Top 1% Investor: How to Become a Millionaire on a 9-5 Salary | Codie Sanchez

money equals Freedom so the more money you can make the more decisions that you can make by yourself if you understand what attracts money then you probably will never have to work again in your life everybody can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year over time if they focus on earning it the rich actually know how to use debt intelligently they understand that money is simply a tool and a toolkit every single way to make money is sort of like a game CU you never get rich investing the only people who are going to

tell you to go invest first to make your first million or people that are trying to sell you something it's the best way to make money is just [Music] to you built a business around acquiring other businesses and enhancing them where did this all get started for you and what have been the key moments over that journey I stole it all from private Equity so I you know I never would have thought about buying businesses and it seemed too big and scary and I didn't go up a lot of money or cash or understanding of

money and so if you would have told like 20-year-old Cody you would be buying businesses and then buying more businesses and building on top of them I would have thought I had to win the lottery or something and uh but thankfully I got into finance and I and I kind of hated finance and I didn't want to be anybody in any of the companies uh even the people at the top I finally realized that after after like 12 years but I was like wow they really understand this language of money and they know how to

buy assets that make money leave and bring back more friends and so I was like I want to learn how to do that and I just don't want to have to do it in a suit and I want to be able to do it in businesses that I want to be able to do it and I want to be able to hold the businesses forever as opposed to buy them you know split them up for parts and then sell them off and so it got started because I'm a pretty good copycat you know I was

just like oh here's a model that works can I do the same thing but a lot smaller cuz I don't have that much cash and then if it keeps working can I scale up to be like the big boys and so that's where it started I think sometimes the best way to make money is just to follow other people who are really good at making it try to mimic the same thing and then add a little bit of your own sprinkle to it talk to me more about that language of money what does that mean

yeah most important language I've ever learned this money so growing up I didn't understand anything except how to save maybe how to spend less right and you know my parents were my mom was just a 30-year special education teacher my dad uh came from an immig immigrant family to the US and so they didn't have any money and their biggest concern was like don't fall into debt kind of like Dave Ramsey right no debt um save everything you possibly can don't use credit cards the typical things we learned but when I went into Finance I

realized that's not how the rich think the rich actually know how to use debt intelligently they understand that money is simply a tool and a toolkit there's no emotional value to it and that if you understand what attracts money then you probably will never have to work again in your life because you will just be able to take money and like a magnet sit it next to more money and it'll bring it over and uh it took me a long time to figure out how to do that since I was a journalism major but once

I realized oh you know you can people say it on the internet and sort of like a kitchy way now you know get other people's money you know passive income I've never earned a dollar passively you know that's always been active but once you have a decent chunk of change then you can put it into other people spending their active time to make more money for you and that's what I wish I learned early on and and the algorithm that taught me that the most was you know every single way to make money is sort

of like a game and there are some games that are low-level games so think about it like pickle ball let's say if you want to become a top paid athlete get all the chicks you're probably not going to go play pickle ball right it is a game that people play it's not a highly paid game and maybe it's not that high of a status game as opposed to football you know soccer internationally oh well some of the highest paid athletes in the world also you get lots of checks if that's what you're into and so

if you're going to think about where do you spend your time if you want to be an athlete you think about what your skills are but also what's like the best indicator of future success other people who have future success and so with money I realized oh wow if I want to make more of it I probably don't want to be a teacher because that's just not a highly paid job and probably I want to be in the industry in which more people than anywhere else are on the Forbes let's say 100 list and that

would be Finance so the number one category of people on the Forbes 100 list is some version of Finance whether that's buying and selling companies whether that's being an active investor uh in equities whether that's um being in in hedge funds but that's the number one way and so I realized oh okay well I'm going to go learn Finance because they seem to understand how to attract money is that like was it a freedom thing to get out of that like you felt like your time with somebody else's um it was more a curiosity thing

in the beginning I love I love the ability to go deep into a subject matter that uh that I think is rare and so you know if you look at skill sets the way we determine if something's rare or valuable these days is typically monetarily right it's not always the best way maybe spiritually it doesn't make a lot of sense but our society seems to say your skill set is ranked on how much money it makes and so when I thought about it that way um I just wanted to go win the game I wanted

to play the game and I wanted to win and the highest game I could see was one in which you you go and get Financial Freedom and then with Financial Freedom it wasn't that I wanted to work less it was that I don't want other people to assert their will on me and so when I was a journalist I saw a lot of people along the US Mexico border who they had a last name lick Sanchez just like me but they were being human trafficked I mean I was in Wares where women were getting mutilated

along the yeah I mean I saw I've cross crossed the border hundreds of times illegally documenting sort of what happens in Conflict zones and um and after a while I was like what's the difference between them and me it really wasn't that I was American it was they just didn't have any money they had no resources whatsoever so the world asserted its will on them and I didn't never want that to happen to me I would rather try to architect my own world and I think the key to that is money yeah you have to

have a little bit of money to create the opportunity how do how do you go about doing that like do you work at a nine-to-five job and save out money and build these income streams or is there another approach to this yeah well anytime you hear advice from somebody on the internet I always think you should look at their biases right so mine is that I was a I was risk based I didn't want to go out and become an entrepreneur and sleep on a couch or a floor and make zero dollars and have some

crazy idea I didn't have any of that I was kind of scared and I didn't know what my big move could be so for me the best way to do it was I went and worked at 9 to5 in the industry that paid me more than anywhere else which is finance which wasn't really 9 to5 I'm guessing oh God not at all no no it was quite long um but when you're young you have an incredible ability to withstand pain and it's much easier to do it when you're in your 20s than it is in

your 40s or 50s so I was like well I could either have short-term pain in the form of long hours uh and long-term gains or I could have short-term fun and in the future I will probably be sacrificing things for that so I'm like no when I'm young and hungry let's go hard let's work 10 11h hour days and let's let's be voracious in knowledge accumulation and then once I have some skill set that is valuable enough enough then I can assert my will on my hours Etc but to begin with it was just let's

go to finance because they pay really well I want to understand the game of money and after you do that then you can go and build whatever you want but I think starting with a 9 to-5 is super underrated today I think so too like you can learn so much somebody else is paying you to learn if you have the right mindset and approach but not many people seem to have that approach oh yeah I I mean I I totally agree so they when I started at Vanguard they said that they put up $100,000 uh

a year into their new hires and so we had it was called Vanguard University and they trained us on Securities and bonds and I think I have four or five licenses in the Securities industry from my days of Vanguard and then I went to Goldman Sachs where I think to get into Goldman as like a little peon analyst which is what I was um I think I had to do like 13 interviews and like PowerPoint presentations and this and at the time I was like this is very annoying but actually what an Incredible Gift all

that training lths and uh and you go to a startup there's no way they're putting you through a training program there's no way they're critiquing your PowerPoint skills um you know everybody's just barely treading water and so I think if you have a chance to go to a big Corporation where you get well paid they train you a lot and then you put an exit clock on two years from now I'm going to leave at the moment in which they won't pay me more or I'm not learning and because I did that I accumulated Millions

before I ever ran my own business and so a lot of people ask me like how do you have all this money to invest I'm like well you know you're in finance for 11 12 13 15 years you learn to invest the entire time you're doing it you're making a lot of money while you're doing it and you're putting the money back into the stock market and into deals and so I didn't have to risk a lot of my own Capital except in the beginning not being paid very much because you know I was brand

new and I didn't know what I was doing imagine I'm a novice and I've never invested a scent and I have five minutes with you like what's the single biggest lesson that I need to take away lesson number one is you never get rich investing you get rich earning so the only people who are going to tell you to go invest first to make your first million or people that are trying to sell you something because it's just really hard to make money investing without money that's rle number one your biggest Roi is on you

and your time and then rule number two would be once you understand that it's how can you make your time your best investment possible and so that's why you have to obsess on increasing your earnings potential and a lot of times people hear this and then they go well I negotiated with my boss and you know they didn't give me arrays and I'm like no no no that's not the play the play is you understand how a business actually makes money and how you make money for a business and how every action you make makes

a business more or less money and then you try to negotiate a percentage of the money you make the business and like if you are a employee right now you would be incredibly rare and Incredibly valuable if you went to your boss or the CEO of the company depending on size and said something like hey I want to make more money at this company but I would never want to take more money just because I want it of course I understand how business Works instead I was thinking if I hit this goal which is 25%

above the goal that you set for me I'd love to make 5% of that additional 25% I brought in you get to keep the extra 20% you beat your goals I look good compared to all the rest of everybody else and I make money if you make money would you be open to something like that and they might say no and life will be littered with series of rejections continuously if you want to have any success whatsoever but they might also say yes or HM we can't do it that way but we could do it

this way and then you learn how the business makes money and most people will never do that because they just say I want an extra 25k or I want to raise or I'm going to leave and that just pisses your boss off I think most people don't have that mindset like you're either directly contributing to revenue or you're helping somebody contribute to revenue or you're a cost 100% And if you're a cost then what are you doing there if you're not contributing in one way or another to revenue yeah it's the best way to make

more money is to figure out one are you a cost center or a profit Center and then two how much of a profit Center or cost center are you and if you can do that it's not just that you're helping your boss in the company you are now thinking like an owner for the first time ever and you don't have to own a business outright to think like an owner and get a piece of a business it's called partial acquisition and you know a way that you can get part of a company for your work

or Sweat Equity is simply by saying I understand what the business's goals are and I understand the next level we want to get to and if I help us get there could I get some sort of participation for that that is how really rich people think and anybody that goes no that's not possible sadly you will never be rich if you think that way I think like an big organization I could see them saying no to that proposal but if your small business owner was saying no to that proposal I'd be starting to look for

a new job you'd be shocked yeah I mean think about it for you too if they were like Hey listen Shane what if I brought in these three Partnerships and you like them you sign off on them they're on brand for you they bring an extra X dollars for you would I be able to take a cut of the extra Partnerships I brought in even though I'm just your producer you'd be like yeah sure dude yeah great 100% you know and if you do work in a big company then the only question you need to

ask is instead of saying if I do this could I make more it's in what part of the company if I work more and if I hit my goals can I make more money what jobs do we have at this company like that they're typically sales jobs right maybe a leadership or recruiting job um but you want to get on the side of the profit Center and that's how you earn more is is there different sort of phases to our career when you think about it like is it like 20 to 30 we should not

be worried about money at all just learning as much as we can and then switch over yeah or how do you how do you think about that yeah I we talk about it like uh learn earn invest repeat so I think when you're in your 20s you're in your learning phase you still want to try to increase your earnings but if I had to choose between earning more or learning in that period i' optimized for learning because learning has unlimited up side potential like you're never going to go in your 20s from making 30k a

year to 300K a year per year because you negotiated a better salary that's a very UNH likelihood what you very well could if you learn something additional and that onee compound that over 30 years to multiple millions or more and so I obsess on learning first and then as I get into my later 20s and early 30s I start thinking more about earning so how can I make more money like my first job I made $37,000 a year when I was at Vanguard I thought that was a bajillion dollars and uh and then I realized

quickly it wasn't especially after taxes but that first job in Vanguard set me up for you know jobs at four the biggest financial institutions out there and an ability to earn more um when I didn't want to be in the world of Finance anymore and like you said they invested $100,000 in your education Oh Yeah from being there totally and then if I think back even further you know there was a really interesting study and I wonder if you saw it it's called um economic interconnectedness and so basically the idea is this if there's two

groups of uh two neighborhoods with two different groups of people in them where on average the average salary is the same in both neighborhoods right so I don't know average person in both neighborhoods makes 50k it's a lower income neighborhood on both of them but in neighborhood b as opposed to Neighborhood a they have a few people who make a million dollar a year so they just have a few rich people in this neighborhood that interact with some of the poorer people as opposed to this neighborhood they really don't have any if you are in

this neighborhood and even if your family is in that $50,000 a year bucket but you interact with some of those rich people AKA you have more economic inur connectedness this group of people has a 30% higher earnings over the course of their life through the same skill set and experience and what I thought was really interesting about that is that it really just goes to show you kind of want two things you want somewhere you can learn as much as humanly possible and you want to be somewhere where you around people who have more money

than you do by orders of magnitude if at all possible and we don't really know if it's causation or correlation but we do know that if you are around people who are wealthier on average you tend to be wealthier even if that's not your background or Skillet and that I think is kind of liberating why why do you think that that is I have a gap but my guess would be you realize that other things are possible you're not you don't have this ceiling of these like false rules that we learn and then all of

a sudden it's like I can do more I can get out of the situation I can aspire to more yeah I mean I think I think there's a couple that one seems the most likely to me it's just W it's like the um H where was it it was like somewhere in the Nordic countries where they had mostly had female um heads of state I don't remember what they call them there if they're the head of parliament or but mostly female heads of state and so there was a small school uh program where the uh

boys and girls in the school were asked you know How likely are are you to be the next I don't know head of parliament or whatever and in the Nordic countries uh all the little girls raised their hands because they had seen that example so much whereas in the US and this I think this study was done more than 20 years ago so in the US it was all the little boys that raised their hand like I could be president right and it was just had you seen an example that looked like you previously so

I think think that's probably the the driving Factor it could also be um you know you have a conversation with these individuals and you get networking opportunities you have a conversation with these individuals and you just ask them advice so you have advice from people who have already done a thing that you want to do which is an unfair equalizer and it could also be that you know maybe they hire you I mean I I know for young people like me when I was coming up and we had no money I got really lucky to

I don't even know what you would call me I was kind of like a [ __ ] I just was like a little assistant for one of my brother's friends in high school his mom and they had a lot of money and so I would drive their fancy cars to the car wash I would pick up their dry cleaning I would take their dog to the vet all this stuff for basically no money and uh just watching them I learned in ton how do you organize what do you guys do for a living they sold

um they sold equipment rentals like big tractor equipment rentals I was like that's so interesting and that's when I first heard about buying businesses because he sold his equipment uh tractor business and then that it went kind of under went a little sideways and he bought it back for pennies on the dollar and I was like I didn't know you could do that and then that same family was one of my First Investors back when I had a fund in the private Equity space and so that was 20 years later um and I think when

rich people see hungry driven competent humans buy and large they want to help because it's rare and you are somehow a mirror for them they're like oh I remember when I was like you totally H how so if our 20s are about learning how do we get in front of the people that we are most likely to learn the most from be it call them wealthy or high performers whatever you want like how do we put ourselves in that because odds are it's probably not our bws no no and so like how do we seek

this if we're going to spend a decade sort of like learning and trying to increase our income we should be methodical about how we approach those yeah well a couple things I was thinking about this today like we have a company here contrarian thinking which is our media company and then underneath it we have contrarian Capital which is our Venture fund and the Main Street holding company which is where we own a bunch of small businesses inside of it and um we get a lot of applications for jobs and you know I was looking around

at our team today you just met two of two of my employees and the reason that both of them came was because they wanted to be around other people who were high performing so one of the nice things about the internet today is yeah maybe you can't get to Shane as much because you're well known on the internet and you might not have time to Mentor people but how often could you see somebody you liked on the internet and then go I want to work for them you can do that a lot now and a

lot of people who are on the internet are hiring like crazy and so you can't go and just slide into somebody's DMS and say I want to work for you what could I do lazy but instead you could keep on job applications continuously for people that you think are high performing and companies that you think are high performing and uh there was another study that I thought was fascinating about underperformers and high performers and the study basically showed it was hundreds of employees at many different companies and uh it was about proximity so the if

you sat next to a high performer 15% increase in productivity if you sat next to a low performer 30% decrease in productivity and so I don't think people realize that if you just look at it like numbers let's say you make a 100 Grand a year Well if you sit next to Shane or a high performer I make 115k it's a gross generalization but an easy way to think about it if I sit next to Cody who sucks wow what if I only make 70k because my performance has actually dropped and so I think about

that a lot I think the best way to get mentors today is go work for them you know don't don't ask to do stuff one off go to the highest performing companies you think you can get into and if they're not that switch to another one because you get paid to get mentored what a crazy idea and that really didn't exist for like my parents generation so taking all the knowledge you have now how would you go about getting in front you're 22 how would you go about getting in front of Cody yeah um a

couple things one um at the risk of blowing up your inbox no not at all um I mean every single company that is growing has a careers page on it and you will be shocked how often those are not applied to across multiple companies and then how seldom they are chased I think the number one problem if you can't find a job right now and you want one and you can't find a high performing job right now is are you applying like a shotgun or like a sniper rifle and you know I remember for instance

one of my employees that came to work for me she really wanted the job so she applied for I think the job of the time was like maybe my chief of staff she applied for my chief of staff normally you know you fill out the resume you fill it out you that's all most people do but that wasn't going to be her she also was like hey um I imagine you need a lot of newsletter writers this was in the beginning so she wrote an entire newsletter for me kind of in my voice and just

sent it to me like you know didn't ask for anything else then she said I also see you're hiring for these other roles here's a couple other candidates I thought might be interesting I kind of pulled some profiles for you then she said you know I imagine you're really busy you're hiring this Chief of Staff role I just read these two books on um on assistance and I wish I could remember the name of the one book cuz now I give it to some of my employees but basically on making a top performer a higher

performer so she was like you're already great but here's a couple books I'm reading to figure out how do I make great people even greater one she's giving me a compliment little ego stroke and then two she's saying I think I understand what you need which is like you don't have enough time and what if I just solve problems for you so of course I hired her I'm like yeah this is great and so most people don't even when I tell a lot of people in my email inbox they'll ask me for something sometimes an

email really stands out and so I'll respond and say hey you want to learn about fundraising okay great read I don't know Venture style or something if you want to learn fundraising and then come back to me and you know tell me what you think how many people do that nobody reads nobody and so it's like if you really want a thing be obstinate in getting it you will be shocked how few people go to that level and I would say I've done this multiple times in my life so when I I wanted a job

I wanted to head the Latin America business at credit swe back in the day which was a big finance company I was totally um I I I really was not credential enough for that job it was a private Equity job I was going to be building out the region and um I went ham I think I traveled to I went to Europe I went to LA I went to New York where the headquarters was to interview in three different places on my own dime I heckled the head guy there Ryan who I'm still friends with

to this day with all these different ideas for the business with contacts I gave him leads from people I already knew down there until finally you know I was in the final running with one other woman she ended up beating me out I was sad but Ryan came back to me about six months later and was like she's not working out do you want it but by that CH time I had already gotten a position heading another business in Latin America so it was cool but that's also how I got my first job at State

Street I think I did like eight inter interviews and sent custom gifts to a bunch of the the corporate heads then um because just a little bit of effort shows your such a decrease of risk as a new hire I mean most of the reasons that people don't work out when you hire them is is not capability it's effort and so if you can decrease the likelihood that you won't work hard for them even much higher likelihood of get in the gig I used to test people because I would get these inbounds being like I

want to work for you I want to I'm like no problem like let's grab lunch they're like oh I'm not in Ottawa and I'm like oh well if you're ever here let me know do you know how many people ever showed up how many none not one not one person was ever like I will hop on a plane and I'll grab lunch with you and I just thought it was like this excellent filter which is like well if you're not willing to do that why should I invest my time that is a great filter yeah

yeah otta was useful and now yeah because it's so hard to get to right this look so inconvenient nobody ever flies there how do you think is it effort is it followup is it determination is it result like what is it because certain people seem to have it and certain people don't but I also think it's totally learnable winning is probably one of the most learnable skill sets out there when it comes to business because the only thing that really differentiates most businesses from winning and losing is giving up you know and we go and

invest out don't know and 20 or 30 startups a year in our in our uh Venture fund um the research shows by and large the reason why Silicon Valley wants two Founders is because the number one risk for investing in a company is that a Founder gives up number one and so if you know that it is really just grit like Angela Duckworth's study on grit then that is what you want to test for you need to have a good idea you need to have the foundation but we really want to try to figure out

how much pain can you tolerate and the more pain you can tolerate in business the higher likelihood you'll succeed over time it's just shots on goal and so I think people should be really liberated by that I was you know I'm like well you know I don't really have to be smarter than anybody else I don't have to be richer than anybody else I don't have to be better connected I just have to be a little bit aggressively Relentless and that is something anybody can do it's not comfortable in the beginning but you you can

do it so when we go out and we look at okay should I give a couple hundred thousand dollars to this company or this company the number one thing we screen are the founders so how do you screen them I want best of future Behavior's past Behavior I think so um I want to see a history of winning in some way shape or form so uh also hard to beat a losing streak as you know in sports um so a lot of times I want to see yeah I came to this startup the startup was

growing really fast I outre the position and I was ready for my next adventure as opposed to I came to this position the company kind of failed I was bored you know it didn't work out so I want that um the second thing I want is I really want we do a specific type of interviewing with uh Founders it's basically just takes them through every single company they've ever been at and you ask them why they went to that company and why they left and those two questions at least seem to tell us a lot

about do they give up do they chase things do they allow things to come to them and easy enough system to gam you'd probably be smarter at coming up with fancy questions but I imagine like you also people D like I love questions where you unintentionally get people to dulge things this case one of the things that strikes me people would diol is like I didn't like my boss it was like they hours were too long they wanted me to work on we like they'll just passively slip up in some of these things and you're

like red flag red flag well and the Beautiful part is I think with having a brand on the internet um now kind of people know what they're getting into you know and I I tell people listen if you want to go work 9 to 5 have probably little to no stress whatsoever outside of work um not have to work a ton be able to take vacation days have a low likelihood of getting fired go work for Vanguard like they're great at that like they love people to stay forever they pay bottom of the the pyramid

um but because they do that uh people stay there for a long time and there's not as much exterior stress now I was never more stressed than when I worked at Vanguard because I hate being held back by arbitrary rules like no you can't make more money until the threeyear Mark it's like what why I don't like that but I magically have the skills at you know two years and 364 days I don't have them but then all of a sudden yeah and they they just have a very militaristic way of at least when I

worked there how they hired and so I didn't like that I liked to the gold men you go eat what you kill and if you suck you're fired and if you're good you're going to make more money and I was like okay well at least I kind of can get benefit from working harder um but I think a lot of people um these days in particular like the hustle culture thing that'll like it um which I get but I don't think you have to do it forever but you should do it when you're young and

um if anybody's getting triggered thinking about well I wouldn't want to work for Cody because she's super tough and she's going to make me work really hard I think it's a tragedy actually I think I think there's something sort of spiritual about working hard on something you're obsessed with with a group of humans all working towards a goal of getting better like where else can you get constant feedback in business be with a team of high performers and figure out what you're really made of did you see that Tom Brady Baker Mayfield thing where Baker

came in he's like well you know he implied that Brady he was there to like lighten up the locker room and Brady sort of replied this isn't kindergarten winning championships is fine exactly and I was like oh man like that's crazy winning is fun it is fun and you know once you figure out the game you you want to win and if you lose you want to learn a lot um and you don't ever want to not win because you didn't go hard and you know what's fascinating too is you know it's never fun to

fire an employee I've had to to do that many times over my life less fun to get fired for sure um but one of the things I've realized is most often people self- select like they kind of know when they're just not a culture fit yeah and when maybe they don't want to run so hard anymore and when it's not their Obsession and when the thing you do is no longer your obsession and you're no longer learning I think it's perfectly cool to go move on to the next thing and that's happened to me multiple

times when I was working at Big corporations and I just but I did it with hopefully a good amount of Grace I think what goes sideways is when um you turn yourself into a victim you know they didn't promote me the company sucked blah blah blah instead it's like listen you've taught me so much thank you for letting me work here for this period of time I hope I've been high value to you I'm ready for my next Evolution and I want to make sure you have a smooth transition like how can we do that

and if you'll do that like I'm pretty much friends with every single boss I ever had back in the day minus minus two I did I did burn a few Bridges but um for the most part I'm friends with most of them even ones where I really disagreed with like what they were doing in the business and I thought I should do it my way but it wasn't my chips so I had to go get my own if you're a boss manager owner how do you determine if somebody's interested or obsessed that's such a good

question um I always think about what can you not sleep for the want of doing you know again I I find business to be sort of spiritual and so I think when you felt that flow state in business before it could be writing emails for me like when I am writing a really good email and I am in the zone and I am focused it's maybe the most beautiful thing I do it's my favorite thing in the world and I'd rather do it than go and drink beers at the bar and so um I like

to ask people a couple questions one of my favorite questions is when was the last time you you pulled an all nighter you stayed up all night working on something that you loved and a lot of times you can tell if somebody is an interested vers obsessed person by the fact that they're like [ __ ] I've never done that you know yeah um or they might say the opposite you know what I don't I don't work as well at night but God I remember like a couple weeks ago we had this problem and I

was just up at 3:00 a.m. thinking about it so like got up and I just got the chalkboard out and what I figured out is this and so I really like that question um the second one is thinking about I'll ask something like um when do you when was the last time that you really believed X was the decision for the business but one of your colleagues or or somebody else wanted to do why and I just want to see how passionate they are about end now a lot of times the answer for that is

something like um you know I I wanted to get a raise and I didn't get get arrays or something like that but a good answer sounds like um well they wanted to launch a new product focused on Argentina and I told them that was a terrible idea because right now the government in Argentina was XYZ and if we focused on an Argentinian bond fund we were going to get slaughtered and I put together this PowerPoint that kind of explained why and I thought through these Frameworks and I looked at these historical models and like that

was the reason why and you know and it turned out you know I was right and I I either I wish I would have presented it more um convincingly or I realized that my opinion you know wasn't going to carry weight there and so I wanted to go somewhere and take my own risk like that's what a great answer looks like and whether you're right or wrong it's a great answer right like because if you say I was wrong yeah but I did all the steps that I was supposed to do I learned from that

now all of the sudden you get a different sort of tell yeah that's true because a lot of times it's just I want to understand how your mind works because we what we're always searching for is like examples where we're the hero right where we're sort of like saving the day but it's it's really um I think interesting when people point out I wasn't a hero yeah I was totally wrong in this situation but I did make an argument I did sort of like outline my thinking and maybe we were lucky or unlucky um because

nobody corrected my thinking or maybe I learned because I missed this huge thing yeah and like what did you do after that like I remember I ran a business where we sold money market funds um to Big pensions and Sovereign wealth funds and uh overnight my business was eviscerated I mean I'm talking about billions and billions of dollars in assets under management it was at State Street so it wasn't like all my money it was their money but uh overnight it was totally killed and it was because of government regulation that did this silly technical

thing um called they took away stable nav um I won't get into what that is but they basically changed the way accounting for this type of of product worked and that meant that the pensions and Sovereign wealth funds couldn't use anymore so I went from selling billions and billions of dollars of this stuff to oh my God massive redemptions they were like give me all my money back I was like oh this isn't great and um and in that moment I realized we had built a business that was technically pretty great like incredible sales team

great customer support great brand great product great team and we didn't think of like our biggest risk which was the government regulation and so that business basically became like unprofitable overnight and uh and my next decision was I went to Georgetown and I got an international MBA and I went to Georgetown in particular because I realized I didn't understand anything about government regulation and oversight like nothing I was so Finance markets investing and I didn't realize that the government is probably one of your biggest risks often and so um so I ended up doing that

Executive MBA for two years while working at the company and opening up a Latin am American Investment business that was a different type of investment but like that would be a great example of like I lost awfully and so then what do I do about it you know do I go curl up and die or do I go learn again so I don't make the same lesson twice hopefully you had another mistake that stands out for me which was you lost $12 million on a cannabis deal oh yeah in like three months what happened there

yeah well that one we didn't scream the founder very well I mean this was a this one was a scary deal because we didn't have that big of a fund I think our fund was like 60 or 100 million bucks back then and uh cannabis was raging you know it was like straight up like hockey stick like growth and the fund before that this was our second fund so the fund before that we killed it it was like 3 to 5x return uh over a pretty short period of time investors got their money back we

looked really smart well the second fund uh was really happening during Co and uh Co almost Creed a bunch of cannabis businesses and uh and the Market started drying up so no more Capital to fund cannabis businesses and capital is the lifeblood of businesses and especially for these businesses they were almost like Venture businesses where if they didn't keep getting more cash they weren't profitable so they weren't sustainable so this business we had put in like12 million into this business and it was like a it was a products business located out of California and um

basically like I can't remember but it felt like two weeks later after we put the money into this uh business we get a phone call from the founder and the founder is like we're basically out of money we don't know what we're going to do next and we need more cash and we were like excuse us like we just did this huge analysis you told us these numbers we confirmed in the bank account well it turns out he had all these historical payments that he was paying through you know massive fraud you know total malfeasant

across the company that we just completely missed and sometimes that happens um we were like well [ __ ] you know is this company going to fold and so thankfully we have uh on our team A guy by the name of Joe who's our turnaround guy and he had to fly out to Oakland and basically over the course of the next four weeks do massive cuts and restructuring and some some smart turnaround stuff in order to save the company but uh I thought we were going to go under and that was one of our murky

Investments that we had made like two weeks prior and um and my biggest lesson learning from there is well two things really I remember when I met the guy and now I have learned to really trust my gut on the first interaction with somebody I'm an invest in I just didn't really trust him he said a couple things that were a little flashy um he drove a flashy car which is always to me a red sign a red red flag when uh the company's not yet profitable and um a little too excitable a little too

L fair but my partners loved him and so I didn't really raise my hand and I didn't put my foot in the sand so that was my fault that was the first red flag and that's happened to me multiple times of Partnerships it took me like three times of having sort of bad Partnerships like that happened start listening to you yeah if if I don't like it on the first go then we're waiting a year is our new rule so if I feel any sort of anything doesn't mean I'll never do a deal with a

person but I'm going to watch them for a year it's kind of hard to fool somebody for a full year so that was one and then the second thing was uh we now do forensic audits on most of these businesses which basically means you get somebody to get in there and you get really deep into the numbers because even if they not committing fraud a lot of entrepreneurs aren't the cleanest with their books and so you know you can commit fraud on purpose or by accident both suck and so uh I never wanted that to

happen again it's almost like people don't realiz like you're you're the only shareholder yeah you can sort of like do what you want that's legal but if you're not the only shareholder and now all of a sudden you're spending other people's money 100% And so there's a huge difference between the expense accounts I would imagine yeah yeah and a lot of times they they've never before raised Capital so they get a bunch of money in and just like I would if if I had Ever Raised capital for my independent businesses you're like okay now let's

grow but you don't really know how to look into the future with that kind of money and say if I do this action will it make me more money because you've never done that game before right and so I think a lot of times that's a danger point in startups I also Joe could anytime you see a a startup founder who takes capital from third parties and they start like doing Twitter threads and writing blog posts it's like a red flag unless they're like unless they're a media company it's like no no no stay focused

you know how do you think about focus when you when you see somebody one of the intuition things I'm imagining is sort of like they're distracted they got like 20 things going on when you're investing I would imagine you want 100% yeah well I it really depends first is this their first rodeo if it's the first rodeo and the first time you've ever run a business do one thing really well until that thing is profitable self- sustainable and you don't have to focus on it 100% of the time that's my rule if it's not your

first rodeo and you've already had a successful exit or two then I think you can get better at layering and so you know one of the things I'd want to see if I was investing in Founders a good example would be like Brett Adcock who started figure the robotics company so he um had before had a company that was uh drones that company did really well they exited that company Big Exit then he started figure he raised a ton of cash now the company's worth more than a billion dollars well Brett also started another company

after that and that company is focused on like security inside of schools and public areas and typically if Brett was a first-time entrepreneur I would be like red flag you know we should watch why he's starting these two companies since he's a multi-time Founder less concerned um and then the third thing to think about is are they a creative or not like does 1 plus 1 equal three and so if um Kim Kardashian would be a great example so Kim Kardashian has her big media Empire right you could say just stay focused on that Kim

well she's looking for better ways to monetize that audience so she has skims right plus she has Sky her um her private Equity portfolio right you know plus she has um whatever Kim calls her Cosmetics company but they're all sort of a creative because they use her media platform and she gets to sell similar things to her audience and increase her overall basket size and so um that's how I think about our businesses today I'm like Cody you're not allowed to start a beauty company because that's not a creative it has to be like bis

Scout which is our business buying and selling Marketplace it has to be resi Brands which is our small business trade franchises it needs to be like right now we're focused a lot on Happ helping our businesses scale not just people buy a business but okay you bought it now let's get it to 10 million instead of 1 million and so it has to really Ladder into the same portfolio otherwise you're distracting yourself what are some of the biggest lies or misconceptions that you hear about money one that it's hard to make I do not actually

think money is hard to make I think it is hard to get a skill set that is valuable and once you get a skill set that is valuable money can be very easy to make and people confuse the two they say like money's hard and it's like no no you just haven't obsessed yet on having a skill set that people will pay enough money for but you you can do that and then money can become easier um I also think it's a very freeing idea like if you keep telling yourself making money is hard making

money is hard making money is hard well it's going to be hard but if you keep telling yourself no it's actually not hard I just haven't done what is necessary yet to get what I want um that would be first and then the second is that I think money is a cruel mistress so I always say money likes attention just like a mistress does and if you don't pay attention to her somebody else will and so um you know I think there's a lot of benefit early on in your career to sort of obsessing on

Race to your first 500k and feel no shame about that shows that happiness increases post 500k in income uh or up to 500k in income after 500k they're sort of these plateaus and it's not really materially different um and then the second thing on it is really obsessing on money on a daily basis like are you looking at your bank account are you looking at the bank account of your business are you looking at how much you make or sell in products are you taking one action every single day to make more money a money

related action and I think if you do those things you'll kind of be surprised at how you can compound over time are there different skill sets between acquiring and sort of maintaining or keeping your money oh yeah I mean uh it's always in my opinion easier in the beginning to save but easier in the long term to earn so you can only save save your way to zero you you know there's very there's limited downside but there's unlimited upside and so I do think that what do they call that they call that like um spending

creep lifestyle creep and so there's certainly that the more money you make the more you spend and then all of a sudden you realize that you've totally outspent your income that is a big problem for many people um but I I think on average we've been told that we need to save a lot more and here's why um one if saving consistently what does that mean it means that we're putting money into third- party investment products um it means that we have money sitting at Banks like if we save we are helping a lot of

other individuals make money if we earn and invest money in our individual businesses we are actually giving money back to employees we are giving money back to local economies like this benefits a few really big guys saving uh earning benefits a lot of little guys and so I I understand why Society has pushed us to save more as opposed to earn more um I also think by and large money equals Freedom so the more money you can make the more decisions that you can make by yourself and most people um they don't want free people

you know the the the people on high really want us to follow rules and to think in terms of safety not opportunity and so I think we should obsess on making money and you should obsess on making money because then you get to push back when people tell you things that you don't want to do and then you have freedom yeah 100% ultimate freedom in terms of you call it [ __ ] you money call it whatever you want but it's like no I don't want to do this thing yeah 100% now I can opt

in or opt it yeah I mean and and you know in society today it's totally doable I think it is it's very hard these days to make a profitable business I think there's never been a harder time to make a profitable business never been an easier time to start a business that's kind of why I obsess I'm buying businesses because you just know it's already making money it has a history of past performance so best predictor future behavior is past Behavior it's not a guarantee but it is a higher indicator and so because of that

I like buying businesses because then you can operationalize them you can increase the growth um and so you know I I also think people listening you know before I made quote unquote a lot of money um if you would have told me that I would have a 9 figure holding company or that I would have all of these small businesses I would have thought you were crazy and it just wasn't part of my psyche that that was possible for a normal human being and even though I get [ __ ] about it on the internet

I like to push upon people that it's it's actually very possible for you to have a lot of wealth you know now I don't think you most people want a nine figureure holding company actually it's there's always something going wrong there's always challenges there's always mistakes it's lost stress um but but I do think everybody can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year over time if they focus on earning it I do think that's largely possible it's almost like people they want the Oken but they don't want the trade-offs to come with the Oken

we look at the gold medal but we don't see the training days that are like 400 a.m. constantly the injuries the recovery the lack of family time we don't see everything that goes into making that possible and if we do see it we often don't want it yeah I think that's true is there a difference between like a rich mindset and then a broke mindset then many things I think couple things rich people overall they really don't believe in that word impossible you know they're not like if you said to a really rich person um

hey it it's just not possible for you to start this next business and execute on it kind of doesn't in their psyche so they have what I've always thought of as like an armor of NOS so rich people have gotten told no so many times they've been rejected so many times that it almost just bounces off of them they kind of go yeah I'm going to do it anyway thanks for the feedback I'm going to try it I think poor people they have confirmation bias of no so when stuff has happened to them that's bad

or when stuff hasn't worked out instead of an armor of no they're wearing a coat of no they're like yep just let it in let's just build some more on this coat let's make this cape longer and I think if you can kind of visualize it like that a deflection versus an accumulation of nose that's the difference between rich people and BR broke people and in my career for a very long time I think you want to be around people who often tell you do more go harder keep going as opposed to people who say

that's not possible it worked for you but it wouldn't work for me and I think that's the difference also between allies those are people who want you to win and friends who are people that want you to stay with them whatever level they're at go deeper on that so um I think most friendships if you just think about human nature like I saw this cool thing I wish I had like a uh it's kind of like this so um there's a monk by the name of Dand pondi sorry if I [ __ ] that up

but something like that and he talks about how as you get rich um you sort of and I'm going to hold it like this you sort of rise up like this and let's say your friends your family you know your colleagues your husband or or girlfriend or boyfriend or something they're sort of these corners and as you start rising in wealth or success what happens they're like wait a second you're leaving me behind I love you I don't want you to leave me you seem to be superseding me this is scary natural response but what

they don't realize is right now as you're Rising they're not really Rising you're just getting further away from them but as you get higher you pull the rest of them along with you and so with most friends all they see is this bottom part of your journey they don't actually realize forward looking you're going to take them with you now the people who do see this are your allies those those are the people who want you to win no matter what and those are the people who see oh okay if Shane keeps winning and then

he takes us you know with him to some of these events and we meet these people too and I share his podcast and he kind of shares my new newsletter we're all gonna win this is oh man Shane did it I can do it that's an ally oh man Shane's gotten kind of too big for his britches oh man Shane thinks that he's better than us I never hear from Shane I miss you Shane friend and um and I think in our life as we're in our growth Journey obsessing on a few more allies is

helpful do you lose friends as you go up what like what's your experience with that yes I think uh I think that success bying of itself these days is sort of a lonely Pursuit and that when you are focused on building something you know you're not boring you're building but you are in an era where if you don't have Focus you won't win it is it is definitely a Relentless grind in order to build something completely new for yourself and so I mean I had a like I remember I had a a series of girlfriends

in college that I was quite close with I think very highly of them still to this day um but I remember you know I posted this one picture on Instagram really sort of like flippantly I didn't think anything of it and in the picture um we'd all been drinking so we kind of looked goofy we were these young college girls you know so we're like I think they look cute I look a little crazy and uh and I I posted it like something like you know I I've been there partying just like you have too

you know you can you can do both something like that and and I remember one of them you know texted me and was sort of like how dare you you know you think so little of us we're just your partying you know [ __ ] drunk friends um and we were never the same again after that so I apologized profusely I was like I don't know how you could seen that that is not at all what I meant by it in fact never even entered my Consciousness and of course I'll take it down if it

makes you feel uncomfortable and uh and from that moment we've never been friends again and this group of girls and I have never been friends again and at first I really couldn't wrap my head around it but I do think what happens is when you become really successful you are a mirror on the things somebody else could have been and so you are a reflection of every decision that they made that was shortterm as opposed to longterm and so I've lost many a friend by the mirror and I think that is I always openly welcome

them back and wish them well um but I I do think that you won't succeed very far if you stay around the same people that you started with I never thought of it like air before that's a really interesting way to frame it yeah do do men and women think about money differently I want to add one other thing so one thing I I don't like actually is I have noticed a lot of people on the internet saying things like you know if they're not above you if they're not in front of you you've got

to leave them behind and if if you know they're not moving as fast as you are then you know they will you don't need to be friends with them anymore and I totally disagree with that and in fact the research really shows the opposite Arthur Brooks does an incredible series of studies about having um what he calls worthless friends and worthless friends are the friends that you have no transactional you want from you don't want anything from them they don't want anything from you they want to hang out with you they want to go on

a walk with you they don't want your email list they don't want access to your money they just want to have a beer on a Friday night and these friendships end up materially increasing our happiness these worthless friends whereas these transactional friendships actually end up in many ways decreasing our happiness and so I think when people say hey if they're not on your level ditch them they don't actually understand the research and I I had a a friend here actually who I saw get really really successful on the internet and and I saw the most

fascinating thing um which was I I just started meeting people who had done business with this person before and every one of those people as this person superseded them had sort of a negative story to tell about them oh interesting you know and it was like yeah the second that you know they got bigger than I did I became irrelevant you know the second that I was no longer useful I was after five or six of these stories I thought wow I don't think that people realize the repercussions of not allowing other people to rise

with you and in fact your reputation is one of your most valuable assets and people often think about the reputation online is like to the masses am I a good person it's like nah to the guy at the grocery store are you a good person to the person that you did a deal with who was your last employee or partner didn't work out are you a good person and if you're not to those people who are worthless to you then it will come around and I truly believe that and so I just want to say

that because I've thought it before too like hey if they're not on your level keep going I don't actually think that's true and I think it will catch up to you and I've seen it firsthand one of Buffett's filters I think if I remember my reading correctly is that uh he was super friendly with people but if they asked him for a favor it was an indication that they weren't necessarily friends in the other person's eye and I thought that was like an interesting sort of not like the common favors you would do with your

friends like oh my husband needs a job or my wife needs a job those kind of favors yeah um I thought that was an interesting thing and I never thought about it again till this moment I think I've had a lot of screens over mind I've only been on the internet for like three years or something like that you've been playing this game a lot longer so you know you're just your spectrum is so much wider and more Vivid than mine is oh you play it better you have millions of followers well do I play

better I like game of Ying things and I think you like deeply understanding things is sort of how I perceive you at least and so I find growth to be really fun that's like one of my favorite games so I obsess on growth um and and sometimes to the detriment of deep understanding and I think that seems to be one of your skill sets which is really beautiful um but the in the time that I've been on the internet I think everybody's my buddy so like you know when I meet people I truly am like

no he was so nice did a podcast we're like best buds we're texting each other and I've had to realize oh like they're just really charismatic we're not that good of friends and that's okay um and so to your point I don't know on the on the favors thing I guess I'm always curious how people are going to be when people lose money or things go sideways totally when people are talking [ __ ] about you when it's inconvenient to be your friend um who will be there and so when those moments happen to me

one of my favorite mentors always said allow accept thank you let it go and so when something tough is happening I'll go okay this is happening I accept it's happening thank you for this happening now kind of Let It Go like whatever it is move on and um and I'll kind of see who there checks in who there speaks out and that I think is really valuable feedback it's not that you're judging them you're just saying how much am I going to give you long term like how much of me do I want to invest

in you as AOW fellow human I do believe in choosing sides and I think um I want to find people who have at times done a really inconvenient thing for themselves because it was the right thing to do or they thought it was the right thing to do totally that's a great indicator to me of of a human with moral Integrity do you have that mindset based on what you just said it sort of brought this and correct me if I'm wrong that you're either with me or against me no but I have a mindset

of can I trust you can I trust you in my darkest moments you know like I I joked the other day I had a little um incident with a girlfriend and I joked with her about it I was like man wait until you meet the real me you know like if this pissed you off who wait until you wait until you really get to build me you know and um and we joked about it and then we were fine but I do have that belief that like you know I want friends who will hide you

in the basement you know when you need to and Chris and I who's my husband he and I talked about that a lot during Co um because there was so much craziness happening in the world and and I remember thinking if we have an unpopular view who would hide us not because they even believe what we believe I don't think you need to do that but because they're like you're my you're my people and I love you and I'm going to be there for you and so um no I don't believe in moral absolutism like

it's actually interesting that our at our company right now for the first time ever we we have something so beautiful I've never seen which is um we have really really conservative people at my company and really liberal people and we talk about it and in fact we of often jokingly label each other like we'll be like you know blah blah blah you know the commi and blah blah blah you know the the you know right of um the right of Rush Limba you know and and what's interesting about that is with these groups of people

they start to respect each other as humans and realize that political views are like the most uninteresting thing about most people and I've never had that at a company before and I really like it and so they have this curiosity about one another as opposed to judgment I have a theory that part of this whole work from home thing is actually amplifying political divide because we go to the office we have to work with the person who thinks opposite to us and all of a sudden it takes the power out of that position it takes

the oh they're a nice person they might believe something completely different but now all of a sudden like it just tones down the emotion but when we don't go to work we sort of we're on a laptop and we're commuting the whole world just looks like us like our friends probably vote the same we do they make the same amount of money that we do the world looks it starts to get insulated yeah it it's it's a beautiful view I mean some of the research shows one higher levels of depression and anxiety with work from

home so I actually think that was a great lie that was a big beautiful lie it's sitting in our sweatpants in our house on on Zoom meetings all day would actually make us happy and give us more freedom hard disagree I do think that sitting in a cubicle you know under fluorescent lights is a form of like mental Insanity over the long term and I have no interest in doing that again um but but I do not think that we humans were meant to be isolated and there's much research that that supports that and to

your point um it's so much easier when you're an anonymous troll on the internet to hate everybody and to think that they hate you and um another thing that I learned from Arthur books who's become a friend of mine he wrote a book called love your enemies and um and I remember I have this one Twitter Troll and like Shane when I tell you like I mean almost every day like tweets about me weird stuff like she's a dude you know um she was a secretary at Goldman Sachs just um she never even worked at

Goldman Sachs she owns no businesses she um I don't know what else and all these things and it was annoying me to be honest I was like but like do I need to be showing my tax return like want to picture of me in a bathing suit and um and at first I remember wanting to clap back and then I thought nah don't feed the trolls that's not very useful and then second I was like very judgmental of this person I was like what a [ __ ] basement dweller you know blah blah blah this

person this person and then I read uh love your enemies and talk to Arthur and he was like just try this thing for me me he's like just like very sincerely wish this person well like anybody who in your mind okay in your mind wish this person well um like send them like Good Good Vibes and hope that that they are wonderful and then he said because wonderful happy people don't do things like this and I was like and then I did it and I will kid you not this is my woooo because we're an

Austin Crystal center of the world they publicly posted like two weeks later he hey sorry Cody Sanchez I actually think you're a really you seem like a really good person like out of nowhere and dm' me like a dissertation sort of apologizing oh wow I know no I don't think the universe does that every single time but it taught me a lesson which is like every time like I get hate I just try to send back a little love because I think it's hard to combat and I think negative emotions are really draining and a

lot of work and so instead um I try to not have that the temptation I think in that situation is to like go Ted for T right like to reply to every post to like and then you get angry and then you're sort of like defending yourself why didn't you do that Arthur really helped me simultaneously I think another truth is like especially with the internet if you mute block these people ignore they don't exist in your sphere they're they're not in the room with you ever they're not in your business they're not in your

friend group you're not shaking hands with them so the only way they exist is if you allow them which is actually a fascinating sort of phenomenon to think about but if you don't look at their stuff how do you even know it's happening you could say well other people could send it to you tell people don't to not send it to you don't look at the comments ignore the DMS and the only times that like this really gets to me is when I think there's a kernel of Truth so like if if if we made

a typo on a post and so somebody was right about that or if if we get something wrong or um you know if we write a story and it wasn't the right one you know then I'm like okay that bothers me but for the most part they don't exist in my sphere because if they're online it's only if you let them like Mark Andre famously who I'm a fan of and have grown to respect like he uses the block button pretty consistently because he just doesn't want to engage with those people so does nval rant

he's like wish you well but out of my sphere because it's my energy is like too precious to protect yeah I think it's an underutilized feature for anybody who has a large social media following yeah I think so too I want to Circle back to reputation I want you to go deeper on reputation like what what do you see as the advantages disadvantages like how do you think about reputation as a concept first of all Buffett said the most important thing which is what did he say exactly it was something like um he said if

an employee makes a mistake and loses US money I will allow that but if an employee makes a mistake and uh hurts our reputation they will immediately be fired and I think that's quite true because it's very hard to get back your reputation and especially if it's uh your fault like you did something that is out of sync with who you say you are publicly when I think about reputation I try to be as transparent as humanly possible on all the things good bad and other wise that are true with me so for instance um

we know that a lot of female Founders get a hard time and uh like you know Business Insider uh pieces written on them for being too harsh and too whatever and there's sort of this phenomenon of this happening to female Founders um and uh and I think sometimes that's because they portray themselves as like sweet kind you know I'm here for other women whatever and and I'm always nice all the time and so I don't do that I'm like I'm tough I'm tough sometimes and you know and and we work really hard and if you

don't want to be a part of that don't work at my company and so I try to say the quiet part out loud as often as humanly possible and then we do what's called inoculations against reputation which is basically can you say things a few times that you think are very very true but you know will be very very unpopular and if you do that so often then people don't get that surprised by what you say and I think Joe Rogan's a great example of this you know he often says the quiet part out loud

he says things he knows will be quite unpopular and because he does that people one think he's telling the truth more often and two his audience is inoculated because the people who really hate who he is and the things that he does they just bail like they leave and so every so often I do kind of this coling of our audience because I don't want to have to deal with trying to be a perfect person I'm very flawed and with our company contrarian thinking we're very flawed we're all just like a bunch of you know

sort of two bipedal monkeys running around trying to figure it out right like we all have flaws we all make mistakes we all have bad days we all but there's no tolerance for that yeah because you're you're Cody Sanchez like you have millions of followers like you you can't have a bad day yeah it's it's weird um I also think that I think your reputation is also it can be cultivated and so you know it's this series of small decisions you make every single day that becomes the person that people think you are and so

I try to really have congruence between that I mean you'll see you know if if if you worked for my company I'm not asking anybody to do anything I wouldn't do that would be very hard for somebody to claim it would be very hard for somebody to claim that they work harder than I do I I don't you know I work quite hard I wouldn't really allow that um there's no world in which I say Chris and I my husband and I have a perfect marriage you know we fight all the time we try to

figure it out um so I I do try to say all of those things but I also remember that I asked for this you know I got on the internet I got obsessed with this idea of growth that is on me and so I think it's one thing if people get famous sort of by accident maybe um or they're a CEO of a company and they're just trying to grow a company and then they get slaughtered but if you're going to try to be an influencer if you're going to try to be a celebrity like

it comes with the territory I think so that's a decision you have to make one way or the other um but one thing I am shocked by that I don't think people are honest about is people who are very famous and wellknown on the internet they're obsessed with their reputation and brand it is never by accident this [ __ ] is cultivated it is created it is mocked up it is Powerpoint like I always like to use the rock who I think really highly of but when you look at the Rocks Instagram for instance count

for me next time just for shits and giggles how many of those pieces of content are an ad for like his energy drink for his face cream for his next movie for his you know XFL for WWE almost every post is like I would say probably somewhere between 80 and 98% of the posts are wow how could he get away with that because he has such a strong brand and every single thing that he promotes is so tied into his brand that it feels effortless but it is absolutely not effortless and so give yourself some

credit I think anybody who's trying to make a brand online or you're trying to build a business like nobody gets Famous by accident for the most most part they all cultivated even like the Haw tuille girl or whatever that chick's name was um she's got a whole team behind her she's got agents now she had people doing Her filming for her the second that she went super viral people creating her people funding her own content creation process yeah and so I think we all need to be a little bit more honest about that because people

are like oh I just grew because you know it just happened one day and you're like no you didn't that's not how it works so as I was doing research for this I was watching some you my kids are totally into YouTube so we're watching YouTube we're like come across some of your stuff I'm trying to research this my kids are interested in business so are they 15 and 14 oh that's amazing you look young and so you I know I feel old on the inside some days uh and one of the shows we used

to watch was undercover billionaire yeah so my youngest son was like ask Cody what she would do if she was dropped off like Grant Cardone was and I forget the other guy's name and you know you're in you get a 100 bucks you get a phone you get no contacts you're the same age you are now you go to this random rule town and he wanted to know the answer to this question it's great question um I'd go find the most expensive thing to sell that I could sell uh I think the fastest way to

make money when you have no money is find other people who already have something valuable and sell it to other people and so I remember I think I watched one episode of of the one that Grant was on and he was in like Philadelphia or something and it was sort of like a manufacturing Town um in that instance I think I would go apply for as I mean you go to the library because you don't have a phone right and you maybe have a car in gas I can't remember you get a cell phone and

you have a car and a full tank of gas but you have no place to stay you only have 100 bucks yeah I that would be the very first thing I'd do so I'd probably go to the library i' get on the computer at the public library and I'd start looking up in this geographic area or because remote sales happens now uh I would go figure out how could I get something where I could sell something as fast as possible and with as high of a price tag as possible and uh and the reason why

is that's just a game of of that's a numbers game and so you know especially with my skill set already I know how to sell things and if somebody already has a market where other people are paying for it all I'm doing is slotting myself in and then once I had done that I would probably find a business where I could get a cut of the business for the sales that I brought in so especially because the goal is to like get to aill bucks right is that what you're supposed to do three months 90

days to build a million dollar business oh yeah I mean but I wouldn't build it that's where I'm probably different than Grant I would go and I would negotiate a portion of the business I would basically go and I'd say all right you're selling um what would be what would be I mean I probably do something in the online space because I play around in that space so much right now so I'd go to a bunch of businesses that were online businesses that sold things online I'd probably try to broker deals between B2B companies and

uh and I try to close a couple of those deals and then say can I get a percentage of your company for all the deals that I brought in and um but if you didn't have that skill set to negotiate deals to start You' just start with selling as much as humanly possible and even if you did that if you did that with a boomer based business where that Boomer wants more sales needs somebody Young and Hungry you could negotiate part of that business just to Apprentice for them and take it over over the long

time using seller finance it and that I think is so underutilized today because you've run a business before how many times in your varying businesses have you been like somebody came to me with the right price in the right terms to sell yeah [ __ ] take this thing take it and so business owners have that all the time and people underestimate it so there'd probably be a lot of door knocking I'd be going to door too saying have you ever thought about selling your business have you ever thought about selling your business have you

thought about thought about buy selling your business and using seller financing to basically acquire the business with very little risk you 100% that's a really interesting approach nobody on the show did this the reason we watched this what I loved about it just being a parent was it's just the mindset of the people going in wasn't the person it wasn't how they went about it it was the fact they were rejected over and over again and they just kept trying new things until something stuck and then they would like oh I'm going to go I'm

going to do more of this this worked now okay now I can feed myself now I can sort of like get a hotel now I can start building a business now I can get a base I can build an agency I can convince other people to be my allies yeah and I just love the mindset that people and I was like this is the mindset you need as kids so true I mean I should play around with that a little bit more in our content because I think one of the things I like to to

try to push upon people is you're way more capable than you think you are totally you just haven't done what is required you've done what you wanted and if you were honest with yourself about that you would realize that if I worked 10% harder than I'm doing right now on a thing that I really do not want to do very first thing in the day I would build up willpower that would allow me eventually to do the things that most people are not willing to do and when you're willing to do that you can win

over time I mean even small things like I have a friend here he's a really good guy he's very quirky but he you know he's he's one of the guys where when I wasn't on the internet at all I was running a finance company back in the day when I first met him and I just I reached out to him randomly now mind you I had a lot of money at the time I knew nothing about the internet and like a lot of money meaning like you know I I was doing the okay and um

I reached out to him because I wanted to understand the internet I thought that in the future we might sell investment products and build investment businesses with the internet and not with my old method which was like going to pensions and S and wealth funds door knocking steak dinners all that stuff I think I was right um and and I've proved that but back then I wasn't so sure I was like how do newsletters work like what is email look like like Finance were were so were dinosaurs with that he was the master was Sumo

me right exactly and so he had a conference or two that I went to and and I was just like you seem really good at emails you sell things with emails like how does that work and um and I reached out to him and I sent I did research on him online and I found out that he was into tacos like weirdly into tacos and so I bought him a bunch of socks that had his face on it in a taco and I sent them to him with like a note that was like hey I'd

love to learn from you you know love what you're doing no need to respond if if you're way too busy like cuz I think that's important too you know the hey you don't have to respond anyway for whatever reason he did respond and we became sort of friends and then he helped teach me a lot of things and if you don't have money right now and you don't know how to make it one of the best ways to start is just to learn to negotiate things that you don't want to which is like he has

a famous thing where he goes into coffee Stu shops even Starbucks and like orders a coffee and then goes I'd love a discount and then shuts up and I'm like what there's no discount here and he's like well I'd just love one like if that was at all possible is there any way for me to get get a discount and often he is rejected but sometimes he is not and just those little lessons of like if I was on undercover billionaire I'd be going to hotels and saying like hey how could I negotiate a stay

for ex do could I do work around here to do that what do you need help with like you're on your shift right now what if I take over a couple hours of your shift do you think I could stay in an abandoned room like I would just be trying to negotiate every single thing I could because you'll be shocked how seldom Americans in particular do that yeah we're brought up not to do that it's like the price is the price whereas a lot of other cultures it's sort of like the price is the starting

point oh my God we have this guy that works for us in our investment team his name is Kareem and he's Egyptian and I think learning from other cultures on negotiation is such a life hack because they do it like a second language if my first language that's most profitable is money the second one is negotiation and Kareem will do it with this huge smile the whole time that's a big key so every time he asks for something there's a big smile and he's like well you know he's very diminutive he's like kind of shrugged

his shoulders like well we could do this but like we could do that like what do you think about that and the whole time you're negotiating with him you like the guy yeah and he kind of weasles his way in to getting you to consider another perspective and uh and he jokes that like that's just like Egyptian dinner conversation that that's it's nothing and he's not that special but um having people on your team and learning from friends from other cultures is really powerful and so any you get to to play with other people who

have normalized this idea of barter I think is a great way to get better at making money the key is like the first no is really the final no yeah right like if you stop at the first no that's a great line right like you you're done but like most people are not going to go past the first no so you've already differentiated yourself I do this with the kids like I love in Canada we get snow so I make them like knock on doors and shovel driveways wow and and we got to a point

where somebody would have a driveway service so literally they're paying somebody to come like plow their driveway and the kids they'd be like no I pay a service and like At first the kids would walk away and I won't negotiate I'll just do labor but I'm like you go to the door I want you to get rejected I want you to learn sales and then they eventually get to this point where they were like yeah but who knows when they're going to get here and they're probably doing like a 100 driveways a day we're doing

like 10 who do you think is going to do a better job and take care of your beautiful car out there and you know they would get to a point where they would actually the person be like yeah yeah go do the drive by right it's like the first no is not the final that is such a good line and what a good way to try so one of our portfolio companies is called resi Brands and they have um that one painter which is a painting company and pinks which is a window cleaning company and

uh so I was going around with the CEO Stephen for that painter and they were painting one house and every time they paint a house they ask their employees to door knock for an hour so while somebody's inside painting some of it they door knock and so I'm like let's go do what let's go knock out a bunch of doors in Texas after about I can't remember was six or eight doors um one of the people that we knocked on was like oh actually I've been needing this and this and this and that's a $5,000

purchase and so in the span of 20 minutes the company made $5,000 from six or seven door knocks and so how often is money sitting right in front of you but you're just not doing what it takes to grab it and and uh and I think asking and rejection is one of the biggest reasons why we don't I love that that's awesome I don't like being in the house when I get these jno see hit them all the time 100% yeah um what's the difference between a good business and a bad business in my definition

good business equals profitable cash flowing what I call a cash flow versus cash suck business so you get paid Upfront for a service not after you provide a service sustainable it can exist for a long time historical it has existed for a long time understandable you can explain it to Grandma really easily and you have What's called the Lindy effect the likelihood of the future continuing to cash flow just as it did in the past um those are my parameters for a good business a bad business would be a business that is unprofitable hard to

understand hasn't been around for very long um you get you have to provide the service before you get paid for the service that is a business that is just much harder that's a harder game to win and so um as often as possible I want to have the lifeblood that is money come to me in my businesses and that way I can make more mistakes as an entrepreneur because I have sort of a I have a pretty I have a trampoline that has a lot of give to it as opposed to I think if cash

suck or bad businesses has a concrete floor that has no give you're going to jump out of the window sometimes and and [ __ ] things up and so it can help if you have cash flow in it because that allows you to jump like a trampoline a lot of businesses think they have a marketing problem when they really have a product problem how do you going in looking at acquiring a business determine if there's a marketing problem or a product problem because that's going to make a difference for you as an investor owner yeah

three things three numbers you need to look at if you want to figure out if you have a company that needs to sell more things or needs to create better things you need to figure out one what's your referral rate how often do your customers tell somebody else that they need to buy something from you two how often do your customers repurchase from you so your repurchase rate they come they buy one water bottle not enough you need to buy two or three and the third is churn how often do the customers once they have

you on a subscription plan or they're continuing to buy from you bail out of that plan and those three numbers can tell you if you have a healthy product business or if you just have a great sales team you can have both types of businesses but it is just so much harder when you have to continue to resell your customers again and again and again much easier to keep them find new customers keep growing 100% I think it's always easier to sell your same customers more things continuously then you can sell your customers more expensive

things continuously then you can get your customers to refer their friends to buy more things from you continuously and then you can ask your customers to say nice things about you continuously AKA reviews and so those you know reviews referrals retention and uh reduction of churn are sort of the four main RS and good business one of the things that a lot of people listening to is hire people whether they're hiring within a company or they're hiring as a small business owner or maybe even a large business owner if you could only have two questions

to ask a candidate what would you ask them well first if you're going to hire somebody the first question is who are you and what are your strengths and weaknesses meaning you yourself often times your first hire in a business needs to be somebody who can do the opposite of what you can do so it's actually not about them it's about can you define the problem first I think most of the reasons why good hires do not work out is because the person and the problem set has not been clearly defined we tend to like

people that are like us we shouldn't always hire people that are like us in fact we often should not um after we've determined okay I need this type of person to solve this type of problem the question is how can you figure out are they that type of person and can they handle that type of problem I think a couple things uh that we our cheat codes we use something called the kby test and so kby is actually allowed from employment certifications for people to figure out what type of Personality they have and so it's

basically like what fills your tank and so there's like four characteristics to it from fast implementer so like we do things right away um I'm sorry fast action to implementer which is like I like to do things consistently over time I am high fast action and low implementation so I need to have an implementation person often in my business I don't need a bunch of ideas person I'm kind of an idea person I need the opposite of that it's also what EOS calls the Visionary versus the integrator I just think the word Visionary sounds gross

you know who's like no I want to be the integrator not the Visionary it's a weird I don't love that terminology um so the question that you need to be asking is how can you get to the root of whatever the problem set in Persona you're looking for is find and so it's really going to depend if I know that I need an implementer I'm going to be asking questions like um one of my favorite ones that I did the other day was uh you know I'd love to see how you organize your calendar can

you show it to me so real time pop up on Zoom what does her calendar look like if they're an implementer it's probably highly detailed it's colorcoded it's assigned specific timelines if there's if it's kind of all over the place or there's mismatched things on top of it not an implementer that's a very easy one to tell um another thing I might do if I'm looking for fast action basically is I would I might say to them something like well hey we're in the business right now this is our problem what would you do about

it right now today and I want to see can they think quickly through what the next steps would be well I would do X and Y and Z and X and Y and Z and then I might say to them how how long would that take you to do something like that see how quickly they could calculate what the timelines are if I already know what the job job is I know if those timelines are reasonable or not and so I know how good they are at calculating their own time and how speedy they are

in that regard and the third thing I do is i' probably have some sort of followup so I'd be like all right you think we should do X and Y and Z I'd love to pay you a thousand bucks to do a project scope for me that would be amazing like how fast could you turn around a project scope for me and if they're like oh a week I'm like no that's not my guy it needs to be a 24-hour window doesn't need to be hyper detailed but I want to see sort of like a

onepage brief and then I can see what they think I'm not a good enough interviewer to not need like an exterior tell I really need show me what your brief looks like show me what your calendar looks like I think some people just can tell by Communications I can get I can get persuaded by somebody I think it's really rare that actually people have good intuition and hire I love what you said because it's hard to fake like show me your calendar right now I can't think I can't make it look good have to do

it on the spot and the same is like what would you do like it's harder to fake that you know something in those cases where so many people are taking credit for you know I worked with Mr Beast and you know I know YouTube well what did you do with and you can't really verify it so it's sort of they have so much and then they get in and you're like oh God like what no 100% yeah I mean I think if you want to make a lot of money you got to figure out Hing

that every problem is a people problem every additional profit is determined by people and so that's been a hard one for me to learn because I do like to go fast and a lot of times I like to do it by myself you know and I I can execute fast so I I kind of go but and then you want to hand it off to somebody else right but once I've really gotten good at leading a team and bringing more people in I've realized like leadership I get now why there are so many books on

leadership I didn't used to you know when you're young and starting out you're like just tell me how to make more money just give give me the Playbook that's a wrong question that's the wrong ask the right ask is how do I create a vision so big that other people think their vision is bigger with me and the second question is how do I become so good that they want to be with me and work with me because they think that I'm better in some instances and if you can't do those two things you'll never

attract top talent um and then it's how do I become so good of a leader that I'm constantly helping somebody become a better version of themselves because if I do that it becomes addictive and people love to be around other humans who will help them become better if they're high performers totally I actually am not so good at like I forget my own birthday I forget my husband in my anniversary I'm not um I'm not the best at like high empathy touchy feely stuff I don't know why um and uh and so I think some

people think well to be a good leader you got to know their kids names and that's probably a good one but like you you have to go really deep with them you have to know everything about that employee and that's just not how I lead um you know I lead by being like what do you want to achieve in life you know what are your big goals because I bet you're an amazing parent I'm not a parent so I'm not going to tell you how to be better at that I'm sure that you have incredible

hobbies that you're good at you can go do that by yourself I'm here to help you make more money become a better version of yourself and Achieve what you want in your career if that's interesting to you you should come work with me and I'm going to do it in a genuine way to you as a person I'm not going to fake that I'm interested in XYZ when I'm not or yeah I got murdered on the internet once because I said it's one of my dear friends who's been employee of mine for a long time

but I was like uh I do not want to hear about your child soccer game and uh and I just I can see why that would go side oh just murdered on the internet and I was like no I stand by it I actually do not and I think that's incredible that you care about that for your kid but what I'm here to care about for you is like your career and sure people can pretend one way or another to care about that but they don't actually care about it you get those casuals like how

is your weekend then somebody launches into more than a sentence and you can just see people's eyes like I used to answer like Oh I thought people were genuine when they were answering this I was like I did XYZ and like I can see the gloss in their eyes yeah they don't really want to know no well and like how interesting are those stories you know it's like um I think as a society somehow we've lost like uh the ability to be honest and we think that um being nice is the same as being kind

and I don't think that's true talk to me about that being kind to me is when you see somebody struggling on the side of the road with a uh you know with a flat tire you get out and you help them with it you know being nice is pretending to listen to Somebody's story about their kids and thinking that that you know they'll like you more because you pretend to be interesting being kind might be like I'm so excited for that for you like hey you know I got to to this other thing and work

right now but when you need help on that thing so that you can actually leave to go hang out with your kid this weekend I will help you with it so you can get out faster kind as opposed to nice which is like I'm going to project this sort of performance on you uh because I think that it seems like a nicity in society niceties are sort of like sprinkles kindness to me is like will you help somebody bake the cake in your inner circle how quickly do you recognize underperformance and how do you deal

with it I need to be faster I mean the good thing for anybody listening is like you don't have to be perfect oh man the more rich people I meet the more I realize how achievable it is for most of us and so I am highly flawed in hiring I am highly flawed in uh letting go of people or changing things when I need to in a business I even though I sound kind of tough I almost always defer on the side of like ah I wait too long I think too much about the person

I want to make sure they're okay something I'd like to get better at I think it is the peak of ego to be like oh I shouldn't let this person go because they have it better with me than anybody else I don't know I believe in their individual capacity to go and do something great that lights up their soul and if this isn't it then let's move them on to the next thing and and maybe the reason why is one time at my let's see company two companies before I started my own I had a

a CEO whose name was Jim and uh Jim is a badass I mean he's like a billionaire many times over he's very intimidating and I remember uh I was running a business in Latin America then we were crushing it we were growing like crazy I was running it for him and uh and he called me to uh a hotel we were at the Monarch and we were walking on the beach after one of our conferences and um he was kind of like listen I can tell you want to run the business this way we do

business this way like either roll my direction or get out of the boat and not so many words and I was devastated I was so mad at him and I disagreed with him and um I felt like a victim and I wanted to yell and scream and um and then I realized like it's not my boat so if I want to go roll in a different direction I got to get my own boat and Jim you know essentially in some ways pushed me out of the company you know was like we're not going to do

it that way so either like get out of here if you want to do it that way or do it my way but he did something there that a lot of people won't do like he was just direct with you instead of like subtly like I'm going to give Cody L opportunity I'm going to push her ex I'm going to constructively dismiss her whatever the term is nope he actually approached you head on and communicated with you that hard thing he was kind not nice you know and and in that moment he let me leave

in a way that like changed my life forever then I went and built a giant company and had massive success and I never would have I I I would have waited a long time if he hadn't done that I would have stayed painfully at the company for a long time and so I always remember that when I'm thinking about letting go of an employee I'm like man you might go achieve something so much bigger than me if you lean into the thing that you actually should do so go do it you know because I can

tell you want to your heart's not in it here and I just had a conversation like that with an employee today literally today and I was nervous about having it and um this employee was like I'm so glad you brought this up because I've been feeling it but I wasn't sure how and I think that is also the mark of a good leader is you you have a lot of conversations with your people who are not aligning in your company perfectly and you're like and so they're never surprised you know I don't think I've ever

let somebody go um or moved in two directions from somebody where they've been like what why it's always been after a few conversations and that is I think a respectful thing for employees do you rehearse that conversation in your head before you have it with them or do you just walk in yes definitely I rehearse yeah I try to put myself in their shoes how would they feel in this situation what would they want out of this communication I mean sunsu has a great line which is give them a golden bridge on which to retreat

and he talks about his enemies in this way and I think you know giving your employees a golden bridge on which to retreat is lovely too you know if if if you've ever worked at a company and somebody gets fired at that company and then the boss talks badly about that person it doesn't actually make the boss looks better it makes you think oo so when I eventually leave they're going to talk about me like that and so I try to never do that now I'm honest I might say hey we have a culture here

that mandates X why wasn't happening and so for that reason we've parted ways um I'm not going to sugarcoat it or pretend that something was there that wasn't if that's the case but in most instances you know unless there's fraud or you know something reputational um most times it's just that you two have been together for a period and that period has passed and that's totally okay do you do performance Improvement plans or you just like no like that's never going to work I'm not going to invest in that because now now that's an investment

on your part too right it's like I've already invested months time salary money and now like to do this I have to do more like how do you think about that uh typically we do improve performance Improvement plans for employees not at the executive level you know if we have executive level people which is usually the people that I am hiring ref firing now um those people we start with the end in mind so when people come on to my company a hack to never have somebody be surprised by being let go is to start

with a 30 60 90day plan with every single person that you bring on board even a new assistant and those 30 60 90day plans have very specific outcomes and if those outcomes don't happen at 30 days for your first check-in first red flag they don't have in it 60 days second red flag third red flag gone from the company and then we have that on a quarterly basis too so we have you know kpis key performance indicators and if you're hitting those then uh we're good to go you keep motoring if you have a quarter

where you're not hitting those okay we've got first red flag depending on the position if you have another month or sometimes another quarter of it that means that you let go and so there aren't I hated when I was at a company and I didn't know where I stood you know it's like am I doing a good job am I not doing a good job um why did this person get promoted why did this person get fired it's so confusing and so I always wanted something where it was like just let me know where I

stand and how to make more money and how to be successful and how to not and I think a lot of companies could do that better we're by no means perfect but I'm working on it that's such a big unlock right just sort of being clear because if you're not clear you're sort of like floundering you're throwing darts at the wall and you're like hoping something sticks and if it's inconsistent you just give up eventually you're like well I yeah this is too taxing on the Mind 100 mean you could focus my energy we're going

to get somewhere so one of the key traits you mentioned I think of high performers was the kind versus nice uh and the ability to communicate clearly in in a way the message is received even though it's not always um sugarcoated what are the other traits that you've learned from people that you would say are high performers yeah um if you want to be a high performer one you got to be around other high performers so try to find a group of people that look like the life that you want in one shape or another

uh second if you want to be a high performer you want to make sure that you always do the things that you say you're going to do and I think that is probably one of the most underrated ways to win is simply say you're going to do a thing and follow through on doing the thing that is very rare in fact sometimes it's rare for me I keep a i i project manage the [ __ ] out of myself because I'm forgetful I have too many things on my plate um and I want to be

human of my word and so I have like a notion task list that has databases and priorities on it and every single day I look at that task list and I say did I promise something to somebody and I check off the things that I don't or I forward expectations set like even with you I was like [ __ ] Shan you know I have this thing I'm going to do this weekend and I let you know ahead of time I'm like I'm a little worried what if I can't do it do you think we

could push it back you know we like overc communicate almost which sometimes can feel like too much um but lets the person know like I'm taking this really seriously like I told you that I was going to do this thing with you and I want you to know I'm really I'm thinking about that and I'm making sure I do everything I can to prioritize it and if I can't prioritize it you're going to know why right and so um if you say you're going to do a thing do the thing you'll beat 99% of people

uh the next thing that I found in high performers pretty consistently is they are helpers not yelpers and uh and I think about this like you know those people that go to a small business and there's something wrong with small business and they get on Yelp and they're like right as opposed to the people who see something wrong in a small business and they go up to the owner or they go up to the person and say hey by the way you know my food was a little cold um I didn't get this you know

I know it's hard I just want to let you know I wanted to let you know personally I always find that high performers are the helpers and they're never the yelpers because when you're a high performer you realize things like the average small business needs 20 positive reviews to overshadow one negative review so every time you do that to a small business you could be crippling it with the one thing that happened in that small business so um I think about that and the last thing I I'll say with high performers overall they're usually quite

giving and so I think a good indicator of if somebody is a winner or not is do they overg give almost because they they sit from such a place of abundance and mutual winning that they do not think that if Shane wins I can't win you know if he gets this that means that I'm less than and don't get me wrong like if you're sitting there ever thinking man I'm a little jealous of that or I wish I could do that I have that all the time too you know there there are times where there's

somebody on the internet and you know they're growing faster than we are or their business is doing better and I'll feel that little twinge you know in my stomach like shoot gosh why aren't we doing that what am I doing wrong and and some that's human nature and I might just mute them for a little bit and just not play the comparison game and like wish them well but like I'm not evolved enough to not feel a little bit of that um but then if I was ever to engage with those people I would be

like you're killing it I'm so excited for you yeah and I hope you keep winning what do you spend money on that would surprise people oh God I I'm really into lately matching sets this is such a girl thing um but uh I love outfit that match because you don't have to coordinate them that's such a nerd move uh so like a shirt and pants or a dress and a shirt that that matches so then you just get to like go off and go so I probably spend more money on clothes like that than I

used to um the second thing I spend a lot of uh money on is uh learning overall so like if you were to see where I spend probably like I mean houses cars I don't really care that much about that trips those probably cost a lot of money but um something that might surprise people is like how many books am I buying how many random courses am I taking like I'm taking one right now on uh notion automations for instance because I want to get better at just prioritization of that I'm taking another one right

now that I'm about done with on AI integration for small business like how could we integrate uh those a little bit better so I spent an odd amount of money on learning how to get faster and better um and I love doing that and then probably the Third is hiring like every chance I can get I try to think about where can I give somebody an opportunity for them to be in their zone of Genius but also help me and Tanner who's my creative director always gives me a hard time because people want me to

say something like a private jet or like something and like yeah sometimes we fly private but I would rather I would rather hire a couple more Chiefs of Staff I would rather buy another business than spend on a liability and so I I don't do that a ton but I do really want to farm with goats and many horses and chickens it's just I can't figure out exactly how to take care of it all without getting stressed out about it there's like an expansion surface area right when you yeah yeah it's like should I just

go rent one a couple weekends if I really want to but uh I have a dude who's become a friend Jesse ier and he's like I bought a farm and it's the best [ __ ] thing I've ever bought I was like God now I want one so maybe we'll do that eventually I think for you part of that would be sort of like uh your weeks are busy they're stressful and this is like getting away take myself out of a familiar environment relaxing so that I can come back on Monday and do it all

over again definitely my husband and I are good at spending on experiences more than things like it's not like I mean I have maybe a couple nice watches but I don't really wear them that much I don't wear a lot of designer stuff if you know if you see me on Instagram a lot of times the stuff I'm buying is from small businesses and stuff like that I I think I think it's sort of a sign of actually I don't want to judge just for me labels and you know big logos I've never really I've

never really gotten off on them I do think there's a bunch of research now like I I saw this thing the other day I don't know if you saw it that there's obviously something called the pretty privilege right what's that well basically um women on average there was a fascinating study showing that women who wear makeup but have the same um attractiveness pole and group of people so everybody so we're all sevens let's say but a seven who wears makeup versus a seven who doesn't wear makeup will earn 15% more over the course of a

year oh wow crazy right uh then for men and women who both I can't remember how they measured this one but it was some measure of how they dress um like they're put togetherness but I can't remember the indicator of like how they determine that um women earn on average 30% more not just for their you know facial symmetry um and whether they're pretty but how they're put together and Men earn 15% more and so I do think there is a reason to dress like a pro so you can earn like a pro and One

D I'm sitting here in my sweatshirt shorts I think you AG greate you got your branding on I mean there's definitely the cases where it's not true but um on average fast it shows you earn more money why do you think it is um I mean I do suppose that we make you know they say that you make a first impression in less than blink of an eye right and so historically we were predetermined worth based on you know meeting capability probably like protection if you're a man and fertility if you're a woman right and

so we're trying to determine is our mate going to protect us or are they going to provide us babies and so prettiness or whatever was an indicator of Health which was an indicator of fertility right and so I think for a lot of reasons it's like our Africa savannah brain basically saying is this person going to could be a good fit for me or not and I should have a higher indication of of value for that um that would be what I would assume and then maybe today it's also due to the fact that you

have a historical bias like the people who do dress better historically have more money and so your prior interactions with people who have more money look like this as opposed to this you take them more seriously yeah could be what do you think I that would be my sort of guess right is you form a snap judgment unconsciously like not consciously uh the this person is and you can probably prove this like if you were to walk into a Porsche dealership and you're wearing a fitted suit versus you're wearing sweatpants how people interact with you

just on that I want to come back to your husband for a second because you guys do this thing I really want to talk about but before that you mentioned books what have you learned from business biographies oh yeah well I think that you learn more from biographies of billionaires than most self-help books I think um you know I just went through a list of a bunch of uh business biographies that I thought was really that I thought were really useful and the reason I like to learn about billionaires lives and even like in my

book I open up with the story of Wayne hinga which who was the founder of Waste Management one of the biggest uh garbage companies in the world and what's fascinating is he started off owning a uh sorry not owning he started off driving a garbage truck and what I think is interesting about that is he goes from owning a garbage truck to working for a small garbage truck company to saying wait a second this guy is running this garbage truck company couldn't I do it why don't I buy a series of garbage trucks and then

a series of garbage companies and then compile them into this big huge thing and so if I can see a model that works then I can reverse engineer how to get there and so I often find with biographies of billionaires and lessons from billionaires there's a model and how they did things and you can sort of reverse engineer it your own way as opposed to at times if you're following like a like a self-help book um it's a lot of theory or Frameworks or ideation which could be useful um but maybe don't have the practical

application and so I like to see like Tom did X Plus Y which got Z if Cody does X Plus y likelihood of getting Z and my brain sort of thinks in not in numbers exactly like that but equations like that I think that's fascinating right but what I'm hearing is you're filling your brain with this reposit at of ideas Furniture if you will that are the raw material for when you run into a problem now when you're searching this yeah you're sort of like oh this reminds me of this situation maybe I can handle

it this way is the environment different can I apply it yeah well I think um I don't have the big huge type of brain that finds completely novel Solutions and runs with it so my brain is in kby what they call a FactFinder brain so I first kind of like probably because I was a journalist I look at the landscape and say how have people done this before what does the data tell us if I get you know 10 instances of this what happens in nine out of those 10 instances okay now I have like

some examples and then I'll go okay here's my problem how do I apply those examples to my problem and that just helps me feel a higher degree of confidence that'll work so if you work at my companies you'll often hear me say like somebody will say this is a good video and they'll say what does good mean and they'll say well I like it or it feels good or whatever and I'll say well I can't really quantify that could you give me some different metrics and so now we'll have definitions with metrics for almost everything

because when you use the same words then you're actually having the same conversation often we aren't like good is too squishy you can't tell what it means and so um a lot of what we do at our companies is figure out words mean things different things to different people what's our exact definition and then once we have the exact definition what's the Playbook we can use with those words I'm also really big on playbooks I think they help what's your problem with Rich Dad versus pora oh yeah I do first of all he's a genius

and I think he changed this is Robert kosaki the the author I think he changed a generation of pure W2 employees who had never thought about uh climbing the investment ladder to be allowed to climb the investment ladder my problem is man Cheryl Samberg became how rich being a W2 very rich I mean the CEO of Google one of the richest men in the world from being an employee I think that we have bastardized this idea of being an employee and we've said it's bad and it's less than you should be a founder and entrepreneur

and so in Rich Dad Poor Dad he has this quadrant where he basically has a W2 employee at the low end of the totem poll and I don't believe in that I think W2 is just your tax status and actually it doesn't matter if you are you not smarter than the average entrepreneur if you are a W2 employee and you use the wages earned with zero risk risk because you're working with somebody else to invest in assets that then increase your income stream but allow you to still make money using somebody else's risk I don't

think there's anything wrong with that so that's my problem with with that framework which is called the cash flow quadrant I believe um because I think that we have made people feel bad about being a W2 and I remember one of my friends came into we run a community of business buyers right and so it's an academy where you go and learn how to do m&a and one of my friends came into the m&a academy and this person was making like $600 $700,000 a year and uh they were making 600 700k they wanted to buy

a couple businesses on the side but they loved what they did and somebody said to them oh you're just a W2 and I was pissed I'm like first of all how do you expect to be a business owner one day with just W2 employees you're not going to have any if you treat them like that yeah second why does that matter it doesn't it just means we need to be able to do what we love and have a backup plan in case that doesn't work out which is some investable assets so that that's my problem

is I think it creates a series of people who think that they're better than or somebody is worse than because of their tax status which makes no sense to me what are the different types of income streams that are available to somebody who's W2 employee like working for somebody else getting a paycheck every week so that they can build Financial Freedom I think one of the one of the best times to invest in assets that can provide more income is when you're employed because you have an income stream which means you have less risk if

you're going to go and start a new business you probably shouldn't diversify right off the C uh bat with a bunch of Investments you kind of need to focus and make sure that you're going to grow your business or invest in other companies inside of your business you could do what's called strategic m&a um but when you're a W2 employee I mean gosh we have probably I would say like 40% of our community and there's thousands of business buyers in there are W2s who largely want to keep their W2 salary they probably are pretty High

earners and they're doing things like they're buying series of hotels or airbnbs and running those simultaneously then they're buying property management companies that run those airbnbs so they have 20% that they take back in them you know they're buying laundromats and car washes so what I call um people light businesses so you don't need a ton of employees for those businesses um they might be buying vendors for um people that they know and use inside of their W2 so you know maybe they buy a studio like this because they work for a podcast company and

so they can cash flow on it so and then of course traditional things like investing in funds and the stock market and REITs and all of that which I think the other thing that's a little funny about today is there's a lot of people who don't like the stock market who don't like bonds who um you know think that you shouldn't invest that way and I think that's bizarre um like the best money managers in the world world have diversification to some way shape or form for longevity over time and so um I think you're

crazy to not want to have multiple ways to protect the downside you and your husband do this thing the team thing can you explain this to me and and how it's helped your marriage yeah yeah we've added on to it so it's so um I don't know if you know you have this but you know when you keep sort of bickering with your spouse like little things and they kind of comp pile and you look back on a fight and you're like why was that so dramatic it was about you know a book left on

the table it was about a water stain somewhere left out what a dumb fight and so we were having some of those and uh and so we have a coach that we use because I believe in coaches and almost every area of your life that you can I want to steal other people's 10,000 hours always and so Brandy was basically like we do this thing called team which is at the end of the day I want to say every day but we don't do it every day so often sit down and it goes like this

you touch so the first thing maybe you're like holding hands maybe you're sitting next to each other um the second is educate so you sit down you're like what did I learn today oh I learned this cool thing from my conversation with Shane I share he shares then appreciation so it's like hey I really appreciate honey if it's a bad day it might be like thanks for taking out the trash you know it's all I [ __ ] got today but I appreciate that you did that the only rule is you can't keep using the

same things every day you got to find something new to appreciate and then finally metrics and metrics is like I wish you did this better today you know today you uh you didn't take care of the dog you didn't feed the dog and I wish you did and you said this to me and I wish you would have said it that way instead and so we keep the small things for a period in which we're not elevated and that is when we are at our best and so and at the end of that we might

also have something like um expectations so that would be like now we're really busy and we're both running business business he runs our portfolio and so we realized even if we did team like maybe this week you're traveling here and your wife's home with the kids and um you know you're going to be in studio six hours a day and you're not going to be available and when you're done you're going to be so tired you're not going to want to get on the phone with her you're going to want a quick call with the

kids but you're going to need to go to sleep afterwards and when you come home on Friday even though you're going to want to like she's going to want to go to dinner and you're going to want toang you're going to be so tired you're not going to be able to and so we do an expect meeting now on Sundays where it's like all right what's going down this week I'm traveling here you're traveling there we got this we got this the kids need this I need that okay cool what do you what's your expectation

level of like energy like is this a brutal week for you yeah this week's awful now this week's pretty late so we go okay if it's an awful week I know you're probably not going to be at your best right you might be a little sure with me you might need a little bit more love I got you this week or we're both kind of it's a brutal week for both of us so let's Trad easy this week let's let's try to not nitpick each other so much and I just think um you know you

do that with your teams you're like all right guys we got a big week this week so like everybody needs to be in the office here you know or let's take Friday off half day because we got too much going on the rest of the week but why not do it with your marriage because otherwise I think life can run you down and you don't realize you're not even fighting cuz you're mad you're fighting cuz you're tired and beat up and you got nothing left and you're just trying to survive and so it really helped

us that expectation thing is really fascinating often in couples there's one partner who's maybe working harder than the other and it could be a female surgeon and a guy who works a 9 to-5 and it could be the other way around somebody running a business and their partner is more their job is more defined how do you handle like a mismatch between you know my days 12 hours your day is like 6 hours or vice versa right my day is 6 hours your day is 12 hours and you get home I'm like full of energy

and I can't wait to see you and you're like oh I'm drained yeah well we we compromise so mine might be like all right I'm in my season I'm in a build season and it's going to be brutal because I'm in my residency for the next three years right and we know that and so it's not on a week basis it's a three-year basis so let's have some expectations setting about what these three years is going to be like all right you know that I'm going to be exhausted all these days but you know what

you're still my top priority so on Saturday I'm going to make it up to you we're going to have a date night I'm going to plan it I'm going to handle it uh we're going to do a vacation like three or four times a year I'll make sure to prioritize that if we do those things like does that fill your cup enough right um I think a lot of times these uh things happen in marriage because we we aren't honest about the fact that we don't have full tanks all the time yeah and you know

you're going to have a build season and if you can tell you know your partner hey I just had a baby you know this next this next year I'm probably going to be tired and I'm and I'm not going to go to the gym as much as I want to and I want to know you're still going to love me and whatever fears you have um then it takes a lot of the edge off because a lot of times we're not even acknowledging what the real problem is Right which is like I am just really

tired and because this year I know like this quarter for me I have a book launch which is brutal and like harder than I thought it was it's like oh my God all this traveling and I mean champagne problems it's like such a hard podcast but like you know it's it's a lot of focus people who aren't in it don't understand all the stuff that goes into it if you're trying to excel at it yeah it's a it's a weird process and so um Chris and I sat down and talked about it and I was

like listen the compromise is in January February and March I'm not going to do any speaking events like I'm just nope zero and so stick with me for 3 months then you know com into the year we're going to chill out there's a light at the end of this tunnel exactly and so you got to find whatever your compromise is otherwise I think if you're always like well I always work 12 hours and you always work six well that might not a happy marriage make and I like how you're sort of setting expectations which is

like hey you know it's going to be busy for the next three months and then there's like this light at the end of the tunnel yeah my husband totally taught me that I was terrible at it I'm not a great communicator actually interpersonally I just go go go go go and he was he's the one that's like often like all right stop let's talk about this let's be really clear what do you really want so I have to give him all the credit in the world for that we always end on the same question which

is what is success for you for me it's two-part long term it's you know Emma Bombeck has this quote which is when I stand before God at the end of my days I want to feel like I used everything you gave me I have not one drop left and that's how I want to feel I want to feel like I'm rung it out like I just left it all in the field every piece of ability that I had and then the second part is I want to feel peace and like I'm enough like no matter

even if if I don't want to ring out those last couple drops that's okay and so it's this balance between what am I capable of and no matter what I achieve is enough little child of God no big deal either way