Passive Income Expert: How To Make 10k Per Month In 90 Days!

0:00:04 I’ve just got back from a few weeks away on my speaking tour in Asia with my team and it was
0:00:08 absolutely incredible. Thank you to everybody that came. We travelled to new cities, we did live shows
0:00:12 in places I’d never been to before and during our downtime talking about what’s coming for each of
0:00:16 us. And now that we’re back, my team has started planning their time off over the holiday period.
0:00:21 Some are heading home, some are going travelling and one or two of them have decided to host their
0:00:27 places through our sponsor Airbnb while they’re away. I hadn’t really considered this until Will
0:00:32 in my team mentioned that his entire flat, all of his roommates were doing this too. And it got me
0:00:36 thinking about how smart this is for many of you that are looking for some extra money. Because so
0:00:40 many of you spend this time of the year travelling or visiting family away from your homes and your
0:00:45 homes just sit there empty. So why not let your house work for you while you’re off somewhere else?
0:00:54 Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. That’s
0:01:01 a lot of people are looking for passive income from side hustles. Yeah, it’s the financial
0:01:06 Ozempic and it’s more accessible than ever. Like 90% of the ideas I talk about can be launched with
0:01:11 $500 or less. And there’s enough time in the day to do these on the nights and weekends. So in these
0:01:14 three suitcases in front of me, I have three different amounts of money. And during this conversation,
0:01:19 I’m going to pass you a box at random. And your job is to tell me what kind of business you would
0:01:23 start with that amount of money. Sounds good. Let’s do this. Known as the king of side hustles,
0:01:29 Chris Kerner has launched over 80 businesses earning millions in the process. And now the serial
0:01:34 entrepreneur is going to teach us how to adopt a business mindset and launch simple overlooked but
0:01:39 profitable ventures with little money. Many of us struggle financially and they see a side hustle as
0:01:43 a solution to that. Like for me, growing up kind of poor, business allowed me to take hold of my life
0:01:47 and make it what I wanted it to be. And it started when I was nine years old and wanting
0:01:51 a Red Schwinn bicycle. My friends had a bicycle, my neighbors had a bicycle and my parents didn’t
0:01:54 have money for it. But I lived across the street from a golf course and these golf balls would fly
0:01:57 in my yard and I would go to my neighbor’s yard and go across the street, dig through the ditches
0:02:01 and I’d pull out all these golf balls and I started selling them. That was my first business.
0:02:06 That taught me that business is approachable and we all have ideas, but we usually don’t do anything
0:02:09 about it. Why? I think number one, they’re afraid of what people think. Number two is they don’t
0:02:14 have the tools or they’re not connecting the tools with the ideas. If we can get over those,
0:02:18 the world is our oyster at that point. I think I have a thousand dollars. What side hustle do you
0:02:22 start? The first thing that comes to mind is my favorite business idea of all right now. This is a
0:02:27 zero employee business. It’s highly profitable and that would be… So how important is it for you to
0:02:33 love the thing, to be successful at it? Ignore passion, follow the profit until you can afford to follow
0:02:37 your passion. Do they need a business partner? No. If you look at the stats on business failure rates
0:02:41 with companies that have co-founders, it’s significantly higher than companies that
0:02:46 have solo founders. And how does someone validate a business idea? If I had to pick one tool, it’s one
0:02:51 that one in four humans use every day. That’s everything you need right there.
0:02:59 Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you
0:03:04 for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us and this really
0:03:08 is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn’t have imagined getting to this place.
0:03:11 But secondly, it’s a dream where we feel like we’re only just getting started.
0:03:17 And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly
0:03:23 and follow us on this app. Here’s a promise I’m going to make to you. I’m going to do everything in
0:03:28 my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We’re going to deliver the guests
0:03:32 that you want me to speak to. And we’re going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love
0:03:34 about this show. Thank you.
0:03:47 Chris, who are you? And what is the mission that you’re on?
0:03:56 I am a father, I am a husband, and I’m a serial entrepreneur. And I love talking about business
0:04:00 and starting businesses and inspiring other people to do the same.
0:04:01 Why?
0:04:08 Business has given me everything. Growing up kind of poor, it was my outlet. It was my way of just
0:04:14 kind of taking hold of my life and making it what I wanted it to be. And I have immense gratitude for
0:04:21 that. And I just love talking about it. It’s the only thing I know. I can’t talk to you about history
0:04:25 or nutrition or anything. But when it comes to business, I just love it. And I want other people
0:04:26 to love it as well.
0:04:30 How have you made your name in the world of business? Because I’ve heard your name
0:04:36 a lot recently. People call you the king of side hustles. Where has this come from?
0:04:43 I think I just published my life on the internet now. I’m always testing and launching and starting
0:04:50 businesses. But only over the last couple of years have I started publishing that. And I didn’t try
0:04:54 to be like the king of side hustles. That’s not something that I’ve ever like intentionally tried
0:05:00 to brand myself as. But I think people see what I do as a side hustle. And they call it that. But I
0:05:06 think that anything is scalable. Any side hustle could be a multi-million dollar business. I mean,
0:05:10 we live on a planet with 8 billion people and we’re all connected and anything can be scaled.
0:05:12 And you make a lot of content now. So you’ve probably
0:05:18 had a bit of a feedback loop in terms of understanding what it is that you say and do
0:05:23 and create that’s resonant with people. And also why it’s resonant. Like what is the crux of what
0:05:26 people like my audiences are looking for?
0:05:48 I think everyone has ideas. Most people are very hesitant to execute on those ideas. And so when they
0:05:56 see someone like me freely executing on all the ideas, hopefully it opens their mind and helps them
0:06:00 look at their ideas in a different way or a more approachable way and maybe give them confidence
0:06:05 to do the same. In the boxes in front of me here, I have three different amounts of money.
0:06:13 $500, I think I have $1,000 and $5,000. And during this conversation, I’m going to pass you a box at
0:06:18 random. And your job is to tell me what kind of business you would start with that amount of money.
0:06:21 Because I know my audience, you know, they’re, many of them are interested in starting their business
0:06:26 one day. And I use specifically sort of low amounts of money just to make it as accessible to them as
0:06:30 possible. So we will do that at some point. I’ll pass you the boxes. You give me three business ideas.
0:06:38 You’d start with $500, $1,000 and $5,000. But I want to get a view on you and the businesses that
0:06:42 you’ve started and the sort of the variety of success you’ve had. So can you give me an overview?
0:06:48 Yeah. So I was nine years old, living in Utah, and I lived across the street from a golf course.
0:06:54 And these golf balls would fly in my yard. And I don’t know what gave me the idea. But I started
0:06:59 selling them. I just wanted money for a bike. I wanted the Schwinn bicycle. And it was red. And my
0:07:03 friends had a bicycle, my neighbors had a bicycle, and my parents didn’t have money for it. And so for
0:07:10 whatever reason, I connected that white golf ball in my grass with money. And I would go to my neighbor’s
0:07:13 yards, I’d go across the street, I’d dig through the ditches, and I’d pull out all these golf balls,
0:07:18 I’d wash them. And then I put up this huge piece of plywood in front of my house that said golf balls
0:07:23 three for a dollar. And that was my first business. And at the time, it was just normal. It was natural.
0:07:28 I didn’t know any different. And now I have a nine-year-old, and I was nine when I did that.
0:07:33 And we live on a busy road today. I lived on a busy road then. And the thought of him
0:07:41 negotiating, haggling with grownups wearing polo shirts on our doorstep is unfathomable. But that’s
0:07:46 what I was doing. And that planted the seed. That kind of taught me that business is approachable.
0:07:51 Preferably, it’s approachable. Approachable and scalable can be the same thing. They don’t have
0:07:53 to be at odds with one another. So…
0:07:55 And how many businesses have you started since then?
0:07:59 I lose count. I have a spreadsheet, but it’s at least 80.
0:08:05 And what have the outcomes been? How much money have you made? How has that changed your life? What
0:08:06 freedom has that given you?
0:08:12 Yeah. So, cumulatively, all of the businesses have generated low hundreds of millions of revenue,
0:08:22 low tens of millions of profit. But on a real number basis, the majority of them have been abandoned
0:08:28 or fizzled out or failed or there was too much opportunity cost, so I pivoted to something else.
0:08:30 It’s just a numbers game.
0:08:34 And how has that changed your life? What does your lifestyle look like?
0:08:41 My life is awesome. We built our dream house in our 20s. We had all four of our kids in our 20s.
0:08:47 We travel a lot. I’ve been married for 17 years. We’re a very close family. We take a lot of trips.
0:08:54 We live in a good school district, but my kids go to public school, and we have everything we need
0:08:56 and more, and we’re very grateful for that.
0:09:02 What is the over sort of underpinning mentality that’s required for someone to be successful
0:09:07 at starting businesses in the way that you’ve started them, starting these side hustles at volume
0:09:13 and seeing success? Is there like a foundational mentality or personality or character trait
0:09:15 required before we get into the tactics?
0:09:26 Yeah. I should say that the pain of your problem needs to be greater than how much you care about
0:09:31 what people think about you. It needs to get to that point. Because by far, that is the biggest
0:09:37 roadblock to success is people caring too much about what people think about them. And so they don’t want
0:09:41 to do the thing, or they don’t want to talk about doing the thing because some random person from
0:09:46 high school follows them on Facebook and might comment something, right? Which is really silly,
0:09:52 but I’ve been there. I get it, right? If we can get over that, if we can just flip the switch in our
0:09:56 brain that says people are thinking about me, people are caring about me, and just switch that to off,
0:10:00 we’ll win, right? Because the world is our oyster at that point.
0:10:06 And in terms of where we sit at this moment of time with technology, with AI, with fast internet,
0:10:11 with mobile phones, do you think this is the best time for people to start something,
0:10:14 to start a side hustle or to try?
0:10:20 Every day that goes by, the timing gets better for people, right? Things are getting more competitive,
0:10:25 but there are more tools than ever. Ten years ago, if I wanted to start a business,
0:10:30 and this is what the internet’s in full swing, social media’s in full swing. I probably had to spend a lot
0:10:37 of money, or move to San Francisco, or raise venture capital. That’s like, I would love for
0:10:41 you to try to convince me. Try to give me an idea where you have to raise money, or where you have to
0:10:47 go all in, or where you have to quit your job. It doesn’t exist. With all these AI tools, software
0:10:51 tools, you can make a website with one prompt, you can make an app with one prompt, you could post to
0:10:56 Facebook Marketplace and have hundreds of inquiries within an hour, you could post Facebook ads, you
0:11:00 could go to Craigslist, like you could put a sign up in front of your house, you could go,
0:11:06 launch a survey to people. There are so many tools for testing and validating and experimenting with
0:11:11 these concepts that it is more accessible than ever. Why don’t people?
0:11:17 I think number one is they’re afraid of what people think. Number two is they don’t have the
0:11:22 tools, or at least they’re not connecting the tools with the ideas, right? They’ll use Facebook
0:11:30 Marketplace to sell a sectional, but then they won’t think to use it when validating their woodworking
0:11:36 idea, right? They’re just not connecting the dots. There’s too many tools in a sense, so we don’t know how
0:11:45 to tie them all together. They also probably don’t know, like, how much the law of abundance is a real
0:11:48 thing, right? People think business is a zero-sum game.
0:11:49 What does that mean?
0:11:54 Well, they think that things are oversaturated. They’ll have an idea for a product or a service,
0:11:57 and then they’ll get really excited, and then they’ll go Google it, and then we’ll see it exists,
0:12:02 and then we’ll move on. And when I do that, and I see it exists, I’m like, yes, this is it.
0:12:07 Someone went to the front lines of the battlefield and validated this for me,
0:12:12 and then I’ll go to the web archive. I’ll go to who is, and I’ll go look at what their website has
0:12:18 looked like over the last decade, see where they started. Maybe their product was $99. Now it’s like
0:12:26 $49 every two months. Interesting. Okay. I’ll look at the copy of their headline. I’ll look at how many
0:12:31 tabs they have on their website. Do they post their Instagram feed on? I’ll look at all these things and
0:12:37 see how it’s evolved over time and think, awesome. I’m going to start where he’s at today. This guy
0:12:42 already proved it out for me. He took all the risk. This is amazing. This exists. I don’t need to do it
0:12:48 better. I don’t need to do it differently. I just need to do the same thing. And the market is big
0:12:53 enough. The world is big enough to where I can win as well. You said web archive. What role does web
0:12:57 archive play? What is that for anyone that isn’t familiar? And how do you use that?
0:13:03 Yeah. It’s just a tool that shows snapshots over time of what a website looks like, right? So it’s a
0:13:08 great way of kind of reverse engineering what businesses have done to be successful. And then
0:13:13 there’s another tool called SimilarWeb where you can see what their traffic has been over time. And you can
0:13:18 kind of overlay the two. And you can say, oh, interesting. When they redesigned their website to be
0:13:25 more mobile-friendly, their traffic went from $3,000 a month to $4,500 a month. Interesting. I’m just going to
0:13:30 make it mobile-friendly from day one, right? So we’re at a great advantage when we start
0:13:36 where our competitors or our future competitors already are, instead of starting where we think
0:13:41 we need to be. Starting like trying to be different or innovative or unique. In my experience, that’s more
0:13:48 of like a signal of our pride or our ego. We feel kind of like weird or odd or even dirty or unethical if
0:13:54 we’re just like copying and pasting a business. Even if we had the original idea ourselves, when really
0:13:59 there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Like we don’t want to steal their intellectual property or their logo or
0:14:04 anything. But copy what’s already working. People think, you know, people don’t think that
0:14:08 that’s a thing because they think if I copy a business that’s already working, then I’m not
0:14:14 going to get any customers because this existing business has all the customers. But it’s interesting.
0:14:18 I had someone on the show where they talked about how some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world
0:14:21 basically just copy 95% of the blueprint. I think it was Walmart. I think he was talking about
0:14:25 Walmart. Yeah, they copied other like regional grocery chains.
0:14:28 Copying as a strategy. Yeah.
0:14:31 Have you done that? Oh, absolutely.
0:14:32 Give me an example.
0:14:42 Okay. Well, I had a phone repair business when I was in college, 2010. And I got a call one day
0:14:48 from someone that said, hey, Chris, I want to buy all of your broken iPhone screens. Do you have any
0:14:51 broken iPhone screen? Sure. We don’t throw them away because we think it’s bad for the environment.
0:14:57 We just have a box of them. How much will you pay me? Three bucks a piece. Why? What? Why will you
0:15:02 pay me $3? It’s just broken glass. And they said, well, there’s actually a way of remanufacturing these.
0:15:07 We can send them to China. We can remove the broken glass, put new glass on them, and then we can resell
0:15:13 them as a remanufactured unit. And that was just like a light bulb, right? So most people, I think at this
0:15:17 point would say, yeah, like, yeah, where do I ship these? You know? But I was like,
0:15:22 oh, I need to be in that business. I want to copy that guy who called me, right? Now, I don’t know
0:15:26 what his website was. I don’t know. I don’t know what the name of his business was. There was no web
0:15:32 archive at the time to look at. I just wanted to copy the business model because I thought this is
0:15:37 going to be a thing. I’m in the industry. I know the industry. I’m going to do this as well. So we did
0:15:42 2 million the first year, then five, and then nine. And then we exited a few years after that.
0:15:44 It’s interesting. But, you know, you often don’t think that
0:15:50 everyone’s in search of a new idea. And it’s tough to find new ideas.
0:15:51 Yeah.
0:15:54 Like, I think, was it Einstein that said there’s no such thing as a new idea?
0:15:55 Sounds right.
0:15:59 But you have an orientation just to look at existing models and to replicate them.
0:16:01 Do you put a spin on it at all?
0:16:07 I’ll develop my own spins over time, right? Because we’re all a product of our environment.
0:16:13 And so in the case of this business, I started copying exactly, right? I went and found people
0:16:19 in China. I just went to Alibaba. I messaged a ton of people that sold iPhone screens. And I said,
0:16:24 do you recycle? Do you recycle? Do you recycle? And like five or 10% of them said yes. So then I
0:16:29 shipped them samples and then they shipped me some back. And then over time, I started like
0:16:34 taking some marketing principles from previous businesses like Facebook ads, cold calling.
0:16:40 And I started applying them just because I didn’t know how this other competitor was finding success.
0:16:43 I knew he was cold calling and that was working. That’s all I knew. Remember,
0:16:47 I didn’t even know the name of his business. And so over time, you start using your previous
0:16:53 experiences to apply these tweaks to the business and to make it your own. But if you do that right at
0:16:57 the outset, right? Like if I got a call and he said, I want to buy your broken iPhone screen,
0:17:01 then I said, okay, I’m going to do that. But I don’t want to just sell iPhone screens. That’s lame.
0:17:05 I’m going to do Samsung, right? Pretty good chance. There’s not even a market for that,
0:17:10 or there’s not even a method for that. And because of my, my ego, my pride, my unwillingness to just
0:17:16 copy what’s already working. I wouldn’t that I wouldn’t have that successful business in my back
0:17:23 pocket. Right? So if you do twist in the beginning, it’s kind of like you’re, um, kind of thinking of an
0:17:28 analogy. Like if you’re on a long road trip and you start taking detours early on, or if a flight is on
0:17:32 a flight path and he starts like getting off track just a little bit at the beginning, he’s going to
0:17:37 end up, he’s going to end up hundreds of miles away from his destination. But if he starts making tweaks
0:17:44 along the way, then he’ll be much closer to where he would have been anyway. And you might reach a
0:17:47 better destination with some of those exact tweaks. Because you’re blending it with your,
0:17:52 your experience. Yeah. You know better than the person that you’re copying. And so it’s important
0:17:58 to, to copy the model exactly at the beginning, because you’re also going to learn what it is about
0:18:03 that existing model that works. Yeah. And therefore what you can iterate on change, expand. If you,
0:18:08 if you didn’t, then you might miss something. Exactly. Because so often I made the mistake of
0:18:13 looking at another business and saying, oh man, why are they doing that? Why are they charging like that?
0:18:17 Like they’re charging all these different things. That’s so confusing. I made this mistake. I had a,
0:18:22 an e-commerce fulfillment business where brands would send us all their products. We had this big
0:18:28 warehouse and we would ship all, all of their stuff out. Right. And I was like, why do they have storage
0:18:35 fees, pick pack and ship fees? They, they charge fees for tracking their expiration dates. They charge
0:18:40 extra fees. If there’s five items in a box versus four, like there’s so much friction there. That’s so
0:18:45 messy. Like we’re going to make this simple. We’re going to just one flat fee, no storage fee. And that’s
0:18:49 going to be our differentiator. Right. And then over time, over the course of months and years,
0:18:56 we learned, oh, storage fees. It’s because sometimes your customers go out of business and then you’re
0:19:00 left holding the bill. And like your storage costs are actually very high, but there’s nothing to pass
0:19:06 on. Oh, pick back and ship fees because you learn all these things and you’re like, okay, I wasn’t like
0:19:11 this genius that had an MBA. I was just like trying to put my own spin on it. Cause I thought I was
0:19:15 smarter than that business owner. Turns out someone that’s been doing this for 15 years versus 15 days
0:19:20 knows a lot more about the industry than me. And I’m much better off just copying his pricing,
0:19:26 copying the layout of his website, copying the size of the warehouse. He has copying the same niche that
0:19:31 he’s going after. Cause that’s clearly working for him. So I don’t make that mistake anymore. I don’t,
0:19:36 I don’t assume that other competitors are idiots, right? Yeah. I’ve been proven wrong too many times.
0:19:43 I assume that they’re doing that because they’ve learned the hard way. Yeah. And if I copy them,
0:19:47 then I won’t have to learn the hard way. I had, um, several of our executives over at my house over
0:19:52 the last couple of days, and we were looking at different models of, so basically we’re looking
0:19:56 at other companies that do similar things to us that have been around for a long time. And the question
0:20:00 that I ended up asking at one moment when I was had the exact same epiphany, I was like, why do they do
0:20:06 it that way? Isn’t that shitty? And there was a second where I think we were tempted to try and
0:20:10 reinvent the wheel. But the question I asked myself now with the wisdom of like many years of business
0:20:17 is like, why did it end up that way? Which is why did our competitor who’s been doing this for 50 years
0:20:24 end up there? Because as you said, there’s clearly a set of things that have happened that have made
0:20:29 them conclude, whether it’s at scale or some other factor that’s made them conclude that this is the
0:20:33 best way of doing it. And just like you, I’ve been wrong so many times where I’ve thought, oh,
0:20:37 they’re just idiots. That’s why they, they, they can’t see this obvious thing, but actually their
0:20:43 model is stress tested in the market much more than mine is. So maybe I should, I should put my ego
0:20:47 aside and at least start how they start, as you said, which I think is really important advice.
0:20:51 Yeah. Well, there are times when a company just keeps doing something because it works.
0:20:54 Yeah. And so they don’t take the time to test something that works better.
0:21:00 right. But it’s almost impossible to guess what that is, right? Like if a, if a clothing brand is
0:21:05 growing their business entirely through Facebook ads, um, and they’ve just never tried Google ads,
0:21:10 maybe Google ads could convert twice as better, twice, twice better. Right. But I don’t want to
0:21:14 guess that. I just want to start with Facebook ads and then I’ll still take 5% of my budget and start
0:21:20 testing other concepts. But nine times out of 10, I ended up just coming right back to Facebook ads.
0:21:24 It got me thinking about how in business, basically everything again,
0:21:28 speaking broadly here can be put into one of two categories, either like old problems where
0:21:34 thousands of people have come before you and the same solutions and same thinking is still
0:21:39 relevant. And then new problems, you know, things like AI have created a set of new problems,
0:21:44 new opportunities as well. And what I tend to find is that like 95% of the things in business
0:21:48 are like old problems, like hiring cashflow, how finance is done, legal, all those kinds of things.
0:21:54 And the, and when, when you’re dealing with a new, an old problem, expertise is usually the answer,
0:21:59 which is like find someone who knows, hire someone or mentor or whatever. And then you have these new
0:22:06 problems where there is no blueprint in our industry. It’s, it’s a new challenge. So experimentation is the
0:22:08 answer. Does that like broadly hold in your, in your mind?
0:22:14 Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. I like to say test everything except drugs. Like we’re always testing.
0:22:19 Um, it’s the basis to everything we do, but do you test when it’s an old problem?
0:22:21 Can you give me an example?
0:22:30 So like things like cashflow management, um, hiring principles around like probation and,
0:22:36 uh, notice periods, um, a lot of legal structuring and deals.
0:22:38 Things with like a well-established president.
0:22:42 Well-established presidents where like nothing has fundamentally changed in the world that makes that
0:22:43 invalid.
0:22:51 Yeah. I think if it’s an old problem, I look to an example of someone within the last decade that solved
0:22:57 it in an interesting way. And I’m more likely to copy that like in hiring. Traditionally, companies will,
0:23:02 they’ll spend hours and weeks or days hiring, going from round to round to round, person, person, person.
0:23:06 And if you look at Y Combinator, arguably the greatest, you know, startup incubator in the world,
0:23:10 they have seven minute interviews. Um, and they said they would make it five minutes,
0:23:14 but it just felt rude. Right. And in their interviews,
0:23:18 they really know in the first three minutes if it’s a fit or not. And then the interview is done.
0:23:23 Like they’re either in or they’re not. I, I approach hiring the same way. Um, I would much
0:23:31 rather, um, take, uh, like a, a law of large numbers approach to it and give five people 30 days
0:23:36 to show what their skills are as opposed to spending 30 days going all in on one person.
0:23:41 Because in my experience, that one person that I spent 30 days on is not any more likely to succeed
0:23:44 than those, those other five people that I might be testing.
0:23:51 Okay. And your example of that storage company you started, it sounds like you hit an old problem.
0:23:53 Yes, very much so.
0:23:57 And you tried to innovate an experiment, but this was an old problem where the laws of human beings
0:24:00 and how they behave and businesses going bust was still pertinent.
0:24:04 Yeah. And at the end of our, our two year experiment, like we look just like all of our
0:24:09 competitors. Right. So if we would have started there, we could have saved two years.
0:24:16 And this is what I find is founders waste years trying to experiment where old problems
0:24:21 are still, um, strong and still hold. Yeah. And this is what I, the mistake, several of the
0:24:24 mistakes I made in my company was that I should have spent all of my time experimenting on the
0:24:31 new problems and should have hired people to tell me, um, how to navigate the old problems.
0:24:37 What was your, um, I think one of the videos that made you go pretty viral was your story of
0:24:41 Buc-ee’s. We don’t know what Buc-ee’s is around the world. I think it’s a U S brand. Yeah.
0:24:45 But this shows, I think how you’ve always had an orientation to think slightly differently or
0:24:48 innovatively. Yeah. What happened with Buc-ee’s?
0:24:52 So this was during the time when I was running that business, shipping products for other companies,
0:24:58 right? Buc-ee’s is a gas station brand, uh, with only 50 locations. And from those 50 locations,
0:25:05 they do billions of dollars of revenue. I say gas station there between 40,000, 80,000 square feet.
0:25:11 Wow. They’re massive. They have an amazing brand, an amazing logo, and they just have a lot of trust
0:25:16 from their customers. But these gas stations are like, they’re on the way out to these road trip
0:25:20 destinations. They’re out in the middle of nowhere. And so if you’re, if you live in Dallas and you’re
0:25:23 driving down to the beach, you’re going to stop by Buc-ee’s on the way there and on the way back,
0:25:26 and you’re probably going to spend hundreds of dollars, right? You’re going to fill up the tank,
0:25:30 then you’re going to buy shirts and snacks and all that stuff. So at the time we were running this
0:25:35 e-commerce fulfillment business, we went to Buc-ee’s. I brought my cousin, my business partner,
0:25:41 just to kind of show them the experience. And we were just having a conversation. I remember exactly
0:25:45 where I was. I was like under this underpass, this huge underpass in DFW. We were driving home
0:25:50 and I said, man, these guys must kill it online. They must sell so much stuff.
0:25:58 Because I knew that Disney sells like billions of dollars of t-shirts on their website, right? I read
0:26:01 a stat recently. So I kind of just took that data point, connected it to Buc-ee’s and said, all right,
0:26:06 Buc-ee’s is a fraction of the size of Disney, but they have the same amount of brand loyalty.
0:26:10 People love their shirts. You’ll see their shirts all over the world, even though they only have 50
0:26:15 locations like in the Southeast, right? And so we went to their website and there was no shop button.
0:26:21 There was no place to buy their stuff. And I was just like, like all the light bulbs were going off
0:26:26 at once, right? It was like, oh my gosh, okay. We need to reach out to them. Like we need to bring
0:26:33 them online. I just had all these ideas and my cousin is much more balanced than I am. He’s like the
0:26:39 operator and I’m like the ADHD crazy guy, right? So his role is to like calm me down. And he’s very good
0:26:43 at that. But I just couldn’t be calmed down from this. I’m like, no, no, no. We got to do something
0:26:49 here. We’re going to buy one of everything. We’re going to hire a photographer to take pictures of it.
0:26:55 We’re going to launch our own Buc-ee’s online store and we’re going to try to go viral. Like it’s viral
0:26:59 or bust, right? If we don’t go viral, then I’ll just be eating these unhealthy snacks for the next
0:27:04 three years of my life. And so we did, we bought one of everything. It cost thousands of dollars. I brought
0:27:09 all four of my kids and we brought it back to our warehouse. We took pictures of it.
0:27:16 We launched a website and I emailed all the reporters I could find. And one of them just
0:27:21 loved the idea. He ran with it. And so he reached out to Buc-ee’s for comment because they wouldn’t
0:27:25 respond to my cold emails. I wanted to launch this like with them in tandem, but who am I? They didn’t
0:27:31 care about me and I don’t blame them. And so he wrote this big article about me. Millions of people read
0:27:36 it. All these other news outlets wrote about it. And we did hundreds of thousands of dollars in our
0:27:41 first 30 days organically from that. How did Buc-ee’s feel about that?
0:27:47 They wanted us to make some key changes to the website. They wanted us to like basically put
0:27:51 disclaimers everywhere that said, we are not Buc-ee’s. We’re not affiliated with Buc-ee’s.
0:27:55 They wanted us to change the name. It had the word beaver in the name. That’s their mascot.
0:28:01 They just, they didn’t want it to be confusing at all. So we made all those changes and then we got like
0:28:04 the unofficial thumbs up from them. They said, we’re not going to sign anything,
0:28:07 but like you have our blessing. Have fun.
0:28:09 And did that website make you a lot of money?
0:28:14 Yeah, it still is. It’s been five years. We still own it. A hundred percent of it. And it’s going great.
0:28:16 And it’s made you millions?
0:28:16 Uh-huh.
0:28:24 What can someone listening take from that in terms of applying that to their own life,
0:28:27 finding opportunities like that out in the world? Or is that just a one and done?
0:28:29 Is there any one opportunity like that?
0:28:34 Okay. So specific, I get asked that question a lot. How could someone do that with another brand?
0:28:40 I don’t know. If there was another brand out there like that, I would be doing it, right?
0:28:45 Trader Joe’s is similar, but they’re very litigious. I think that was kind of lightning in a bottle
0:28:52 for that particular experiment, as in launching an online brand for an in-person business, okay?
0:28:58 But people should not be disheartened hearing that because on a macro level, like people should
0:29:06 take their curious ideas very seriously. They need to shorten the amount of time spent between having
0:29:08 the idea and doing something about that idea.
0:29:09 Why?
0:29:16 Because that will strengthen their bias for action muscle, right? We all have ideas. Some of them good,
0:29:21 some of them bad on a regular basis. We usually don’t do anything about it. It’s just a passing
0:29:25 thought, right? Whether it’s a business idea or a hard conversation I need to have with something,
0:29:33 any idea, right? But the more we shrink the amount of time between doing something about that idea and
0:29:39 having that idea, the more often we’ll do that. And it becomes a self-perpetuating snowball that
0:29:44 just compounds. And then before we know it, we’ll get more ideas. We’ll do more about those ideas.
0:29:49 We’ll be testing things. We’ll be learning tools. We’ll be experimenting and we’ll have a whole
0:29:51 portfolio of businesses.
0:29:55 Is there something in your mentality or perspective there, where you walk into a Buc-ee’s and you even
0:29:59 think about how you could do something, whereas most people walk into a Buc-ee’s and buy their stuff and
0:30:02 leave? Like, is there something foundational in the way that you’re looking at the world?
0:30:09 Yeah. But I don’t think I’m any different. I think a lot of people have ideas like that. Like,
0:30:15 you walk into a Buc-ee’s and you see something about something that could be improved and people
0:30:22 have these passing thoughts and they move on. I think that you become an expert at doing something
0:30:27 about those ideas when you do something about those ideas. You get better at what you do, at what you test.
0:30:32 Because you’ve built up some kind of muscle, which means that you don’t really care about,
0:30:37 it seems, failure as much as the average person. And also, in that particular case,
0:30:40 the average person might think, well, I’ve got no experience in doing that.
0:30:46 No one has any experience in anything until they do it, right? Like every expert started out as a
0:30:55 beginner, right? Sometimes though, people try this and they learn, eh, it doesn’t give them energy. It’s
0:31:01 not for them. That’s okay. Now when they have ideas, they can know, all right, box checked. That’s not
0:31:07 really for me, that entrepreneurship thing. Someone else needs to do that. And great, good. All the power to
0:31:12 them. I just want people to answer that question for themselves. I hate seeing regret in people’s
0:31:17 faces. Like I have friends that want to start a business. They’ve always talked about it and I
0:31:22 know they would be good at it. And I know it just eats them up and they have really, really good ideas
0:31:29 objectively. And I, I just hate seeing them have that question for the rest of their lives. I just want
0:31:36 them to, to taste entrepreneurship. Is it for everybody though? You know, you can think, think of all your
0:31:41 friends. Yeah. You can probably put them in groups of this person should, this person shouldn’t. And what
0:31:51 defines who goes in which group? To me, it’s how far they go in doing something about that idea. Because I will
0:31:57 have friends that will text me ideas or talk to me about ideas. And then I never hear from them again about
0:32:04 that thing. I don’t worry about them. Right. I feel like there’s a selection bias at play. Like if they
0:32:08 really want to do something about it, they would get a little further down the line. They’d follow up
0:32:12 with me. They’d say, I did this thing. Cause I’ll always give them tips and feedback. You should do
0:32:17 this. You should try this. And they’ll follow up. And then, you know, at some point along the line,
0:32:22 it’ll die. Right. But if they don’t get any further than just telling me their idea, then
0:32:27 I don’t, I don’t lose sleep over them. So it’s kind of survived. It’s kind of sort of
0:32:32 self-selecting itself anyway. It is entrepreneurship. Yeah, absolutely. But then I have other friends that
0:32:37 are like the follow-up, the follow-up, the follow-up, and then, and then it dies, which is okay. A lot of
0:32:41 my ideas die too. And to me, that’s the signal that it was supposed to die. Right. I’ll just move on to
0:32:46 the next thing. Um, so it’s those people that maybe I’m just biased and they look more like me,
0:32:52 you know, um, maybe that’s not an accurate signal or not, but if they look more like me, then that’s
0:32:56 a signal that they, they should get further down the line and actually launch something that gets to
0:33:00 revenue. Yeah. In your head, think of one person, you know, that should never start a business.
0:33:06 Okay. Why did you think of that person without telling me who they are?
0:33:14 Because they make a lot of money at their job and they like their job well enough. They’re not
0:33:21 miserable. Um, and they’re in their late forties and they probably feel like it would be too big of a
0:33:25 risk to start something. And do you objectively agree that it would be too big of a risk for them?
0:33:31 I do. So you’re looking at that on a risk reward basis, thinking the reward doesn’t outweigh the
0:33:35 risk here for you. Yeah. Yeah. Cause people come to me like hoping that I’ll encourage them to quit
0:33:40 their job. Right. Like begging me to do that without actually begging me. And I don’t want to do that.
0:33:46 Like I’ve, I’ve never had to quit a job. Like I, I started with entrepreneurship, right? So the thought
0:33:54 of being 48 with four kids and quitting my $400,000 a year job to test something, it just sounds crazy to
0:33:59 me. On the other hand, think of one person, you know, that isn’t an entrepreneur, but definitely
0:34:03 should be, but you always think, why don’t they do it? Yeah. Why did you think of that person?
0:34:10 Because it’s a person that comes to me the most often with ideas and they’re really,
0:34:16 really good ideas. He’s an engineer. Um, and so he sees the world in that way. Engineers make great
0:34:24 entrepreneurs. Um, and he has a great work ethic and he’s like mid career, but not, not so far along.
0:34:31 And I know objectively that he’s not, he’s actually quite miserable in his job. And I hate that for him
0:34:38 because I see the talent that’s there and I want him, like, I think he would excel. And I want to see
0:34:41 that dream come true for him. Why isn’t he doing it?
0:34:48 I think it it’s insecurity. Fear. Yeah. Fear of
0:34:57 probably fear of just letting go of something certain that’s provided his family, a nice lifestyle
0:35:04 and not getting that back again ever. Um, I think that insecurities are at the root of
0:35:10 our best and our worst selves and it can drive us to be our best or our worst selves. Um,
0:35:13 depending on how self-aware we are about those insecurities.
0:35:22 Is there a little bit of a flaw in his thinking in your perspective? Like why is it you, you still,
0:35:26 even though what he’s saying there about, you know, what you think he believes there about
0:35:31 the security for his family is true. You still think he should, which suggests that there’s some
0:35:37 kind of flaw you see in it, the way he’s thinking about it. Yeah. Because he doesn’t have to quit his
0:35:44 job. Um, there’s enough time in the day to do this on the nights and weekends to, to do enough of it,
0:35:54 to really prove itself out. Oftentimes like whatever our side hustle is, uh, it has a very
0:36:01 low ceiling if we’re only working on it, um, after hours, right? Let’s say we’re spending 20 hours a
0:36:08 week on a side hustle and it makes us $50,000 a year, but our job pays us $200,000 a year. And we
0:36:13 spend 40 hours a week on that. One thing that I’ve noticed, which is kind of contradictory to how I feel
0:36:21 about quitting something, um, is when we go from 20 hours a week on the $50,000 a year side hustle to
0:36:28 40 hours a week, and we quit the full-time thing that $50,000 a year goes to 500,000, right? We double
0:36:33 the amount of hours, but we 10 times the amount of money that comes from it because of the fact that
0:36:38 we burn the boats, that it has to work. I just, I don’t want people to burn the boats too soon,
0:36:44 right? Like there has to be a pathway. Like let’s say our Facebook ads are converting really well. We’ve
0:36:49 tested scaling it and they’re profitable and we know what that would look like. But if we scale it,
0:36:52 then we’re going to have more customer service complaints. We’re going to have to do more
0:36:57 architecture of the website, but we like, we see a path to scaling and it’s already profitable. And we
0:37:03 know that like, probably my boss will take me back. Like we have kind of these, uh, safety nets.
0:37:08 That’s like the perfect time to really burn the boats. Not when like we have an idea or we’ve
0:37:12 tested it a little bit, but not thoroughly. Um, that’s too soon in my opinion.
0:37:16 And by burn the boats, you mean the analogy of, I guess, some of the wartime leaders who would
0:37:20 pull up on an Island that they were invading and burn the boat so that they had no plan B.
0:37:22 Exactly. Yeah. To quit.
0:37:28 Do you think that really matters? The whole idea of a plan B? Do you think people should have a plan B
0:37:32 when they embark on entrepreneurship? Can I contradict myself?
0:37:39 A hundred percent. All right. So the rational Chris, the Chris with four kids says, absolutely.
0:37:44 Like you got to be a dad. You got to be a husband. You got to provide for your family. Right. Um, and
0:37:49 again, there’s so many tools out there for testing, for scaling, for outsourcing. We can find a business
0:37:53 partner to help pick up the slack. We can use our kids. We can use our spouse, whatever. There’s so
0:38:00 many ways to really vet something out before quitting that we don’t have to quit. But on the other side
0:38:06 of my mouth, there’s been, um, two times in my entrepreneurial career when someone burned the
0:38:12 boats for me. Right. I pull up to an Island and it’s, I’ve got my plan B. I’m testing this business.
0:38:17 This business is profitable. It’s paying the bills. And then someone else in the middle of the night,
0:38:23 they snuck out, they burn my boats and I wake up and I’m like, Whoa, where’s my plan B? I wasn’t ready
0:38:32 to burn those boats yet. Um, and plan a just freaking thrives. Right. And it’s not so much
0:38:37 because of the fact that I don’t have a safety net anymore, but it’s because that event put a chip on
0:38:44 my shoulder that makes me want to, to prove those bad guys wrong. Right. To oversimplify those guys that
0:38:50 burn my boat. Toxic motivation. Exactly. That’s a, that’s a good way to put it to show them. I didn’t
0:38:54 need those boats. I’m not going back. Right. This Island is better than where I came from.
0:38:59 I remember reading about a study on plan B’s where they’ve got a group of students, two groups,
0:39:04 and then they told them to do a puzzle to win a treat. And then in one of the groups,
0:39:07 they told them that they could get this treat at a vending machine down the hallway. If they,
0:39:13 if they wanted it after. And the group that didn’t understand, they could get the same reward
0:39:19 from a plan B worked significantly harder to complete that puzzle. So there’s something in
0:39:25 the human psyche of when you know that you could get the reward in another way, when you have a plan B,
0:39:28 we work less hard at the plan A.
0:39:29 100%.
0:39:37 Logically, maybe we should, you know, we’re practical and unresponsible, remove the plan B from our mind.
0:39:44 Yeah. Yeah. I just like, I, I can’t think of any stories from people in my sphere of influence that
0:39:53 have tested something, quit the plan A, and then plan B just failed. And like, they just lost everything.
0:39:59 Like surely that’s happened. Right. That does happen when people like prematurely quit. But in my
0:40:04 experience, it’s just, it doesn’t happen. Like it, it has the opposite effect. It becomes this huge
0:40:09 motivating factor. And when they quit, I asked them, like, how do you feel? Are you freaking out?
0:40:17 And it’s always, always, I’m so excited right now. Like, I’m going to go all in on this. Like this has
0:40:18 to work. And it does. It just does.
0:40:25 A lot of people are looking for passive income from side hustles. And I wondered what your, your opinion
0:40:29 was on passive income, because it’s a word that comes up so often in the comment section of this
0:40:33 channel. But when we’re doing sort of sentiment analysis and what people are, what they’re interested
0:40:39 in passive income seems to be a bit of a buzzword. Yeah. It’s the silver bullet, right? It’s like,
0:40:44 it’s the, uh, it’s the financial Ozempic, you could say. What is passive income? How would one define
0:40:51 that? I would define it as income that you receive, um, that you don’t have to continually put effort
0:40:58 towards like, uh, buying treasuries, earning 4% on your money and you don’t do anything and you just get
0:41:04 paid. And it’s, it’s very hard to find, especially early on. Like we have to be willing to create
0:41:11 active income, sweaty income, ugly income, like by whatever means necessary. And the more we do that,
0:41:16 the longer we do that, the more, um, realistic true passive income actually is.
0:41:24 Sweaty, ugly income. Yeah. Give me an example of some sweaty, ugly income that anyone listening
0:41:29 right now could, could create. What are your favorite examples of non-obvious businesses that
0:41:35 people have started that have resulted in passive, sweaty, ugly income? Yeah. I mean, most things that
0:41:43 I’ve started have been just that I had a, uh, a concierge car buying business. Um, a concierge car
0:41:47 buying business. Yeah. So picture a traditional car dealership, a used car dealership. You’ve got
0:41:52 to get your dealer’s permit that, uh, enables you legally to go to the auctions and buy cars at
0:41:58 wholesale, put them on your lot and sell them. So I did all the regulatory stuff. I got my, my dealer’s
0:42:04 permit, but then I would go to individuals and they would say, I want a 2024 Sequoia. I want it to be blue
0:42:09 under 30,000 miles. And I would just go to the auction and buy it for them for like $700 fee. So they
0:42:14 get wholesale. They save money. I make money. I don’t have to bear the inventory risk and I can
0:42:20 buy exactly what they want. Um, this sounds great, right? On paper, people do that business
0:42:25 successfully. I didn’t invent it. I copied it. Right. I hated it. Uh, I was breaking down on the
0:42:29 side of the road, driving these things back from the auction. I’m not a car guy. I don’t care about
0:42:34 cars. I don’t work on the cars. It’s not my passion. That was ugly. It was hot in Texas. I was
0:42:39 standing out on the blacktop. I was making money. It was profitable. And I got to the point where I
0:42:45 just like quit it. I just shut it down, moved on to something else. Um, that was very active.
0:42:52 It was not scalable on the surface. It was ugly. I hated it. And so I pivoted because I had a plan B.
0:42:57 I didn’t have to do that. Right. Um, that’s one example. Uh, if someone likes cars, it’s,
0:43:01 it’s actually a great business. Like I know a gentleman in Alabama that makes a lot of money
0:43:04 doing that. Right. For me, it was, it was not great.
0:43:09 So how important that is passion in this equation? Like how important it is for you to love the thing
0:43:10 to be successful at it in your view?
0:43:16 I think you need to fall in love with business, with commerce. And if you can love entrepreneurship,
0:43:21 turning $1 into two, and that like, if you could focus on that being your passion,
0:43:28 then anything that falls underneath that you should win at. Right. But I like to say,
0:43:37 follow the profit, P-R-O-F-I-T, um, until you can afford to follow your passion. Right. Because if
0:43:41 we’re trying to follow our passion from day one, we’re probably not ever going to get there because
0:43:47 the statistical likelihood that what we love and what makes us money overlaps in the beginning is
0:43:55 almost zero. So ignore passion for a time, try to build your passion around commerce, um,
0:44:00 and then start anything. And then once you’re able to have more passive income,
0:44:04 then start things that you’re passionate about, like in the, in the actual industry that you’re
0:44:10 passionate about. Persistence. Persistence is obviously going to create the repetitions to
0:44:16 like understand the problem, to learn more, to, you know, so I wonder as it relates to passion and
0:44:20 persistence, they seem sort of in strictably linked. Something I’m more passionate about,
0:44:23 I’m more likely to continue out even when the rewards don’t show up.
0:44:28 Yeah. Yeah. Like my car, my car business, right? I know passion for cars and I had another
0:44:36 business that was doing great. So, so I abandoned that. Um, but people think that like people sometimes
0:44:41 look at themselves as lazy or they’re not a hard worker. And so they’re just, they’re not confident
0:44:47 that they could do this, but there’s like, everyone is a hard worker. Everyone on this planet has the
0:44:53 same DNA that enables them to work hard. But the problem is what they’re working on probably gives
0:44:57 them no energy, right? They’re probably not passionate about it. So what am I passionate
0:45:01 about? Well, we’ve got to, we’ve got to test everything. We have to try new things. We have
0:45:06 to take that curious question and turn it into a business. Maybe that’s fun. Maybe it’s not right.
0:45:10 We need more surface area for finding what our passions actually are. Cause we might think that
0:45:14 like, like I love woodworking, right? I don’t have to build a business around that because I love
0:45:19 business, right? So I can build a business around anything. But if I got super hung up on like,
0:45:24 I cannot make a profit from this woodworking business, um, then I would fail at entrepreneurship
0:45:30 if I started there. Right. Whereas if I approach this from, um, the angle of, all right, I like
0:45:35 woodworking. What else do I like? Maybe I like running. Maybe I like cooking. Maybe I like short form
0:45:41 videos and I just start trying all those new things. Then eventually I’m going to have enough surface area
0:45:46 for testing that I’m going to find things where, um, if you heard of the Ikigai principle, right?
0:45:53 So what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what you can charge for,
0:45:58 right? The overlap of that is the sweet spot. That’s what’s scalable. That’s what you can do
0:46:03 until you die. But if you get super hung up on that on day one, like, I’m just not passionate about that.
0:46:06 Like you’re never going to find it. Like you’re going to be in that job forever.
0:46:11 My career follows the same, same arc, which is I tried tons of things and then I built this marketing
0:46:16 business and then that became more of a product business and grew. And I didn’t love it. Like it
0:46:21 wasn’t my passion to do, um, to help like Coca-Cola sell more cans of Coke or like,
0:46:25 you know, Uber sell more Ubers necessarily. That wasn’t like my passion in life. However,
0:46:30 it taught me a bunch of skills, which then in, when I quit that business and I spent some time
0:46:35 in psychedelics, DJing, building software, web three, you name it. Um, I came out on the other
0:46:39 side and could ask myself that Ikigai question, which is of all the things that I have tried,
0:46:42 what is the thing that I would do that really irrespective of money?
0:46:46 Now I had that luxury to do that. And actually in 2020, the answer was this,
0:46:52 like this was the answer. This answer was, I literally moved to London from New York and found
0:46:56 a place without viewing it properly that looked like this because I thought this would be a good
0:47:02 podcast set and moved into that place, called Jack. And then we started about five, five years ago,
0:47:08 doing, doing this weekly and it’s become a business off the back of it. But I didn’t have
0:47:12 that luxury at the start. If I tried that from day one, I wouldn’t have had a, the skills to know how
0:47:18 to scale an audience. I wouldn’t have had the flexibility to buy all these cameras, which was
0:47:23 like 50 grand or whatever at the start. Um, so I, and I do think some people sometimes get that inverted.
0:47:27 Yeah. And you, you’re not distracted anymore, right? You’re not looking for the next DJ thing or
0:47:33 like you found it. You’re here, right? Now you’re focused on scaling this. Like people get so hung
0:47:38 up on focus or lack thereof and they just beat themselves up over it. But in my experience,
0:47:44 like a lack of focus is a signal that there’s something else out there, right? That maybe we
0:47:48 shouldn’t be focusing on that thing. Cause you’ve probably worked on things that had perfect product
0:47:53 market fit and we’re just crushing. And you weren’t thinking about starting a DJing business at that
0:47:58 point, right? You were all in on this one thing, but in the times when you were working on something,
0:48:01 you’re like, maybe I’ll try this. Maybe I’ll try this. And you beat yourself up. You’re like,
0:48:06 oh, and focus, focus, focus. Like, let’s actually pay attention to those signals. Why am I distracted
0:48:12 from this thing? So that’s, I don’t know if that’s just me coping with my own ADHD or if that’s actually
0:48:18 a true principle, but I try to lend some credence to those signals of distraction that I get on a regular
0:48:25 basis. Yeah. I have a Sunday shelf, which is just a digital board on my Monday board where
0:48:31 when I have ideas that like captivate me at 11 PM at night, one night, instead of trying to act on
0:48:34 them immediately. Cause I think I’m in some respects like you, I put it on the Sunday shelf
0:48:40 and, um, I wait and see. Yeah. I wait and see how much it pulls at me to come off the shelf.
0:48:45 And then sometimes it comes off the shelf. I get a little bit of the way down. I discover that
0:48:48 actually there’s something I didn’t realize. And then I quit, but then there’s this, you know,
0:48:53 when you think about the, like the excitement arc of a new idea, you have the like initial surge of
0:48:56 excitement. Like this is the best thing ever. I’m going to become a billionaire. Why has no one
0:49:00 ever thought of this before? And then you kind of get into it and you get into that sort of value
0:49:04 of, oh, fuck, this is a terrible idea. I’m an idiot. Yep. If I can come out of that valley,
0:49:09 if something pulls me up out of that valley, then I think it’s worth pursuing. Yeah. That’s a good
0:49:13 way of looking at it. The valley of despair or something. That’s what they call it. Yeah. Yeah.
0:49:17 Yeah. Do you follow a similar sort of path with your ideas?
0:49:27 It’s funny. Cause I, my kind of framework is if I have an idea, am I thinking about it still two
0:49:32 weeks later? For whatever reason, that’s just my timeline, two weeks. I had an idea yesterday and I
0:49:37 was at the airport. I was excited about it and I was doing research. I feel like I forgot about it.
0:49:42 Right. Who cares? You know, but I have ideas where I just cannot get it out of my head and I’ll see
0:49:47 something out there in the world that adds to the idea. And I tell my friend about it and I send these
0:49:53 manic voicemails or these manic voice notes to my friends about it. And I’m still thinking about it
0:49:59 two weeks later. That’s my signal that there’s actually something here. Yeah. You used the word
0:50:05 validating earlier on when you’re talking about these ideas. And I think this is something that could
0:50:09 really, really help a lot of people who have a lot of ideas is this idea of trying to validate your
0:50:13 idea as fast as possible. How might one validate an idea? And can you give me an example of an idea
0:50:23 that you have validated? What does validation mean? Yeah. So I like to see people get joy from my product
0:50:27 or service, right? Not just like, oh, it’s good. Like, let’s say I’m selling a food product. It tastes
0:50:33 good. It’s good. Okay. People might buy this, but I’m not going to have product market fit. I’m going to be
0:50:39 pushing a boulder up the hill, right? But if people are like, oh my gosh, this is the best thing I’ve
0:50:45 ever had. Where did you make this? How did you make this? It lights up in their face. That’s an example
0:50:52 of a validation in my case, right? Same industry, food product, completely different reactions, right?
0:51:03 So one specific example is my wife has a cookie bar business, right? Square cookies. And they’re
0:51:07 amazing. And we’re not trying to scale it. We don’t want to scale it. It’s a way to teach our kids
0:51:13 entrepreneurship and we love it. But the best way to validate this was going to our local farmer’s market
0:51:19 and just posting up and just giving people samples and just watching them, right? What do they say versus
0:51:25 how do they react? And is it the same? What do you mean by that? Well, sometimes we try to use the
0:51:30 internet in places where it’s, it’s not needful, right? She sold these online, right? She shipped
0:51:34 them to friends and family across the country. Like they’re great. We love them. Okay. I didn’t see you
0:51:40 eat it. I don’t know how you actually love it. Are you saying that because you’re my mom, right? Or you’re
0:51:45 my friend. But when you solicit feedback on your product or service in person, even if it’s like an
0:51:50 internet tool or an app in person makes all the difference, you want to take note of what
0:51:56 they say and take note of their body language and how they react when they experience your product or
0:52:03 service, right? And if all three of those things overlap, then either they’re a psychopath and
0:52:08 they’re just lying for no good reason, or you have something really special on your hands. And so that’s
0:52:12 what we did with her cookie bar business. And, and they loved it. And you can do that with any
0:52:17 business. It doesn’t have to be food. And what does validation mean? It’s, it’s checking if the
0:52:23 market gives a fuck about the thing you’re making as fast as you can. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I like to kind
0:52:30 of picture a, you know, a boulder up a hill, right? And most people in their businesses, even businesses
0:52:35 that are working, there are two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. And
0:52:41 that’s okay. Like that’s not a bad thing. But in my experience, 5% of the time I’ll have a business
0:52:46 where the boulder is chasing me. Like I’m trying to not die because this boulder is chasing me down
0:52:52 a hill. And that boulder in this case represents customers demand, right? Like I can’t sleep because
0:52:57 I’m fulfilling orders. I’m answering emails. Like I’m not getting distracted by the next shiny object.
0:53:04 That is validation. That’s product market fit in my experience. You don’t have to have that to launch.
0:53:09 I don’t want people to misunderstand. Um, but if you have that, like you have something very special and
0:53:14 you need to go all in on that thing. There was a book published, uh, several years ago called
0:53:19 the lean startup, which talks about this idea of just like testing an MVP as quick, quickly as you
0:53:24 possibly can. Can you explain that to the audience who probably have ideas, but in their head of
0:53:28 thinking, right, I’ve got to quit my job. I’m going to have to raise money. I’m going to have to spend
0:53:32 two to three years building something to figure out if this is a good idea or not. What is the alternative
0:53:35 approach that you adopt when you’re trying to stress test an idea quickly?
0:53:41 Yeah. So if I had to pick one tool, I mean, it’s one that one in four humans use every day
0:53:47 and it’s Facebook, right? You’ve got Facebook groups, you’ve got WhatsApp, um, Instagram,
0:53:54 Facebook marketplace, Facebook pages, uh, Facebook ads, right? Let’s just say there’s six different
0:53:59 meta products, Facebook products. That’s everything you need right there, right? Why don’t you give me an
0:54:05 example of just a random business and I’ll, I’ll tell you or the, the audience how they could validate
0:54:21 that with a Facebook product. Okay. Um, I’m thinking of starting a creatine brand for women that has,
0:54:27 makes creatine taste good. Okay. All right. Are we talking powder gummy? What form factor?
0:54:33 I don’t know. Okay. Well, let’s, let’s try both. Okay. So I’m going to do something that seems very
0:54:38 non-obvious and probably won’t work, but it’s the lowest amount of friction. I’m going to take a
0:54:44 description for that and I’m going to use nano banana, Chad GPT, any of the AI image generators to come up
0:54:49 with what the product could look like, right? In both a gummy form and a powder form. Okay. Then I’m
0:54:53 going to go to Facebook marketplace. You’re just going to post the photo. Yeah. I’m just going to say
0:54:58 like women’s creatine brand actually takes, tastes good, right? Like, did you know that creatine and
0:55:03 improves cognitive function or whatever, just your standard pitch? I could even use AI to generate
0:55:07 it. It doesn’t really matter at this point. And I’m going to post it to Facebook marketplace simply
0:55:12 because that’s the lowest amount of friction to get some level of validation or not. Right. Because
0:55:21 in my experience, focus is overrated and momentum is underrated. Right. And so you could have told me
0:55:26 any idea. And my first step that I tell you to do is going to be something very, very low friction
0:55:32 because I want you to get something back from the world. Right. Because the most likely way to sell
0:55:36 that product is with meta ads. Right. But there’s a lot of friction there. Like it’s, it’s hard to use.
0:55:41 So you’re going to be like, okay, you’re going to go Chad GPT, how do I use meta ads? And you’re going to
0:55:44 burn out and you’re going to have beyond something else by tomorrow, but that might be an amazing idea.
0:55:49 Right. So I’m going to tell you to go to Facebook marketplace, even though people don’t sell creatine
0:55:54 on Facebook marketplace. And then we’re going to see, you know, Facebook gives us like three stats
0:55:59 when you post something to Facebook marketplace clicks, and then how many people that reach out
0:56:05 and then how many views. Okay. So I’m going to post one Facebook marketplace ad for the gummies,
0:56:10 different picture. It’ll look like gummies. Um, basically same headline, same benefits,
0:56:15 same description, post a Facebook in the same local market with the same radius.
0:56:19 Don’t want to change any variables. And then I’m going to open a Google sheet and I’m going to say
0:56:25 how many views, how many clicks, how many messages for that. Then I’m going to do the same thing,
0:56:28 take the same features, the same benefits, different picture. Cause this one’s powder
0:56:33 posted in the same market with the same radius to Facebook marketplace and have a new column,
0:56:41 views, reach outs and clicks. Right. And then I’m going to watch and I’m going to see what’s getting
0:56:46 more clicks. And I’m going to know within two hours where there’s more demand. Now, does that
0:56:52 little sample size indicate like what form factor I should go all in on? Not necessarily, but it’s
0:56:57 something it’s a relevant data point, right? There’s not very likely to be a large amount of people
0:57:00 searching for creating gummies on Facebook marketplace, but it doesn’t matter because
0:57:05 there’s 2 billion people using it. Right. So we’re just trying to capture some of that traffic.
0:57:11 So I’m going to do that with two ads. And then after a day or two, I’m going to boost those two ads,
0:57:17 put $10 behind each of them to see how my results differ. Does it make any difference? Do I get a lot
0:57:23 more clicks, a lot more views, or is it just wasted? And then I’m going to, um, I’m going to probably
0:57:28 post like 10 more ads of like different photos, different headings, different descriptions,
0:57:33 different price points, and then put all those in a Google sheet and track it. All right. Now I have a
0:57:39 lot of data now concurrently. So while I’m doing all these things, I’m going to go to Facebook groups
0:57:46 and I’m going to join Facebook groups, like moms who work out moms who love creatine moms who love
0:57:51 rucking ultra runner moms, like healthy moms, whatever. I’m going to join all these groups and just start
0:57:58 doing searches for creatine gummies, powders, price points, vendors, websites, and just start like
0:58:03 pulling pieces of data out of, out of the atmosphere. Right. And I’m going to put that
0:58:07 in my spreadsheet and I want to wait till the Facebook marketplace tests are done. I want to do that at
0:58:11 the same time. Then I’m going to start learning Facebook ads because everything I’ve told you to
0:58:16 do so far takes like two hours. Let’s say we have an afternoon to dedicate to this, right? Then I’m
0:58:20 going to learn Facebook ads and I’m going to watch a YouTube video about, you know, how to get
0:58:24 Facebook ads up in 10 minutes. How important is it to understand Facebook ads and how long would
0:58:31 it take me to get a sufficient understanding of Facebook ads? You could be proficient in a couple
0:58:37 days. If you had like one thing to sell and you just wanted to go all in on that thing. Um, and you
0:58:41 actually learned by launching ads and not just learning, not just endlessly watching YouTube videos,
0:58:47 you could be fairly proficient, uh, within a couple of days easily. Do you think that’s the skill
0:58:53 everybody should have? Absolutely. I mean, Facebook ads are like the infinite money glitch. It’s just like a,
0:58:59 a magic money machine. It’s the reason they’re a trillion dollar company. Um, it’s like a cheat code.
0:59:04 Yeah. It’s a, we should know Facebook ads. Like we know how to write emails. Like we should know Facebook ads.
0:59:08 Like we know how to build websites or to do anything. It should be foundational.
0:59:13 Hmm. I wonder how many people actually have that skill.
0:59:18 Very few. That’s why there’s so many ad agencies charging a lot of money.
0:59:24 And then, so you’ve got the data back into your spreadsheet on this creating situation. How do you
0:59:26 then make a decision whether this is something worth pursuing?
0:59:29 Yeah. Then I would go find like a co-packer.
0:59:31 That’s a co-packer.
0:59:35 It’s a company that will take my idea and put it into a physical form.
0:59:42 Right. Um, I’d find like a supplement company that can actually make this and I would tell it roughly
0:59:47 like what I’m thinking and then ask for samples. And then I would use those samples to go get feedback
0:59:52 from people in person. Right. But I wouldn’t get those samples until I got feedback from all these
0:59:56 Facebook tests telling me what form factor, what price point, what color, what flavor,
1:00:00 um, et cetera. And then I would go to a farmer’s market and actually have people try it.
1:00:05 I’ve had so many founders speak to me and say, why didn’t this particular ad that I ran on this
1:00:10 platform work for me? Maybe the copy wasn’t good. The creative wasn’t strong, but usually the problem
1:00:14 is they’re not having the right conversation because that ad never reached the right person. And if you’re
1:00:20 in B2B marketing, that is much of the game. And this is where LinkedIn ads solves that problem
1:00:24 for you. Their targeting is ridiculously specific. You can target by job title,
1:00:30 seniority, company size, industry, and even someone’s skillset. And their network includes
1:00:36 over a billion professionals. About 130 million of them are decision makers. So when you use LinkedIn
1:00:41 ads, you’re putting your brand in front of the right people. And LinkedIn ads also drive the highest
1:00:46 B2B return on ad spend across all ad networks in my experience. If you want to give them a try,
1:00:53 head over to LinkedIn.com slash diary. And when you spend $250 on your first LinkedIn ads campaign,
1:01:01 you’ll get an extra $250 credit from me for the next one. That’s LinkedIn.com slash diary. Terms and
1:01:06 conditions apply. I’ve heard you say that there’s various types of entrepreneurs. There’s the sort of
1:01:11 zero to one entrepreneur who’s good at starting things. There’s the maintainer. And then there’s
1:01:19 the finisher. Which one are you? I’m a starter. Yeah. Through and through. I, if I stay in a business
1:01:26 too long, it all falls apart, right? Just objectively. So I need to hand off the reins at a very specific
1:01:33 point, or I need to have a partner from the outset that knows me, my strengths and my weaknesses that
1:01:39 just takes over at a certain point. So I like to say there are starters, maintainers, and finishers.
1:01:44 A starter could be called like a visionary and not as like a backhanded compliment way, but someone,
1:01:50 an idea guy, right? Not just a business idea guy, but like a marketing idea guy. Let’s change the
1:01:57 subject line to this idea guy, like an idea machine, right? That’s a visionary. And then you have the
1:02:02 maintainer, which would be an operator. That’s a guy that just wakes up every day and loves
1:02:08 tweaking little things and making small improvements, process oriented, someone that loves growing
1:02:14 something and just fixing little problems all day, right? And then you have a finisher, which is like
1:02:20 a deal guy, right? That’s the guy that’s a super connector. He likes to, oh, you need to talk to
1:02:25 Barry. And then he calls him, he connects them. And like, he just gets a lot of energy from connecting
1:02:30 deals, coming up with creative deals for an exit, for a sale, putting people together, hiring the right
1:02:37 people, um, seeing something to its completion. Um, but I’m definitely in the first camp. Is it possible
1:02:43 to be all three? Yeah. When you’re all three, you’re Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, truly like you start
1:02:48 something from scratch and you see it to a trillion dollars. Um, there’s been like, I think there’ve been
1:02:53 three people on the planet that have brought something from zero to a trillion. Jensen Huang,
1:03:01 NVIDIA, um, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. I think like even Bill Gates, even Steve Jobs,
1:03:05 I might be wrong. Yeah. But even Steve Jobs got out long before they hit a trillion market cap.
1:03:12 But a billion, a lot of people get a billion. That’s not nothing. Also very impressive. But
1:03:16 when you get all three, that’s what you get. One of the things that I find really interesting about
1:03:23 your story is you’ve started, what is it? 75, 80 businesses. When I speak to people like Kevin
1:03:27 O’Leary, who’ve worked with some of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever live, like Steve Jobs, and
1:03:35 he’s very familiar with Elon Musk. They talked to me about focus. And he says to me that the great
1:03:42 thing about Steve Jobs is he was 80% signal and 20% noise, i.e. 80% of his time he was focused on the
1:03:48 most important thing. And he was brutal about not entertaining anything else. Johnny Ives has famously
1:03:52 said that the one thing Steve Jobs was most known for is his remarkable ability to focus. He would
1:03:58 literally ask you, what have you said no to in order to focus on the most important thing? I think about
1:04:04 Mark Zuckerberg and his unbelievable ability to focus. I remember several people at Meta, but also
1:04:08 I think it’s a public story telling me that when he realized he was late to mobile, he refused to take
1:04:13 any meetings about anything other than mobile, like extreme levels of focus. And then Kevin O’Leary from
1:04:17 Shark Tank said the same to me about Elon Musk. He says, Elon Musk is the only person that I think
1:04:21 operates close to 100% signal, which is he, and I interviewed Walter Isaacs and his biographer, and he said,
1:04:26 Elon will sit in a meeting and if people aren’t talking about something that is the most important thing,
1:04:30 he’ll completely zone out. And then the minute he hears something that he considers to be the most
1:04:35 important thing, it’s like he snaps into reality and he takes control and he’s deep into the detail.
1:04:41 And I, it sits in contradiction to a lot of the, the narrative of like lots of side hustles, lots of
1:04:46 businesses, do as many things as you can. How do you, but you’ve both kind of, you know, you’ve managed
1:04:50 to create a life for yourself where you’re, you’re a millionaire and you’re free in that regard.
1:04:55 But when I look at the biggest companies in the world, there’s this like, there appears to be
1:05:03 obsessive focus. Yeah. I love that question. I, I think that all else equal, the guy who focuses
1:05:10 more is more likely to be a billionaire, but back to momentum, right? The person that keeps and has and
1:05:16 maintains momentum and has, gets energy from what they do, they’re more likely to be a millionaire by the
1:05:23 than the average person, right? I genuinely have no desire to be a billionaire. Genuinely. If I get
1:05:28 there, cool. But I don’t want to leave my kids tens of millions of dollars anyway. I know where I get
1:05:33 most of my energy from, right? I have a lot of surface area for this. I’ve tried the focus. I’ve tried
1:05:38 having a board. I don’t want any of that. Genuinely, I don’t, right?
1:05:46 So if my life with hyper-focused Chris looks like billion dollar exits, reporting to a board,
1:05:51 being chairman of the board, being CEO, sitting in meetings all day, that’s miserable, Chris,
1:05:55 right? And if I’m not going to, if I don’t want to leave a ton of money to my kids anyway,
1:06:02 then why am I making Chris miserable? So my fourth great grandkids can be rich instead of just my second
1:06:07 great grandkids. Like that’s, that’s genuinely how I look at it. I’m one of my superpowers is my,
1:06:13 my long-term perspective, right? I think of things on an eternal scale. And if I have to have a
1:06:21 miserable life, so my kids in year 2300 can still be wealthy, forget that. Like, I don’t, I don’t,
1:06:25 I don’t want them to have all that money anyway, you know? So I want to live an awesome life where I’m a
1:06:29 good and present father. And to me, that looks like focusing less, not more.
1:06:35 What if you focused for the next 10 years, you made it to a billion dollars on one thing.
1:06:43 And then because you’ve done that, you can take even more sort of experimental bets with higher
1:06:48 risk and more enjoyment and more sort of pleasure centric bets over the next 40, 50, 60 years of the
1:06:53 rest of your life. Yeah. I just don’t think that that juice would be worth the squeeze. I think that
1:07:00 those bigger bets that I take will just amount to more meetings and more travel and more time away
1:07:07 from my kids. And I don’t like, it might sound controversial. Like I’m not trying to change the
1:07:12 world. Like I want to help people start businesses and I can do that with my iPhone and that will change
1:07:16 the world. Right. But I’m not trying to solve world hunger. I think that’s someone else’s problem to
1:07:22 solve. And so I just want to be a good dad and work on really cool things. And it’s been, it’s been a grind
1:07:30 to get here. Right. Like I’ve had more years with zero income than I’ve had up years. Right. But my
1:07:35 up years have more than compensated for my down years. So what you’re looking at today is the end result
1:07:42 of 17 years of a lot of testing, like a very patient wife that was unquestioning and unwavering
1:07:48 extremely loyal, which I could not have done it without. Um, and so there were a lot of periods
1:07:53 of my life where I beat myself up over that lack of focus. I went and got my MBA because of my lack
1:07:58 of focus. I finished my undergrad because of my lack of focus. Like how getting a full-time job has never
1:08:03 really been off the table until the last five or so years. So I’ve, I’ve never been unwilling to get a
1:08:09 job or to focus. Um, and I probably did it the hard way, honestly. Um, but I’m to the point now
1:08:16 where I don’t feel the need to focus all on one thing. Did you ever feel guilty because of the
1:08:24 situation you put your family or your partner in? Yeah. Oh, more than once. Yeah. More than many times.
1:08:33 Give me an example. I spent, I spent 18 months working on a project.
1:08:42 Um, that had no cashflow along the way with the hope of a big payout. Um, and we were making no
1:08:47 income. Right. And I was focused on this one thing. And that is kind of the downside of focus is if you
1:08:52 focus on the wrong thing, it can really come back to bite you. Right. But to me, this is objectively
1:08:57 the right thing. It was showing all the signals. It was growing. Um, we, we had like a few rental
1:09:03 homes. We had some assets and I was selling those things. So my family could maintain their quality of
1:09:10 life. Right. So I felt guilty, but I was also insulating them from feeling the, the pinch that
1:09:16 I was feeling in the office. Right. And then at the end of that experiment, it all went to zero.
1:09:22 I was out money. I was out time. I was out everything. And I felt, I felt very guilty. That
1:09:28 was one, one example. Um, but thankfully, like we, we didn’t have to sell our house. We didn’t have to
1:09:34 do anything drastic. And what that looked like at home was dad was quiet more often than not dad was
1:09:40 grumpy more often than not, but dad wasn’t really talking freely and openly about the things he was
1:09:45 going through because he was trying to, you know, put on a brave face and insulate, um, the family from
1:09:51 that. Even when my wife was begging to know more, to get more out of me, I just, if I talk about
1:09:54 stressors, then it becomes more stressful to me oftentimes. So I just keep it in.
1:10:00 I find the same. I think my partner understands this of me. And I tried to explain to her that I
1:10:05 don’t like talking about the stress because in this environment, you’re, it’s actually de-stressing
1:10:10 me from not having to explain and conversate about it. So, which is a bit of a paradox because then
1:10:15 they don’t really understand. Yeah. And if they don’t understand, they might misunderstand.
1:10:19 Misunderstandments might lead to arguments. The arguments create stress. And then you’re going to
1:10:25 tell them in some sort of like argument. Yeah. What’s going on. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve lived that for sure.
1:10:30 I don’t know how to navigate that, but, but it’s definitely true that me going through something
1:10:34 in work and then having to come home and like go through it for another hour to someone else and
1:10:40 stress them out potentially. Yeah. Doesn’t feel like the right approach. No, but I don’t know what the
1:10:44 right approach is because they, they have a right to know about it as well. Right. I think we just need
1:10:50 an outlet, whether it’s a friend that kind of understands or someone else that, you know, is in our
1:10:53 space that we can just talk to about the situation. I think having no outlet is also bad.
1:11:02 Yeah. And I’m guilty of that. I find a lot of joy in my work. And so I, I don’t look at it as work
1:11:07 often, but it’s still work, right? Like it’s still taxing. Um, so I need to be better about having an
1:11:13 outlet. Have you developed a new relationship with rejection and failure because, you know, starting
1:11:19 80 odd businesses, you must’ve dealt with a lot of failure and how does that feed into everything
1:11:25 we’re talking about today? Oh man, I would, I don’t know where I’d be without rejection and failure.
1:11:31 Um, I’m not good at sales. So if anyone’s watching this and like, I can’t start a business. Business is
1:11:35 all sales. Like you don’t have to be good at sales. I’m not good at sales. I can’t think of a business
1:11:41 that where I had to rely on like early customers coming from friends and family. Cause I cared a lot
1:11:46 about what people thought. I didn’t want to post my side hustle number 37 to Facebook. Cause I just
1:11:51 thought my friends would roll their eyes. So I created this stupid constraint for me where like,
1:11:55 I had to launch things without the help of my ever willing friends and family. Cause I was too prideful.
1:12:02 Right. So I advise against that. First of all, second of all, um, I served a mission for my church.
1:12:09 I went to Eastern Europe for two years and I knocked doors in Hungarian for two years straight.
1:12:17 I approached people on the street in freezing weather, wearing a big Russian cat. Like I got
1:12:22 rejected tens of thousands of times over the course of two years, being an introvert, staying an introvert,
1:12:29 still an introvert, still bad at sales, still hating sales today at age 38. Right. But that like changed
1:12:37 me as a man, as a person, right. That rewired my brain to just realize that every no is closer to a yes.
1:12:43 If my conversion rate is 0.1%, I got to talk to a thousand people and I will surely get a conversion.
1:12:48 If I talk to a thousand and I don’t get a conversion, then I’m going to get two conversions by the time I
1:12:53 get to 2000 statistically speaking. So I just need to keep getting rejected. Um, and that changed
1:13:01 everything for me. I think it’s super underrated to give kids a job in like cold sales. It’s what I did
1:13:07 when I was 16 till 19. Sounds like it’s what you did as a young man. Are your kids going to do that?
1:13:14 Yeah, hopefully. And two of my kids are introverts, two are extroverted, but, uh, they will, they are
1:13:19 selling like they already have businesses, little side hustles here and there. Um, but I am encouraging
1:13:23 them to go on missions and to do selling because it’s, it’s the fastest way to learn. Like it’s the
1:13:28 fastest way to test. If I talk to a thousand people, then I can have a thousand different
1:13:34 approaches. And if my conversion rate is 0.1%, um, I’m going to get that to 0.5% over time because
1:13:39 I’m able to test and iterate and, and pivot based on all that feedback I get.
1:13:43 What have you learned about team building and business partners through this process? What
1:13:48 advice would you give to someone who sat there alone listening to this right now? Do they need
1:13:56 a business partner? If they do who, how, what? Oh man. Um, usually people don’t need a business
1:14:04 partner. Um, if you look at the stats on like business failure rates with companies that have
1:14:09 co-founders, it’s significantly higher than companies that have solo founders. We see their survivorship
1:14:15 bias examples, right? The, the apples and the, a lot of companies we can look at that had two
1:14:23 co-founders that, that one, but nobody talks about or writes about the 90, 60, 80% of companies that fail
1:14:29 with co-founders. Think about it this way. When we get married, we’ll spend years talking about our
1:14:33 potential plans, like big goals. Like where do we want to live? How many kids do we have? My wife and I
1:14:38 wanted seven kids when we got married. We settled on four, right? It changed over time. It took years to
1:14:43 change. We realized kids are actually frigging hard. Right. And we, so then we’re like, where do we live?
1:14:46 What kind of a house do we want? We spend all this time, maybe while we’re engaged, maybe while we’re
1:14:52 dating, maybe after we’re married, but those are big decisions. Right. But when we choose a business
1:14:58 partner, we go get avocado toast together and we’re like 50, 50. Cool. Sounds good. Let’s do this. You
1:15:03 know, I’ll get the doc signed. It’s like, who is that guy? You might’ve even known him your whole life,
1:15:08 but who is he as a business partner or as a business person? I just, I feel like business
1:15:15 partnerships are significantly harder than marriages even, but we put 99% less thought
1:15:21 into like the structure of things. And that’s a giant failure that I’ve made over and over again.
1:15:25 What do you wish someone had said to you in the situations where it didn’t work out with business
1:15:29 partners or really like across the board? Cause I read that you’d had what, seven business partners.
1:15:35 It says that I’ve had like 15. Okay. So in those 15 occasions, what is the advice you wish someone had
1:15:40 given you before you engaged in those business relationships? Yeah. Well, what do they say about
1:15:45 dating? It’s like, be a, be a good, like the best way to find a good spouse is to be a good spouse.
1:15:49 Best way to find a good girlfriend. You know what I’m saying? You’ve got to learn more about yourself
1:15:54 before you partner with someone else. Most people have no idea like who they are as a business person or as
1:15:58 an entrepreneur when they partner. They don’t know what their strengths are or their weaknesses are.
1:16:02 They sure don’t know what the other guy’s strengths or weaknesses are. So I suggest people
1:16:08 solo found things to start, to learn more about themselves. Are they a visionary? Are they an
1:16:13 integrator, starter, maintainer, finisher? Who are they? And then when they want to jump into another
1:16:18 thing, cause inevitably if we launch one thing, we’re going to launch more. They know more about what to
1:16:25 look for in a partner. Um, and they can optimize for that. What about equity? Yeah. I mean,
1:16:33 50-50 is the old standby, right? Um, could you imagine if you, like you go on a first date and it’s
1:16:40 like, how many kids do you want? Four. Okay. We’ll have four. We’ll get married. And that’s how many we
1:16:46 will have, uh, no matter what. That’s a 50-50 partnership, right? It’s making an incredibly
1:16:53 important decision based on both equal a hundred numbers sound clean to me, but like, what is the
1:16:58 statistical chance? This is what needs to be true for a 50-50 partnership to work. Okay. They both
1:17:05 have to be all in. They both have to always be all in for the whole lifespan of the business, maybe years,
1:17:08 maybe decades. They have to put in the same amount of money, same amount of effort, same amount of
1:17:15 connections, value, history, background. Also, both of them should be completely selfless,
1:17:20 right? And not care if the other one’s not pulling his weight. I’m taking a month long vacation. Cool.
1:17:25 You’ll make up for it later. They have to be like that chill of a human being. And of course, like
1:17:30 they have to be the same as the other person. If all those things are true, 50-50 works great.
1:17:34 And they need to develop going forward in the same way because for the next 10 futures.
1:17:38 They need to grow at the same rate. Yeah. Yeah. Which will never, never, ever be the case.
1:17:45 So I like to say like, you don’t want to, uh, DTR to find the relationship too early or too late.
1:17:52 If you sit down and branching, let’s do 50-50. Cool. Big mistake. If you, you’re two years down the line
1:17:55 and you’ve got all this revenue and customers and you’re like, all right, we should probably formalize
1:18:01 this too late. Cause like that only works if the business just stays at like a steady state forever,
1:18:07 which it won’t, it’s going to go up or it’s going to go down. Right. And like things get really ugly
1:18:12 when either one of those two scenarios happen. So the sweet spot in my experience is listen,
1:18:18 this is how this conversation would work. We’re going to partner together. Hey, um, I think you’re
1:18:21 going to be great for this business because you have a sales background. You’re great at sales.
1:18:25 You have a lot of contacts in the industry. I don’t have any of that. I don’t even like sales.
1:18:29 I don’t know anything about sales, but I’m an amazing engineer. Like I know I can build this
1:18:34 thing. You’ve seen me build other websites, other apps in the past. I already have like a wireframe
1:18:40 in mind. Like we’re going to be great for this. Right. So let’s just do this. I don’t know how
1:18:45 this is going to go. I don’t know how much time you have. We both have full-time jobs. Um, why don’t
1:18:51 we just get to $10,000 in revenue? Um, let’s get product market fit. Let’s get some good traction.
1:18:56 Maybe we’ll get like, you really have to set up a defined metric around it. Not like, let’s see how
1:19:01 this goes in 30 days, but something like a revenue number, number of customers or something. At that
1:19:06 point, let’s sit down. Let’s just like put it in the calendar today and let’s have a conversation about
1:19:13 what our equity looks like. Um, because almost every time they’re going to be remote just based on the
1:19:18 world we live in, or one person will put in more money or one person has more experience. Um,
1:19:25 and all those things are relevant, but you’re going to get resentment a hundred percent. And you’re
1:19:30 probably not going to talk about that resentment and it’s only going to get worse. Um, it’ll only get
1:19:36 worse if, you know, things either go up or down. So they will always get worse. Um, but it’s,
1:19:41 it’s hard to define because one person might have 30 years of industry experience and context
1:19:46 and expertise and he can make one phone call that changes everything. And the other person might be
1:19:51 18 years old and just a hustler and willing to put in 80 hours a week. So is the level of value the
1:19:58 same? If the level of hours put into the business, not the same, it’s hard. Like it’s, it’s really hard
1:20:04 to say, Hey, my one phone call made us 10 millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, but you’ve done
1:20:09 all the work. You’re the operator. So we should be 50, 50. They’re both going to take issue with that.
1:20:14 The only instance I was thinking about all the business partnerships that I’m aware of.
1:20:19 So companies I’ve invested in this about 60 or 70 companies I’ve invested in and then businesses I’ve
1:20:26 started myself. And the one time I’ve seen it work to split equally, the two people had known each other
1:20:33 for a long, long time and they were both late in their career. So they’re like, you know, when we think
1:20:39 about rate of development and potential, not only did they have a strong relationship, they’d known
1:20:45 each other a long time, they’d worked together for more than five years together. And they’re sort of
1:20:51 later in a more mature phase of their career where, you know, like the kid situations figured itself
1:20:56 out. Are they going to have kids or not? And there hasn’t been some of the big life disruptors that
1:21:01 sometimes can come along and change things. And then I can think of another example where two people
1:21:06 knew each other. They were very, very young. They’d worked together before. The contract went
1:21:13 in 50-50, although it was never really equal. And then their rate of growth changed wildly where one
1:21:19 person really just like became a superstar. And they look back at the contract and it was 50-50. And I
1:21:23 remember being privy to the conversation where that person turned around to their business partner.
1:21:29 it’s like, this is not fair. This company without me goes to zero. Without you, it keeps growing.
1:21:33 Yeah. And there was an adjustment made to the equity at that point, which is hard to do because
1:21:34 of tax reasons and stuff.
1:21:39 Yeah. The one thing I will say about a 50-50 and going in with someone that you’ve known for a long
1:21:44 time or going in with your best friend, that can be really freaking fun. Like it can just be the most
1:21:50 enjoyable life ever. So it’s just very high risk and very high reward. And if you can make it work,
1:21:57 like oftentimes the biggest and the best and the most well-ran companies you see were 50-50 partners
1:22:01 that knew each other for a long time for that reason. But the rate of failure is higher than average.
1:22:10 So in these three suitcases in front of me, I have different amounts of money. And all I want you
1:22:16 to do is to let me know if I was giving you this amount of money, what business you would start.
1:22:26 Okay. So the first one has $500.
1:22:31 Yeah. Awesome. So most people would look at this and think, what am I going to do with $500?
1:22:36 It’s a lot of money, right? In the age of today with 30-day free trials
1:22:42 and a lot of Silicon Valley funded companies willing to give you a lot of money to test your product,
1:22:49 this goes a long way. So the first thing that comes to mind is probably my favorite business
1:22:53 idea of all right now. Thankfully, you can start it with even less than this. And that would be a
1:22:58 business that helps implement AI into small businesses, small to medium-sized businesses.
1:23:04 So some facts for you. There’s 400 million small businesses on the planet. They’ve surveyed some
1:23:12 of these business owners. And 77% of them have admitted that AI would be transformational to their
1:23:19 business. They need AI. It’s not a fad. It’s not going away. 5% of them have claimed they’re using AI
1:23:24 in a meaningful way, right? And define that as you will. So basically, we have this knowledge gap,
1:23:29 right? We know it’s like a business cognitive dissonance, if you will. We know we need to do
1:23:34 something and we’re not doing it. It doesn’t matter how easy the tools are. It doesn’t matter how much
1:23:39 you can create a new website or an app with one prompt. They need someone to do it, right?
1:23:43 I know how to vacuum my floor. I know how to clean my house. I still would rather just pay someone to
1:23:50 do it, okay? And so with a fifth of the money, call it $100, I would start learning some vibe
1:23:55 coding tools. Replit, Lindy, there’s a ton of them out there. What is vibe coding for anyone that doesn’t?
1:24:02 Vibe coding is the non-technical person, the non-coder such as myself, using their natural language
1:24:09 to just say, hey, build me an app that manages customers for dog trainers. You’ll have an app,
1:24:14 right? Is it fully functional? Is it workable yet? Not quite, but 10 to 20 more prompts and you’re
1:24:18 good to go. And for anyone that doesn’t know, I would suggest I’m an investor in both Lovable and
1:24:26 Replit, so disclaimer, but I would recommend going on Replit or Lovable and typing in any website ID
1:24:31 you have just to have that sort of eureka moment of watching it be made in front of you. I think that
1:24:35 eureka moment is the moment your mind expands to the possibilities that are currently right in front
1:24:39 of all of us. Yes. You know, we think of building websites or apps as exclusive to those that have
1:24:45 spent five years learning to code. That has now changed. Yeah. We can all do it. Yeah. And everyone
1:24:50 should, like you said, one prompt, develop an app. Oh, what do I prompt? What do I build? Ask ChadGPT
1:24:55 what to build. Copy, paste one of those. Ask ChadGPT to prompt it, take it over to Replit or Lovable,
1:25:01 paste it and see what it builds. So I would use this as my education. And also to build a website.
1:25:06 Right. Chris’s AI automations dot com, whatever, anything. And then I would take the rest of the
1:25:14 money and I would put it into ads. Right. Preferably meta ads, Facebook ads. And I would target local
1:25:18 businesses, even though this is a global thing. If I live in Omaha, Nebraska, I could sell this to
1:25:23 people in Tokyo. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to put radius around Omaha and my ads are going to say,
1:25:29 I’m Chris and I can help put AI into your business. I’m going to use fifth grade words.
1:25:34 I’m not going to use LLM. I’m not even going to say ChadGPT. I’m just going to say, I will make your
1:25:41 business more money or save your business money with AI, just a service business. And then I’ll get on
1:25:45 discovery calls with these business owners and I’ll just start peppering them with questions about their
1:25:50 business. And over time, I’m going to learn based on their answers, what their problems are,
1:25:54 what they’re struggling with. Is it hiring? Is it payroll? Is it sales? Usually it’s going to be
1:25:59 sales, right? And then I’m going to take this money over here, this a hundred dollars and go back to
1:26:04 those apps and start building solutions for them for free, just to kind of implement myself as an expert.
1:26:06 And what are you going to charge them?
1:26:13 I’m going to charge them between $500 and $5,000 upfront one time to implement it. And then I’m going
1:26:18 to charge them 20% of that amount in an ongoing basis to maintain it and fix it as it breaks.
1:26:26 Let’s say there’s a gutter cleaning business in Omaha, Nebraska that doesn’t want to take calls
1:26:31 after hours. He’s with his wife watching Netflix and he knows that’s a $3,000 job. He doesn’t want
1:26:36 to take it. So it was going to voicemail and they’re calling someone else that is taking it, right? So I’m
1:26:41 going to build an AI voice agent for him, which sounds really intimidating. It feels like we have to have
1:26:45 all these skills. You don’t. You just need to prompt a couple of tools a couple of times. I’m going to
1:26:49 build a voice agent for him. And then I’m going to tell him to call that agent as if he were a customer
1:26:53 and say, Hey, pretend you’re a customer that needs a gutter cleaning. You’re calling at 930 PM.
1:26:59 And just see how it reacts. He’s expecting there to be a delay. There’s really not. He’s expecting it to
1:27:04 be dumb. There’s not. He’s expecting it to need to know all about his business. It doesn’t,
1:27:10 right? The AI knows about gutter cleaning businesses. Then he sold, right? Charge him $3,000 for that.
1:27:16 You build it and then you charge him, call it 500 or 600 a month to maintain it over time.
1:27:19 And then the beautiful thing is you can go to every other gutter cleaning business in Omaha or anywhere
1:27:22 and copy and paste that same app and sell it to them.
1:27:29 Got you. So selling AI to small business owners who are in huge demand, but don’t have the time or
1:27:38 think they need some sort of incredible expensive time and resource expensive competence to understand
1:27:42 AI when actually AI is really, really simple. Yes. And we see this play out over history where there’s
1:27:49 an initial arbitrage when a new technology comes into play. In fact, one of the call center jobs that I
1:27:56 had when I was very, very broke many, many years ago when I was like 18 or 19 was calling businesses
1:28:03 from the yellow pages and selling them Facebook ads. I would call a builder on a building site. I’d speak
1:28:07 to Dave, who’s the owner of the building company and I’d explain Facebook ads to him over the phone
1:28:13 and then I’d set them up for him and manage them for him on an ongoing basis and just send him the leads
1:28:20 because he didn’t understand Facebook ads. And these opportunities seem to exist for years when
1:28:21 there’s a new technology as we’re seeing the AI.
1:28:26 But the thing is with that idea and with most ideas in my experience, we think there’s a very
1:28:30 limited time span. But if I were to start that business today, just start calling people, it would
1:28:34 work. Yeah. You could still do it. Yeah. I might have more competitors, but like it doesn’t matter.
1:28:39 It would still work. Interestingly, the issue back then was people didn’t even know what Facebook ads
1:28:44 were. So maybe it works to some degree better now. Yeah. People have heard the word. Yeah. You were
1:28:50 pretty early. Yeah. It was 2015 or something. So it was, it was quite rough, but it was a business
1:28:53 nonetheless. Yeah. And there was 40 other people in the room with me in that call center doing it.
1:28:58 Wow. So that’s the first idea you have. Yeah. What else? $500. What else could you do?
1:29:02 Okay. Do you want a, uh, you want a physical business or an online business or does it not matter?
1:29:09 What about a physical one? All right. For a physical one, I would, um, have you heard of drop servicing?
1:29:14 No. So the phrase drop shipping is kind of has a bad rap and some of it for good reason,
1:29:22 which is basically buying a product in China, uh, having a website for it and basically having the
1:29:25 Chinese manufacturer, the supplier ship it directly to your customer. So you don’t have to take possession
1:29:30 of the inventory, right? Drop servicing is doing something similar with a service call it a, let’s
1:29:36 call it a home service business, right? So in this case, it would look like, um, a garage repair company
1:29:41 that has a website that looks like they have a physical presence in a market, but it’s really
1:29:46 just a lead gen factory. Right. And so what you’re doing is you’re using Facebook or Google ads to
1:29:51 generate leads, kind of like what you were doing on Facebook, um, for a local business. And then you’re,
1:29:58 you’re instead of just selling the leads for $20, you’re actually doing more of the work. You’re,
1:30:03 you’re subcontracting out the work to a local business that actually repairs garage doors.
1:30:07 They’re the fulfillment arm of the business. You’re the marketing arm of the business.
1:30:13 So in essence, you have a garage repair, um, business without actually having one. Like you
1:30:17 don’t know anything about garage doors. You’ve never been on site. You’re just drop servicing. You’re,
1:30:23 you’re sending all the work to a local company to do it. So I, a car repair company, I put up a car
1:30:30 repair website. I use Facebook ads to drive people towards it. When they click to buy my, my car repair,
1:30:34 I call a local car repair person and say, Hey, I’ve got a customer here for you.
1:30:41 Um, can you take them? I book the customer in, they handle the car repair. I take the payment and pay
1:30:47 the garage. Yep. Great question. So let’s just say in your example, um, an oil change at, at some,
1:30:52 at Bob’s car repair that doesn’t have a website is 40 bucks, which is a great price. Your website is
1:30:58 clean. It’s nice. They can pay with a few clicks and it’s 80 bucks. Right? So you call Bob one day and
1:31:03 say, Hey, congratulations. I have a lead and I don’t have a lead. I have a customer. I want to
1:31:07 send you $40. Her name’s Mary. She’s going to be coming in. She has a Sequoia. She needs an oil
1:31:12 change. Right? And so Mary just interacts with you. She’s trusting you with the money. You don’t have
1:31:17 to trust Bob with the money. Uh, you just send Bob the money. You make even more margin than Bob’s
1:31:22 makes, right? It’s a higher price service, but what you’re charging for is the better UI,
1:31:28 the better user experience and having a cleaner checkout method. And is there particular types of
1:31:32 businesses you would target with that approach? Are you targeting ones that have a shitty customer
1:31:37 experience, bad website, et cetera? In the home services, like take your pick. Um, they pretty
1:31:42 much all do, right? Um, there are some more established industries like roofing that don’t
1:31:46 have those issues, uh, because they have higher margins so they can afford better websites, but,
1:31:52 um, they pretty much all have a bad experience. Any others at that $500 level that stand out to you?
1:31:56 Yeah. I love, um, directory websites. What’s that?
1:32:01 So Travelocity is a directory website. Yelp is a directory website. It’s a website with a list of
1:32:07 things that helps people find answers to their questions more easily. So another example of a
1:32:14 website could be like Wisconsin, um, ice suppliers.com. I don’t know if that’s a website, right?
1:32:19 Where if I need to go buy ice for my party, uh, I’m going to Google ice near me. Um, some
1:32:24 categories are so niche or so unevenly distributed that Google maps is not a good solution for it.
1:32:30 Right? So you’re directed to these random directory websites that are just lists of other businesses.
1:32:35 Um, and what people are doing is they’re proactively creating their own directories by scraping, uh,
1:32:41 let’s say every dog park in Seattle, Washington and putting them on a website. And then they don’t,
1:32:46 they don’t even drive traffic to it. There’s no paid ads. They just wait for Google and for
1:32:51 SEO to do its trick. And it’s very much an 80, 20 rule. You could kind of build the architecture for
1:32:56 a directory website with repleter lovable, and then you just copy and paste it right in different
1:33:02 markets. Uh, so the play here is to have dozens of directory websites and some of them make $0 a
1:33:06 month. Some make a few hundred, some make a few thousand, but it’s very passive. It’s like one of
1:33:12 those rare things that’s passive yet also doesn’t need a ton of money to get, to get started.
1:33:14 Where’s the money coming from? Where’s the revenue?
1:33:17 Great question. You can either do like display ads.
1:33:18 What’s a display ad?
1:33:20 Just a banner ad on a website.
1:33:23 And are you having to go and sell that ad to someone that wants to buy it?
1:33:28 You would just take Google’s like ad network and just put it on your website. So you don’t have
1:33:28 to do anything.
1:33:32 So you can just click a button and it’ll add adverts to your website, which you’ll,
1:33:33 you, you’ll then paid for.
1:33:38 Yep. Or you could, um, you could just aggregate those leads. Like if we had dog parks in Seattle
1:33:43 and, you know, we see on our Google analytics that we’re driving traffic to this one dog park,
1:33:48 then we reach out to them proactively and say, Hey, you notice all these customers you’ve been
1:33:52 getting. That’s because I put you on my website. Would you like to pay $300 a year or a month or
1:33:58 whatever for priority placement? Right? So I like to call this permissionless marketing. Um, you’re
1:34:02 just proactively adding these businesses to a website. They have nothing to lose. You have nothing to lose.
1:34:07 And then once you see traffic, then you reach out to them and say, Hey, I’ve been bringing you more
1:34:13 business. Would you like to start paying for that? Interesting. And how much money can someone hope to
1:34:17 make if they execute that strategy? Well, in your view, what’s realistic with the directory website,
1:34:22 it could be tens of dollars a month and it could be tens of thousands of dollars a month, but we’re not
1:34:27 talking about building another Yelp or Travelocity. This is a zero employee business with that costs
1:34:33 almost nothing less than $100 to start. Um, but it’s just a numbers game. You’re not really going to
1:34:39 know what directory really hits until months have passed and until you have a lot of surface area for
1:34:46 these experiments. I hear a lot of people talking about vending machines online. And I’ve always been
1:34:50 really curious about that. People say you can make money from vending machines. Yeah. Could you do that
1:34:56 with $500? Absolutely. So if we were doing another physical business, um, I would go to Facebook
1:35:03 marketplace and I would find an existing vending machine, uh, for three to $400, right? That could
1:35:09 be a snack or a drink vending machine. Um, oftentimes the expensive part of a vending machine is the credit
1:35:13 card reader. It can often cost more or as much as the whole machine itself. And then I would use a
1:35:19 $100 to stock the machine. Um, with Costco, Costco or Sam’s club is where all of these operators buy
1:35:24 their snacks, believe it or not. And then I just need one business owner to give me a chance, um, to
1:35:29 allow me to put the vending machine in his lobby. Let’s say it’s a car repair business. I can say, Hey,
1:35:33 I’ll pay you a hundred bucks a month or Hey, I’ll split the revenue with you. I’ll give you 30% of the
1:35:38 revenue. And then once I have one, that’s the hardest part. Now you have a track record. Now you can say,
1:35:43 Hey, Bob’s auto repair makes $700 a month passively. Cause he let me put, uh, this vending machine
1:35:47 there. This is a business that can be passive. If you have an employee to restock it, that is the
1:35:52 active part of the business is the restocking and the selling of new locations. Um, but if you have
1:35:58 an ATM, then that becomes even easier because you can outsource all of the restocking to a cash
1:36:03 management company. How much money could one person hope to make from a vending machine business? And
1:36:07 have you ever run this business yourself? I have, I’ve actually been in a different part of the
1:36:12 vertical. I’ve sold vending machines. I posted a video to Instagram that got tens of millions of
1:36:16 views. And we started just importing those vending machines that I was talking about in the video,
1:36:22 uh, and then selling them to entrepreneurs. But the level of revenue is, I mean, it’s as much as you
1:36:27 want to scale it. I have a friend in San Diego that makes seven figures a year, uh, on vending machines,
1:36:33 just snacks and drinks. Is there an art to good vending machine placement or the right things to sell
1:36:38 in the vending machine or anything else? Yeah. It’s funny that you asked that because he said,
1:36:42 you know, I’m in San Diego, people are health conscious here. And he tested all these healthy
1:36:47 concepts and they all failed. Like people want Doritos and Coke and diet Coke. Right. So that’s
1:36:53 all they have now. That’s where the demand is. But the biggest needle mover on this is the location.
1:36:59 And it’s a matter of testing back to testing, right? Testing what types of locations he landed on, um,
1:37:04 apartment complexes, like apartment lobbies. He tried auto repair shops and they just weren’t high
1:37:09 volume, but it’s the type of business kind of like directories where if you have a hundred vending
1:37:15 machines, um, you’re going to have 20 of them that make $3,000 a month each. And then you’re going to
1:37:20 have 80 of them that make $400 a month each. But once you find out what types of locations are the
1:37:24 most profitable, then you just start directly reaching out to those types of locations.
1:37:30 I’ve just finished writing my third book. I haven’t firmed up the title yet, but I have started
1:37:35 mocking up some different designs and I’ve been doing this with Adobe Express, which is one of our
1:37:40 sponsors. What I love about Adobe Express is that it makes it so easy for me to obsess over the tiniest
1:37:45 details, the typography, the font, the color, the text placement, the stuff that might sound petty to
1:37:50 most people, but actually compounds to create something that stands out, something that’s one
1:37:55 better than the rest. And designing my cover art has reminded me of how many creative things I’ve
1:37:59 learned over the year. But it’s also reminded me that there are so many creative minds around me that
1:38:05 are also sitting on their own secrets. So I’ve created the one better guide in Adobe Express to bring
1:38:09 those tips to you. And in it, you’ll find principles from the very, very best in their industry
1:38:15 turned into quick and easy practices for you to apply. So you can train yourself to create exactly
1:38:20 like the best performing teams in the world do. Just head over to adobe.ly slash one better to
1:38:26 download Adobe Express now and make sure you visit the learn tab to discover how you can become
1:38:32 one better than the rest. You know, every once in a while you come across a product that has such a
1:38:38 huge impact on your life that you’d probably describe it as a game changer. And I would say
1:38:46 for about 35 to 40% of my team, they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me
1:38:52 called Ketone IQ, which you can get at ketone.com as a game changer. But the reason I became a co-owner
1:38:57 of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because one day when I
1:39:01 came to work, there was a box of this stuff sat on my desk. I had no idea what it was. Lily and my team
1:39:06 says that this company have been in touch. So I went upstairs, tried it, and quite frankly,
1:39:12 the rest is history. In terms of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive
1:39:18 I am, game changer. So if you want to give it a try, visit ketone.com slash Stephen for 30% off.
1:39:23 You’ll also get a free gift with your second shipment. And now you can find Ketone IQ at Target stores
1:39:30 across the United States, where your first shot is completely free of charge. So I have another box here.
1:39:39 This box has slightly more money in double. Okay. $1,000. What would you do with $1,000?
1:39:50 All right. So for whatever reason, when I see $1,000, I think about the wedding rental business.
1:39:51 Do you know anything about that? No.
1:40:00 So believe it or not, weddings are increasing in popularity. People are getting married outside
1:40:06 more than ever. I think like 75% of weddings are outside now, which is increasing every year. And
1:40:12 that increases the market for these random one-off rentals, right? I read an article on Reddit about a
1:40:19 guy that built a wedding arch from his garage with some two-by-fours, some lumber. I think he spent
1:40:25 like $200 or $300 to build it. And he rents it out to weddings for like $1,000 per wedding.
1:40:31 And it’s just a piece of wood for the couples to stand under as they say, I do, right?
1:40:35 And so he works with event organizers or wedding organizers to continually rent it to the wedding
1:40:36 organizer.
1:40:40 Exactly. He doesn’t go through the brides. He goes through the wedding planners because
1:40:44 it’s surface area. They’re touching all kinds of weddings on a regular basis.
1:40:51 To find these wedding planners, you go to The Knot, you go to Zola, WeddingWire, you scrape them,
1:40:55 and all of their phone numbers and emails and names and businesses are on the website for everyone to
1:41:01 see. And you just start reaching out. And one contact could be one wedding a week. So that could
1:41:09 be started. That could be in the $500 box, right? You could spend $300 on supplies. You could spend
1:41:19 $100 on scraping all the emails quite cheaply. And then you could spend $100 on gas. And then,
1:41:24 or let’s say another $100 on renting a truck and trailer from Home Depot. So you have a car,
1:41:31 so you don’t have a car, right? You’ve got $400 left over to go to a nice meal or for Facebook ads.
1:41:40 So photo walls are very popular. Charcuterie carts where wedding patrons can make their own charcuterie
1:41:48 board. You can do like custom pizzas at weddings. You could do wedding arches. There’s a lot of
1:41:55 different opportunities there. Weddings and funerals. Yeah. Because everything you said there could also
1:42:00 apply to. That’s true. That’s true. They don’t seem to be stopping either. I guess funerals are
1:42:06 going to get more popular with the population. Yep. Continuing to increase. What else? So wedding
1:42:11 rentals is the first one you do with a thousand dollars. Anything else? Yeah. Should we do an online
1:42:18 one? Sure. So there’s a lot of people nowadays making money with local email newsletters. Are you
1:42:24 very familiar with that? No. So basically what you do, we keep coming back. This is like a big ad for
1:42:30 Facebook, right? I swear it’s not. But people are using local Facebook ads. Let’s say you live in
1:42:35 Boise, Idaho. There’s 200,000 people there. You post a Facebook ad that says, hey, find out what’s
1:42:42 happening in Boise, Idaho. One email per week in your inbox. You can acquire a subscriber for about 50 cents
1:42:49 from Facebook or Instagram. Okay. Let’s call it a dollar to be, to be more conservative. Acquire a
1:42:57 subscriber for a dollar. If you sell ads inside that email newsletter, you can charge about 50 cents per
1:43:07 month per subscriber. So if we had a thousand dollars, I would use a free trial for an email newsletter
1:43:13 or software like Beehive or ConvertKit or any of those. And so I’ve already spent zero dollars and
1:43:19 I would give all $1,000 to Meta. I would set a defined radius in a local area. Preferably it’s
1:43:22 where you live, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be on the other side of the world. I’ve launched this.
1:43:27 I tested this in New Mexico and it worked. I’d spend a thousand dollars to acquire a thousand
1:43:32 subscribers. And then I would start sending them weekly newsletters. What’s happening in Boise,
1:43:39 Idaho. Discounts in Boise, Idaho. News in Boise, Idaho. I would not use ChatGPT to write it. I would
1:43:43 write it myself in my own natural language, whether I’m a good writer or not. Why? Because it needs to
1:43:48 feel personal. It needs to feel like a local is writing it. Not like an author, not like ChatGPT.
1:43:57 And then I would use those same subscribers to source sponsors. So Bob’s car repair owner is
1:44:03 potentially in your list. There are 10% of all adults are business owners, right? So if I have
1:44:06 a thousand email subscribers, a hundred of them are going to be business owners are going to be
1:44:11 potential sponsors to my newsletter. So after a month or so, I’m going to put, send out an email
1:44:17 that says, Hey, your ad here. I’d love to sponsor your business. It’s a very relevant market. It costs
1:44:24 $500 per send to send your email. Um, so then if I spend a thousand dollars to acquire these customers,
1:44:32 I will get that money back within two months because I’m, I’m making $500 a month, 50 cents per subscriber
1:44:38 from a thousand newsletter subscribers. And that can scale, um, as much as you want. If Boise,
1:44:42 Idaho is only so big, you copy and paste the template in another city or a bigger city.
1:44:50 Okay. Let’s move up then. This, this briefcase has a lot more money in it.
1:44:57 $5,000. What side hustle do you start if you’ve got $5,000?
1:45:05 Okay. So if we’ve got a sliding scale of active to passive income, the closer you get to this,
1:45:12 to $5,000, the more realistic the passive income becomes. Okay. So I’m going to go closer to that.
1:45:22 Um, I love RV parks. What’s an RV park? An RV park is one of two things. It’s a place for someone
1:45:28 to live in full time for months or years at a time where they live in a recreational vehicle in an RV,
1:45:34 a camper van, a camper van. It could be a fixed income, uh, retired person. It could be a blue collar
1:45:41 worker. It could be a digital nomad, right? That’s kind of the three categories. Um, the other type of RV
1:45:46 park is a recreational, like a more short-term RV park that might be right outside of the Grand Canyon
1:45:51 or, you know, a popular tourist destination where people are staying one to four nights at a time,
1:45:58 right? This is a business I’ve been in for about seven years. Now they have very small RV parks out
1:46:06 there that are three to 10 pad sites that are about three to 10 times more profitable than buying a single
1:46:11 family home as a rental. Okay. So I genuinely, I don’t understand why people buy single family homes
1:46:18 because like buying a small RV park costs the same, but is significantly more profitable
1:46:24 and more flexible because you have your, your risk is more distributed amongst five to 10 tenants,
1:46:29 as opposed to one tenant that could go bankrupt or disappear in the middle of the night. So with this
1:46:37 $5,000, um, I would call every small RV park in my area, preferably within a three hour drive,
1:46:42 I would just find them on Google maps. This would take a little more time because we can’t allocate
1:46:46 any of this budget to the finding of the park. We’ve got to do that very manually with the,
1:46:53 our iPhone and our internet connection. Okay. I’m going to find in my experience for every 100 parks I find
1:46:59 about two or three of them can be a really good deal. Okay. So if I get a hundred people on the phone,
1:47:04 I know I can find one good deal from that with seller financing because we can’t use any of this
1:47:09 to buy the park either. We’ve got a lot of constraints. I’m going to use, uh, let’s say
1:47:17 2000 of these dollars, um, for my due diligence. I’ve got to get inspections on the park. I’ve got to get a
1:47:22 title policy on the park to make sure it’s not a scam to make sure that the owner who says they own it
1:47:30 actually owns it. Um, and then with the remainder of the money, I need some operating capital. I need
1:47:35 to be able to pay the power bill to maybe trim some trees to get the park looking nice on day one.
1:47:39 And then to actually buy the park, I need to set up creative financing with the seller.
1:47:43 And the best way you can do that is by building a relationship with the seller,
1:47:47 building some trust with them, um, showing them that you’re going to take good care of the park.
1:47:54 Now the unit economics on this, let’s say you buy a park for $200,000 in the real estate world.
1:48:00 They’re valued on a cap rate basis, which is the profit of the park divided by the asking price of
1:48:09 the park. So if I buy a park for a 10% cap rate, that means it’s going to make $20,000 a year of profit
1:48:18 and it’s going to cost me $200,000. Okay. So that park probably has no website. It probably has
1:48:23 way under market rents. It probably has occupancy issues because there has no website. They’re not
1:48:31 doing anything. So I’m going to get the park to perform by literally posting ads on Facebook
1:48:38 marketplace, free ads, making a free website with a vibe coding app and, um, and increasing the occupancy
1:48:47 and that $20,000 a year goes to $30,000 a year. And the park is worth an 8% cap rate. You bought it
1:48:55 undervalued at 10%. So it’s now a 300 and I don’t know, $60,000 park that you paid $200,000 for. So you
1:49:00 can either sell it or you can just manage it, um, and enjoy the profits. When you said seller
1:49:06 financing, what, what does that mean? That means the seller is holding the note. They are bearing
1:49:13 the risk of you buying the park, but what’s in it for them is a, they can get the park back if you
1:49:19 default. Okay. So they’re not actually giving you the park up front. They’re letting you have it today
1:49:23 on the basis that you’ll pay them in the future with profits you make. Exactly. So you’re making
1:49:28 monthly payments to them. Um, because oftentimes they’re going to take that money that you give
1:49:31 them and they’re going to have to invest it in something else, something they don’t understand.
1:49:37 So your pitch to them is, Hey, you know, this park better than anyone, right? You know what I can do
1:49:41 to fix it. You know what the deficiencies are. If for some reason I’m not who I say I am, you just get
1:49:45 it back. You take it back and you, where you started and you keep all the money that I’ve paid you
1:49:53 so far. How much money have you made from doing this? I’ve made net profit probably four,
1:50:01 to $600,000 revenue. I would say between three and 4 million a year with these RV parks and mobile
1:50:08 home parks as well. Yeah. How many of them I’ve been involved with 35 or so over the last seven years.
1:50:15 What about business? No, I mean, you’re capitalizing on baby boomers retiring and on millennials traveling
1:50:20 and on, yeah, it’s just, it’s a growing market. People are getting outside more.
1:50:26 Yeah. What are the macro things you think about at the moment when you’re trying to decide on a new
1:50:29 side hustle or a new business to start? Are there like obvious macro things that are happening that
1:50:34 we should all be thinking about? You just can’t ignore AI. Like whatever you’re doing, AI has to be part
1:50:43 of it. So I like the framework of implementing new AI tools into old businesses. And I like the
1:50:49 framework that 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every single day. And that will be the case for the next
1:50:55 five to 10 years. What’s the opportunity there? To either buy the businesses or to implement AI into the
1:51:00 businesses. Those are the two biggest opportunities I see. Those two. Get them to give you the business
1:51:06 and you run it better in a more digital way. Yeah. And you pay them off for that business when
1:51:10 you’ve made profit from it. If you don’t make the profit, they get their business back. Yes. Now I
1:51:17 will say finding seller financing on a business is harder than on a piece of real estate. But it is
1:51:24 possible. Of all the businesses you’ve started, which one has been most profitable and was the
1:51:33 easiest. Oh man. So like, what is the winner? I would say either, um, my RV parks business or my,
1:51:40 my Texas snacks business, my e-commerce business. Um, and they weren’t easy because they’re easy
1:51:47 businesses or industry industries. They’re easy because I had matured enough to a point to find
1:51:53 good operators to run those businesses where I had little to no involvement in them.
1:51:58 Does that make sense? Yeah. You found people to run them for you so that as a starter,
1:52:02 they didn’t die the minute you got bored. Exactly. Whereas they carried on growing and evolving.
1:52:07 Right. Whereas those are both quite hard industries. E-commerce is quite hard and, uh,
1:52:12 and real estate is as well, but I had good operators. What have you learned about finding good operators?
1:52:22 Hmm. Oh man. It all comes down to
1:52:30 trust. How much trust am I able to put in them? How much trust do I have them? I’ve found a, um,
1:52:35 a direct correlation between people I know really well, um, and people that have made really good
1:52:42 operators. How do you incentivize them directly from the profits of the business? So that they feel more
1:52:48 like a entrepreneur, they’ve got more of a piece of the pie. Yeah. I made the mistake in my twenties of
1:52:56 dangling a carrot of equity too often, genuinely meaning it like, but it most equity goes to zero
1:53:03 period. Um, I put a lot more emphasis on cashflow now in my thirties than I do on equity. I think
1:53:09 equity is overrated. And so nowadays I’m less likely to give an operating partner equity, not because I
1:53:13 don’t think they deserve it, but because it’s more likely to go to zero and I’m more likely to cut
1:53:19 them in on the profits so they can get paid ongoing. On an annual basis or quarterly basis,
1:53:25 et cetera. Quarterly. Yeah. Interesting. Hmm. Is there any side hustles that you’ve heard about
1:53:30 that you wish you’d started? It’s funny because a lot of the ones that I wish I started, I started
1:53:35 like a lot of the 80 that I’ve done. I just, it’s something that I thought about for two weeks. I can’t
1:53:39 get it out of my head and I just, I have to get it out of my head. And so if I start something and it
1:53:44 fails, I don’t really care because I don’t invest a lot of money into it. And I answered the question.
1:53:48 I don’t have to like stay up at night wondering if that thing would have worked anymore. Sometimes
1:53:54 I’ll like run these tests on Facebook that show me such amazing results that just kind of unlock
1:53:59 an opportunity for me. Can I give you an analogy? Yeah. Have you ever been deep sea fishing?
1:54:06 Not deep sea fishing. No. Okay. So here’s a real story. I was out deep sea fishing and we
1:54:11 were just throwing lures and we weren’t getting any, any bites. And the captain reaches in under
1:54:17 the seat and he pulls out straws from McDonald’s, McDonald’s straws specifically, because they have
1:54:21 red and yellow stripes along the side of them. And he pulled out scissors and he started cutting
1:54:27 them into fourths. And then he, he took the hook off the line and he, he put the string through
1:54:32 the straw and then he tied the hook back on. He’s like, I know it seems crazy. Just stick
1:54:37 with me. And we cast it out and we started getting bites. And I’m like, what is it? It was the same
1:54:43 place with the same lure, same hook with just a straw. And I’m like, what, why does this work?
1:54:49 And he’s like, it’s the colors. It’s like the white and the red and, and it just spins as
1:54:54 you reel it in and it mimics a fish. And I was like, how did you learn this? Like, what made
1:54:58 you think to try this? He’s like, I don’t know. Uh, maybe alcohol was involved. I don’t
1:55:03 know. But like that worked and we started catching fish the rest of the day. So it just got me
1:55:09 thinking like entrepreneurship is this massive ocean with millions of varieties of fish, billions
1:55:14 of fish, some sharks, some minnows. And so many of us go out there and we cast a few times
1:55:17 and we just go back home. We’re like, entrepreneurship doesn’t work. It’s not for me. Back to the nine
1:55:22 to five, but we’re not testing enough, enough stuff. There’s different depths. There’s different
1:55:25 baits. We could spray something on it to make it smell different. We could put a McDonald’s
1:55:30 straw on it. And occasionally we’ll find something. We’ll get a bite. Maybe we won’t get another bite
1:55:35 for another hour, but the bite is a signal. And it’s like, oh, there’s something there. Okay. Let’s
1:55:39 try that again, but try this. Or maybe let’s just cast a hundred more times. And then you get a fish
1:55:44 and then you get a bigger fish. And like the more you’re out there, not just focusing on one type of
1:55:50 fishing, but increasing your surface area and trying all kinds of different things. The more you learn,
1:55:54 like the more you test and like, now you have a bunch of sharks in the boat and you have this
1:55:57 and you have this and you have all these options at your disposal. We’re eating shark tonight. We’re
1:56:02 eating grouper. We’re eating snapper. You have this amazing life that’s dynamic and full of color and
1:56:07 all these other awesome things are coming into play because you stayed out there and you didn’t just do
1:56:12 one thing. You tried all these other things. So that’s how I look at business. Like I’m out there on
1:56:17 the ocean testing other things. And even if I don’t catch anything, it’s fun. And I think other people
1:56:23 try that too. A lot of people want sexy stuff, don’t they? Yeah. I want to build the next Facebook or
1:56:29 they want to do the chat GPT or the AI app that does this, that, and the other. Do you think that’s
1:56:35 in part a trap for the average person to be aiming at sexy? Yeah. Because the fact that everyone wants
1:56:40 sexy means the fact that the sexy things are the most competitive. It’s the exact reason why we
1:56:44 should go as unsexy as possible because no one’s looking at it.
1:56:51 I’m looking forward, Chris. What is, um, is there anything that you’re mulling over now in terms of
1:56:57 new business ideas that you could give me? Man, I, lately it’s been about like stuff I can launch with
1:57:05 my content. Um, I like, I love the phrase unfair advantage, right? I will only start businesses today
1:57:11 where I have an unfair advantage. Everyone has an unfair advantage in something, right? Even a 13
1:57:17 year old has an unfair advantage. They might know Roblox better than anyone, right? So unfair advantage
1:57:21 is not, you know, only for the rich or the wealthy or the elite or the most experienced or the PhDs,
1:57:27 right? So I try to start businesses where I have an unfair advantage. And that might be because I can
1:57:31 grow it with my content. It might be because I have a bunch of friends in that space or have a unique
1:57:37 knowledge or insight into that space. So if I have a zillion ideas and a spreadsheet, a mile long with
1:57:41 a bunch of business ideas, the ones I’m most likely to start are the ones where I have an unfair advantage.
1:57:51 A right to win. Yeah. I have this phrase called mirage opportunity, which, um, which I use when I look at an
1:57:58 industry that never seems to work for anybody, but seems so obvious. Do you know what I’m saying?
1:58:02 Yeah, I do. I’m thinking of something. Yeah. And I, I, this has been a bit of a way for me to know
1:58:07 what not to work on is if I see everybody trying to solve this particular problem and nobody’s been
1:58:11 successful, yet more and more people are plowing in. And yet it seems obvious to me, I just stay away
1:58:19 from it because there’s something in my understanding of consumer behavior or current alternatives that I’m
1:58:27 like misunderstanding. An example I’ll give you. Everyone at the moment is trying to start a, so that
1:58:30 this is the first sort of first principles they’re reasoning up from. They’re saying people are more
1:58:38 lonely than ever before. They’re saying there’s no clear place to organize a group of people.
1:58:43 WhatsApp has its, um, has its limitations, its restrictions, doesn’t have the feature set one
1:58:48 would like. Facebook groups aren’t working for a certain generation of people anymore for sort of
1:58:52 gen Z’s and younger generations, millennials. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to make an app
1:58:59 for groups, your run club, your friends, your piano recital group, your, your entrepreneurs. We’re going
1:59:03 to build all the group features into this app and it’s going to be dedicated to that. I’ve heard this
1:59:08 pitch over and over again. I’ve seen all of them seem to have any traction or work. It’s a mirage.
1:59:14 Something fundamental about your assumptions is off. Yeah. When I said mirage opportunities,
1:59:20 did you think of anything in particular? I stay away from businesses where, where I don’t know
1:59:25 why it’s not working, but clearly it’s not working. Yeah. I think of banking or healthcare, right? Like
1:59:30 banking is terrible. Like look at the UI at bank of America. It’s why it’s like, ah, it’s probably like
1:59:34 that for a reason. Right. Or like Amazon’s UI is terrible. It’s like, what is it? It’s like,
1:59:38 they probably know why it looks like that. Right. I assume they’re smarter than I am.
1:59:42 One idea that I thought of is like, everyone hates typing in their password a zillion times a day. So
1:59:46 you have like these password managers, but I’ve seen a dozen companies that are like going to fix
1:59:52 the password, right? Some like replacement to a password and they’ve all failed. And it’s probably
1:59:56 because it’s, it’s a really hard problem to solve. And I don’t want to try to invest in a person that’s
2:00:01 trying to solve it because statistics are not on their side. Another one that comes to mind for me is
2:00:05 at university, every entrepreneurial college kid decides that they’re going to build a on-campus
2:00:10 what’s going on app to let everybody know what’s going on on campus. Yeah. And they never seem to
2:00:16 work. Yeah. And I think the reason why they don’t work is because both you’re losing 33% of your
2:00:20 potential customers every year and gaining 33% new customers every year. So you have a bit of an
2:00:24 acquisition problem, but then also people don’t decide what they’re going to do based on some notice
2:00:28 board. They decide based on their dorm room friends and where they’re going and where the girl
2:00:32 they like is going. Yeah. And you, and so it’s not really about what’s going on. It’s like,
2:00:38 what does my group of people want to do? I think that’s, I think that’s the mirage in that.
2:00:42 Well, I thought of another example that’s like building apps around podcasting.
2:00:45 Oh my God. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I have a friend that he had a podcast.
2:00:46 It’s a great one.
2:00:53 That helped podcasters. Right. And it was great. Like really, I listened to it and he, he realized over
2:00:58 time, like I’m selling to a market that quits, right? I’m asking for customers to pay for my
2:01:03 thing that are statistically like 95% of them are going to quit within six months. So it’s just a
2:01:08 broken market to sell to. And then the 5% that are successful, what percentage of them are actually
2:01:13 profitable? What percentage of them can afford to pay for an expensive agency or software? Very few.
2:01:22 Mirage opportunities. I like that. I would, yeah, it’s a, it’s been a really useful framework because
2:01:26 it’s the obvious ones that no one’s doing, but there’s clearly a huge opportunity that I think
2:01:32 pulls people in the most. But for me now with the, with the amount of time I’ve spent starting
2:01:37 businesses, those are the ones that push me away the most. Yeah. Well, it all comes back to the value
2:01:41 of just copying what’s already working. Amen. Is there anything we haven’t talked about that we should
2:01:47 talk about Chris for young and old people that are considering starting their own business,
2:01:53 their own side hustle, building passive income? Many of the people that think they want to be an
2:01:57 entrepreneur, they just like the idea of it. And they think there’s freedom in entrepreneurship
2:02:03 when oftentimes it’s even more of a prison than their nine to five. It can be at least in the first
2:02:09 years, not months, not years, sometimes decades. Right. And so I want people to answer the question
2:02:16 for themselves. Is this for me? So they don’t regret. They need to find out if they love the idea of it
2:02:23 or they like the actual day-to-day grind of it. Cause they, they probably won’t, but I want them to find
2:02:29 out. Such an important point because the narrative online at the moment is, you know, be your own boss,
2:02:34 et cetera, et cetera. And I, I just, I don’t think people I’m speaking for myself here. I don’t want to
2:02:38 speak for you, but I don’t think people realize how many people I have to answer to. Oh yeah. I have all of my
2:02:43 team members, which is hundreds of people that I have my investors. I have my suppliers, my clients.
2:02:51 So it’s not like I’m living as a free man. Yeah. I’m less free now than I was before. Yeah.
2:02:55 Well, I started all this stuff. Isn’t it nice when someone just also just tells you what to do and
2:03:00 exactly what path to take? Yeah. Like my wife does that. She’s like, Hey, I need you to do this.
2:03:05 It’s like, Oh, it’s so nice. I don’t have to like, thank you. Like, thank you. You know? So I have
2:03:09 bosses in other areas of my life and it’s really nice. Like there’s something to be set for a nine
2:03:14 to five. And some people have no desire to even test an entrepreneurship. Great. All power to you,
2:03:18 but I want people to test it. And I think, you know, people would look at someone like me or you
2:03:23 and think, Oh, you know, they’ve got total freedom, but this is just not the case. Even for me as a
2:03:28 podcaster, you know, I’m now kind of somewhat constrained by the fact that I need to publish on a
2:03:32 Monday and I need to publish on a Thursday. And that means lots of other work takes place throughout the
2:03:37 week. And, um, I can’t just go to Hawaii and chill out and spend a month off. And then I’ve got all
2:03:42 my clients now and the team members, et cetera. So I’m, I’m, I think I’m starting a bit of a war
2:03:49 against this idea that independence and total freedom is both something to aim for, but also
2:03:54 like realistic when you’re pursuing something you love. Yeah. I think a generation have been sold this
2:03:57 idea of independence and I don’t think it’s gotten us anywhere. Yeah. Like that, that’s the goal.
2:04:02 Freedom, independence don’t depend on anybody. Right. But when I look on your life, your life,
2:04:07 you’ve got four kids, you’ve got lots of responsibility, you’ve got employees, you’ve got
2:04:13 businesses, you’ve got so much dependency. And that’s probably the source of much of your happiness.
2:04:18 Yeah, exactly. My quote of this year is there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
2:04:23 The entrepreneurship is not a solution. You’re trading something for it. The question is,
2:04:27 is that trade-off worth it or not? And we won’t know until we try it.
2:04:28 And what’s the trade-off you’re making?
2:04:37 Stability, lack of volatility, predictability. My life has been volatile and unpredictable.
2:04:43 But the more I do it, the more predictable it becomes in a good way. But that’s been the trade-off
2:04:49 is the mental load of not knowing where my paycheck’s coming from or if it’s coming at all.
2:04:53 It’s not for the faint-hearted?
2:04:53 No.
2:04:58 Chris, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next,
2:05:02 not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you, I love this question for
2:05:07 obvious reasons, is during your interview with Stephen today, what is one thing he did that
2:05:07 you genuinely appreciated?
2:05:26 I would say that I appreciate that the questions you asked me got me to look at the things I’ve been
2:05:34 looking at in one way completely differently. I came into this conversation, you know, looking at things
2:05:38 in a specific way, in ways that I always have. But your questions got me to approach it from a different
2:05:45 angle that made me learn something more about my own story, if you will.
2:05:50 And what was that in particular? Was there a specific thing you’re thinking about?
2:05:58 Maybe just the overall framework that, maybe it’s just recency biased, but
2:06:09 just that it’s not for everyone. It’s not for everyone. And that we just need to learn if the
2:06:10 trade-offs are worth it.
2:06:18 There’s an element of your personal trauma experiences, upbringing, insecurities, toxic fuel
2:06:24 that makes the trade-offs worth it. That makes you in some respect unreasonable, unrealistic,
2:06:28 willing to take the risk. And we don’t talk about that enough because we’re not able to go into
2:06:32 people’s trauma and the nuance of their life and childhood and what their dad said to them and
2:06:39 how they were bullied to be able to like transmit into their mind to make that, to figure that out
2:06:44 for themselves. But I think probably is in both your life and my life. I mean, we both, I think,
2:06:52 have ADHD to some degree and we have a brain wired in a certain way. So it’s not, it can seem like we’re
2:06:58 making a choice, but it often doesn’t feel like that for me. It doesn’t feel like I’m making a choice.
2:07:02 It feels like there is no other choice. Yeah. In the same way that one might make a choice to get
2:07:09 a nine-to-five job. I have, I think for me, that would be a terrible thing. Yeah. And vice versa,
2:07:14 probably. Yeah. Well, what you just said just brought up a memory. I don’t know if it’s relevant
2:07:20 to this or not, but you said ADHD. When I was an undergrad, I got tested for ADHD and the psychiatrist
2:07:28 said, it was a big report. I’m summarizing it to the only sentence that I remember. But she said
2:07:33 that I just had delusions of grandeur, right? It wasn’t like an official diagnosis. It was one
2:07:38 line in like an eight-page document. But I saw that just like bounce off the page and I was like,
2:07:44 how do you know that’s a delusion, right? Like it’s only a delusion if enough time has passed so we
2:07:49 could look back and say, yeah, he was wrong. He was way off base. By delusions of grandeur,
2:07:56 what does she mean? She means like I had unrealistic expectations about how my life would turn out.
2:08:04 and that that was causing strife in my personal relationships. And I thought it was wrong. I
2:08:09 still think it was wrong, but it put a chip on my shoulder. It planted a seed that I never forgot.
2:08:11 I have that printed. It’s in my drawer at work.
2:08:13 What does it say?
2:08:21 I just have like literally the report that she gave me back in 2009. It’s like highlighted and
2:08:27 drawn up in my drawer at work. And I just look at it sometimes for motivation because what is a delusion
2:08:33 of grandeur? Like I have plans of grandeur. This is a plan. And so I think about her sometimes. She
2:08:36 probably has no idea who I am. She probably forgot all about me. But
2:08:44 if people want to learn more, where’s the best place they should go to check your work out? You’ve
2:08:49 got your podcast on YouTube. It’s not necessarily a podcast in the same way that this is a podcast.
2:08:53 It’s much more sort of practical and specific around specific subject matters. So I highly recommend
2:08:56 people go check that out. I’m going to link it below and put it on the screen. But where else,
2:08:59 where’s a good place to get in touch with you or to consume your work?
2:09:01 Probably tkopod.com.
2:09:03 Tkopod.com.
2:09:06 As in the Kerner office. It’s just like my main website.
2:09:09 And people can sign up here for your newsletter?
2:09:10 My newsletter, yeah.
2:09:11 I’ll link this.
2:09:12 One email per week.
2:09:13 What do you send out?
2:09:20 Like a very tactical guide on how to start X, Y, or Z business. And I ask my audience like what
2:09:24 they want to learn about. So they tell me and then I dive deep and then break it all down for them.
2:09:26 I’ll link that as well below for anyone that’s interested.
2:09:31 What is the most popular, most frequent request you get through that website?
2:09:33 On business ideas to talk about?
2:09:33 Yeah.
2:09:40 Probably the AI agency, the AI implementation agency idea that I talked about.
2:09:43 And what is the most viral video you’ve ever made?
2:09:52 Oh man, that was about this Chinese street vendor that sold ice cream. She had this little
2:09:56 contraption. It was like a frozen cylinder that she poured cream over.
2:10:00 And it would scrape off ice cream in this really visually appealing way.
2:10:06 And so I basically broke down in 30 seconds, like you could pay $200 for this. You could
2:10:10 post it at any given street corner and you can make a thousand dollars by the end of the
2:10:16 day. So it’s like A, B, C, here’s how to get to this revenue. And like 30 or 40 million
2:10:16 people saw it.
2:10:20 I’ll put the video on the screen for anyone that’s interested in that as well, just so
2:10:22 you know what this ice cream contraption is.
2:10:24 Chris, thank you so much.
2:10:28 Thank you so much for being yourself in every respect. You teach me that there’s many ways
2:10:32 to skin a cat, as the saying goes. There’s many ways to become successful, to be happy, to
2:10:35 be motivated in your life. There’s many ways to become a millionaire. Some of it bucks sort
2:10:40 of conventional wisdom of how to grow a business. And I think that is actually liberating to know
2:10:45 that your own unique wiring and your own unique perspective and ikigai can drive you to the
2:10:49 same outcome of financial freedom. If you do have the self-awareness, if you’re willing
2:10:56 to work hard and if you can cope with the opinions of others. And also if you’re willing to sacrifice
2:10:59 tremendously, because you have sacrificed tremendously. And especially as someone, as a man that has,
2:11:04 a young man that has four kids, you’ve taken on your shoulders a huge amount of risk. And
2:11:09 I applaud you for both simplifying and demystifying the pursuit of side hustles and business
2:11:14 entrepreneurship for so many people. Because I think in the world we live in, it’s probably
2:11:19 going to become more and more important that people have more options in a world of AI. And
2:11:23 if Elon Musk is to be successful in creating the age of abundance that he’s describing,
2:11:26 then maybe we’re all going to end up as entrepreneurs. Who knows?
2:11:27 Who knows?
2:11:28 Thank you.
2:11:28 Thank you.
2:11:29 Thank you as well.
2:11:38 Make sure you keep what I’m about to say to yourself. I’m inviting 10,000 of you to come
2:11:44 even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private
2:11:47 community that I’m launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen
2:11:52 that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I’m recording the
2:11:56 conversation. We have clips we’ve never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with
2:12:02 the guests and also the episodes that we’ve never ever released. And so much more. In the
2:12:06 circle, you’ll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be,
2:12:10 who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have.
2:12:15 But remember, for now, we’re only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it
2:12:19 closes. So if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description
2:12:24 below or go to doaccircle.com. I will speak to you there.
2:12:56 I’ve just got back from a few weeks away on my speaking tour in Asia with my team, and it was
2:12:59 absolutely incredible. Thank you to everybody that came. We traveled to new cities. We did live
2:13:04 shows in places I’d never been to before. During our downtime, talking about what’s coming for each
2:13:08 of us. And now that we’re back, my team has started planning their time off over the holiday period.
2:13:13 Some are heading home, some are going traveling, and one or two of them have decided to host their
2:13:19 places through our sponsor, Airbnb, while they’re away. I hadn’t really considered this until Will in my
2:13:24 team mentioned that his entire flat, all of his roommates were doing this too. And it got me
2:13:28 thinking about how smart this is for many of you that are looking for some extra money. Because so
2:13:32 many of you spend this time of the year traveling or visiting family away from your homes, and your
2:13:38 homes just sit there empty. So why not let your house work for you while you’re off somewhere else?
2:13:45 Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host.
2:13:48 That’s airbnb.ca slash host.