we can also generate capital. Somebody has to be in charge. And this is what happens”

with businesses as they start to grow. The business owner gets trapped in doing all the work. And it hopes the people they surround themselves with are going to set that tone. But those

people have never been in that kind of environment. They don't work in that environment. The work

life balance starts to become a conversation. Are because targets are being missed. People are pissed. They're not making the money they want. And all that waste starts landing back on your shoulders. And people are saying, you don't give us the attention. You don't give us the time. You're too busy. You're not giving us the right direction. I would start today at seven and say target is if you're going to do 30, it might as well be 45. Because what you're going to have

you to get to 30 isn't going to be any different to 45. You can say 25 and say, okay, this is what it's going to look like. A 25, I'm going to have four other partners at 25, we're going to be running 25% profitability. That's six point two five million dollars a profit. We're going to be generating two million dollars on average two point two million dollars every single month divided by 30. That's our daily cash target. And I'm going to be looking at that cash collected every single

day. And then for a head of schedule, we're going to adjust our target up and for behind schedule, we're going to attack it and get back on target. And you're going to drive with that level of intensity. And if you don't and you're like, I was working and I hope it works. And they're going to be great.

It's all going to fall apart around you. At that intensity never ends all the way to 125 because

to go from 25 to 45, 45 to 75, 75 to 75 to 125, you as the owner are going to have to make the leaps and bounds of a skill set adjustment. In the way I have done that is I bring retired people in who are really an authority. I hired them for up to 18 months to work side by side with the younger people I'm developing. So they understand how to make the move from cash to a cruel or hybrid. They understand what cash collected is. They understand how to put money aside and how to get money

on the money. And they understand how to manage the balance sheet. They understand like, somebody has to teach if you have a great finance person who's young and hungry that you trust, somebody's got to develop them on what a hundred and twenty five million dollar CFO looks like. Well, you start hiring those people. And then if you don't like them, you get rid of them and get somebody else, right? But you're not burning out your one person you really like, but they just

don't know what they're doing. And the biggest risk is those people aren't going to want to let

really bad when it happens. But they're not going to let you know it's happening to fix it ahead of time.

“Because they're scared that you'll lose confidence in them. So that's what you're going to do”

to get to twenty five or thirty million. So I know that there's sort of like a bottleneck or a plateau

at three to five million that a lot of businesses hit. So how would do people get over this? And what are some of the common challenges that you see at that stage of entrepreneurship? Yeah, we'll just look at this statistically. Thirty, four and a half million small-dimensional businesses. Ninety two percent I believe are stuck at three million or less with twelve employees or less. So it is Blake Point One.

And that's because the what works. And then you hire a friend or two. And then maybe you got your daughter or your wife or your mother working in the business. And so things are kind of working because you are good at what you do. Now you're at three in your stock and your in your profitability shrinking. You don't really know how to manage your business well because you have all these personalities. You're not exerting leadership because you want to upset your mother and lawn and your

daughter or your wife. And so there's people are tip-toeing around each other. But now you're spending more money. You're hiring marketing agencies. You're hiring employees. You're buying vans or you're increasing your location size because you're pushing your business to growth. And are long that you're pushing it. This is scale versus scaling. You're getting diminishing returns. As you get diminishing returns, you start to get flustered. You start to get frustrated.

You start to get fear. You start to have anxiety. You start to get more stress because you're making less money and you're working even that much harder. And you start to give up on the idea getting big and you decide to settle on what worked with the people it worked with. This is the cycle. These businesses go through. I call the washing machine in cycle. It just keeps going. You take something out of a washing person. I'm about in. It's still banging around, banging around.

And it's because the way you do is only going to get you so far. Recognizing from three to

five million scale versus scaling, you shouldn't be trying to push your business by spending

“more money and by hiring more people and by buying more assets. You should be trying to slide”

to five million with the same people, the same assets and the same resources you have at three. Because there's no way you maximize your operational effectiveness in your business when you have no idea what you're doing. And you assume you do because it works. But it will not work when you go from three to five. Increasing the costs, increasing assets, increasing time isn't the thing that's going to take you to five. Being more efficient, being more effective, hiring higher

quality people who can execute without you babysitting them and do it for you instead of you doing it. These are the things they're going to move the business. And they will pull the business up versus you shoving it up. And this is why so many business owners wear themselves out. And if you listen to the people they'll use the right language, it's like rolling a huge rock up a big hill. Yeah, because you need to tame the polar rock up the hill. So you're doing it because you're

good at something and you've been doing it is the thing that's going to kill you. That rock

“will roll back on you. You recognizing you need to surround yourself with other people who are”

as committed, who want to help you pull that rock up the hill. And they come along side of you. Well, that's a different skill set because you have to create that. And you can't do a no accountability, no discipline, all that stuff in your business. And you can't do it by giving people bigger titles because you don't make enough money to give them raises. Those aren't the things that are going to get you there. And if you don't technically choose to change who you

are, how you think and what you do as the leader of the business, you're guaranteed to have the business fall the leader. As we're talking about these leadership principles, you brought up John Maxwell, who I love. I've been to a bunch of his events. I haven't interviewed him yet, but I love his books. And you mentioned one of his principles. You also talk about in your book The Law of the lid. Can you talk just about the importance of the law of the lid when you're thinking about leadership

in the business? 100%. You know, I was not a good leader in my first business. The first thing

I had to acknowledge is I really sucked. I was practicing on everything. I let my ego get the middle of it. I thought leadership was telling people what to do and demanding that they do. It was it was really all backwards. Okay. So when my mentor, when when we went through what I did well and all the things I screwed up when I was going to reset and start again, he gave me a list of books based on where I identified my biggest weaknesses, leadership, operations, finance. And he gave

me a bunch of books. John Maxwell, 21 year, a few of the laws of leadership, sharing lecture, cash, flow quadrant, beyond positive thinking for how, because my thinking was broken, gym columns go to

come back to me and tell me what you did wrong the first time around. So I had that context contrast,

right? You need that as a business owner. And I came back and I created this massive list of all the shit I did wrong. And then I started reading the books and filming the gaps and the first book on leadership was John Maxwell's 21 year few laws. He ended up writing three, now he's got four. But he ended up writing three additional law books. So he had 53 laws and then I created a whole algorithm out of the 53 laws. But the first one I read in the first chapter was Law the Lit.

Lit is a cap. It's, it's, it's, you cannot be a five leader and have age working for you. They'll leave you. You can't be a five producer and develop ten producers. They'll leave you. You can't be, you can't be an inspiration as a three. Who business folks and everything's hard. They expect people to be excited and work for you. So I created, it just became so obvious when I started getting into James Collins and John Maxwell. I realized there was three lids in business,

lit is the cap. It's the belief lid. The higher you believe, the more energy effort you'll push into achieving it, as soon as you lower your belief, you give up on pushing. So the higher you

“believe, higher you achieve lower you believe, lower your cap. Well, the only way if you believe”

high that you're actually going to reinforce getting there is through operational effectiveness. So I realized there's an operational effectiveness lid in the business. So if I'm a three sales manager, I'm only going to produce two's and ones. If I may three producer, all I have two's and ones. So the only way for the business to grow in scale, proportionate to my belief about what's possible, is if my operational effectiveness grows in scales. So conversion, all the numbers in the stats,

and all those things have to grow, or eventually I go, oh, it's not going to happen or my team says, he's crazy. He believes he's going to be under a million, but he's been going three million for 10 years. Nobody believes me anymore. Well, to have high effectiveness in the operational effectiveness and to have high belief, there's three stages of leadership identified. First is the

“meat leadership. Do I have the patience, the persistence, the perseverance? If I really believe”

and getting to 125 million, I am never giving up until I get there. I don't care if I fail a thousand

times. I don't care if I'm like, I'm going there. Okay. Now, that takes strong meat leadership. People like, oh, we can't do it. It's not going to work. Screw it. I'm going there anyway. Right? Strong meat leadership. If I lower my meat leadership, I am guaranteed everyone around me is going to lower their leadership expectations. But once I start going, I have to create re-leadership because that move from 8 million to 15 million to 25 million is no longer me

propping everybody up. It's the core leadership team telling everyone and inspiring everyone. We can do it. We can do it. I can't do it all by myself. But something magical happens. So that goes from me leadership to creating re-leadership, a group of us doing it. That'll be

3 at 15, 5 at 25. At 45 million to 75 of your business is still pushing and it becomes us leadership.

And the definition of us leadership I created was cultural leadership. Your group and your company is pushing and pulling the company to success. Because if you take the statistics and gallop pull for 25 straight years every year, they interview 100 million US workers. Two-thirds say they're actively disengage or disengage. 18% admit their sabotage in the company. So if you have a honored employee, 60% are doing little to nothing. And 20% are trying to put you out of business.

So that's a lot of weight for the business owner to hold themselves. But by the time you make those moves, your weel leadership teams dragging those people. But at 45 to 75, your culture, your people who have been there and they're committed and they got your logo and they believe in what you stand for and they believe in you and they believe in where you're going and they believe they're going to win with you. They'll run off the bottom 30%, 40%. And so if you get your, if you

cannot understand that it goes for me to us, of me, we us and you grow yourself, you want to

“lead because those are all three different lids. That's why when people like, oh, I'm a great leader.”

How many, how many employees do you have 20? You're just benchmarking against the wrong person. Like, like, you're, you're good from where you came from, but you're not good to what is available. And I think most people get stuck on where they came from versus what's really available. In terms of like actionable steps that people can take to increase their lead, level up their lead, you mentioned a bunch of really great books, which we can put in the

show notes for everybody. What else should people do? Should they get a mentor? Should they join a entrepreneurship group? You know, I, it's a tricky subject. First of all, on the books,

if you went to one of my events in 2008, you would have had 15 books in front of you and there were to been 500 tabs and my notes as to why those 500 tabs are relative. I consolidated a majority of that for the belief aspect. So the three lids, belief, operational, effectiveness, leadership, I consolidated the belief into my book nine figure mindset. So if somebody's like, how do I take the shortcut to not having to read all these books? You can simply go to my nine

figure mindset and you'll get it. My wife wrote, "Start the work and and teamwork, which is the people aspect of growing and scaling your business." And then my partner wrote, "Tenek's rule, seller be sold, which is you for you, and learning how to communicate your sales proposition." And then of course, I would rip through the John Maxwell's leaders, the lids books. He's got four of them now or the the laws books. He's got four I would go through right now. So so you can consolidate

into just that group of books. But share and lecture three feet from gold. Everyone should read that and think about what's my one little thing I'm not thinking about where I could tap into the gold in my business because most people do that wrong. Here's the net of it though. If you're not committed to personal development beyond where you're at today, if you're not willing to grow your awareness. If you're not willing to really judge your overall effectiveness. If you're not willing

to test into your own ideas on are you actually evolving as a remarkable leader or are you

“relying on what you've already developed for leadership skills? You have to be honest with yourself”

because when things stop working, you've tapped out your lid and then you're going to start

defolting to blaming everything around you and the truth is that simply you chose not to continue to

grow your lid. So the resources for this, there's plenty of these resources now goes over to mentors and it goes over to advisors. And what I'll tell you is most people are communicating entirely into the wrong mentors and wrong advisors. They're what I call polling, asking people what would you do and what do you think I should do and how would you how did you do it or how would you do it? Well the problem is they don't know what they really want to do. They don't have that clear

picture where they're going to. They're talking to the wrong people who have never done it or maybe they did it but they don't know exactly how they did it. So they give you the same thing you're going to get an arbert which is you got to be a great leader. You got to be strategic. You got to have a plan. You got, you know it's like all stuff that's like okay how exactly, right? What is the specific

“exact way to do it? We're a build one on another. And that's what I developed because I realized”

that it doesn't exist in the marketplace. The only way really today is trial and error. There's no science. So I wanted to be the first in the marketplace to create the science of scaling. And that's what we've done. So we've been able to show people. Now since launching this business, I personally have created $200 million companies from dead stop, no invested capital, no debt. We've run nine billion of businesses through Cardone Ventures. We've got a portfolio of about 230 business owners

that are doubling and tripling in size. And so now we're going back and studying what we did with all of them. So people can just get the quick answer but here's the net effect. If you're talking to somebody and I have some friends in the marketplace and you've interviewed some of these people who've been hugely successful building their business. But the information

and data they're giving you is still somewhat generic. So it's like here's what I did and here's

how I did it. That's great. But that doesn't tell you in the moment in the heat of battle. If I make a choice between 1, 2, 3 or A, B and C, which decision do I need to make to get the fastest result? And what should I expect that result to be? It's very difficult. So and here's the thing I would tell everyone watching or listening to your show. If you're asking guidance or advice from somebody who's never done it, like what I call pulling your friends, your family,

other business owners, what do you think I'd do? You're already going to go broke. That's a guarantee.

“The only people you should be asking anything of are people who are living, breathing examples”

of what you're actually trying to do. Because if you go to people in multiple industries, it's going to be different. Those nuances is the things you need to do the tech. If I'm trying

to build my HFAC business from 5 to 25 million, it's going to be entirely different metrics,

different things I look at. Then if I'm building my restaurant chain from 3 to 15 locations. Because you're going to have a lot more employees, a lot more moving parts, a lot more inventory issues. You have to manage versus the HFAC business. If I'm building the HFAC business

But the nuances is what's going to make or break you. So you need to find people that are actual living, breathing examples in the thing you're trying to do. And here's a pro tip. If you're sitting here right now, thinking you want to start a business, don't. Go find a business owner that has a 5 to 10 million dollar business that's frustrated. They've been able to demonstrate that they're able to be in business, but they're not really growing. And perfect the art of identifying

the perfect kind of client, how to communicate to them through meet, what you do, what you teach people to do, how to promote to them so they can actually hear what you're saying, how to engage them to get them to be interested in what you're talking about and how you can help them and just

“work with a business owner and figure that out because that's what most technician-owned businesses”

88% of them never learned how to do is to activate new clients because they started their business

with friends or with an inner circle or a warm market and they just built it till that ran out and papped out at 3 million and then they don't know how to promote and get new customers. Every business needs new clients. And so if you could just perfect that, you could build just about anything. Yeah, I love that advice. It reminds me of what Cody Sanchez talks about, which is like 5 boring businesses, but you're suggesting go work for somebody.

She talks about buying laundry mats and stuff. I mean, look, that's, that's, that's Cody's awesome. And, and if that's what you want and I've got a lot of wealthy friends at own 50 laundry mats or 20 car washes or, I mean, those are unbelievable. I, I just be completely transparent. I started buying many storage in 2000. In 2000, I have 680,000 square feet with a

“couple of partners and they pay me 60,000 a month. I've got all my money plus out. So those things are”

great. I view that as a different type of business. That's more of like, if I want to build a micro portfolio of things that will cash flow and then there's nothing wrong with that and Cody's, the best in the world that talking about it. I'm a business builder of businesses. Things that actually can become 10 million, 50 million, 500 million, a billion. That's the market. I don't do startups. I'm not even interested in talking about how to hire my first employee or my second

employee. It's just, it's not my expertise or where I choose to spend my time. My sweet spot is 3 million to 100 million and 10Xing that. And, and if you're a business owner and you're at that stage and you're frustrated, you just simply need to understand. You just don't know what you don't know and the hardest and slowest and most complicated and dangerous way to do it is to practicing trial and error. And so you need a different solution. So if I'm in HFAC or dental or anything,

who do I want to talk to? I want to talk to the dentist to build a hundred chain unit and sold it. I want to talk to the, if I want laundry mats, I want to go find somebody. I learn from Cody and then I go find somebody that owns 10 laundry mats. And I say, look, you teach me how you did this.

I'll go find 10 more and make you a 50 50 partner. Drafting is always faster than being in the

headwinds by yourself. Every professional sport proves that out in motor sports and in bicycling as if you can cut in behind somebody who's already moving quicker, you both move quicker. I'd rather learn from somebody who's a living breathing, prove an example and whatever I want to do and I'd rather give them half of whatever I'm going to do because that was my value popped a grant. Grant, I don't know how to bring in millions of people into this audience and do all this

social stuff, but I do know how to take a business owner and blow their business up and make a highly profitable and valuable. I'll give you 50% of a new company. I'm the management partner. I control everything because it's my IP. You and my partner own half. Once I prove to you and you feel that I'm credible and what we're telling you, me up my wife and I were business partners,

“then you just blow on us and tell people go talk to my partner. And that's how we've created”

a quarter of a billion dollars in five years. We're no investor capital, no debt. That's worth, you know, probably a couple billion dollars right now to be honest with you. So the idea is doing up by yourself is broken thinking because you're never going to get big by yourself. Doing it and inventing an already invented space is stupid so that that's going to be a high condition for failure. So what is the fastest and biggest way to become successful? Find an

example that's doing it. Make a commitment that you'll add value to them. Make a bigger commitment that if they teach you how to do it, you'll partner with them and go become an expert in something that's already proven to work by somebody who's proven they know how to do it. There's six trillion dollars of businesses getting handed off in the next eight years from

baby boomers who have three, five, ten, fifty, a hundred million dollar businesses and they never

made any money. They're just giving those businesses away. So becoming an expert on how to start

just starting something hoping over the next 20 years you can create a legacy value in that business.

“Hmm, you just have done something that I was going to be my next question which is your”

relationship with Grant and Cardone Ventures and this idea of creator entrepreneurship is really popular right now and essentially, you know, it's all about getting eyeballs online and having social media and the biggest entrepreneurs out there also have a huge personal brand like Grant does. So talk to us about, you know, why you teamed up with him and sort of how you see things evolving and why you thought having a partner who had a big personal brand was really important

for your next company. Yeah, so we hired the same research firm in 2016 when I sold my business for the 77 times he but I hired IGS had a Boston. It's another huge research company in the private equity uses. I gave him the original work we did with FTI out of Chicago and I said refresh this 10,000 business scoping thing over the next three years while I integrate my business into the Danish public company that we took from one to four and a half billion and when we had done all that

and all that new data came back I told Natalie Natalie now we're talking about starting our new company and and so we're like what's the fastest way to success and she's half my age and she said

“you should look at some of these social media people who have legitimate businesses so she made”

me a list of 25 people because I wasn't following social media and I hired my same research company

and I said here's what we want to build. We want to build a business that helps entrepreneurs and

business owners across these hundreds of sectors to be able to grow scale create massive value. We want to do it with somebody who has high credibility, somebody who understands how to build a business and so I turned them loose they came back and said here's a list of three people. We went deep on those three people. The reason we picked Grant and Elena Cardone is because Grant I created the first reverse triangular merger decentralized democratized equity

structure with business owners long before blockchain came out to innovate the small business space and create platform companies Grant was the first person that actually took the laws that changed from David Wheel during the Obama administration crowdfunding laws and and he was the first

“to actually do it in in multi-family and when I went to his event he had raised 250 million directly”

from his community nobody else had done that. I knew we were going to buy businesses and wanted to do with our community so I said that's a perfect fit. He does it for real estate. I'll see how he does it and I can do it for businesses with business owners. Then underneath that he was the number one marketing and sales guy in the marketplace and so he had that down. Now I'm a scaling expert based on the engineering I know there's 10 things to build a big business. You got to be an expert

app first strategy second promotion marketing third sales conversion fourth people. You got to find people 50. You got to be able to deliver 60. You got to understand your finances and get your numbers right. Seventh you got to become a master for a leader eight data. You got to know what you're looking at nine systems and technology because that's different than data in expanding growths in your business and then 10 investment thesis what to do with your money to get the highest returns and

grow scaling faster right by either automating or acquiring assets or bolting on or touching in or buying your technology. Whatever it is. Well he had the sales and marketing and investment thesis for real estate. I had everything else. So we went to that conference. My wife scoped it. We went there to say okay what is this audience look like who shows up and while we were there we had on a list of all the verticals we were excited about and we just started meeting of 34,000 people.

I'd never knew anything about Grant Cardone. Other what I said online we went in boss seats 35

grams sent in the front row with the idea that if we didn't see what we wanted to see by the end of the half of the first day we were out of there. We saw everything we wanted to see. We met so many remarkable business owners that were there and we're like why are you here? What are you doing with Grant? Well it just so happens John Maxwell was speaking at that event. The John and his leadership team whom Natalie and I are extremely close to for the last 10 years. We went to

dinner the night before and we were talking about I wonder what this is going to be like. I wonder what we're going to see. I wonder if it's all hype. Well both of us agreed at the end of day one that this was unbelievable thing that Grant was able to do and I had decided that if he could put 34,000 people in a stadium on Super Bowl weekend with the lineup I could look through the things I didn't like and I could hone in on the things that I was blown away by. So a few weeks later

we approached him. We met him there whatever but a few weeks later we approached him and said we'd

love to talk about partnering and the reason for that is this he has a network of 25,28 million

high trust with them and he has his haters trust me. This whole social thing and media thing for me

“is new okay but it seems like anybody successful half a half love it just kind of seems like it”

is and there are a lot of most of jealous but he has now raised over 2.2 billion dollars. We've first

in the marketplace to do a Bitcoin back balance sheet. Multi-family that is going to become a hundred billion dollar business. We launched our card on equity group. His audience has been phenomenal for my wife and I. We've been able to add value to his business. He's added value to ours and to put it in scale when we partnered with him. His training business was only 50 million. Today it's 150. Our business from startup is 120 and our help business that we bought for 250,000

from breakfast's wife is a hundred and 2,530 this year. So in three in five years we've created three businesses, our over 125 million, our profitable, our following the exact example of what we teach over 9.8 billion of business owners to do today. So we're extremely bullish. We're launching our private equity group, Cardone Equity Group. We're now out buying businesses with business owners that we have high trust and confidence in. We launched Cardone Financial Group. It's a whole

series of financial assistance programs. I've created for entrepreneurs and business owners. We and we have Cardone Ventures, which is our growth scaling and venture company for entrepreneurs.

So what we see combined is a multi-hundred billion dollar, maybe trillion dollar portfolio,

as I've just opened Cardone Ventures Cardone Financial Group and Cardone Equity Group UK, we're opening our UAE branches and then we'll be an Asia by the end of the year. So I've, when I partner with Grant, I said, I will I'll take the Cardone name to a global enterprise. That'll be my commitment to you. If your commitment back is to do all the things you're remarkable and teach me how to do it. And once you have confidence in my wife and I, let's just

put our heads down and go full steam ahead. After the third year, he's like, dude, we're going to

“kill this thing. And it's been a remarkable relationship. And that's why we partnered with them with the”

hopes that we would be exactly where we're at today, helping entrepreneurs and business owners create massive value, legacy net worth, having a great time doing it and having our brand-reach real estate business, finance, a whole thing and innovate the small to mid-sized business and real estate space and create a trillion dollar portfolio where everyone's winning with us. That's the idea. Yeah, you guys have done an incredible job. I've been hearing about you and Natalie for

years now. And it's just so impressive what you've built with Grant and Elena. I know months going on here. So in terms of picking your business partners, I know you have like, I think it's like five different elements that you look for and a business partner. Can you break that down for us? Yeah, we have first of all that persistence, perseverance and patience is very important. People who want to now and want it to be in that now, we won't partner with those people.

They're just, it's not even realistic. Most of them have businesses that are anywhere near how valuable they can be and they just want it now, want it now and they demand and they're in the app immediately. It's the same behaviors that got their business in trouble in the first place. You've dealt with people like that in your marketing side. They hire you that they bitch 90 days later,

your marketing doesn't work when the reality is they're getting more leads than they've ever gotten

their life, but their internal operations suck. And instead of blaming their people inside, they blame you because that way they don't have to address their friends and their family and their people that have been around. So they go through these cycles. So what are we looking for? Open mind. I ended forward thanking high integrity, patient, persistent and willing to persevere. And if they have that, we will dominate anything we put our attention on.

So I end my show with two questions that I ask all of my guests. The first one is what is one actionable thing are young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow. Yeah, great question. Identify the three things that create the most value in your business, right now, and put 80% of your attention just on those three things. Period.

“Love that. And what would you say your secret to profiting in life is? And this can go beyond”

business and financial. What is your secret to profiting in all areas of your life? You know, I accidentally stumbled on it in the walnut orchard when I hired all those people to come in and pick the walnuts. And I didn't know then the impression that would make me now, but my absolute secret is understanding that the only way to get huge is to amplify and multiply through others by creating value. And if you can do that, there's an enormous amount of wealth

about the impact of the people who are me they're working with, working for partnering with, advising, guiding because if they're winning, I'm going to win all day, every day. And I just want to do one quick shout out because I talked around it, but I didn't directly address it.

Having the right partner, partner is plural. My wife is absolutely beast and she's incredible

and Natalie Grant and Elena are also equally, absolutely incredible. So surround yourself with

“people that you love, you admire, you respect, and here's the thing. I don't want to let any of”

those three people down. So for those business owners that really want the hack to success stop thinking about yourself and become the absolute best partner to everyone you work around and you work with and make yourself the center of that partnership instead of thinking about you, think about how can I just do something so amazing because in everyone's going to love you and they're going to want to be your partner. Really good advice. Now I didn't get to ask you about the

walnut story. We kind of skipped over it in the beginning. So I'd love for you if you can, if you've got like a minute, just so people understand the context and the leadership, you know, principles that you learned when you hired the students to help you up the walnut farm. Yeah, well I had been sneaking in past my curfew, my dad grounded me and and I was frustrated because they were going on a two week vacation. I was home alone, but he made me pick the walnut orchard, which he knew

would consume my time between school football practice and working at the the night deposit is a dish washer till midnight. So I went to school the next day and the seniors were, I was a junior, they put little notes on all our lockers saying senior fund drive. They're trying to raise $1,000

to go on a senior trip. And that was my first entrepreneur, Tiffany. I went to the captain of the

foot. I was a co-capped into the football team. I was a junior in the senior I went to and said, hey,

“I think I could help you with that thousand bucks or some portion of it if a few of you showed”

up at the walnut orchard because if I could pull the walnut picking forward, I could go spend the following weekend with my girlfriend who I was terrified she would bail on me because she was going to Oregon State and I was in the high school, right? So I was like, didn't want to lose her. And I ended up with like 35 kids in their family and everybody come out and in two days we picked that thing clean and I didn't do any of the things I hated. I didn't get my hands stained. I didn't do

I just went around top and trees and put stuff in the burn pile and then the parents bought all the walnuts because they were and I didn't understand it. But when I look back on the parents showed up and did that with their kids because they were graduating. They wanted to show them they were interested, right? They did something I hated to show the people that were their kids. They loved them and then they bought it to think me. They bought everything to think me for allowing

this to happen. Everything I hated turned into something that was like a massive blessing for other

“people and I think what I'd like to say to every business owner who's right now frustrated with”

their business or fearful or upset because they're struggling. Just remember the very thing you hate can create life for somebody else. So instead of thinking about what you don't like, ask yourself the question, how could this resource create life for somebody else and then give them an opportunity to consult that problem with you and watch how fast the things that you're frustrated with turn into the things that you become the most joyful about which is watching other people succeed.

I love that. What a great way to end the interview. Brandon, this is such an incredible

conversation. You're welcome to come back on the podcast whenever you'd like. I work in everybody learn more about you and everything that you do. My Instagram is easy at Brandon M. Dawson. My YouTube channel is @B Dawson and obviously I'm trying to build both of those. My podcast is the building billions by Brandon Dawson. So those three areas are just go to cardalmentures.com. You can look us up there too. But look, I love, I think you my wife would kill it. I looked

you up and I, you know, I know who you are. I looked you up. I looked at some stuff before we didn't put the show. I know how hard it is to be successful in this space and you have done such a great job. I just want to congratulate you all. Thank you. That's so sweet. Thank you so much. Thank you Brandon. I really enjoyed our time together. As did I. Thank you for having me on your show.