Massive output, from teenage flyers to 500 blog posts, built Wilson's family office business.

[07:18]

"Back in 2007, I started writing on it once a week, then once every couple of days, then once a day, and what I did was find there was 500 keyword related to family offices that people were searching for online."

[06:22]

"A 22 year-old, you know that much money? Pretty much nobody, unless you sell commercial real estate or raise capital. So I went to the capital raising world and everyone said again: if you haven't raised $100 million, if you haven't raised capital for 7 years, go away, we don't want you."

[09:02]

"We have one investment where we did, where I had put in 150,000, another investor put in 350,000. When money comes off the table, he gets all of his 350,000, first before I get a dime, then I get my 150,000 and then we're pro."

Full transcript

Hope everyone had a great time yesterday. Looks like some people had a great time late last night, and we'll be wandering in here in the next couple minutes. Um, I'm going to go through some quick slides and we'll kick off the day with uh 40 plus speakers on stage throughout today. A lot of great content coming for you tomorrow as well.

Um, don't forget about the social media challenge. You can post up to two times per day um to win the pair of Beats uh noise cancelling headphones for, uh, your trip home. Um, what I'm going to go over this morning is a strategy that I didn't realize that I used, but has really been helpful in growing our business, and I started using this back, uh, even in high school, and then it worked, and so I just kept on using what worked, like all of you do in business. So it's just what happens to work for me.

Um, I call it Brute Force reciprocation. If you know anything about like the hacker world and someone tries to guess your password 100,000 times per second, you know it can sometimes be described as like a Brute Force attack, and if they get the password right, then and they get access to your stuff. Um, and the way I look at this is part of the strategy here is to approach something in many different directions, with a lot of focus and experiment and try many different angles of what combination works to unlock the lock and get something done, but to also enact a sense of reciprocation and doing something good for somebody else, helping them first and removing the friction of doing business together. Um, because reciprocation is basically, if you do something for someone else, they want to thank you or do something for you in return.

So combining these two ideas into one is what's really helped me, um, be successful over time, and so realizing that it makes me want to do even more about it and talk about it and share it with you, because I know, if it's a lot of what's made me successful, than doing this twice as often or even faster is just going to make success go faster, right? Um, when I was meeting with Mark, I mentioned yesterday that he said that he was confronted recently with someone who told him what you're about to do is not possible, that's not going to get done. And his exact like: no, you don't understand, I make things happen, I'm going to get it done. And that attitude is why Mark's a huge success.

If you have time to talk with him here at the event, you know you'll see that this was the first advertisement I ever created. This was a flyer that I stuffed in mailboxes when I was 17 years old in my neighborhood. Luckily, I remember being in my parents bonus room and the phone rang and the local County government was calling um and they said: oh, is this the residence of Richard Wilson? And I was just a kid and I said yes, and uh, I don't know they thought I was the parent or what.

They said: oh, I've been getting complaints that the neighbors are upset that you're stuffing mailboxes with advertisements and it doesn't have proper postage on it and that's illegal. Uh, so apparently some grumpy person you know tattled on the 17-year-old trying to build a yard cleaning business. So that's comical. But uh, also, it was the first attempt of like: all right, let me stuff a bunch of mailboxes here and see what happens.

And we got, you know, six or seven clients. We called that half success back then, mowing lawns for5 to $20 a piece. Um, I then in high school my dad bought me a multi-level marketing sell longdistance telephone service business and I cold called everybody in my high school directories. I called all the parents of my high school friends and I think I sold two people on Switching their long distance telephone service and one of them was my, my girlfriend's, parents, so that doesn't really count.

Um, I' already made that sale at a lower level I guess, and so, uh, but that was another thing of like putting myself out there and trying something until it worked. I then in high school for a summer job. I didn't want to be a lifeguard or a swim coach or a soccer referee anymore. I wanted to learn about how to do something in computers, this was in the 1990s, and how to make websites.

So I cold called every company in the Yellow Pages that related to computers. One person called me back, his name was nanan and he was an Indian and he had an Indian Community and he built websites for them. So this is before Dreamweaver, before front page, before WordPress. So we, he taught me how to script websites with HTML and and JavaScript and Notepad, and I created websites for Indian businesses and he taught me how to do that and when, you're, you know, 16, 17 years old and it's 1996, 1997.

Getting paid $16 an hour to do something like that was pretty cool and it created, Created my own Opportunity by just putting lots of uh output out to the world. I use that to buy some Office Depot stock, which luckily tripled, and bought my first car, which was a, a fun, exciting car in college, you know, um, and then, when I graduated from my undergrad at Oregon State University, I was faced with the fact that most people coming out of Oregon State University, uh, in 2002, I guess it was 2003, you know, get paid $30,000 a year and they want you to manage a warehouse or you can go work at Target and try to move up the management chain. Um, that's about as exciting as the opportunities got for graduates of Oregon State University at that time, a lot of the time. So, um, I went and I interviewed with everybody in the Portland Oregon Chamber Of Commerce that would take a coffee meeting with me, like four or five of them did.

One of them was an Alum of the University, uh, her name was Lisa and she said: yeah, it's great, be happy to keep in touch, but there's no way we can hire you. You need seven years of experience to work here. I said, okay, well, how about this? I'll remove the friction. This comes down to the reciprocation part of it.

I'll remove all the friction. I'll work for you for free. If I'm horrible, you fire me in the first hour. No hard feelings. If I'm horrible, you get rid of me in the first day or two and I'll work for free until you think I'm worth it. And she was paying her other risk consultants for SAR, Oly, risk control, mapping, you know, $70, $80 an hour.

So she felt bad me not getting paid at all. She said: well, if you last, we want to pay you, so we'll pay you $40 an hour instead of 70 or 80 an hour. She was probably charging the corporation 120 hour for every hour, Bill across the whole thing. And um, we lasted. In my first 12 months doing this.

I made more money than my professors that were teaching me the couple months before at Oregon State University who told me: don't graduate a year early, take your time, enjoy school, take your time going through the classes. And I didn't want to do that. I was eager to get to the real world and actually do things. But it was that approach, again the brute force, reciprocation, that really helped me do that.

In Boston, nobody wanted to give me a job to raise capital. I got really bored doing risk controls. It paid for my MBA, which I paid for with cash by living at home while doing the risk control work. Um, and I said, who's going to pay? A 22 year-old, you know that much money? Pretty much nobody, unless you sell commercial real estate or raise capital.

So I went to the capital raising world and everyone said again: if you haven't raised $100 million, if you haven't raised capital for 7 years, go away, we don't want you. So I did the risk Consulting two days a week. I worked for free three days a week for a placement agency, um learned how to raise Capital, learned what a family office was, learned that nobody was being a helpful Trail guide to myself, um, but I got the job raising Capital. He saw that was putting in all the work and after four or five months of working for free three days a week, um, he said: okay, come on full-time and I'll give you this base salary, um to come on and get into the industry and while doing so, stumbled across family offices.

Um created a free blog at uh blog spot. Back then, um, and started writing just once every week or two on Capital raising, hedge funds, family offices. When I started seeing that people cared about all three topics but family offices almost no one else was writing on. Back in 2007, I started writing on it once a week, then once every couple of days, then once a day, and what I did was find there was 500 keyword related to family offices that people were searching for online.

So I created a spreadsheet, tracked it and I wrote two blog posts on all 500 keywords that people search for. To rank on SEO, we started getting 5,000, 7,000 hits a day. I got on the front page of the Boston Globe, spoke a couple hundred times and a dozen countries, and everything kind of took off from that approach of kind of a Brute Force mentality of Doing Hard, focused work but trying a whole number of combinations and just poking at the opportunity. I didn't have any money with any of these opportunities.

I didn't have any you know, uh person that sat on a board of a big school or that owned some huge corporation. My parents didn't get me any of the jobs and I really think that luck is a four-letter word for a reason, and when you tell your kids, oh yeah, we are so lucky to have this, we're so lucky that we own family office Club, we're so lucky that we get to go to Austria. I really think it discredits everything you're trying to pass on in terms of values. Every person in this room is here because you're hardworking and when you call it luck, then you're just throwing away that value of teaching them that you have to work hard.

It's not luck. They shouldn't just be waiting to get lucky. That's the worst thing you can pass on to the next generation is making them think, oh, maybe one day I'll get lucky. Those are the lottery players and the people pulling the levers in casinos, and that's not where you want your kids. Um. One of my favorite quotes showed this yesterday.

In case you missed it: it's not about money and connections. It's a willingness to outwork and out learn, and that's what I'm talking about here: outworking with a lot of focus. Take all the risk off the table for the counterparty. Um is a great thing to do anytime you can. We have one investment where we did, where I had put in 150,000, another investor put in 350,000.

When money comes off the table, he gets all of his 350,000, first before I get a dime, then I get my 150,000 and then we're pro. That's another example of taking taking um the other person's risk off the table earlier. And another transaction: um, we've put out structures where if we put up 100K, someone else put up 100. Okay, if there's a 50% loss, you know we take 100% of the loss because we're confident there's not going to be a loss, and then they get damaged.

It's another example of removing some of the friction of an offer potentially um Medical Clinic Capital. We're approaching lots of medical practices through investor clubs, doctor investor clubs, and taking minority Equity stakes in profitable, uh fast growing medical and dental clinics. So we're learning a ton by doing that and getting better and better, trying to remove the friction for investors but also the medical practice owners. So, just like you, we're trying to to grow our balance sheet in that area.

So here's kind of the few bullet points here on what brute Forest reciprocation means and just after all the experiments we've done, um what works and what doesn't. Uh, the first thing is to just do it and if you want to get something done, just go after it, even if you feel like you don't have the resources and don't feel like you have the perfect pitch yet, and you'll learn by pitching different things. The other thing is to take away the friction. I don't know how many times people have told me you're wasting your time, go away.

And then I say, well, would you do the deal if we did it like this? And I say, yeah, we'll do that deal. So at billionaires do.com, it took 150 emails over 12 years to get the deal done. But I wanted to own that asset more than I guess anyone else on planet Earth did. Um, and they said, if you have, you give 10 days and we'll give you half off on the valuation that we've stated for the last 12 years.

And my pitch was like: Hey, for 12 years you've told me you want to sell it for a million bucks. No one's bought it. No one on planet Earth wants to buy this for a million bucks. So, uh, obviously that's not the market market price, because sometime in the last 12 years someone would have found it and bought it.

Um, and then that was part of my sales pitch. So outwork everyone else out, learn everyone else. Focus on a niche worth focusing on. If you focus on a really valuable sandbox, it doesn't matter if it takes you 12 years just to get the domain name. It doesn't matter if it takes me, God forbid, another 12 years to interview 100 billionaires.

We're at 27 already after 18 months, but maybe for some reason it'll go slower instead of faster, which I'm pretty sure it'll just go faster. But, um, it doesn't matter. If the niche is worth focusing on, then we'll get there eventually, and then it'll be awesome when we do so. If you're not focused on the right Niche, it's not motivating to work hard, though it's not motivating to innovate.

It's not motivating to be curious, and that's why you can't work on things that are not exciting, or other people will run circles around you, eat your lunch and then run more circles around you, because they're excited and you're not, and they're passionate and you're not. So later on today, I'm going to be talking on two really important topics. One of them is going to be average equals Death, and I'm going to show how bad it is to be average with many different parts of your business or life and point out at least one way where we could all be less average than we are now. You're obviously not average in the core thing you do, or you wouldn't be here in the room, obviously, um, and so I think we all recognize that that's important and I'm also going to talk about have the most, how to have the most fun year of your life that makes your business more productive than any other year.

At the same time, and those ideas are related, uh, to this topic, um, the other thing is to try every possible combination approach, pitch demographic. We're trying to remove the friction for some billionaires who have written a book, saying we'll buy 500 copies of your book and give it away at some of our events, and then, by doing so, we say, oh, but if you can also just answer these three questions for billionaires. That'd be amazing and that's really what we're going for, but by spreading the word about their book. It's a form of reciprocation and helping them first.

Uh, riches are typically in the niches. Focusing on little niches that are very high value is what's worked uh well for us over time. If you think about what a real reasonable person would do and you do 5%, 1%, 10%, more. If you win by 1%, it might be enough. You won. It doesn't matter.

In the Olympics, you win by 01, you won. You got the gold medal. In Investments, you might get the whole allocation. The second place might get no allocation or a small one. You know, uh, Grant Grant Cardone would say: to do 10x, do 100x what everyone else does, what. However you want to look at it, whatever it would be reasonable, and then whatever you think the other person at the table next to you would think is enough, Beyond reasonable, and then go beyond that, then that's probably where you should be aing.

For if you want to make sure to be a success, um, because you just have to put Massive Action out there, if you want to get massive results. Use creative structures to turn NOS into yeses. We gave examples of that. Use a sense of humor, or whoever you are, uh, Mark Victor Hansen, um, I forget the name of the Olympic rowing athlete who tried three different sports to go to the Olympics.

Uh, forgive me, but he talked about being yourself, not trying to be someone else. What, whoever you naturally are, whether it's hunting or fishing or flying helicopters, whatever your passion is, golf, Etc. Um, really importantly for investors, I mentioned this at the lfi launch yesterday, it's really important to see deals first, exclusively and at a better valuation than everyone else, and your balance sheet will scale. We help investors do that and craft strategies on how to do that.

But also for those who are raising capital or looking for partners, it's really important to be number one in something for a very specific someone. So we're trying to be the number one source of billionaire insights on planet Earth at billion.com and have the most insights ranked, ranking all the books, reading all the books, Etc. We also want to be the most helpful to those starting a family office for you, it might be the best number one in self storage in Austin, or it might be stem cell therapy centers in Florida, Etc. Right, um, look for levers, catalysts, anchor investors, Blue Chip Partners, publicly traded companies, billionaires, industry leaders, because if you can get one of those on board, everything else will go faster.

One of my mentors, sjin Thomas. He's raised over $3 billion and he always goes for the Blue Chip investor first. He'll go and secure someone for $30 million. The rest of the $150 million raay will go much, much faster, because I know that Calpers came in for $30 million and he's learned those lessons the hard way. So I' would encourage you to know that as well, even if you don't like the strategy I'm sharing here today.

Going for an anchor investor is always a smart approach. Smart idea helps others move a lot faster. Um, so this is our team. Just want to, uh, thank all of our team. There's too many here to mention by name or we'll burn another couple minutes at the conference, but they're the reason that everything goes smooth and hopefully is it's been an enjoyable event, so we thank them for all their help, and that's it for my comments now, um, we're having a a fun fireside chat later.

Many discussion panels, um, they'll be giving a couple talks later as well, so hope you enjoy the whole day. And the next speaker is different than all of the other speakers, uh, at this event and, honestly, I think, from any of that we've had at any of our events in the past. So we're going to have Charlie come up and introduce him in just one second, but I think you're uh about to see something very interesting and it's never been unveiled before, uh, to the general public. Um, so I hope you'll find it fascinating, and when you see this next person speak, you can tell that they're passionate about, uh, what he does.

Michael's very passionate, but also, uh, what I appreciate is the structure of how he's organized. Everything is different than everyone else here in the room and, um, I really respect that, and I think that a lot of success comes down to structuring things the right way, so I respect that as well. So thank you for everyone's attention and uh hope you have a great day with us here today. Thank you.