Okay, so the news is this, if you've been listening to this podcast, you know that Shepard
is a business that I'm a part owner in.
I've been talking about it on the podcast and it's a great business and last week news broke that there was a private buyout of a majority stake in the company for $52 million at a $52 million valuation.
It was done by Nick Huber.
I had the opportunity to sell my shares in that.
I decided not to. Not a single share.
I'm holding every single share.
So today we're going to talk about, I guess we'll tell the story of, you know, how Shepard even grew in four years to be a $52 million company, how I ended up getting involved with it becoming a owner in the business and why one of the owners in the business did this buyout, how they, they took $29 million and bought the majority controlling stake in the company.
So that's the news. Now here's the back.
All right, Sean. Next week you guys had an a big announcement, so you and Nick bought Shepard and that's amazing.
And I didn't, I didn't do it.
Nick did it. Not me. Yeah, but you were part of it.
You're part of it. You're, you're one of the partners and I guess maybe I'm going to interview you at least for this first segment because I want to learn all about it.
Sure. I think it's amazing what Nick has done.
So let's start with the beginning.
Explain what Shepard is and then I guess the will start it in like 2020 when it started and explaining like how it grew and what happened last week.
Yeah, so there's a guy named Marshall Haas who was entrepreneur, done a bunch of different things.
I think he owns like a hotel in St.
Louis. He had a bunch of e-commerce companies, some goofy one like some emoji, something, something.
Then he had peel, which was like a phone case type, like a thin phone case.
So he was in e-commerce and one of the common things with e-commerce is e-commerce is like a real business, but it's like a lemonade stand business.
Every margins matter. And so what a lot of e-commerce operators do and I did this too with my e-commerce brand, I think 60% of our staff is offshore is because margins matter, you have to figure out a certain specific problem, which is how do I get great talent without paying the full cost, without paying the full cost of hiring Stanford grads and Harvard grads or even just a normal median worker in the States.
And so a lot of us, we go to talent hotbeds like Latin America where you find great programmers or data analysts or the Philippines where you can find a great customer support team that will do the job at a fraction of the cost.
Usually about five times less than it costs in the States.
So five times less is like pretty massive.
So Marshall's running peel, he starts hiring more and more people overseas and he decides to start a company called support chipper.
Which at the time was ridiculous.
I saw, I'm president Marshall on Facebook, I've been president Marshall since 16 or 14.
When he told me he was doing this, I was like, this is silly.
But then I saw the branding, the website pretty much looked the way it does now from the beginning.
This is your favorite color of green as well.
And so he creates his brand and you're right.
Like the idea of hiring talent overseas is not new.
This has been going on for a long time.
I remember my dad once bought this book called The World Is Flat.
And I was a little kid and I read this book and it was all about globalization of talent.
And it was something that big companies were doing.
But more and more small companies have been doing the startups and the like, especially for specific roles, right?
So anyways, he starts this company and it starts doing decently well.
He's promoted it on Twitter and starts to grow.
So now Nick comes along.
Nick Hubert from Sweaty Startup.
Exactly. Nick's got a storage company.
He's in the real estate space.
And what people don't know is Nick has certain companies like he has a cost segregation business.
Costag is basically when you buy a property, you do a costag study and it allows you to accelerate your depreciation.
So instead of depreciating something over 30 years, you might be able to accelerate the schedule to seven years.
It saves you a bunch of money in your one.
So it's well worth the trade to go pay for costag study in order to save the money.
So most people who do a costag, they hire a US talent.
What he does, all of his talents like in Columbia, they do it on an iPad.
You walk around with an iPad.
Oh, it's late how it works.
So the way it works is and I'm far from an expert.
The way that I understand it is basically typically real estate has something like a 30 year lifespan.
But they came in and said, look, the rules actually say that your windows can depreciate in 10 years.
Your roof is actually only 15 years.
So what I need you to do is do a video tour with one of our people on the phone and I have a checklist of things I need you to show me in the home and you got to walk through and spend about 30 minutes just walking through the house.
And I did that and the person was, I knew he was, I mean, he spoke perfect English, but I thought he was overseas and I was like, I actually don't know where you are.
After some reason, I thought I was in Europe.
I had no idea where he was.
And there was a guy in the other line as I'm like looking through the house and he's marking down what type of windows I have and things like that.
Right. So pretty crazy that used to be something you, somebody walks on foot through the building and has a clipboard of the piece of paper.
And now you've got low cost talent in Columbia that are getting it done for you, right?
So anyways, he builds that business.
So he's using shut-happard lot.
So he ends up going to Marshall and cuts an affiliate deal.
I think initially it was an affiliate deal, which was just, hey, if I send you traffic, if I tell people, hey, I'm using Jeopardy, it's great.
Give me a cut of the fees that you, that you generate, the revenue that you generate.
Marshall says, yes. He starts sending traffic.
And along the way, Nick goes back and he says, you know what, affiliate's great, but my beak's not wet enough.
I need a little more skin in the game.
So he cuts a deal with Marshall to end up becoming a part owner of the business.
Business continues to grow.
Last year, almost a year to the day, I become a part of the business.
I approach Marshall. I say, hey, same story.
I'm a power user of the product.
I have a big audience. And I think I can help grow your business.
Did this all come from the place of it be cool to grow a company based off of your influence?
I had a lesson which was invest in your P&L.
And this was the lesson I learned the hard way, which was when I was running my startup studio.
And for six years, I was trying to make a successful chart.
I was trying to be successful make money.
And what I learned in the end was that a lot of the, I would have made a hundred times more money.
Had I simply look at our expenses in our P&L and just knocked on their door and said, hey, can I invest on a big fan of your product?
I'm an early user of this product.
I really understand this product.
And whenever you're raising your next round at whatever valuation do that, maybe I can help you out in some small way.
And I was one of the first, I don't know, 200 companies using Slack, Elasticsearch, Pager Duty we were using early on, Figma we're using early on, like all of these, like tons of them.
I don't even know, there's like 20 apps like this.
And so I learned this lesson the hard way, which is you always try to invest in your P&L.
So you look at your expenses, you figure out which expense is meaningful.
It's a line item that you notice, but you don't regret it.
It's an unregretted expense, meaning it was worth more than the cost.
And so I looked at mine and I was basically like, this overseas recruiting is one because I'm getting great talent.
So I went to Marshall and I said, hey, love the product.
I said, I love this category too.
So I said, I'm not for sure going to invest in your business, but you're my first pick and I'm going to, I use your products.
Let's talk. And so we ended up working out a deal.
And it was a great deal for me.
What actually, I thought at this time was a great deal for me.
It turned out to be an even better deal for Marshall.
So he had a lot of wisdom in making that deal because I thought I was getting a very favorable deal, but he understood the power of the audience and he understood the power of what we could bring to the table.
And he listened to MFM. He saw what we were doing on Twitter.
He had no, they could come on MFM before and mentioned it.
And it was like the biggest day in a year or something like that.
So he kind of had a, he had enough validation to take a leap of faith, but it was still to be clear, a leap of faith.
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Back to the chaos. So it turns out better than we expected.
Like we had forecasted how much we thought we could grow the business and I tried to always under promise over deliver type of thing.
So I was like, look, I think we can, you know, maybe 50%, maybe 75%.
We basically grew up by 300%.
So the business was basically tripled in the last year, valuation grew, and along the way different acquisition offers came up and I went to Nick one day and I was like, hey, look, there's acquisition offer.
I think this thing still got a lot of runway to run.
And actually the initial idea was, Nick, why don't we, what if we bought it?
What if we raised the money and we bought this thing?
So most people don't know that.
I was the initial conversation and Nick's like, I'm thinking the exact same thing.
Let's talk to Marshall and see.
Within an hour, I'm like, too much work.
Never mind. Nick, I don't want to do this.
This is too much effort for me.
It'd be a huge transaction.
Like heat to buy this business.
So what actually ended up happening is, Nick announced he said, big news.
Yesterday, I acquired a controlling interest in support, shepherd for 29.7 million.
So he paid 29.7 million dollars to buy enough to become a controlling owner of the business.
I think he said the valuation.
I think, yeah, maybe they did another one.
52 million was the valuation.
Yeah, they said 52 million dollars.
And so we're just pretty amazing because from the time one, literally one year ago, I think it was April of May that we did the, in my deal.
That means the value of the company has more than tripled in a year.
So just tremendous value growth.
A win for everybody involved.
My state grew, Nick's state grew.
Marshall did obviously phenomenally well.
And Nick goes and he basically raises the money.
And so he raises the money to go and buy, basically for 30 million bucks, he buys control and stake in the business.
My little crew, we threw in a little bit.
Welcome to the team. Finally.
Yeah, we're very, very, very small stakeholders amongst this thing.
It was hurting me to get rich without you.
I had to be honest. It kept me up in that a few days.
That's all right. We have a very small taste of it.
But okay, so here's what I wanted to bring up.
About two or three years ago, you and I did a podcast where we said, look, there's all these people who have created billion dollar companies off of Instagram.
They've done it off of YouTube.
They've done it off of Facebook.
There's not really been any breakout hits off of Twitter yet because Twitter's audience is a bit small.
But I was like, I think it's good.
I think we both said it's great because it's text-based.
You get to know people whatever.
And there's a B2B crowd, a little bit more so.
I value crowd. Yeah, more so than the other places.
And it hasn't happened yet.
But I think it is happening right now.
I think I don't know if this is going to be a billion dollar company.
But I think the fact that humor went out and raised this money to do this, that is a big swing.
And it took a lot of courage for him to do that.
Our prediction could be coming true as we speak.
Very bulls-y move. I got to say, very bulls-y move to do this.
And I tweeted the second bulls-y move.
I can't wait to see what how this plays out.
And people thought that was a negative thing.
But to me, I literally just met like, oh my God, I can't wait to see how this ends.
Like, what is the story going to be?
And I think it's going to end really well.
It's not bulls-y move. It's bulls-y that he took the ball in his court and he's like trying to do this thing.
And by the way, when I tell everyone is, I don't want to bet against Nick.
Nick is a really good entrepreneur.
And if someone could pull it off, I have faith that he can pull it off.
You know, when you watch somebody play sports, you learn a lot about them.
And I play basketball with Nick Heuer.
He is a war course. He's an incredibly physical player.
He's an incredible. He comes to pick up games with a mouthpiece in.
It's like, bro, I don't know how much contact you're planning for, but it's more than I was ready for today.
And so you learn how he operates.
Let me tell you a couple things about this.
So Nick could have been on cruise control.
The guy owned self-storage facilities.
Self-storage is literally a closet you lock.
It's the least operational thing you could possibly do.
It's literally put your objects in this door and lock it forever.
I think it's $100 million worth.
It's worth a self-storage unit set of your own.
So it's a significant amount.
My point being is he's kind of financially he could have been.
He could have been in a good spot.
He loves to hunt. He's got a little kids.
He loves to do outdoors.
He loves to play sports.
He could have just been chilling.
Then he has a Twitter audience.
So he could have done affiliate deals.
He started launching all these agencies.
He's like, I got an SEO agency.
He's got a hiring agency.
I got a, you know, I forgot what else he has.
He's got like seven different agencies.
He started. And each of those would have brought in, I don't know.
If you don't have a month enough, he could have been totally chill.
He chose violence. He chose to not chill.
He chose to bet his entire career, put his entire network and net worth on the line, basically, to say this is, to take this bold bet.
And you'll love to see it.
I love to see it. I don't think it's going to fail.
I think even the worst case, it's a very survivable thing.
I think best cases is quite huge.
It could be a very big outcome for him.
And I think it's so cool that he's doing this.
Yeah, yeah, it is. Like, look, I thought we were taking a big bet when I put my name on something or Nick puts their name on something, it's got to be good.
Because we're setting all this time, years building up a reputation, years building up a loyal trusted audience.
At the end of the day, you got to turn over your cards.
And if you don't have, if you don't have the hand, you know, you were just bluffing the whole time and you can't do that.
Nick took it to a whole new level, which is to basically say, forget all my other shit.
I'm going all in on this.
And I think that's really awesome.
Okay, so now let me tell you the big picture take.
So forget shepherd for a second.
This is part of a general idea I've had for a while, a couple of years now, which is the idea of an audience co-founder.
So when I started my first companies, I knew I needed like I myself as an entrepreneur could do part of what was needed to succeed.
To succeed, you need to build a great product.
You need to say identify a gap, build a product that fills that gap.
You have to have maybe a technical team in order to build the product.
You need money. You need a bunch of things.
And as a founder, you try to go do all the things.
You try to identify the gap.
You try to go raise the money.
You try to go recruit a team.
But it's hard to do by yourself.
And so very common in Silicon Valley is to have a technical co-founder.
A technical co-founder is, you know, that's the person who's going to do the engineering, the building.
And you rely on them to do that.
And you're say, I'm going to do the other components of this business.
Well, now I think there's a more more common playbook, which is the idea of an audience co-founder.
What an audience co-founder is, you partner with somebody who has a cheat code and go to market, right?
They have a advantage. They have an unfair advantage that is non-fungible, that is non-easy to recreate yourself.
And what they do is they essentially lower your cost of customer acquisition.
Sometimes they'll point at being zero, sometimes negative, but it definitely lowers it.
Which is it new? This isn't new.
You know, George Foreman, and then since the beginning of time, we've talked about celebrity partnerships of...
Exactly. So they've evolved.
And so that's what I want to bring up.
Like the evolution of these.
So for example, you got the Foreman Grill.
And it used to be you hire a celebrity, they hold your product, they smile, by this product, right?
That was an endorsement.
Then the audience people, they got a little bit wiser.
They said, oh, instead of just taking cash for this, I'll take some equity too.
Thank you very much. So they start taking equity too.
And you're going to put my name and face on it.
Then that means I'm going to have to own a piece of this.
So you get the Foreman Grill.
You get all of the celebrity alcohol brands.
You get McGregor doing proper whiskey.
I think McGregor owned about 15 to 20% proper whiskey.
You have Logan Paul and Prime.
I don't know, but I think it's something on the order of magnitude of 20 to 30%.
You've got Clooney doing his tequila.
You got the rock doing his tequila.
You got Ryan Reynolds doing his gin.
You got a bunch of people that do the sort of celebrity alcohol brand, the celebrity cosmetics brand, right?
Rihanna with Fenty Beauty.
But each time it's getting a little more and more tied in with the co-founder.
So you go from hold up the product and thing, play the jingle to put my name and face on it to actually it's named after me.
Actually, I'm going to be the one creating the media that we use to market this thing.
Instead of you paying me twice a year to come to some commercial shoot, I'm going to be posting every day.
I'm Kylie Jenner. I'm going to be posting every day on my Instagram stories about this.
I'm Conor McGregor. I'm going to be reposting tons of material in this.
I'm going to take a bottle to the press conference.
I'm Logan Paul. I'm going to take a bottle of prime with me to WrestleMania when I'm going to use it.
I'm going to crush one right before I go in the ring.
So the celebrities become more and more involved.
Now, what's happening is this is transitioning out of major celebrities doing major consumer products to more and more happening in the software space, which is more new, I would say.
So you have Russell Brunson do this with click funnels.
You have Hormosi just bought a chunk of school.
And now he's wearing a school hat and a school wipe beater everywhere he goes because he tried to promote that product.
And so you sit what me and Nick did was shepherd.
And you see that basically these brands that are almost private equity brands, right?
So we build a consumer facing brand and then we do private equity.
And the beautiful thing is that the private equity guys don't know anything about brand.
And the brand guys don't know anything about private equity.
And if you happen to be somebody that knows about both, you're a pretty unique proposition in the market.
And so I think we're going to be seeing more and more of these audience co-founders for people realize that I can either just take a bet that my product will get off the ground that I can get out of the kind of the the the muck of similar products at the subscale and try to break through.
And they're going to use their cap table as a tool to do this.
And I narrowed it down into three things that I think you need in order to make this work because I think there's going to be a lot of people that try this and they're going to fail.
And here's I think the three essential things you need in a audience co-founder.
The first a large trusted audience, trust being the key word here.
There's a lot of people with an audience, but they have low trust, meaning if they go tell people, hey, you should go try this.
You should read this book.
You should try this lotion.
You should show up at this event.
You should watch this movie.
How many people actually go do it?
And I'm not going to name names.
There's a lot of people that we know that have audiences, but they don't have anything for trust or they have audiences, but their audiences broke.
And so the only thing they can sell them is very cheap things for broke people, basically.
And so you have to find the right trust somebody with a trusted audience.
So trust, that's quite challenging to measure, but large is easier.
So I could tell you, so our podcast, the MFM, if you measure YouTube, including shorts, which you could argue, and I would agree with it, that shorts is nonsense.
But we had something like 90 million impressions last year across the podcast.
And then if I had to guess, your Twitter handle probably had another 10 to 20 a month, 10 million impressions.
And then your newsletter, I don't know how often you said it once a week.
Let's say let's keep around number of 100,000.
So you're talking to tens of millions of people of mod.
Would you say that's accurate?
No, to be honest, no. I think the number of people is a lot less than the number of impressions.
Sorry. For sure, tens of millions of impressions.
I don't know how many people, maybe a million, maybe more than a million.
I think we reach somewhere between half a million and a million people truthfully, right?
And there's a lot of people that will exaggerate these numbers truthfully.
I think that's the absolute ceiling of what we reach.
But the trusted audience is a fraction of that.
But it doesn't matter. It's the depth of trust that matters.
And this is the total mispriced asset in the market.
Because the easy thing to measure is number of followers, number of views, number of impressions that something gets.
A little bit better might be likes or replies.
But then even better is bookmarks.
Even better is how many people click the link.
And then the ultimate source of truth is revenue.
There's other tests that I like to think about.
So another trust test is, and I talked to a guy who's getting millions and millions of views on shorts.
And I said, hey, if you tweeted out tomorrow that you are hanging out at this coffee shop in Austin, and you said, hey, I'm hanging out from 10 to 2 tomorrow or 10 to noon, two hours, I'm hanging out, stop by.
How many people would show up?
There are some people that would have a line out the door.
And then there's some people that nobody would show up for because they have a very fleeting transactional impression based thing.
They are not the focus of it.
Maybe they're putting up meme content or they're putting up canned videos that are highly animated, but they're not even involved in it.
There's no trust that's being associated with them.
Another trust test. If I email my list tomorrow, and I said tomorrow, I'm putting out something that I've been working really hard on, it's fucking good.
Trust me. And I said, it would be available at 5 a.m.
tomorrow. It's going to be available to the first 1000 people that try it.
How many people would set their alarm?
There are certain companies and products you set your alarm for.
Apple gets people to set their alarm and come camp out to get their new product.
It's trust at the other day.
That's the measurable value of a brand is trust.
I think that's the number one variable.
Number two, product to audience fit.
So basically, if I came on here and I started telling you about Cologne, it's not going to work.
It's just the wrong product for the wrong audience.
It's not what my audience wants.
It's not what they trust me on.
It's not the right price point given the size of my audience.
I sell products that are worth tens of thousands each.
Logan Paul sells products that are worth $4 each, but he's got a much bigger audience.
You've got to find an equation that works.
So product audience fit.
A great example was the episode we did with Danny Austin on this podcast.
Danny Austin was a woman who was, she had struggled with postpart, I think postpart of hair loss.
It was really insecure about her hair.
She wore wigs for like a year that she took the wig off and told her her Instagram audience, like, this is what I've been going through.
I feel a little bit silly.
I felt insecure about it, but I'm trying some things.
Let's see what works. And eventually ends up creating her own line of hair care called Divi, which is a product to cure this pain point that she authentically had that many people in her audience authentically had and trusted her for it.
And so the highest version of product audience fit is when you genuinely authentically experience a problem and can tell a story about it.
And that story resonates with your audience because they also have that problem and they believe your story.
Third one, content creativity.
So how good is this person at creating an ongoing stream of content that plugs the product?
Dude, that's shockingly hard, by the way.
Very hard to do. It's very hard to do.
I'm good at it. I think you're good at it.
I think Nick is exceptionally good at it as well.
Nick is fantastic at it.
He posts probably, I think, a hundred times a week on Twitter.
I looked it up and he's good.
He makes hits. And you see this everywhere.
So when Logan Paul and KSI launch Prime, they did a photoshoot.
They did the photoshoot of them drinking and then there's this viral image.
There's this image that goes super viral and it's basically, it's Logan Paul drinking prime and KSI drinking private.
KSI was kind of like bent down on one knee and then somebody Photoshopped them together so it kind of looked like KSI was, you know, like going down on Logan Paul and then they printed a card, we're cut out of that and they put it in the aisle of, I forgot where Walmart or wherever they were launching.
So the news was we're launching in Walmart and many, okay, what does it create or do?
Normally, hey guys, just so excited.
Can't believe it. We launched in Walmart.
Good for me. You know, go check it out.
Please go buy our product from Walmart, right?
Well, Logan Paul does a smart about, as he knows how to go viral around his product.
He knows that it's not about padding yourself on the back.
It's not about a generic announcement that doesn't mean anything to the audience.
He gave them a reason to share the news, which was put him in KSI in a compromised situation made joke out of it and then that image goes and gets 100 million views, right?
And it's the same story but he knew how to package it to go viral.
He'll also do things like, he'll create content that'll be, I'm going to try to make this drink using these three flavors of prime.
It's like kind of like those, we'll blend type of commercials, but he's using his product.
For us, we will do, me and Nick, we would do a workshop where we did a delegation workshop.
So I was like, look, is that what most people call those things?
I mean, haters will call webinars, but they're called haters.
You call a webinar. I call you a haters.
I knew it was a W word. It was a workshop, something like that.
Yeah, it's on the web. I forget.
It's kind of like a seminar.
We would do these things and they would drive so much business for the business.
And so we would come up with what is a value add thing we could do that delivers so much value in 45 minutes and we just say, by the way, if you want to do this, check it's a great tool.
But you've delivered so much goodwill and so much value that you can do that.
Anyways, there's a whole bunch of stuff around content creativity.
How do you end an ongoing basis, create native content that is going to continue to bring the brand front and center or do it?
We created the thrill of the shield, for example, to give ourselves an excuse to talk about our products.
So there are creators that are better at that and there are creators that are worse at that.
We're good, but there are people who are incredible at who do you think is the best?
Like who do you look to besides some of maybe some of the non-popular ones?
Is there any non-popular ones you look at and you're like, that's really great?
There's a guy on Twitch named Dr.
Disrespect that I first noticed is incredible at this.
And I noticed it because majority of Twitch streamers get a ton of blowback if they ever mention a product, a service, to chat immediately, sell out, sell out, sell out, oh my God, whatever.
Dr. Disrespect created a brand that almost allowed for it and he created so much humor and content.
It's like, you don't want to be in the middle.
So either you just never sell out or you try to sell product, but you're trying not to sell out, you're sort of hedging and the audience can sniff that out in a second and they will bounce on you.
Before you go full, you go full sell out.
At Twitch we even did this when Amazon wanted Twitch to promote Prime Day.
It's like, oh, however we can do this, our community is very sensitive to us promoting something, especially promoting a big corp, mega corp like Amazon.
And so they created a campaign called Twitch sells out.
And they made a thing, you got to make a joke out of this.
Twitch sells out and that was the whole campaign was, well, today Twitch sells out and they basically, like they leaned into it.
Dr. Disrespect would do this.
He would do a promo with Old Spice and then he would create like a full, like a full, like content series around this thing around Old Spice and he would do it in such a way that by the end of it, the whole chat was looking forward to the next Old Spice, like if you're a party called it like the Champions Club or something like that, he would create all these little things around it because he was a total character.
He knew how to do it. So he was, I could see how much money he was making.
He was making way more money per viewer than the average Twitch member because he knew how to monetize that audience.
So remember we had Justin Mayer's come on and he told us about his new company called, is it true Med or true medicine?
True Med? Yeah, true Med.
So true Med. I, how do you explain it?
Is it HSA spending? So it's like a, kind of a boring topic, but basically like you could spend your insurance money.
Anyway, his co-founder is this guy named Kayleigh Means and Kayleigh Means is, I guess he's a, I think he's a doctor or a former doctor, but he's like obsessed with metabolic health and I filed him on Twitter and he is indoctrinating me on like healthy eating.
I, I bookmarked his thing yesterday, saying it was like the four points, four thing, like, you know, basically he's like, America has like, you know, a 20% obesity rate or something that in young kids and like other countries have four percent.
Here's the four things we should do in meat effective immediately to turn this around.
And I was like, sir, yes, sir, you know, yes, really, I've never met this guy, but God damn, he's convincing.
He is so convincing. And so his company, and he does it in such a good way because his company is a very specific thing, HSA spending and you can buy like healthy stuff.
I think you can buy like an eight-sleep mattress or whatever using like your insurance, something like that.
But anyway, he, his whole crusade is on like processed foods and over and being overweight and things like that.
And so he's like a renegade and a champion for like healthiness.
And it just so happens, I have this thing that I, that you could actually use to like buy some of these things.
So like he tweeted out there, he's like, America's super obese here's four points.
Like you shouldn't be able to use food stamps on soda or a pharmaceutical company should not be allowed to advertise on TV.
And he had like two or three more things.
And I get obsessed with it.
And he started to change my opinion.
And then I'm slowly starting to think about true med his company.
We should have him come on, by the way, because I've seen him now do a couple of these rants and each time I am so convinced, I am so convinced that I actually scheduled time on my calendar to look up opposing evidence.
Because I'm like, before I just fully bathe in this crew way, same, I need to hedge myself.
I need to create some firewall where I go see if this guy's full of shit because he is very convincing.
He's very convincing. And this is a really good example.
I asked you for a non-popular example.
I guess I had one. Kayleigh means is a non-popular example of a, well, I guess he's, I mean, he's not like mainstream popular, but he's somewhat popular in our little circle of a B2B product.
And he is selling it wonderfully.
Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's amazing.
There's a bunch of these, by the way, liver, king, mickbear.
Like a lot of guys do this.
And I think the interesting thing now is it used to be celebrities hold up the product and endorse it.
Or it would be the celebrity creates the company themselves.
What I'm finding now is this interesting new variant of this, the new strain, which is company that already exists finds a audience co-founder to accelerate growth.
And by the way, if you kind of do this company, I want to do this again.
I want to do this one more time.
The shepherd thing went so well.
And I tweeted this out. So if you have a cash flowy product that is genuinely a great product, like it has to be a great product, otherwise I'm not going to put my name on it.
And you are bootstrapped.
You are not on the venture path.
Hit me up. Sean at Shumphery.com.
I want to do this one more time.
You have this thing on here about the curse of family riches.
And I want to talk about that.
But before we talk about that, I want to tell you a story about someone I spoke with recently.
So there's this company called Simple Modern.
Have you heard of Simple Modern?
Of course. So Simple Modern is a website that sells basically mugs.
But I think they sell a ton of stuff.
So like Stanley Mug compilers.
Comblers. They sell a ton of stuff.
I talked to him the other day.
And he gave me his annual revenue since they started the business, along with the profit from some of the recent years.
And he said I could talk about it.
And so I listed it here in this document.
So when people give you their revenue, do you just go, what?
Do you just like evil laugh or what do you do?
Well, whenever I talk to people, I'm like, hey, before we have to have a conversation, so you know, I'm not saying any of this.
And then our 20s, we try to get girls numbers.
And our 30s, we try to get guys numbers.
Yeah, yeah. I want to know those people's income.
But then at the end of the conversation, I was like, dude, this is so fascinating.
Can I share this or not? And he was like, yeah, dude, I don't care.
You go to share. And so anyway, he started this company, 2015.
In 2017, they had 10 million in revenue.
18, they had 20 million.
They grew it. And I'll skip a few years.
Up in 21, they got 80 million.
Jail's in 22, 95 million, 23, this most recent year, they did 180.
This year, they're expected to do $25 million, selling these tumblers.
It's mostly tumblers. And he started the company with like $200,000 in his 30s.
And so he's a boot shop company.
He owns half the business because he gave away a lot of the business to employees.
And I was asking him about it.
And by the way, in Jail's in 23, they did $180 million in revenue and $45 million in EBITDA and profit.
And so he's been able to make like a significant amount of money.
But the reason why Mike was so fascinating to me is he's based in Oklahoma.
So he's this like real soft, sweet, wonderful, nice guy.
I'm sure he's aggressive in business, but when you're just hanging out with him, he's like a sweet man.
And he was like, I started this company because I wanted to do two things.
One, I wanted to just build a business that I could hire people who I admire being around.
And number two, he's like, I just wanted to give away a lot of money.
Like I feel like it's my mission to like give away money.
And so this guy, since the beginning of the company, the company has pledged to give seven or 10% of their profits away to charities.
And the people within the company vote where the charity goes to.
And so he actually doesn't have control.
He set it up so everyone's allowed to vote.
But in the meantime, he's been given away all his money.
And so he's giving away something like $100,000 a month of like the Beckham family money.
And he like said, what is he's like, I've been able to save up like $4 million, but I'm still giving away something like $1 million a year right now.
And I don't know if my $5 million liquid network is going to go up a significant amount because I intend to give as I go.
And he's been giving since the beginning.
So he's like, when it started, I was giving away $5,000 a month when I was making a, he said, what did he say?
He was like, when I was making 200 grand a year, I was giving away $5,000 a month.
And my intention is to continue giving.
So when I die, I don't have a lot left.
I've given it away as I've gone.
And he was like, basically like, I kind of wanted to be generous when I was alive, not when I was dead, which is what a lot of people do.
I don't know if I'm going to leave any money for my family or not.
Maybe I'll leave him enough that they have a little bit of something, but we're going to give away most of this.
He's like, my net worth right now is probably $200 million based off the value of the business.
I'm giving it all the way.
And I was so fascinated by this.
And it really actually inspired me not enough to take action because honestly, it's still a bit fearful if I beg on it.
It's like, I'm so quite fearful of it.
But he seemed so freaking happy talking about this.
Do you give away any money at all like this?
A little bit. Yeah, not like this.
Sounds like he's giving away 20% of his liquid net worth per year.
Something like that. Yeah, like a significant sum.
And his liquid net worth is growing because he was like, this is the first year that the business.
He's like, we're going to do 45 million in EBITDA.
It's the first year where we don't have any new ideas within the business.
So we're going to take a big fat dividend.
And I'm going to end up giving most of that away.
And I'm just going to give it away as I go.
Two parts of this impressive.
One is money where your mouth is.
There's a lot of people that talk about, oh, you don't want to be able to give things away.
And then they live their whole life.
And they're like, it's like the sandbake when freeds of the world where it's, did you give any of it away?
What happened? What happened to that?
He was giving as he goes.
I think that's really, really, really great.
Some of the happiest people I've met in life are the people that give the most.
Same. Some of the most successful people I know in life are people that give the most.
And the more interesting thing is of the people that give the most, they've been giving from the beginning.
I think that's the real takeaway is like the fallacy that when I have enough, then I'm going to give.
And it just creates this like internal fear of giving away, right?
This year, last year, when we had Scott Harrison on, I did the thing where I gave away my birthday.
So I basically said, I'm 30, 35.
I'm going to give $35,000 to charity water.
I'd set it live on the pods.
I can say that out loud here.
And then I encourage you, hey, if you want to give me a gift, go to the charity water thing, donate the gift there.
Do you know how much that raised?
I think it raised like about another 30 or 35,000.
I think it raised 30,000.
So in total, this pod gave, audience, people gave 30,000.
I gave 35,000. And it was an uncomfortable gift.
Not that, like, it didn't change anything in our life.
But when I went downstairs, I told my wife, I was like, yeah, on the pod, I got kind of inspired and I committed to giving away $35,000.
And she was like, she's a poncho in the stomach really hard.
Yeah, she was like, what are you doing?
I was like, I'm helping people.
And she's like, help me.
And I was like, what? And she's like, take out the trash.
I was like, okay, sorry.
But, you know, just in general, it was an unfamiliar territory to just like that on a whim, amount of money that's, you know, meaningful.
That's a car, you know, that's, that's something.
And I really like the feeling.
And every year, I try to do that.
And I try to get to giving away in a way that's meaningful to me.
So the other thing we did was when Tony Robbins came on, we pledged to give away, I think it was 40 or 50 tickets.
And each ticket is, you know, 50 to 500 to $1,000 basically.
You know, so that's another, you know, sort of 25 to 50 grand that we'll give.
But I'm like, giving away an experience that was really meaningful to me that I think could help a lot of people.
And so, by the way, I need to go pick the winners for that.
That reminds me. And I was waiting, you didn't miss out.
I didn't pick the winners yet.
There's like a thousand people to go through.
And I just left that pile of, you know, 2000 applications.
I was like, I'll get to that when I have some free time.
But I will do it. But the idea is given out that's slightly uncomfortable for you.
I think that's a good practice that I'm just now doing.
Last three years, I think I've done that and probably should have been doing it earlier to be honest.
I'm not. I need to do it. And the reason it kind of interests me.
And I was like, Mike, is it okay to be selfish about this?
He's like, well, yeah. So, I was like, do you get tax advantages?
He's like, yeah. You can, like, you can, like, there is some stuff I can capture.
You're trying to find the other reason to do it?
Wow. He was like, he's like, I'm not going to not take advantage of something.
But that's not the reason why I do it.
But it is a nice, like, cherry on top that I can take.
But I was talking to him and I was like, you know what's crazy to me?
So he's religious, but not in a way where we disagree on anything.
Like, he's very kind about his shit.
And I was like, dude, if you're telling me that you're put here, you're on earth to like, please God by giving away money.
I never want to bet against you.
That's like the best motivation on earth.
You know what I mean? Who wants to bet against that person?
Like, I don't want to go against you.
You're going to like destroy everyone.
You get the best motivation.
And so what's the second here about Curse of, of, of, of, oh, was it, it was familiar riches.
I remember. That's it. I didn't know when to break it to you that you thought I was saying family riches, but it says familiar riches.
It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, 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it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's different for everyone.
It could be tens of millions.
It could be a certain amount of the year per year.
But that's $70,000 study.
That's bullshit. If you zoom in on that graph, it continues going up.
It just doesn't go up as steep, steep.
And that study is also like 20 years old.
So it's totally outdated.
But there is, there is some number.
I think we'll make you happier.
The bad news. I know a lot of rich people, you and I know a lot of the same wealthy people.
We know people who are billionaires.
We know people who are hundreds of millions of millions and billionaires.
I am just about 100% positive.
And I can tell you that this is based on my personal experience.
It's never enough. It is never enough.
You and I have a couple of friends who it is enough for a very small group of people.
But for eight out of 10 people, it's never enough.
And that whole 2x idea, it always exists.
And so it is a challenge.
But it is imperative that we, it doesn't matter if we're making 100 grand a year, it doesn't matter if we're making 500 grand or 50 million a year.
That we have to figure out how to be happy.
And present and enjoy ourselves along the way.
Because once you just automatically get that outcome or whatever you get, it doesn't change a significant amount from like where you were the months or years prior.
What's the Jim Carrey quote he goes, I wish everybody could be rich and famous.
So they would know that that's not that that's not the answer.
It's absolutely not the answer.
I think it can make you happier, but it doesn't necessarily make you happy.
Let me tell you one for all the finance, personal finance nerds out there, what I used to do is so money is kind of a weird thing because when you like sell your company or something like that.
It's just like for the first few weeks, the only major change is when you log in to chase.com, the number, like the digit, like the string looks different.
Like if you think about it, that's like the old, that's like, and that is awesome.
But that's like, it's kind of weird that that's like there's some weird psychological thing where that's the only like meaningful difference is that numbers.
People that have come on the pod and said they used to just go to the ATM and just click print receipt.
Like to just like do random withdrawal 10 bucks print receipt please just so they could see the number.
So I'm going to explain how I act that.
So they told me that I heard that as well.
And so about two years before my exit, I used to use this thing called personal capital.com.
Where it's basically mint.com, whatever whatever you using could work.
I you can trade a manual account where you can add in manually where it's not connected to your bank account.
You can just add it numbers.
I put in like $15 million in the manual account.
So it said that my net worth on paper was at least $15 million.
And so I saw that number.
And then I sold my company and I got the money and I went and deleted the 15 million and I and then I saw like the real number and I was like, well, I've already seen this for the last two years.
Like this isn't really like that different.
You know what I mean? And it did a shocking amount of stuff to my brain to like see that number leading up.
And so you almost get used to it.
It's very strange. And it kind of ruined that like initial deposit because I was like.
It's like these numbers are kind of like the same.
But by the way, I got to be the counterbalance to this because I've heard I've listened to many podcasts, YouTube videos and I've heard many people say similar things that you know money doesn't make you happy.
There's never enough. You know that day after it happened and you know nothing really changed.
I just kind of felt a little.
I didn't know what to do.
I kind of actually almost had a little bit of a depressed period after it.
And I'm not saying that they're lying.
I'm sure that's true for many people.
I had a very different experience.
I had what I had exactly what I would have hoped.
The more money I got, the happier I got.
The more free time I had, the less bullshit I had to deal with.
Sure I had some new problems, but they're way better than money problems.
And then when I saw the number of the big out, I said, fuck yes.
And I was so excited. And I had such a great day.
And I took my parents to dinner that night.
And I was so excited. And they were so excited for me.
And I bought a bunch of socks.
And those like these socks make me happy because I got a bunch of matching socks with the highest quality and the highest highest kind.
And then I felt amazing.
I felt better and the money made me feel better.
And so there are people out here.
I'm just happy. Don't don't misunderstand me.
I said it makes you happier.
It made me happier. But if we did what we still want more, right?
We're still having a conversation of how do we two or three or five or 10X because if we were truly content, we wouldn't be asking that question.
And so what I'm saying is we still want more and it does make you happier.
But it's in itself is not always it's not like the answer.
It is potentially part of the equation.
Right. And I guess the thing that I'm talking about right now is really just a question of leverage, meaning for the same inputs, can I get more outputs?
Okay. So all I'm saying is that if you just change your brain to say, you know what?
I am familiar with many ways to get this amount of rich now because I've done it.
I know other people have done this.
I've been doing this for a little while now.
I am comfortable at this level.
And there's more levels that I would love to be at, you know, without 10Xing my input, can I 10X my output?
I'm always interested in that.
If I could get 10X more people listening to this podcast without having to record 10X more or 10X more.
That'd be awesome. I would do that any day.
And I think even you did this when we were talking about growth for the pot.
It was like, here's some low hanging fruit.
And then you were like, is there anything we could do that would just get like a million views per video.
So it's like, let's just shouldn't we just like ask that question at least in case there's an interesting answer.
And that's kind of what I'm saying, which is, you want to ask that question because it fries your brain for a second and it forces you to think a little differently.
You may decide that you may never come up with a great answer or you may decide, I don't want to do any of those things or I'm totally comfortable with that where I'm at.
But I just think that there is a curse of familiar riches, whatever level you're at, if you're making 10 million a year, you probably now know a bunch of ways to make 10 million a year.
But you'll have very few ways to make 100 million in a year.
And as it thought exercise, I think it's very valuable to say, let me say no to all things that do that are at the level I'm familiar with.
And let me only think about and consider options that would 10x where I'm at.
And then see, then you could decide afterwards whether you want to take any action on that or not.
Let me ask one question as we wrap up.
Yeah. You're talking about earning.
Would you spend 10x what you're spending now in order to get used to that life?
In order to get used to it?
Yeah, in order like, you know, the act is it.
So I've got friends who will say like, you know, this is going to work.
Therefore, I'm going to just behave as if it works.
And I'm going to spend because I like burning the boats and feeling this and I have to make it work.
I am totally into act as if.
But not by spending. That's not the I don't I think that that that that perverts the spirit of act as if living from the end.
So what the way I do it is act as if means.
To me, I'm like in decision making meaning I'm willing to say no to doing certain things that come from a scarcity mindset.
So maybe I would have said yes to some speaking gig because it gives me money.
But if I had 100 million bucks, I wouldn't say yes, I wouldn't go travel, leave my family, go to this speaking gig and Duluth.
You know, I would I would just I would just say no.
And so the loop. So I use it in order to just put myself in a more of a of a of abundance mindset in order to make decisions that are more aligned with who I really want to be.
Those aren't like let me go buy a tiger in order to increase my burn rate in order to add the pressure to me like I just think that's a completely unhealthy way to go about it or the other version is.
How would I you know a lot of people walk around with a lot of anxiety.
A lot of stress or in a big rush they rush through their day.
They're constantly feeling a lack of time and they live again in the scarcity mindset lack of time.
The lack of ease. And so the act as if that I'll try to do is put myself in a place where what if I was what if it was all figured out what if I knew what I was doing what if I had already done it what if what if you know what if X was already done and it allows me to just walk through my day with a greater sense of presence and ease and joy and less stress less anxiety less of a rush.
I'll use it in those areas I will never use it to be like hey how about I just like increase my burn just to see how it feels it's like you know it's like aren't people into like dripping hot wax on themselves before they like you know do do stuff like not me I'm good don't need to do that.
And if you live in Duluth you can kiss my ass.
I just said that I had a yeah there's a dilute in Minnesota but there's probably a dilute that a lot of places to shout out to the listener who just caught an absolute strain.
If you're looking at it.
If you live in Duluth there's comment in the YouTube a little so but you can still kiss our ass.
