Brandon Dawson: My Blueprint to Scaling Your Business to Nine Figures | Entrepreneurship | E27

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That's Global SKU. Hello, my name is Tim Story. Welcome to Miracle Mentality. Remember rooftops, drawing spaceships on the ground. It's for the dreamers, the doers, the believers in something greater. In each episode, I'll invite you to rise above the mundane, to push past the messy, and learn to live boldly in the miraculous. Every episode will have practical wisdom, spiritual insight, and my guests will explore what it takes to activate your miracle mindset. Remember to subscribe, follow, and like. Welcome to the Miracle Mentality Podcast. I really appreciate you guys watching, subscribing, liking, and telling people about it. And we continue to rank in the top 10 on both Spotify, Apple, and so many other platforms. And that's because you guys are sharing it. We're also bringing on great guests. Today, I'm very, very excited because I have somebody that I consider a friend of mine. You know, when somebody sows good seed back in your life, that says a lot about that person. I remember when I came out with a book called The Miracle Mentality, and this guest that we're about to announce, he bought several thousand books that I could give away to charity. It's the type of person that he is. In my opinion, he is one of the best businessmen, not just in America, but in the world. him and his wife take time to mentor people, tutor, coach them, not just to scale financially, but also in their lives. So let me read a little bit about my guest. His name, number one, is Brandon Dawson. And he is a person that even at the age of 29 years of age, that he rang the bell at the American Stock Exchange, which is really amazing. And one of the things that he does is he talks about not just scaling a business, but scaling your life. He is a co-founder and CEO of Cardone Ventures, where he works alongside Grant Cardone, helping entrepreneurs and leaders to build businesses and live their lives at the 10x level. What I love about Brandon, I write in my notes, is that his story isn't just about money or metrics. It's about mastering mindset, finding resilience and understanding that the greatest asset we can ever scale is ourselves. Let's welcome to the podcast, my friend, Brandon Dawson. Hi, Brandon. Tim, it is so great to be with you. Really appreciate you. And you and I have been friends. We met, I think, six years ago, and we immediately hit it off because the one thing I know about you is you're the real deal. Thank you for that. So Brandon, one of the things that's interesting about your life is you seem to love the underdog. I noticed this in people that I meet and they talk about how they're coaching with you. A lot of them are people that had setbacks and they're finding their way to a comeback and then they'll find their way over to you and you're really coaching them, helping them. Tell us about one reason you love the underdog and want to help them. Well, I've been an underdog. You know, I've been an underdog my whole life. Barely got out of high school, little town, you know, and just had to figure it out. I moved to Atlanta and traveled 11 states. I had to figure out how to use an atlas at the time because you're talking about 1987, 88. You couldn't print things out. You had to figure it out with a pen. And I had to figure out how to check into a hotel. I had to figure out how to communicate to older people because I was selling hearing aids in different markets. And I had to learn to communicate with business owners and doctors all at 19, 18, 19, 20. And all my friends are like, you're never going to cut it. You're never going to do it. And it's been that way basically my whole life. I've just had to figure things out. I was always told it's never going to work. It's never going to happen. You're never going to be successful. You're never going to be able to do it. Then I'd have success. And then I'd fall backwards with a mistake. And then people say, see, see, see, I told you, you just got lucky. So I've been there and I know how it feels. And I think that the thing I learned that turned my whole life around was first finding the right mentors to give me the right information. And secondly, I learned how to control my mind, which then allowed me to frame where I wanted to go in life. And then that allowed me to track the people that I need in order to nurture me, feed me, teach me, develop me, mentor me. And then I feel like my give back is to take the total sum of all those people and all those failures and mistakes and setbacks and shortcut it for people who are like, hey, I'm starting to go move into this struggle. and if we can eliminate the actual falling so they don't get injured and reset them into a direction that works bigger, better, faster, more valuably and teach them to bring people with them, well, that enthusiasm will carry them through the actual problem and it'll improve their personal, professional, financial life. And I've proven it over and over and over and over and that's what I'm actually passionate about. The numbers end up being the numbers and all that. But the fact is, it's watching people transform their lives from where they were at to what their true potential is. I love that. So I look at my notes that you grew up on a walnut farm and you had a 2.4 GPA and yet you became one of the youngest to ring the American stock exchange bell. Talk to me about this idea of growing up on a walnut farm, what it did for you positively. Because you look at a lot of people that have done well. I may remember way back to this guy T. Boone Pickens. a lot of these people who did well, including Jeff Bezos, they had some kind of farming connection. And there's a lot of things we can't learn. What was it like growing up on a walnut farm? And what did you learn? First of all, I had the tale of two stories. My mom and my dad divorced when I was seven or eight. And I got the chance to go between the two. One set was in Minnesota. One that was in Oregon. I grew up in Oregon. And my dad was a pastor. And then he got a computer sciences degree at Oregon State University. And then he was employee number one and a guy that started building motherboards in 76, 77, 78 for Apple. So my dad was kind of an entrepreneur. He was kind of a pastor. He was doing those things. And us kids, just if we wanted to play sports, we needed to make our own money. If we wanted gas money, my school was 18 miles from my house. I had to work. And so $5,500 a year was the requirement. My dad was chairman of this little Christian school. I had 35 people in my class. I think the whole high school had like 130. And by being chairman, they gave us a discount on me and my little brothers to be able to go to that school. But we needed $5,500 a year. And the walnuts is what yielded the 5,500 a year. And that was the difference between it being a huge financial strain versus, and my dad had side hustles. He was always working. My stepmom, she was an insurance adjuster. She was always hustling and had all these little kids to take care of. And so I grew up in that environment where, you know, I had to buck hay. I had to trim the walnut orchard. I had to pick walnuts. I had to work at the night deposit and bust dishes. I needed to work at the tanning salon. I needed to make money if I wanted cleats, if I wanted to afford sports, if I wanted to do martial arts, I needed to earn my own money. And that, I think, is something that gets lost on kids today. But that's what growing up on a farm does. It teaches you that you got to physically use your body to make things happen. And that teaching isn't what's happening in many environments today. And so I think when you grow up needing to have to do something and enduring cold weather and sleet and hail and rain and dangerous things like saws and tractors and edging and cutting at 10, 11, and 12. You learn to respect those things. You also learn a little bit of courage, and you learn to think things through. You're going to hurt yourself. And I think those are a lot of principles that are lost in today's world for kids. Yeah, no doubt about it. And I'm loving the way you're framing this. So Brandon, do you think that part of this resolve to step forward and do things at a high level was innate or was it learned behavior or is it a hybrid of both? Tale of two stories. I have my dad and my mom struggling to take care of their kids, always grinding, always working, always buying food in bulk, always picking corn out of the cornfield that grew up behind us because we wanted the corn and canning it, picking the plums off the plum trees and canning it, picking the blackberries and canning it. So we had jelly. It was all manual to make sure the kids and everybody was taken care of. Then my mom moved to Minnesota and married my stepdad. And he was a crazy entrepreneur that had this idea. And when I lived with them for a couple of years, I was sleeping on a couch in a living room and driving an old Oldsmobile. But I had the opportunity to go back and forth to that environment during all my school breaks and summers. And that became today the largest independently owned hearing aid manufacturing company in the world at over a billion dollars. I got to watch that go from almost going out of business multiple times, living in the stress. I'm just scary as a kid. You'd show up and everybody's happy because the hallway's lined with green boxes, which are new orders. And then you come back and visit a month later and they're lined with yellow boxes, which are repairs. And then you come back a month later and they're all red, which is refunds, and they're going out of business. And, you know, at 11 and 12 years old, my holidays with my parents in Minnesota wasn't partying and being on Lake Minnetonka. It was sitting under microscopes for 10 hours a day, cutting faceplates off of hearing aids, clipping off microphones and receivers and testing them with OM meters to see if they died or if they worked so we could salvage parts in order for the new products because they didn't have the money to just keep buying new. And so every time I showed up, there was something to do. Work in the shipping department, work in the printing department, work on the manufacturing line, work on the production line, work on buffing and grinding and selling and answering phones at three in the morning from international calls, all at eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13. It was so much that I couldn't stand to live there because my parents never had a moment of time for us because they were reacting to an environment of survival from 1978 all the way to 1992 where they initiated an eight-year divorce once they figured it out. So I had to get out of that environment when I was older and go do my own thing. But I got to watch what real entrepreneurial-ism and the pains associated. I got to see it as a kid and experience it, feel it, know it. The hard work and dedication, expectation was on both sides. So different farming, going to a little Christian school and high pressure building a business. And I got to toggle between those things. And what I did is at some point, instead of feeling the pain from those things, I decided to pick the best pieces of each of those things. I made a personal decision driving on that tractor. I'm gonna pay attention to what makes my mom and my stepdad great. I'm going to pay attention to what makes my dad and my stepmom great. And I'm going to become a version of both those things. And I made that decision in 18 when I left Corvallis, Oregon. And I said, I'm a kid with a dream. I'm going to do something. I don't know what, but I'm not going to be stuck here in this little town working at Les Schwab or at the paper mill. I'm going to go be somebody. And I used to dream driving on that tractor about going to New York and going in tall buildings. Tallest building in Corvallis, Oregon is four stories. So all these things I never got to experience. but I was going to do it. And that's what I decided to do. And that's what I did. This is one of the greatest stories I've heard about being adaptable, because I think so many people could have become a victim in that case of, oh, my gosh, I've got to go between these both houses. But you became adaptable. One of the things I've noticed about you, Brandon, is that even like at the 10X conferences, I think there's nobody that's on stage at 10X more than you because you are helping with things on the grant side and all the other companies you guys are doing. And then you speaking at it, and then you running over to another group and then meeting with other people. And I watched that work ethic, the work ethic that you have. When do you feel like you kicked it into that next gear? It's almost like having a six-gear Porsche. It runs nice in the fifth gear, but in the sixth gear, it kicks in. When did you really kick in to this Brandon Dawson level that we're all witnessing today? I quit my job working for my stepdad because they started getting divorced, right? When things were getting great and the company was becoming successful and I was running sales and I had done a lot. I've done everything in that company from cutting face plates to grinding to working in print shops to shucking boxes and sending things out. And now I'm running sales and making a lot of money. And then they decide to get divorced. And because the tension of building that business was unbelievable. And I decided to remove myself December 15th, 1995 and go do my own thing. And that's what really kicked in because I first was in survival mode. And then I made all these mistakes. And then I found all these mentors. And then I started having unbelievable success. And then I screwed it up. And then I got cocky and arrogant and thought I had it all figured out. And then it all went away. and then I had to restart, but I had to reassess why I screwed up, why I got cocky, why I got arrogant, what my strengths, weaknesses, because I had great mentors catch me and go, dude, don't let this be your definition. Don't let this be your legacy. Don't let this be what you're known for. You need to pick your strengths and you need to shore up your weaknesses You need to understand or really do a deep dive into what those things were You need to reverse engineer your life Where did you make tactical mistakes What did you do wrong What should you have done differently What would you do differently And I literally went through this cycle, smoking cigars and drinking wine over the course of a week, putting all this grid together. And then one of my best friends, mentors, Hector Lamarck, gave me like 12 books. John Maxwell's books on leadership, on teamwork, Sharon Lecter's on Cashflow Quadrant, Sharon Lecter on Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which I could relate to, honestly, that title was exactly how I grew up. It was like, whoa. And I never read before. I just did. I did. I touched things and fixed them and did, right? But now I'm reading and I'm highlighting and I'm identifying that was a strength of mine. Ooh, that was a huge weakness. But I didn't know it was a weakness because I didn't know what I didn't know. By the time I was done, I had put little tabs in all those books. I had 590 tabs of all the things, if I would have known, I would have done it entirely different. And I decided to start talking about that. And I launched a new business and I decided I was going to reinvent how businesses were built. And I launched that as a teaching business, building businesses for entrepreneurs, created my own equity structure, fought with the SEC to get it approved. They didn't know what I was doing, had to get around taxation, had to get around franchise laws. I created this collaboration entrepreneurship model where if you work with me and if you pay me, I give you equity in my company. I have no Wall Street people in the middle of it. If you work for me, I'm going to create another company and give you a little piece of equity for working for me based on how long you've been there and how much money. And then at a point in time when I'm going to sell that business, we're all going to share in it together. I'm going to bypass Wall Street. And I had to create all this structure and work with KPMG and Ernst & Young and the SEC lawyers. Everyone said I couldn't do it. But I was Inc. 500, Inc. 5000, fastest growing this, fastest growing that, three times entrepreneur, Ernst & Young, Entrepreneur of the Year nomination and regional finalist. I had all these accolades, fastest growing private company in the Pacific Northwest seven years in a row. And I decided I had figured something out about humans and business. And this was my awakening. I hired a research firm in 2009. And I said, let's break down tens of thousands of businesses. Let's survey tens of thousands, if not a hundred thousand business owners. Let's understand how businesses are built, what makes them work, what causes them, because I read built to last and how the mighty fall. And I created this whole system using what I learned from Sharon Lecter, what I learned from John Maxwell, what I learned from Jim Collins, what I learned from Michael Gerber, what I started taking these authors and breaking all their books down, but I turned it into one system. And then I found this mentor, Story Musgrave. He was the only astronaut that flew all five space shuttles designed to deploy and fix Hubble. And he tied it all into an operating system about how NASA plans, operates, executes, and gets people back to Earth safely. And I put it all in a bow and I called it the transformational growth system. I patented it, I trademarked it, and I released it in 2013 to 1,500 entrepreneurs. And that's where I knew I was going to change the world of entrepreneurs. And you're doing it. What year did you start to collaborate with Grant Cardone? I had some great mentors. In fact, one of my strongest mentors, he is the managing partner of a company, an investment group out of LA called Leonard Green. And he's the one that taught me a lot about scaling and platform companies in the late 90s and then in the 2000s. Well, when I went to him and said, I'm going to launch all these businesses, I've done all this vertical work. And he's like, hey, you made a promise to your employees and you made a promise to your clients that you're going to create one of the highest valued businesses ever in the marketplace. You have to prove that and complete that cycle because if you don't do it and you screw it up, your reputation will be destroyed for what you're saying you're doing. Great advice. So I put the business up for sale. I sold it for one of the highest values ever paid ever for a private company, 77 times EBITDA. And the proudest day of my life was wiring 45 million out to my customers as thanks for doing business. And what ended up being 21 million to my employees, thanks for working with me. I took about 95 million out of the equation for putting it all together. and then I was ready to go. And I said to my fiance at the time, Natalie, let's go build another company. And then I went back and showed my mentor everything I built and he said, time out. Now this guy today runs a $78 billion, one of the most prestigious entrepreneurial friendly private equity group on the planet, okay? And he says, time out. You just sold your business for 77 times even. One of the highest prices and values ever paid for a company on the promise that if the buyer bought you, And your sales process was unheard of. And the fact that you got somebody to pay this, but your promise was if a buyer bought you, you're going to add $2 billion of value to their enterprise by them integrating you into their bigger company. And you're going to help them do that. And yet you're not going with the deal. So here's your new problem, Brandon. If they screw this acquisition up and they say it was a write-off and it was a horrible deal, you'll never sell another company. And you're sitting here telling me that you want to do 1,000 of these. and so you have a new problem now, which this has to work or your credibility will be destroyed and it's not going to be dependent on you. It's going to be dependent on them making the decisions. You have to go make it work. And I was like, oh no. So I stopped at 16 and I called the company that was buying me, closing in a week. And I said, I'm going to come in and make this work for you guys. And they were like, oh my God, thank you for saying that. The CFO, the global CEO out of Denmark. And so they closed on my business July 1st. 2016. And by July 1st, 2019, exactly 36 months, the business went from $17 a share, a billion in value to $94 a share, four and a half billion in value. And that's when I said, enough is enough. I'm going to go do this. And they said, you overachieved. I gave all the earn out money that was still getting paid to my team. And I said, you can have it or 50%. I said, you can have it, which was another seven or eight or $9 million. And I said to Natalie, let's do something. And I went through a little window where I was uncertain what I wanted to do. I was finally wealthy. I'd been grinding my whole life. I finally arrived. I felt like I arrived, but then I felt like I lost all my purpose. Once I gave up on, maybe I don't need to do anything. And this really shows the strength of my wife now, because she was my fiance then. And she said to me, I didn't marry you. So you would retire and give up on your dream. I fell in love with you because you're going to change the world. And if you're changing your perspective, if you're changing what you're going to do, then I'm not certain I should be with you because she's half my age. She fell in love with the idea that we could go create this world together. And now I'm like, hey, I'm rich. I'm getting fat. I'm playing golf all the time. So I'm hanging out with my billion dollar buddies. I don't know if I really want to work again. And she's like, good for you, but I'm going to do something. And then I sat back and I'm like, I ain't letting her. She's the greatest asset. in my life. And I've had some phenomenal, two great ex-wives, by the way, at different points of times that have contributed significantly to my life, but things sometimes go different directions. And so here I am with somebody that I realize is the most magical human being I've ever met in my lifetime. And I'm putting that relationship at risk because I became uncertain. And that's the one thing I would say to every person listening to this podcast. As soon as you become uncertain, everyone around you becomes uncertain. It is the single most lethal way to have collateral damage and break everything in your life because you became uncertain. And where there's uncertainty, there's confusion. And where there's confusion, there's always failure. So as soon as you become uncertain, everything around you fractures because you're the highest. And this is what I learned from John Maxwell. You're the highest example in that environment if you're leading. And if you become uncertain, people get confused. And when they get confused, your best people can go anywhere and do anything, and they will. Thank you for watching the Miracle Mentality podcast. So many of my friends are texting me, DMing me, speaking to me and saying, Tim, thank you for these great guests that you're bringing on. So share it with somebody, a friend, a family member, a colleague, and then make sure and reach out to us at Tim Story Official and let us know that you love what we're doing. Thank you for being a part of this movement. Yeah, so you had an unusual situation because in knowing your background story from talking to you and talking to your amazing wife, Natalie, is that, Brandon, the fact that you had made so much money, I could see why one would just play golf and live and you had a beautiful fiance. say. But the fact that Natalie is one of the smartest women both of us know, she is so brilliant. The class, the beauty, but also the compassion, just like you have compassion. I really love that, that you found a woman that really put a fire underneath you. And really what she did is remind you of the person that you are. And I think you would agree with this. I think that God gives assignments and that you've had a series of assignments, like Brandon Dawson had assignments as a young person to take your life from one level to the next. And then God gave you another assignment. I'm loving this assignment that you have right now because you are mentoring, tutoring, coaching people not to stay stuck. Even I love the TikToks that your team is doing, the social media that you're doing, where you'll get on and someone will be behind the scenes and say, hey, Brandon, what do you think about this? And this wisdom just starts flying from you. I mean, you have really become an ultimate source of wisdom to people. When did the wisdom start to become something that you were comfortable with and were able to express value in such short sentences? Because that's really a gift. When did that start to happen in your life? It's a great question. In 2009, 10, 11, and 12, when I did all this research, I really compressed that research into what I called the BDOS, the Brandon Dawson Operating System. And it covered everything from how to build an equity model, how to operate your business, how to empower and inspire and get your people to do things that they otherwise don't think or believe or have the skillset to do. And when I wrapped it and introduced it in 2013 on stage, I broke everything down to three elements. Belief, the higher you believe, the higher you achieve. The lower your belief, the lower energy and effort you put into it. So belief is a catalyst to everything. Operational effectiveness. The ability to execute at a high level of success requires discipline, accountability, transparency, alignment, and you have to get results. If you don't do that, you will not succeed. And then that requires the third component, me, leadership. I have to do it for me and be the example. But then when the business we identified from 3 million to 8 million to 15 million, that me leadership, because I can't be doing everything, needs to go to we leadership. It needs to go to me and a group of people where we're entirely aligned, we're in sync, we're pulling everyone in the same direction, there's no confusion. But by the time you're 45 to 75 million, it becomes us leadership, which is really cultural leadership in the organization. And so to introduce all this framework and all the systems and processes and studying and all the tens of thousands of businesses trying to identify the 97% that failed, what caused, what was the reaction, what was the result? 3% that succeeded and inside the 3%, there was two cohort groups. You had the entrepreneur who succeeded and you'd ask them, what allowed you to succeed? Well, I got good people. I developed good leadership skills. I surrounded myself with people I trusted. We got our books in order. So it's very general, detailed information about what allowed them to succeed. But then you go over to the less than 1% cohort group of serial entrepreneurs. They were like surgeons. We did this at this point. We then did that at this point. And then before we screwed this up, so we did it this way. And then we got this result. And I started studying that sub 1% of 34 million business owners under 100 million. And I started honing in. And what I found was an algorithm. I found the accidental algorithm of get good people, have good books, have good strategy, make sure you have the right mentor, very general, to the precision, do this at this time over and over and over and over and don't let anybody tell you otherwise, or you're going to go broke. To 97% of the people, here's what I do. And I found the 97% always repeat themselves under fear, stress, resistance, anxiety at all these little failure points because of the weight of the organization. And then I found what the sub 1% did. And I just created a technology algorithm that said, if this is what you're encountering, this is the best outcome, do it this way. And I shot all that content. and because I was starting to shoot all that content and break the 575 concepts into 10,000 business owners at 3 million, 8 million, I got so precise because I shot for two and a half years and the biggest miss I had in my life was my team trying to get me to do Business with Brandon podcast, Business with Brandon YouTube channel in 2010, 11, 9, 12. I had all these authors that I read their books, used their work, eventually met them, had them on my stage in 2013. The person that introduced the power of belief to 1,400 entrepreneurs was Story Musgrave, with a rocket shooting up. Everyone was blown away. The person that came out and talked about operational effectiveness was Jim Collins. The person that came out and talked about me, we, us, cultural leadership program I created was the one and only John Maxwell. And the reason John was comfortable with that is because in 2012, he spoke to my group. He heard me speak and he pulled me aside and he said, you have operationalized my life's work. Nobody in the world has done this. Can you please come into my company, work with my team and see how this affects my business? And I did. And we grew his business by double in a year. And that is so huge. Could I just stop on that one? because I've known John for 30 years. And for him to trust somebody with that is gigantic because that's like coming into a great coach like Phil Jackson when he was coaching the Bulls and going in there and saying, let me work with your leadership. We can help you grow So Brandon that said a lot about where you were and the knowledge that you have on this subject So I like to study people like Ray Dalio He wrote, I'm looking at my notes, principles, leadership. Something that I'm finding with you and even reading your last book is that you've taken a lot of the great leadership coaches like a Dalio and you're bringing it down to a level where I feel like a lot of people who did not know about things, you're teaching them how to get there. You're very good at onboarding somebody to where they don't get overwhelmed. Okay? How did you learn to do that so you could speak in a way where somebody that has a roofing company and maybe they did not go to Harvard or Yale and you teach them how to build a business, sustain a business, scale a business? how did you learn to kind of onboard people simply? That is a great question. And I'll use your example. Ray Dalio is one of my heroes. I mean, one of the most successful aggregator of value in businesses on the planet. So if you just boil down what he did, same with Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, what did they do? They found great business systems. They found leadership. Let's just distill it down to what they actually did. They found great business models. that were combined with phenomenal leadership that they believed in, that would listen to guidance and advice from people they could interject into the environment, into the equation in order to help give a bigger, broader, more powerful perspective. And they aggregated the relationships, the business models, the brands, and created best practices and then developed and invested in teams that listened and did. Okay, so, but if you read as a person like me, Ray Dalio's book, you're not going to understand any of it because it's complicated. Most people don't understand the power of words or the multi-meaning of words. And so they combine big words with big strategies, with big think, with small execution, but big results. And that's the confusion creates failure. So what I did is I decided I was going to take all this complexity that's taught, and I'm going to study the most successful people that did the biggest things, Buffett, Charlie Munger as partners, Ray Dalio. I'm going to understand what they actually did at its root, which is aggregated, great brands, great concepts, innovative market strategies with phenomenal talent, made sure they understood how to build it to value. That's what they did. So then I went, okay, I'm not Harvard. I'm not MBA. I barely got out of high school. So what's the biggest marketplace where none of this gets translated none of this has any help because it's all so small and i went to the small business space it's a 16 trillion dollar market today 34 and a half million people business owners and only two percent break the three million mark but It's a $16 million velocity of revenue that Wall Street just, and you know what gave me the idea? I'm fishing with my buddy in 2009 in Alaska, and we're in his boat out in the ocean, and we got our lines out, and we're doing this. We're all day. We're out getting beat up in the ocean, getting beat up with the sun, throwing up over the side of the boat. And all of a sudden, this massive trawler comes by, and they're pulling in their nets, and they're taking fish that we would have dreamed of catching. and they're throwing them back because they're too small and they're keeping the massive king salmons and all these huge fish. And I said, you know what, Bob, we're the small business owner. That's private equity. Just trolling through, scooping up anything big that's confused and can be bought cheap, restructuring, repackaging, recooling bonds. Another one of my mentors was Michael Milken and I was with him last week, but he was the junk bond king. He took different levels of bonds, put them together and sold them as packages. And then they blamed him when people got too aggressive at doing it. And then eventually he got pardoned for it. But the point is he is a genius, absolute genius at diversification through multiple layers of assets that you can get huge derivative value from by creating more value in the value. And so I was like, okay, why can't I do this in the $16 trillion marketplace? But I got to prove I can do it. I got to be able to have credibility. I have to be able to understand it. And so that's where I was at. And then in 2019, I was like, I don't know how to go to the market. I missed it in 13. I missed it in 12. I didn't listen to my team. I missed so many hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of opportunities in that little window of time where I had it all. And I didn't see the bigger picture. And my wife said, you didn't see the bigger picture because you weren't thanking 10X. And I'm like, what's that mean? She goes, I want you to listen to this guy. And she puts Grant on. And to be honest, I was like, ah, no way. I can't. Hey, Grant Cardone here. My sons and hats and sideways. And I'm like, I'd never be that guy. That guy, blah, blah, blah. She said to me one day, you know why you refuse to look at Grant Cardone? And I go, no, why? She says, because he's got tens of millions of followers. You had a bigger business in 2010, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 than he did. He is known all over the world. Nobody knows who you are. Nobody cares what you've done. Everyone knows who he is. And he's going to have 35,000 people come to him to talk about how to make money. And nobody would know who Brandon Dawson is today. And that's really why you won't listen to him because he pisses you off. So now we're going to sit in the car for three and a half hour drive to Bend, Oregon, and you're going to listen to his audio book, 10X Rule. And I'm like, fought with her and fought with her about 20 minutes in it. She said, I'm not giving you a choice. You're listening to it. about 15 minutes into listening to grant 10 X rule, I start laughing and hitting the steering wheel. I'm like this guy and my daughter 13 at the time, she takes her headset off. She goes, daddy, daddy, she's laughing. I go, what babe? She goes, he sounds just like you do. And I was like, this guy is on fire. And if I would have known and had the courage to do what he did, because if you go back to 10, 11, 12, 13, when he was just doing 3 million, just trying to overcome his setbacks in real estate and figure it out. I was running meetings with 12, 14, 1500 people. I had all these business concepts. I had all the authors. Every author that I read about is now someone I'm working with, I'm friends with. They open any door I want. I call Jim Collins. He says, go see this person. And I have access to everything. And yet I'm not talking about it to anybody, despite having 68 full-time marketing people buying Facebook ads, putting, posting stuff, running a thousand locations for the customers we serve. And they just wanted to build a business with Brandon Page or a choose growth in business page. And I fought it, fought it and resisted as a dumb idea. And I look back to what Grant built and all this research. If I would have just talked about it, if I would have just taken all the videos, the thousands of videos I created for my clients to watch on my little closed system. And if I would have just created a general business education platform, I would own the whole marketplace because I had all the resources and assets, but because I was thinking too small. And that's what pissed me off about Grant. He went the other direction and he ended up owning the market. So my wife said to me after 10X Rule, by the time I listened to that book, I was 40 pounds overweight. I was feeling horrible about myself. And so we came down to Arizona and I started running every morning, listening to sell or be sold, be obsessed or be average, and 10X rule. And I think for three or four months, October, November, December, January, well, for Christmas, I bought us $35,000 tickets to go to his conference. And we were like, let's go check it out. And I knew what we were looking for walking into that conference. If we did not see it, we were out of there. If we did see it, we were going to be partners with Grant Cardone. And I went to dinner with John Maxwell, who was opening that conference. And he goes, why are you here, Brandon? I said, I got to see if this thing's real. If it is, we're going to go to the moon, John, and we're going to partner with Grant Cardone. And that was the night before the conference even started. So here we are. I mean, Brandon, just amazing. And I think that I give you credit for your humility to be willing to partner with such a big personality as Grant. Who would have thought that you guys would become best of friends, vacation buddies confidants he's my brother from another life he and elena man yeah but you compliment each other because i know you both i love what you're doing for grant and i love what he's doing for you it's not just a financial exchange it's really like two friends who stand together that's a biblical scripture yes absolutely and have an amazing we have an amazing private family life with them. Yeah. And with the girls. And we have our public personas, and then we have our public persona life. And what I'll tell you is that you asked me, how did I learn to communicate in these cycles? Right? I'm working on that every single day, the value of having all this content and information in here. Because what I did, sorry, I got a little emotional talking about Brandon. I saw that and I love that as your brother but brandon if we can just go there deep for a second he needed you too he needed you too because we both have seen grant say on different podcasts and that like you know about friendship because he's been hurting friendships but for you to be like his real friend in his real brother he needed you he needed you too so that's what i'm loving about this connection the bible scripture Charles is going to say to you is it actually says that two are better than one. Ephesians 4.9, if one falls, his brother can help him up. If one is cold, the other can keep each other warm. You guys have been through thick and thin with each other and stood steady and unsteady times. I have one more question for you. But before I give you the question, I'm going to tell you only one thing I'm jealous about with you, okay? You have one of the most beautiful wives in the world. I'm not jealous of that. You have access to private jets. I'm not jealous of that. You have houses all over the place. I'm not jealous of that. I'm jealous that you have your own emoji. If you go to Instagram and I go to Instagram stories and I look up 10X, there's you and Grant together in an emoji. You got your own emoji, buddy. Yeah, we do. I need to redo those. I was 40 pounds, 30 pounds heavier when we did those emojis. Don't tell me on air, off air. I want to know how I get my own emoji, okay? Yeah, I will tell you. I promise. If you can help me make that happen, that will change my life. Okay. Last question. Talk to me about 10X Health and the global announcement, strategic partnership with people. Tell me about that and how people can get involved. Yeah. So it's a great question. So we launched this business. I told Grant when we partnered, my wife and I sat down with he and Elena and we said in 60 months, we're going to be $125 million company. And in another 60 months, we're going to be a billion dollar company. And here's how we're going to get my help on all these people using all this stuff we have. He's been burnt by 20 people pitching in partnerships. Nobody's ever worked out and they end up treading on him and leaving. So he's very conservative about that. Well, we just finished last year, Cardo Ventures, we were $125 million company. So 123. So we did everything we said we were going to do there. Four years ago, during COVID, I was engineering two businesses that were IV businesses, one in Arizona, one in Fort Lauderdale. And the Fort Lauderdale business, I would go in when I was in Miami, and they'd take my blood, they'd put me on a peptide, they would give me these IVs, and we never got sick. And the one time I got sick, I recovered a few days later. So I told Grant, because we are in the business of helping our clients grow and scale. But I told Grant at the time we were maybe going to do is our second year, we're going to do 35 million. I said, I'm going to start this new company. I'm going to start a health and wellness company because all these IV businesses are owned by nurses and doctors that don't know how to scale businesses. And I built a thousand location medical business. So I understood it all. I said, I'm going to start another company inside. And he says, you should talk to my buddy, Gary Brecka, they're doing IVs. And so he introduced me to Gary and Gary and Sage had been doing like a million and a half dollars for four years, run around like chickens with their heads cut off. They were always late two or three hours to every appointment or they no showed, are they this, are they that? And so I approached Gary and said, I'm going to start this new company. If you want to join us, you can. Well, unbeknownst to me, I was going to name it 10X Health. And Grant said, we launched 10X Health. I tried to with Gary in 2019, but then 3,800 people hit the website, it crashed. And then Gary said, I can't figure out how to do any of it. So they shut it down. I said to Gary, I'm going to relaunch it, call it 10X Health, and I'll make you a partner and Sage, I'll buy your business for a quarter of a million bucks. And so that's what we did. And then we became partners. I was the managing partner. We owned 82% of the company and Gary got his equity for promoting the company because he didn't own his wife's business. She owned it and then she had some of the company. Well, we went from a million five in three years to 130 million. And I just applaud. Scaling principles. and Grant introduced Gary to his community, which were a lot of the people that were why we're getting all these attention with Dana White and everybody else. But it came a point where Gary had become so successful that from a promotion, because he was the promotional arm of the company, but he started making it more about him. And he started talking about things that were contradictory to what we did as a company. And that even put us in kind of a gray area with government, medical community, things like this. So I was sending him cease and desist every two weeks. And you can't say this, you can't do this, you can't do this, you can't say this, you can't have your kids doing this, you can't be doing this. And he got upset about that. But what I tried to do is explain to him that the whole company could come crashing down if we get in trouble FTC, we get in trouble with FDA, we get because you're saying all these things. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that's not what we do. And yet it's reflecting on our company. And we just had all these disagreements as the business was getting bigger. And so then he started his own company and put his kids in business and started running revenues through them that should have been going through us. And a lot of weird stuff started happening. So we just were like, hey, we need to go different directions. It evolved into some lawsuits, eventually settled out because we just had a lot of data and information. I run a professional organization. I mean, if you're going to send emails around, I'm running tracers on them. I get to see everything that's going on. And if you've never done it before, you don't even know what's happening, So he agreed, hey, I shouldn't have done that. I'm going to give you an apology letter. I'm going to do my thing. I agreed you should be your own person. You have your own voice. So did Grant. And we really took what started out as a fight and he ran around saying some negative things about us and just concluded it and said we better each being the best version of ourselves So we settled that out But a year before the fight I started making strategic investments What really triggered this is I started making strategic investments around the world because Michael Milken, my mentor, said, where the world's going to be in 10 years is you're going to walk into a restaurant with a QR code or you're going to go to the grocery store and they're going to shoot a QR code and you're going to get precision food by each household member based on your genes, your blood, your mitochondria health, and your gut health. And that's going to be how people are going to stay healthier longer because he had the Cancer Institute, all these things. And I said, well, when's that going to happen? And he said, 2035, by the time 2035. And I'm like, okay, why so long? He says, because you got to think about regions around the world and you got to think about base nutrition and how it affects each person and what's the root nutrition values and how to assign them. And there was an AI three years ago doing what it does today. So I went around, I started buying these little assets and investing, and I ended up investing about $33 billion of our money and Grant's money in Cardo Ventures and introduced to the world at GrowthCon, maybe 18 months ago, the first precision nutrition platform, doing all this with AI, with automation. Gary didn't believe in it. He didn't like it because it wasn't his idea, to be honest with you. And so he wouldn't get behind it. So he's like, I'm going to do my thing. You go do your thing. But he proceeded to go on a bunch of podcasts and trash what we were introducing into the marketplace. Well, the reason this announcement you just asked me about is so important is because we just partnered with a sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, a trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund that is the single greatest, biggest leader in genomics around the world who has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on precision health, genes, blood, precision health. When I met with them 18 months ago and showed them what I was doing, they said on their product roadmap, it was going to be a 2035 project because they did not believe the elements were available in the world today to be able to do it. So when I said, I have it, I'm going to show it to you. So they deployed it into their test markets for the last 18 months. A lot of people that they've been working with in Abu Dhabi, and they came back and said, you have the world's only precision nutrition platform. We're running type one, type two diabetes studies. We're able to get people with skin diseases, with health diseases, over 300 different diseases that we can help solve potentially through nutrition. And we've mapped in 46 countries and all those regions around the world the ability to identify a human being's genetics, blood, gut health, soon mitochondria health, and give them a process to restore the deficiencies that the bodies lose as they age in order to stay healthy and well and deliver it to them using our state-of-the-art AI where there's 7 trillion configurations to get supplements. that are made for them to get IVs that are generated for them and peptides and cellular therapies. And we have the evidence to show around the world that people that go on this system improve their life. They become healthier. They feel better. They get the precision nutrition they need as a base nutrition. We can augment it with IVs and peptides and cellular therapy. So what I wanted to do is move healthcare from entirely reactive. We spend $14,500 per capita in the United States right now. It's going to double the way they're going in the next 10 years. And yet we rank next to Vietnam and those countries that spend $100 a year. So our healthcare is a disaster. It's entirely broken. And I wanted to build something that's not healthcare, but it's human optimization and longevity. Because if you're optimized as a human being, and this is where we share with Gary Brecka. This is what he's trying to pursue. He's just doing it in a different fashion, but this is what his language is around. And we wanna be able to take any human being in the world, be able to blueprint their genetic, be able to look at what's going on in real time with blood, look at what's going on in their environment with gut health, look at what's going on with their mitochondria health, and be able to drive a prescriptive precision nutrition that gets every person off of drugs and get them away from being addicted to painkillers and to all this junk that's been shoved down our throats as a cure, but really as a dependency that ruins people's lives. So our mission, Grant, Elena, Natalie, and I, and if anybody wants to know how we had the thought, we were sitting on the boat. This is what we do when we're together. And we ask each other questions like this. What business could we start that could literally touch the lives of 8 billion people and improve while they're here on this earth in a way they could afford to do it. And we all sat around, wrote down all our ideas, and we said, nutrition. If we could, as cheap as just knowing what to put in your body, so you're just putting the right things in. You're already paying for the food. You're already getting it. But if you just knew what worked for you or against you, you could choose to put the things for you and stay away from the things that deteriorate you and harm you. base. Then what could you augment it with with different delivery systems where you don't have accessibility to certain things around the world? And so what I did is I reverse engineered precision nutrition at the base, at the root. You know what you need to eat. You know what you need to stay away from all the way to augmenting it with precision nutrition to precision peptides to precision cellular therapies. You've got stem cells, exosomes, NK cell, killer T cell, and a new whole new cellular function coming out. I wanted to be the leader in the world. But to have credibility, the way I operate is I needed to partner with a leader in the world. Because if they believe me and they do their homework and they say you're the only one in the world and they partner with me, you should know that traditionally when you go to a sovereign wealth fund that has trillions of dollars, to get a deal done with them, it could take three to 10 years because the amount of stuff you have to go through with the Department of Health, the leadership within the royal families being okay with it, and then you have to then be able to prove through research, clinical research, that what you're saying and what you're doing actually works. That whole process takes years and years and years. We completed it in less than 18 months. And that's why that announcement, because they are our partner around the world, the most forward-thinking leadership organization for precision healthcare nutrition is our partner, and it is an exclusive partnership, which they've stated, you're the only ones that have it anywhere in the world, and we want to be your partner. And we're going into clinical trials that they're funding to show that we can change the world and get people off of drugs, get them not dependent on the current healthcare system, optimize and improve their quality of life. Because if you feel great, you're going to be great. And you ask me, like, where's my energy come from? I'm on my own stuff for the last three and a half years. And I'm watching. I've anti-aged from when you and I met in 2019. I've anti-aged 20 years. I'm watching it. So Brandon, how do people find out more? Is there a website? Yeah, the easiest thing to do. Look, if you go to my Instagram, at Brandon M. Dawson, I'm posting this stuff with links to everything. It's the easiest thing to do. Or you can go to 10xhealthsystem.com or you can go to cardomentures.com. Either way, you're going to find us. Because as you know, if you click on anything that says Cardone anything, we're going to find you. And that's the genius of my partner. All right. So go to his Instagram. Follow what he's doing with this. It's life-changing. I was talking recently to our friend Mark Cuban. We were in this little office just chatting about health, nutrition, and all that. But guys, we're in trouble in the area of health. And here you go again, Brandon, being a pioneer, one step ahead. And I just want to say to you, I'm so proud of you as a friend. I also think you talking openly about Gary is really, really smart. because we both like Gary as a human being. I met Gary Breckin and his wonderful wife through Grant. But sometimes there's disagreements about things, and we should be open about that. It's in the Bible. There was a time the Apostle Paul said, I refuse to travel with Mark. It's not a fit. So thank you for your transparency even about that. Well, I think it's a lesson. Tim, here's the real deal, right? The top three reasons businesses break up when they're already successful is they fall out of partnership either with a spouse that's fighting or with a business partner or a series of partners. It is a reality that as you get in the pressure cooker of trying to expand and grow and things are not working and other people have to give up on their idea of what's right or wrong or want to do something different, the pressure of growth as you're forming that diamond, there's pieces that chunk off of it. and it should be expected. So while all this is going on, I'm not emotional about it. I'm just very pragmatic. But I also know what the future looks like and I know what I need to do to protect it if I'm your partner or you're my partner. So that didn't feel good when Gary and I split up because I had my T's crossed, my I's dotted and I own the trademark to the ultimate human and he didn't like that because I saw him launch it. So I'm like, I'm gonna own all this. And people criticize me for it. But look, at the end of the day, I have other business partners. I have other employees that depend on us. And I can't allow someone to come inside of an environment that we created and then leave with the assets that we own and do it in a way that's not correct. But the flip side is, because what makes me be able to move through these things, and I think this is going to be a great lesson for people listening to this. I am an expert at putting myself in both shoes. So when I think of Gary Brecka, here's a guy that nobody knew who he was, just like nobody knew who I was. Here's a guy that has a mission that he wants to tell the world about, but he was constrained and boxed up from it. Now he's in a business environment where he has to be controlled what he can and can't say because the business element's not because, and it's out of alignment with his own passion, his own desire, and his own beliefs, because it's a business that's regulated by authorities, and there's things you cannot say or do that you could as an individual. So I was able to sit back and say, most of the frustration and the pent up anger and his doing his things and us having to do our things wasn't because I disliked Gary. In fact, I think Gary is one of the best communicators and orators in this world. And he's got a photographic memory so he can combine data super quick and deliver something. Now, is it always right? No, but either is anybody else. He'll go back and say, I shouldn't have said that. Like he'll go correct it when he's identifying that something was wrong. But it just didn't fit in the business environment of what we were building. And then when he felt like it wasn't built by him, it conflicted with him. Okay, no problem. Do your thing. Be the best in the world, which he is. He will be. There's zero question. This guy is going to go in his own way, change a piece of the world because there's nobody like you. And when Gary and I, even when this was going on and people were seeing him talk shit about me on the podcasts, and I stayed silent because I knew there was going to be a conclusion. But we ran into each other in Dubai and we worked out together. We hung out at the spa together. We hung out at the pool together. I never actually personally, because I fully understand Gary's acceleration and passion and joy, I don't want to be the reason he can't be that. So he had to do it outside of us. And I understood that. It just needed to work itself through so that technically it happened that way. Gary and I could go see each other right now anywhere. People are going to think we hate each other. We'll go have dinner together. We'll laugh our asses off. I had some of the best times of my life traveling and doing things with Gary Brucker. So on a personal level, I'm not going to throw shade at him. On a business level, I have a responsibility and an obligation to our enterprise and to make sure that we're building it according to the vision, the ethics, the morals, the legalities of a successful business. He now can do anything he wants to with anyone else, and there's no friction between us. He's great at what he does. We're great at what we do. And so that's where we decided to leave it. And a lot of people watching the story don't understand how we got here, but it doesn't matter because he's happy, man. He is changing the world. He's everywhere doing everything. We're happy. We're changing the world. We're just doing it differently. Brandon, what you're doing as we conclude is so wonderful. It's called the power of honesty. And that's all through the Proverbs too. Like a true brother will say it to the brother's face. That's the power of honesty. We don't do that today. That's very old school. And I love how you come across. All right, so we will follow Brandon Dawson. Your last book is called what again? nine figure mindset by brandon dawson i've only had 28 clients get that book so you know i life coach people so i have all my clients get that doggone book brandon i love you you rascal i love you too buddy i really appreciate you yeah let me come on one of your private islands when you buy one. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So I just wanted to say this. Thank you for watching Miracle Mentality today. I think this is my favorite episode. I mean, just the brilliance. I love to read these success motivational books, but the way Brandon is breaking this down, guys, and he's breaking it down and he's making it easy enough for us to understand and to grow and to learned, to get better. And look what Brandon said today. He was so honest about shortcomings in his own life, even challenges in his own life, but not sitting or settling in a setback. So don't you ever give up on yourself. So continue to watch The Miracle Mentality, like, subscribe, and continue to tell a friend. Until next time, keep on doing good. Life is good. thank you for sharing space with me on this episode of miracle mentality with tim story if today sparked your courage or helped you understand why you're created for success i invite you to carry that miracle mentality forward visit me at timstory.com that story with an EY on the end. Until next time, walk by faith, embrace possibility, and create your own comeback story.