A live breakdown of the three-phase framework for turning one agency into a portfolio of owned businesses, from a marketing CEO who's lost as much as he's built.
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2 days ago
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Scaling past a single agency into real wealth requires three sequential shifts: from operator to CEO, from CEO to multi-business operator, and finally to a capital allocator who buys equity instead of building businesses from scratch.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
An agency owner or service-business founder who has hit six or seven figures but still can't step away for a week without revenue dropping.
A founder who wants a repeatable framework for building leadership layers and systems instead of just hustling harder every quarter.
Anyone with cash flow from one profitable business who is considering buying into or acquiring a second business instead of starting one from scratch.
A founder evaluating a deal or partnership who needs a simple way to weigh a person's track record against how good the business itself sounds.
SKIP IF…
You haven't gotten a single business profitable yet; every framework here assumes there's already a cash-flowing operation to leverage.
You're looking for tactical ad or funnel advice; this is a mindset and business-structure framework, not a marketing tutorial.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Revenue and wealth are not the same thing: a business that depends on its owner's daily effort produces income, not an asset. Scaling into real wealth happens in three phases. Phase one moves an operator into a CEO role by building leverage, systems, and a real leadership layer instead of just hiring skilled task-doers. Phase two shifts a CEO into a multi-business operator who values replication, capital allocation, and deal flow over grinding on one company's growth. Phase three turns that operator into an asset builder who buys equity in existing businesses instead of starting new ones, structures deals with cash for leverage, and shifts focus from monthly revenue to a business's sale value. The throughline: never start another company from zero, judge deals by the person running them, and stop confusing control with ownership.
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Cold open and failure history: the nine-figure mindset framed against four failed businesses (a supplement distributorship, a novelty apparel brand, a colored-AirPods import business, and a booking-software startup) before pivoting into RemotelyX and the Social Culture wall-art brand.
10:04 – 11:14
02 · Agency Coaching Program
Pitch for his agency coaching and accelerator programs, segmented by revenue tier from $10K/month to $100K+/month.
11:14 – 13:53
03 · Escaping the Agency Box
Names the real problem with 'successful' agencies: revenue isn't wealth, and most owners have just built a bigger box to be trapped in. Introduces 'operators build income, businessmen build assets' and previews the 3-phase framework.
13:53 – 25:48
04 · Phase 1: Operator to CEO
The shift from operator to CEO: leverage, systems, and leadership. Covers hiring a first real leadership layer, SOPs and scorecards, removing yourself from fulfillment, and owning vision, culture, and accountability. Mistakes flagged: hiring helpers instead of leaders, delegating tasks instead of outcomes.
25:48 – 48:05
05 · Phase 2: CEO to Multi-Business Operator
The shift from CEO to multi-business operator: replication, capital allocation, and deal flow. Portfolio mindset, scalability over growth, income to optionality, illustrated with the OpenSend and RemotelyX equity deals and the Scoville chicken-restaurant scalability story.
48:05 – 1:01:00
06 · Phase 3: Asset Builder & Buying Equity
The shift into asset builder: buying equity instead of building from scratch, structuring deals with cash for leverage, and thinking like private equity. Covers the $63K Scoville acquisition, the roadmap to a $250M sale, and mistakes like staying emotionally attached to operations and confusing control with ownership.
1:01:00 – 1:03:00
07 · Personal Brand as Leverage
Closes on personal brand as the lever that compresses the time it takes to earn trust, access, and deal flow, and restates the talk's thesis: wealth is built on equity, not effort.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Revenue and wealth are different things: a business that stops making money the moment its owner stops working is an income source, not an asset.
Operators build income; businessmen build assets, and that single mindset shift is what separates the two.
Delegate outcomes, not tasks, so the measure of a team member's work is what they produced, not how busy they looked producing it.
The first hire that actually frees an owner's time is a leader, not another highly skilled specialist who still needs to be managed.
A business built for scalability can run without its owner; a business built only for growth just becomes a bigger version of the same trap.
More deal flow creates more room to say no, and the ability to say no to almost everything is what makes the one yes a good one.
Judge a deal by the track record of the person running it, not by how good the product or the market opportunity sounds.
Starting a new business from zero fails far more often than buying into one that already has a product, a team, and a customer base.
Cash on the table creates more negotiating leverage than sweat equity or services traded for a percentage of a business.
A deal can be structured as a small cash payment plus a committed revenue target, turning a modest upfront cost into a real ownership stake.
Staying emotionally attached to day-to-day operations is one of the most draining habits a founder can carry into a later growth stage.
Confusing control of a business with ownership of it keeps a founder working inside the business long after they could have stepped back.
A personal brand compresses years of relationship-building into a much shorter timeline by giving strangers a reason to trust someone before they've met.
Wealth is built on equity, not effort; hours worked and money earned stop correlating once a business becomes an asset instead of a job.
Takeaway
Three phases separate an operator from an asset builder.
SCALING FRAMEWORK
Revenue and wealth aren't the same thing, and the jump from running a business to owning one happens in three distinct stages, each with its own mindset, mistakes, and skill to master.
01Think Bigger: The Nine-Figure Mindset
Every failed venture in this founder's history followed the same pattern: chasing a promising product before there was any real distribution or regulatory clearance in place.
A single point of failure, like one platform account or one supplier relationship, can erase a business overnight no matter how much revenue it was producing.
Sunk cost is a trap: the instinct to chase money already lost costs more time and energy than building something new would.
03Escaping the Agency Box
Revenue and wealth are not the same thing; a business that depends entirely on the owner's daily effort is an income source, not an asset.
A service business the owner cannot walk away from for a month isn't a company, it's a self-built job with better pay.
04Phase 1: Operator to CEO
The first shift out of operator mode is moving from doing tasks yourself to making the decisions that let someone else do them.
A system's real job is to answer the question before an employee has to ask, not to look impressive in a folder nobody reads.
Hiring a highly skilled specialist without hiring someone to lead them just adds another person for the owner to manage.
Delegate the parts of the job that drain the most time first, and keep the one skill that's actually irreplaceable until last.
05Phase 2: CEO to Multi-Business Operator
Once time is the constraint, growth has to come from money and other people's effort, not from working more hours.
A business built for scalability can be reproduced without the owner; a business built only for growth just gets bigger and more fragile.
More deal flow lowers the pressure to say yes to any single deal, which is what makes it possible to only take the best ones.
Evaluate a deal on the track record of the person running it, not on how good the product or market sounds on paper.
06Phase 3: Asset Builder & Buying Equity
Buying into an existing business with a working product beats starting from zero, because most failure happens in the zero-to-one stage, not the one-to-ten stage.
Cash gives far more negotiating leverage than sweat equity or services traded for a stake; people give up more ownership for money in hand.
Structuring a deal as a small cash payment plus a revenue commitment can secure a real stake in a business without overpaying up front.
Staying emotionally attached to daily operations, and confusing control of a business with ownership of it, are the two habits that cap growth at this stage.
07Personal Brand as Leverage
A personal brand compresses what normally takes years of relationship-building into a much shorter timeline, turning strangers into trust before a single meeting.
Build a public presence to create optionality and security, not to perform success; the goal is always having something to fall back on.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Operator
A business owner whose income depends on doing the day-to-day work themselves; if they stop working, the business's output drops.
Multi-business operator
An owner who manages a portfolio of several businesses at once rather than being fully absorbed in running just one.
Asset builder
An owner who focuses on acquiring equity and building enterprise value rather than running operations directly, treating money and connections as resources to deploy.
Capital allocator
Someone whose main job is deciding where money gets invested across a portfolio of businesses, rather than running any one business's operations.
Roll-up
A strategy of acquiring and combining several smaller businesses in the same space into one larger, more valuable company.
Earn-out
A deal structure where part of a business's purchase price is paid later, contingent on the business hitting agreed performance targets.
Deal flow
The steady stream of potential business or investment opportunities coming to a person, which grows as their reputation and network grow.
Advisory shares
Equity given to someone for advice and effort rather than cash, kept separate from a company's official valuation on paper.
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And I told you I wanted you to think bigger, so that's what we're going to do today. I'm going to break you out of the agency box and show you the path to turn into a nine -figure businessman. I don't have nine figures in my bank account yet, but I'll show you exactly how we have a nine -figure valuation in the next 12 to 24 months across the board.
And I want you guys to do the same. I want you to think bigger, play bigger. Every motherfucker in this room needs to play for a home run.
Every other person competing against us sitting at home right now, maybe asleep somewhere else in the world. But you guys showed up to this event. A lot of you spent 10 grand on a ticket, another 20 grand on your stay, another five grand flying business class, all just to show up in this room.
And on top of it, you took a week away from your work, your family, whatever it is to be here. And that's a sign of the top 0 .1 % of excellence. And you deserve nothing less than to become a nine figure businessman.
But before we begin.
You guys know my success, but you don't know some of my failures. So I want to walk you through some of my biggest failures in business that I've had outside of the agency space so you can understand how far back this goes. This one, 2015.
You can see the date on here. This was elite fitness and nutrition. I actually thought I was a billionaire after I came up with this business.
Who here knows bodybuilding .com in America? Bodybuilding .com, multi -billion dollar company. Takes all the top supplement brands.
They sell them themselves. They basically have a media company and influencers around it, and then they resell other people's supplements and they private label. This did not exist in the Middle East in 2015.
All the supplements in the Middle East were trash. They were all shit. They were poisoning people.
I went to America. I was in America. As a 20 -year -old kid, I showed up to a convention for supplements, and I signed 12 of the top 15 brands by volume of sales in the United States.
For full exclusivity of the entire Middle East, Dubai, Lebanon, Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi, Egypt, you can name them all. I was the exclusive distributor of the top 12 of 15 brands in America. I had the top 40 influencers in the Middle East all signed to contracts that I took to these distributors and said, I got the biggest in the name.
They all want to sell your shit in the Middle East. I'm building a warehouse. I will be the Amazon of supplements in the Middle East.
And they all gave me contracts for free. I thought I was a billionaire. Lo and behold, the Middle East is the most corrupt fucking place in the world.
Accepted by, accepted by. But all these guys wouldn't let me get in because the Ministry of Health had their hands in other people's pockets. And I realized I'm not getting in business to make a billion dollars.
I'm getting into business to become free. And I realized this isn't going to get me there. I shut that whole thing down after two years of blood, sweat, and tears.
Every single dollar in my bank account. and what was a clear billion dollar opportunity. Yo, yo, yo, come check this out.
Come check this out. These do not untuck from my shirt.
This is the current COO and partner at Bad Marketing.
A lot of you guys know Fredo for his off skills. I know him for those butt cheeks right there. Those butt cheeks sold thousands of units of our tucked right.
Pants things so we put them under your pants They'd pull down your your dress shirt and then when you're at weddings and shit your shirt would never come out It's actually a sick product. I still use it to this day low -key. It's kind of uncomfortable about like Whatever as a funny story about this before I move on and why we trash this product Who was running Facebook ads in like 2016 2017 raise your hand?
Okay, cool. You guys know targeting was like insane back then so we did a bunch of influencer campaigns and uh out of all the influencers there's one gay one and he sold like 400 units on one twitter post and we're like holy fuck the gay people love this the most so we're like we're gonna make everything targeting gay people so we we shot ads i didn't put them up here it just become too much but like super sexy ads with fredo's legs and shit and like him butting his pants and unbuttoning them and we targeted gay people like back then you could literally like pick enough targeting to only target gay people.
And at our church, there's this guy who for like 10 years, we're all speculating he's gay. And he would never admit it. And he was always like homophobic.
He's like, ew, gay people, fuck gay people. You know what I mean? Like one of those guys was like, we'd be like, I'm like, yeah, my cousin's gay.
Ew, fuck him. Keep him away from me. I'm like, okay, whatever.
And so we ran this ad campaign on like a Tuesday. And we go to church on a Sunday. Church finishes up.
He walks up to Fredo. He's like, guys, I saw your fucking ad. That thing is awesome.
And me and Fredo looked at each other. He's fucking gay. We knew it.
We knew it. So this was tucked right. We sold a few thousand units, made like 100 grand, and then we trashed the whole thing because we realized there's bigger opportunities out there.
So I'll talk over this one because there's no words. This was Pulse Beats. I went to China.
I found colored AirPods. This is back in 2018 -19. You get the point.
I'll skip it. 2018 -19. Pulse Beats.
I did influencer campaigns. I ran ads on Facebook. And I was doing $550 ,000 a month selling colored AirPods from my mom's basement.
I thought I was going to be the richest motherfucker on the planet. I was like, yo, this is a fucking cakewalk. And then one day, after i put in a 250 000 order for more airpods i woke up i had no store i had no instagram i had no payment processor apple sued me and they shut down in one night everything i had my website my ebay my instagram tick tock didn't exist my facebook my entire business had disappeared i'm in the lost 250 grand and i got a whole basement full of colored airpods that i had to spend the next five years You know, selling differently.
You know, where's John? Cash to the office and shit. Whatever I could get to try to get my 250K back.
And that went under. This was what I thought was going to be another few hundred million dollar project. And honestly, if I stuck to it, it might have been.
This was called Buku Bookings. What happened was COVID hit. We had 150 clients that were selling birthday parties.
Every place that sells birthday parties uses another software. They're all fucking. dinosaur softwares they've no pixel integrations they can't track sales they were made by guys in the 90s and never updated we saw this as a massive opportunity to go build a software in that space that could handle the leads track the sales ping back to the pixel on facebook and google so we can track conversions and we actually made the product and it was the best product on the market to this day my father and all his businesses that sell birthday parties still use my product that has not been updated in four and a half years I spent $450 ,000 on this.
I got a booth in the biggest conference in America for birthday parties. I mean, I ran this bitch up. And then at one point I realized, unless I give this thing my full attention, I am not capable as a man, a CEO, financially and from a resources standpoint, to be able to support this business.
And then I had to make a choice. Do I pick bad marketing or do I pick Buku Bookings? And we dropped that business.
Two more. Hire properly. This was our first recruiting business we tried.
Did not work out to say the least. I learned a lot of lessons, which I'll show you later in the presentation. But we thought, hey, dude, we're recruiting so many people for bad marketing.
We have thousands of applications a month we're going through. Why don't we just do it for other people? So we did a few hires.
It went well, but it didn't scale without my attention, which was the problem. And so we moved off it. Thankfully, that led to RemotelyX with my partners, where we now have a mega successful company.
Thankfully to a lot of you guys also supporting us. Big round of applause for the RemotelyX team.
Social culture. Did anyone buy one of these in America? I know you guys have.
You know the Amex fucking wall art that everyone bought? That was me. So basically the story behind this brand, they brought me in.
They were doing $40K a month. They were losing money. I ran the ads.
I ran the creative team. I ran the email marketing. We went to $650K a month in four months.
We thought this was going to be a massive exit of a play. I moved them to Georgia from California. I paid for all their stay.
I paid for the warehouse. I paid for everything just so they could be side by side with my marketing company so we can scale this thing up even further. And on the day my daughter was born, because I caught them stealing the week before, they decided to plan a theft altogether.
They packaged all our millions of dollars worth of equipment and printers. They took the money from the bank account. And they packaged everything up in a semi truck and took off back to California and stole all my shit.
Pretty tough knowing that I'm the reason that they made all the money. But pretty cool now watching them and knowing they're still operating out of a bedroom because they can't do what I do. And they lost their X factor because of it.
I had the choice to go sue them and chase them for money. And I learned a lesson that day that all that toxicity that it would take to go chase this negative situation and try to get my money back. I'm powerful and smart enough to go.
Make my energy positive around me. And go make that money back. In less time.
By doing something else. And focusing on making more. Rather than chasing what was lost.
So.
So yeah. We did wall art like this. It honestly was sick as shit.
Our entire office was full of it. Huge shout out to Weeers. You get it.
Enough of this losing shit. Let's start talking about some wins. If you're an agency owner ready to take your business to the next level, we finally opened up spots for personalized consulting to take your agency to the next level.
We have hundreds of agencies active in our coaching programs right now. We have over 180 agencies who have done over six figures a month. We have over 20 agencies who have done over a million dollars a month.
And we have over 500 agencies who have done over $10 ,000 a month. So if you want to get into an agency program that actually levels you up, that surrounds you in a community with agencies who are doing... your level of revenue or higher, all you got to do is look at the description below, click one of the links.
And if you're over a hundred K a month, you can message me personally on Instagram. I'm going to take care of you and kind of walk you through our accelerator program, which is to take you to your first seven figure month in the agency business. And if you're doing at least $10 ,000 a month in your agency and you want to get to your first hundred K month, that's the first link below in the description.
I'd love to work with you hands -on with me and my team of coaches who are all six figure a month agency owners. And in our main program for the hundred K a month plus agencies, they're all seven figure. month agency owners as well directly with my team my c -suite team all my upper level management and myself doing the coaching calls for you guys if you want to learn more details about that click one of the links below or message me on instagram if you're doing at least 100k a month would love to be a part of taking your agency to the next level all right let's talk about the real problem with successful agencies as a whole most founders are trapped in their own business what you guys are actually doing you just don't realize it is you're building a box and over time you're just making the box bigger You make more money, blah, blah, blah.
But you're just building a fucking box. You're still trapped in this box. As soon as you break the box, the money goes away.
And that's the only way that you can get your time back. And what we're actually doing is building kind of a big prison. A lot of people associate revenue to wealth, but they're not correlated.
And I'll show you how to build the second one today. Operators build income. Businessmen build assets.
I want you guys to remember that because a lot of you guys in this room, if not all of you, are operators right now. You're working day to day. And the month that you stop working, your business will decline because it is not an asset.
It is an operation. The mindset shift required to escape the hamster wheel. That's what we're going to talk about today.
So your agency is a vehicle, not a destination. I want you guys to remember this. Who here in the room?
genuinely believes that in 15 years their full -time job is running a marketing agency raise your hand not a single hand is in the air i want you guys to understand that the agency model is the sickest cash flow model in the entire fucking world i have no doubt about it that's why we're all here that's why you guys are able to put together money to just gift me a fucking rolex because you guys like me Which I fucking appreciate so much, but that's this is the shit that it can afford us It can afford us the freedom to fly to Dubai and spend an entire week with our friends and family going out having fun Getting dinner stepping away.
That's why we're in the agency model, but it is just a vehicle It is not the final destination. We will not be here in 15 years. There's three phases of the evolution of an agency owner Number one is from operator to CEO This is where you level up from I'm running the business to other people are running the business and I'm coaching the people.
Phase two, I move from a CEO to a multi -business operator. My eye is no longer fully focused on the agency. It is focused on the portfolio of businesses that we have.
And phase three is the asset builder. This is where I leverage resources that are not my time. To build more long -term equity.
It is my money. It is the people that I hire. It is my expertise.
It is my connections that I've built. My brand. And so growth happens in phases.
And skipping steps is where companies break. So I'm going to walk you through every single phase. What the shift in frameworks and mindsets are in each one.
So you can start playing the game bigger. So phase one, operator to CEO. This is where you're focusing on leverage.
Like Jem was talking about, how do I price more so I can hire more better people so this whole cycle runs better? Number two, systems. How can I build this thing to run without me?
Okay? And the point of systems, I think a lot of people have different perspectives. For me in an agency, the point of a system is to stop someone from coming and asking me a question to figure it out.
The system should already have the answer to the question. This is how I avoid. always being pulled in a million different directions into my agency.
We build systems where the systems will answer the question. And number three, most importantly, is leadership. I always talk about this, but I would rather have a business with nine out of 10 talent and a two out of 10 system than two out of 10 talent and a nine out of 10 system.
Because the people, the nine out of 10 people, they will figure out the business and they will make it better than me. And they will do it according to what they're doing every single day. And so this is the most important piece of scaling yourself out of your agency.
And a lot of you have different reasons why you don't have leadership. Maybe your brand isn't big enough to pull people. Your vision isn't big enough to pull people.
Maybe your bank account isn't big enough to pay people. Whatever it is, you have different issues that you need to solve in order to scale yourself out of leadership. And all it takes is vision and money.
Even when I first started. We had no money in our bank account. I was selling people who are now C -suite in our company on the vision of where 4Media was going to go.
We're going to be this big marketing company, and I promise you, and I remember I was sitting in an office. We didn't even have money for furniture. We had to finance our desks.
The desks weren't there yet. We're just sitting in chairs, and there's a case of small Costco water bottles, and that's all I had to offer. I was like, hey, you want a water bottle?
Trust me. This is going to be fucking huge. We're going to have hundreds of people.
And all I had was the vision. But that was enough to get them bought in to joining that vision. And here we are today, five, six years later.
These are the same people that are now equity partners in the business. They believed in that vision because it was big enough to fit them. So here's some core shifts that you guys need to start doing.
You need to start moving from doing to deciding. When I meet with my team and I talk about things, I'm not assigning myself tasks. Very rarely am I ever assigning myself a task.
That task is assigned to someone else. I'm just making the decision on how we're doing that task or why we're doing that task. And then they can go back and forth and talk about it if they want to change it.
But that's all I'm doing. I'm deciding. How many decisions can I make a day versus how many things I'm doing can I do a day?
You guys might be able to do 10 things. But in the time you're doing 10 things, I might be able to decide 1 ,000 things. I'm just making a decision.
Yes or no, yes or no, this or that, this or that, do it this way or do it this way. And someone else is taking it, right? I'm now removing myself.
I don't have ClickUp tasks on my board. From hustle to structure. A lot of you, I said this yesterday, the agency owner who wins is not the one who works the hardest.
It's the one who learns when to stop working. And this is why. A lot of you are just...
attached to hustling. How can I work 16 hour days because I got to catch up and I got to make a million dollars a month. And that's the only way to do it.
And as long as we're doing that, we do not have the mental clarity to step back and watch and be like, dude, if I keep doing this, I'm just building a bigger box and the box makes me more money, but it's still a box. I'm running on this treadmill 16 hours a day. Where does it go until you step back?
off the treadmill and you watch, you're always going to be stuck hustling and hustling and hustling. And I'm not telling you don't work hard, guys. I worked 16 hour days for fucking years.
And that allowed me to save up money and build up and get out of my parents' house and get a nice car and do all these things. And I still work hard as fuck. But I don't end my day always thinking there's another thing I got to do and I'm exhausted.
I'm conserving my energy. I'm making decisions. I'm building structure.
And I have leadership. in place. A lot of you guys are just hiring talent.
Who's the most skilled worker? Who's the best media buyer? Who's the best copywriter?
That's what I need on my team. That's what I need on my team. But who the fuck ends up managing these people?
It's you. You're just adding more work to yourself by getting someone else in a skilled position because there is no one to lead these people. Leadership is the key and attracting better talent is the key.
So to break it down, hiring your first real leadership player. D was talking about this yesterday. He had you guys raise your hands.
How many layers of leadership do you have? If you guys don't have one, start with one. If you have one, get to two.
If you have two, get to three. Separate yourself from the actual task work and put yourself in the decision maker seat. And a lot of you guys, it's going to take a year to get there.
That's okay. This isn't stuff that you got to do today. But I want you to reframe your brain of why the fuck we're doing this in the first place and where we're trying to go.
Because if you don't know what we're trying to go -to, we will never get there. We're always going to be stuck in this cycle, this hamster wheel.
SOPs and scorecards. Fredo talks about this a lot, but this is how we document everything. This is how we make sure that everyone's on the same page.
A lot of us, it's all in our head. We're like, oh, I think he's doing a good job. I don't think he's doing a good job.
How does the person know they're doing a good job? How does the person know that they are doing the job correctly in the first place? Put these things on paper.
Remove yourself from fulfillment. Who here has done a coaching call with me before? Raise your hand.
Okay. Everyone here paid five grand to be on a coaching call. First thing I'm doing is I ask them, what are you doing in the business?
Which of these things that you're doing in the business do you think are the worst use of your time? Let's rank them from one to 10. Great.
Let's start delegating all of these. This one takes six hours of your time a week. Let's delegate it.
This one takes five. Let's delegate it. And the last thing that I delegate is the thing that they're most skilled at, where they live.
If it's a creative person, don't delegate the creative side. If you're a salesperson, don't delegate the sales side. Delegate the fulfillment side.
Look at Mehdi standing up here. He's sales. He's creative.
He's revenue. He doesn't know shit about fuck when it comes to his fulfillment. I went into his office.
I was like, how does this work? He's like, I don't know. Sina runs that side and they make videos.
I'm like. You guys use ClickUp or like, what do you, you guys use Sheets? I don't fucking know.
I just make money. He stays in his skill set. And that's why he's making $40 million this year.
Because he removed himself from the fulfillment side. And most importantly, you need to own the vision, the culture, and the accountability. This is something that slips up from us as CEOs all the time.
We forget that we know where we're going. We know where the company is going. We see it clearly.
We wake up and we're like. One day we're going to be here. We're going to do this.
We're going to do that. But we forget to consistently communicate that to our team. And I'm guilty of the same thing, guys.
I'm guilty. I catch myself going six months without communicating it to the team. This is where we're going.
Don't forget. And then my own leadership team checks me. Like, hey, Eddie, I think we need to remind the team of what we're trying to do and where we're going and what the bigger picture is, not just what are we doing for this client every single month.
You're right. Thank you for checking me. I appreciate it.
As soon as I get on a call with the whole company and I remind them, this is where we're going. Everyone get on board. The amount of productivity increase is unmatched.
Like I cannot even explain to you guys because they're not thinking, I need to get this task done on time. They're thinking, I believe in the company that I'm working for and I'm proud and I'll beat my chest for every single fucking core value for bad marketing because we're going to the moon, right? And that's the most important thing we can do.
As a CEO. And we make the mistake of just leaving it here all the time. And that's why we're so motivated.
We wake up every day. Why isn't everyone working as hard as I am? It's because they don't fucking know what you believe.
And they don't believe what you believe about your own business. So make sure you remind them that. Mistakes to avoid.
Most importantly, hiring helpers instead of leaders is the worst thing you can do. What's a helper going to do? Well, Eddie, sir, what would you like me to do today, Eddie, sir?
Fuck that shit. I want them to just do. I don't even want them to ask me unless it's a super important decision that they cannot figure out.
And most, most, most important thing, we talked about this so much in VIP day, delegating tasks instead of outcomes is like the biggest mistake you can do. Guys, if Neo can go put up a million dollars on the board for me, kicking his feet up, lazy, and he does it his own way in an hour, and then Cameron over here sucks at sales.
I don't care if Cameron does 10 ,000 dials and Neo does three. Neo got the outcome. Actually, Neo, take the fucking month off, brother.
Thank you so much for getting me the outcome. I'm happy. The problem is we condition our team.
How many tasks are you doing? How many videos can you make? How many emails can you send?
Go, go, go, go, go. Not how much money did this video generate? How many views did it get?
How many conversions did the email get? These are the things that we should be looking at, not the task itself. I don't give a fuck about the task.
I can do five things a day and make more money than 99 % of people. The other guy does 100. He doesn't make anywhere near me.
Why? Because the outcome is all that fucking matters. And we are doing that, but our team is not because we are conditioning them to think that the task is the most important piece of the business.
And it's not. It's just the outcome. If you go to a restaurant and someone's serving you, I don't care about the million things they're doing.
All I care about is when that person leaves. He goes, man, that was the best fucking service I've ever had. It doesn't matter what happens in between.
I don't need him to do every single little thing. It's the outcome that matters, and that's all you remember. You don't remember anything that they did.
You just remember how you felt when it was over. So if the business collapses without you, just understand you are not yet the CEO. You are still the operator in your business.
One thing I want you to remember, Sean mentioned this in VIP Day, and someone told me this a few years ago, and it really stuck with me. Even though I 90 % believe this phrase, I don't think it's 100 % true. But I need you guys to remember that the best talent is not on your team yet.
Okay? If your business is improving, if you're making more money, if you are expanding, if you're doing all these things, naturally, you will begin to attract better talent. Therefore, do not be so attached to elevating all the talent in your team from the bottom up.
Sometimes they're not built for that because you hired someone at this capacity because that's what your business could handle or afford. As your business grows, you can now afford to hire someone at this capacity. You're able to get bigger people.
And I'll show you examples of how I've done that because I went from bad marketing where we had to basically raise people from interns. We had no money. We're like, dude, I'll give you a thousand bucks a month.
Come start with us. And then all of a sudden this person is making 8K a month later on. We built them up, right?
In Scoville, my chicken business, I didn't make that mistake. Day one, I got the head of franchising of the other biggest franchise company. I went and got the ex -CEO of KFC because he knows how to fuck to sell fried chicken to everyone in the world.
I was like, you're on my team now. Get over here and we're running this bitch, right? Because the best talent is not on my team yet.
It's always in front of me. So keep that in mind and you need to always be searching for the best talent. Are you with me, guys?
All right, was the volume good? Cool. All right.
CEO to multi -business operator. This is the next phase. And I think this is kind of where I'm personally at right now.
Main focus is our replication of process. So how can I do the same thing multiple times without more effort is the key. It's not just multiple times with more effort.
It's without more effort. Capital allocation. What do I do with all this money sitting here?
Do I put it in Solana at fucking $95 today? Do I go build another business with it? How do I make my little minion dollars go make more minion dollars for me without me doing anything?
Number three is deal flow. How do I get more deal flow coming in? The more opportunities you have, the bigger opportunities you get.
I need you guys to understand this. If you guys get five deals a year, you're more pressure to say yes to one of those five deals. If I get 10 ,000 deals a year.
And I know I'm only picking one. You bet damn well that's going to be a home run because I can say no to 9 ,999 and I still got one on the table. So increase your opportunities of deal flow that come to you, whether that's for clients, whether that's for future businesses, whatever it is, increasing the opportunity is the most valuable thing you can do at the top.
So core shifts mentally here are going to be, you're going to move from one business to a portfolio mindset. How can I do this with multiple companies? I only have 40 hours every single week.
Who here has kids? Raise your hands. Okay, beautiful.
Half the room. God bless them. A lot of people say like, oh, when you have a kid, you work harder.
I've come to find that as false. I've actually worked less since I've had children because I don't want to be a dad that just never is home for his kids, right? I want to be a part of my kids.
I want to have them run up to me. You see them in this event. Even they're sitting in the back right now.
You saw them at the dinner. My kids are always involved in our life. I've integrated them.
And the point of this is to help you understand, like, I realized I can't keep spending more time on the business. There comes a point where I either have to sacrifice my family, which we all know the rich people who have a lot of money, who lost their family in a divorce or whatever it was. Not because they even cheated on them or anything, just because they didn't give them attention and time, right?
I refuse to be that person. But I realized, okay, I'm not going to be able to work more than 40 hours on average a week. Some weeks, maybe 60, some weeks, maybe 30 or 40 on average.
So you start realizing I need more leverage. I can't just build a bigger portfolio and spend more time. I have to do it the same time I have right now.
So something has to give. I have to take something off my calendar. I have to hire someone to do it.
I have to use money to make it happen. I cannot use more time. Whereas originally we're so used to using our time to build things.
When I first started, I didn't give a fuck. I didn't have money. It doesn't matter.
I'm on a computer all day. I'm making it rain. I'm getting on sales calls.
I'm running ads. I got all the time in the fucking world. It doesn't matter.
As soon as a kid pops out, you're like, do I really want to do this or should I spend time with them? You feel an intrinsic guilt to just spend time with your family. Picking money over a family is just fucking stupid.
Number two, from growth to scalability. Instead of just picking, how do I make more money today? And then we run on this treadmill where someone churns and the next month I have to go sell again.
And we're just thinking growth, growth, growth. I need to grow. Let's take a step back and be like, dude, how do I make this thing grow without me?
How do I make this system so simple that it can grow without me? And this is where the real unlock happens, guys. When you start understanding how to do that.
Even in Scoville. of my chicken restaurant. First thing I did, it's so funny.
I bought the business and I'll tell you how I did that deal later. You'll be like, this was fucking savage. When I bought that business, I spent the first year declining every request to open a Scoville.
I probably turned down 50 locations. And all I did for 12 months was fix the scalability of the business. How can I build a business where I put monkeys and the monkeys can do the job?
I did everything in my power to simplify the business. I cut the business and I cut the menu in half. I brought it down to four possible items that we could make.
I made SOPs for every single thing. I changed the design of everything. I made sure everything was locked in.
It took me a whole year, dude. I'm experienced. I got money.
I got team. I got partners. It still took me 12 fucking months for a tiny little chicken shop, let alone an agency.
This thing is going to take time. That's okay. It's not going to happen tomorrow, but this is the most important piece.
And now we have 15 locations being built at the same time because I took the time. to build it for scalability, not just for growth. I could have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in open locations right there on the spot.
The hype was the highest when I bought it. Everyone wanted it. Oh my gosh, Eddie's in school.
I want one, I want one. I said no to everyone because I wanted to build for scalability long -term. This Burj Khalifa we're standing on, if the foundation's not what it is, we are not eating on the 122nd floor for VIP day.
No fucking way. This building is collapsing, right? They didn't focus on growth.
They focused on how do we scale this bitch to the tallest building in the world. Let's take our time and let's spend the four years actually building this thing. And then last but not least, from income to optionality, not just where is my money coming from.
I have more options for money now. I'm a multi -business owner. I don't need to depend on one thing.
I don't need to say yes to every opportunity. I can have options, okay? So key components in this phase, at least for me.
Again, Mehdi seems like he's a very similar approach to me. I used to think three years ago that selling my agency was like the sexiest thing in the world. I've come to realize the sexier thing is using my agency to build other companies that I could sell.
If I'm a car manufacturer, why would I ever sell my manufacturing facility? Why don't I just open a bunch of dealerships and sell the dealerships that are full by my manufacturing facility? I don't sell the engine.
I sell the other pieces. And so that's what we're doing at Bad Marketing. We're taking our cash.
We're investing in other equity plays. I'll show you a few of them. There's a lot more that I can't share publicly yet.
Or we're just under NDA or whatever. But when we exit and sell them, you guys will see them online. But just understand, like, we are not taking our money and going and buying Gucci bags all day.
I got cars and shit like that. You guys see them. But we are putting our money into serious business opportunities on the back end.
launching or acquire complimentary businesses. So really good examples like opensend .com, one of the software companies we invested in. Has anyone used opensend or heard of it before?
Great, look at that, right? So this was a complimentary business for us. We're like, hey, we sell to e -com brands, we sell to info brands.
Why don't we get a software that we use and believe in? Why don't we acquire it and sell it to more e -com and info brands? Worst case, we scale our acquisition on the software so well that we have a ton of client lead flow for bad marketing.
Because our software is selling to the same people and everyone wants to use the software and no one wants to work with a marketing agency, right? That company, as of last week, got an offer for $142 million. Complimentary company.
We never took our eye off the prize. It was in our industry. I didn't have to build a new team.
I didn't have to build a new infrastructure. It was a complimentary business that I can bolt on and both can feed each other. And it was a win -win.
I'll show you how I did that deal too. Pretty cool deal. Shared services is the biggest benefit here.
One finance team manages all the businesses. One marketing team can manage all the businesses. One CEO, me, can manage all the businesses.
One personal assistant can manage all the businesses. And as the businesses grow, those people can become on one business if the business becomes worth it. For example, Sean in VIP day was saying his personal assistant graduated to the COO of New Tonic, these drinks that you guys are having here.
Same thing. I bet that's... assistant, started on four or five companies with him, working on all of them.
And then they became really good at one business and it made more sense to put them in that seat and then find someone else for the share team. So it's very easy because in the agency, you have a finance person, you're spending all your money on a finance person for one company. You can build three, four companies and that same finance person can manage all four for marginally more, 10 % more, 20 % more salary, but they're doing 400 % more output for you.
As a CEO, this is a very, very important key is the shared part. And then last but not least, installing operators instead of managing day -to -day. Any business outside of bad marketing, I do not know what the fuck is going on on a day -to -day basis.
Scoville right now, I have a thousand unread WhatsApp messages and group chats I have not looked at in two weeks. There are building locations. Every location is making sales.
Things are running remotely thanks to these guys. I don't know anything about who's hiring what, what applications are out. I don't know anything about that.
These guys are operating the business. I'm advising the business. I'm funding where needed.
And we're scaling the business because we're collaborating together. We each have our own role. And my role is here and their role is operations.
So here's some common mistakes to avoid. Shiny object syndrome. It's very easy, guys, when you're like, dude, I want to buy businesses.
I want to get into other companies. Eddie said do this. Other people are doing it.
It's super fucking cool. It's very easy to do too many things at the same time and get distracted. What I'm trying to tell you is do not take your eye off the prize of the agency.
You need to stabilize your agency without your day -to -day. I'm not saying don't work at the agency. I still put in 35, 40 hours a week to bad marketing.
I've built all these other businesses in less than two to three hours a week of my time. I still focus on bad marketing, but bad marketing is stable. I can stay here all week at an event, not look at a single Slack notification.
Sales team closed deals yesterday. They're closing deals today. Fulfillment team is closing deals.
My finance team is still billing clients on performance bonuses. That bitch runs. You get it?
Only Neo gets it? Cool. That's why he's making the most money in the room.
Just remember, one strong business can fund many. Okay? That's why the agency is so fucking sick, guys.
We have cash cows. We don't need offices. We can literally run it on contractors.
If everything falls apart next day, we can let go of everything and we're not bleeding money. We don't have a 30 year rent lease that we have to have for an office. We don't have any actual overhead.
All the overhead we have is optional. I can cancel my softwares tomorrow. I can technically fire everyone tomorrow.
I'm at low risk, high cash. I talked to my friends here in Dubai who have insanely sick businesses. fucking doing glass for tate's living room and every top hotel and atlantis the royal they're doing everything and i show them the cash that we make in the agency cash and they're like what the fuck am i doing bro i want to fucking run a marketing company that's how sick our shit is bro i'm talking the number one guy in the country he's actually in this room right now smiling and laughing in the back but i'm showing him the deposits He's like, is this cash?
Like cash in the bank? I'm like, yeah. He's like, here in Dubai, you're not even fucking working.
I'm like, I know. And that's why the agency model is so sick. So I'm not telling you, take your eye off this prize.
I will never let my agency go. But will it be the biggest thing I work on? Absolutely not.
This is the rule. I want you guys to write this down because this is probably the most important investment advice. I've spent millions of dollars of losses getting robbed.
All these failed businesses I showed you at the beginning. And the one most important piece of advice I can give you. is bet on the jockey, not the horse.
I don't care if it's the fastest horse in the race. If the guy riding that horse is not the guy who's going to win the race, I'm not betting on his ass. And the biggest mistakes I've done, millions of dollars lost, was betting on what I thought was a good business or a good product with an inexperienced founder.
Someone who hasn't sold a company. Dude, if I'm going to buy a company and you haven't sold a company and you're selling me that you're going to sell the company, I'm not investing with you. Because you haven't done it before.
If you've sold a company before, I'll listen on how we're going to go sell this other company. But if the jockey has not sold a company, I don't give a fuck how sick the horse is. I don't believe he can sell a company, right?
So I'm looking for track record of the actual founder. I'm looking at how distracted they are. What have they done in the past?
Ton of criteria. But the point is, don't get shiny objects in them when you see like a sick software or a sick whatever. It's all about the founder.
All your businesses right now run the way they do because of you sitting in these seats. If you think your business should be making more money, it's because you need to be a higher level person. From a leadership standpoint, you are the cap on your business.
And the same will be in every business you invest into. And you're putting your heart and cash into it. So I want you to just remember that.
So let's talk about some of the success plays we've had remotely X, one of our super successful business, I'm not going to give the numbers for specific reasons here. But let's just say we're doing really damn well this year. We'll almost do eight figures if everything goes super well.
And this is a business that a year and a half ago was doing 20K a month? 30K? 30K a month.
30K a month. I spend an hour every other week with my partners getting on calls. 30 % of them get canceled because we all get busy.
I meet with the ads team for 15 minutes a week. And this business has scaled 30X in the last two years. Right.
And that's because I bet on the jockey and not the horse. I know these guys are loyal. I know these guys have stand up characters.
And I know these guys can get the job done and I don't need to get the job done. And from day one, this is the most important thing. From day one, I set the standard that this is my job role and I will not step outside of it.
And there have been scenarios where they say, hey, can you help with this? And I'll say, I'll do my best, but that's not my job. I'd rather this person do it.
The problem with our current agencies is we built it ourselves. We built it depending on us from day one. We didn't enter it externally being like, hey, this is my role.
You guys figure everything else out. This is where I stay. We built it being like, I can do everything.
I'll do it. I'll do it. I can do everything.
And it becomes very hard to pull yourself out of it. But when you go into another business, whatever the next thing is, while you still have your agency, whatever the next thing is, you can set those standards from day one. And this is the line I'm drawing.
And this is my contribution. And if you don't want it, there is no deal. And if you do want it, we'll make this happen.
You do your job. I'll do mine. I will make tons of money.
Number two, open send. Like I told you, same situation. I'll tell you how I did this deal.
Actually, I'm going to connect. Is it cool if I tell them how I bought into remotely? So they understand.
Yeah, cool. So actually, I'll tell you how I did this deal first. So they were doing revenue, whatever, 30K a month.
And I was like, what do you guys think the business is worth? They're like 200K. I was like, cool.
200k, fair enough. I want a quarter of the business. I'm Eddie Malouf.
I'm going to bring my personal brand. We're going to grow it. Whatever.
It's going to be worth way more. They're like, okay, cool. We want 50k.
I'm like, why the fuck would I pay you 50k? As soon as I join the business, it's going to be worth a million dollars instead of 200k. Why would I give you cash?
They're like, oh, we just worked so hard. We built this business. It's worth something.
I was like, okay, cool. How about this? I'll give you 15k cash just so you can take some cash and feel like I paid you something.
And then I am required to bring 50 grand of revenue to the business in the next 90 days. If I don't, whatever that gap is missing, I'll pay you in cash myself. They said deal.
10 days later, 50K in the business. Didn't pay a single dime after that. And now they pay me distributions every month.
And I make, you know, humbly multiple six figures from this business passively from my guys depositing because of the work that we do. And the cool part and the most important part about this business, guys, back to CEO vision and everything else. is this mission is so fucking strong.
Our mission is to place 10 ,000 underprivileged people in the Middle East into American and foreign companies. And we are changing 10 ,000. Like, everyone shows up to work ready to go to fucking war.
And it's amazing because some of these people are getting like 4K a month jobs. when they're used to $600 a month. Their family now can stop working.
Their dad, who's crippled, who can barely go to work, can now sit at home and rest for once in his life. And it's cool the impact that we're doing there. So it's very easy to have people bought in on a mission that big.
Number two was OpenSend. So how this deal actually took place, and we'll cut this out of the recording. No one record this part, please, just because it's kind of private.
So basically what happened was they came to sponsor agency founders. uh two and a half years ago two years ago something like that and uh they came to me they're like hey we want to sponsor i was like hey sorry i don't take sponsors i don't care everyone's trying to pay me money i don't accept sponsors i don't want people selling to my people i want it to be a safe place and uh i was like but i'll use your software i kind of like it sounds cool so we used it on some stores and we made so much money for those stores from the software uh for those of you that don't know what it does you basically install it on your website anyone that comes to your website you can set parameters like if they spend 60 seconds on my website then scrape their information and add them to my email list just as an example at bad marketing we use it for when someone touches our website we get a slack notification of their linkedin profile their name their social medias everything so we know exactly who visited i'll see like head of marketing at dell and i'll be like find this guy on linkedin and get him you know what i mean even if you did an opt -in so really cool software we used it
We made money. Then I was like, this has to be illegal, obviously. So I got a bunch of lawyers.
It wasn't illegal. And I went back to them. I was like, hey, listen, instead of you sponsoring my event, how about I partner with you and then we'll promote it.
We have all these clients. We have this list. We sell to these people.
It'll be huge for the brand. They said, deal. We have a $12 million valuation.
We said, cool. I want to buy 10 % of the business. They said, okay, it's going to be $1 .2 million.
I said, I don't want to pay $1 .2 million. I want to pay $400K. for 10 % of the business.
We're not going to fucking do that. I'm like, okay, let's work out a deal here. How about, and part of this, by the way, for those of you that have been in software and stuff, when you raise money or you take investment, you're pinning a valuation for future.
It's all documented. So if, for example, they let me pay 400K for 10%, that means the business is worth 4 million on paper. They can't have that happen because the next time they want to ask for money, the person will be like, well, last time you raised it was at 4 million.
Why am I paying 50? So we have to pin it higher. So the logic makes sense.
Just so you guys understand the logistical side of this negotiation. It's a little weird. So I was like, okay, how about this?
I'm going to be 400 K and you're going to give me whatever amount of shares that is to 12 million, 3%. And then you're going to give me another 3 % as advisory shares. So this is on the side.
I didn't pay for them. This is for my efforts to help you and advise you and do all this. So it doesn't affect the valuation, the cash that we spent.
We're still at a 12 million valuation. So that's what investors will see forever. They'll never see my advisor shares.
As you guys do deals, this is very important. This is how you get lower valuations for the same money you're putting in. And then I said for the remaining 4%, we'll do an affiliate deal.
I'll take 50 % of all revenue we refer. And until we get to another 400K, then all of that becomes cash. You pay us in cash.
But up till then, half of everything we refer. goes to paying down our total to get to 10 % of the business. Does that make sense?
I know it's a little complex, but you see how I made a deal work here? I put only 400K to get 10 % of a business that just got an offer for $142 million cash two years later, right? All creative deals.
You know how much time we put into this? Probably combined in two years, my partners have put zero time. My team has maybe put a combined 25 hours of telling clients to sign up for the software.
And I've probably put a combined 50 hours in two years. And we turn what was a $400 cash investment into potentially $10 million plus, right? So this is leverage.
This is doing things that are still coinciding with our business to make us a fuck ton of money on the back end. And last one, Scoville. This is our roadmap to selling.
So red is open locations. Blue is sign locations. So you can see here.
We're opening 15 by the end of this year. We'll have 10 more signed. We might actually break these numbers, to be honest.
Next year, 50. Next year, 105. And in 2029, 195.
So 125 will be open. 70 will be signed. And I'm selling this bitch for a quarter billion dollars.
And the coolest part is I'm doing it on the side. Because I bet on the jockey, not the horse. I picked the two best operators out of all the Scovilles.
I made them my partners. They didn't have money. So I gave them sweat equity and then they basically paid me over time.
Justin Lim, Michelin star chef. He was the one that owned the business in the first place. I knew I had the best product on the market.
And then I got this guy, Brian Stevens. This was actually by accident. He tried my food.
He flew back the next day on a jet just to meet with us. He's the former president of KFC, the former CEO of Marco's Pizza. He opened 1 ,500 locations.
He's like one of the goats of the franchising space. I drop his name to anyone in that space and they're like, oh. Brian.
And he's on our team. And he's asking us to be on our team. Okay, that's the difference.
So, are you guys still with me? Am I boring you? Yeah.
All right, so phase three of this, which is the phase that I'm getting into right now. I think I'm in phase two still, getting into phase three. But I kind of mapped it out of how it's all going to go down.
Phase three. has a few points of focus number one is ownership two is equity so not remember the last one was cash flow systemization all these things were past that and number three is enterprise value how can i sell this for the biggest amount possible with the least amount of my resources so core mental shifts here i'm moving from an operator to a capital allocator i showed you a few ways that i'm doing the deals i didn't tell you about the scoville deal but I'll keep it short.
They wanted a million dollars for me to buy Scoville and the rights to it. The day I transacted, I paid them $63 ,000 cash and the business was mine. I made that back from the business in four months.
So I literally bought a company that they spent five years building for nothing. And in four months, I paid for everything that I spent on it. And here we are now opening 15 locations.
I'll probably just do a training on that some other time. But just for context, I was able to use capital. And the key here, guys.
It's one thing, I see a lot of you guys try to do this. It's one thing when you go, oh, well, I'm going to exchange services for equity. Oh, how about we do this and I'll get some equity on performance or whatever.
That's cool. But when you have cash and that, you have so much more leverage. People just love getting cash.
Even if it's 75K, 150K, they love that point of cash. So I can go from saying. Hey man, I'd love to exchange services for 10 % or to going, hey bro, I'll give you a hundred grand and I'll do the services and I want 40 % of the business, not 10.
The gap that you can create from having cash allocation in these businesses, and I've never paid full price. I always pay like a discount on the business because of what I can bring to the table, okay? But the cash is key.
Without this, you have less leverage. You're just another service provider. You're a risk.
They don't know. If you put cash down, they shut the fuck up. You gave them cash.
Worst case, you paid them. Whatever. You suck at marketing.
It's cool. You paid them money. They'll shut up.
They'll take a deal. You'll get a much better deal. Just remember this in the back of your head.
I've spent cash to buy 12 companies or so. I used to do it with no cash. Now I realize I have way more leverage, even as a partner.
Bro, I put a quarter million dollars. Well, why are you talking to me like that? I put a quarter million dollars.
I'm not just fucking doing your marketing. I put a quarter million. Done.
From revenue to focus. From revenue focus, sorry, to valuation focus. We talked about this.
I don't care about my monthly cash right now. I care about who's buying this bitch and how much money I can get on it. From income to exits and long -term wealth.
And this is where you build generational wealth, guys. I can sit here for my marketing company and I can make $5 million net, $6 million net every year. For 10 years, $60 million.
Pretty good. Not bad. Or on the side, I could start a chicken business.
And so for a quarter billion dollars in like three, four years, I like barely do anything. And not put any of my own cash, which is the coolest part. So some key components here.
We're buying equity instead of building from scratch. I never start another business. This is key.
If there's any advice you take from this, if you just didn't listen to a single fucking thing I said, just remember, do not start another business. Buy one. Invest in one.
Find one that's already there. The hardest thing you can do, and the reason hire properly and all these other businesses tucked right and all this shit failed in the past is because there was no proof of concept. There was nothing already running.
And our skill set in this room is very unique. We can probably take any business from zero to one. Any business, bro.
You give me an idea right now, and I don't have an event to run, and I have a laptop and Wi -Fi, that business will be running by tomorrow. We will be closing deals, collecting money guaranteed. We might not have a product yet.
but that marketing system is dialed and I'm running that business day one, okay? But I cannot do that for every business. And the hardest thing for you to do with less of your time is to start a business from zero to one.
Because when it's at one, that business already has team, that business has resources, that business has product, and I can go give advice, money, skillset, whatever it is, and I can take that business from one to 10. But every business that I failed is because I started zero to one. I assigned someone on my team.
I said, hey, you're really good at hiring people. You're really good at marketing. You're really good at sales.
You two together. Here's my vision. Here's how the businesses go.
And then it didn't go. And that's why they're on my team because they don't start shit from zero to one. They can take shit from one to 10 with direction, but they don't have the resources zero to one.
So never, ever, ever start another company again. If you have resources, whether it's your time, whether it's your team. Whether it's your money, someone else's money, I don't care.
Never start a business again. Always buy it at level one, level two. Don't go crazy and try to start your own company.
You're going to burn out. Structuring deals, earnouts, partnerships, roll -ups. I gave you a few examples of these.
Professionalizing companies for scale and exit. This is from day one. The problem that we do is we always focus on cash.
How can I make more money now? How can I make more money now? How can I make more money now?
We're not focused on like... What do I need to restructure right now, even if it means we lose a little bit of money, so that I can go 10x this bitch and I don't have everything breaking on the back end? Even I was talking to Igor.
Where's Igor? Right here. He's in my mastermind.
Yesterday, he was like, bro, I'm making great money, but I need $100 million play. What is it? And we're going back and forth.
And he's like, dude, what I have is cool. I can make money. I can double it.
I can triple it. But I can't get it to $100 million like this. But I know there's something I can.
What is it? And we started going back and forth. And we started planning an AI and this software.
Maybe we could do this. And then now he's like, I'm fucking this close, right? He's rebuilding a foundation of his company so that he can afford to scale to whatever number it is that he wants and build it differently from the foundation.
And then last but not least, start thinking like private equity, not a founder. I'm telling you guys, a $50 ,000 check. go so much further than you guys think for us it might depending on who you are might be a week of net profit it might be a month of net profit it's just a month to someone else you're giving 50k to you could buy a whole fucking scoville franchise if you do it right you understand what i'm saying for us it's just like a month of profit and so we're so used to this heavy cash flow business info agencies etc that we don't realize how low most businesses are on cash when you go give another founder 50 100 grand the the tides turn very quickly all of a sudden you have half of a company that's worth significantly more because no one's coming to buy it so mistakes to avoid staying emotionally attached to operations this needs to be someone else's job not yours that is the most draining part who here agrees the most draining part is like of running an agency is like your clients complaining, you feeling like you didn't do a good job, you getting pulled in.
Exactly right. That's the most draining part of the business. As soon as I removed 90 % of that off my plate, I was able to build everything else.
But as long as you're getting pulled in, Eddie, oh, Eddie, this client's mad. Oh, Eddie, we missed this campaign. Oh, I care about my product.
I care about my fulfillment. Don't get it twisted. But I'm no longer involved in the emotions on the negative side that comes to it.
That's the team's job that manages them and made the mistakes because that is the most draining thing to my energy. And I need to focus on building bigger shit and playing bigger like we're talking about. And then don't confuse control with ownership.
I would rather be an owner than a controller of anything. Sign me up for the guy that owns the fucking mega football team in America that's worth $6 billion instead of being the general manager on the field, talking to the team, sweating in the heat. I don't want to be that guy.
It looks cool because he's on television. He's all this. But the guy who you don't know his name, who owns the whole fucking team, who's sitting up in the AC, that's the guy we really want to be.
But we're all chasing the control guy. We feel like we got to be the control guy. If you have the right team, the right systems, you don't need to control anything.
A couple quotes here at the end that I think are very important for you guys to take away. Wealth is built on equity, not effort. Don't confuse the two.
Just because you work fucking 60 hours a week doesn't mean the guy who's making bigger moves, less moves, less time is not outpacing you by 100x. And here are the skills that I believe are required at each level. We're going to give you guys the slides, so no need to take pictures.
But at the operator, you need to be really good at execution. This is most of you guys in the room. You can sell.
You can run ads. You can do whatever it is. You can fulfill.
You can actually run a whole fucking company solo. At a CEO level, you need to build leadership, not only yourself, but the leaders in your own organization. You need to build them up to be the leaders.
When you become an operator of operators, you need systems to run the whole thing. So again, if you remember, I told you I'd rather have top talent than top systems. This is it right here.
The talent comes first. They will build the systems for me. I'm naive.
I might think this is the best system, but they're doing that one job every single fucking day. They will build it way better than I can. Every single onboarding course, every single SOP in all of bad marketing was not touched by me at any point in time.
I assigned the person who does that job to build the best SOP that they possibly could. And a lot of you guys who are in the mastermind, you've seen all our SOPs, our playbooks. They're fucking dialed.
And it's because I didn't do them. I trusted the person who does that job, who's in the leadership role to do them themselves. And the last is when you become an asset builder, you're just finding out how to allocate resources, whether it's your centralized team, whether it's your money, whether it's your brand, whether it's your connections.
Sometimes all it takes is like a connection. You've built a handshake. You made in a room like this in a future business to make that connection.
And all of a sudden, you're making big plays. Where's Ash? Ash right here?
Ash came to me. We have a massive peptide business that's being built right now. And out of nowhere, Ash, five years we've had a relationship.
He's spent six figures on consulting, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff, whatever. We came. Yesterday, he's like, bro, are you in peptides by chance?
I'm like, yeah, actually, I really am. I started showing him. He's like, fuck, that's you, whatever.
He's like, dude, I'm the cheapest supplier. in all of america for peptides i've been wanting to talk to you guys let's get a deal done this is a relationship five years ago we shook hands sure we've made money sure he's paid for consulting whatever but that's leverage i haven't showed up to one of those team meetings in three weeks the team's running that business but this relationship right here this handshake might make us 10 million dollars this year and that's resource allocation it's not time allocation it's resource allocation sometimes it's just a connection So just remember, what got you here will not get you there.
And I want this quote to stick with you guys, please. The agency founder who wins is not the hardest worker. It's the one who learns when to stop working.
Stop bragging about how much fucking time you work and how much effort you put in. It's not cool. Your kids don't think it's cool, I promise you.
Your wife doesn't think it's cool. Your friends don't think it's cool. They just look at you and it's inspiring because you work harder than them.
But it's not fucking cool. What's cool is being able to not work. And still get the same results.
So here's the identity shift that no one talks about. This is the most important thing that you need to kind of process in your head to get all these things done. Number one, you need to let go of being the best.
Who here thinks they're the best person in their company? Raise your hand. Be honest.
That's cool. Yeah, that's a problem. Okay, you think Jeff Bezos is the smartest motherfucker on Amazon?
No fucking way. No way. There's at least 10 ,000 guys smarter than Jeff Bezos.
He just has a bigger vision.
Become replaceable on purpose. When I was in Dubai, I was talking about this in VIP day. I thought I was going to come.
I was going to work from 6 p .m. to 3 a .m. on a laptop, calls with the team.
I started realizing there's too much opportunity here for me to do that. If you guys know Dubai, 10 p .m., dinners every night, shisha, drinks, whatever. That's where the deals get done.
I was like, bro, I can't work past 9, 10. No way. So I started working from 6 to 9, 6 to 10, and that's it.
I forced my team to figure it out on purpose. And guess what? I became replaceable.
The company's running. They're getting some of the best performance they've ever gotten. And no one's even fucking sending me a Slack message because they know Eddie's off in three hours.
They're figuring it out, right? I've become replaceable. Redefining self -worth outside of work.
Stop thinking working so hard is the coolest shit ever. I'll tell you what's cool is Neo taking his kids to every fucking country, giving back to underprivileged children all the time, throwing massive house parties and inviting people for free just because fuck it. That's cool.
It's not Neo grinding 60 hours a week. That shit's cool. And then playing a longer, more strategic game.
So the one thing that will accelerate all of this. for you at the same time and close your time horizon from 10 years to a few years is your personal brand i need you guys to remember this because all my top talent all my top opportunities the reason most of you guys are in this room in the first place is because of my personal brand and the same can be true for you and i don't have a whole personal brand presentation a lot of guys have talked about that already but i need you guys to understand This is the superpower that all of you can create that people outside of this room do not have.
I am connecting with artists that I dream to talk to. I'm connecting with CEOs of companies that are worth billions of dollars. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
All because of a fucking Instagram page I have. I reach out to them. They look at my page.
They see some mutuals. Oh my gosh, who's this guy? He must be amazing.
Even if I'm shit, they don't know. It looks like I'm amazing. my personal brand, our mutual friends.
This puts me in rooms that none of you can maybe be in, right? Because of just a personal brand. And so I really challenge you to double down on this.
I know a lot of speakers are building machines where you don't need your personal brand, but think further than your agency in your personal brand. Just think in your life. all the opportunities that you could have in the future, all the future business that will come to you because of your personal brand, all the future talent that will come to you for your future brand, all the future money that will come to you and the time that will come to you because you're leveraging your personal brand and build it from freedom, not for ego.
You're not building a personal brand to be the fucking coolest guy on the block. You're doing it to become free. If I lost everything today, I swear to you, I could go post an Instagram story, text only, and I'll make a hundred grand cash.
That's freedom. I can lose everything. Post one story, sell something, me getting on a Zoom call, I'll make $100 ,000 right there on the spot.
That's freedom to me. That gives you security to lose everything, to risk everything, to play bigger, and know there's always something to fall back to. People always know who you are.
Therefore, people will pay you. And remember, agencies are one of the fastest paths to wealth if used correctly. So the goal isn't more clients, it's more leverage.
Jem talked about this. Curtis talked about charging 20, 30 grand a retainer. That's called fucking leverage, right?
So who here after this is committed to playing bigger? Can I get a yes? Who here is committed to playing bigger?
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Before laying out the framework, the speaker walks through the businesses that failed him first: a Middle East supplement empire killed by corruption, a colored-AirPods brand Apple sued out of existence overnight, and a partner who packed a semi truck with stolen equipment the same day his daughter was born.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
11:40concept
Operators Build Income, Businessmen Build Assets
The core distinction the whole talk is built on: income depends on the owner working, assets keep producing value without them.
Steal forany pitch that reframes a service business as a step toward equity, not just cash flow
13:26model
The 3-Phase Evolution Framework
Phase 1: Operator to CEO
Phase 2: CEO to Multi-Business Operator
Phase 3: Asset Builder
A staged map for scaling a founder out of day-to-day work: first build leadership under yourself, then build a portfolio, then start buying equity instead of building from scratch.
Steal fora coaching program's core curriculum outline or a keynote structure
19:02list
Phase 1 Key Components
Hiring your first real leadership layer
SOPs and scorecards
Removing yourself from fulfillment
Owning vision, culture, and accountability
The four concrete moves that take an owner from doing the work to running the business through other people.
Steal foran onboarding checklist for a first-time manager or a coaching program's Phase 1 module
31:59list
Phase 2 Key Components
Using the agency as a cash engine
Launching or acquiring complementary businesses
Shared services (finance, ops, marketing)
Installing operators instead of managing day-to-day
How one profitable business funds and staffs a growing portfolio without the owner touching daily operations in the new ones.
Steal fora holding-company structure pitch or an internal shared-services proposal
37:46concept
Bet on the Jockey, Not the Horse
When evaluating a deal or partner, the founder's track record matters more than how good the product or business idea sounds.
Steal foran investment thesis, a partnership vetting checklist, or a hiring rubric for leadership roles
The moves that shift a founder from building businesses to acquiring and professionalizing them for eventual sale.
Steal foran acquisition thesis or a pitch to a founder considering a buyout
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
10:04product
“if you're doing at least $10,000 a month in your agency... that's the first link below in the description... if you're over a hundred K a month, you can message me personally on Instagram”
Mid-talk pitch for his agency coaching and accelerator programs, segmented by revenue tier so each viewer self-selects into the right offer rather than one generic pitch.
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A single-host whiteboard talk laying out the five-part operating system one entrepreneur uses to run multiple seven-and-eight-figure companies without getting pulled into daily drama.
A solo info-coaching founder audits a punishing $100M year of leadership gaps and burnout, then lays out a 2026 plan built on direct-to-cart selling, an 80% organic-bookings goal, and a sweat-equity deal with Whop.
A sales recruiter who has cash-collected over $100M walks through the five revenue levels that took him from bartending to $2.5M a month, and the constraint that defines each one.
Two direct-response operators sit on a patio and trade the actual numbers behind their businesses: setter pay, application grading, spend cuts, and the leadership gap that shows up once you're past eight figures.
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