Why Most Deals Fail with Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary

Most people talk 70% of the day, listen 30. You should actually listen 70% of the day, talk 30. Because when you listen, you get more power. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. Today's guest, Harley, is an introduction. Kevin O'Leary, sitting next to me, known as Millions is Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank, world-class investor, entrepreneur, business leader, who built and sold the learning company in one of the largest tech deals of all time. He went on to launch O'Leary Funds and O'Leary Ventures and today manages a diverse portfolio that spans everything from fintech to crypto to consumer brands, best-selling author, global speaker, and a straight shooter on personal finance, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Kevin's not here just to talk about money, but also discipline, decision-making, and how to build wealth that lasts. Kevin, I'm really excited that you're here, brother. I appreciate it. Why did you decide to do this is my first question. I love working with entrepreneurs. And, you know, what that room was full of was entrepreneurs, people that really understand that entrepreneurship is not a destination. It's a journey. And we're all in it together. And we were sharing our thoughts together. I really enjoyed that session because there's a lot of energy in that room. But that's what it's about. When you start a business in America, it's only a third of the population can pull it off. I mean, it's not for everybody. And I'm not telling people to do it. But if you are going to do it, you want to talk to other entrepreneurs. You want to share ideas. You want to help entrepreneurs not make the same mistakes that I made. So I kind of go through that journey saying, here's what worked. Here's what didn't. Here's what I've learned recently. Here's what I've applied. Here's how it's worked. I want to share. You want to give back. That's the way I look at it. What do you think about the home service industry? It's probably one of the best times ever to be in it. um not only technology advancing it it's never going away it's never going to be replaced by ai or any of this disruption stuff it's the core of most people's net worth is where they live and they care about it it's a it's a spectacular industry i mean it reminds me there's two industries that i've that i admire so much that are going to be around forever climate control storage which i came up in it's directly linked to the stuff you buy for your home because after a while you store it i mean it's kind of like everything that goes on in maintaining a home or a business is a perpetual business good times bad times recessions whatever it's always a required service you know there uh we run at my company 25 000 jobs a month yeah and uh you know You know what's crazy what happened through COVID is we were deemed essential. And I've been through 2008, as you know, and the multiples went from 10 to 12 to 14 to 18 to 20x. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? 20x. And it's hard to do the math, really, of 20x multiples on EBITDA. Then I learned about annual reoccurring revenue. And you can get a multiple of that. Yeah. And it's fun stuff. What do you look for when you make an investment? I look exactly for that. How do I get my money back, first of all? Secondly, how stable is the reoccurring revenue? How risky is that recurring revenue? What would make it stop? I mean, I'll pay way more for a safe investment that has recurring subscription or whatever it is to keep continuing every month. That's what you're describing and that's why it's valuable. And it turns out the whole market feels that way. And so these multiples have increased for a reason. It's the safety of the investment. First to return the capital invested, and then to accrue the benefits of a renewed pace of free cash flow. That's very, very valuable. People covet those kind of investments. And so it takes executional skills too. You have to have someone that can execute, that can do it. But if you understand the model on how to acquire a customer and how to maintain it and it generates cash, that's pure gold. And that's what this business is. That's why it went from a seven to a 20. That's not you or I deciding. The market decided that because that's what the market wants. And so you're very lucky to be in that space right now. Very fortunate. And I think it's going to 6x in the next seven years. And I watch a lot of people. There's a lot of jobs going away. And it's scary. It's kind of scary in one way. I mean, what do you predict? I just heard Bill Gates come out and say in 10 years, there's going to be a government subsidized. You're going to have to pay people to live because robots next year, Elon Musk, it could cook for you. It could walk the dogs. I mean, where are we going? What do you think about in the future? You know, I've listened to that narrative for multiple generations now. And I bet you if you were, you had a family business back 150 years ago making horse-drawn buggies. and you went and saw the first car roll off the Ford production line with four tires on it and an engine and you say, oh, we're dead. I mean, we're all going to lose our jobs. That's not what happened to the economy. New technologies advance productivity. There's a shift in who works on what and where. That happens. There's dislocation. But because it's productivity enhancing, the economy actually expands. It's the same argument as saying, oh, well, television is going to destroy radio. That's complete BS. Radio still exists. Comes from satellites now. I don't worry about that kind of stuff. I don't believe in predicting doom in the American economy. That's never worked. It never has happened. I never bet against the American economy. It's provided an 8 to 10% return on average for almost 200 years. I mean, we're good at doing stuff that makes it easier to live and more productive. If I need a robot or a car that's going to drive me, great. and whoever was going to drive that car is going to do something else probably a business that's more valuable and make even more money it's going to free human beings from tedious tasks like flipping burgers right i saw robot flipping burgers the other day i don't care i'll eat the burger as long as it tastes good yeah that's it i uh i think a lot about where business is going and just like you just showed the video of you, I can speak in Russian, Japanese, my AI, HeyGen, some of the other tools we're using. I just watched a thing. Have you ever heard of N8N? Yes. It's like Zapier, but for AI. I could literally have it research the number one post for home service and build a whole integration that actually goes out, does the research, writes it. I'm talking, builds a thumbnail, which Mr. B spends $40,000 on a thumbnail. and it posts and build it perfect for X, TikTok, Instagram. I mean, now you're using the technology. Well, that's what's crazy is I want to talk to you. Like, I know every major PE company in the space, all of them. Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, all of them. And they show up with their loafers, their nice watches. I don't want to get in trouble here. I love you guys, by the way. And they think home service is just anybody can do it. And then I watch them fall apart because they lose the culture. They lose the, these blue collar guys, they weren't raised the same way. Some of them have bad teeth. We got to work on that. And they walk in, they treat them like a cog, a wheel. And they watch it fall apart because they say, number one, you can't cut your way to success. And I've seen very few people pull it off. That's why PE just learned, never get rid of the founder. Never get rid of the founder. What is that? I don't know if you've ever seen that when they go in and they start looking at balance and income statements and cash flow. And they try to figure out a way to absorb the, like make it more profitable very quickly. Have you ever seen that in business? Yeah, yeah, I see that all the time. The challenge is the analysts that do that work have never actually run a business. It's a problem with PE and venture capital. Until you've actually made payroll on a Wednesday night, you don't know what it's like and how hard it is to run a business. And just use the metrics of, okay, I'll put debt on it or I'll change this, I'll change that and it's gonna be more profitable. rarely works out. And the PE guys aren't that stupid anymore. They're starting to realize they got to partner with the founder, figure out a way to keep them motivated. So a founder in their 60s or 70s is looking for some liquidity for generational reasons, but they don't necessarily want to stop working. And so the better strategy is to partner with them. Maybe you buy, you know, a 80% control position and you cash out the family, but maybe some members want to stay working and they know all the customers. That's a much better model. And you give them incentives to actually work as hard as they did when they controlled it. It doesn't always work, but it works a lot better than just buying it out and thinking you can just parachute in some random CEO that doesn't know anything about the history and the culture. And I would also say something that you touched on at the beginning of this question about technology. You should use every tool that you can afford to advance productivity, both personally and in your business, because your competitor definitely is. And I'll give you an example. Damon got me into this. I'm going to pull it out of my ear. This is an IFB, a Bluetooth IFB from a company called Starkey. I don't own any of Starkey. Why am I wearing this thing? This thing is connected to my phone. It reads to me every communication I'm getting. Even if it comes in a foreign language, it translates it into English for me. I've chosen five different languages because I'm doing business in the Middle East. You can use it for all kinds of purposes. You know, if you've got a bum ear, you can use it at a hearing aid. But if I want to listen to the conversation over there, I can tune it to listen in over there. Now, these are not cheap, $6,000. But this thing has saved my hiney so many times when I travel, you know, or I'm doing something like on television. I've got the director in my ear. I'm on live TV and I'm getting my messages on all of my deals and this year, it's reading it to me. And I'm able to absorb that and be more productive. So the minute I get off air, I can call. Thank you Damon Thank you Starkey I mean I not the only guy I mean a lot of the sharks are using these things now and Damon brought them to us That great It very cool Very cool You know I going to get one of those clips that actually monitor everything I do in the day Yeah. And they listen to everything. And I just know my assistant, my executive, she's right over there. She's the best. Ashley. She's hiring another assistant for her. And I said, they got to be using ChantyBT5. They've got to be taking it. Of course. I mean, we use that. I use that every day myself. Our entire companies use it. We all have subscription services. We look at our social media, put it through all of the models to see if we can change one or two words. You know, a 15-second commercial has 75 words in it. Which 75? Because we spent a lot of money on digital advertising. So we're testing. We'll do three versions. We'll put it through ChatGPT and other models and say it'll change two words. Then we test it in the Florida market. Boom, it worked better. And so, you know, it's kind of like... Maybe testing, yeah. Yeah, but testing works. I mean, you can do it by geolocking your Facebook buy or whatever you're using. And it's so easy to do it now. Like, it's not that complicated. You know, what's interesting, I just thought of this, is I'm a big fan of attribution. I have 7,000 call tracking numbers. Every single landing page has a separate UTM parameters. I know exactly. We spend right now on average $3.75 million a month in marketing. What do you think you make back on that? You think you make $9 million? What do you think? No, my advertising budget is 12%. So I almost get a 9.4%. My ROAS, I'm getting almost a 10 times return. That is anything past seven, you've got it nailed. Anybody, listen, I see lots. Very rarely do I see a business that past seven, Ross. That's really hard. And if you're getting 10, you fine-tuned it. That's amazing. I spend a lot of money on branding. Even our trucks is a logo. It doesn't have a phone number, an email. Doesn't have any of that stuff. Doesn't have the BBB or Angie's List or Yelp. It's a driving billboard. But one of the things that was really interesting is it's been very, very hard for TV, radio, billboards to get attribution. And I saw that you had some... Changing, changing. And that's what you're... Yeah. Tell me about that. So, you know, we spend so much money across 54 companies. And one of them I was involved in called ERC. we all did the erc loans and i actually built a business to help companies get erc loans because it was the only way small business could survive and we started advertising we were spending about three million a week and you know a lot of it was digital and then i got approached um by a company called tatari saying have you tried uh television i said no we're doing he said why don't we do a test and it really worked we found the golf channel was much better than buying digital so So unfortunately, at that time, it was for only guys that were spending like $3 million a week in advertising. And I said to the owner, why don't we form a partnership, let's call it Wonder Ads, and create a buying consortium so that all of my companies can use Wonder Ads to do television. And so you go to Wonder Ads and you run small budgets, and we aggregate the buying up to $5 or $10 million of all the Wonder Ad participants. And then we buy, whether it's Golf Channel, CNBC, CNN, Fox, Fox Business, whatever. But the way you can get the attribution is you put a pixel in it so you can actually track. And every Tuesday, we know exactly which channel produced the highest ROAS. And we found that now a third of our advertising is done on television, on streaming services. Right. We never did that before. And that was wonder ads. That's what we did it for. And so anytime I see a business that works for my 50 companies, I want to share it with everybody. And we form a company. And that's what we did in the case of Wonder Ads. And it worked. And now 30% of my spend is in the strangest places. I was watching some home shopping thing. And oops, there's one of our company ad popped up at 15. And I asked them, are you getting good ROAS? And I said, yeah, it's our number one this week. So you pour the gasoline on where it's working and you pull back when it stops. And a lot of people don't know. A lot of people just know what's in their account. What I'm going to talk about here a little bit is four KPIs I track that I can build the budget. I could go into any business. I don't care if it's dental. I don't care what country I'm in. Their booking rate, which is your contact center, is when the phone call comes in or the lead comes in. Conversion rate, when you're door-to-door knocking and you meet the client. The average ticket and the cost per lead. I don't like cost per acquisition because this funnel already builds that into it. And with those numbers, I could actually build the future of any company. And I'm like, how do you do more with what you got? Everybody's saying I need leads. Well, with COVID, everybody said I need people. So I look at marketing as how do I attract good talents? And one of the things, if you're going to build businesses, how do you acquire great talent? Like, what do you look for? How do you find great talent? Why have 54 companies too? Why not put it all into one? Well, it is in the holding company. They're all owned either through debt or equity. Not all in a control position, but many of them. It's a portfolio strategy. And at any one time within that portfolio, there's a catastrophe happening or a euphoric outcome. I have one that just yesterday told me they're getting sued. And then an hour later, I get a phone call from another saying they're going public and they're going to be listed in three weeks. I own a huge piece of that. So, I mean, I get the portfolio strategy is this heartbreak one hour and euphoria the next. And I've kind of learned that that's just the way it is in life. You're going to have good, bad, and ugly. But having many companies means the outcomes generally I look at on an annual basis. 17%. Well, we've had better years. That's not the greatest. Private equity gets 22. So we have some work to do. But 17 is pretty damn good. It doubles in four years. I just have a chance to get teary. I'm very proud of what we've achieved. And that means we're doing a good job managing them. They're profitable. And then, of course, on top of that, we get the distributions every month. I'm getting checks from pretty well everything. And that maintains and supports the community, you know, the families that work. Our biggest cost increase, social media. Boy, it's expensive. I mean, we're just spending a fortune generating content. And as long as our ROAS is four or better, as you know, we're happy with that spend. Have you ever heard of a guy named Roy Williams in Austin, Texas? I have actually. The Wizard of Ads? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've worked with him and he said, quit making ads transactional. Tell stories. Let people get to know you. You talked about that on stage. Let people see who you are. So I started writing ads about me and my dad working in the garage, working on a car. And people just relate to it. And if you could tell stories on ads and not say, we're cutting prices, 15% off. And that works. But it's of a race to the bottom walmart figured it out but every nobody could ever be walmart again i don't think well their scale of purchase you can't beat them but your point is it's being transparent about who you are and if people want to be part of that community and that culture and that vision they're going to become your customer and those are very valuable and i agree with that that is the wicked cupcake story what we learned from wicked good cupcakes that whole thing was unbelievable what happened there i mean cupcakes are a total commodity anybody can make a cupcake But they turned it into a massive business and no one saw it coming. It's crazy. That's a great story you shared. I tell customers, I was in the garage for nine years. I'm an overnight success of two decades. So I was running jobs. I was running six a day, six days a week. Failed relationships. Never been married, no kids. But I got a fiance now. Congratulations. I'm very excited about it. Going to be an old dad. That's good. But I say, you know, Mr. O'Leary, here's what you need to do. Here's what you should do. And this is the third one that works every time. My mom worked three jobs when I was a kid. She worked her ass off. I love my mom more than anything in this world. Here's what I'd be telling my mom to do. That's the question? That's what I tell people. This is what I'd be telling mom to do. Yeah. And I always give them what I would do for mom. And if I could treat people like mom, they keep coming back. Well, I have a similar story. I learned so much from my mother about how I conduct myself today. She told me something once that I've never forgotten, and it's actually changed who I am, I think, over time. Always tell the truth. She said this to me. Always tell the truth, and you'll never have to remember what you said, which is very hard to do in the moment because when you tell people the truth, sometimes they don't like it. It's still the truth. And that, in the context of Shark Tank, made me the bad guy, but I'm actually the friendliest guy because I'm telling you, you have a bad idea and you're going to go bankrupt with it. And it's, you know, you should try something else. But the point is, you get great lessons from mothers because they care a lot about you. But that one for me was great. And she taught me how to invest, even though she wasn't an analyst or anything. Diversification is everything. And I always get a check, either buy a bond with interest or a stock with, you know, a dividend. And that's kind of what I did. And she was right about that. But, you know, it's really become an interesting journey for me. You always have mentors in your life and there was another guy named jerry patterson who said you know you really should focus on things you got to get done during the day and not listen to all the noise around you he was actually a hockey agent the first guy to bring in a russian hockey player into the nhl which was really controversial but he did it and he was my partner in a company called special then television we used to shoot the intermissions in boston and detroit and new york you know for the for the league and red wings go red wings yeah i mean it was so i really got involved in hockey instead of 1988 to 85 when gretzky was in the league and i learned so much from jerry uh just about how to conduct business and i learned a lot about hockey um and the game it's become and about professional sports there's so many different lessons you're going to learn in your life through your your journey and you should always pull knowledge out of everything you're doing and And it just makes you a better and more productive entrepreneur, I think. You know, I think Ben Hardy, Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan, I don't know if you know them, but they wrote several books. Who, Not How is one of my favorite. And just the cliche or the message of who, how do I get the right who's. I love when I walk in a board meeting, everyone says no to me. I have no yes people around me. But you got to have the data. And I will pull the trump card every now and then. But how do you get the right people on your team? What do you look for? Because I hire people way smarter than me, way better at their specialty that they're at. But what do you do to find the talent when you're looking at companies? What I do, and I've changed this recently, maybe the last three years, the right people are ones that can work within the team on a mandate that everybody agrees on So they all going in the same direction But you don know that when you hire somebody you not sure so don hire them hire them as contractors first my standard deal is look let work out your contracts as if you already successful let get that and put it here on the shelf but i'm going to pay you 30 percent more to be a contractor for the next six months and at any time during that six month period we can change our minds say you fit into the team it's all working or you can walk away saying i don't think it's going to work here and it won't be a blight on your resume you just acted as a contractor so you don't have to say you were hired and fired and i don't have to do the same to you and then you'll just find out if you fit into what we're doing and i i do this with the ceos for sure i just hired a new ceo for wondercare and i made that deal with him and he agreed he liked it this guy's a rock star and you know he's come out of a giant tech company not necessarily a watch guy because it's a watch insurance business but that doesn't matter he understands the tech and how to operate and how and how to build the website and how to advertise and all the rest of that. But he said, I love this idea. It gets me a chance to feel the groove, get in the cadence, work with you and the rest of the team, understand what we're doing together, go to all these countries with you. And after six months, if I'm on board and you're on board, we just take that contract off the shelf and boom, he owns a piece of the company as the CEO, is an option pool. This really works. It really works. I've done that. And I listen to you talk about that. Yeah, I know. It's a genius. It's a great idea and so you're paying 30% more. Who gives a damn? It costs you a lot more than that to hire somebody and two weeks later fire them. That's crazy. And so this is my new strategy and that's how I find great people and they appreciate it. And it just plain works. When you share everything like you do, and people always ask me, why do you give me your playbook? When people come into my shop, my competitors, and I say, well, you know, you're more likely to be a millionaire than have a six pack. And I could tell you exactly how to get a six pack. You still got to do the work. Less than 1% of the people will do the work. But you share everything. Yeah. I mean, look, you know, I'm happy to share it because I know what the magic sauce is executional skills. You can understand how a business is successful. You can't necessarily execute the same way. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Executional skills are impossible to find. Great people have them, their ability to set a goal and achieve them consistently over and over again. And that comes from being a great salesperson, learning that way. I like to see people come up through sales because they understand how hard it is at the beginning of the month to be zero and then have to hit the goal every month. I did that for my whole life, still do. But just because you know how a business is operated and it's transparent about it, I bet you less than one out of ten people can do the same thing. It's very rare. Yeah. I mean, less than that. You mentioned you work for Steve Jobs. I love the fact that he goes, if you hire great people, they'll tell you where to go. 100%. He also taught me about the concept of signal-to-noise ratio, which I've really adopted. He would argue that you need to get three things done every day, whatever they are, three to five. Three to five things you have to get done every day, and that's the signal. The noise is all the stuff that comes at you that stops you from getting the three to five things done. And so you have to identify the three things, and then you have to fight off all of the noise coming at you to stay within 70-30 ratio. You've got to block out 70% of the noise so that 30% is getting the three things done. And so I've kind of adopted that too. You got to understand, you will get stuff coming at you all day that doesn't matter. And because you push it aside, people get pissed. I know. They feel they're not important. Well, the truth is they're not. What they want from you is not relevant. It's not important for your mandate. And what matters long-term is that you're successful. You will keep your friends and family and you will have respect. People don't have to like you. They have to respect you because you can achieve things. That's what matters. You will always have respect if you can achieve things. If you try and make everybody like you, you will fail. You will fail because you'll spend your whole day dealing with noise. That's the problem. You know, you mentioned you hired the CEO. And when I learned about equity incentive programs, it's, you can call it phantom shares, you can call it stock options. You know, the biggest, best companies in the world, private equity, they'll do a 10 to 15% pool and they know how to use it strategically. When I learned about this, by the way, I hate ESOPs. There's some tax advantages to ESOPs, but equity incentive programs gives people a stake in the outcome. And if you do them right, you make a lot of millionaires and you make a lot of owners. you know how do you feel about equity I 100% believe in it you know often my model often if there's an operating business someone comes to me says let's start this operating business it's my idea but I want you as an investor I'll say look I'll do a 70 30 deal with you I'll do 70 you do 30 but the minute you hire somebody that needs equity we get equally diluted so we start at 70 30 and then as new people come in we equally get diluted that makes the person who's running the deal, the guy with the 30%, sweat every hire because he or she is also taking the hit. The delusion. And so, but I want, they know they have to give away some. And as the business grows, they keep giving away and they have to because I believe everybody that's important to the business should have some sweat equity in it, whether it's an ESOP or it's an RSU or it's an option. I don't care what the structure is depending on the state, the tax efficiency. but that person, everybody is sitting there thinking every day about how do I keep as much of this for myself, but I know I can't be a pig. It's a wonderful dilemma. And we're never 70-30 by the time the business gets sold. We're fractional by that time. But we've created something of so much value, which is a different model than the agent model. And you pay your agent 10% because they have no outcome. In Hollywood, if I get a roll or something or a month shark tank, somebody's making 10% of my salary for being the agent and 5% for the legals. That's the typical Hollywood deal. But they don't determine the outcome of the performance. So, you know, that's the maximum they're going to get. And those are the two kind of things. You start off a lot more if you're going to be a founder of a business. But if you're just a service provider, you get 10%. And that's kind of the way America works. It's a great, great country. You know, I got the opportunity. I was at this Freedom Summit with a guy named Alex Epstein. And I got an opportunity to meet Mike Rowe. We clicked. He's a big guy in the blue collar industry. I got an opportunity to be on his podcast. And what I've realized now about myself is a lot of people love me. A lot of people hate me. And I'm sure you get the same. But on his podcast, there was 4,000 comments. And not one of them talked bad about me. They were all great. And that just goes into the brand. And from your perspective, how do you build a brand of somebody in there that's a million dollars, a million dollars revenue in plumbing? What would you say the core essentials are to build a brand? Like Mike Rowe, everybody loves the guy. Nobody talks bad about him. He's done a great job of that. brand building is now storytelling that's what it is and I think telling a transparent honest story about who you are what you do how you provide services what what matters to you and your community of customers that stuff is the only way you can build a brand and then what happens is if you are a great provider of the customers start talking about your brand your company your service and they're the best ambassadors they're the best advocates they're the best advertisers for you and And that's why you have to spend most of your energy taking care of them. And the ones that are the noisiest ones are the squeaky wheels that are the most valuable. You know, it's such an amazing thing, and I talked about this in the presentation. Unhappy customers are very valuable because they give you an opportunity to make them happy again. And then they become the biggest. Biggest advocates. And so you should spend a lot of time taking care of unhappy customers. And they become a huge asset to you. No matter what it takes, you've got to solve that problem. Even if they don't like you, you don't like them, they will admit after they've been provided the service and they've been made right by you, this is the company that I'm going with. This is the one I use because they take care of me. And I spent a lot of time talking about that in there today because I think it's very important information. I've seen it happen both ways. It's really very important. You know, I used to take all the one-star Yelp or Google calls myself, and I'd call them up and I'd say, listen, I'm so embarrassed that this happened, and your time's important. Can you tell me exactly what went wrong? And I just, all you have to do is let them talk. And I just listen. And I would listen for 10 minutes and I'd go, that is so embarrassing. I'm sorry. And I'd make it right. and those people became raving bands that my ambassadors and uh you know 25,000 clients a month we make mistakes of course and we learn from those mistakes yeah but you're guaranteed to make mistakes and you have to learn from them but that's brand building I mean it's customer service in every business I don't care what it is financial services or you know HVAC or plumbing it doesn't matter it's customer customer customer then employees and then shareholders in that order if you don't you don't have business you don't have customers it's that simple i don't know i think uh my internal clients are a little more important than my clients i i because if i treat them right and they care enough they take care of the clients automatically well it has to be to me i'm always monitoring where we sit in customer satisfaction reporting net promoter score type thing yeah it's just there's so much data you can scrape now online about where you fit in the plethora of competitors on every business and what people say about you you always want to be monitoring anything that goes viral in a negative way because there's a reason somebody's pissed off and spending energy to make your life miserable that's the thing about a soft customer they'll actually spend a lot of energy to make your life miserable they want some kind of revenge yeah and you don't want that that's it's it's not it's not good it's stupid sometimes they turn around they sue you and i'd rather settle i'd like to find a way to solve it you know it's crazy just that's that's just the nature of how business works i asked three questions and i'm i love these questions for you in particular um what's one piece of game-changing advice that you wish you knew in your early 20s to reverse the ratio of talking and listening most people talk 70 of the day listen 30. you should actually listen 70% of the day, talk 30. Because when you listen, you get more power. You understand where you're at. I was taught this by one of my women CEOs a few years ago. She said, Kevin, you know, you talk too much and you're not listening, and you should try reversing it and see how powerful you're gonna become. And she was right It helps you a lot to just listen Listen go into a meeting and just listen And sometimes there an uncomfortable moment you don see anything and they start giving you information they didn want to because they feel socially uncomfortable I don't feel uncomfortable. I'm happy to just listen, and it's very powerful. It works immensely. That's one thing I wish I'd learned in my 20s because I talked too much back then, but now I don't. I'm very careful. I just listen. what's a millionaire habit that sets you apart from the rest not a millionaire i don't even care about a millionaire habit just what's one thing you do you mentioned seven hours and 20 minutes you mentioned no alcohol three hours before the best wine the best tequila uh you mentioned you go for a long walk 10 000 steps but what do you think that you do that that you've learned that kind of no one else is really doing? What I've learned and I've started to do it recently is I try and spend about 30% of my day doing something that's outside of my comfort zone. Something I'm completely uncomfortable about that I don't know how to do, I'm going to learn it. And that's exercising the brain. The brain wants to do that. You never give it that chance. You're always staying in your comfort zone and that's very bad. And so I'm trying all kinds of things that I thought I could never do. And it's helping me immensely. And, you know, recently I took on acting. I've never been an actor. I'm dyslexic. I can't memorize lines. Well, I found out a way to do it. And I just, that's helped me on other things. And, you know, it was an amazing journey for me. I don't know what it'll lead to, but it was a hell of an opportunity and I did it. And you can judge for yourself. It's a movie called Marty Supreme. It's, It's a big movie with Timothee Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow. And I'm in this movie as an actor. And check it out. We will. If you had to start over tomorrow with $10 million, but you still got all your connections, $10 million, what are you doing with it? I would do what I do now. I would diversify my holdings into, you know, I have a very simple rule. No more than 20% in anyone's sector of the economy. There's 11 sectors. No more than 5% in anyone's stock or bond or crypto. but there's one there's one thing I do break the rule for and that's real estate I have 31 percent of my you know net worth in real estate and I've been a developer my whole life and so I'm doing you know real estate is what I do it's a core you know I've done everything from climate control storage to you know luxury condos or whatever it just and right now the hot sector in real estate as data centers. So I'm doing that. But I like real estate. You can touch it. It never goes to zero unless you put too much leverage on it. And so, you know, I'm very careful about how much debt I put into my equation. I keep a very low debt ratio. I want to be able to survive debt. And because I went through 2008 in real estate, that was pretty tough. So it's kind of learning from the past experiences. But I take that 10 million and I think I could probably, you know, do well with it by just being diversified? You know, I think a lot. Money for me now is a KPI. It's kind of like, it's not going to change the way I live. It's just not. But I find that the goals keep getting bigger. The goalpost always moves. No matter how much I succeed, no matter what my body fat is, no matter how much I'm praying, no matter how much time I'm spending time with family. it's just it's never i've never arrived and you talk a lot about investing you you know a lot you're you know a lot of people at what point i mean what's it all for i mean you said you still spend weekends with your family you go anywhere in the world but i mean it'll never be enough there's always yeah i don't think about it that way um i don't need more money i need more time And so you can't buy time, obviously, so you want to use it the best you can. You know, money is sort of the index by which you can judge as an entrepreneur success or failure. If you do something well, you're going to make more money and you can decide what to do with it, reinvest it or do whatever you want. But it's a derivative of what you're doing successfully. It's not the goal. You can't create a business without it, obviously, but it's a derivative of success. it's if you make more money it's because you've been more successful and but it there comes a point where it doesn't change your life at all whether you have and i would say to young entrepreneurs your goal is trying to get five million dollars in the bank somewhere making you know just treasury returns as your safety net at four to five percent yeah that's all you're going to make but you have it there for whatever happens you know medical emergencies or catastrophes whatever and after that you're starting to build um generational wealth and it's very hard to make that first five really hard it's hard to make the first million but if you can make a million you can make five you can make five you can make 50. if you can make 50 you can make 500. it's just you have it in you you only need to prove it to yourself once and then go do it again and again and again but it's at some point i mean i don't know what the number is for most people 50 million i don't know i mean how much do you need i mean what more do you need you got a beautiful house hopefully it depends on if you're uh if you love boats and jets okay well i get that but you know what i do listen i've owned planes i it's i don't want to ever own a plane again i want to lease the hours and i want an operator to run it and deal with the pilots yeah charter it yeah yeah yeah so i i i probably charter 250 hour 250 hours a year and so that's a lot of plane time but i don't consider that a luxury anymore i just a necessity for me today i'm going to be in three cities i got to get there and i got to get there on time and so i'm not excited about getting back on a plane that people think that's a luxury no it isn't it's a pain in the ass who wants to do that all day i would rather transport teletransport myself as opposed to sit there like in a plane for hours and hours not that i want to whine about it i'm just saying you know oh if i could only own a a plane why would you want to own a plane it's utility well the deal is all i care about is that i have internet because i get a lot done on a plane unless and starlink on planes works better than the hotel internet does that that's one thing that's what we're looking at is uh making sure we got great starling who's there if the rest i don't care if they're dead or alive who do you look up to i mean jesus maybe but who's somebody that you just are like man woman old young dead or alive who's who inspires you the most and maybe obviously i know your mother had a big yeah of course of course but i think the guys that had most impact in terms of how i look at it was steve jobs and now elon musk who's 100 signal he has no noise it's made him very awkward socially obviously but um look at what that guy's produced and how successful he is in so many different sectors every mandate he takes on he's wildly successful you know it's just sort of um he really really understands that the metric of spending time on the things that matter i've seen him walk out away from a conversation midstream when he realizes there's no value here yeah i'm not going to waste you're allowed to walk out on meetings you don't know no value no value and so i understand why he does it and i think he's achieved a lot he's a good example for people understand the whole noise to signal ratio and i think yeah that's i just look at executional skills i look at what's the mandate when does it get done is it achieved yes or no the rest is all bs like you know and people that come to me and say look i want you to invest in me i had a couple of failures and i learned from my mistakes and i asked them you know why did that last business fail and they start blaming everybody else except themselves blame these two fingers and i always say you know, you own it. It failed because you screwed up. The only person responsible for failure is you. And you spent the last half hour blaming everybody else, including the market. I'm not going to invest in you. If you don't understand why you failed, why would I want to invest in you? Every time you fail, you should own it. If you're an entrepreneur, it's not anybody else, it's you. You're the reason. And if people ask you, you should tell them the truth. I love it. We're going to wrap up here in a minute. You know, I'm a big reader. When I was 2007, my CPA handed me a book and he goes, when's the last book you read? I said, 11th grade to kill a mockingbird. He said, why don't you read? I said, I don't really like books. He said, well, read this one for me. It's called The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. And I came back the next day. I said, this is the best book ever. He goes, here's the ultimate sales machine. Then he said, this is the richest man in Babylon. And then I I just started reading like crazy, and I read several books a week. What is the most impactful book? And there's several, I guess, depending on the sector, but if you had to pick a book that was just like, change the way you do things, How to Win Friends and Influence People is probably one of my favorite, but what would you say is a book that is the game changer? I think Keith Richards' autobiography. I've read many books, but that one really, it's a huge book and it's all about his life, But there's so many lessons to be learned in terms of longevity and focus in that book about sticking on mandate. And even through all of the problems he had, including drug addiction and getting arrested and all this stuff, the guy knew what he wanted to do and what he was good at and how to do it. And look at the success he's achieved. And I think everybody should read that book right from the early days when he was in junior school in England. and just just realized there's a lot of lessons he's very transparent in it it's it's there's some tough parts in there but just his journey in his life i think is remarkable and he's still at it now on mandate doing what he does it's pretty remarkable that is a book about perseverance perseverance and understanding the power of focus it was really good all right close us out, leave us with something for the listeners. And I, by the way, I really appreciate you being here, brother. You got it. Well, I really enjoyed it. This was a fantastic day. If you ever get a chance to come to one of these sessions, you showed it. It's just a group of entrepreneurs just talking about building businesses. And I think there's nothing more noble than that. And I've really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you. in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets to help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.