talk about risk I mean at what because you have a in the book you have you know three questions to evaluate um you know like an investment risk uh C what's the downside what's the upside can you live with it with the downside um how should everyone here think about stupid risk intelligent risk or however you would describe risk because I mean we get paid I think relative to what we are willing to take on relative to the risk which could be misconstrued as let make crazy ass you know judgments good risk doesn't cease to exist just because you ignore it one of the smartest investor one of the smartest investors in the world today who Warren Buffett stops what he's doing to read what this man has to say this is the only guy that Warren says when Howard marks talks I listen Howard marks has written a book you should own this book and you should read it soon probably after you read The Road Less stupid but then again I'm biased if my kids asked me to which one they should read first I'd Point them to Howard Marx so read Howard marks first Howard marks runs a company called oak tree Oak Tree financial and he's written a book called The most important thing the most important thing he says three he says a lot of brilliant things three that I'm going to mention number one the less risk you perceive the more risk there is which is completely counterintuitive to the way most of us think if I perceive that there's no risk of having having an automobile accident between my home and the grocery store then I won't put on my seat belt I'll text while I'm driving I'll be talking on the phone and watching a video and as a result of perceiving there's no risk risk skyrocketed the way you lose money is by perceiving there's no risk I'm a natural I've got all this money these are smart people I if it doesn't work out I still got a lot more I mean what could go wrong and so we begin to think in terms of we we say stupid stuff everybody in here's done it I've done it we stay say stupid stuff like the greater the risk the greater the reward this is intergalactically stupid this is unbelievably ignorant the greater the risk the greater the probability of a loss but we say oh yeah I mean it's risky but I mean the reward my God the upside is so huge we've done this you and I were talking about this Warren Buffett was playing golf this is true story Warren Guff Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are playing golf they're best friends there's with two other guys they get to a par three which is the only kind of hole you can legitimately make a hole in one on they get to a par three and the one of Warren's playing Partners right as Warren right as Warren was about to hit his t- shot the playing partner said Warren let's have a bet on this hole Warren said okay what's the bet the guy said $2 I bet you $2 uh that said you don't hit a hole in one and Warren said well like what if I no it's $20 if I $20 and Warren said okay $20 if I I got to give you $20 if I don't hit a hole in one and Warren said if I do hit a ho in one how much will you give me guy said I'll give you $20,000 which is a, to1 odds that's what that is so if Warren loses if Warren doesn't hit a hole in one he has to give his playing partner 20 bucks but if if he does hit a hole in one then his playing partner's got to give him 20,000 and Warren looked at this and said no bet and the guy said why Warren said well I mean the odds of me hitting a hole in one are not a th to one it's 10,000 to one if I stood up here and hit 10,000 golf balls there might be one that goes in the hole but if I only hit a thousand golf balls the likelihood of one going in the hole never going to happen so I'm not going to take the BET and the guy looked at Warren and said Warren it's $20 last year you made 5.6 billion it's 20 bucks and Warren said I know stupid in small things stupid in big things write that down write that down write that down what's sabotaging us is the small things sometimes so this idea of risk doesn't cease to exist that the less risk we perceive the more risk there is Howard marks in his book said a house that can withstand a hurricane is indistinguishable from a house that cannot withstand a hurricane until after the hurricane and what we want to be doing is building houses Financial Empires that can withstand a hurricane I mean for crying out loud if you know that the economy does this and nobody can predict it I mean you know there's the susers out there the econ somebody told me one time the Reason God Made economists is to make astrologers look good right right the the the the whole idea that somebody can predict what's about to happen I mean they can smell you know but nobody knows how big or severe or anything like that they just know it goes in cycles and what I want to do as a business owner is build a world class defense to go with my world class offense as CEOs as leaders as owners what most of us have done is build world class offenes and so we're always going long we're always I'm probably the only one here that did this but when I was a kid the the guys would get in the front I'm talking about a kid like seven eight years 10 years old and we'd be playing football and in the front yard and there'd be a quarterback and he draw in his hand he say all right now you do this and you do that and everybody look at me and say Keith you go long right that means you just run and we're just going to heave the ball down there it's going to be a Hail Mary and maybe we'll get lucky and that's how often times we we run our businesses is relying on Hope and luck my dad told me years ago Keith you can rely on the rabbit's foot if you want but it didn't do much for the rabbit and that's that's kind of true right you have to kind of think about am I where am I relying on Hope and luck as opposed to being thoughtful and being thoughtful would say is there something that could go wrong and and asking that question and building a defense so that you can live to survive another day which I didn't do when I was 40 which is why I lost all that money y right it was all offense plus it was arrogant plus it was huus I I had a exhaust pipe in my mouth and I was just in healing my own fumes I told somebody one time I was 40 years I was 38 years old I told somebody one time I was being interviewed and they said Keith how would you describe yourself and I said that shows you how screwed up I was okay I'm I'm not proud to say this I said I'm a little bit like Haley's Comet a guy like me only comes around about once every 70 or 80 years that's how good I am at business and that was right before nose down into the dirt right all right here's the final thought on risk it's better to ensure survival under negative outcomes than it is to predict success under favorable ones say that again it's better to ensure survival under negative outcomes than it is to predict success under favorable ones and so this way of thinking you mentioned it a second ago the three questions what's the upside and we tend to be experts at the upside because we're optimistic and we can see the opportunity what's the upside what's the downside which we tend to not be that good at we rarely ask that question and if we do we kind of minimize it it's kind of like what most of us do with our competition most of us with our competition minimize our yeah I got some competition but nobody's really doing I mean I'm Different I mean I've got that is about the craziest thing let me ask you a question I get I'm opening another tab let me ask you a question let me ask you a question how much money could you charge for your product or service if you had no competition how many customers would you have if you had no competition I already know your answers if you had no competition you could charge whatever you wanted and you'd have all the customers so what dictates what dictates your revenue is your competition and how you position and message against your competition I think that the same thing is true with risk at the downside how do I how do I need a think about the downside and be realistic with it and if the downside happened then can I live with it and one of the most powerful tools I found in this is called a premortem a premortem you know what a postmortem is a postmortem is you know somebody dies they crack them open they look around say had they die well their heart stopped they stopped breathing blah blah blah that's how they died a premortem said says I'm about to make a decision I'm going to project myself one year into the future and I One by projecting myself one year in the future I'm going to look back over the course of the last year and this decision I'm just about to make has turned into a dumpster fire this thing is a train wreck it it is a mess so one year into the future I'm now thinking as I'm looking back it's a mess a premortem says what are all the things that went wrong that caused this thing to turn out to be screwed up if you will exercise this muscle which is defense on premortem on identifying any valuating minimizing risk it's questioning assumptions losing some of the optimism my my God we're optimistic we're irrationally optimistic about the initiatives and ideas that we have and I think one of the best ways to play defense honestly is with what you're doing with this and some of the work I'm doing with the the boards that we have which gives business owners an opportunity to have people around them that will give them advice and tell them no yeah ask yourself the question how many people do you have right now right now that can tell you know that that will question your assumptions that will push you back on some of the ideas most of us don't have people around us that will do that in fact the vast majority of business owners don't have that and so it's why they say leadership is so lonely and it is because we don't have people around us that'll push you look at the most successful most successful businesses on on the planet every one of them has a board and every one of those boards meets once a quarter there's a reason for that that board is not there to inject the CEO with adrenaline that board is there to say whoa Cowboy slow down just a little bit just a little bit let's think this thing through what are the second order consequences what could go wrong do we have a plan that ensures success or at the very least ensures survival or are we going all in hey I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to Joe's free book.com and you can get a copy there so imagine it's the beginning of 1994 your father just passed away unexpectedly the family business he was leading is headed for bankruptcy and owes the bank $20 million your well- Diversified portfolio looks like this on your net worth scale is a valueless business and everything else weighs into around $300,000 since your father just passed away the bank financing the family business asks you to sign the $800,000 personal guarantee that used to be in his name what would you do walk away or sign it this is what it looks like after you sign it there's now an $800,000 balloon lifting everything in your entire life off the scale you know that phrase burn your boats well effectively that's what I did when I signed that guarantee with the help of a turnaround coo for 18 months and making a long-term hire afterward the business slowly started to turn the corner when the current bank got the great news we were putting their business out to bid one of the checkboxes on the short list of competition was if they needed a personal guarantee or not selecting one that didn't got rid of that balloon however there was another bad financial decision hiding in the business too a single Bank was holding the business loan and the mortgages on the properties that were separately owned by the family you don't want to do that either the key to getting them to appear on the scale was Finding separate Banks to refinance the mortgages paying higher rates made the loans non-recourse as well to a cash flow thinker this is terrible since there'd be less available to me as the owner however I was focused on net worth building a platform for both growth and and diversification the COO I hired to grow the business gave me one of the simplest and most important points of wisdom in what would be my future success it was somewhere around 2004 the year we partnered with private Equity that in another much smaller family business they were re redoing their tool shop floors with this amazing epoxy stuff that was super tough and non-slip thank your to typic Home Depot Depot mix on steroids when I asked them for a quote to do the garage floor of a home we just moved into I was greeted with the surprise of them saying since I own the business they would do it for free now what would you do given this opportunity cash flow wise it was obviously a pretty awesome deal but what if you're focused on building net worth for some reason I paused on this and went to my coo in the business I would sell in just four short years for 500 million milon dollar and described what they had offered without hesitation he said pay for it you never want to owe anyone any favors in business from banking relationships to accountants legal and everything material we purchased this simple philosophy gave us unbelievable freedom to always get the best deals where for wherever we were in our path of growth remember a dollar saved in business goes right to the bottom line This mindset flows over into your personal life as well but in ways that are not entirely obvious if you focusing on cash flow you might be looking for the best interest or dividend rates for an account thinking of the growth it'll bring when you focus on net worth you will understand that assuming a 30% tax rate a 5% cash back you know like you get on credit cards or other form of discount is a risk-free 12-month return of 7.14% if you're focused on cash flow you might see you might have enough to purchase that Ferrari yes I always wanted that Ferrari never got it also managed to figure out it was far more fun to want it than to buy it and that was before spending any money when you focus on net worth you will understand that if you bought the Ferrari you would need to make 143% return on that lost cash just to replace it this is true for small things too I don't go offroading but my car does sometimes look like that my family makes fun of me for never getting it washed as in literally never but you're probably thinking I have it all wrong it's the cash flow from the business or the cash flow from your Investments that pay for all this stuff expenses don't compound yes that's the cash flow mindset at work Warren Buffett is known to be legendarily frugal I bet this is not true for the reason a cash flow mentality would think the less you spend is obviously the more you have in your bank account no for Warren if I'm reading his mind correctly the less he spends the more more opportunity he can take advantage of he doesn't see the cost of a $300,000 Ferrari today he sees the four million dollar of equity that could turn into 10 years from now if it's applied to the right deal the net worth mindset thinks like this instead of just consuming it finds ways to get the best pricing on needs and moves the savings into new buckets the net worth mindset also takes the dollars you would have spent on things you don't need and starts putting them into new buckets as well these buckets are the ABCs of investing always be compounding some of the buckets you can start filling to add to your net worth are things you already know about they are your list of Usual Suspects some of these things even generate income which you might keep in the bucket it came from or choose to use it somewhere else these are your nest egg keep them and keep them growing the the risk of losing everything in any one of these buckets should be extremely small and the return should come compound well over all the years to come in your journey through life since there's an abundant amount of expertise available for each of those buckets and since this is not a 10day talk I'm not going to attempt any deep Dives there however all of us all of us in this room well Zoom session did not make the majority of our net worth that way and for those who have been ingenious you might recognize this gaping void image explaining life as an entrepreneur you put a small amount of money into an idea you defied the odds and built something successful that's worth many many times what you originally put into it the cash on cash returns are probably into the triple digits this is an example of a power law success remember that car wash slide you know the fact that I never get my car washed which is about $20 a pop I figure I saved about $1,000 in car washes for a year investing that into a startup in October of 2016 it was worth a million dollars in April of this year that's the power of looking at your net worth as Business Leaders even with our survivorship bias in place we know it is still really hard and most attempts at starting something new don't turn out well sometimes we'll be lucky enough to get some money back and the only good news is that failure usually comes brutally quick this is why you need to think about using your extra compounding dollars to literally play in this space the great thing about truly understanding your net worth is you can get to feel for how much of your total net worth you might want to put in these power law buckets and the math of power law returns only works if you make enough bets to play long enough to find the big returns in other words if you assume you'll lose everything you put in you will always sleep well at night looking for the B Big Win wow imagine a cash flow mindset trying to wrap their brain around that proposition speaking of how much when there is an opportunity in front of me and someone who else who does not understand their net worth is looking at it too I almost always hear the question how much money do you think I should put into it well that question is impossible for me to answer for you but you should know the answer by heart it's based upon how much of your net worth you want to have in these kind of buckets and how many buckets you want to spread that risk over the call to action is to figure out your net worth and in doing so understand your net worth understand where you can take risk that doesn't change your life if it goes the wrong way but can manifest an entirely different future if it hits big if you do that this talk could be the most meaningful Financial message you have ever heard because that's how I got to where I am when I sold my business I stopped getting a W2 and have not had one sense talk about the cash flow mindset getting brain freeze I put my liquidated net worth into my Nest Egg bucket and gave constant grief to Goldman Sachs who always asks don't you want to take more risk I take my risk outside of that bucket and to date assuming covid doesn't have further plans to change the world being invested in Brawn which is the business of producing which is in the business of producing films like the Joker alone might double that Nest Egg add other startup Investments like level good money proteum energy bulletproof Capital Logics Pharma packs and so on it could be much much more than that and there's no such thing as a single point of failure anymore success might be hard to achieve but as successful entrepreneurs we have all learned at least some of what it takes adding that knowledge to the dollars you choose to invest in startups may not take all of the risk away but it can give an unfair advantage to the people running them that's where the real magic happens let your net worth drive your budget instead of the instead of CAS cash flow budgeting your net worth when you focus on net worth you will see how well you are Diversified and where risk is and when you focus on net worth you see where opportunity is and when you focus on net worth you get freedom in 2009 you joined Shark Tank how have your Investments worked out on the show and uh you know if a business owner these are the questions I have doing over a million a year was going to invest their wealth what would you recommend they look at analyze and try to do so all right so in the Investments on the show I want to make make this quick so the first three three years I think I lost 750 the first year 500 the second and I think I made it all uh I lost about 200 the third and I made it all back in the fourth year off of one deal called uh jamama juice Tales we sold to Jamba Juice here's the reasoning uh you know people really didn't know what shark tank was at first so the deal flow was poor second of all the producers are really producers so in the first season of vetting people whatever people said was whatever people said and the producers didn't know any better after sitting on sets for three years watching you know 150 people per year pitch in two hour pitches The Producers became more Savvy towards this so the deal flow became much better and the closing ratio went from only closing 30% to now we close approximately 95% also the Sharks themselves that uh have become very astute we've all put the right resources around us after making those mistakes so um so I didn't make anything up until that point and then only one deal itself paid for everything and now we have found ways to convert um sales and you know I've had a licens inivision everything else going taking that and going into the model of having a million dollars you want to know what would where should somebody invest that yeah like if they were going to invest the wealth what would you recommend they look at analyze deals and try to do so we're not talking about going to public markets or anything we're talking about looking at Venture that's out there in the market market and Angel things of that nature correct yeah tell you the truth if it was if it was me um first of all I would invest in what I'm seeing is a large shift in business where many people in this room are doing this already in regards to online curriculums and things of that nature but I'm seeing that uh there are kids at home and people at home that are going into these networks and into these uh forums and they're speaking the voice of other people and people are prepaying for goods or whatever it is and they're doing two five $10 million worth of business the entire business model is Shifting now you know so they always say retail is messed up or or or bad or let's say my business is 20 billion it's not a 20 it's not that it's not a$2 billion business no more it's just that these big guys like us aren't doing it it's a 10,000 kids doing a million dollars out of their home so that is how business is Shifting and it's about social media and it's about continuity and transparency uh you read a lot uh I read a lot but I don't I don't get to read a a large amount because I'm dyslexic So reading a lot means three pages to me but it may take uh two years and usually the three pages are one of J Abraham's emails that is actually funny with every adjective every noun so I'm reading that then I got to go to the dictionary not going to read that go back to the dictionary what the hell did he say what what no I mean he has the most expensive vocabulary of any human being I've ever met he's like the Muslim guys that come out of jail when with kids and they just start saying everything cuz they studed the dictionary everything no I I always love Jay's like talk about engineer reciprocity and stuff like that amazing but that's why he's my mentor yeah yeah all right so let's talk about how you uh how you do what you do you went from uh your first investment to being an angel investor and ranked number six in the world uh in around five years so tell that story and a little bit about uh your life sure so I I wanted to talk today uh broadly speaking about reinvention and what that entails because I feel like it's very easy when people have a certain degree of success in any field to become defensive and I noticed that in myself where I was the 4-Hour Work Week guy and I had these nightmares of talking about email autoresponders for the rest of my life and uh it's it's easy to go from a proactive building position to a I need to defend what I have uh and that can relate to finances brand reputation Etc and I think that's a precarious unproductive place to be so I decided uh at one point in 2007 to explore diversifying my identity into Angel Investing and I'll try not to spend too much time on it but I think that if you have just one brand or business or project your entire selfworth becomes dependent on the success or failure of that project and it and it's and it es and flows over time and that's a very I think uh dangerous place to be so the Angel Investing started I'll just give you the quick the quick sequence so I started off by putting in small amounts of money meaning about you 10K or so into uh into startups and helping them in ways that far outstripped any potential financial gain and the objective there was to work with uh early stage startups and develop a reputation for being very highly value add this will be important later once I had six or seven of those companies where I was never going to make my money back so to speak for the time I put in I used references from them to then start investing and advising as a blended model uh in in other potentially successful or later stage startups uh once I was able to then gather data from those uh I was able to leverage that into say uh getting to know early employees and Founders at companies why is this important because you can you can buy stock or get Equity at specific financing events or you can buy on What's called the secondary market and typically that's when say an early employee is like well it's great that our CEO is getting rich because he took $20 million off the table cuz he raised 100 million but I need to buy a house how do I get some cash out of this situation and he'll sell or she'll sell 10% of their stock and I want it to be the first person they called so that's how I ended up uh in in Twitter and Facebook um once I had Twitter and Facebook I realized a separate thing which was and you can apply this in many different areas so I won't spend too much time on it but you have Financial return on investment decisions and then you have what in my particular case a a marketing budget for my reputation as an investor So 20% of my investments I never expect to make money on directly what does that mean that means I put 25k into something like Twitter even at a crazy valuation if I'm able to get unique access that makes me a Twitter investor which then gives me better deal flow and and a stronger calling card I use that to then get better choices when I allocate my 80% for the strict Financial return if that makes sense um and I would say last but certainly certainly not least is in invest my recommendation would be invest in companies that solve a problem that you have I've been ridiculed by a lot of venture capitalists like oh my God you need to look at the total addressable Market size and this this and this and this this if you invest in things that solve a problem for you uh it's very hard to go wrong you will have failures but I think it increases your batting average tremendously so you know I was a preed money adviser to Uber uh great example ever not as the first adviser these are all uh examples of products that solve a problem I have on a daily BAS basis so I would encourage people not to get too fancy with doing due diligence in Worlds you don't understand for instance every time I try to invest in something that's like bleeding edge biotech which I feel like I understand on some level but I don't understand FDA uh phase trials intimately I get kicked in the balls by the universe like every single time just lose all of my money so focus on something that fixes your problems um that's that's sort of the basic overview if you guys want to get an education in Angel Investing uh my recommendation and I'm an adviser to this platform as well oh that's another thing I advise Platforms in positions where I will make very little money because I want exclusive access to the people who run those platforms so if I need help at Facebook Twitter just go down the list and name every any service you can imagine chances are I'm somehow formally involved with that company so I can make any phone call I need to make okay so that has a utilitarian benefit Beyond just the strict Equity return on investment uh but go to Angel list I'm an adviser yet another platform angel.co and you can look at the Investments that every one of these investors has made you can look at the composition of the financing you can look at the employees the key uh the key hires you can look at how much they're paying new hires you can look at the equity they're offering new hires it is such an education um you can see my entire portfolio at angel.co Tim and you can really drill down and see where people have made good decisions made bad decisions uh and you can just paper trade for a while and and really get MBA in early stage investing without spending a ton of money you know it's a basic question uh I might have asked you this sometime before but you use the term platform what does that mean what is a platform well there different types of platforms so they're platforms that people use to Market or promote a given product or service right so people might might consider a their TV show that they're on or their blog or their email list a platform of sorts something that you can sort of shout to the rooftops or from the rooftops from otherwise platform is a an architecture technological architecture typically that allows people to on mass perform some type of task so Twitter would be depending on who you asking a micro blogging platform right so you're limited to 140 characters and uh so they'll have a director of platform or chief platform officer in the case of Shopify another company that I advise uh and I view that like a a city state on the Internet or an entire nation you know in the case of Wordpress you know they they power almost 20% or maybe more than 20% of the entire internet uh so I'm an adviser to automatic which runs wordpress.com and that's effectively like knowing the mayors of these respective territories right and uh on the internet that's how you get away with all the you do right no no you mean like my last challenge no I don't even know if you guys haven't enjoyed the knob Nom challenge you should join you got two week left that's no booze no masturbating with 5,000 people being held accountable to do it why I I it's a long I honestly I can see the impact on your life that would save you hours a week yeah exactly that's what people ask me what do you spend your other you know 36 hours on I'm like uh the uh so that's those would be the two primary categories uh I think Germain to a lot of the conversations that people here would have is uh platform from a personal marketing standpoint what you use as your your bully pulpit or your your megaphone and then platform in the sense of broader sort of technological playing field okay awesome that was great what do you think of this platform beautiful the one we're on no I know I love the like it's the Llama the Llama for of Contour this is this is I am what we do genius Network here like how would you uh to take it as at the most basic level yeah and this is going to sound totally ridiculous but I'm interested to see how you would you would uh answer what is money so money is simply a receipt right so I think that money is a receipt of two other things the first thing is how effective we are at taking our mental Capital which is our ideas our knowledge our wisdom and business is the bridge between what we know and people and that's the that bridge is business so it's how effective do we serve other people and then money is just the receipt to show how effective we are at it okay so if you were so some people call it energy some people call it you know but it's it's just a representation of value it's not value in and of itself it's a representation of value that we can store that value because if I if we're not bartering and I do something for you or like when I joined genius Network right then all of a sudden I paid before I came to all the sessions you know and all that kind of stuff but it it's it was stored value until until until I until I didn't give you any value whatsoever yeah I was like this guy you he only like you pulled out this thing right here oh yeah this is our first phone call so just Background by the way so people that aren't W uh seeing this on video they're hearing like CU a lot of people listen to my podcast they listen to the audio version uh and if you are listening to the audio you can always go to you know the Gen you can type in you know Joe polish and Gary Gunderson and find this video um or go to genius Network and you can find it there um so this is new rules to get rid how to optimize your wealth and maximize your fulfillment cuz we're in U my one of my conference rooms in my building that has about 2200 books on the Shelf currently uh and I know the value of every one of these books by the way the ones that are not old additions and stuff because there are some that you can't trace but uh it's like $888,000 worth of book sitting in this room right now so nonetheless uh this is a night G conut program that was done how many years ago uh in 2008 or 2009 and so this is how it came about 2006 I have two business partners that D in a plane crash and uh Babs calls me strategic coach and says hey what can we do to help you out and I was like I I don't know I'm you know I just I need some help for sure we have 42 employees I don't really we're I'm figuring out how personality based we were we don't have a lot of systems in place and she goes all right why don't you just come out to Toronto and so I flew out to Toronto had dinner with her and Dan stayed at their guest house house um went and you know interviewed Dan for a series thing that I was doing they showed me the business and they just talked to me about how to navigate a lot of that process and all I said was look I would like to know how to Market better I don't really know like we had now I lost two partners these were big personalities they drove a lot of business in and they said well you need to know Joe polish so it was a chaotic time so you and I didn't meet right but then I wrote the book Killing sacred cows and someone sent it to Robin Robbins she sent it to you and and then Dan happened to tell you about me that week so we ended up connecting on the phone because of that and on that first phone call um we were talking and I said yeah you know night Andale conut was going to do something with me but they decided to go with the cheap skate millionaire because it tested better you're like let me make a phone call the next thing I know I'm doing the night Andale conut program so then you're like hey uh would you like to join my Mastermind and by the way I don't know if you remember this but I just written a check for $91,000 to plan television Arts I just written a check toot a book for $95,000 I just written a check for 66,000 The Remnant rate it goes on to be $500,000 of checks and then you're like hey do you want to join my Mastermind well I had already listened to PR marketing because I bought it at strategic coach it was sitting out there yeah so at the end you're talking about the importance of Mastermind you marketing s so you know just getting me totally bed like oh God I need to be in this Mastermind then you're like hey do you want to be in I said yes before I even knew it was 25 Grand I'm like absolutely I'm like when is it you're like next week I'm like great I'll be there you're like cool just send the $25,000 to Unice I'm like oh okay I just wrote a bunch of checks so let me figure this out and I just I you know I figured it out and it was really kind of a tough thing because I didn't have the exact resources based on everything I was allocating towards the book but I just knew that it was going to be a good thing for me so I came out the next week went you introduced me to someone that helped me uh sell a thousand books the first week my book was out and uh someone that's been a longtime friend on that first session and then I mean I came into that room and I I kind of felt like the baby of the room like I didn't know much about Mark marketing I felt a little bit out my league I was a little bit nervous and then now I feel like when I'm in the room you call on me now like I'm one of the contributors but uh but that's where a lot of the background was and so it was a pretty transformational thing for me to invest in myself to and and I kind of figured I was like look if I put all my money in this book it wasn't all my money but if I put a lot in this book like that's something I have a lot of ability to course correct I have a lot of ability to influence to me it was a great investment you know going to the Mastermind I'm like hey an investment in relationships I'm going to meet people that I never met before and it was it was definitely an exponential thing for me because all of a sudden I mean you where you're brilliant and uh and other people just don't do what you do is someone that you didn't know really well you met in New York and they were going to Park City so you just called them me you're like hey this is Patrick he's coming to Park City next week now look like I knew 10 people that knew me a new Patrick no one connected us so I get on the phone with Patrick cuz you awkwardly hand your phone to him yeah and then the next thing you know he's uh in Park City the next week we meet I go to a thing for that he's hosting the week after in Denver and get seven clients by the way from a 10-minute talk not because it was a Joe polish 10-minute talk just because that's all they had for me right and I was just there as a guest transform my son's health because it was all these health professionals and we didn't know what to do and so you just think about the power of an investment in yourself and all the peripheral things that come about from that and I think in the world of investing too many people people think it's about a product and there is no magic product out there there is no like o cool if I do this investment then that's going to be the game Cher if that happened we'd all call the 800 number we'd all line up to buy that investment but the bottom line is it's basically building your foundation it's making sure that your money safe so it can be sustainable and then keeping your growth totally aligned with where you have expertise where you have knowledge and staying more in cash than almost anyone will tell you because real investors pounce when there's opportunity and stay in cash rookie investors constantly stay invested because they're indoctrinated to do that by the entire investment World which is because of the system of the compensation not because of the reality interesting yeah so the the when it comes time for them to have you know available cash flow to put in a cash to put into an into any opportunity it's just not there right a market they don't control starts to go down now they're going well I don't want to take those losses or they get burned by that loss and then they don't want to invest and then everyone else like McDonald's goes it's time to buy estate Apple goes it's time to start acquiring businesses everyone else goes Now's the Time and then the other people were going oh the Market's going up I better jump in and get into this and look I believe real wealth is built through Focus not diversification diversification is admission that we don't know what we're doing I don't know diversify maybe this will work maybe that'll work and it actually spreads us thin and moves us further away from understanding the outcomes so I believe diversification creates risk in some sense even though it might create more stability to your money it creates more risk in it because you're further removed from the outcomes and the knowledge so so you said diversification is the say that line again the diversification is admission of ignorance admission of ignorance I don't know what I'm doing let's diversify you see Andrew Carnegie said put all your eggs in one basket and watch it like a hawk look at the wealthiest people in the world did they get there from diversification or did they get there from Ultra focus with ideas with business with you know something that made an impact and most people think investing is is about Roi and numbers but investing is actually about how what kind of mental Capital do you have that actually impacts other people and the more people it impacts the more wealth that could come about or the deeper it impacts people the more the wealth could come about so when people wake up in the morning and want to know know how they can make more money that's not a good question right it's not powerful the better question is what mental Capital do I have That's Unique that I can actually do something with and marketing is one of the accelerators to business because it helps that bridge become more effective to reach more people right so I I think that people just have a faulty equation because genius Network proved this for me you're either one idea or one relationship away from the next level of prosperity right so I show you you were that relationship that had an exponential growth for me Patrick was another relationship exponential growth we can kind of you know tie that down the road um and my book brought a bunch of great relationships because I shared mental capital that the marketplace hadn't seen yet so when people read it they resonated and they wanted to talk well I mean look just like what we're doing here just like putting out my podcast that I do on you know the genius network podcast uh which you know just the time we're doing this interview recently launched you know just what a little over a month ago and putting ideas out to the world like this is a way of just anyone literally tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people end up listening to this and there's a small percentage that will actually do something with it you know and now the when someone pays a large sum of money their likelihood of doing something with ideas and relationships is greatly we pay attention to that which we pay for exactly exactly you you know you taught me hey the quickest way to build a relationship is write a check right and and look but the other thing is I think people get so enamored like leaders Visionaries people that are up to something they get caught in the details too often instead of the vision so I have a kind of a philosophy of people over projects so for example when you're like dude come to Vietnam I was in the middle of a pretty big project at the time and I was like man this is kind of bad timing but I went home told Carrie and she's like you got to go that's going to be a good group of people you know you're going to like build something out of that right so you immediately ask me where on the flight hey you should come speak at my event okay you know I I meet some new people that I still have relationships with that have you know that have become valuable but I think a lot of people they want to build relationships without putting in the work but they get that it takes work to build a company they get that it takes work to finish a project but they don't get the work that it takes to build a relationship and that's where they miss most of the wealth I think most wealth in the world right now that's under capitalized is relationship Capital right one thing I want to point out before I get started is that the final idea is the most valuable one so I'm going to kind of rush through the first four but obviously I'm happy to take any questions at the end first of all I have found that right now with Biden coming into Administration that tax efficiency is on top of a lot of investors minds and if you're looking to raise Capital uh or you're a high earner yourself it's become more important recently because of upcoming tax changes that have been promised by the administration so just know that every deal that you invest in or you prepare to invest in or that you offer someone else to invest in can be made more tax efficient a year ago even after running our investor club for 13 years I didn't know a lot about these strategies so I started in Q4 last year doing a 100 tax expert interview series and we've done 40 of those interviews now and I've already seen a massive Roi on building relationships more quickly with investors on my tax efficiency and how we structure deals that we're trying to get done the most recent example of this was a dental clinic I invested in last month we were able to protect the same amount of income that put into the deal so I put in $200,000 $200,000 of my income was protected from taxation uh on that income so what that means is that you essentially only invested 130,000 or 110,000 because otherwise that money would have gone to the IRS so you don't need as big of a return to get two times your money back on the investment so for those of you that like cash flowing Investments conservative collateral uh Investments that have like assets behind them securing your investment this is a way to take a boring investment and make it a lot better the number two strategy is that when dealing with operating businesses gross revenue royalty deals are King we've closed on seven gross revenue royalty deals we're looking to structure another four to five this year and if you don't know what that means it essentially means that instead of holding equity in a company or while holding Equity you get paid off the Topline not the bottom line if you're an investor that gets paid through a gross revenue royalty so that means every $100 of Revenue that's made you get $2 if you have a 2% gross revenue royalty this is great because whether the business makes money or not you're getting paid you can usually get these paid out monthly or quarterly at the slowest and the great thing about it is that many CEOs love their business and they think they're worth $8 million in their valuation but investors look at it and they say well you only did a million in Revenue I think you're worth about 1.5 million three times profits and so to get past this you could say okay well let's agree on something in the middle a $5 million valuation set up a gross revenue royalty at 2% and then once I get all my money off the table My Equity goes down from X to y or after I get double my money back from the royalty My Equity goes away if you've seen Shark Tank a lot you know Mr Wonderful is famous for setting up these types of deals and we found these to be very successful in getting deals done and probably 60 to 80% of any of the deals that we're involved with these days are set up as a gross revenue royalty on the operating business side of things uh number three consider using Equity warrants instead of equity so when you invest in a company you may or may not be getting that royalty obviously I encourage you to do so and then you could get an equity warrant and in this way you're getting a piece of the company that could be activated within a certain certain period of time or activated when the business is sold and if you can combine tax efficiency with that in a royalty it can be beneficial because again it can get past an argument on valuation and then the CEO isn't paying out dividends you're just waiting until that Equity warrant is activated also if you have an Advisory board or board members you need to compensate typically giving people an equity warrant is not a security that holds current value until they activate the warrant so I would not take tax advice over any event or Zoom call you're ever on unless you figure out your exact situation but most of the time you could do that as a way to reward somebody you're helping you get to the finish line or having it be somewhat performance-based and the warrant is triggered by meeting some sort of goal and then they get equity in the company or Equity at the exit the fourth strategy is making sure that if you are an investor and you're going to take a little bit more risk than in a very conservative cash flowing real estate deal or something of that nature that you really focus as an investor on what you know best what is as Dan suvin would say what is your unique ability what industry did you create your wealth in where do you have an unfair advantage and where could you step in to be chairman CEO or at least have the brain to know who you need to hire to run that company if things go sideways most investors get burned the hardest when they take something more than a very conservative cash flowing investment risk um or even when they do that sometimes and it's not in their industry and and they can't add strategic value look at the flip side of that coin if you're raising capital and you're not the investor you should only be going after investors who know your industry one they're going to respect your intelligence and hard work people who don't know your industry are not going to realize why your medical office building is a great investment if they're not familiar with that space if they're not working in healthcare or a doctor or it's going to take them longer to understand that so we talk about navigating the three trust Curves in our investor Club a lot and the trust curves are trusting the team trusting the industry and then trusting the actual deal which means that's why everyone raises capital from friends and family first they already trust you the leader or the team then you go to people who are in your industry and you don't have to teach them what a medical office building is you don't have to teach them what stem cells are um you don't have to teach a dentist why this dental clinic is a good investment they're going to know more than you do potentially about why it is because they've already sold their dental clinic chain to a DSO so they're going to be able to add strategic value and take less of your time and then if you're not local to a deal you better be pretty high on those other three trust curves or just wasting everybody's time if you're going out there as an investor and you're looking at deals where you don't know the person you don't know the industry and you're not local to the deal you're going to lose your money or you're just throwing a dart and if you're raising Capital don't waste anyone's time going to them if you don't have some sort of elevation on one of those three Trust curves the final strategy I think is most important that's been most exciting uh that we've developed over the last few years has been emphasizing how to approach a deal where you save investor taxes you save the CEO of a company equity and as much as you can turn it into an income investment and when you have that Trifecta going in a deal it makes everybody Lean Forward because even sophisticated investors see thousands of deals only maybe out of literally a thousand are going to be highly tax efficient and if you can make it so that a company owner is not being diluted they're much more likely to say yes so I'm flying to two different cities this month with a a Manufacturing Company a chain of medical care facilities and it might take us 11 months it might take us three months to structure the deal but we're using this exact same idea it's the same idea we use in closing the dental clinic deal where somebody was going to give away 10 15 20 35% of a retail location or 35% of their whole business to do a one-time raise of a million dollars but if they already have revenue and they're already doing several million a year there's a way to structure it so that you give the investor no equity the CEO of the company doesn't get diluted at all and that gets them to lean forward and listen you go and you structure it because of bonus depreciation or NOS or things we don't have time to go into but there's different ways if you're buying equipment or if you're in R&D business or Manufacturing or anything with medical equipment or real estate that you own or you do tenant improvements on which are improvements on pieces of real estate those are all chances to make a deal very tax efficient so getting the investor to Lean Forward by making it very tax efficient the most tax efficient investment they've seen all year telling a CEO hey don't give away 25% of your company you might regret that in 10 years when you go to sell it and then structuring it as an income investment as a gross revenue royalty or Venture debt or some sort of debt with collateral behind it if you can do that then in my experience you're going to close more deals more quickly and it's a way to approach 30 million hundred million plus net worth families and get them to respond to your otherwise cold LinkedIn message or email because nobody else is offering to save them 20% equity on every location they open or on their business so I think that's just a little bit under 10 minutes but that's what I wanted to convey today which I know is a lot of information said pretty quickly but thanks for your attention and happy to answer any questions you have great job Richard uh we've got a lot of good love and chat and a lot of people were talking about just how clear you were speaking um so I this is complex stuff and just being able to break this down and tell it the way you told it's fabulous so let's uh bring in any comments questions we got Jim du he's gonna come up here and share some big Ideas come up here Dr Jim du I lost the jacket so you can uh be in the jacket Club great job Richard amazing stuff and just a piggyback on that is when you're doing any of these deals there's so much opportunity if you have the right team in place so just what Richard said about using warrant warrants or you can use synthetic equity and if you have a financial expert who knows how to Value those can value those way before the triggering event and they may not be worth much at all so we've helped clients do this of course with the help of tax attorneys putting that into a Roth IRA that then could be 5 million 10 million $20 million in the future can be a huge way to even more maximize that idea of using warrants or synthetic Equity uh the other idea that I had that along the lines of what Richard said is when you're doing real estate Investments a lot of people are investing in syndicated real estate funds and they're not all created equal from the fees and the opportunities but also from the tax planning so there's a couple funds that that I know of that have done very extensive planning so that they can qualify for something that's called 199 cap a which is the qualified business deduction 20% for pass through entities and just by doing all the things they needed to do for qualify to qualify for that puts them Head and Shoulders above other syndicated funds just from the tax perspective so what Richard said is amazing really good stuff and think about having a team together so that you can take those ideas and maximize your after tax returns I'm just going to ask you how should business owners be thinking about this crisis in terms of risk and opportunities okay so I I'll share with you five or six really cool distinctions that I've talked about a little bit so people might have heard it in some other forums but they're really unique uh perspectives on what I'll call mental Arbitrage so the first thing is I mean this is very very trit but I I think in terms of diads and and triplets so diads mean I want to divide and conquer so there's two types of attitudes there's there's reactive defensive uh uh uh Readiness and then there's proactive strategic opportunist ethical opportunistic uh preparedness so let's assume that everybody we're talking to is in the latter not the former so what I look at are opportunities correlations implications anomalies nobody else is perceiving so I think I'll through this very quick what I'll call five-part distillation number one I don't think there will ever be another window of opportunity by the way if I look up I'm just accessing my thinking I'm not trying to be rude to anybody I don't think there will ever be another window of opportunity as wide deep and receptive as there is right now for doing collaborations joint ventures uh uh strategic alliances endorsements co-branding referrals uh of the of the most wide magnitude you can take me deep on anything you want and I'm not talking about no disrespect a typical affiliate deal I'm talking about much richer deeper much more uh involved and and sustainable number two there's never going to be as many companies that have been as ill prepared financially and are going to be against the ropes an En dire probability of either having to very barely make it or go broke and there'll never be as big an opportunity to acquire not businesses you don't need the Yoke of liability but the assets the buyers the prospects the distribution channel the URL the phone numbers uh any key personnel number three uh and this is really interesting is that uh there now I think 22 million people unemployed if you look at it Joe it's polarized top and bottom there's a large number pardon me one second there's a large number of unskilled people which for this discussion are irrelevant but they're very relevant human beings men and women father's mother's husband day Etc but on the upper end they're super skilled and why that's important is these are people that had hard one very deep relationships with key decision makers for their very very recently previous employer for very significant things if you can identify them on LinkedIn which you can because I've already done this for clients and we've done tests that that validated it and you can prove that your company your your product service is superior if they do not have a non-compete or if it's not a competitive product they will never because these people were making two three four 500,000 more and now they're sitting hoping to get unemployment which couldn't come close to paying their car payments so if you can contact them persuade them that your company product service is warnable they have all these relationships that they can feed to you and they'll never be receptive any other time in their life to doing something on a performance and if they do well they can earn themselves a career opportunity finally and there's one more after this finally but finally in these categories there's a million and a half or so salespeople that can't sell something you can recruit them right now to do any of the three things I just talked about or anything else uh imaginable on a Pure Performance and that'll never be available to you in that way again finally there's something that I call options trading but it's not options trading like stocks it's getting control of assets and access I got a lot more things but these are the five big ones for example uh if you came to me and said Jay I got this great idea I want to do a j Abraham uh advisory letter you don't do one and uh I'll take it out and I'll give you a fee when I start of XEX and I'll give you so much percentage and I'll give you a piece of the back end you can literally take that right and flip it to somebody in the advisory business for a bigger amount and a bigger override and there's all kinds of stuff like that Joe and that's are the kind of things that I sort of function on which are a little different than most people I don't know if that makes sense yeah no that helps and by the way how you're looking at me right now if you could gaze in to the eyes of everyone through their screen the rest of the time I think there'd be a much deeper yeah I'm sorry yeah absolutely pardon me no I'm just I'm sort of messing with you but then it's okay now I tend to be I tend to be a little bit not intentionally distant I was just trying to remember what I wanted to talk about I'm gonna I'll be deeply focusing on on the camera okay that's perfect so like you've spoken in front of what's the largest audience that you have ever spoken in front of I don't know 15,000 15,000 okay I'm just trying to check like on an arrogance level how arrogant do you think you are just because you know so many people all over the world think you're like just this amazing genius I don't think I'm arrogant as as an ego I think I'm arrogant about the concepts yeah yeah I think it's a different I think I'm misperceived I really do I've known Jay I've known Jay for like I don't know 25 30 years and he he's he's mellowed he's uh you know he he wants to be arrogant even about his ideas and he's he's a he's a pussycat no no actually I I I've gotten to know Jay very well I think he's a really incredibly kind cool awesome uh guy so yeah I wanted to just I just want to add one like specific like when Jay was talking about his number one where you've got you know the the companies like a like a a chiropractor for example who has an office and he can't take patience or he can if he wanted to go one one patient at a time and he wanted to fumigate the office and he wanted to you know he could get away with it but while he's doing that slowly but surely what Jay is you know one of the things that I was thinking about because it was a chiropractor in my group that you coach Jay and he wants to drop ship supplements for their pain so he can't crack their back today he can crack their back maybe a few months from now so he a free visit three months from now but he drop ship supplements pain supplements or even more there are companies like with lasers and all this kind of stuff that don't know what to do I mean they can sell stuff online but if they can partner with a guy like this who's got the network who's got the the funnel so to speak of all of what he's doing I mean Partnerships are are I I agree with you 100% Jay this is the best time to to buy as opposed to make everything and you get to test all these different things that you might not go into those businesses anyway it's brilliant yeah it's great Brian thank you I like your beard you look very distinguished Joe if you think about it very interesting that everyone needs money and people are rudderless and they're trying to figure it out I mean there's a real sleeper that people don't think about all these restaurants that are on the ropes that are closed the independent ones not not the chains but the independent ones have very rich deep relationships with their clientele and the more upscale have much more sophisticated clientele they are great influencers you could contact to introduce all kinds of different products or services and that's just just a singular idea and I mean I I I want to be very supportive and I want to bring to your your audience as much as I possibly can I I was thinking about something if you'll let me that I would love to share about distinguishing between a superficial partnership and something very deep and I can tell a couple stories when you want if you want and if not I will shut my no no do do it right now because there are so many people that are viewed as influencers and experts that present themselves as actually having deep relationships with people when it's just a manipulative setup sort of game so I'd love for have you make the distinction between superficial okay well so let me start by telling you how we used to do what you you would call an affiliate before the Advent and again I go back everybody knows that Brian knows that to to when there were a lot of newsletters that were physical but when we would set up a deal and the one that I'll use as a reference is I had a very large uh gold brokerage company when the newsletter business was very high and most people would just try to get uh the the the the editor the personality to recommend them in a in a a letter or or a little blurb in the newsletter I I did not do that the first thing I did was set us up as the recommended provider and every time anyone ever became a new subscriber they got in their new subscriber welcome package a collection of materials we created all about hard assets all about gold silver the case for it and even the case against it so it was balanced number two four times a year we underwrote the cost of special edition newsletters that basically focused on uh hard assets the Outlook had had epic uh iconic people sorry I'm looking up again forgive me uh people that uh would write and they were really cool third is we funded quarterly Regional events where we would bring an icon we would bring the editor we paid for everything and then we would bring our person fifth is a lot of people back then would keep mailing Brian knows this until they hit break even and break even would be two different things for some it was imputing fulfillment which wasn't that much $10 a year for a two three $500 newsletter sometimes it wasn't when they stopped we would take over funding it because we got joint tency of all the names I would change the headline the the bonuses the risk reversal make it a little tighter and we would basically turn it into viable and make money on it we'd get joint tenancy of the name when it stopped working because most newsletter promotions then I think Brian would affirm and maybe today to they were based on the bonuses and we were in the gold business which was lead generating and lead generating would cost us sometimes $150 a lead before it was a deferred uh deferred investment we wouldn't recoup for a month or two so we would use the mailing piece for the newsletter stri down to just the bonus just to get leads at a lower cost but we basically was sort of like the concept the integrative concept of becoming an integral part of the relationship but that that didn't happen until we won very very deeply the trust of the the partner and that we protected them on everything and we and mean I was very good and I think I still I'm pretty good at preemptively thinking through all the negatives all the concerns not just overcoming them but blatantly bringing them up to show that we have already protected them I go on and on but that's just one example Michael Middleton sent me a a um private question and I said you know what why don't you just bring this up and ask Jay directly so uh Michael uh if you want to uh unmute yourself and ask that question let's do it and when he does it I have three or four points that I think would be fun to share sometime if you'll let me before I I am thrown off okay okay thanks Jay you you you you um just mentioned something about restaurants which uh um struck a cord with me and but I I've been struggling to think about how to use this but some of the high-end restaurants in London have been sending out to their mail lists recipes and that kind of thing but then also linking out their Their Food suppliers because the Wholesale Food suppliers that their businesses same thing here the hotels and restaurants so in in the in the world that some of the rest of us are in I'm I'm struggling to think of situ ations where I've maybe got clients or business connections where I could use uh the same kind of thing where we can help them uh can I ask a clarifying to make sure I here are we talking about restaurants or you just using restaurants as a springboard to some other industry application just as a springboard I'm not in the restaurant business I have a financial planning business and a retirement coaching business okay and so your client are home my clients are uh corporates with so companies with sort of 4,000 employees and more uh many of whom they've sort of furing Staff but they're looking at redundancies they've got people that they're going to be taking on to to early retirement um it's a new business we had a face-to-face Workshop program which just got shocked a bit and Michael and Joe I forgot it's I'm embarrassed I forgot a big part of of the first element that I've been talking about and that is whatever you do now you want to identify what else people buy before during after and instead and I can go into instead and you want to be able to make those products services available to them also then you want to go to the next level Michael and think about this and think about what else they are buying uh decision makers for that your your exact your your your the trust you create would be appropriate to introduce them to and a lot of people are very vertical they only think in terms of whatever they do and the uh the transactional activity that that they they uh deal with but if you think about the fact that that person in normal times is buying or or influencing certain things but in abnormal times they're even new things and and most of them are indiscriminate they don't know who to choose they don't know who to who to uh to go with they don't know who to really uh pick as a choice or a provider if you are in a position you've earned their trust that trust now can basically it can it can uh what's the word not Crescendo it can basically expand out to a multitude of different ways you can very ethically monetize and then there's two different ways to monetize now and in the future if you know that there it's only a matter of time between before certain types of products or services will be paid for you can set them up now you're going You're Gonna most everyone on this call is going to need unless they're doing fabulous which some are they're gonna need money Works in six days EXC me in 60 days than they do right now I don't know if that helps or I gave you a headache no no no it helps a lot hopefully I can read my writing with the restaurants anybody here who might have a a whole uh influence sort of chain to restaurant tours I think you could go to a lot of them and introduce them to all kinds of qualitative people that their upper level type clientele would be very receptive to and you have to realize one of the greatest and you guys know this because I've watched some of the discussion with people that are doing the virtual uh events you're never going to have also the high level decision makers captive in one place for such a period of time where they are able when you engage them to be very focused I mean there's a lot of really interesting sort of AD adversity produces enormously unique opportunity if you understand how to first of all identify it and then and then uh seize it okay I hope you found that video awesome and useful so if you want to get a free copy of my book I want you to click here and if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome click here go ahead they're over here do it now come on thank you watch him