A couple weeks ago I interviewed a 300 million dollar entrepreneur in Houston, Texas. Excuse me sir, is this your Ferrari? Yeah, it is. What do you do for living out in Houston, Texas to be able to afford a Ferrari?
I'm an entrepreneur. And how long have you been a business owner for? 21 years.
And what type of business do you run? I own a labor force management company. How important was it for you learning how to master delegation? Let's put it this way.
How important is it? My company will do $300 million this year in revenue, right? If I were still doing it all myself, we might do three.
That video got over 20 million views across social media. His name is Louis, and he invited us out to his private car collection. It's worth over $20 million to drop some more game for you guys. So with that being said, let's go see what Louis has to say.
Louis, how's it going my friend? Wonderful sir, good to see you. Thanks for having us out here man.
This is the private car collection right here. This is it, this is it. It's pretty well hidden, which I like.
It's things private. But yeah, here we are. it yeah so i interviewed you out in houston texas yeah the video got over 20 million views across social media i never expected that it was crazy yeah you built a 300 million dollar company yes yes absolutely and we're at your private car collection now how many cars do you have here so today i think we've got 21 cars here currently in the at least in this warehouse right now. Could we check some of them out and just kind of like see what you got to do?
Yeah, we've got I think we've got about 14, 14 Ferraris currently in the collection. About six Lamborghinis and then there's other things, you know, Rolls Royce, a couple of Porsches here and there. There's some stuff that only makes sense to me like my very first car when I was 17, a Mokita Bandit Trans Am. I got to ask you about these two, these two Lamborghinis right here. I see the, these are insane, gold and orange Lambos right here.
Growing up, did you ever think that all this was possible? Did you ever think that you were going to make all this happen when you were growing up? You know what? I definitely had the dream. The dream was actually of the Countach here in the very back.
But I will tell you, I didn't have a dream this big. Yeah. But, you know, I think the belief in yourself comes one way or the other.
And then the more you have some achievements and you make some things happen, the dream begins to grow bigger and bigger as your confidence grows. So what's more important, mindset or skill set? Mindset.
100%. Yeah. I talk about this all the time.
You know, I can give you skills, but I can't control your mindset. I can't give you passion. I can't give you drive.
And what type of business do you run? FX is a labor force management company. So we partner with companies all over the United States, and they outsource their entire labor force to us.
And I noticed the Ferrari right over here. This is the Ferrari that I actually interviewed you with. Yeah, that was the one you came up to me in that day, which is crazy.
In fact, I'm not even sure if I had a chance to drive it since I saw you last. Yeah, no, it's incredible. I mean, you kind of have that moment where, like, you don't even know what to choose from pretty much a lot of the time.
You know, it's the two big decisions of my morning, and this sounds kind of silly, but it's what car am I going to drive and what watch am I going to wear? Those are my big ones. Yeah, that's incredible, man.
Do you think everybody's built for entrepreneurship? Absolutely. Absolutely not.
It is tough. I was mentoring a gentleman yesterday, someone I cared very dearly about. I've known this person for a very long time, and he's got great ideas, and he's had some terrible failures, and not from lack of trying or caring, but at the end of the day, you could just tell that the risk of being an entrepreneur, the toll that it takes him, it's not mentally healthy for him.
I see that with most people. In fact, when most people come to me for mentorship about being an entrepreneur, I usually try to spend a lot of time talking them out of it. It is very, very, very difficult.
Did you know that one of the things that I One in four millionaires are living paycheck to paycheck? Unfortunately, yes. Isn't that insane?
So from your perspective, what keeps people broke in today's world? Spending money. Absolutely. You know, I think that, I don't know whether it's through social media or things like, you know, listen, I've been collecting cars or watches for a long time.
And I've seen this massive explosion in the last seven, eight years of more and more people spending a lot of money on cars and watches and second homes and things like that. And I think people continue to go out and get more and more leveraged in things that they shouldn't be getting leveraged in, taking on more and more debt. I think I've been reading actually currently. right now where Americans now owe more credit card debt than at any other point in time in history, even though we as an overall country are making more income than we ever have as a whole. And yet we have more debt.
People are going out and blowing money on things that have no ROI. Spend money on things that make you money, right? Don't go out and blow money on that new Rolex, a new Paddock, the new Ferrari, the new Lambo or whatever it is.
Invest that money in something that's going to give you an ROI. People are taking out debt to buy consumable products and things like that and blowing their money. money.
Like you said, one in four millionaires live in paycheck to paycheck. What does that tell you? No matter how much money you make, you still got to live within your means.
We were making good money, but every dollar I made every week had to stay in the company to reduce my debt liabilities the next week. So I can do one of that down week after week after week. Then once I got the company out of debt, then I still had to build my balance sheet and retained earnings to be able to grow and fund our scale and growth. Eight out of 10 businesses, they won't make it past five years.
What's the most common mistake that business owners make in today's world? They get the company to where it's doing okay or good enough and they quit. quit growing. Look, we're doing 300 million this year in revenue.
Our goal is a billion, right? And it reminds me of the quote that Jack Welch said, where he said, the day you stop growing as a business is the day you begin to die on the vine. And it's so true.
You've got to continue to grow and scale that business. The moment that you don't, the customer base, whatever you've got recurring your revenue is going to begin to dwindle. Your competitors, they're not resting on their laurels. They're sharpening their business. They're getting better and better and better, and they're coming for you.
The game you're dropping is amazing. I'd love to be able to sit down and ask you some questions. Is that cool? Absolutely, man. Let's do it.
So now I interviewed you back in July. One of the things that I asked you, right, because getting that capital to start businesses is a big problem that a lot of people face. And you said that you had to beg, borrow and steal to get the means to kind of start that business.
Can you kind of break down, in your opinion, the most efficient way to get the capital to start and grow businesses in today's world? I mean, how you did it and versus maybe in today's world, what you would do if you were a business owner today. What is that blueprint that you would take to get the money to start and grow businesses? Right, right. You know, a lot of people come to people like me today, right?
Or other very. successful entrepreneurs looking for the investment. Okay.
And that's not necessarily wrong. I think there's a lot of good to be done there, but, but let's be honest, if you come to me and you've got a great idea, right. And you haven't launched anything yet, you're looking for seed money, right? I'm taking all the financial risk.
You're going to risk your time and some sweat equity, but if it goes South, it's my money, not yours. Right? And I'm going to be in control of that money, how that money gets spent. Let's just say you're a young man or young woman coming to me, little to no business experience or acumen, but you've got a great idea, and we both believe in the idea.
I see great ideas happen all the time that don't succeed because they don't know how to execute. So we'll get in I'll talk more about execution in a minute point is though you come most people are coming to people like myself Or other successful entrepreneurs looking for that capital front. Well, we're gonna want to be in control of how that money gets spent So we're gonna want majority equity in that in that venture, right 50 51% plus, depending on the deal, right?
And usually seed money is a 70% partnership where you're getting 30, but I'm taking 100% of the financial risk. So there's give and take there. For me, what I like to see people do and where they're gonna be in a much better position for a capital perspective is to start trying to cashflow their growth.
I see, in fact, I just had a gentleman here yesterday I was meeting with, mentoring him. And he took out $100,000 loan to put it into this business, right? The business was already generating revenue. Why didn't you pay yourself as little to none as possible, live off of some sort of savings, live a very menial life for a long time, build up that money, rather than going and taking out this loan, took on all that risk at once, and you didn't have the revenue to support it.
So I'd rather see people cash flow issues, their growth like that, in small chunks. Now for me, as I mentioned, the first deal was $9 million a year, annualized revenue. They needed 30-day pay terms. right so I needed what about about about a million roughly because 30-day pay terms plus your fifth week of expenses going out hopefully that payment comes in on time right so we're looking at five weeks that you're having a cash flow so I need about a million bucks I went to what's called invoice factoring type of services or accounts receivable factoring and that's it's horrible it's 21% interest rate right when it's all said and done that's why I refer to it as loan shark money right and they essentially every week I present my invoices they buy them from me and would loan me, I think around 90%, loan the value of the invoice, right? And as awful as that was and as painful as it was for a long time, I couldn't pay myself money for a long time.
We talked about the tax situation that I had, right, going into my second year. I'll talk more about that in a second. But it was excruciating, but I look back on it today and where has it gotten me today?
I've learned financial discipline, right? Because I could not take money out of the company, even though the company was making money every week. I had to leave that money in the company so that next week I'm borrowing a little bit less at 21% and a little bit less and a little bit less that's number one So I learned how to number one live well below my means I learned how to build up a balance sheet in a business Which is imperative right and third I'm sitting here today, and I still on 100% of my business I never sold off shares my business to get the money That's not always possible depending on what type of business you're going into and how capital intensive it is up front front, but even if somebody comes to me and says, hey, you know, I need $2 million, $3 million, $5 million, whatever the number is to start something up, I first look at, did you even try to cash flow any of this yourself?
Or you just ask for somebody to take 100% of the risk up front, and all you have is an idea, right? Immediately, that's a red flag to me. I want to see that you already started hustling. You already started turning some revenue, maybe at a very small level.
You know you can scale it to X, Y, and Z. That's great. I'll help you get there, right, if I really believe in it. But I want to see that you've already taken the steps to bust your butt, make the financial sacrifice, and start growing it in small increments and your cash flowing.
And now we've got proof of concept. We know this business concept or idea is going to work. Now let's put the money into it to scale it.
And, by the way, if that's the case, you're in a much better position to negotiate with someone like myself relative to shares and ownership of the business. Because I'm now funding. scale and growth, I'm not funding something that's just a raw idea.
Looking back at your career running this business as a whole, how did you go from a ten to a hundred million dollar company? So focus, I made it all about our customer, okay? That was how we, listen, even if I'd have been strongly capitalized.
I still had to grow my relationships with customers. And so two big things. Number one, by focusing on what was best for our customers, they continued to turn over more and more of their business to us so that we were able to mushroom the relationships that we already had. had, right?
And then by way of working on new customers, by coming in with more of a consultative sales approach where I'm here to see how I can make your business better. And if I can't make your business better, you don't owe me a dime. But if I can come in and show you that we can do these things and make you more profitable and make you more competitive in your industry, then maybe we have a reason to do business together, right?
That's really what we grew from a new business development standpoint. The growth, obviously, from a capital standpoint was... like I've talked about earlier, being extraordinarily disciplined to continue to build my retained earnings, build that balance sheet so that I had the money to fund my growth.
So you've got to have both. I've got to have people that believe in your service, willing to sign contracts with you, and I've got to have the money to fund that growth. Both of those have to happen. Along the way is where you start. So, okay, I've got new customers coming in.
Now I've got the money to fund the growth. Now, how do I get everybody on board with what we're trying to do? How do I get success?
Okay, we've been successful with these three or four sites. Now we've got four or five new ones. How do I get people on board to do daily operating procedures, standing operating procedures consistently every day and get consistent results over and over and over again? Well, that's when you get into the training development side of things, right? Getting into very good SOPs.
And then the third piece and the most vital piece is what we've spent a lot of time talking about. And I spend most of my time talking about this because if you don't get this piece right, not only will your success be very limited, at some point you're going to be crippled because someone like me is going to come steal your talent. I understand. absolutely am.
And that was the leadership style, building that company culture, treating people with respect and loyalty and making them feel valued and rewarded for the job that they're doing, knowing that I'm here for you, right? If you're giving me your best, I will invest in you. I will back you.
I will be here for you. I will defend you. You make mistakes. We're going to learn from them together.
I'm not going to point the finger at you. None of that. We're going to learn and grow together. And I want you to have the freedom to take those risks, right? If you're going to give people accountability, right?
They've got to have the ability to take those risks. to have authority, right? You can't just, you know, nail people down and hold them accountable for any little thing that they do.
If you give people authority, then comes the accountability. Well, they've got the authority to do things to push the envelope of the business, right? Think of things that you don't think of yourself. If you don't give them the freedom to do that, then the company's never going to be any better than you as the CEO or the entrepreneur of that business.
And that's a scary place to be because I don't care how smart you are, you're still one person, right? I'd rather sit in a room where there's five people sitting in this room and always tell them I'm number six. Let's just say.
say to speak that it's an executive meeting, right? And there's six of us sitting in the room. If you're in that room, you're here because I think you have knowledge, experience, expertise outside of what I have.
I want you to tell me where I'm wrong. I want you to tell me why this won't work. I also want you to tell me what we're going to do to make it work, right?
Lewis, that won't work, but here's another way we can make that happen. Lewis, I don't think this is going to work, but here's another way we can achieve that same goal, that same vision. You bring value to the table.
And so people have that freedom to take that authority to tell me that I'm wrong, disagree with me, push me, challenge me. right? And when we have that, now we have something real cohesive and collective in the room. Hard Knocks family, we're about to get right back to the interview, but I've got a very special announcement to make.
A couple of weeks ago, we recently launched our official entrepreneur community, the School of Mentors. If you want to be able to hop on live calls every single week and ask your questions directly to entrepreneurs just like Louis and get access to this full uncut interview, as well as tons of other masterclasses, go to the link down in the description of this video to join. We'll see you on the inside of the community. But with that being said, let's get back to the video.
video relationships right as a business owner you're starting a company you're more of a visionary it seems like yes how do you go about kind of navigating to find the right relationships to not just build within your company but just in the business world in general right whether it's lawyers accountants tax people whatever it may be how do you you're the entrepreneur you build this company you built a big business how did you go throughout your career and maybe what would you have done differently like who are some of those relationships you would have made very early on banks investors whatever it may be oh that's a good question Yes, establish relationships with bankers as fast as possible. You're going to need them if you're going to scale, right? You know, I talked about the invoice factoring that we did, but that all was to get to the goal of getting to a traditional line of credit with banks, right?
And so even though our balance sheet wasn't there yet, I started developing relationships with bankers during those early days and then letting them guide me. Where do I need to get my balance sheet to so that I would be qualified for a line of credit with you of this size? Because we grew very quick. So I think in our second year, it was probably third year, probably third year where we finally got where we could get into a true traditional line of credit.
At that time, I borrowed... needs were almost 14 million dollars and the company's only three years old right and so i started working with bankers got them to believe in me right believe in my integrity my credibility right because they want to be taking risks with people that they believe have strong credibility ability and I started having them guide me where they were I want to get my balance sheet you then they saw me making those steps and doing it and then once once we actually weren't even quite there and one particular banker who's now my neighbor by the way that's how strong the relationship was bought the house next door to me wasn't quite there but he saw that I'd done consistently been building the balance sheet retained earnings doing all the right things and he saw that we were taking on wise risk that stupid risk put us in our first facility line of credit and tremendously changed the business forever from there but I would Strongly suggest, absolutely, bankers, investors, if that's the direction you have to go, if it's a capital-intensive business up front, start establishing those relationships before you have the need. Or you have the need, but hey, here's the goals. And let them see you achieve those goals along the way.
They know that now they're betting on a consistent winner. They will take that risk with you. The other big thing, too, and I wish I would have done this, and I didn't do it. I wish I would have gotten involved in some organizations where we're not.
we're not trying to sell to one another, but we're really there as business owners, entrepreneurs, CEOs, whatever, that we're there to collaborate. Hey, I'm having this struggle in the business. I'm struggling to understand how to maximize this or to improve upon that.
And sitting in a room with people just collaborating and chatting about their experiences and what they're going through and what they've been able to learn from, hey, we did it this way. Maybe we should try this. Maybe we should try that. Reach out to our mentorship, a group, not just one person, but a group. and it's got to be a group.
I think this is really the key thing. No one's there to sell one other anything where it's just a soliciting group, right? Those are, in my mind, that would have been the biggest way. Entrepreneurs don't have time to waste and I damn sure don't have time to sit there and for an hour every Wednesday morning and having breakfast while everybody's trying to sell me something. That's just BS.
Get into a group where we're all there to learn and grow and collaborate and share experiences with one another. That's probably the one thing if I were to go back to me at 24, 25 years old, I would tell myself to do it at the time. I felt like I didn't have the time.
to do it. What I didn't account for is how much time I spent trying to figure out things on my own that I could have had a group of people that could have given me some advice or at least just their experience up to that point and it would have saved me a lot of agony. So that one hour, you know, a month or however often they would have met would have been a far better use of my time than me spending, you know, 30, 40 hours trying to solve a problem that I could have chatted with someone in 15 minutes once a month, you know, something like that. You're very relationship centric as opposed to being. being transactional, but you've negotiated and closed some massive multi-million dollar, seven, eight figure business deals throughout your career.
What is your best negotiation advice for people out there? Maybe they're struggling in those business meetings. They're at the table with some heavy hitters. They want to get really good at negotiating, right? And maybe let's say it's not going in their favor and any negotiation advice for people out there that are still trying to, you know, have that win-win business to where it's more relationship and not transaction centric.
What's your best negotiation advice for people out there? There's been times where I've gotten in negotiations and especially if you're dealing with some people in procurement that are just truly price driven, they don't really care about anything else, right? You need to focus on the long term wins, right? So rather than getting locked in that battle about the margins today or the price point of this today or whatever, let them have that win, okay? But now start looking long term, right?
Okay, let's agree to do that, but perhaps let's make it results driven, right? If I give you a chance to do that, you these results that's quantitative right we know exactly what i've been able to do to your bottom line right let's focus on on on on some piece of that coming back to us only after we've saved you the money only after we've delivered the results your business or if by the way we we were able to successfully because of of the efficiencies that we brought on brought to the table and drive down your cost you're able to grow your business right then maybe there's a percentage every percentage that we grow your business so now it's directly related to results we have a direct percentage increase on our price point right so allow me to earn my margins allow me to earn my money by making your business better now I'm eliminating the risk of you paying me more upfront today with with no guaranteed ROI right so in other words find another end around when you just get locked into these negotiations you're on you're on your back foot right and you're losing those negotiations don't lose the deal find another way to think long term and the other thing it does it shows the customer that you're thinking long term about this relationship not just on today's transaction Okay? That will give you the end around. to free everything up. And now you've got a whole new path of freedom to negotiate a true value results oriented pricing and margins.
That's now going to benefit you longterm. Yes. But you're going back to what I tell you.
I said, I'd focus most on the first, my customers results in their business. So if I'm starting to demonstrate and focus on making you more successful, you're happy as hell to pay me more on the backside. Right. I've already delivered my results to you. Yeah.
Lewis, this was absolutely phenomenal. Thank you so much. My friend.
Sir, good prayer. for everybody tuning in right now. Where can everybody find you on social media?
So actually, as I've said, FX Management Solutions is our main company. That runs itself mostly today. I'm not really that involved today.
Now I'm doing Passion Project, which is we've started a YouTube channel. And right now we're showcasing a lot of the cars and stuff of my car collection. But really the point is to motivate and inspire people to do a lot of what we're talking about right here. It was a car that first inspired me, the Countach.
I think we've got that sitting in the back back there. But it started with that passion for cars that motivated me to do that. me and to start striving for levels of success in life I didn't even know existed.
And so now I'm at a place where I really want to give back. I love mentoring other people. I'm hoping anytime I go to a car show, it's there. I want to meet a kid that asked me a question and I want them to ask me, hey, how'd you make that happen? How do I get here?
What advice do you have for me? I love mentoring others. So the Gentleman's Garage, we're on Instagram, we're on YouTube, we're on TikTok.
Please check us out. And so, yeah, we're sharing cars. We're having a lot of fun with that.
But the whole point of that is to hopefully motivate and inspire. people that if if i can grow up on a farm and on welfare and end up i don't know we're sitting here with a i don't know a 21 million dollar car collection um you can too there's nothing there was nothing special about me as i talked about i i had a dream i had a vision for something that i wanted for myself and at the end of the day it's the number one thing i tell people all the time believe in yourself and just don't quit so check us out the gentleman's garage look forward to seeing you guys there and share more content everybody go follow louis right now and as i mentioned earlier guys we recently launched our official social entrepreneur community, the School of Mentors, where you can learn directly from and get mentored by entrepreneurs just like Louis, who's built a $300 million company. And every week I'm hosting live calls with the multimillionaires and the billionaires I interview on this channel every single week.
To get access to this entire exclusive interview, go to the link down in the description of this video or go to the School of Mentors to join today. With that being said, we'll see you guys in the next video.