Excuse me, sir.
Question for you.
How old were you when you became a millionaire?
You have to ask a millionaire.
What do you mean?
I'm a billionaire.
You're a billionaire?
Yeah.
Have you ever been broke before?
Hell no.
No?
And what lot of business are you in?
Shit, I want to tell you that, but I ain't been broke.
Are you a business owner?
I was, but I sold my company.
How much did you sell your company for?
$255 million.
You sold a company for over $250,000.
I did.
Actually.
Yep.
How old are you now?
I'm 39.
And how old were you when you became a millionaire?
17.
17 years old?
That's right.
You became a billionaire at 17.
Throughout your career, what was the most amount of money that you made in a single year?
In sales?
Yes.
Hundreds of millions a year.
Did you go to college?
I did go to college.
Elementary was good enough.
Elementary was good enough.
All right, so give me one last lesson about business.
It's not time to speak, you guys.
We just landed in beverly hills in one of the richest cities in the entire world los angeles, california and today i'm going to be going around one of the wealthiest shopping centers, out on rodeo drive, to ask holiday shoppers how they created their wealth, how they grew multi-million dollar billion dollar net worths, and how you can do the exact same thing and start your path to becoming financially free going into 2025.
So stay tuned from start to finish, because this is going to be another banger.
But, with that being said, let's get this video on the way.
Excuse me, sir.
Question for you.
How old were you when you became a millionaire?
You have to ask a millionaire.
What do you mean?
I'm a billionaire.
You're a billionaire?
Yeah.
How old were you when you became a billionaire?
Oh, in my 50s.
In your 50s?
Yeah.
And what line of business were you in?
The hospitality business.
What were you doing in hospitality?
It's a funny story.
I was busboy to boardroom.
I've done every job.
Created Diamond Resorts International.
Yeah, so you're a business owner.
I was.
I was.
Hilton owns my company today.
Hilton bought your company?
Hilton bought my company.
Wow.
Eventually, yeah.
What did the company do?
I own hotels.
All over the world.
35 countries.
I go all over the world interviewing the most successful entrepreneurs.
Can I get one quick minute with you for the show?
Sure.
Do you come from a lot of money?
No.
I started with negative $20 million.
Unfortunately, my father went broke.
I had to pay it off.
So I didn't start from zero.
I started negative $20 million.
Try that party trick.
What did you turn that into?
I actually created a company that was worth $2.2 billion, $3.3 billion equity value.
Actually enterprise value, yeah.
What was your relationship with debt as a business owner?
I always made sure that I never over levered myself and I always paid my partners back as quick as I can.
My banks off as quick as I can. before I took money myself.
So I always made sure that people were paid off before I paid myself.
Did you go to college?
I did.
Did college help you become a billionaire?
It taught me how to think logically because I went to school to be a surgeon.
I never went to business school, but I kind of did because Mike Milken helped me learn business.
He gave me my business degree.
And Harry Reid taught me about politics and policy.
You've sold billions of dollars in revenue and in profit throughout your career.
What is a billionaire's secret to sales?
Give me some sauce on sales right here.
Listen.
Is that simple?
Listen.
The customer, your friends, your bankers will always tell you the pathway.
Listen, deliver equal or greater value.
But what's your best negotiation advice as a billionaire?
Put the pen across the table and the first person who talks loses.
Actually, break that down.
You don't want to speak first in a negotiation is what you're saying.
When the deal is ripe, it solves itself.
Just put the pen across the table and shut up.
But that comes from listening.
What's a lesson about money that banks don't want people to know?
The lesson, always, I never negotiated with my banks.
Don't negotiate with your banks.
Make sure you make your banks a ton of money.
They'll always be there for you.
What do you mean by that?
Because banks are in the business of making money for themselves.
So how can you kind of, I guess, forego that?
I never negotiated rate.
I always made sure my banks made a lot of money with me.
We all made a lot of money together.
Everyone was always paid back.
Everyone.
My investors early, my bankers early, and they all made a lot of money.
So never worry about negotiating rate.
If somebody offers you a deal and it makes sense for everyone, let everyone make money.
Have you ever been broke before?
Came damn close to being broke.
Never.
But it was usually for unintended consequences like 9-11, the financial crisis of 08-09.
Uncontrollable situations.
What do you mean by 9-11?
When the Planes hit the Twin Towers and I was in the hotel business and we had guests at our hotel, and then all the planes stopped flying.
I had no customers.
My cash register went to zero.
How important were relationships for you?
Relationships are always very important but, a matter of fact, you've got to stay out of one zip code, the zip code of bad people.
If they're around your life, make them go away.
Don't go in that zip code.
You are who you hang around with.
So hang around people that are smarter than you always, that are more successful than you.
Learn, learn, learn.
And you'll have your time.
But you've got to work hard.
There's no free lunch.
There's no lottery.
And if you win the lottery, it's called the lottery curse.
So you will go broke.
Bad things will happen to you.
You have to earn it.
The old-fashioned way.
Work hard.
What's the red flag that you see in people that tells you stay away from that person?
When you're leasing a Lamborghini or leasing a house in Bel Air or Beverly Hills.
You can't afford it.
Don't stay there.
Don't drive it until you can pay cash for it.
So you can't trust people who are renting is what you're saying?
Flakes, frauds, cons, grifters.
Wow, you got amazing advice, sir.
Thank you so much for your time.
I appreciate you.
You guys, we just ran into and interviewed a billionaire out here in Beverly Hills.
He said, I'm not a millionaire.
I'm a billionaire with a B and i have to say my favorite part of that interview was when he talked about the importance of listening and, most importantly, to your customers.
Guys, the biggest reason people go out of business is because they have the customers people buying their products, but they don't listen to what they want, the changes they want being made, so they're going to go give their business to other people.
If you listen to your customer feedback and figure out what they want in the products and the services that you're offering, you can create real market share and build a winning million dollar business.
Great interview out here in beverly hills.
We got to keep this video rolling and go get another one out here.
Come on, Excuse me, ma'am.
Quick question for you.
Have you ever been broke before?
I have.
And what line of business were you in?
I owned hair salons.
So you were a business owner?
I was, but I sold it.
How much did you sell your company for?
$255 million.
You sold a company for over $250,000.
I did.
Actually.
Yeah.
I go all over the world interviewing the most successful business owners.
Could I get one quick minute with you for the channel real quick?
Sure.
Did you have a lot of money when you started your company?
No, I had no money.
I had no money.
Luckily, my brother had a little bit of money.
My brother was one of the first employees at Yahoo back in the day. so he had made a little bit of money but i had no money but he offered me basically sweat equity and said you know you run the business and i'll you know and be the day-to-day and he had another job at the time i was like so let me get this straight i don't put in any money but i have 50 equity which i thought i was like that's a great deal like yeah no i had nothing back then did you raise a lot of money we did 75 million you raised 75 million about 75 million give or take yeah eight out of ten companies in today's world they don't make it past five years know i've invested in a lot of those yeah what's the number one reason why those businesses fail what i see in general most businesses they're just not paying attention to enough of the details that are important and also like i believe in like asking your employees asking your customers like what's working for you what's not and like most people don't want to hear bad feedback because it hurts and you're like you've put all this money into this business and you don't want to be told like something you thought is good isn't good but if you can get past that and listen and pay attention to what's going on in your business and what's working and what's not working.
You know, I just don't think a lot of people even see it to be able to correct it.
So in other words, the littlest things can make some of the biggest differences.
Huge.
I mean, you know how it is.
Whether you're going into a restaurant or your favorite coffee shop, you inherently, whether you realize it or not, you feel better.
Everything's taken care of.
You feel like there's somebody in charge.
Things are running smoothly.
You're not waiting forever.
Person at the front isn't have attitude with you like you go to the bathroom.
It's not disgusting like there's a ambiance that a business owner can create to make you as a customer me feel comfortable and I really like being here.
They don't often know why.
You know, have you ever been in like a place where someone pulls out a chair and they hear that loud, like screech, and you're like why doesn't somebody fix that?
Put a little thing on the bottom of the chair?
Like it drives me crazy, but I'm I'm a lunatic.
I will go into any place and be like, this could be so much better.
So I think that's why, to your point, I didn't know exactly the statistics.
But yeah, so many fail because they're just not paying attention.
As a multiple nine-figure entrepreneur, what was the best financial advice that you ever received?
I would say be really careful who you get into business with.
And that was definitely an experience that we went through as we were raising money and we raised about 75 million.
You don't want to raise money from the wrong people.
And by the wrong people I mean people who aren't in lockstep with you, what you want to build, what your vision is.
It's like a lot of entrepreneurs, I think, can easily make the mistake of someone's offering to give them a lot of money to invest in their company, but they have a different idea of what they want and what the long-term vision of it is.
Or you know what infrastructure is gonna look like or if the CEO or founder is gonna stay like.
There's all these things that come into play.
So you have to really know who you're getting into business with because again, it's a marriage and you want to make sure you feel really good about that, not just take a check guys.
She sold her business for over 250 million.
And we're headed to go get our next interview right now.
But before we do that, I need to drop some game for you guys.
See.
After interviewing over 1000 millionaires and over 10 billionaires, the one lesson I've learned is there's only one shortcut to success in anything you want out of life in business, in your career, in finances, in everything.
That's mentorship.
And that's why, after building a multi-billion dollar network over the last three years, growing this channel across social media to 10 million followers, I decided to launch one of the greatest entrepreneur communities in the entire world called the School of Mentors.
We've already got almost 2000 members where, every single week, the members in our community get to hop on live calls with the millionaires and the billionaires that I interview on this channel, where they can ask questions directly to people about how to sell, how to market and grow their business, how to create wealth in real estate, how to invest their money and make it work for them, how to negotiate like a billionaire would.
You guys do not want to miss out on this opportunity.
I'm also hosting live workshops with big entrepreneurs every week to learn and implement these skills in your businesses.
To join the community, go to the link down in the description of this video.
You do not want to miss out on it.
With that being said, let's get back to this video and go get this next interview.
Come on.
Who am I here with today?
Neil Patel.
And for those that don't know, what industry did you decide to pursue a career in?
Marketing.
Are you a business owner?
I am.
How long have you been an entrepreneur for?
23 years.
What was the turning point getting into entrepreneurship?
Well, I was 16 when I was starting, so there wasn't too many options other than create your own business if you wanted to make money.
What was the most amount of money that you've made in a single year?
Well, our revenue is in the nine figures a year.
And for income, I try not to make more than four or five million a year max in distributions because I rather reinvest majority of the profits versus taking it.
So I take enough to pay for my expenses.
The rest I invest into buying more companies, expanding, hiring more people, etc.
There's a saying that I love about marketing that a lot of people are extremely good at what they do, but no one knows what they do.
What's a hack about marketing that you could give to a business owner in today's world that maybe they have a great product but they suck at building awareness?
The number one highest ROI channel right now in marketing that most people don't want to leverage is influencer marketing.
But I'm not talking about the people who have a lot of followers.
I'm talking about the people that are micro influencers between 1000 and 100,000 followers.
Look for ones that are relevant to your product and service, that have really engaged communities.
Hit them up.
They're super flexible in how they take compensation.
So you can pay them commission base, a percentage of sales.
They'll go above and beyond to make really good content and promote your product.
It's extremely profitable.
We see over a 30% return on investment with micro influencers.
So that's marketing game from a nine figure entrepreneur right there.
Yeah, that works out.
I love that.
And why do a lot of companies fail in today's world?
Most people would say most businesses fail because of lack of capital.
I say that most businesses fail because they're going after too small of a TAM.
TAM stands for total addressable market.
You know, someone may look at my business and be like, oh, nine figures, that's a lot of money.
Well, some of my competitors do 15, 18 billion a year in revenue.
So if you're after a really big market, it's not hard to take one two three four, 5 of the market.
If you wanna go after a 10 million market, if you capture 100 of it, all you're making is 10 million a year, and that's just revenue.
You wanna go after something really big and just try to capture a small percentage of it.
I love it.
How old are you now?
I'm 39.
And how old were you when you became a millionaire?
17.
17 years old?
That's right.
You became a billionaire at 17.
I started my career when I was 15 and a half slash 16, and I was helping people drive more traffic to their websites.
My first client paid me five grand a month.
I made him 25 million in revenue, got three more referrals.
That took me up to 20 grand a month and it just kept scaling from doing really good work.
Did you inherit the money?
No, my parents, my mom was a teacher and my dad worked at a bank.
Did you go to college?
I did go to college.
Was it worth it?
No.
I would not recommend anyone go to college unless you're in a profession that requires you to go to college.
If you had to start from zero and you had one year to make a million dollars and your life depended on it, what would you do?
I would go buy a business from someone who's retiring in a boring ugly field like roofing plumbing, HVAC.
Do seller-based financing and get an SBA loan so a combo of both and grow that business and put in technology like spreadsheets, invoicing and automate all the stuff they're not doing.
Get them better rankings on Google also.
Do their Google My Business profile, get the reviews, ratings and grow the business.
But if you were to start from zero, how would you get the money to buy that business?
You would seller-based finance it.
So you say, hey, you're retiring.
You're six years old.
You don't want your HVAC business anymore.
I'll buy it from you.
I'll put down 2x profit which I can get bank financing for and you hold the note and provide the rest of the financing.
Will banks give you money if you don't have any capital?
Yes, they will, based on that business.
And the government helps.
It's called SBA financing.
Wow.
They don't teach that in school.
You know that, right?
They don't.
That's amazing.
Most people who go to Harvard right now aren't thinking about private equity or venture capital.
They're graduating Harvard and saying hey, instead of going and working for someone, I should just go buy one of these boring ugly businesses that are owned by these 60-year-olds who are retiring because no one wants their old ugly business that's printing off millions of dollars in profit.
One of the greatest transfers of wealth that's about to happen.
That's right.
You got amazing advice, my friend.
Thank you so much for your time, sir.
I appreciate you.
You guys, we just interviewed a nine-figure marketing mogul out here in Beverly Hills.
That's got to be one of my favorite interviews I've done.
Because when I asked him what he were to do if he were to start over from zero and how he were to build back his empire and make a million dollars in a year, go back and rewatch and listen to his answer.
See these guys, once they have the mindset and the skill sets to build this kind of wealth, you can take everything away from them and they will build it back and build it back 10 times bigger.
Great interview out here in Beverly Hills.
We got to keep this video rolling and go get another one out here.
Come on.
Excuse me, sir.
Question for you.
Have you ever been broke before?
No.
I don't know.
No?
And what lot of business are you in?
Shit, I want to tell you that, but I ain't been broke.
Wait, real quick.
I started a channel in Austin.
I grew it to 10 million followers.
I've interviewed the biggest business owners all over the world.
Can I get one quick minute with you real quick?
I got one quick minute with you.
It's one quick minute, go ahead.
What line of business are you in?
I'm in transport.
Transporting?
Yeah.
You own a trucking company or what?
Yeah, yeah, it's a truck company.
How did you get into this business?
What was the journey for you?
You know what, someone told me about it.
I was driving down the freeway, and I always see these trucks going down the freeway.
And I said, man, transport is always there.
It's always going to be there.
No electronic, no robot or anything like that is going to change it.
It's just going to be there.
It's recession-proof and people can't replace it.
Yeah, you can't replace it.
You're always going to be in a job flow.
You looking for a job?
No.
Not a job, but maybe another business to get into.
Let me ask you this, sir.
At the company in terms of revenue, not personal income.
What was the most amount of money you made in a single year?
You want me to tell you, man, and it's almost the first of the year.
You want me to actually put that on IRS?
Just revenue, not personal.
I couldn't say.
But is it safe to say there's a lot of money to be made?
It's a lot of money to be made, and it pays my bills.
Do you come from a lot of money?
Yes, I do.
Yes, I do.
My father's a king.
If you lost everything tomorrow, could you make it all back?
Oh, hell yeah.
I'm a brother.
We lost everything before, so there's nothing for us to get it back.
Are you a good salesman?
Yes, I am.
What's your secret to selling?
Consistency.
Never take no for an answer.
How about negotiating?
A lot of people struggle to close deals.
You've closed some big deals with some heavy hitters.
What's your negotiation advice?
Man, like I said, consistency.
Everything is consistency.
Being at the right place at the right time.
You can take a glass of water, a bottle of water, and move it from place to place and it changes its price.
But it's the same glass of water.
That's game right there.
Love that, my friend.
Did you go to school?
You went to college or no?
Elementary was good enough.
So give him one last lesson about business that's not taught in school.
Man, you working me, man.
Am I getting paid for this, brother?
Maybe.
Come on.
We're going to have to cut it.
We're going to have to cut it for you.
Get a mentor.
Definitely get a mentor.
Because you don't have a mentor, you don't have no direction.
You know, and find out his bad moves that he hasn't made.
You can grow from there.
You got amazing advice, my friend.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, my friend.
Likewise.
Thank you.
Guys, that is a wrap on today's video.
I need you guys to like and subscribe for amazing content.
We've got coming every single week on this channel to connect you guys to learn from the biggest business owners in the entire world.
And if you're not a member already, you guys need to join my private entrepreneur community, the School of Mentors.
The link's going to be up here or down in the description where you guys can connect with, learn from and implement the skills taught to you directly from the millionaires and billionaires I interview every single week via live calls, live workshops where you can ask your questions directly to the people I interview about how to scale and grow your business, how to sell, how to develop, how to invest everything.
You do not want to miss out on this opportunity.
So I can't wait to see you inside of my community, the school of mentors.
That being said, see you in the next video.
