#211 Codie Sanchez: Your Blueprint to Financial Freedom

0:00:07 In my definition, good business equals profitable cash flowing, what I call a cash flow versus
0:00:12 cash suck business. So you get paid upfront for a service, not after you provide a service.
0:00:19 Sustainable, it can exist for a long time. Historical, it has existed for a long time.
0:00:25 Understandable, you can explain it to grandma really easily. And you have what’s called the
0:00:30 lindy effect, the likelihood of the future continuing to cash flow just as it did in the past.
0:00:34 Those are my parameters for a good business. A bad business would be a business that is
0:00:42 unprofitable, hard to understand, hasn’t been around for very long. You have to provide the
0:00:47 service before you get paid for the service. That is a business that is just much harder.
0:00:56 That’s a harder game to win.
0:01:02 Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I’m your host, Shane Parish. In a world where knowledge
0:01:06 is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have
0:01:11 already figured out. Today’s episode will transform how you think about building wealth
0:01:16 and financial freedom. My guest is Cody Sanchez, who is known for her bold advice on helping people
0:01:20 buy, grow, and sell businesses. Whether you’re looking to increase your income,
0:01:24 start a side business, or completely transform your financial future, Cody breaks down exactly
0:01:30 what separates those who successfully build wealth from those who stay stuck. This conversation is
0:01:35 packed with immediately actionable insights. We talked about the single most important thing to
0:01:39 know about building financial freedom, and it’s not what you think it is. The biggest
0:01:44 mess around money, the difference between acquiring and keeping money, the rich versus
0:01:50 broke mindset and how it changes everything, non-obvious lessons on negotiating, and so much
0:01:55 more. If you’ve ever wondered about the real playbook for financial freedom, this is it.
0:02:00 Keep in mind, this podcast is not financial advice. Cody’s opinions are her own,
0:02:04 and she’s pretty bold about them. It’s time to listen and learn.
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0:02:55 You built a business around acquiring other businesses and enhancing them.
0:03:01 Where did this all get started for you, and what have been the key moments over that journey?
0:03:07 I stole it all from private equity. I never would have thought about buying businesses,
0:03:12 and it seemed too big and scary, and I didn’t grow up a lot of money or cash or understanding of
0:03:17 money. If you would have told 20-year-old Cody, you would be buying businesses and then buying
0:03:21 more businesses and building on top of them. I would have thought I had to put in the lottery or
0:03:29 something. Thankfully, I got into finance, and I kind of hated finance. I didn’t want to be anybody
0:03:35 in any of the companies, even the people at the top. I finally realized that after 12 years.
0:03:42 I was like, “Wow, they really understand this language of money, and they know how to buy assets
0:03:48 that make money, even bring back more friends.” I was like, “I want to learn how to do that,
0:03:51 and I just don’t want to have to do it in a suit, and I want to be able to do it in businesses that
0:03:56 I want to be able to do it, and I want to be able to hold the businesses forever as opposed to buy
0:04:02 them, split them up for parts, and then sell them off.” It got started because I’m a pretty good
0:04:07 copycat. I was just like, “Oh, here’s a model that works. Can I do the same thing, but a lot
0:04:12 smaller because I don’t have that much cash?” Then, if it keeps working, can I scale up to
0:04:16 be like the big boys? That’s where it started. I think sometimes the best way to make money
0:04:20 is just to follow other people who are really good at making it, try to mimic the same thing,
0:04:22 and then add a little bit of your own sprinkle to it.
0:04:25 Talk to me more about that language of money. What does that mean?
0:04:31 The most important language I’ve ever learned is money. Growing up, I didn’t understand anything
0:04:38 except how to save, maybe how to spend less. My parents were, my mom was a 30-year special
0:04:44 education teacher. My dad came from an immigrant family to the US, and so they didn’t have any
0:04:49 money. Their biggest concern was don’t fall into debt, kind of like Dave Ramsey. No debt,
0:04:55 save everything you possibly can, don’t use credit cards, the typical things we learned.
0:05:00 But when I went into finance, I realized that’s not how the rich think. The rich actually know how
0:05:06 to use debt intelligently. They understand that money is simply a tool in a toolkit. There’s no
0:05:12 emotional value to it. If you understand what attracts money, then you probably will never
0:05:17 have to work again in your life because you will just be able to take money and like a magnet,
0:05:21 sit it next to more money, and it’ll bring it over. It took me a long time to figure out how
0:05:27 to do that, since I was a journalism major. But once I realized, oh, you can, people say it on
0:05:32 the internet in sort of like a kitschy way now, get other people’s money, passive income. I’ve
0:05:37 never earned a dollar passively. That’s always been active. But once you have a decent chunk of
0:05:43 change, then you can put it into other people spending their active time to make more money for
0:05:48 you. That’s what I wish I learned early on. And the algorithm that taught me that the most was
0:05:58 every single way to make money is sort of like a game. And there are some games that are low-level
0:06:04 games. So think about it like pickleball, let’s say. If you want to become a top paid athlete,
0:06:08 get all the chicks, you’re probably not going to go play pickleball, right? It is a game that people
0:06:14 play. It’s not a highly paid game. And maybe it’s not that high of a status game, as opposed to
0:06:19 football, you know, soccer internationally. Oh, well, some of the highest paid athletes in the
0:06:23 world. Also, you get lots of checks if that’s what you’re into. And so if you’re going to think
0:06:26 about where do you spend your time? If you want to be an athlete, you think about what your skills
0:06:31 are. But also, what’s like the best indicator of future success? Other people who have future
0:06:36 success. And so with money, I realized, oh, wow, if I want to make more of it, I probably don’t want
0:06:41 to be a teacher because that’s just not a highly paid job. And probably I want to be in the industry
0:06:46 in which more people than anywhere else are on the Forbes, let’s say, 100 list. And that would be
0:06:53 finance. So the number one category of people on the Forbes 100 list is some version of finance,
0:06:58 whether that’s buying and selling companies, whether that’s being an active investor in equities,
0:07:03 whether that’s being in hedge funds. But that’s the number one way. And so I realized, oh, okay,
0:07:07 well, I’m going to go learn finance because they seem to understand how to attract money.
0:07:12 Is that like, was it a freedom thing to get out of that? Like you felt like your time with somebody
0:07:17 else’s?
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0:08:21 Yeah, I mean, I saw I’ve crossed the border hundreds of times illegally documenting sort of what
0:08:28 happens in conflict zones. And after a while, I was like, what’s the difference between them and me?
0:08:33 It really wasn’t that I was American. It was, they just didn’t have any money. They had no
0:08:38 resources whatsoever. So the world asserted its will on them. And I didn’t ever want that to happen
0:08:43 to me. I would rather try to architect my own world. And I think the key to that is money.
0:08:48 Yeah, you have to have a little bit of money to create the opportunity. How do you go about
0:08:54 doing that? Like, do you work at a nine to five job and save out money and build
0:08:57 these income streams? Or is there another approach to this?
0:09:01 Yeah, well, anytime you hear advice from somebody on the internet, I always think you should look
0:09:07 at their biases, right? So mine is that I was a, I was risk based. I didn’t want to go out and
0:09:13 become an entrepreneur and sleep on a couch or a floor and make $0 and have some crazy idea.
0:09:20 I didn’t have any of that. I was kind of scared. And I didn’t know what my big move could be.
0:09:23 So for me, the best way to do it was I went and worked at nine to five in the industry that
0:09:27 paid me more than anywhere else, which is finance, which wasn’t really nine to five, I’m guessing.
0:09:32 Oh, God, not at all. No, no, no, it was quite long. But when you’re young, you have an incredible
0:09:38 ability to withstand pain. And it’s much easier to do it when you’re in your 20s than it is in
0:09:43 your 40s or 50s. So I was like, well, I could either have short term pain in the form of long
0:09:50 hours and long term gains, or I could have short term fun. And in the future, I will probably be
0:09:55 sacrificing things for that. So I’m like, no, when I’m young and hungry, let’s go hard. Let’s work 10,
0:10:02 11 hour days. And let’s let’s be voracious and knowledge accumulation. And then once I have
0:10:07 some skill set that is valuable enough, then I can assert my will on my hours, etc. But to begin
0:10:12 with it was just, let’s go to finance because they pay really well. I want to understand the game of
0:10:17 money. And after you do that, then you can go and build whatever you want. But I think starting
0:10:22 with a nine to five is super underrated today. I think so too. Like you can learn so much. Somebody
0:10:27 else is paying you to learn if you have the right mindset and approach, but not many people seem to
0:10:33 have that approach. Oh, yeah. I mean, I totally agree. So when I started at Vanguard, they said
0:10:39 that they put about $100,000 a year into their new hires. And so we had, it was called Vanguard
0:10:46 University. And they trained us on securities and bonds. And I think I have four or five licenses
0:10:50 in the securities industry from my days of Vanguard. And then I went to Goldman Sachs,
0:10:54 where I think to get into Goldman as like a little peon analyst, which is what I was,
0:11:00 I think I had to do like 13 interviews and like PowerPoint presentations. And at the time,
0:11:05 I was like, this is very annoying. But actually, what an incredible gift all that training wants.
0:11:09 And you go to a startup, there’s no way they’re putting you through a training program. There’s
0:11:15 no way they’re critiquing your PowerPoint skills. Everybody’s just barely trending water. And so
0:11:19 I think if you have a chance to go to a big corporation where you get well paid, they train
0:11:24 you a lot. And then you put an exit clock on. Two years from now, I’m going to leave at the moment
0:11:30 in which they won’t pay me more or I’m not learning. And because I did that, I accumulated millions
0:11:34 before I ever ran my own business. And so a lot of people ask me, like, how’d you have all this
0:11:39 money to invest? And I’m like, well, you know, you’re in finance for 11, 12, 13, 15 years.
0:11:42 You learned to invest the entire time you’re doing it. You’re making a lot of money while
0:11:47 you’re doing it. And you’re putting the money back into the stock market and into deals.
0:11:52 And so I didn’t have to risk a lot of my own capital, except in the beginning not being paid
0:11:55 very much because, you know, I was brand new and I didn’t know what I was doing.
0:12:01 Imagine I’m a novice and I’ve never invested a cent and I have five minutes with you. Like,
0:12:05 what’s the single biggest lesson that I need to take away?
0:12:10 Lesson number one is you never get rich investing. You get rich earning. And so the only people who
0:12:14 are going to tell you to go invest first to make your first million are people that are trying to
0:12:18 sell you something. Because it’s just really hard to make money investing without money.
0:12:25 That’s rule number one. Your biggest ROI is on you and your time. And then rule number two would be
0:12:30 once you understand that, it’s how can you make your time your best investment possible? And so
0:12:35 that’s why you have to obsess on increasing your earnings potential. And a lot of times people
0:12:39 hear this and then they go, well, I negotiated with my boss and, you know, they didn’t give me
0:12:44 a raise. And I’m like, no, no, no, that’s not the play. The play is you understand how a business
0:12:49 actually makes money and how you make money for a business and how every action you make makes
0:12:54 a business more or less money. And then you try to negotiate a percentage of the money you make
0:13:00 the business. And like if you are a employee right now, you would be incredibly rare and
0:13:06 incredibly valuable if you went to your boss or the CEO of the company and depending on size
0:13:11 and said something like, Hey, I want to make more money at this company, but I would never want
0:13:17 to take more money just because I want it. Of course, I understand how business works. Instead,
0:13:22 I was thinking if I hit this goal, which is 25% above the goal that you’ve set for me,
0:13:29 I’d love to make 5% of that additional 25% I brought in. You get to keep the extra 20%,
0:13:34 you beat your goals. I look good compared to all the rest of everybody else. And I only make money
0:13:39 if you make money. Would you be open to something like that? And they might say, no, and life will
0:13:44 be littered with series of rejections continuously if you want to have any success whatsoever.
0:13:50 But they might also say yes, or we can’t do it that way, but we could do it this way.
0:13:54 And then you learn how the business makes money. And most people will never do that
0:14:00 because they just say, I want an extra 25K or I want to raise or I’m going to leave,
0:14:04 and that just pisses your boss off. I think most people don’t have that mindset. You’re either
0:14:08 directly contributing to revenue or you’re helping somebody contribute to revenue or you’re
0:14:13 a cost. 100%. And if you’re a cost, then what are you doing there? If you’re not contributing
0:14:19 in one way or another to revenue? Yeah, it’s the best way to make more money is to figure out one.
0:14:23 Are you a cost center or a profit center? And then two, how much of a profit center or a cost
0:14:28 center are you? And if you can do that, it’s not just that you’re helping your boss and the company.
0:14:32 You are now thinking like an owner for the first time ever. And you don’t have to own a business
0:14:38 outright to think like an owner and get a piece of a business. It’s called partial acquisition.
0:14:44 And a way that you can get part of a company for your work or sweat equity is simply by saying,
0:14:49 I understand what the business’s goals are and I understand the next level we want to get to.
0:14:54 And if I help us get there, could I get some sort of participation for that? That is how
0:15:01 really rich people think. And anybody that goes, no, that’s not possible. Sadly, you will never
0:15:05 be rich if you think that way. I think like in a big organization, I could see them saying no
0:15:10 to that proposal. But if you’re a small business owner was saying no to that proposal, I’d be
0:15:14 starting to look for a new job. You’d be shocked. Yeah. I mean, think about it for you too.
0:15:20 If they were like, Hey, listen, Shane, what if I brought in these three partnerships and you like
0:15:25 them, you sign off on them, they’re on brand for you, they bring an extra X dollars for you,
0:15:28 would I be able to take a cut of the extra partnerships I brought in? Even though I’m just
0:15:34 your producer, you’d be like, Yeah, sure, dude. Yeah, great. 100%. You know, and if you do work
0:15:39 in a big company, then the only question you need to ask is instead of saying, if I do this,
0:15:46 could I make more? It’s in what part of the company, if I work more, and if I hit my goals,
0:15:52 can I make more money? What jobs do we have at this company like that? They’re typically sales
0:15:58 jobs, right? Maybe a leadership or recruiting job. But you want to get on the side of the
0:16:04 profit center. And that’s how you earn more. Is there different sort of phases to our career
0:16:08 when you think about it? Like, is it like 20 to 30? We should not be worried about money at all,
0:16:14 just learning as much as we can and then switch over. Or how do you think about that?
0:16:21 Yeah, we talk about it like, learn, earn, invest, repeat. So I think when you’re in your 20s,
0:16:26 you’re in your learning phase. You still want to try to increase your earnings. But if I had to
0:16:32 choose between earning more or learning in that period, I’d optimize for learning because learning
0:16:38 has unlimited upside potential. Like you’re never going to go in your 20s from making 30k a year
0:16:45 to 300k a year per year because you negotiated a better salary. That’s a very high likelihood.
0:16:51 What you very well could if you learn something additional in that one year compound that over
0:16:56 30 years to multiple millions or more. And so I obsess on learning first. And then as I get into my
0:17:02 later 20s and early 30s, I start thinking more about earning. So how can I make more money? Like
0:17:08 my first job, I made $37,000 a year when I was at Vanguard. I thought that was at the trillion
0:17:15 dollars. And then I realized quickly it wasn’t, especially after taxes. But that first job in
0:17:20 Vanguard set me up for jobs at four of the biggest financial institutions out there,
0:17:25 and an ability to earn more when I didn’t want to be in the world of finance anymore.
0:17:31 And like you said, they invested $100,000 in your education from being there.
0:17:37 Totally. And then if I think back even further, there was a really interesting study. And I wonder
0:17:44 if you saw it. It’s called economic interconnectedness. And so basically the idea is this. If there’s two
0:17:50 groups of two neighborhoods with two different groups of people in them, where on average,
0:17:54 the average salary is the same in both neighborhoods, right? So I don’t know,
0:17:59 average person in both neighborhoods makes 50K. It’s a lower income neighborhood on both of them.
0:18:04 But in neighborhood B, as opposed to neighborhood A, they have a few people who make a million
0:18:09 dollars a year. So they just have a few rich people in this neighborhood that interact with
0:18:12 some of the poorer people. As opposed to this neighborhood, they really don’t have any.
0:18:17 If you are in this neighborhood, and even if your family is in that $50,000 a year bucket,
0:18:23 but you interact with some of those rich people, AKA you have more economic interconnectedness,
0:18:28 this group of people has a 30% higher earnings over the course of their life for the same skill
0:18:34 setting experience. And what I thought was really interesting about that is that it really just
0:18:38 goes to show you kind of want two things. You want somewhere you can learn as much as humanly
0:18:42 possible. And you want to be somewhere where you are around people who have more money than you do
0:18:48 by orders of magnitude, if at all possible. And we don’t really know if it’s causation
0:18:53 or correlation. But we do know that if you are around people who are wealthier, on average,
0:18:58 you tend to be wealthier, even if that’s not your background or skill set. And that I think is kind
0:19:06 of liberating. Why? Why do you think that that is? I have a guess. But my guess would be you realize
0:19:10 that other things are possible. You don’t have this ceiling of these like false rules that we
0:19:15 learn. And then all of a sudden, it’s like, I can do more. I can get out of the situation. I can
0:19:21 aspire to more. Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a couple. That one seems the most likely to me.
0:19:27 It’s just, it’s like the, where was it? It was like somewhere in the Nordic countries where they
0:19:32 had mostly had female heads of state. I don’t remember what they call them there. They were the
0:19:37 head of parliament or what, but mostly female heads of state. And so there was a small school
0:19:43 program where the boys and girls in the school were asked, how likely are you to be the next,
0:19:47 I don’t know, head of parliament or whatever. And in the Nordic countries, all the little girls
0:19:52 raised their hands because they had seen that example so much. Whereas in the US, and this,
0:19:56 I think the study was done more than 20 years ago. So in the US, it was all the little boys
0:20:01 that raised their hand. Like I could be president, right? And it was just had you seen an example
0:20:06 that looked like you previously. So I think that’s probably the drive and factor. It could also be
0:20:11 you have a conversation with these individuals and you get networking opportunities.
0:20:15 You have a conversation with these individuals and you just ask them advice. So you have advice
0:20:20 from people who have already done the thing that you want to do, which is an unfair equalizer.
0:20:26 And it could also be that maybe they hire you. I mean, I know for young people, like me, when I
0:20:32 was coming up and we had no money, I got really lucky to, I don’t even know what you would call me,
0:20:37 I was kind of like a bitch. I just was like a little assistant for one of my brother’s friends
0:20:42 in high school, his mom. And they had a lot of money. And so I would drive their fancy cars,
0:20:46 the car wash, I would pick up their dry cleaning, I would take their dog to the vet, all this stuff
0:20:52 for basically no money. And just watching them, I learned a ton. How do you organize? What do
0:20:57 you guys do for a living? They sold, they sold equipment rentals, like big tractor equipment
0:21:02 rentals. I was like, that’s so interesting. And that’s when I first heard about buying businesses,
0:21:07 because he sold his equipment tractor business. And then it went kind of under,
0:21:10 went a little sideways, and then he bought it back for pennies on the dollar. And I was like,
0:21:15 I didn’t know you could do that. And then that same family was one of my first investors back
0:21:21 when I had a fund in the private equity space. And so that was 20 years later. And I think
0:21:28 when rich people see hungry, driven, competent humans, by and large, they want to help,
0:21:33 because it’s rare and you are somehow a mirror for them. They’re like, oh, I remember when I
0:21:41 was like you. Totally. So if our 20s are about learning, how do we get in front of the people
0:21:46 that we are most likely to learn the most from, be it call them wealthy or high performers,
0:21:51 whatever you want? Like how do we put ourselves in that? Because odds are, it’s probably not our
0:21:56 loss. No, no. And so like, how do we seek this, if we’re going to spend a decade sort of like
0:22:01 learning and trying to increase our income, we should be methodical about how we approach this.
0:22:05 Yeah. Well, a couple of things. I was thinking about this today. Like we have a company here,
0:22:09 Contrarian Thinking, which is our media company. And then underneath it, we have Contrarian Capital,
0:22:13 which is our venture fund, and the Main Street Holding Company, which is where we own a bunch
0:22:20 of small businesses inside of it. And we get a lot of applications for jobs. And I was looking
0:22:25 around at our team today, you just met two of my employees. And the reason that both of them came
0:22:30 was because they wanted to be around other people who were high performing. So one of the nice things
0:22:36 about the internet today is, yeah, maybe you can’t get to Shane as much because you’re well known on
0:22:40 the internet and you might not have time to mentor people. But how often could you see somebody who
0:22:44 likes on the internet and then go, I want to work for them? You can do that a lot now. And a lot of
0:22:49 people who are on the internet are hiring like crazy. And so you can’t go and just slide into
0:22:55 somebody’s DMs and say, I want to work for you. What can I do? Lazy. But instead, you could keep
0:22:59 on job applications continuously for people that you think are high performing in companies that
0:23:04 you think are high performing. And there was another study that I thought was fascinating about
0:23:11 underperformers and high performers. And the study basically showed it was hundreds of employees
0:23:19 at many different companies. And it was about proximity. So if you sat next to a high performer,
0:23:25 15% increase in productivity, if you sat next to a low performer, 30% decrease in productivity.
0:23:30 And so I don’t think people realize that if you just look at it like numbers, let’s say you make
0:23:36 100 grand a year. Well, if you sit next to Shane or a high performer, I make 115k. It’s a gross
0:23:42 generalization, but an easy way to think about it. If I sit next to Cody who sucks, wow, what if I
0:23:47 only make 70k? Because my performance has actually dropped. And so I think about that a lot. I think
0:23:54 the best way to get mentors today is go work for them. Don’t ask to do stuff one off. Go to the
0:23:59 highest performing companies you think you can get into. And if they’re not that, switch to another
0:24:05 one because you get paid to get mentored. What a crazy idea. And that really didn’t exist for
0:24:11 like my parents’ generation. Sticking all the knowledge you have now, how would you go about
0:24:17 getting in front? You’re 22. How would you go about getting in front of Cody? Yeah, a couple things.
0:24:25 One. At the risk of blowing up your inbox. No, not at all. I mean, every single company that
0:24:32 is growing has a careers page on it. And you will be shocked how often those are not applied to
0:24:39 across multiple companies. And then how seldom they are chased. I think the number one problem,
0:24:42 if you can’t find a job right now and you want one and you can’t find a high performing job
0:24:49 right now, is are you applying like a shotgun or like a sniper rifle? And I remember, for instance,
0:24:56 one of my employees, they came to work for me. She really wanted the job. So she applied for,
0:25:00 I think the job at the time was like maybe my chief of staff. She applied for my chief of staff
0:25:04 normally. You fill out the resume, you fill it out, you wait. That’s all most people do.
0:25:09 But that wasn’t going to be her. She also was like, Hey, I imagine you need a lot of newsletter
0:25:14 writers. This was in the beginning. So she wrote an entire newsletter for me kind of in my voice
0:25:18 and just sent it to me, like, you know, didn’t ask for anything else. And then she said, I also
0:25:22 see you’re hiring for these other roles. Here’s a couple of other candidates I thought might be
0:25:25 interesting. I kind of pulled some profiles for you. And then she said, you know, I imagine you’re
0:25:32 really busy. You’re hiring this chief of staff role. I just read these two books on, on assistance.
0:25:36 And I wish I could remember the name of the one book because now I give it to some of my employees,
0:25:42 but basically on making a top performer, a higher performer. So she was like, you’re already great.
0:25:46 But here’s a couple of books I’m reading to figure out how do I make great people even greater?
0:25:51 One, she’s giving me a compliment, a little ego stroke. And then two, she’s saying, I think I
0:25:56 understand what you need, which is like, you don’t have enough time. And what if I just solve
0:26:02 problems for you? So of course I hired her, like, yeah, this is great. And so most people don’t
0:26:08 even, when I tell a lot of people in my email inbox, they’ll ask me for something. Sometimes
0:26:14 an email really stands out. And so I’ll respond and say, Hey, you want to learn about fundraising?
0:26:19 Okay, great, read, I don’t know, venture style or something, if you want to learn fundraising,
0:26:24 and then come back to me and, you know, tell me what you think. How many people do that? Nobody
0:26:30 reads, nobody. And so it’s like, if you really want a thing, the obstinate in getting it,
0:26:37 you will be shocked how few people go to that level. And I would say, I’ve done this multiple
0:26:42 times in my life. So when I wanted a job, I wanted to head the Latin America business at
0:26:48 Credit Suisse back in the day, which was a big finance company, I was totally, I really was not
0:26:52 credentialed enough for that job. It was a private equity job, I was going to be building out the
0:27:00 region. And I went ham, I think I traveled to, I went to Europe, I went to LA, I went to New York,
0:27:06 where the headquarters was to interview in three different places on my own dime. I heckled the
0:27:10 head guy there, Ryan, who I’m still friends with to this day, with all these different ideas for
0:27:15 the business with contacts, I gave him leads from people I already knew down there. And so finally,
0:27:19 you know, I was in the final running with one other woman. She ended up beating me out. I was
0:27:22 sad. But Ryan came back to me about six months later and was like, she’s not working out, do you
0:27:27 want it? But by that time, I had already gotten a position heading to another business in Latin
0:27:32 America. So it was cool. But that’s also how I got my first job at State Street. I think I did
0:27:38 like eight interviews and sent custom gifts to a bunch of the corporate heads then. Because just
0:27:46 a little bit of effort shows you’re such a decrease of risk as a new hire. I mean, most of the reasons
0:27:52 that people don’t work out when you hire them is not capability, it’s effort. And so if you can
0:27:57 decrease the likelihood that you won’t work hard for them, even much higher likelihood of getting
0:28:01 a gig. I used to test people because I would get these imbalance being like, I want to work for
0:28:07 you. I’m like, no problem, like let’s grab lunch. And they’re like, oh, I’m not in Ottawa. And I’m
0:28:10 like, oh, well, if you’re ever here, let me know. Do you know how many people ever showed up? How
0:28:18 many? None. Not one person was ever like, I will hop on a plane and I’ll grab lunch with you. And
0:28:21 I just thought it was like this excellent filter, which is like, well, if you’re not willing to
0:28:27 do that, why should I invest my time? That is a great filter. Yeah. Yeah, Ottawa is useful.
0:28:32 And now. Yeah, because it’s so hard to get to, right? It’s so inconvenient. Nobody ever flies
0:28:37 there. How do you think, is it effort? Is it follow up? Is it determination? Is it result? Like,
0:28:43 what is it? Because certain people seem to have it. And certain people don’t. But I also think
0:28:48 it’s totally learnable. Winning is probably one of the most learnable skill sets out there when it
0:28:53 comes to business. Because the only thing that really differentiates most businesses from winning
0:28:58 and losing is giving up. You know, when we go and invest, I don’t know, in 20 or 30 startups a year
0:29:06 in our venture fund, the research shows by and large, the reason why Silicon Valley wants two
0:29:10 founders is because the number one risk for investing in a company is that a founder gives
0:29:17 up number one. And so if you know that it is really just grit, like Angela Duckworth’s study on grit,
0:29:21 then that is what you want to test for. You need to have a good idea. You need to have the foundation.
0:29:26 But we really want to try to figure out how much pain can you tolerate? And the more pain you can
0:29:31 tolerate in business, the higher likelihood you’ll succeed over time. It’s just shots on goal. And
0:29:35 so I think people should be really liberated by that. I was, you know, I’m like, well,
0:29:39 you know, I don’t really have to be smarter than anybody else. I don’t have to be richer than
0:29:44 anybody else. I don’t have to be better connected. I just have to be a little bit aggressively
0:29:49 relentless. And that is something anybody can do. It’s not comfortable in the beginning, but you
0:29:54 can do it. So when we go out and we look at, okay, should I give a couple hundred thousand dollars
0:30:00 to this company or this company? The number one thing we screen are the founders. So how do you
0:30:06 screen them? I want to best predict your future behaviors, past behavior, I think. So I want to
0:30:11 see a history of winning in some way, shape, or form. So also hard to beat a losing streak,
0:30:16 as you know, in sports. So a lot of times I want to see, yeah, I came to this startup. The startup
0:30:20 was growing really fast. I outrude the position and I was ready for my next adventure as opposed to,
0:30:26 I came to this position and the company kind of failed. I was bored. You know, it didn’t work out.
0:30:31 So I want that. The second thing I want is I really want, we do a specific type of interviewing
0:30:38 with founders that basically just takes them through every single company they’ve ever been at,
0:30:43 and you ask them why they went to that company and why they left. And those two questions at
0:30:50 least seem to tell us a lot about do they give up? Do they chase things? Do they allow things to
0:30:55 come to them? And easy enough system to gain. So you’d probably be smarter at coming up with
0:31:01 fancy questions. But imagine like you also have people, I love questions where you unintentionally
0:31:05 give people to divulge things. In this case, one of the things that strikes me, people would
0:31:11 divulge is like, I didn’t like my boss. It was like hours were too long. They wanted me to work
0:31:17 on. They’ll just passively slip up and some of these things, you know, like red flag. Red flag.
0:31:21 Well, and the beautiful part is, I think with having a brand on the internet,
0:31:26 how can people know what they’re getting into? You know, and I tell people, listen,
0:31:33 if you want to go work nine to five, have probably little to no stress whatsoever outside of work,
0:31:40 not have to work a ton, be able to take vacation days, have a low likelihood of getting fired,
0:31:44 go work for a vanguard. Like they’re great at that. Like they love people to stay forever.
0:31:51 They pay bottom of the pyramid. But because they do that, people stay there for a long time,
0:31:55 and there’s not as much exterior stress. Now, I was never more stressed than when I worked at
0:32:02 vanguard because I hate being held back by arbitrary rules. Like, no, you can’t make more
0:32:08 money until the three-year mark. It’s like, what? Why? I don’t like that. I magically have the skills
0:32:13 at, you know, two years and 364 days. I don’t have them, but then all of a sudden. Then you do.
0:32:18 Yeah. And they just have a very militaristic way of, at least when I worked there, how they hired.
0:32:23 And so I didn’t like that. I like to the Goldman, you go eat what you kill. And if you suck, you’re
0:32:27 fired. And if you’re good, you’re going to make more money. And I was like, okay, well, at least I
0:32:34 kind of can get benefit from working harder. But I think a lot of people, these days in particular,
0:32:39 like the hustle culture thing that’ll like it, which I get, but I don’t think you have to do it
0:32:46 forever, but you should do it when you’re young. And if anybody is getting triggered thinking about,
0:32:50 well, I wouldn’t want to work for Cody because she’s super tough and she’s going to make me work
0:32:58 really hard. I think it’s a tragedy, actually. I think, I think there’s something sort of spiritual
0:33:03 about working hard on something you’re obsessed with, with the group of humans all working towards
0:33:08 a goal of getting better. Like, where else can you get constant feedback and business,
0:33:12 be with a team of high performers and figure out what you’re really made of?
0:33:17 Did you see that Tom Brady Baker Mayfield thing where Baker came in? He’s like, well,
0:33:23 he implied that Brady, he was there to like lighten up the locker room. And Brady sort of
0:33:29 replied, this isn’t kindergarten winning championships is fine. And I was like, oh man,
0:33:35 like that’s crazy. Winning is fun. It is fun. And once you figure out the game, you want to win.
0:33:41 And if you lose, you want to learn a lot. And you don’t ever want to not win because you didn’t
0:33:46 go hard. And, you know, what’s fascinating too is, you know, it’s never fun to fire an employee.
0:33:51 I’ve had to do that many times over my life. Less fun to get fired, for sure.
0:33:58 But one of the things I’ve realized is most often people self-select, like they kind of know when
0:34:04 they’re just not a culture fit. And when maybe they don’t want to run so hard anymore. And when
0:34:08 it’s not their obsession. And when the thing you do is no longer your obsession and you’re no longer
0:34:13 learning, I think it’s perfectly cool to go move on to the next thing. And that’s happened to me
0:34:19 multiple times when I was working at big corporations. And I just, but I did it with hopefully a good
0:34:25 amount of grace. I think what goes sideways is when you turn yourself into a victim, you know,
0:34:29 they didn’t promote me, the company sucked, blah, blah, blah. Instead, it’s like, listen,
0:34:33 you’ve taught me so much. Thank you for letting me work here for this period of time. I hope I’ve
0:34:37 been high value to you. I’m ready for my next evolution. And I want to make sure you have a
0:34:42 smooth transition. Like, how can we do that? And if you’ll do that, like, I’m pretty much
0:34:47 friends with every single boss I ever had back in the day, minus, minus two. I did burn a few
0:34:53 bridges. But for the most part, I’m friends with most of them, even ones where I really disagreed
0:34:57 with, like, what they were doing in the business. I thought I should do it my way. But it wasn’t
0:35:03 my chips. So I had to go get my own. If you’re a boss, manager, owner, how do you determine if
0:35:10 somebody’s interested or obsessed? That’s such a good question. I always think about what can you
0:35:16 not sleep for the want of doing? You know, again, I find business to be sort of spiritual. And so,
0:35:21 I think when you felt that flow state in business before, it could be writing emails for me. Like,
0:35:28 when I am writing a really good email, and I am in the zone and I am focused, it’s maybe the most
0:35:32 beautiful thing I do. It’s my favorite thing in the world. And I’d rather do it than go out and
0:35:37 drink beers at the bar. And so, I like to ask people a couple of questions. One of my favorite
0:35:42 questions is, “When was the last time you pulled an all-nighter? You stayed up all night working
0:35:47 on something that you loved?” And a lot of times, you can tell if somebody is an interested,
0:35:54 versed, obsessed person by the fact that they’re like, “Fuck, I’ve never done that.” Or they might
0:35:58 say the opposite. “God, you know what? I don’t work as well at night. But God, I remember a couple
0:36:02 weeks ago, we had this problem. And I was just up at 3 a.m. thinking about it. So, like, I got up
0:36:06 and I just got the chalkboard out. And what I figured out is this.” And so, I really like that
0:36:14 question. The second one is thinking about, “I’ll ask something like, when was the last time that
0:36:20 you really believed X was the decision for the business, but one of your colleagues or somebody
0:36:25 else wanted to do Y?” And I just want to see how passionate they are about it. Now, a lot of times,
0:36:32 the answer for that is something like, you know, I wanted to get a raise and I didn’t get a raise
0:36:41 or something like that. But a good answer sounds like, “Well, they wanted to launch a new product
0:36:45 focused on Argentina.” And I told them that was a terrible idea because right now, the government
0:36:51 in Argentina was XYZ. And if we focused on an Argentinian bond fund, we were going to get slaughtered.
0:36:55 And I put together this PowerPoint that kind of explained why. And I thought through these
0:36:58 frameworks and I looked at these historical models and like, that was the reason why.
0:37:03 And, you know, and it turned out, you know, I was right. And either I wish I would have
0:37:10 presented it more convincingly, or I realized that my opinion, you know, wasn’t going to carry
0:37:13 weight there. And so, I wanted to go somewhere and take my own risk. And like, that’s what a great
0:37:18 answer looks like. And whether you’re right or wrong, it’s a great answer. Because if you say I was
0:37:23 wrong, but I did all the steps that I was supposed to do, I learned from that. Now, all of a sudden,
0:37:26 you get a different sort of tell. Yeah, that’s true. Because a lot of times it’s just I want to
0:37:31 understand how your mind works. Because what we’re always searching for is like examples where we’re
0:37:38 the hero, right? Where we’re sort of like saving the day. But it’s really, I think, interesting when
0:37:44 people point out, I wasn’t the hero. I was totally wrong in this situation. But I did make an argument.
0:37:52 I did sort of like outline my thinking. And maybe we were lucky or unlucky. Because nobody
0:37:57 corrected my thinking. Or maybe I learned because I missed this huge thing. Yeah. And what did you
0:38:03 do after that? I remember I ran a business where we sold money market funds to big pensions and
0:38:09 sovereign wealth funds. And overnight, my business was eviscerated. I mean, I’m talking about billions
0:38:13 and billions of dollars in assets under management. It was at State Street. So it wasn’t like all my
0:38:18 money, it was their money. But overnight, it was totally killed. And it was because of government
0:38:24 regulation that did this silly technical thing called they took away stable NAV. I won’t get
0:38:29 into what that is. But they basically changed the way accounting for this type of product worked.
0:38:33 And that meant that the pensions and sovereign wealth funds couldn’t use it anymore. So I went
0:38:38 from selling billions and billions of dollars of this stuff to, oh my God, massive redemptions.
0:38:43 They were like, give me all my money back. I was like, oh, this isn’t great. And in that moment,
0:38:49 I realized we had built a business that was technically pretty great, like incredible sales
0:38:57 team, great customer support, great brand, great product, great team. And we didn’t think of like
0:39:03 our biggest risk, which was the government regulation. And so that business basically became
0:39:09 like unprofitable overnight. And my next decision was I went to Georgetown and I got an international
0:39:14 MBA. And I went to Georgetown in particular, because I realized I didn’t understand anything
0:39:21 about government regulation and oversight, like nothing. I was so finance markets investing,
0:39:26 and I didn’t realize that the government is probably one of your biggest risks often. And so
0:39:31 I ended up doing that executive MBA for two years while working at the company and opening up a
0:39:35 Latin American investment business that was a different type of investment. But like that would
0:39:41 be a great example of like, I lost awfully. And so then what do I do about it? Do I go curl up
0:39:46 and die or do I go learn again? So I don’t make the same lesson twice, hopefully.
0:39:51 You had another mistake that stands out for me, which was you lost $12 million on a cannabis
0:39:56 deal in like three months. What happened there? Yeah, well, that one, we didn’t screen the founder
0:40:02 very well. I mean, this one was a scary deal because we didn’t have that big of a fund. I think
0:40:07 our fund was like 60 or 100 million bucks back then. And cannabis was raging, you know, it was
0:40:14 like straight up like hockey stick like growth. And the fund before that, this was our second fund.
0:40:18 So the fund before that, we killed it. It was like three to five X return over a pretty short
0:40:23 period of time, investors got their money back, we looked really smart. Well, the second fund
0:40:30 was really happening during COVID. And COVID almost cratered a bunch of cannabis businesses.
0:40:36 And the market started drying up. So no more capital to fund cannabis businesses.
0:40:40 And capital is the lifeblood of businesses. And especially for these businesses, they were almost
0:40:44 like venture businesses. Or if they didn’t keep getting more cash, they weren’t profitable. So
0:40:50 they weren’t sustainable. So this business, we had put in like $12 million into this business.
0:40:57 And it was like, it was a products business located out of California. And basically like,
0:41:01 I can’t remember, but it felt like two weeks later, after we put the money into this
0:41:05 business, we get a phone call from the founder and the founders like,
0:41:12 we’re basically out of money. We don’t know what we’re going to do next. And we need more cash.
0:41:16 And we were like, excuse us, like, we just did this huge analysis, you told us these numbers,
0:41:21 we confirmed to the bank account. Well, it turns out he had all these historical payments
0:41:27 that he was paying through, you know, massive fraud, you know, total malfeasance across the
0:41:32 company that we just completely missed. And sometimes that happens. And we were like, well,
0:41:37 fuck, you know, is this company going to fold? And so thankfully we have on our team a guy by the
0:41:41 name of Joe, who’s our turnaround guy, and he had to fly out to Oakland. And basically over the
0:41:46 course of the next four weeks, do massive cuts and restructuring and some some smart turnaround
0:41:51 stuff in order to save the company. But I thought we were going to go under and that was one of our
0:41:57 murky investments that we had made like two weeks prior. And my biggest lesson learning from there
0:42:03 is, well, two things really, remember when I met the guy. And now I have learned to really trust
0:42:09 my gut on the first interaction with somebody I’m going to invest in, I just didn’t really trust him.
0:42:16 He said a couple of things that were a little flashy. He drove a flashy car, which is always to
0:42:22 me a red saw a red red flag when the company’s not yet profitable. And a little too excitable,
0:42:27 a little too laissez-faire, but my partners loved him. And so I didn’t really raise my hand and I
0:42:31 didn’t put my foot in the sand. So that was my fault. That was the first red flag. And that’s
0:42:36 happened to me multiple times of partnerships. It took me like three times of having sort of
0:42:40 bad partnerships like that happened, starting listening to you. Yeah. If I don’t like it on the
0:42:45 first go, then we’re waiting a year is our new rule. So if I feel any sort of anything,
0:42:48 doesn’t mean I’ll never do a deal with a person, but I’m going to watch him for a year. It’s kind
0:42:53 of hard to fool somebody for a full year. So that was one. And then the second thing was
0:42:58 we now do a forensic audits on most of these businesses, which basically means you get somebody
0:43:02 to get in there and you get really deep into the numbers because even if they’re not committing
0:43:09 fraud, a lot of entrepreneurs aren’t the cleanest with their books. And so you can commit fraud
0:43:14 on purpose or by accident, both suck. And so I never wanted that to happen again.
0:43:17 It’s almost like people don’t realize like if you’re the only shareholder,
0:43:22 yeah, you can sort of like do what you want that’s legal. But if you’re not the only
0:43:24 shareholder, now all of a sudden you’re spending other people’s money.
0:43:29 100%. And so there’s a huge difference between the expense accounts, I would imagine.
0:43:35 And a lot of times they get, they’ve never before raised capital, so they get a bunch of money in.
0:43:39 And just like I would, if I had ever raised capital for my independent businesses,
0:43:45 you’re like, okay, now let’s grow. But you don’t really know how to look into the future with
0:43:49 that kind of money and say, if I do this action, will it make me more money? Because you’ve never
0:43:55 done this game before. And so I think a lot of times that’s a danger point in startups.
0:43:59 I also joke that anytime you see a startup founder who takes capital from third parties
0:44:04 and they start like doing Twitter threads and writing blog posts, it’s like a red flag.
0:44:08 Unless they’re like, unless they’re a media company, it’s like, no, no, no, stay focused,
0:44:12 you know? How do you think about focus when you, when you see somebody, one of the intuition
0:44:16 things I’m imagining is sort of like they’re distracted. They got like 20 things going on.
0:44:19 When you’re investing, I would imagine you want 100%.
0:44:25 Yeah. Well, it really depends. First is, is their first rodeo. If it’s the first rodeo and the first
0:44:29 time you’ve ever run a business, do one thing really well until that thing is profitable,
0:44:36 self-sustainable, and you don’t have to focus on it 100% of the time. That’s my rule. If it’s
0:44:40 not your first rodeo and you’ve already had a successful exit or two, then I think you can
0:44:45 get better at layering. And so, you know, one of the things I’d want to see if I was investing
0:44:50 in founders, a good example would be like Brett Adcock who started Figure, the robotics company.
0:44:57 So he had before had a company that was drones that company did really well. They exited that
0:45:01 company, big exit, then he started Figure, he raised a ton of cash, now the company’s worth
0:45:06 more than a billion dollars. Well, Brett also started another company after that. And that
0:45:12 company is focused on like security inside of schools and humbling areas. And typically,
0:45:16 if Brett was a first time entrepreneur, I would be like, red flag, you know, we should watch
0:45:21 why he’s starting these two companies. Since he’s a multi-time founder, less concerned.
0:45:26 And then the third thing to think about is, are they accretive or not? Like,
0:45:32 does one plus one equal three? And so, if Kim Kardashian would be a great example.
0:45:37 So Kim Kardashian has her big media empire, right? You could say, just stay focused on that Kim.
0:45:42 Well, she’s looking for better ways to monetize that audience. So she has skims, right? Plus,
0:45:50 she has Sky, her private equity portfolio, right? You know, plus she has whatever Kim calls her
0:45:54 cosmetics company. But they’re all sort of accretive because they use her media platform
0:46:00 and she gets to sell similar things to her audience and increase her overall basket size.
0:46:05 And so that’s how I think about our businesses today. I’m like, Cody, you’re not allowed to start
0:46:10 a beauty company because that’s not accretive. It has to be like BizCout, which is our business
0:46:15 buying and selling marketplace. It has to be Resi Brands, which is our small business trade
0:46:21 franchises. It needs to be like right now, we’re focused a lot on helping our businesses scale,
0:46:25 not just people buy a business, but, okay, you bought it. Now let’s get it to 10 million instead
0:46:31 of 1 million. And so it has to really ladder into the same portfolio. Otherwise, you’re distracting
0:46:36 yourself. What are some of the biggest lies or misconceptions that you hear about money?
0:46:43 One that it’s hard to make. I do not actually think money is hard to make. I think it is hard
0:46:50 to get a skill set that is valuable. And once you get a skill set that is valuable,
0:46:55 money can be very easy to make. And people confuse the two. They say like money’s hard.
0:46:59 And it’s like, no, no, no, you just haven’t obsessed yet on having a skill set that people
0:47:04 will pay enough money for. But you can do that. And then money can become easier.
0:47:10 I also think it’s a very freeing idea. Like if you keep telling yourself, making money is hard,
0:47:14 making money is hard, making money is hard, well, it’s going to be hard. But if you keep telling
0:47:18 yourself, no, it’s actually not hard. I just haven’t done what is necessary yet to get what I want.
0:47:25 That would be first. And then the second is that I think money is a cruel mistress. So I always say
0:47:29 money likes attention just like a mistress does. And if you don’t pay attention to her,
0:47:35 somebody else will. And so, you know, I think there’s a lot of benefit early on in your career
0:47:42 to sort of obsessing on race to your first 500K and feel no shame about that shows that
0:47:49 happiness increases post 500K in income or up to 500K in income after 500K, there’s sort of these
0:47:55 plateaus and it’s not really materially different. And then the second thing on it is really obsessing
0:48:00 on money on a daily basis. Like, are you looking at your bank account? Are you looking at the bank
0:48:05 account of your business? Are you looking at how much you make or sell in products? Are you taking
0:48:10 one action every single day to make more money? A money related action? And I think if you do
0:48:15 those things, you’ll kind of be surprised at how you can compound over time. Are there different
0:48:22 skill sets between acquiring and sort of maintaining or keeping your money? Oh, yeah. I mean,
0:48:30 it’s always in my opinion, easier in the beginning to save, but easier in the long term to earn.
0:48:35 So you can only save your way to zero. You know, there’s very, there’s limited downside,
0:48:42 but there’s unlimited upside. And so I do think that what do they call that? They call that like
0:48:48 spending creep lifestyle creep. And so there’s certainly that the more money you make,
0:48:52 the more you spend, and then all of a sudden you realize that you’ve totally outspent your income.
0:48:58 That is a big problem for many people. But I think on average, we’ve been told that we need to save
0:49:04 a lot more. And here’s why. One, if we’re saving consistently, what does that mean? It means that
0:49:09 we’re putting money into third party investment products. It means that we have money sitting
0:49:15 at banks. Like if we save, we’re helping a lot of other individuals make money. If we earn and
0:49:21 invest money in our individual businesses, we are actually giving money back to employees. We are
0:49:29 giving money back to local economies. Like this benefits a few really big guys saving earning
0:49:36 benefits a lot of little guys. And so I understand why society has pushed us to save more as opposed
0:49:42 to earn more. I also think by and large, money equals freedom. So the more money you can make,
0:49:48 the more decisions that you can make by yourself and most people, they don’t want free people.
0:49:56 You know, the people on high really want us to follow rules and to think in terms of safety,
0:50:01 not opportunity. And so I think we should obsess on making money and you should obsess
0:50:06 on making money because then you get to push back when people tell you things that you don’t want
0:50:12 to do. And then you have freedom. Yeah, 100%. Like ultimate freedom in terms of you call it,
0:50:16 fuck you money, call it whatever you want. But it’s like, no, I don’t want to do this thing.
0:50:22 Yeah, 100%. Now I can opt in or opt out. Yeah. I mean, in society today, it’s totally doable.
0:50:26 I think it is, it’s very hard these days to make a profitable business. I think there’s never been
0:50:31 a harder time to make a profitable business. Never been an easier time to start a business.
0:50:36 That’s kind of why I obsess on buying businesses because you just know it’s already making money.
0:50:41 It has a history of past performance. So best predictor of future behaviors, past behavior.
0:50:46 It’s not a guarantee, but it is a higher indicator. And so because of that, I like buying businesses
0:50:54 because then you can operationalize them, you can increase the growth. And so I also think people
0:51:00 listening, before I made quote unquote a lot of money, if you would have told me that I would
0:51:04 have a nine figure holding company or that I would have all of these small businesses,
0:51:09 I would have thought you were crazy. And it just wasn’t part of my psyche that that was possible
0:51:15 for a normal human being. And even though I get shit about it on the internet, I like to push
0:51:22 upon people that it’s actually very possible for you to have a lot of wealth. Now, I don’t think
0:51:27 you most people want a nine figure holding company, actually. There’s always something going wrong.
0:51:31 There’s always challenges. There’s always mistakes. It’s a lot of stress. But I do think
0:51:36 everybody can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year over time if they focus on earning it.
0:51:40 Do you think that’s largely possible? It’s almost like people, they want the outcome,
0:51:44 but they don’t want the trade-offs to come with the outcome. We look at the gold medal,
0:51:48 but we don’t see the training days that are like 4am constantly, the injuries,
0:51:54 the recovery, the lack of family time. We don’t see everything that goes into making that possible.
0:51:58 And if we do see it, we often don’t want it. Yeah, I think that’s true.
0:52:02 Is there a difference between like a rich mindset and then a broke mindset then?
0:52:10 Many things. I think a couple things. Rich people overall, they really don’t believe
0:52:15 in that word impossible. They’re not like, if you said to a really rich person,
0:52:21 “Hey, it’s just not possible for you to start this next business and execute on it,”
0:52:24 kind of doesn’t enter their psyche. So they have what I’ve always thought of as like an
0:52:31 armor of nose. So rich people have gotten told so many times, they’ve been rejected so many times,
0:52:34 that it almost just bounces off of them. They kind of go, “Yeah, I’m going to do it anyway.
0:52:41 Thanks for the feedback. I’m going to try it.” I think poor people, they have confirmation bias of
0:52:47 no. So when stuff has happened to them that’s bad or when stuff hasn’t worked out, instead of an
0:52:51 armor of no, they’re wearing a coat of no. They’re like, “Yep, just let it in. Let’s just build some
0:52:56 more on this coat. Let’s make this cape longer.” And I think if you can kind of visualize it like
0:53:00 that, a deflection versus an accumulation of nose, that’s the difference between rich people
0:53:08 and broke people. And in my career, for a very long time, I think you want to be around people
0:53:14 who often tell you, “Do more. Go harder. Keep going,” as opposed to people who say, “That’s not
0:53:18 possible. It worked for you, but it wouldn’t work for me.” And I think that’s the difference also
0:53:23 between allies. Those are people who want you to win and friends who are people that want you to
0:53:30 stay with them, whatever level they’re at. Go deeper on that. So I think most friendships,
0:53:33 if you just think about human nature, like I saw this cool thing, I wish I had like a,
0:53:39 it’s kind of like this. So there’s a monk by the name of Dandie Pondie. Sorry if I
0:53:44 fucked that up, but something like that. And he talks about how as you get rich,
0:53:50 you sort of, and I’m going to hold it like this, you sort of rise up like this. And let’s say your
0:53:56 friends, your family, your colleagues, your husband or girlfriend or boyfriend or something,
0:54:01 they’re sort of these corners. And as you start rising in wealth or success, what happens? They’re
0:54:04 like, “Wait a second. You’re leaving me behind. I love you. I don’t want you to leave me.
0:54:09 You seem to be superseding me. This is scary,” natural response. But what they don’t realize is
0:54:14 right now, as you’re rising, they’re not really rising. You’re just getting further away from them.
0:54:20 But as you get higher, you pull the rest of them along with you. And so with most friends,
0:54:26 all they see is this bottom part of your journey. They don’t actually realize forward-looking,
0:54:30 you’re going to take them with you. Now, the people who do see this are your allies.
0:54:35 Those are the people who want you to win no matter what. And those are the people who see,
0:54:41 “Oh, okay. If Shane keeps winning and then he takes us with him to some of these events,
0:54:46 and we meet these people too, and I share his podcast and he kind of shares my new newsletter,
0:54:51 we’re all going to win.” This is, “Oh, man. Shane did it. I can do it. That’s an ally.”
0:54:55 Oh, man. Shane’s gotten kind of too big for his britches. Oh, man. Shane thinks that he’s better
0:55:01 than us. I never hear from Shane. I miss you, Shane. Friend. And I think in our life,
0:55:06 as we’re in our growth journey, obsessing on a few more allies is helpful.
0:55:10 Do you lose friends as you go up? What’s your experience with that?
0:55:21 Yes. I think that success, buying of itself these days, is sort of a lonely pursuit. And that
0:55:27 when you are focused on building something, you’re not boring, you’re building. But you are in an
0:55:35 era where if you don’t have focus, you won’t win. It is definitely a relentless grind in order to
0:55:42 build something completely new for yourself. I remember I had a series of girlfriends in college
0:55:48 that I was quite close with, I think very highly of them still to this day. But I remember, I posted
0:55:52 this one picture on Instagram, really sort of like flippantly. I didn’t think anything of it.
0:55:56 And in the picture, we’d all been drinking. So we kind of looked goofy. We were these young
0:56:03 college girls. So we’re like, “I think they look cute. I look a little crazy.” And I posted it
0:56:11 something like, “I’ve been there partying just like you have to. You can do both.” Something
0:56:18 like that. And I remember one of them texted me and was sort of like, “How dare you? You think so
0:56:27 little of us. We’re just your partying, shithead, drunk friends.” And we were never the same again
0:56:31 after that. So I apologize profusely. I was like, “I don’t know how you could have seen that. That
0:56:35 is not at all what I meant by it. In fact, never even entered my consciousness. And of course,
0:56:40 I’ll take it down if it makes you feel uncomfortable.” And from that moment, we’ve never been friends
0:56:45 again. And this group of girls and I have never been friends again. And at first, I really couldn’t
0:56:51 wrap my head around it. But I do think what happens is when you become really successful,
0:56:56 you are a mirror on the things somebody else could have been. And so you are a reflection of every
0:57:02 decision that they made that was short-term as opposed to long-term. And so I’ve lost many a
0:57:11 friend by the mirror. And I always openly welcome them back and wish them well. But I do think that
0:57:15 you won’t succeed very far if you stay around the same people that you started with.
0:57:19 I never thought of it like a mirror before. That’s a really interesting way to frame it.
0:57:23 Do men and women think about money differently?
0:57:30 Well, I want to add one other thing. So one thing I don’t like, actually, is I have noticed a lot
0:57:36 of people on the internet saying things like, “If they’re not above you, if they’re not in front
0:57:43 of you, you’ve got to leave them behind. And if they’re not moving as fast as you are, then
0:57:48 you don’t need to be friends with them anymore.” And I totally disagree with that. In fact, the
0:57:53 research really shows the opposite. Arthur Brooks does an incredible series of studies about
0:57:59 having what he calls “worthless friends.” And worthless friends are the friends that you have
0:58:03 no transactional value you want from them. You don’t want anything from them. They don’t want
0:58:06 anything from you. They want to hang out with you. They want to go on a walk with you. They don’t want
0:58:11 your email list. They don’t want access to your money. They just want to have a beer on a Friday
0:58:17 night. And these friendships end up materially increasing our happiness, these worthless friends,
0:58:22 whereas these transactional friendships actually end up in many ways decreasing our happiness.
0:58:28 And so I think when people say, “Hey, if they’re not on your level, ditch them.” They don’t actually
0:58:35 understand the research. And I had a friend here, actually, who I saw get really, really successful
0:58:42 on the internet. And I saw the most fascinating thing, which was I just started meeting people who
0:58:48 had done business with this person before. And every one of those people, as this person superseded
0:58:54 them, had sort of a negative story to tell about them. Oh, interesting. And it was like, yeah, the
0:59:01 second that they got bigger than I did, I became irrelevant. The second that I was no longer useful,
0:59:05 I was… And after five or six of these stories, I thought, wow, I don’t think that people realize
0:59:13 the repercussions of not allowing other people to rise with you. And in fact, your reputation is
0:59:18 one of your most valuable assets. And people often think about their reputation online as like,
0:59:23 “To the masses, am I a good person?” It’s like, nah, to the guy at the grocery store,
0:59:26 are you a good person? To the person that you did a deal with, who was your last employer,
0:59:31 partner, didn’t work out, are you a good person? And if you’re not to those people who are worthless
0:59:36 to you, then it will come around. And I truly believe that. And so I just want to say that
0:59:42 because I’ve thought it before too, like, “Hey, if they’re not on your level, keep going.” I don’t
0:59:45 actually think that’s true. And I think it will catch up to you when I’ve seen it firsthand.
0:59:49 One of Buffett’s filters, I think, if I remember, my reading curricula is that
0:59:54 he was super friendly with people, but if they asked him for a favor, it was an indication
1:00:00 that they weren’t necessarily friends in the other person’s eye. And I thought that was like an
1:00:05 interesting sort of… Not like the common favors you would do with your friends. “Oh, my husband
1:00:10 needs a job,” or “My wife needs a job,” those kind of favors. I thought that was an interesting
1:00:16 thing. And I never thought about it again until this moment. I think I’ve had a lot of screens
1:00:20 over my… I’ve only been on the internet for like three years or something like that.
1:00:25 You’ve been playing this game a lot longer. So your spectrum is so much wider and more
1:00:30 vivid than mine is. Oh, you play it better. You have millions of followers. Well, do I play it better?
1:00:35 I like gamifying things. And I think you like deeply understanding things is sort of how I
1:00:40 perceive you, at least. And so I find growth to be really fun. That’s like one of my favorite games.
1:00:46 So I obsess on growth. And sometimes to the detriment of deep understanding. And I think
1:00:53 that seems to be one of your skill sets, which is really beautiful. But in the time that I’ve been
1:00:58 on the internet, I think everybody’s my buddy. This is so like… You know, when I meet people,
1:01:02 I truly am like, “No, he was so nice. We did a podcast. We’re like best buds. We’re texting each
1:01:07 other.” And I’ve had to realize, “Oh, they’re just really charismatic. We’re not that good of friends.”
1:01:13 And that’s okay. And so to your point, I don’t know, on the favor’s thing, I guess
1:01:20 I’m always curious how people are going to be when people lose money or things go sideways.
1:01:25 Totally. When people are talking shit about you, when it’s inconvenient to be your friend,
1:01:30 who will be there? And so when those moments happened to me, one of my favorite mentors always
1:01:36 said, “Allow, accept, thank you, let it go.” And so when something tough is happening, I’ll go,
1:01:42 “Okay, this is happening. I accept it’s happening. Thank you for this happening. Now kind of let
1:01:50 it go,” like whatever it is, move on. And I’ll kind of see who there checks in, who there speaks out.
1:01:54 And that, I think, is really valuable feedback. It’s not that you’re judging them. You’re just
1:02:00 saying, “How much am I going to give you long-term? Like, how much of me do I want to invest in you
1:02:06 as a fellow human?” So I do believe in choosing sides. And I think I want to find people who
1:02:12 have at times done a really inconvenient thing for themselves because it was the right thing to do,
1:02:16 or they thought it was the right thing to do. Totally. That’s a great indicator to me of
1:02:23 a human with moral integrity. Do you have that mindset based on what you just said? It sort of
1:02:26 brought this, and correct me if I’m wrong, that you’re either with me or against me?
1:02:39 No, but I have a mindset of, “Can I trust you in my darkest moments?” I joked the other day.
1:02:45 I had a little incident with a girlfriend, and I joked with her about it. I was like, “Man,
1:02:50 wait until you meet the real me. Like, if this pissed you off, wait until you really get to
1:02:57 build me.” And we joked about it, and then we were fine. But I do have that belief that I want
1:03:03 friends who will hide you in the basement when you need to. And Chris and I, who’s my husband,
1:03:08 I talked about that a lot during COVID because there was so much craziness happening in the world.
1:03:16 And I remember thinking, if we have an unpopular view, who would hide us? Not because they even
1:03:20 believe what we believe. I don’t think you need to do that, but because they’re like, “You’re my
1:03:24 people, and I love you, and I’m going to be there for you.” And so, no, I don’t believe in moral
1:03:30 absolutism. It’s actually interesting that our company right now, for the first time ever,
1:03:35 we have something so beautiful I’ve never seen, which is, we have really, really conservative
1:03:40 people at my company, and really liberal people. And we talk about it. And in fact, we often jokingly
1:03:46 label each other. We’ll be like, blah, blah, blah, the commie, and blah, blah, blah,
1:03:55 the right of Russia and blah. And what’s interesting about that is with these groups
1:04:00 of people, they start to respect each other as humans and realize that political views are maybe
1:04:04 the most uninteresting thing about most people. And I’ve never had that at a company before,
1:04:11 and I really like it. And so, they have this curiosity about one another as opposed to judgment.
1:04:16 I have a theory that part of this whole work from home thing is actually amplifying political
1:04:21 divide. Because we go to the office, we have to work with the person who thinks opposite to us.
1:04:26 And all of a sudden, it takes the power out of that position. It takes the, “Oh, they’re a nice
1:04:30 person. They might believe something completely different.” But now, all of a sudden, it just
1:04:37 tones down the emotion. But when we don’t go to work, we’re on a laptop and we’re commuting.
1:04:42 The whole world just looks like us. Our friends probably vote the same
1:04:46 we do. They make the same amount of money that we do. The world looks, it starts to get insulated.
1:04:52 Yeah. It’s a beautiful view. I mean, some of the research shows, one, higher levels of depression
1:04:56 and anxiety with work from home. So, I actually think that was a great lie. It was a big, beautiful
1:05:01 lie. That sitting in our sweatpants in our house on Zoom meetings all day would actually make us
1:05:07 happy and give us more freedom. Hard to disagree. I do think that sitting in a cubicle under
1:05:11 fluorescent lights is a form of mental insanity over the long term. And I have no interest in
1:05:16 doing that again. But I do not think that we humans were meant to be isolated. And there’s much
1:05:22 research that supports that. And to your point, it’s so much easier when you’re an anonymous troll
1:05:28 on the internet to hate everybody and to think that they hate you. And another thing that I
1:05:31 learned from Arthur Books, who’s become a friend of mine, and he wrote a book called Love Your
1:05:38 Enemies. And I remember I have this one Twitter troll. And like, Shane, when I tell you, like,
1:05:45 I mean, almost every day, like tweets about me, weird stuff, like, she’s a dude, you know.
1:05:52 She was a secretary at Goldman Sachs. Just, she never even worked at Goldman Sachs. She owns
1:06:01 no businesses. She, I don’t know what else. And all these things. And it was annoying me, to be
1:06:08 honest. I was like, do I need to be showing my tax return? Like, I want to picture me in a bathing
1:06:16 suit. And at first, I remember wanting to clap back. And then I thought, nah, don’t feed the trolls.
1:06:21 That’s not very useful. And then second, I was like, very judgmental of this person. I was like,
1:06:25 what a fucking basement dweller, you know, blah, blah, blah, this person, this person. And then
1:06:30 I read Love Your Enemies and talked to Arthur. And he was like, just try this thing for me.
1:06:36 He’s like, just like, very sincerely wish this person well. Like, anybody who is in your mind,
1:06:43 in your mind, in your mind, wish this person well, like, send them like, good, good vibes,
1:06:49 and hope that, that they are wonderful. And he said, because wonderful, happy people don’t do
1:06:54 things like this. And I was like, math. And then I did it. And I will kid you not, this is my
1:07:00 woo woo, because we’re an Austin Crystal Center of the world. They publicly posted like two weeks
1:07:06 later a, hey, sorry, Cody Sanchez, I actually think you’re really, you seem like a really good person,
1:07:09 like out of nowhere, and DM to me like a dissertation sort of apologizing.
1:07:10 Oh, wow.
1:07:15 I know, no, I don’t think the universe does that every single time. But it taught me a lesson,
1:07:20 which is like, every time like, I get hate, I just try to send back a little love,
1:07:24 because I think it’s hard to combat. And I think negative emotions are really draining and a lot
1:07:29 of work. And so instead, I try to not have that.
1:07:34 The temptation, I think, in that situation is to like go tit for tat, right? Like,
1:07:39 to reply to every post to like, and then you get angry, and then you’re sort of like defending
1:07:44 yourself. Why didn’t you do that? Arthur really helped me. Simultaneously, I think another truth is
1:07:50 like, especially with the internet, if you mute, block these people, ignore, they don’t exist in
1:07:55 your sphere. They’re not in the room with you ever. They’re not in your business. They’re not
1:08:00 in your friend group. You’re not shaking hands with them. So the only way they exist is if you
1:08:05 allow them, which is actually a fascinating sort of phenomenon to think about. But if you don’t
1:08:08 look at their stuff, how do you even know what’s happening? You could say, well, other people
1:08:12 could send it to you, tell people don’t to not send it to you. Don’t look at the comments,
1:08:19 ignore the DMs. And the only times that like this really gets to me is when I think there’s a kernel
1:08:26 of truth. So like, if we made a typo on a post, and so somebody was right about that, or if we get
1:08:33 something wrong, or, you know, if we write a story and it wasn’t the right one, you know, then I’m
1:08:39 like, okay, that bothers me. But for the most part, they don’t exist in my sphere, because if
1:08:45 they’re online, it’s only if you let them. Like Mark Andreessen famously who I’m a fan of and have
1:08:50 grown to respect, like he uses the block button pretty consistently, because he just doesn’t
1:08:54 want to engage with those people. So does Naval Ravikant. He’s like, wish you well, but out of
1:09:00 my sphere, because my energy is like too precious to protect. Yeah, I think it’s an underutilized
1:09:06 feature for anybody who has a large social media following. Yeah, I think so too. I want to circle
1:09:12 back to reputation. I want you to go deeper on reputation, like what do you see as the advantages,
1:09:16 disadvantages? Like how do you think about reputation as a concept? First of all, Buffett
1:09:22 said the most important thing, which is what did he say exactly? It was something like he said,
1:09:29 if an employee makes a mistake and loses us money, I will allow that. But if an employee makes a
1:09:35 mistake and hurts our reputation, they will immediately be fired. And I think that’s quite
1:09:41 true because it’s very hard to get back your reputation. And especially if it’s your fault,
1:09:47 like you did something that is out of sync with who you say you are publicly. When I think about
1:09:51 reputation, I try to be as transparent as humanly possible on all the things good, bad, and other
1:09:58 wise that are true with me. So for instance, we know that a lot of female founders get a hard time
1:10:05 and get like business insider pieces written on them for being too harsh and too whatever.
1:10:09 And there’s sort of this phenomenon of this happening to female founders.
1:10:17 And I think sometimes that’s because they portray themselves as like sweet, kind, I’m here for other
1:10:23 women, whatever, and I’m always nice all the time. And so I don’t do that. I’m like, I’m tough,
1:10:28 I’m tough sometimes. And we work really hard. And if you don’t want to be a part of that,
1:10:34 don’t work at my company. And so I try to say the quiet part out loud as often as humanly possible.
1:10:37 And then we do what’s called the noculations against reputation, which is basically,
1:10:42 can you say things a few times that you think are very, very true, but you know will be very,
1:10:47 very unpopular. And if you do that so often, then people don’t get that surprised by what you say.
1:10:53 And I think Joe Rogan’s a great example of this. You know, he often says the quiet part out loud,
1:10:57 he says things he knows will be quite unpopular. And because he does that, people one, think he’s
1:11:03 telling the truth more often. And two, his audience is inoculated because the people who really hate
1:11:08 who he is and the things that he does, they just bail, like they leave. And so every so often,
1:11:12 I do kind of this culling of our audience because I don’t want to have to deal with trying to be
1:11:17 a perfect person. I’m very flawed. And with our company, Contrair and Thinking, we’re very flawed.
1:11:22 We’re all just like a bunch of, you know, sort of two bipedal monkeys running around trying to
1:11:34 figure it out. Right. Like we all have flaws. We all make mistakes. We all have bad days. We all,
1:11:39 but there’s no tolerance for that. Yeah. Because you’re Cody Sanchez. Like you have millions of
1:11:46 followers. Like you can’t have a bad day. Yeah, it’s weird. I also think that
1:11:54 that I think your reputation is also, it can be cultivated. And so, you know, it’s this series of
1:11:58 small decisions you make every single day that becomes the person that people think you are.
1:12:04 And so I try to really have congruence between that. I mean, you’ll see, you know, if you worked
1:12:08 for my company, I’m not asking anybody to do anything I wouldn’t do. That would be very hard
1:12:13 for somebody to claim. It would be very hard for somebody to claim that they work harder than I do.
1:12:18 I don’t, you know, I work quite hard. I wouldn’t really allow that. There’s no world in which I
1:12:22 say Chris and I, my husband and I have a perfect marriage. You know, we fight all the time. We
1:12:28 try to figure it out. So I do try to say all of those things. But I also remember that I asked
1:12:34 for this, you know, I got on the internet. I got obsessed with this idea of growth. That is on me.
1:12:38 And so I think it’s one thing if people get famous sort of by accident, maybe,
1:12:43 or they’re a CEO of a company and they’re just trying to grow a company and then they get slaughtered.
1:12:46 But if you’re going to try to be an influencer, if you’re going to try to be a celebrity, like
1:12:51 it comes with the territory, I think. So that’s a decision you have to make one way or the other.
1:12:59 But one thing I am shocked by that I don’t think people are honest about is people who are very
1:13:05 famous and well known on the internet, they’re obsessed with their reputation and brand. It is
1:13:13 never by accident. This shit is cultivated. It is created. It is mocked up. It is power pointed.
1:13:18 Like I always like to use the rock who I think really highly of. But when you look at the rocks
1:13:23 Instagram, for instance, count for me next time just for shits and giggles, how many of those
1:13:29 pieces of content are an ad for like his energy drink, for his face cream, for his next movie,
1:13:37 for his, you know, XFL for WWE, almost every post is like, I would say probably somewhere
1:13:42 between 80 and 98% of the posts are. Wow. How could he get away with that? Because he has such a
1:13:48 strong brand and every single thing that he promotes is so tied into his brand that it feels
1:13:54 effortless. But it is absolutely not effortless. And so give yourself some credit. I think anybody
1:13:58 who’s trying to make a brand online or you’re trying to build a business like nobody gets famous
1:14:03 by accident for the most part, they all cultivated even like the Haktui girl or whatever that
1:14:08 chick’s name was. She’s got a whole team behind her. She’s got agents now. She had people doing
1:14:13 her filming for her the second that she went super viral, people creating her, people funding
1:14:19 her own content creation process. And so I think we all need to be a little bit more honest about
1:14:23 that because people are like, oh, I just grew because, you know, it just happened one day.
1:14:28 And you’re like, nah, you didn’t. That’s how it works. So as I was doing research for this,
1:14:32 I was watching some youth. My kids are totally into YouTube. So we’re watching YouTube where
1:14:36 like come across some of your stuff because I’m trying to research this. My kids are interested
1:14:40 in business. How old are they? 15 and 14. Oh, it’s amazing. You look young.
1:14:48 And so I feel old on the inside some days. And one of the shows we used to watch was
1:14:53 Undercover Billionaire. So my youngest son was like, ask Cody what she would do if she was
1:14:59 dropped off like Grant Cardone was. And I forget the other guy’s name. And, you know,
1:15:04 you’re in, you get a hundred bucks, you get a phone, you get no contacts. You’re the same age
1:15:09 you are now. You go to this random rural town and he wanted to know the answer to this question.
1:15:13 It’s a great question. I’d go find the most expensive thing to sell that I could sell.
1:15:20 I think the fastest way to make money when you have no money is find other people who already
1:15:26 have something valuable and sell it to other people. And so I remember, I think I watched one
1:15:30 episode of the one that Grant was on and he was in like Philadelphia or something. And it was sort
1:15:36 of like a manufacturer in town. In that instance, I think I would go apply for his, I mean, you go
1:15:40 to the library because you don’t have a phone, right? And you maybe have a car and gas. I can’t
1:15:44 remember. I think you get a cell phone and you have a car and a full tank of gas, but you have no
1:15:48 place to stay. You don’t have a hundred bucks. Yeah. That would be the very first thing I’d do.
1:15:52 So I’d probably go to the library, get on the computer at the public library, and I’d start
1:15:57 looking up in this geographic area, or because remote sales happens now, I would go figure out
1:16:03 how could I get something where I could sell something as fast as possible and with as high
1:16:09 of a price tag as possible. And the reason why is that’s just a game of, that’s a numbers game.
1:16:16 And so, especially with my skill set already, I know how to sell things. And if somebody already
1:16:20 has a market where other people are paying for it, all I’m doing is slotting myself in.
1:16:25 And then once I had done that, I would probably find a business where I could get a cut of the
1:16:29 business for the sales that I brought in. So especially because it involves to like get to
1:16:32 a million bucks, right? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Three months, 90 days to build a
1:16:36 million dollar business. Oh yeah. I mean, but I wouldn’t build it. That’s where I’m probably
1:16:39 different than Grant. I would go and I would negotiate a portion of the business. I would
1:16:45 basically go and I’d say, all right, you’re selling what would be, what would be, I mean,
1:16:50 I probably do something in the online space because I play around in that space so much
1:16:55 right now. So I’d go to a bunch of businesses that were online businesses that sold things online.
1:17:00 I’d probably try to broker deals between B2B companies. And I’d try to close a couple of
1:17:04 those deals and then say, can I get a percentage of your company for all the deals that I brought in?
1:17:09 And, but if you didn’t have that skill set to negotiate deals to start, you’d just start
1:17:14 with selling as much as humanly possible. And even if you did that, if you did that with a boomer-based
1:17:20 business where that boomer wants more sales, needs somebody young and hungry, you could
1:17:24 negotiate part of that business just to apprentice for them and take it over over a long time using
1:17:32 seller financing. And that I think is so underutilized today because you’ve run a business before.
1:17:36 How many times in your varying businesses have you been like, somebody came to me with the
1:17:43 right price and the right terms to sell? I could take this thing, take it. And so business owners
1:17:47 have that all the time and people underestimate it. So there’d probably be a lot of door knocking.
1:17:51 I’d be going door to door saying, have you ever thought about selling your business?
1:17:55 Have you ever thought about selling your business? Have you thought about selling your business?
1:17:59 And using seller financing to basically acquire the business with very little rest to you.
1:18:04 That’s a really interesting approach. Nobody on the show did that. The reason we watch this,
1:18:08 what I loved about it just being a parent, it’s just the mindset of the people going in.
1:18:12 It wasn’t the person, it wasn’t how they went about it. It was the fact they were
1:18:18 rejected over and over again. And they just kept trying new things until something stuck. And then
1:18:22 they would like, oh, I’m going to go, I’m going to do more of this. This worked. Now, okay.
1:18:26 Now I can feed myself. Now I can sort of like get a hotel. Now I can start building a business.
1:18:32 Now I can get a base. I can build an agency. I can convince other people to be my allies.
1:18:35 Yeah. And I just love the mindset, the people. And I was like,
1:18:39 this is the mindset you need as kids. So true. I mean, I should play around with that a little
1:18:45 bit more in our content because I think one of the things I like to try to push upon people is
1:18:50 you’re way more capable than you think you are. Totally. You just haven’t done what is required.
1:18:55 You’ve done what you wanted. And if you were honest with yourself about that, you would realize
1:19:00 that if I worked 10% harder than I’m doing right now on a thing that I really do not want to do
1:19:04 very first thing in the day, I would build up willpower that would allow me eventually
1:19:07 to do the things that most people are not willing to do. And when you’re willing to do that,
1:19:12 you can win over time. I mean, even small things like I have a friend here. He’s a really good
1:19:17 guy. He’s very quirky, but he, you know, he’s, he’s one of the guys where when I wasn’t on the
1:19:21 internet at all, I was running a finance company back in the day when I first met him. And I just,
1:19:24 I reached out to him randomly. Now, mind you, I had a lot of money at the time. I knew nothing
1:19:29 about the internet and like a lot of money, meaning like, you know, I was doing the, okay.
1:19:35 And I reached out to him because I wanted to understand the internet. I thought that in
1:19:39 the future we might sell investment products and build investment businesses with the internet
1:19:42 and not with my old method, which was like going to pensions and sovereign wealth funds,
1:19:49 door knocking, steak dinners, all that stuff. I think I was right. And I’ve proved that. But
1:19:54 back then I wasn’t so sure. I was like, how do newsletters work? Like, what does email look like?
1:20:00 Like finance were so, were dinosaurs with that. And he was the master with Sumo me, right?
1:20:05 Exactly. And so he had a conference or two that I went to. And, and I was just like,
1:20:09 you seem really good at emails. You sell things with emails. Like, how does that work? And,
1:20:14 and I reached out to him and I sent him, I did research on him online and I found out that he
1:20:18 was into tacos, like weirdly into tacos. And so I bought him a bunch of socks that had his face
1:20:24 on it in a taco. And I sent them to him with like a note that was like, Hey, I’d love to learn from
1:20:29 you. You know, love what you’re doing. No need to respond if, if you’re way too busy. Like,
1:20:32 because I think that’s important too, you know, the pay, you don’t have to respond.
1:20:36 Anyway, for whatever reason, he did respond. And we became sort of friends and then he helped
1:20:41 teach me a lot of things. And he don’t have money right now. And you don’t know how to make it.
1:20:45 One of the best ways to start is just to learn to negotiate things that you don’t want to,
1:20:50 which is like, he has a famous thing where he goes into coffee stock shops, even Starbucks,
1:20:54 and like orders a coffee and then goes, I love a discount. And then shuts up.
1:20:58 And I’m like, what? There’s no discount here. And he’s like, well, I just love one. Like,
1:21:01 if that was at all humanly possible, is there any way for me to get a discount?
1:21:07 And often he is rejected, but sometimes he is not. And just those little lessons of like,
1:21:11 if I was on undercover billionaire, I’d be going to hotels and saying like, Hey,
1:21:16 how can they negotiate a stay for extra? Could I do work around here to do that? What do you need
1:21:19 help with? Like, you’re on your shift right now. What if I take over a couple of hours of your shift?
1:21:23 Do you think I could stay in an abandoned room? Like, I would just be trying to negotiate every
1:21:28 single thing I could, because you’ll be shocked how seldom Americans in particular do that.
1:21:32 Yeah, we’re brought up not to do that. It’s like the price is the price.
1:21:32 The price is the price.
1:21:35 Whereas a lot of other cultures, it’s sort of like the price is the starting point.
1:21:39 Oh my God. We have this guy that works for us and our investment team is Korean and he’s Egyptian.
1:21:45 And I think learning from other cultures on negotiation is such a life hack,
1:21:50 because they do it like a second language. If my first language that’s most profitable is money,
1:21:55 the second one is negotiation. And Karim will do it with this huge smile the whole time. That’s
1:22:00 a big key. So every time he asks for something, there’s a big smile. And he’s like, well, you know,
1:22:05 he’s very diminutive. He’s like kind of shrugged his shoulders like, well, we could do this, but like,
1:22:09 we could do that. Like, what do you think about that? And the whole time you’re negotiating with
1:22:15 him, you like the guy. And he kind of weasels his way in to getting you to consider another
1:22:21 perspective. And he jokes that like that’s just like Egyptian dinner conversation, that it’s
1:22:26 nothing. And he’s not that special. But having people on your team and learning from friends
1:22:32 from other cultures is really powerful. And so any chance you get to play with other people
1:22:36 who have normalized this idea of barter, I think is a great way to get better at making money.
1:22:43 The key is like the first no is really the final no. Right? Like if you stop at the first no.
1:22:48 That’s a great line, right? Like you you’re done. But like most people are not going to go past
1:22:53 the first no. So you’ve already differentiated yourself. I do this with the kids like, I live
1:22:59 in Canada, we get snow. So I make them like knock on doors and shovel driveways. And we got to a
1:23:05 point where somebody would have a driveway service. So literally, they’re paying somebody to come
1:23:10 with plow their driveway. And the kids, they’d be like, no, I pay a service. And like at first,
1:23:14 the kids would walk away. And I won’t negotiate. I’ll just do labor. But I’m like, you go to the
1:23:17 door. I want you to get rejected. I want you to learn sales. And then they eventually get to
1:23:21 this point where they were like, yeah, but who knows when they’re going to get here. And they’re
1:23:26 probably doing like 100 driveways a day. We’re doing like 10. Who do you think is going to do
1:23:30 a better job and take care of your beautiful car out there? And you know, they would get to a point
1:23:35 where they would actually the person be like, yeah, go do the driveway, right? It’s like the
1:23:41 first no is not the final. That is such a good line. And what a good way to try. So one of our
1:23:46 portfolio companies is called Resi Brands. And they have that one painter, which is a painting
1:23:51 company. And Pinks, which is a window cleaning company. And so I was going around with the CEO
1:23:56 Stephen for that one painter. And they were painting one house. And every time they paint a house,
1:24:01 they ask their employees to door knock for an hour. So while somebody’s inside painting,
1:24:05 some of it, they door knock. And so I’m like, let’s go do it. Let’s go knock on a bunch of doors
1:24:11 in Texas. After about, I can remember six or eight doors. One of the people that we knocked on
1:24:16 was like, oh, actually, I’ve been eating this and this and this. And that’s a $5,000 purchase.
1:24:23 And so in the span of 20 minutes, the company made $5,000 from six or seven door knocks.
1:24:27 And so how often is money sitting right in front of you, but you’re just not doing what it takes
1:24:33 to grab it. And I think asking and rejection is one of the biggest reasons why we don’t.
1:24:37 I love that. That’s awesome. I don’t like being in the house when I get these door knocks.
1:24:42 No, you get them all the time. 100%. What’s the difference between a good business and a bad
1:24:50 business? In my definition, good business equals profitable cash flowing, what I call a cash flow
1:24:56 versus cash suck business. So you get paid upfront for a service, not after you provide
1:25:03 a service. Sustainable, it can exist for a long time. Historical, it has existed for a long time.
1:25:09 Understandable, you can explain it to grandma really easily. And you have what’s called the
1:25:14 Lindy effect, the likelihood of the future continuing to cash flow just as it did in the past.
1:25:19 Those are my parameters for a good business. A bad business would be a business that is
1:25:26 unprofitable, hard to understand, hasn’t been around for very long. You have to provide the
1:25:31 service before you get paid for the service. That is a business that is just much harder.
1:25:36 That’s a harder game to win. And so as often as possible, I want to have the lifeblood that
1:25:42 is money come to me in my businesses. And that way, I can make more mistakes as an entrepreneur
1:25:48 because I have a trampoline that has a lot of give to it, as opposed to I think of cash suck
1:25:52 or bad businesses as a concrete floor that has no give. You’re going to jump out of the
1:25:57 window sometimes and fuck things up. And so it can help if you have cash flow in it because that
1:26:01 allows you to jump like a trampoline. A lot of businesses think they have a marketing problem
1:26:08 when they really have a product problem. How do you, going in, looking at acquiring a business,
1:26:12 determine if there’s a marketing problem or a product problem because that’s going to make
1:26:17 a difference for you as an investor or owner? Three things, three numbers you need to look at.
1:26:20 If you want to figure out if you have a company that needs to sell more things
1:26:24 or needs to create better things, you need to figure out, one, what’s your referral rate?
1:26:29 How often do your customers tell somebody else that they need to buy something from you?
1:26:34 Two, how often do your customers repurchase from you? So your repurchase rate.
1:26:37 They call them they buy one water bottle, not enough, you need to buy two or three.
1:26:42 And the third is churn. How often do the customers, once they have you on a subscription plan or
1:26:46 they’re continuing to buy from you, bail out of that plan? And those three numbers can tell you
1:26:52 if you have a healthy product business or if you just have a great sales team. You can have both
1:26:56 types of businesses, but it is just so much harder when you have to continue to resell
1:27:03 your customers again and again and again. Much easier to keep them, find new customers, keep growing.
1:27:08 A hundred percent. I think it’s always easier to sell your same customers more things continuously.
1:27:12 Then you can sell your customers more expensive things continuously. Then you can get your
1:27:17 customers, their friends, to buy more things from you continuously. And then you can ask your
1:27:24 customers to say nice things about you continuously, aka reviews. And so those reviews, referrals,
1:27:29 retention, and reduction of churn are sort of the four main Rs in a good business.
1:27:34 One of the things that a lot of people listening do is hire people, whether they’re hiring within a
1:27:39 company or they’re hiring as a small business owner or maybe even a large business owner.
1:27:44 If you could only have two questions to ask a candidate, what would you ask them?
1:27:49 Well, first, if you’re going to hire somebody, the first question is who are you and what are
1:27:55 your strengths and weaknesses, meaning you yourself. Oftentimes, your first hire in a business
1:28:00 needs to be somebody who can do the opposite of what you can do. So it’s actually not about them.
1:28:05 It’s about can you define the problem first? I think most of the reasons why good hires do not
1:28:12 work out is because the person and the problem set has not been clearly defined. We tend to like
1:28:17 people that are like us. We shouldn’t always hire people that are like us. In fact, we often should
1:28:23 not. After we’ve determined, okay, I need this type of person to solve this type of problem,
1:28:27 the question is, how can you figure out are they that type of person and can they handle that
1:28:34 type of problem? I think a couple of things that are cheat codes. We use something called the Colby
1:28:41 test. Colby is actually allowed from employment certifications for people to figure out what
1:28:47 type of personality they have. It’s basically like what fills your tank. There’s four characteristics
1:28:53 to it from fast implementer. We do things right away. I’m sorry, fast action to implementer,
1:28:59 which is like I like to do things consistently over time. I am high fast action and low
1:29:05 implementation. I need to have an implementation person often in my business. I don’t need a
1:29:09 bunch of ideas person. I’m kind of an idea person. I need the opposite of that. It’s also what EOS
1:29:13 calls the visionary versus the integrator. I just think the word visionary sounds gross.
1:29:19 I want to be the integrator, not the visionary. It’s a weird title of that terminology.
1:29:26 The question that you need to be asking is how can you get to the root of whatever the problem
1:29:31 set and persona you’re looking for is defined? It’s really going to depend. If I know that I
1:29:37 need an implementer, I’m going to be asking questions. One of my favorite ones that I did the
1:29:43 other day was, I’d love to see how you organize your calendar. Can you show it to me? Real time,
1:29:48 pop up on Zoom, what does our calendar look like? If they’re an implementer, it’s probably highly
1:29:54 detailed. It’s color coded. It’s assigned specific timelines. If it’s all over the place or there’s
1:29:59 mismatched things on top of it, not an implementer. That’s a very easy one to tell.
1:30:07 Another thing I might do if I’m looking for fast action, basically, is I might say to them something
1:30:12 like, well, hey, we’re in the business right now. This is our problem. What would you do about it
1:30:17 right now today? I want to see, can they think quickly through what the next steps would be?
1:30:22 Well, I would do X and Y and Z and X and Y and Z. Then I might say to them, how long would that take
1:30:26 you to do something like that? See how quickly they could calculate what the timelines are?
1:30:32 If I already know what the job is, I know if those timelines are reasonable or not. I know
1:30:36 how good they are at calculating their own time and how speedy they are in that regard. The third
1:30:41 thing I’d do is I’d probably have some sort of follow up. I’d be like, all right, you think we
1:30:45 should do X and Y and Z. I’d love to pay you a thousand bucks to do a project scope for me.
1:30:49 That would be amazing. How fast could you turn around a project scope for me? If they’re like,
1:30:54 oh, a week, I’m like, oh, that’s not my guy. They need to be a 24-hour window. It doesn’t need to
1:30:59 be hyper detailed, but I want to see a one-page brief and then I can see what they think. I’m
1:31:06 not a good enough interviewer to not need an exterior tell. I really need, show me what your
1:31:11 brief looks like. Show me what your calendar looks like. I think some people just can tell by
1:31:18 communications. I can get persuaded by somebody. I think it’s really rare that actually people
1:31:24 have good intuition of her hire. I love what you said because it’s hard to fake. Exactly,
1:31:29 show me your calendar right now. I can’t make it look good. I have to do it on the spot. The same
1:31:35 is, what would you do? It’s harder to fake that you know something in those cases where so many
1:31:40 people are taking credit for, I worked with MrBeast and I know YouTube and it’s like, well,
1:31:45 what did you do with it? You can’t really verify it. They have this so much and then they get in
1:31:51 and you’re like, oh, God, what? No. 100%. Yeah. I think if you want to make a lot of money,
1:31:57 you got to figure out hiring. Every problem is a people problem. Every additional profit
1:32:03 is determined by people. That’s been a hard one for me to learn because I do like to go fast
1:32:08 and a lot of times I like to do it by myself. I can execute fast, so I kind of go.
1:32:14 And then you want to hand it off to somebody else. Right. But once I’ve really gotten good at
1:32:19 leading the team and bringing more people in, I’ve realized like leadership, I get now why
1:32:23 there are so many books on leadership. I didn’t use to, you know, when you’re young and starting
1:32:28 out, you’re like, just tell me how to make more money. Just give me the playbook. That’s a wrong
1:32:34 question. That’s the wrong ask. The right ask is, how do I create a vision so big that other people
1:32:39 think their vision is bigger with me? The second question is, how do I become so good that they
1:32:44 want to be with me and work with me because they think that I’m better in some instances? And if
1:32:50 you can’t do those two things, you’ll never attract top talent. And then it’s, how do I become
1:32:56 so good of a leader that I’m constantly helping somebody become a better version of themselves?
1:33:00 Because if I do that, it becomes addictive. And people love to be around other humans
1:33:05 who will help them become better if they’re high performers. I actually am not so good at like,
1:33:11 I forget my own birthday. I forget my husband in my anniversary. I’m not, I’m not the best at
1:33:19 like high empathy, touchy-feely stuff. I don’t know why. And, and so I think some people think,
1:33:23 well, to be a good leader, you got to know their kid’s names. And that’s probably a good one. But
1:33:27 like, you, you have to go really deep with them. You have to know everything about that employee.
1:33:32 And that’s just not how I lead. You know, I lead by being like, what do you want to achieve in life?
1:33:36 You know, what are your big goals? Because I bet you’re an amazing parent. I’m not a parent,
1:33:39 so I’m not going to tell you how to be better at that. I’m sure that you have incredible
1:33:44 hobbies that you’re good at. You can go do that by yourself. I’m here to help you make more money,
1:33:48 become a better version of yourself and achieve what you want in your career. And that’s interesting
1:33:53 to you. You should come work with me. And I’m going to do it in a genuine way to you as a person.
1:33:57 100%. Not going to fake that I’m interested in XYZ when I’m not or.
1:34:01 Yeah, I got murdered on the internet once because I said, it’s one of my dear friends who’s been
1:34:06 an employee of mine for a long time. But I was like, I did not want to hear about your child’s
1:34:12 soccer game. And I like just. I can see why that would go so. Oh, just murdered on the internet.
1:34:17 And I was like, no, I stand by it. I actually do not. And I think that’s incredible
1:34:23 that you care about that for your kid. But what I’m here to care about for you is like your career.
1:34:29 And sure, people can pretend one way or another to care about that, but they don’t actually care
1:34:34 about it. You get those casuals like how is your weekend? And then somebody launches into more than
1:34:38 a sentence and you can just see people’s eyes. Like I used to answer like, oh, I thought people
1:34:42 were genuine when they were answering this. I was like, I did XYZ and like I can see the
1:34:48 gloss in their eyes. Yeah. And it’s like they don’t really want to know. No. Well, like how
1:34:54 interesting are those stories? You know, it’s like, I think as a society, somehow we’ve lost
1:35:01 like the ability to be honest. And we think that being nice is the same as being kind.
1:35:07 And I don’t think that’s true. Talk to me about that. Being kind to me is when you see somebody
1:35:13 struggling on the side of the road with a, you know, with a flat tire, you get out and you help
1:35:18 them with it. You know, being nice is pretending to listen to somebody’s story about their kids and
1:35:23 thinking that, you know, they’ll like you more because you pretend to be interesting. Being
1:35:28 kind might be like, I’m so excited for that for you. Like, hey, you know, I got to go do this
1:35:32 other thing and work right now. But when you need help on that thing so that you can actually leave
1:35:36 to go hang out with your kid this weekend, I will help you with it so you can get out faster.
1:35:41 Kind as opposed to nice, which is like, I’m going to project this sort of performance on you,
1:35:46 because I think that it seems like a nicety in society. Niceties are sort of like sprinkles.
1:35:48 Kindness to me is like when you help somebody bake the cake.
1:35:54 In your inner circle, how quickly do you recognize underperformance and how do you
1:35:59 deal with it? I need to be faster. I mean, the good thing like for anybody listening is
1:36:06 like, you don’t have to be perfect. Oh man, the more rich people I meet, the more I realize how
1:36:12 achievable it is for most of us. And so I am highly flawed in hiring. I am highly flawed in
1:36:16 letting go of people or changing things when I need to in a business. I,
1:36:22 even though I sound kind of tough, I almost always defer on the side of like, ah, I wait
1:36:26 too long. I think too much about the person. I want to make sure they’re okay. Something I’d
1:36:34 like to get better at. I think it is the peak of ego to be like, oh, I shouldn’t let this person go
1:36:39 because they have it better with me than anybody else. I don’t know. I believe in their individual
1:36:44 capacity to go and do something great that lights up their soul. And if this isn’t it,
1:36:48 then let’s move them on to the next thing. And maybe the reason why is one time
1:36:55 at my, let’s see, company, two companies before I started my own, I had a CEO whose name was Jim.
1:36:59 And Jim is a badass. I mean, he’s like a billionaire many times over. He’s very
1:37:04 intimidating. And I remember I was running a business in Latin America then we were crushing
1:37:10 it. We were growing like crazy. I was running it for him. And he called me to a hotel we were at,
1:37:16 the Monarch, we were walking on the beach after one of our conferences. And he was kind of like,
1:37:20 listen, I can tell you want to run the business this way, we do business this way.
1:37:27 Either roll my direction or get out of the boat. And not so many words. And I was devastated. I was
1:37:34 so mad at him. And I disagreed with him. And I felt like a victim and I wanted to yell and scream.
1:37:41 And, and then I realized, like, it’s not my boat. So if I want to go roll in a different
1:37:47 direction, I got to get my own boat. And Jim, you know, essentially, in some ways pushed me out of
1:37:50 the company, you know, was like, we’re not going to do it that way. So we’re like, get out of here
1:37:55 if you want to do it that way, or do it my way. But he did something there that a lot of people
1:38:00 won’t do. Like he was just direct with you. Instead of like, subtly, like, I’m going to give Cody
1:38:04 less opportunity, I’m going to push her out. So I’m going to constructively dismiss her,
1:38:10 whatever the term is. No, he actually approached you head on and communicated with you that hard
1:38:18 thing. He was kind, not nice, you know. And in that moment, he let me leave in a way that like
1:38:25 changed my life forever. And then I went and built a giant company and had massive success. And I
1:38:30 never would have, I would have waited a long time if he hadn’t done that, I would have stayed
1:38:35 painfully at the company for a long time. And so I always remember that when I’m thinking about
1:38:40 letting go of an employee, I’m like, man, you might go achieve something so much bigger than me
1:38:45 if you lean into the thing that you actually should do. So go do it, you know, because I can
1:38:49 tell you want to your heart’s not in it here. And I just had a conversation like that with
1:38:55 an employee today, literally today. And I was nervous about having it. And this employee was
1:38:59 like, I’m so glad you brought this up because I’ve been feeling it, but I wasn’t sure how.
1:39:05 And I think that is also the mark of a good leader is you have a lot of conversations with your
1:39:10 people who are not aligning in your company perfectly. And you’re like, and so they’re never
1:39:17 surprised, you know, I don’t think I’ve ever let somebody go or moved in two directions from
1:39:23 somebody where they’ve been like, what, why? It’s always been after a few conversations. And that
1:39:28 is, I think, a respectful thing for employees. Do you rehearse that conversation in your head
1:39:33 before you have it with them or do you just walk in? Yes, definitely a rehearse. Yeah, I try to put
1:39:38 myself in their shoes. How would they feel in this situation? What would they want out of this
1:39:42 communication? I mean, Sun Tzu has a great line, which is give them a golden bridge on which to
1:39:49 retreat. And he talks about his enemies in this way. And I think, you know, giving your employees
1:39:55 a golden bridge on which to retreat is lovely, too. You know, if you’ve ever worked at a company
1:39:59 and somebody gets fired at that company, and then the boss talks really badly about that person,
1:40:05 it doesn’t actually make the boss looks better. It makes you think, ooh, so when I eventually
1:40:10 leave, they’re going to talk about me like that. And so I try to never do that. Now, I’m honest,
1:40:15 I might say, hey, we have a culture here that mandates X, Y wasn’t happening. And so for that
1:40:20 reason, we’ve parted ways. I’m not going to sugarcoat it or pretend that something was there that
1:40:28 wasn’t if that’s the case. But in most instances, unless there’s fraud or something reputational,
1:40:33 most times, it’s just that you two have been together for a period and that period has passed.
1:40:38 And that’s totally okay. Do you do performance improvement plans? Or are you just like, no,
1:40:42 like that’s never going to work? I’m not going to invest in that because now that’s an investment
1:40:46 on your part, too. Right? Yeah. It’s like, I’ve already invested months, time, salary, money.
1:40:51 And now to do this, I have to do more. Like, how do you think about that?
1:40:57 Typically, we do improve performance improvement plans for employees not at the executive level.
1:41:01 If we have executive level people, which is usually the people that I am hiring or firing now,
1:41:08 those people, we start with the end in mind. So when people come onto my company, a hack to
1:41:14 never have somebody be surprised by being let go is to start with a 30, 60, 90 day plan with every
1:41:18 single person that you bring on board, even a new assistant. And those 30, 60, 90 day plans
1:41:23 have very specific outcomes. And if those outcomes don’t happen at 30 days for your first check-in,
1:41:28 first red flag, they don’t have in it 60 days, second red flag, third red flag, you’re gone from
1:41:33 the company. And then we have that on a quarterly basis, too. So we have KPIs, key performance
1:41:39 indicators. And if you’re hitting those, then we’re good to go. You keep motoring. If you have
1:41:44 a quarter where you’re not hitting those, okay, we’ve got first red flag. Depending on the position,
1:41:48 if you have another month or sometimes another quarter of it, that means that you let go. And so
1:41:53 there aren’t, I hated when I was at a company and I didn’t know where I stood. It’s like,
1:41:59 am I doing a good job? Am I not doing a good job? Why did this person get promoted? Why did this
1:42:02 person get fired? It’s so confusing. And so I always wanted something where it was like,
1:42:07 just let me know where I stand and how to make more money and how to be successful and how to not.
1:42:11 And I think a lot of companies could do that better. We’re by no means perfect, but I’m working
1:42:17 on it. That’s such a big unlock. Just being clear. Because if you’re not clear, you’re floundering,
1:42:21 you’re throwing darts at the wall, and you’re hoping something sticks. And if it’s inconsistent,
1:42:27 you just give up eventually. You’re like, yeah, this is too taxing on the mind. Meanwhile,
1:42:32 if you could focus my energy, we’re going to get somewhere. So one of the key traits you mentioned,
1:42:37 I think of high performers was the kind versus nice. And the ability to communicate clearly
1:42:45 in a way the message is received even though it’s not always sure coded. What are the other traits
1:42:51 that you’ve learned from people that you would say are high performers? Yeah. If you want to be a
1:42:55 high performer, one, you got to be around other high performers. So try to find a group of people
1:43:01 that look like the life that you want in one shape or another. Second, if you want to be a high
1:43:07 performer, you want to make sure that you always do the things that you say you’re going to do.
1:43:13 And I think that is probably one of the most underrated ways to win is simply say you’re
1:43:18 going to do a thing and follow through on doing the thing. That is very rare. In fact, sometimes
1:43:24 it’s rare for me. I project manage the shit out of myself because I’m forgetful. I have too many
1:43:31 things on my plate. And I want to be a human of my word. And so I have like a notion task list
1:43:35 that has databases and priorities on it. And every single day I look at that task list and I say,
1:43:39 did I promise something to somebody? And I check off the things that I don’t or I forward expectation
1:43:43 set like even with you, I was like, blockchain, you know, I have this thing I’m going to do this
1:43:46 weekend. And I let you know ahead of time, I’m like, I’m a little worried. What if I can’t do it?
1:43:51 Do you think we could push it back? You know, we like over communicate almost, which sometimes can
1:43:57 feel like too much, but let’s the person know like, I’m taking this really seriously. Like I told you
1:44:00 that I was going to do this thing with you. And I want you to know I’m really, I’m thinking about
1:44:05 that. And I’m making sure I do everything I can to prioritize it. And if I can’t prioritize it,
1:44:08 you’re going to know why. Right. And so if you say you’re going to do a thing,
1:44:13 do the thing, you’ll beat 99% of people. The next thing that I found in high performers pretty
1:44:20 consistently is they are helpers, not Yelpers. And, and I think about this, like, you know,
1:44:23 those people that go to a small business, and there’s something wrong, it’s small business,
1:44:29 and they get on Yelp and they’re like, right, as opposed to the people who see something wrong
1:44:34 in a small business. And they go up to the owner or they go up to the person say, Hey, by the way,
1:44:40 you know, my food was a little cold. I didn’t get this. You know, I know it’s hard. I just want
1:44:46 to let you know. I want to let you know personally. I always find that high performers are the helpers
1:44:52 and they’re never the Yelpers. Because when you’re a high performer, you realize things like
1:44:58 the average small business needs 20 positive reviews to overshadow one negative review.
1:45:04 So every time you do that to a small business, you could be crippling it with the one thing that
1:45:09 happened in that small business. So I think about that. And the last thing I’ll say with
1:45:14 high performers overall, they’re usually quite giving. And so I think a good indicator of if
1:45:23 somebody is a winner or not, is do they overgive almost, because they sit from such a place of
1:45:30 abundance and mutual winning that they do not think that if Shane wins, I can’t win, you know,
1:45:36 if he gets this, that means that I’m less than and don’t get me wrong. Like if you’re sitting
1:45:40 there ever thinking, man, I’m a little jealous of that, or I wish I could do that. I have that
1:45:45 all the time too. You know, there, there are times where there’s somebody on the internet and,
1:45:50 you know, they’re growing faster than we are, or their business is doing better.
1:45:54 And I’ll feel that little twinge, you know, in my stomach, like shoot, gosh, why aren’t we doing
1:45:59 that? What am I doing wrong? And, and that’s human nature. And I might just mute them for a little
1:46:04 bit and just not play the comparison game. I’m like wish them well, but like, I’m not evolved
1:46:09 enough to not feel a little bit of that. But then if I was ever to engage with those people, I would
1:46:15 be like, you’re killing it. I’m so excited for you. And I hope you keep winning. What do you
1:46:24 spend money on that would surprise people? I’m really into lately matching sets. This is such a
1:46:29 girl thing. But I love outfits that match because you don’t have to coordinate them.
1:46:36 That’s such a nerd move. So like a shirt and pants or a dress and a shirt that that matches.
1:46:40 So then you just get to like go off and go. So I probably spend more money on clothes like that
1:46:48 than I used to. The second thing I spend a lot of money on is learning overall. So like if you
1:46:55 were to see where I spend probably like, I mean, houses, cars, I don’t really care that much about
1:47:00 that trips, those probably cost a lot of money. But something that might surprise people is like,
1:47:05 how many books am I buying? How many random courses am I taking? Like I’m taking one right now on
1:47:11 notion automations, for instance, because I want to get better at just prioritization of that.
1:47:16 I’m taking another one right now that I’m about done with on AI integration for small business,
1:47:21 like how could we integrate those a little bit better. So I spend an odd amount of money on
1:47:28 learning how to get faster and better. And I love doing that. And then probably the third is hiring.
1:47:33 Like every chance I can get, I try to think about where can I give somebody an opportunity
1:47:38 for them to be in their zone of genius, but also help me. And Tanner, who’s my creative director,
1:47:43 always gives me a hard time because people want me to say something like a private jet or like
1:47:49 something. And like, yeah, sometimes we fly private, but I would rather, I would rather
1:47:56 hire a couple more chiefs of staff. I would rather buy another business than spend on a liability.
1:48:04 And so I don’t do that a ton. But I do really want to farm with goats and many horses and chickens.
1:48:09 It’s just I can’t figure out exactly how to take care of it all without getting stressed out about
1:48:16 it. There’s like an expansion surface area, right? Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, should I just go
1:48:21 one a couple of weekends if I really want to? But I have a dude who’s become a friend,
1:48:24 Jesse Eitzler, and he’s like, I bought a farm and it’s the best fucking thing I’ve ever bought.
1:48:28 That was like, God, now I want one. So maybe we’ll do that eventually.
1:48:33 I think for you, part of that would be sort of like your weeks are busy, they’re stressful,
1:48:37 and this is like getting away, take myself out of a familiar environment, relaxing so that I
1:48:41 can come back on Monday and do it all over. Definitely. My husband and I are good at spending
1:48:46 on experiences more than things. Like it’s not like, I mean, I have maybe a couple of nice watches,
1:48:51 but I don’t really wear them that much. I don’t wear a lot of designer stuff. If you see me on
1:48:55 Instagram, a lot of times the stuff I’m buying is from small businesses and stuff like that.
1:49:04 I think it’s sort of a sign of, actually, I don’t want to judge. Just for me, labels and big
1:49:10 logos, I’ve never really gotten off on them. I do think there’s a bunch of research now.
1:49:14 Like I saw this thing the other day, I don’t know if you saw it, that there’s obviously something
1:49:19 called the pretty privilege, right? What’s that? Well, basically, women on average, there was a
1:49:27 fascinating study showing that women who wear makeup, but have the same attractiveness poll
1:49:32 in a group of people. So you were all sevens, let’s say, but a seven who wears makeup versus a
1:49:39 seven who doesn’t wear makeup will earn 15% more over the course of a year. Crazy, right? Then for
1:49:44 men and women who both, I can’t remember how they measured this one, but it was some measure of how
1:49:49 they dress, like they’re put togetherness. But I can’t remember the indicator of how they determine
1:49:56 that. Women earn on average 30% more, not just for their facial symmetry and whether they’re
1:50:02 pretty, but how they’re put together. And men earn 15% more. And so I do think there is a reason
1:50:10 to dress like a pro, so you can earn like a pro. And I’m sitting here in my sweatshirt shorts.
1:50:15 I think you agree. You’ve got your branding on. I mean, there’s definitely the cases where it’s
1:50:22 not true, but on average, it shows you earn more money. Why do you think it is?
1:50:27 I mean, I do suppose that we make, you know, they say that you make a first impression
1:50:33 in less than the blink of an eye, right? And so historically, we were predetermined worth based
1:50:38 on, you know, meeting capability, probably like protection if you’re a man and fertility if you’re
1:50:44 a woman, right? And so we’re trying to determine is our mate going to protect us or are they going
1:50:49 to provide us babies? And so prettiness or whatever was an indicator of health, which was an indicator
1:50:55 of fertility. And so I think for a lot of reasons, it’s like our Africa Savannah brain basically
1:51:00 saying, is this person going to be a good fit for me or not? And I should have a higher indication
1:51:06 of value for that. That would be what I would assume. And then maybe today, it’s also due to the
1:51:11 fact that you have a historical bias, like the people who do dress better historically have more
1:51:16 money. And so your prior interactions with people who have more money and look like this as opposed
1:51:21 to this. And then you take them more seriously. Yeah, it could be. What do you think? That would
1:51:26 be my sort of guess, right? Is you form a snap judgment unconsciously, like not consciously,
1:51:32 that this person is, and you can probably prove this, like if you were to walk into
1:51:37 a Porsche dealership and you’re wearing a fitted suit versus you’re wearing sweatpants,
1:51:42 how people interact with you, just on that. I want to come back to your husband for a second
1:51:46 because you guys do this thing I really want to talk about. But before that, you mentioned books.
1:51:51 What have you learned from business biographies? Oh, yeah. Well, I think that you learn more from
1:51:56 biographies of billionaires than most self-help books. I think, you know, I just went through a
1:52:02 list of a bunch of business biographies that I thought were really useful. And the reason I
1:52:08 like to learn about billionaires lives and even like in my book, I open up with the story of Wayne
1:52:14 Hezinga, who was the founder of Waste Management, one of the biggest garbage companies in the world.
1:52:20 And what’s fascinating is he started off owning a, sorry, not owning, he started off driving a
1:52:25 garbage truck. And what I think is interesting about that is he goes from owning a garbage truck
1:52:30 to working for a small garbage truck company to saying, wait a second, this guy is running this
1:52:35 garbage truck company. Couldn’t I do it? Why don’t I buy a series of garbage trucks and then
1:52:40 a series of garbage companies and then compile them into this big huge thing. And so if I can see
1:52:47 a model that works, then I can reverse engineer how to get there. And so I often find with
1:52:52 biographies of billionaires and lessons from billionaires, there’s a model in how they did things.
1:52:58 And you can sort of reverse engineer it your own way, as opposed to at times, if you’re following
1:53:05 like a self-help book, it’s a lot of theory or frameworks or ideation, which could be useful,
1:53:11 but maybe you don’t have the practical application. And so I like to see like, Tom did X plus Y,
1:53:18 which got Z. If Cody does X plus Y, likelihood of getting Z. And my brain sort of thinks and
1:53:22 not in numbers exactly like that, but equations like that.
1:53:26 I think that’s fascinating, right? But what I’m hearing is you’re filling your brain with this
1:53:33 repository of ideas, furniture, if you will, that are the raw material for when you run into a problem,
1:53:38 now when you’re searching this, you’re sort of like, oh, this reminds me of this situation. Maybe
1:53:43 I can handle it this way. Is the environment different? Can I apply it? Yeah. Well, I think
1:53:50 I don’t have the big huge type of brain that finds completely novel solutions and runs with it.
1:53:54 So my brain is in Colby, what they call a fact finder brain. So I first kind of like,
1:53:58 probably because I was a journalist, I look at the landscape and say, how have people done this
1:54:03 before? What does the data tell us? If I get, you know, 10 instances of this, what happens in nine
1:54:08 out of those 10 instances? Okay, now I have like some examples. And then I’ll go, okay, here’s my
1:54:13 problem. How do I apply those examples to my problem? And that just helps me feel a higher
1:54:17 degree of confidence that’ll work. So if you work at my companies, you’ll often hear me say,
1:54:23 like somebody will say, this is a good video. I’m gonna say, what does good mean? And they’ll say,
1:54:29 well, I like it, or it feels good, or whatever. And I’ll say, well, I can’t really quantify that.
1:54:33 Could you give me some different metrics? And so now we’ll have definitions with metrics for almost
1:54:38 everything. Because when you use the same words, then you’re actually having the same conversation.
1:54:44 Often we aren’t like good is too squishy. You can’t tell what it means. And so a lot of what we do
1:54:49 at our companies is figure out words mean things, different things to different people. What’s our
1:54:53 exact definition? And then once we have the exact definition, what’s the playbook we can use with
1:54:58 those words? I’m also really big on playbooks. I think they help. What’s your problem with
1:55:05 Rich Dad versus Porta? First of all, he’s a genius. And I think he changed, this is Robert
1:55:12 Kiyosaki, the author. I think he changed a generation of pure W2 employees who had never
1:55:19 thought about climbing the investment ladder to be allowed to climb the investment ladder.
1:55:29 My problem is, man, Sheryl Sandberg became how rich being a W2? Very rich. I mean, the CEO of
1:55:32 Google, one of the richest men in the world from being an employee, I think that we have
1:55:37 bastardized this idea of being an employee. And we’ve said it’s bad, and it’s less than you should
1:55:42 be a founder and entrepreneur. And so in Rich Dad, Porta, he has this quadrant where he basically
1:55:46 has a W2 employee at the low end of the totem pole. And I don’t believe in that. I think W2
1:55:51 is just your tax status. And actually, it doesn’t matter. Are you not smarter than the average
1:55:57 entrepreneur? If you are a W2 employee and you use the wages earned with zero risk because you’re
1:56:03 working with somebody else to invest in assets that then increase your income stream, but allow
1:56:07 you to still make money using somebody else’s risk. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
1:56:12 So that’s my problem with that framework, which is called the Cash Flow Quadrant, I believe,
1:56:19 because I think that we have made people feel bad about being a W2. And I remember
1:56:24 one of my friends came into, we run a community of business buyers, right? And so it’s an academy
1:56:29 where you go and learn how to do M&A. And one of my friends came into the M&A Academy,
1:56:34 and this person was making like $600, $700,000 a year. And they were making $600, $700,000,
1:56:38 they wanted to buy a couple of businesses on the side, but they loved what they did.
1:56:42 And somebody said to them, “Oh, you’re just a W2.” And I was pissed. I’m like, first of all,
1:56:48 how do you expect to be a business owner one day with just W2 employees? You’re not going to have
1:56:54 any if you treat them like that. Second, why does that matter? It doesn’t. It just means
1:56:59 we need to be able to do what we love and have a backup plan in case that doesn’t work out,
1:57:03 which is some investable assets. So that’s my problem is I think it creates a series of people
1:57:08 who think that there are better than or somebody is worse than because of their tax status, which
1:57:13 makes no sense to me. What are the different types of income streams that are available to somebody
1:57:19 who’s a W2 employee, like working for somebody else, getting a paycheck every week so that they
1:57:24 can build financial freedom? I think one of the best times to invest in assets that can provide
1:57:29 more income is when you’re employed, because you have an income stream, which means you have less
1:57:34 risk. If you’re going to go and start a new business, you probably shouldn’t diversify right
1:57:38 off the bat with a bunch of investments. You kind of need to focus and make sure that you’re
1:57:42 going to grow your business or invest in other companies inside of your business. You could
1:57:48 do what’s called strategic M&A. But when you’re a W2 employee, I mean, gosh, we have probably,
1:57:53 I would say like 40% of our community and there’s thousands of business buyers in there are W2s who
1:57:58 largely want to keep their W2 salary. They probably are pretty high earners and they’re doing things
1:58:04 like they’re buying series of hotels or Airbnbs and running those simultaneously. Then they’re
1:58:09 buying property management companies that run those Airbnbs. So they have 20% that they take
1:58:17 back in them. They’re buying laundromats and car washes. So what I call people light businesses.
1:58:22 So you don’t need a ton of employees for those businesses. They might be buying vendors for
1:58:29 people that they know and use inside of their W2. So maybe they buy a studio like this because they
1:58:33 work for a podcast company and so they can cash flow on it. And then of course,
1:58:38 traditional things like investing in funds and the stock market and REITs and all of that,
1:58:43 which I think the other thing that’s a little funny about today is there’s a lot of people who
1:58:52 don’t like the stock market, who don’t like bonds, who think that you shouldn’t invest that way
1:58:58 and I think that’s bizarre. Like the best money managers in the world have diversification to
1:59:07 some way, shape or form for longevity over time. And so I think you’re crazy to not want to have
1:59:13 multiple ways to protect the downside. You and your husband do this thing, the team thing. Can
1:59:18 you explain this to me and how it’s helped your marriage? Yeah, we’ve added on to it. So I don’t
1:59:25 know if you have this, but when you keep sort of bickering with your spouse, like little things
1:59:30 and they kind of compile and you look back on a fight and you’re like, why was that so dramatic?
1:59:35 It was about a book left on the table. It was about a water stain somewhere left out. What a
1:59:41 dumb fight. And so we were having some of those. And so we have a coach that we use because I
1:59:45 believe in coaches in almost every area of your life that you can. I want to steal other people’s
1:59:50 10,000 hours always. And so Brandy was basically like, we do this thing called team, which is at
1:59:55 the end of the day, I want to say every day, but we don’t do it every day. So often sit down
1:59:59 and it goes like this, you touch. So the first thing, maybe you’re like holding hands, maybe
2:00:03 you’re sitting next to each other. The second is educate. So you sit down and you’re like,
2:00:08 what did I learn today? Oh, I learned this cool thing from my conversation with Shane. I share,
2:00:14 he shares, then appreciation. So it’s like, Hey, I really appreciate honey. If it’s a bad day, it
2:00:19 might be like, thanks for taking out the trash. That’s all I fucking got today. But I appreciate
2:00:23 that you did that. The only rule is you can’t keep using the same things every day. You got to
2:00:30 find something new to appreciate. And then finally, metrics. And metrics is like, I wish you did this
2:00:36 better today. Today, you didn’t take care of the dog. You didn’t feed the dog. And I wish you did.
2:00:40 And you said this to me and I wish you would have said it that way instead. And so we keep
2:00:46 the small things for a period in which we’re not elevated. And that is when we are at our best.
2:00:49 And so and at the end of that, we might also have something like
2:00:56 expectations. So that would be like, now we’re really busy and we’re both running businesses,
2:01:02 he runs our portfolio. And so we realized, even if we did team, like, maybe this week,
2:01:08 you’re traveling here and your wife’s home with the kids. And you know, you’re going to be in
2:01:12 studio six hours a day. And you’re not going to be available. And when you’re done, you’re going
2:01:15 to be so tired, you’re not going to want to get on the phone with her. You’re going to want a quick
2:01:19 call with the kids, but you’re going to need to go to sleep afterwards. And when you come home on
2:01:22 Friday, even though you’re going to want to like, she’s going to want to go to dinner and you’re
2:01:26 going to want to you’re going to be so tired, you’re not going to be able to. And so we do
2:01:30 an expectation meeting now on Sundays, where it’s like, all right, what’s going down this week?
2:01:35 I’m traveling here, you’re traveling there, we got this, we got this, the kids need this,
2:01:40 I need that. Okay, cool. What do you, what’s your expectation level of like energy? Is this a brutal
2:01:46 week for you? Yeah, this week’s awful. No, this week’s pretty light. So we go, okay, if it’s awful
2:01:50 week, I know, you’re probably not going to be at your best. You might be a little sure with me.
2:01:55 You might need a little bit more love. I got you this week. Or we’re both kind of, it’s a brutal
2:02:01 week for both of us. So let’s try it easy this week. Let’s, let’s try to not nitpick each other
2:02:07 so much. And I just think, you know, you do that with your teams, you’re like, all right, guys,
2:02:12 we got a big week this week. So like, everybody needs to be in the office here, you know, or let’s
2:02:16 take Friday off half day, because we got too much going on the rest of the week. But why not do it
2:02:20 with your marriage? Because otherwise, I think life can run you down. And you don’t realize you’re
2:02:23 not even fighting because you’re mad, you’re fighting because you’re tired and beat up and
2:02:28 you got nothing left, you’re just trying to survive. And so it really helped us.
2:02:34 That expectation thing is really fascinating. Often in couples, there’s one partner who’s
2:02:39 maybe working harder than the other. And it could be a female surgeon and a guy who works
2:02:44 in nine to five, and it could be the other way around or somebody running a business and their
2:02:48 partner is more, their job is more defined. How do you handle like a mismatch between,
2:02:54 you know, my day is 12 hours, your day is like six hours or vice versa, right? My day is six
2:02:58 hours, your day is 12 hours. When you get home, I’m like full of energy and I can’t wait to see
2:03:04 you and you’re like, oh, I’m drained. Yeah, well, we compromise. So mine might be like, all right,
2:03:10 I’m in my season. I’m in a build season. And it’s going to be brutal because I’m in my residency
2:03:15 for the next three years. And we know that. And so it’s not on a week basis, it’s a three year
2:03:20 basis. So let’s have some expectations studying about what these three years is going to be like.
2:03:24 All right, you know that I’m going to be exhausted all these days, but you know what? You’re still my
2:03:28 top priority. So on Saturdays, I’m going to make it up to you. We’re going to have a date night,
2:03:33 I’m going to plan it, I’m going to handle it. We’re going to do a vacation like three or four
2:03:38 times a year. I’ll make sure to prioritize that. If we do those things, like, does that fill your
2:03:46 cup enough? Right. I think a lot of times these things happen in marriage because we aren’t honest
2:03:51 about the fact that we don’t have full tanks all the time. And you know, you’re going to have a
2:03:57 build season. And if you can tell, you know, your partner, Hey, I just had a baby, you know,
2:04:03 these next, this next year, I’m probably going to be tired. And I’m, and I’m not going to go
2:04:06 to the gym as much as I want to. And I want to know you’re still going to love me and whatever
2:04:13 fears you have. Then it takes a lot of the edge off because a lot of times we’re not even acknowledging
2:04:20 what the real problem is, right? Which is like, I am just really tired. And because this year I
2:04:25 know like this quarter for me, I have a book launch, which is brutal and like harder than I
2:04:29 thought it was going to be. It’s like, Oh my God, all this traveling and I mean, champagne
2:04:33 problems. It’s like such a hard podcast. But like, you know, it’s, it’s a lot of focus.
2:04:38 People who aren’t in it don’t understand all the stuff that goes into it. If you’re trying to
2:04:45 excel at it. Yeah, it’s a, it’s a weird process. And so Chris and I sat down and talked about it.
2:04:51 And I was like, listen, the compromise is in January, February and March, I’m not going to do
2:04:57 any speaking events. Like I’m just nope, zero. And so stick with me for three months, then,
2:05:01 you know, come into the year, we’re going to chill out. There’s a light at the end of this tunnel.
2:05:06 Exactly. And so you got to find whatever your compromise is. Otherwise, I think if you’re
2:05:10 always like, well, I always work 12 hours, you always work six. Well, that might not a happy
2:05:15 marriage make. And I like how you’re sort of setting expectations, which is like, Hey, you know,
2:05:19 it’s going to be busy for the next three months. And then there’s like this light at the end of
2:05:23 the tunnel. Yeah, my husband totally taught me that I was terrible at it. I’m not a great communicator
2:05:29 actually, interpersonally. I just go, go, go, go, go. And he was, he’s the one that’s like often
2:05:34 like, All right, stop. Let’s talk about this. Let’s be really clear. What do you really want?
2:05:38 So I have to give him all the credit in the world for that. We always end on the same question,
2:05:43 which is, what is success for you? For me, it’s two part. Long term, it’s,
2:05:48 you know, Emma Bombeck has this quote, which is, when I stand before God at the end of my days,
2:05:54 I want to feel like I used everything you gave me. I have not one drop left. And that’s how I want
2:05:59 to feel. I want to feel like I’m rung it out. Like I just left it on the field every piece of ability
2:06:08 that I had. And then the second part is, I want to feel peace and like, I’m enough. Like no matter
2:06:14 even if, if I don’t want to wring out those last couple of drops, that’s okay. And so it’s this
2:06:20 balance between what am I capable of and no matter what I achieve is enough. Little child of God,
2:06:21 no big deal either way.
2:06:33 Thanks for listening and learning with us for a complete list of episodes,
2:06:41 show notes, transcripts, and more go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google the Knowledge Project.
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2:07:19 The Furnham Street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking,
2:07:24 Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. It’s a transformative guide that
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