Removing stress and toxicity from a business can make everything, including growth, go faster.

[01:22]

"You don't need to pay a mentor, uh, Lots, tens of thousands of dollars to design some plan to grow, to make 75,000, 100,000 or 200,000 plus a year over time, and most people around you think that is success and that is successful."

[11:12]

"When I started this business, I was in the basement apartment in Harvard Square and I didn't have $1,000 in my bank account to pay rent that month and everything that I've grown in my business is from studying family offices and studying billionaires,"

[15:08]

"Sometime takes a little courage to know that your own business is going to fill that Gap, instead of selling your soul by the hour to build somebody else's business right."

Full transcript

It's going to be pretty quick. It ties into some of the thoughts I shared earlier today on the seven ways to have the most fun year of your life, for business and health. Um, I think there are things that most of us here can can relate to very easily and hopefully you find it really practical. So this is a picture, um, of when I was in uh, Croatia.

We took a hike up from our hotel and at the top of the mountain is when it crosses over into Bosnia. I never thought I'd go to Bosnia in my life, but it was hike away from the Sheron Hotel. So we went up there with my brother-in-law and my wife and it was a great time made it made it a lot of fun. And, if you think about it, who does not want to have the most fun year of your life?

We all do right, but we have responsibilities, we have our team, we have our family to take care of, you have a, maybe a more mortgage to worry about, maybe payroll, maybe some goals that you want to meet, and so you might think, hey, I need to hunker down, need to work really, really hard. Just focus on working hard, right, but we all want to have the most fun year of our life. We all want our definition of success to involve having a lot of fun. None of us want to be average.

Other people around us don't want to be average. What I covered earlier today at 10:30, shared the example of Arnold and his uh Vision strength, and you know, one thing that I I've said in social media and got a lot of comments was that, like you know, basic success is not that hard. You just have to work hard in Focus. People say, hey, that doesn't make sense.

You said: it's not hard, you just have to work hard. Well, it's not complicated. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. You don't need to pay a mentor, uh, Lots, tens of thousands of dollars to design some plan to grow, to make 75,000, 100,000 or 200,000 plus a year over time, and most people around you think that is success and that is successful.

But my point is that we want to all Elevate our definition of success and be healthier, be more successful in a holistic way, uh, be happy doing exciting things all the time, and what I find is that some of the most ultra wealthy, successful business people I know are very happy, and I'm going to share how it can affect business and how to screen things going on in your business, just to remove the stress and toxicity in the business which can really make everything go faster, because if you're distracted by what's not working or a stressful employee or partnership, then it kind of muddles the waters and you're slowed down by that, versus focusing on adding another team member that's like the rest of your a class team. So this is my daughter and we got to flip the coin at the Vienna Vikings game in Austria, uh, which was awesome. She she said that she was so nervous that she was shaking before she flip the coin on the field, uh, so we had to practice on the sidelines and um, so that was a lot of fun.

It was just a fun, unique experience to take her to a um cin, a millionaire strategies conference. Um, this is us doing a lin8 stand just about three weeks ago in Scottdale. Um, we brought in $250 in about two hours, 2 hours and a quarter, and, uh, every time we go we come up with some new strategies. This time they had a little sign that says: please help us go see Taylor Swift.

Uh, some people gave money just for that and you know she's a billionaire, so I support it. Was against it until last month. Uh, um, so they have a lot of fun doing this. They get excited by it. Um, they're not the best at being very outgoing on the sales pitch, but we figur out how to automate the sales pitch, not using AI, like like every Company claims to use.

Uh, but we have lemonade Depot signage: the prices on there, it's only $1 a cup. We get five and 10 and $20 bills. All the time people say: oh, I support women entrepreneurs. We'll probably make a new sign next time that says: support women entrepreneurs. Just to encourage that. Uh, they want new iPads, but they're going to buy them themselves.

I don't care if they're cracked. You want a new iPad, you do a couple lemonade stands and our goal is to make $1,000 in one weekend doing lemonade stands. Um, the the new trick we came up was: I got my mobile Bluetooth speaker. We put it in the trees and there's two crosswalks. We put it by the second crosswalk and when every people gathered there, I would have my 9-year-old do the sales pitch in her little voice and then I would have it on my phone and when they got to the stoplight, then I'd push play and they would hear his voice come out of the bushes and they would turn around and look and see the lemonade stand and we got 100% hit rate the first four times we pushed play and we used it all day long to maximize our sales and it was like an automated sales pitch.

It's like a recorded voicemail, right? So we love that. This is my daughter skiing with us up in Flagstaff: uh, doing what messy kids do. This is us, uh. When we were in, uh, where was this in Rome? And uh, we went to go work out at the gym and, of course, they wanted to join me.

So for me, this is my definition of fun. For Bo, it's climbing K2, or 25% of people die. Uh, and doing fun adventures like that, you know. Um, for you it's going be different. Right, I told the story of like, who built these buildings? Like, how could I be someone that does something that big?

And the point of bringing that up is that you should be doing things very exciting because they're so ambitious and so big and so exponential that you wonder how you could possibly get there and then figure out what would be the next steps on that path towards that. Shared a couple of those pictures already. Um, there's some pictures, just some Adventures. My wife and I have gone on.

I climbed halfway down the slippery Cliff, there's just slippery, muddy rocks, and Havasupai Falls to get down to the lower three waterfalls. Halfway down, I thought I might die, so I was like I'm not doing this. I looked up and there's already five more people coming down, including like a 12-year-old. Um, so I kept on going down because I didn't really have a choice at that point, but not sure I'll do that one again.

This is West Coast Trail. There's 130 ladders and bridges and some of them are as tall as 30 stories, uh, like four sequences of ladders and it was awesome. Um, that's in a Vancouver Island. This is a Olympic National Park. With my guy friends, every May in August, I go with my guy friends on a backpacking trip and it's great.

Talk business, talk personal things, talk family things. It's time to get off my phone for once or email, and This Is Us in dolber, Croatia. So, but I also have fun in the business and that's the important thing. Like, of course, okay, yeah, go on a fun trip, great, that, that's great, Richard, to to travel. But having, um, the ability to have fun in your business is the most important part of the message, because that's the non-obvious part.

If what you're doing is not fun, then why are you doing it? If anything you're doing is not exciting, then why are you doing it? If you know what your strengths are and what you're excellent at and what Dan Sven would call is your unique ability, then why do you do anything outside your unability? Every year you should Define: look at everything you're doing.

Cut out 80%, if you can, at least 20% of the stuff that's not your inability, and chunk it down and then focus on that 20% and every year, be doing that. Hiring people, Outsourcing, shutting down the business unit, that's not worth it. Um, reducing things that are a stress or toxic. So that's important and I get excited working with this, because doctors who go to school for a decade, then do a residency and then start a medical practice and grow to multiple locations, they're 17 years in by the time I talk to them.

They're not disappearing to Venezuela or Croatia. On me, you know, with investor Capital, they usually got debt. They have families, they're, they vested their whole life. It's their life's work having these medical practices and I like that. I can sleep at night and they can sell for a big multiple. So to me that's a def definition of exciting in business.

You know, interviewing billionaires like: why does Richard Wilson own billionaires. Comom with with um, a few invest that are they're here in the club. It's like, um, why doesn't Goldman Sachs own this? Why doesn't some billionaire own it? Like? Everyone would like to have more relationships with billionaires.

Unless you're, you know, Mark Cuban or Elon Musk yourself and you can have all the relationships you want. Everyone else needs more relationships. They need distribution. So we shouldn't be able to have this, and we do somehow, and that's exciting. So we want to encourage you to do the same thing, um, because without the excitement Factor, you're not going to have the grit factor, and the Very definition of flow is to work on something that is very important and you're very passionate about it, or you don't enter the state of flow.

That's why I get on an airplane. It's a 6-hour trip. We land before I know it and I've knocked out, you know, tons of work and messages and exciting progress on things. Um, and I don't really see it as work. It's like an exciting adventure, exploring this, exploring that if something becomes tough, you might have to work through it, but it it becomes too toxic or negative Etc.

Then just duck out of it, say okay, we don't need this inside of our universe, right? So I encourage you to do the same. Uh, we've talked hundred of Medical Practice owners to close just six platform deals to get us minority 20% and 50% Equity stakes and 28 medical practices to get billionaires. Comom is: I shared 152 emails over 12 years for billionaires.

Comom, we've sent 9,000 emails to get 27 interviews done, not the best hit rate, but hopefully that goes up and we get some referrals to get more of those done. Right, but you wouldn't do that unless you're excited about it. So that shows why it's important. Uh, one thing I'm trying to do is inject my brain with an hour of billionaire mental model.

Uh, every day I listen to the books at two or 2.5x speed, so it's really two hours or two and a half hours of billionaire ideas trying to get input in my brain every day. I don't always get to that, but if you're not working on the exciting projects, things are going to go slow and it's going to be a brutal slog, basically. So since I started our, our business, um, I've sent 161,000 emails. It's not through our CRM, it's just oneoff emails that I've written, you know, uh, one at a time, and I'm sure you guys can see where you've had success.

It took similar determination and keeping at it over a long period of time. You know, Monger just passed away. I think it was like social media and everywhere was blanketed with notes about that. People respected him so much and one of the things he said in one of the many videos that people were releasing on social media, which, by the way, what a legacy that Munger leaves if people react that way when he passes away.

Right, and they would share all of his insights. But he also talked about how being good-natured was a really important strength. He talked about having a sense of humor and what's the point of doing it if you're not having fun? This one of smartest, most successful investment human beings on planet Earth, saying you have to have fun and have a sense of humor and be good-natured, right, that's what we've been talking about through the whole conference that we're trying to go out of a way to help good people, Etc.

So it's not just like a nice thing to do. It's like like what Bo is talking about. It's an advantage on your IQ and your thinking, just like if you don't sleep enough, your IQ goes down just as much as if you were drunk. Right same thing as if you're always unhappy and don't like what you're doing, don't like your partners and not excited about your project.

Then imagine what that does when you compound at all. If you have mediocre employees, if you have bad deals, if you have energy vampires around you all the time, if you let negative media into your brain more often than b billionaire mental models, those are all things that infect your brain. And if you have a great team, it's like an immune system. A new team member will not survive in that petri dish.

They will be kicked out without you having to do anything and they'll probably quit or your team members will will tell you what needs to happen. So sometimes there's an employee who creates great results but just really hurts the company culture. We've all had to deal with those before and usually there's two to four clients that take up all your time and the other clients are all great to work with, has been my experience. So, all things to cut out to make life more fun and, as I mentioned yesterday, the reason why IC billionair is getting exponential results is stacking the great business models, investment structures, access to Capital, reputation, seeing deals first, exclusively of better valuations.

Plus, they know themselves so well. Why would they do anything that's not enjoyable, right? Why? Why would you spend time on something that's super painful when you're worth a billion dollars? Plus, you're only going to work on what you're super passionate about. So I think that's really important for all of us to try to do.

Uh, whether your goal is to get to 5 million or 1 million or 10 million or 50 million or higher net worth, um, it all applies. When I started this business, I was in the basement apartment in Harvard Square and I didn't have $1,000 in my bank account to pay rent that month and everything that I've grown in my business is from studying family offices and studying billionaires, right and so, um, we've really built our business from the ground up organically, not by taking in a bunch of capital. We have no big brother Partners, we have no debt, we have no equity Partners. It was all just organic, slow growth, and that's why it's taken me 16 years, when other people blow up to 50 million in Revenue in three years, sometimes, uh, by going a different route.

So I get excited studying all this stuff and there's many reasons why youd want to have the most fun year of your life, but sometimes defining how you're going to get there, I think, is important, and there's been several people that, once we me mention this message and the message of being Ultra healthy, like one of our members don't want to put him on the spot is here in the room. He's lost 65 pounds in the last 18 months because he heard this message at one of our Mastermind events. Right, and, and what you need to do to cut out of your life to have the most fun year of your life is going to be different than what it is for other people, but you probably want your legacy to be about not just work, work, work, and your whole life should be work, work, work. Have no fun.

Don't do things for other people, don't do fun things for yourself. Don't be a happy person. Don't have a social life right. Almost none of us want that for me. I had to quit two boards. One of the boards I quit is someone here in the room.

Were're still friends, but I was spending four hours a month on board calls that I think could probably be done in an hour or less, and I just felt like I was spending all this time to build someone else's business I didn't have equity in. They paid me an amazing amount per hour for my time, but it just painful to be on the call four hours and I find myself want to kill off emails while I sit on these long board calls and people would talk slowly about issues that we've already talked about, you know. So I still respect them, like them, Etc. But uh, I turned down money just to regain more sanity and fun and and build our own business versus spending time being on boards and building other people's businesses.

Joel Nagel has sat on over 30 boards, I think he's off all of them, but just a couple now. So he's decided the same thing with his investment of time. Uh, I cancel all meetings I don't want to go to. I'm just not going to go to meetings I don't want to go to. I I'd rather have a smaller business and just enjoy my day and only do exciting things with people I want to do business with.

Only work on exciting projects. Fired stress from my team and my Client List: um, that's why we have a great team. Um, that's why the event goes relatively smooth and hopefully you're all having a good time here. And a real big commonality among billionaires is not just the Curiosity but it's the level of Excellence they expect from people.

If you read Steve schwarzman book What It Takes, he's a founder of Blackstone. It's one of the top five billionaire books I've ever read. He talks about how anything less than excellent is not acceptable, and I'm not. I don't rail against my team if something goes wrong here, but we take notes on it. How do we fix that process, how do we adjust things?

And you know right away, in real time, we're saying which speakers are doing an amazing job. I thought Pierre was very tactful on stage. If someone was talking too long, say oh, I'm going to interrupt you right now, we're going to keep on moving along with the conversation. I thought he did an amazing job of that and I told my team that we should have Pierre back.

So I'm sure you guys do very similar things. Last Point here: one of my themes during covid was: just do it. I had delayed a long time on some ideas and I realized, man, I'm 14 years into this thing, 13 years into thing. What am I waiting for to turn 50 before I do some of these ideas?

So that's when we bought commercial realestate.com, bought billionaire . You know, quadrupled our social media presence, bought social media assets and dentistry and really been growing much faster and being a little bit more transparent with what I care about on the health side and having fun while also making your business actually fun to run, which usually means you're running a better business. So I would encourage you to write down a couple of ideas. I'm sure you've been thinking about them as, as I'm talking about quitting a Consulting engagement, that it's like part of your brain because all of us had to be resourceful to start our businesses, turning down small or now moderate amounts of money.

You're not not used to doing that, but have more of an abundance mindset and focus on what's working, what's exciting, what your biggest strengths are. Sometime takes a little courage to know that your own business is going to fill that Gap, instead of selling your soul by the hour to build somebody else's business right. Um, that's something I really try to get away from. So it might mean quitting a board.

It might mean firing a team member next week. It might be ending a partnership. It might be focusing on three things instead of seven. Um, for you it's going to mean something totally different than me, but I hope this message kind of resonates with a few people here in the room. I'd love to hear how it does with some.

I had someone come up to me in the hall that said one year ago they met someone for dinner downstairs at LMA and today they committed $6 million to to fund their Venture, their real estate venture. They've been under due diligence for a year. I also met someone out in the hall. I shook my hand and said a year and a half ago I talked about having an accountability partner, that for 13 years I have a call with every Monday and we set our number one goal for the week and keep each other accountable.

And this time of year we have all of our goals for next year established. So January 1st hits and we're on version eight of our annual goals and hitting the ground running. And he said he found an accountability partner at a family office club events. I've never heard of that idea. And every Sunday at 6 PM they have a call and they hold each other accountable.

So I hope you meet friends here in the room. I hope you meet clients, hope you meet JV Partners, hope you hear about exciting investment structures, Trends in the industry, grow conviction in what you're already doing. Figure out how to focus to have a more fun, profitable business, a better Investment Portfolio. Train the next gen in a way that's with your values and skills, and I hope you see our investor Club as a Perpetual learning machine.

That's how I see it, and I would just encourage you just to write down real quick, uh, something that you could take action on right now to make it the most fun year of your life, whether it's going on an epic trip with your spouse or your kids, bringing NextGen to one of our next events to train them, if that would make it more fun, Etc. And encourage you to take some action on that. Um, so you get a unique type of value out of being here, because most investment conferences don't talk about maximizing your fund, and I think it's important. It makes you more profitable.

I also want to thank my team again, not going to uh take up your cocktail Time by reading off all their names. But, um, appreciate you treating them with respect and, um, as you all have been, you've been every everyone's been great and I think everything's been going really well, at least from our perspective here at the event today. So appreciate you keeping us in mind. Uh, we have these books in the portal.

Uh, for your membership portal, if you're an investor here in the room, you haven't done an investor mandate yet with Laura or andrees, would love for you to record that. Um, let's enjoy some networking cocktails now and we'll see you tomorrow back here in the room at 10:00 a.m. For the last day of the family office super Summit. Thank you everybody.

Join the family office club by visiting family offices.com. We look forward to seeing you at our next live event.