Brandon Dawson
Appearances
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
You're going to make a bunch of dumb mistakes because the only way to build a business if you've never done it is through trial and error.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Well, so I sold the company. And then all of a sudden, I had done 10 years of research. And I knew what I wanted. But then I was all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I was pretty rich. And I had been working since, like I said, since I was 18. Always a worker. But I had been on my own working since I was 19. And I never really knew. I finally hit my wealth target.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
My wealth target was $75 million by 47. When I sold the company, I had $8 million. And all of a sudden, despite dreaming about doing all these other things, when I first sold, I remember getting the money wired into my account because I had to fly to Spain to speak to their global group. And the business closed, it was supposed to close on a Friday afternoon, US time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Yeah, I love being here. It's great to see you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And so I flew to Spain on like a Wednesday and Natalie and I were in the hotel room and we were getting ready to go to dinner and the time zone was different and all this. And I was maybe supposed to come in the morning and it was nighttime there or whatever. And so I was laying in bed and there was no notification and there were some last minute signatures and all that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And we were going to go to a celebration dinner, the two of us. And I was laying in bed and all of a sudden my phone goes ding. And I looked at it and in my Morgan Stanley account showed how much money I had in it. And I stared at it for a minute. And then I just started crying. It was like, Hey, I get emotional now. It's like, you think that just defined you. You did it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
But then you think, who am I now? All the things I was doing yesterday and everything. So plus I rang that bell. I had it. I lost it. I got it back. I hit all my targets. And yeah, It's not like you're celebrating. It's not like I wasn't laughing. I wasn't jumping up and down. I just sat there and kind of cried. And Natalie came out and she's like, what's going on? What happened?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I said, the money got in. And I gave her the phone. She looked at it. She's like, wow. She just hugged me. I realized that that wasn't really why I did everything I did. And I just wanted to be successful. And so all of a sudden I'm like, shit, now what? And all of a sudden, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Because I had given 35% of the equity to my customers as a thank you for doing business with me. And I had given 15 million to my employees and everyone's accounts were starting to ring. 197 partners got $38 million. Some people got multi-millions because they'd been there at the beginning. All of a sudden, I get overwhelmed with hundreds of text messages. You changed my life. We love you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Unbelievable. We're so happy we trusted you. It's like, Now I'm crying because I just feel like.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Yeah, shit, let's go get a Michelin dinner and drink some wine and celebrate. It was a magical time for me, but without all my clients celebrating with me, it felt a little bit like a vacuum. But recognizing you did something, you finally did something so big. Nobody I knew in my family, I was voted least likely to succeed.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
There isn't one human being I grew up with I knew I was ever around that did what I did, especially after I lost it all. So to me, I lost it and I got it. That was the point. And then I was uncertain. I had to go to the company that bought me and I immediately had to integrate for three years, everything they bought into their company. So I was busy. Like I didn't have time to celebrate.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I just was boom. That next day I was on the stage in Spain talking to the global group. Here's what we're going to do. Here's, and I just went operate, operate, operate, operate. It wasn't to 2018 basically. So that was two. So 16 July. So it was like July 18th. where all of a sudden I had integrated and we blew the business up to $4 billion from one, basically. So it's like we overachieved.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Everyone was happy. I had my team in there and all of a sudden I wasn't needed other than for special projects. And that's where it really got weird for me because I'm like, okay, What am I going to do now? What am I going to do? Do I really want to work? I've never got to go play golf. I got to go hang out with my billionaire friends. I was traveling. I got fat. I was eating whatever I wanted.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Yeah, well, I grew up in Corvallis, Oregon with some brothers and my mom and dad and my stepmother and my father. And he was a pastor that had gone on to computer sciences and she was an insurance adjuster. And I went to school with 35 kids in my class. It was a small Christian school. And in order to pay for my cleats and the gas in my car, I had to work besides school.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I was drinking with people. My wife was like, I did not sign up for this. After a year and a half, she goes, I want to go build something. That's why I fell in love with you. This is not building something. And I was miserable. And that's where we got our heads together and said, let's go build the next thing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And she had suggested we look at some of these social media guys because I had all the IP. I had built the systems. I had the technologies. I had all the research. I had all the everything done. It just, I wasn't sure how I was going to go to market. And she found Grant Cardone and we went to his event in 2019 and saw what we needed to see and approached him about partnership.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And here we are, six years later, we've got a business that's worth probably half a billion dollars. We've changed the lives of thousands of entrepreneurs, people like you. And we've had a half a dozen or a dozen of these exits with our clients. that went from being broke or only having a $2 million business and now have $35 million in cash or $75 million or $200 million in cash.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
It's just we get to celebrate all the time. Even if they're little wins, we're always celebrating, which is what I love about what I do today.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Yeah, family businesses really struggle in this because they They're under pressure all the time, so they take it out on each other. It's very unfortunate. And it's because they're existing through trial and error, and there's always problems and struggles, so it causes stress at home. And it's just very sad. And I had that experience.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I'm a prodigy of two divorce, and I had it in two different areas of my life for different reasons. But it is unfortunate. Natalie and I made the decision that if we were going to work together, build together, fall in love, get married, we were going to have the perfect life. So it forced us into understanding what does that look like?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And it wasn't until Natalie, what really hooked us in Grant and Elena is Natalie in 2018 found Elena and started doing Elena's relationship, building an empire book. And we did this exercise together, my things I'm excited and I want to go do hers and then what we want to do together.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And then Elena has a process to have you prioritize that together and then pick a few things that you want to do individually. And We realized that our list was mostly together. We loved being together. We wanted to travel together. We wanted to work together. We wanted to earn together. We wanted to spend time together. We didn't want to do anything apart. So we were like, oh, good.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Let's go design a business. You pick your things. I'm going to pick my things. And she's the president of our company. She's the co-founder. She is remarkable in so many ways. And she lets me be and do what I love and takes care of the details. I told her, I do not want to become an operator again. I did that enough.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And so we have our, we compliment each other so well, and we have so much respect for what we each contribute. And we don't step on each other. We don't step over each other. I don't get involved with any of her stuff. She doesn't get involved with mine. We coordinate, we collaborate, we strategize together. But when I say I'm going to go do this, she supports me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
When she goes and doesn't, I support her. And conversely, we have my brother runs sales in the business. He's been here since the start, does a remarkable job. Her brother is our chief technology officer. This is a family business. And we work with Grant, Elena, and the kids doing things. So it's like we consider our business a very tight family business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So I did school, sports, work. And then I always worked on the weekends and everything. And I'd buck hay and I'd work in a restaurant, a tanning salon, and I used to harvest our walnuts on the orchard. I just wanted, when I got 18 years old and I could leave Corvallis, I was like, I got to get out of here. But I wasn't a very good student.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And yet we're a super high performance business on Grant Cardone's side and on our side. And we get a lot of flack. There's a lot of haters out there. There's a lot of people to say that we don't say all the right things or we work too hard and we set the wrong examples. But you know what? We're loving our life and the people we're doing it with love being it and doing it with us.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So we've just learned not to care about what anybody else thinks. As long as we're happy and we are doing the right things and we're doing it with the right people, then we're doing everything we want to do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And so if Natalie and I run into a situation where maybe we're not aligned, we really ask the question, but once a year we get in a little tiff about something and then it's like, okay, on the priority of everything we're conquering together, how much of this is really an issue? And we usually start laughing and realize this is stupid. And so we support each other and we encourage each other.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I think because of that, we want to see the other one win, but we want to also win together. And I think that's different than how most people view their roles, their responsibilities, and how they collaborate at work. They end up fighting with each other because they don't want to take it out on everyone else.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
They're nitpicking with each other, and there's so much external pressure, you're in a cooker. So you beat each other up when really you need an external enemy, not an internal enemy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I have a saying. My older brother used to tell me this when we were kids. He'd say, there's the way you'd like it to be. There's the way it could be. There's a way it should be. But we live in a world, it is the way it is. Okay, so what that means to me is like, I don't worry about what I would like it to be. I don't worry about what it should be. I just allow it to be.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And I mean, I have some haters out there right now that, quite honestly, people that we've tried to really help, and we've added an enormous amount to their life, but you can't change who they are. So they're still miserable, and so they're still looking to be a victim, and they still want somebody to blame.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And so all this energy comes at you, and when it comes at you, you can either react to it or you can just say, well, they're the same person. You knew that that's the kind of person it was. You were trying to help them. You're the same person you are, which I'm not going to stop helping people. So it's an implication of you trying to help somebody else and They're going to be victimized by you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So what do I do with it? I'd move on to somebody who wants my help. Because here's the thing. When you get caught up in yourself and you start self-thinking like, oh, me, me, me, the best way to break that is to go find somebody who's making 20 or 30 grand a year and show them how to make 100 grand.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And so college really, I tried college for a couple months and I wasn't going to do well in it. But I'd got a part-time job selling and I was killing it selling. So I decided I wasn't going to go to college and I moved from Portland, Oregon, Corvallis to Portland, went to college, then started selling.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
and celebrate with them because you're always going to have the people that you help become millionaires or multimillionaires that then they'll be ungrateful and they'll think they did it all. They're like, this shit happens all the time. So anytime you have that kind of stuff, ungratefulness or pettiness or criticism or,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
hate coming towards you, instead of you talking about it and dwelling on it, go find somebody that could use the help that you can bring to people and go start helping them. Because it just diffuses, it puts your energy on something that's productive for you and them, makes you feel amazing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And if you do that enough, there'll be less haters than there are people running around saying you changed their life. And in my case, I have thousands and thousands of millionaires and multimillionaires that I've helped change their life. Versus one or two haters running around that don't know me real well or took advantage of me or whatever. And so you just got to know who you are.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
If a hater's getting to you and being critical, it's because you have something in your mind that you think there's a reason they are able to do that. Like you're allowing them to affect you. And it's usually because you have some thing... that you've been doing or criticizing others on, and so you're taking it personal.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
But if you don't have that in you because you feel like you're being the best version of yourself, operating legal, moral, ethically, compliantly, helping others, and then people criticize you, you can just recognize the reason they're doing that is because it's them. And that's how you deal with haters.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
You don't put any energy into it because haters are haters because they have the same problem with you they have with anybody else they don't like because they don't like themselves.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
That's why I use the word resilience because you have to be tough. Think of it this way. If you're a battery and your battery has a full charge or it's entirely depleted, so you're a battery, and these are your goals, and you're going to take your battery and you're going to stick it into your goals. I don't want a depleted battery in my goals. I want a fully charged battery.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And then about six months later, I moved to Atlanta, Georgia, become an outside sales rep for a device company. And I realized I just loved going out and figuring it out. And that I did so well at 19 years old, I was making more money than anybody I knew. I had done so well. And then they asked me to take over sales, inside sales in Minneapolis when I was 21, moved to Minneapolis.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So I'm in charge of charging that battery. And if I'm letting you get into my head, if I'm listening to things you're saying about me, if I'm getting pulled off target and you're draining my battery and I'm allowing it to happen, I'm choosing that. And then I don't have the energy to go after my dreams and goals because I'm beat up. I'm tired. I'm disappointed. What you think is what you say.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
What you say is what you do. What you do is what you're known for. So when I go and sit down and have a cup of coffee with someone that might just very well be the person that can introduce me to the greatest business relationship I could ever meet in my life. Instead, I spend my time talking about the problems I have in my life because I'm upset about what somebody said about me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And that person listens to me. And then they're nice. Oh, that's too bad. You're great. Don't. But they never got to the conversation of the person they were going to introduce you to because you consumed it all, draining the opportunity because you're feeling bad.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So when you're off target, when you're coming off target, you're not talking about where you're going, how you're going to get there, who you want to get there with, what's important to you. This is my mission. This is my vision. This is my value. This is my purpose. This is why I exist. This is where I'm going. But instead, you're talking about, oh, my, that person. Oh, my goodness.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
This is so hard. Now you're consuming energy. that somebody else is now winning because that was their whole point, pulling you off target. So why would I give them like, give me all you got, throw it all at me, get it all out there. And once it's all out there, let the world see it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And once I see it, I'll just drive right through it and get to the next destination because I don't actually, I'm not going to let somebody else dictate my future. And that's how you get through it. You got to have resilience. You got to have trust in yourself, trust in the people around you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And when someone violates that trust, you stop moving at the speed of trust or you go find somebody else to trust and you keep moving at the speed of trust. What you don't do is let them pull you off target and start putting a bunch of weight around you, depleting you, because when that happens, they're actually winning, which is what they want to do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And then I did so well there, they fired my boss. And then I took over the department. And by the age of 23, 24, 25, I was making 150 grand a year running sales teams. My confidence was just super high about what I was capable of doing. And then I was sitting in a room with a bunch of older people being told I can't make any more money because I make as much as them.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
How much did you invest with me?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Most people would say you're crazy. Why would you do that? But what's happened with your business in 12 months?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
You've already made it back six times over.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Well, I mean, look at the statistics and it's been true for a long time. 97% of all small businesses under a hundred million go out of business every 10 years, two thirds go out within 60 months. 98.2% of all businesses under a hundred million are stuck at 3 million or less with an average of 12 employees or less. So. Those stats right away made me think, why? And what can you do about it?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I did the biggest deal of my life and I was at the peak of my career in May of 2001. And when I came home from celebrating in Europe, My private equity group was like, now we can sell the company. I was like, well, I'm not selling the company. And within six months, they had sold my company. There was nothing I could do to stop it. Every person that chooses to can create the life they want.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And then what was the difference between the ones that went from 3 to 10 to 20 to 50 to 100? And then I used my own experiences and I reverse engineered where I struggled, where I wish I would have had help. And then all the author's content and data that I was reading and realizing, oh, if I had that, if I would have known this.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall, talks about businesses in silos and hierarchical positions running off the new talent. And I'm thinking to myself, well, that's what a lot of the business owners do. They get new talent and they're scared they're going to leave them. So they run them off.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And so I just started working both sides, the big companies, why they fail from the little companies going to the middle and started looking at a Sharon Lecter three feet from gold, which I was like, oh man, that's, we should engineer businesses using this theory. So these things don't happen.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I kept adding and adding and adding until I hired FTI, billion dollar salting firm in 2009, because the market was shitty and the economy had dropped. So I could hire them really cheap, hire some kids out of Wharton and Stanford and University of Portland where Natalie came from. And I said, we're going to break down thousands and thousands and thousands of industries.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
We're going to interview thousands of business. In fact, Natalie, her first intern job when she was a, she might've been a freshman in college or something. was to call thousands of dentists in our dental vertical so we could track to it. And I had a bunch of people calling all these different verticals and interviewing business owners so that we could say, what happened when?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And I decided December 15th, 1995 to go and become my own business owner.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And what would you do different? And how would you do it differently? And what was the first thing you learned? What was the second thing you learned? And we just collected all this data and then created a force ranking process, which built the breakpoints. And so it's like, think about 80, call it if you have 33 million businesses and 32.8 million of those businesses have 12 employees or less.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Okay, well, that was easy to come up with breakpoint one. So then it's like the 2%, how'd you get to 3 million? What'd you do different? And then we found these natural areas, one to three, three to eight, eight to 15, where they would collapse and break and go out of business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
There was an interesting cohort group of business owners that had built businesses, failed, then built a business and succeeded. The questions are like this. What was the one thing, going back and looking at success versus failure, what's the one thing that changed from the business that failed for you as the owner, from the business that failed versus having success.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And if you ask 100 business owners that failed and then went and built something and had success, and you say, what's the one thing you would say change? And 70% of them answered the same damn thing. You know you're onto something. And what the 70% said was, we stopped listening to anybody else, and we started finding the example of who we wanted to become and only focused on that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So then you're sitting back and you're like, okay, when you ask all the businesses that failed, what was one of the largest causation of failures? And they say, we were so scared to make a decision. This goes to your point. We were so scared to make a decision, we started asking everybody what we should do. And we found out in reflection, we're asking all the wrong people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
We're asking our wives or our husbands. We're asking our friends, our kids, our employees, our other coworkers. Well, look, if I walk in a room and I'm struggling in business, there's a hundred business owners in the room and I go ask them all the same question. Remember, 97% of those business owners are going to fail.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So now I got to know if I walk in a room and there's three out of a hundred businesses that that have been in business for 15, 20 years, that started small and got big. And I know who they are. Am I really going to go ask the other 97% what they think I should do? Or am I going to go to the 3% that know what to do? So that's what we started honing in on. And we built all the science off.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And then I applied it, developed it, found success. Because my company that I sold was successful because I worked with independent business owners. And on average, we were three and a half to 15 times larger than their peers. That's why we got so much money. And I'm like, now I can go do it for all business owners.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And I wanted to test it internationally, which is what I did in those eight countries that blew up, which is why we went from one to four and a half billion. So the details and the facts of decision-making and taking the right action and getting the right results, I mean, that's an algorithm. It's equally an algorithm to think with broken thinking, do broken actions, and get broken results.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
But if you're not intentionally learning and studying it, then you can only figure it out through trial and error, and that's the problem. You try things that doesn't work, and then you don't try them again, but you didn't do it right the first time. You don't know that's what happens. So it's a difficult game.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So what we decided to do is help business owners speed that up, get rid of the complexity, make great decisions, learn the 125 laws to get to 125 million in business, and just have data and information that nobody else in the world is providing to entrepreneurs and business owners. And that's why we've been so successful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
The first thing I'd say is that intuitively, most decisions that come to you intuitively are the wrong actions because those intuitive decisions come when you're under pressure or stress. and high emotion is low intelligence, so you end up taking the wrong action.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I would tell business owners to start using statistics to look at their business, which means if you track your revenue daily, you track your cash collected daily, You track your profitability daily and you graph those three lines and you take actions to improve all three every day. It's all you think about every day, every day.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Well, see my confidence when I moved to Atlanta. Well, first when I moved Corvallis up to Portland and I started selling and making my own money and I wasn't depending on my parents, I was like, I can take care of myself. Then when I moved to Atlanta and I became an outside sales rep, I had 11 states and a company car and I had to drive everywhere and meet doctors and meet people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Then when there's something going wrong, if those three lines aren't trending down, they're still going up. Don't change anything. If you're terrified that something big is happening or changing, but they're going up, start being more conservative in what you're doing with your profit and build a fourth category, which is reserves.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So if something dynamic happens, you have firepower to withhold or withstand. It's learning to make really specific decisions based on facts, not on emotion, and paying attention to your fight controls, which is about five things you need to look at every day that I look at. And if those things are green lights go, don't make any radical changes. Just try to improve them
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
incrementally, micro improvements. Jim Collins talks about innovation as granular, incremental improvement on the things you can prove work. There's another definition, which is radical change and invention, but that's normally where you go broke.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So just trust me when I tell you make small incremental changes towards a targeted objective and steer your team there and try to eliminate emotion out of the business. Be very pragmatic. And if you need help, go talk to business owners like you who have gotten help and you've changed how you view the world and how you take action. So therefore, you're getting different results.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And I just want to leave everyone with this word. Every person that chooses to can create the life they want and never let anybody else tell you otherwise.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
500.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Yeah, thank you. I can't wait till we're 300 million.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I will. Thank you. We'll talk to you later. Bye.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I didn't know how to use an Atlas. I had to just figure everything out, check into hotels, do expense reports, do call reports, set up my routings, be in charge of myself, be a good business person for the company I represented. And that just gave me so much responsibility because up until then, parents were always taking care of things for you. And so I am self-sufficient. I can do whatever.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And I think those were all good moments of time for me because by the time I decided to quit a job, I was making a lot of money and had kids and sold everything and started over. I'd had three or four big moves where I was very successful and in my mind, like self-dependent. And I was like, no matter what I do, I know how to go out and survive and make money.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So the risk isn't, yeah, did I give up a good job? Because I thought I could go get any job and make 150 grand selling. That wasn't the issue. It was like, what am I going to do bigger than that? And so I had the courage to make that big, bold move. And it wasn't just leaving the job. There was other dynamics. But I took control of my own life.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And once I started doing that, I have literally, since I was 26 years old, I have literally lived my life the way I wanted to live my life.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
It doesn't mean it's been perfect and it hasn't had hiccups and I haven't had problems and haven't made mistakes, but I have been an independent person doing what I want to do, eating where I want to eat, hanging out with who I want to hang out with since I was 26 years old. That's 30 years now because I'm 56.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I mean, tenacity. I just didn't have anything to lose. You know, I made a hundred presentation to raise my first million. I was told no, you know, I was like 105 present. I was told no 104 times. Some people were ruthless. I wanted to give up a few times. Then trying to buy my first five businesses, I was told no. And I just kept going until I found somebody said yes.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I just, it was water over rocks. I just realized that if I just hung in there long enough, eventually something was going to break. And I also recognize the responsibility that if I'm not getting yeses, it's because I'm technically not communicating in a way that's inspiring people to work with me. So I own modifying my communication pathways
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
The second business I built, I grew it effortlessly and seamlessly, and I shared the equity with my customers. I bypassed Wall Street. I never worried about payroll. I never had headaches. And I shared $15 million of sale proceeds with my employees when I sold, and we all celebrated together.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
as I kept getting more no's until I could start testing into when people were more interested or more engaged. And I just kept making that a better presentation, a better presentation, switching things up, seeing what kind of engagement I can get. And I figured if I just kept modifying until I could get a yes, then I will have learned how to do it. And I just kept doing that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I did it with individuals and I did it with a financial institution. And then I did it with one of the most prestigious private equity groups on the planet, Warburg Pincus. They had $18 billion in private equity, or $22 billion, and they gave me $18 million as a young entrepreneur, like crazy stuff. And then they helped me go public.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And so being that successful that young just kept saying, if I just keep pushing, keep figuring out, I will continue to win. What I didn't know is actually at the pinnacle of my career after all that, May of 2001, I had finally built the company that was going to be profitable.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I had finally had everybody in the world throwing money at me and throwing opportunity at me because we were the only ones that consolidated at the time hearing care. And I was the largest retailer in North America. And so everyone wanted to work with us and we had systems and process.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
We finally broke through those platforming things I talk about where we had technology and we had people and we had systems. And I did the biggest deal of my life. And I was at the peak of my career in May of 2001.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And when I came home from celebrating in Europe with the supplier that gave me 20 million of free capital and a contractor worth a million dollars a month to bring what we had built here to their market, my private equity group was like, great job, unbelievable, come to New York. I thought they were going to pat me on the back.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And instead they were like, this was so valuable that now we can sell the company, get 100% of our money back and make 100%. But that doesn't leave anything for anybody else. So sorry. I was like, well, I'm not selling the company. And in that 15 minute exchange, With people that I had been very close to for like five years, they brought a new guy in and said, he's going to sell your company.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And within six months, they had sold my company. There was nothing I could do to stop it. In the middle of that, September 11th happened. So it just was nobody wanted to hear a founder's complaint about getting their business taken away from them. So it just happened. And then I had to start over. And I had to learn from the mistakes I made in that process.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I think that the number one attribute that you need to truly be a successful entrepreneur or business owner. So you need a lot of things, but the number one thing you have to have is resilience because It's always hard. It's never going to be the thing you think it is. People around you will let you down. People around you will use you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
So you need a lot of things, but the number one thing you have to have is...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
You're going to make a bunch of dumb mistakes because the only way to build a business if you've never done it is through trial and error. People will try to take your credibility away. People will try to take your company away. People will try to take your money away. People will try to take your success away.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And you're your worst enemy because you just fall into these little traps while you're trying to appease people or take a shortcut or figure something out and you figure it out and you realize you're not doing it the right way. You're not doing it compliantly or legally. And then you're like, oh, I got to make a change. And it's like, you know, you're just street fighting, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
You're just like surviving, going through the streets because most businesses are built through trial and error. And And that's why 97% of all businesses under 125 million go out of business every 10 years. And two-thirds go out in the first five because you just make these catastrophic mistakes. And it's the resilience that are going to get you through those moments.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Because most people, when it gets rough, will bail on you and leave you to take care of it yourself. Or you're the kind of person that will run the good people off because, you know, you don't want to acknowledge them. See, my first time around, I wasn't good at, like,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
acknowledging people and being nice to people because I was always fighting to win every day and everything was a fight and everybody was an enemy unless they were on my side. It didn't work for me. The second business I built that I sold for 77 times EBITDA with the principles that I wanted to create for starting, growing, and scaling a business
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I grew effortlessly and seamlessly and I shared the equity with my customers. I bypassed Wall Street. I never worried about payroll. I never had headaches. I never worried about problems. And I shared $15 million of sales proceeds with my employees when I sold and we all celebrated together. It felt really super great.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And so then I launched this business with Grant and Elena Cardone and we've gone from startup using the principles we've taught and we use and built a quarter of a billion dollar company and and helped $9 billion in businesses in 60, 70 months. And we get to be around people we love. Look at your smile. I get to spend time with people I like. We hug each other. We're all celebrating together.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
There's still people that come in that environment and try to steal or take away Or aren't willing to do their part and they want to defer, deflect, and blame others. But you don't really worry about them because you have too many of the people that are killing it together. And that's why I love doing what I get to do every day is I get to spend time with the people I want to spend time with.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And the ones I don't, we just figure out a way to move them out.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
Well, what I learned in Sonos was how to be a tyrant. What I learned is how to be a dictator. I was in survival mode. I had the false because I had broke through all the glass ceilings and was always told I couldn't do something.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
The only way I learned to do something was to bust through glass ceilings and tell everybody they don't know what they're talking about and then become overly self-reliant and then made a mistake and then allowed my company to be sold. And once I kind of owned some of that and decided I wanted to be a different person, I have some phenomenal mentors in my life.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
But Hector gave me 21 Irrefutable Laws by John Maxwell. And I read it and I was like, I identified every mistake I made. And so then I broke down all 53 of his laws. He had three different books at the time. I broke them all down to really understand where I went wrong. What would I do differently? And I decided that I was going to put my attention on being a better person, being a better example.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And then I started combining the work on leadership with, because John wrote a book, level five leadership might've been Collins, five levels of leadership, maybe John, or they're the same. So they were friends. So John, I had met John. He said, read, Jim Collins' book too. So I read that and then I read Good to Great, Great by Choice, How the Mighty Fall. Then I read all Sharon Lecter's books.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I started putting this little algorithm together of things that I had identified, all the things I had done wrong in my first business. And I created an operating system off of leadership, off of belief system, off of operational effectiveness. And I realized those things all kind of tie together. And if you could actually paint a picture, elevating people's belief,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
showing them how to become more operational effectiveness in their day-to-day routine so they can hit targets bigger, better, faster. And then learn me leadership so I can be an example. Then we leadership, I can develop examples. And then us leadership when your culture takes over.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And that set me on this path for 10 years where we were researching businesses, interviewing entrepreneurs, trying to understand what was working, what was not working. And then applying that, I was doubling every year, Inc. 500, Inc. 5,000. entrepreneur of the year, three times in a row nomination, all these things because we were killing it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And then I started teaching it to the author's businesses. I was working with John Maxwell. We go in and help him. He grows his business huge. And then we become friends. It just really, Michael Gerber worked with him for a while. So what happened is I was able to absorb all this knowledge. And because I had tried it first and screwed up, I had this perspective of
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
I wasn't learning something new and going, how do I do it? I was like, I'm learning things that I screwed up. I could immediately go, that's where I messed up. So then I was like, if I don't mess up and I do the things I did that was good, and I learned to not do the things I did that were broken, and I combined that with what was good, and then I built that prototype.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson | E79
And then after I launched it and sold to a billion-dollar company, and we helped them grow to $4.5 billion in 36 months deploying this, then my confidence was super high about creating a whole new business centered around this.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Literally, my opening presentation was, Hi, I'm Brandon Dawson. I have a $35 million business doing $2 million of EBITDA. If you acquired me and integrated me into your business, I would add $2 billion worth of value within 36 to 48 months, and I want 10%.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Well, I don't think it's important to them if they don't know what their three to five things are. I think to the level you have intentionality, you know what you're looking for, if you go to the right places, you're gonna find that right data. If you just go because you just want to get something and hope it works, it's never gonna work.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So if you can say, these are the things or the areas I'm deficient, these are the things holding me back, and I wanna go to a place where I can receive information that can bridge that for me, find mentors, find information,
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
that will help me take a different action tomorrow than i'm taking today that's different than what i did yesterday so i can drive to a different result like if you're going to go for that reason i think it's critically important to go to the right places listen to the right people and get the right information because you're not going to get it where you're at and you're not going to get it from the people you're talking to if they knew how to do it that you you wouldn't be talking to them they wouldn't be talking to you because they'd be doing it
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So trying to do it the traditional way through pulling, P-O-L-L-I-N-G. What do you think I ought to do? And what would you do? And how would you do it? To people who've never done it, it's the wrong place to go. Pulling, P-U-L-L-I-N-G. Go up and pull down from someone who's been there, done that, doing it, and learn from them. It's the only way to do it.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And we have other multiple companies we're rolling out on our way to a billion and loving every minute of being part of the 10X family under the Grant Cardone brand.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And that's why I would go to those conferences.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Well, so the people that we work with, and the reason we've been so successful, we've had almost nine billion in businesses come through our format in six years. That's crazy. Six years, is because Grant has proven He is the world's greatest marketer. Now let me tell you the five things that drove me to the Growth Conference to see if I wanted to partner with Grant.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And I can answer this from my perspective because everyone has a different perspective. But I was already hugely successful. I was already wealthy. And I had a plan. I just didn't know how to, at scalability, execute my plan. When I went to the Growth Conference, A, I wanted to know what kind of person Grant was.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So you really need to know when you go places, if you're listening to people, what kind of people are they? You need to figure that out for yourself. You can't watch YouTube, you can't listen to other people's perspectives. Self-education is the only way to do it. Secondly, I wanted to build with my wife. So is Grant and Elena really a team? Do they believe in that?
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Because I've worked with entrepreneurs that don't really believe in working with family or spouses. So I wanted to go check that out. Thirdly, the community that he draws in, that 10X community, does it fit the community that fits my research?
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Are they independent business owners in spaces that we've got all our research in and that we know have the opportunity to do some wealth creation strategies? Fourth, can I actually get along with this guy? And do we compliment him or conflict with him? Because I knew he did sales and marketing training, and I knew he was the global leader in using crowdfunding for multifamily real estate.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Like, I knew that. And there was nobody that competes against him. The things I'm an expert in and all the research and the execution and all the systems and technology I built will compliment his belief system in how he teaches or will we have a problem? And then the fifth thing was I had all my targets.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Since I was a kid, I was told by one of my mentors at 26, Warren Buffett at 27 was worth a million at 37, 10 million at 47, 75 million at 53, he was worth 350 million. And then obviously went on from there. Well, at 27, I was worth 10 million. The problem was at 32, I was back down to only being worth 250.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
When I sold my business, the reason I picked that number is because it got me 75 million net. And that was my target at 47. But I had a new problem. I had no idea how I could escalate my success at 51 to be worth 350 million. So could the things Grant does rub off on me enough and compliment my skill set and my research and my business to accelerate my growth?
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So I was less fixated on starting another company and building it up and more how fast can I do it to hit that 350 number. So when I got a chance to meet Grant, I said, these are the five things I need from you. Are you committed to those? And he said, absolutely. Here's the five things I need from you. We're like, let's go.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
For me, being able to hit that next target was everything I was fixated on and finding somebody who could help me do it. And there wasn't a lot of people out there that I thought I could do that with. So that's why I went there and that's why we started doing what we're doing. And I forgot the exact question you asked me. No, that's fine.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Most people sell when they're under pressure and it's not working anymore and they get a low value for their business. Private equity is like the big troller that's going through the water just waiting for somebody to go, I'm overwhelmed. I got all these high costs.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
In fact, what we identified within our research is there's seven breakpoints between startup and 125 million and another four between 125 and a billion. And people tend to sell at the top end of any one of those breakpoints because it's the hardest thing to do is punch through them and they increase costs. And then they get less return and they get worn out and then they sell.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And if you're a 15 million or 25 million or 45 or 75, you're in that perfect sweet spot for being tucked into a platform company. And they can buy you cheap. You know, they offer you six or eight times EBITDA. A real buyer that's offering eight times EBITDA if it's a platform company, it's eight times your EBITDA, it's four times or three times theirs, and they know that when they buy you.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So when should a seller sell? A seller should sell when they've predetermined a target, a net worth target, and they've built to that target, and that target will accommodate that the passive income they'll generate after exit will accommodate the lifestyle they want. And this is the calculation none of them do.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Most entrepreneurs build and build and build until they're worn out and then they sell. Or they just stay small and they take an income. If you said to me, my target is I want to be able to live on a million dollars of income a year and have a remarkable life, own two houses, and not have to do anything anymore, and I want a million dollars a year.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Well, Gary was a grant service provider and I had a few of my own, one in Arizona and a guy in Fort Lauderdale. And I was doing this human optimization thing in 2019 and 20. When COVID hit, I really leaned into it to keep me healthy. I was doing a lot of IVs. I was really getting into things like, because I'm 56 at the time, I was 52, 51.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Well, you're gonna need to sell your business for a net of somewhere between 18 and 25 million bucks. Now, if you want a $3 million house in both locations, you're gonna earn that money while you're building to your network target. Because you're only at 5, 6% protected on the income.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
A lot of people, though, will build their $20 million business, and they'll live on four million a year, and then they sell, and then they're only making a million a year, so they start spending the principal, and then they find themselves, they gotta go back to work.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So if you know what kind of lifestyle and you build it that lifestyle and you have those targets and I always tell people have a 10 year target, but you can do it earlier, but have a 10 year target and know what you want to do. And when you hit those targets, that's the time to sell. If you don't hit the target, you got to keep building.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
But what really happens if somebody gets their lifestyle to that and they get to the 20 or 25 million, they're like, I can go a little further. And it becomes less burdensome because if you have that backstop, you have that confidence that, hey, I can quit any time. I'm going to have a great life.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And that's usually what happens when people takes their first money off the table and they go back at it. They're like, I got a backstop. So then they get more aggressive and they actually do the things they could have done before they sold. And so that's why you get serial entrepreneurs doing over and over and over.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Yeah, so that's my partner. So my partner is an expert in real estate, multifamily assets that traditional people would never have access to, the big institutions buy them. I am the other side. So I'm launching Cardone Equity Group, which is our private equity group for businesses, for investing in businesses. So I always say to people, you should have a diversified portfolio.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And in full disclosure, outside of Grant, I'm the second largest investor in Cardone Capital. So again, I like to use myself as an example. I want to have a diversified portfolio. I'm happy with 5% or 6% coming in on things I don't have to touch. They also give me a tax shield. But for me, real estate's boring. I own a lot of it. I don't really love any of it unless I work in it.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Like I own a big piece of this building with Grant through Cardone Capital. So I love being in here. It's my building too, right? But I love businesses and I can move the dial on businesses. And I can move the dial on businesses. So I think a balanced approach.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So when you take, for example, I do have a guy that was, you know, we groomed from going out of business 2 million to 8 million to 22 million and then a $35 million exit. Now he's got 10 million.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
But that, that there is a guy and he had a couple of partners in the, in, in the age took 10 million. Um, they've retired and they're living off 400 grand a year and they're happy. So real estate, they were able to put it in real estate and not do anything. That's the beauty of real estate. You don't have to do anything.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I like active investments, so I like to take my cash and I like to have an eight to 20% return on my cash. Well, I have to be able to drive that. And so the example of the guy that had a couple partners and they took that money off the table, that was a three year cycle, by the way, $2 million of revenue going broke. to a $35 million exit in 36 months.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
The one that has 11 million that's working with me, he took his expertise, because many business owners don't do a completed cycle. They don't know how to do the exits and all that. They usually screw them up.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
He did it, and so now I have him working with other business owners, but he also is co-investing some of his money with us in those businesses, like a traditional private equity exit strategy. And he's then adding operational value, and we're launching a whole new business around his expertise. And that happens to be in automotive repair. So it depends on what you as a human want to do.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I was getting into things like testosterone, getting my blood checked, doing the IVs, doing all the cool stuff. But I was not getting sick during COVID. And so I really, I came out of healthcare. The business I sold was in healthcare. And part of that business was in allergy. So we had a whole allergy business.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
But for me, I want to have a diversified portfolio. I want to have something that's going to pay me five or six percent for life where I don't have to even think about it. I don't have to manage it. I don't have to take the phone calls. I don't have to change the toilets. And I and that gives me my passive income.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And for me, it's mostly Cardone Capital, but I also own a partner in 700,000 square feet of storage units. I own warehouses in Texas, Midland, Texas for oil and gas. So I have a real estate portfolio that I want to have Passive income, I don't have to do shit. Then I can go risk my personal active time making passive income in investments in business.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So whatever you're good at is where you should spend your time. And what you're not good at, you should trust somebody and give them their money and go generate money in what you're good at.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Yeah. So I agree. I agree with the 40, 40, 20. I just do it a little differently. 40% real estate. That's fine. Great. Only with people I implicitly trust. Most of that, because I've been doing that for 20 years, but two thirds of that is with Grant, my business partner, because I implicitly trust him. And I would live in any asset he buys, right? Or work in any office building we own.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And because we're partners and we see these things together, I'm always like, well, wow, I'm always mind blown at the stuff he gets and how he gets it. He's a genius in that. The other 60% of the 40, 20, 40% of that is something I'm still actively involved in, but it's at critical mass.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So my business model is bringing all these people through that I help grow their business and then in partnership with them acquiring businesses and aggregating them into their business and then helping them go to the next level. And so it's a little less risky because of the engine I've created of deal flow and be able to buy things right and at low risk, but with great operating partners.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So that's why I wanted to protect that other 40%. The 20% is in with people I have relationships with like micro nuclear investments, things that I generally or public company stuff that my friends are involved in that they're like, hey, this is a good target or that's a good target. And so I do less of that 20% with few people. But when they're like, you should look at this company.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I have very wealthy friends, 30, 40, $50 billion portfolio managers, very successful. And when I'm sitting around with them, I'm like, what's the one thing you really love three to five years? Then they tell me, and I'm like, is it insider information? They're like, no, it's just, you know, you can go search it yourself. So then I go put my attention on it. I'm like, It's two bucks a share.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And so I looked at people that were having allergy problems and part of that crept over into longevity. being affected or impacted by things you eat, things you breathe, the environment you're in. And so in this longevity space, I was getting very curious and then became a chairman of a 275 location chiropractic regenerative medicine business.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
It's a rocket. It's three bucks. It's a rocket. It's supposed to go to the moon. It's the only one that's done it. I bought a million dollars of the stock and I sold it for $4 million nine months later because it landed on the moon even though it fell over. So I like look at stuff like that. And if I really fall in love with it, that's my risk 20%. But otherwise, I'm fairly disciplined in the 80%.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I don't like to lose money and I only like to work with people I trust and invest alongside them.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Yeah. You said something though in that. You said things I can help. I fundamentally believe that 20% risk is the big things you put money in because if I'm not involved, I don't trust anybody.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Honestly, don't. I don't really want to give my money to private equity groups and trust them. I would rather put my money in my own private equity group and be able to leverage that with people that trust me and Grant and my wife, because they know we're great operators. Think about Tenex Health. I put a million dollars of cash into Tenex Health by buying Sage's business.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I paid for it over four years because they had a little business making a hundred grand each year. I mean, they had no risk. They, they made their last year working with us as partners, they made over $11 million personal income. Like they made a lifetime of money. They made six times revenue in their last year of working with us as partners. Now, we had a falling out.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
You know, I find that people fight when there's no money or too much money. And I also find that when you buy businesses that are owned by artists, because Gary's really an artist. Gary is your typical artist. He is so in love. with the science of what he does, but a lot of those artists aren't really, you know, that good of business.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And so, uh, and the, and they, and they have this feeling of how exactly the piece of art needs to work. And, you know, sometimes it's hard to please artists. And so you have a falling out, uh, but we patched it all up and he's doing what he loves to do. We're doing what we love to do and, and, and where it fits, we're still working together, which is great.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Um, but that was a million dollar investment and some equity. and turn it into whatever the business is gonna be worth in three to five years. Trust me when I tell you, it'll be astonishing. But see, I can affect that and have low risk.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And so for me, putting my money in our private equity group that we launched, having our business owners, a lot of our business owners have lined up to invest alongside of us. because they love business, they want us to invest that money in businesses they want us to co-invest with them buying, and we create our own ecosystem that'll be 10 billion to 100 billion dollars.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So I don't need any outside influence, but if I didn't have that, and I didn't know what to do, I would only invest my money with people I implicitly trusted, And what you're doing is you're making micro investments with people that trust you to overlook those investments. And you don't need to make a lot of them. If a handful of them work, it's going to give all your money back.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And so I started looking into, a lot of them were doing IVs, they were doing stem cells, they were doing things of that nature. And I was like, I love this space, this whole space, and it was so mom and pop. So I met Gary through Grant, and I liked Gary. We got along great. And so I told Grant, look, I'm just going to, Gary's business had been doing, it was actually his wife's business.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So your downside protection is somewhat protected. But if you weren't involved with that, the people that trust you, that give you money and work with you, they wouldn't put money in that if some stranger came along. It only works because you have the relationships and you know what you're doing.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Yes. You mean a micro investment? Well, first of all, like you got to look at the track record, 96%, 97% of all businesses under a hundred million fail. Two-thirds fail in the first five years, 97% fail in the first 10. Now, the actual stat, the pure stat is 65% fail. So everyone always asks me, why do you say 97%?
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Because out of 34.5 million small to mid-sized businesses under $100 million in revenue, 26 million have a sole producer, sole provider, sole owner working on their living room making $72,000. To me, that reeks like failure. So I count those in the failure rate. That's not a real business. So how do you know and what do you know to invest in? I would never invest in somebody's idea.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
It's guaranteed to fail. I would invest in an entrepreneur who's been able to complete a cycle which includes an exit, who has a stellar track record, knows what they're doing, they are an authority in whatever they're doing, and they have a legacy historical capability to not only build but exit.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Because the number of ideas that never go anywhere, and majority of them, even if they do, they fail, not because the opportunity is not good, but because building a business, the first 3 million is what you do, the what you do has to work, it'll get fleshed out in 3 million. But once it's 3 million, the what you do still has to be excellent. But it's who you do it with, how you do it.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And most of these small business owners don't know how to find, attract, align, develop, and retain great people. Most of them don't know how to promote properly. Most of them don't know how to scale financially. Most of them don't know how to train other human beings. So what happens is it just falls apart. And so you're never going to get your money out of it. And it's not liquid.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
There's no point in investing in something that's going to be tiny. So the idea has to be huge. It has to be with someone who has a phenomenal track record and authority and has to be somebody who's proven they understand the concepts of building and scaling a business. If they can't fit all three of those buckets, I wouldn't even entertain putting a dollar in there.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Well, the rule of three, because we studied 10,000 businesses and what caused them to fail. And what allowed the others to succeed? And I came up with this thing I call the rule of three. It's crazy how the business concepts, the number of locations, all these things became three, three, three, three. So I call it the rule of three.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Even if you have seven locations, if two, so that's three times two is six. So if the seventh location's underperforming against the six, and they cannot get it to the standard of the best two, or three. The business ultimately will fail. It only takes two to take six down.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Gary didn't own any of it, but he was her partner. And Gary was a great communicator. Sage ran all the back in, make sure the nurses show up, do the things they're supposed to do. And one of the things I noticed in that whole space with everybody I worked with, they were all doctors and nurses, none of them had a big personality.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And so it isn't the seventh because they have six because normally what you see with someone that opens six is two are working really well, two are breaking even, two haven't got to break even yet. So what I would say if someone said, I'm opening a seventh, I'd say, great, show me the individual store P&Ls. And they'd say, here they are. And in aggregate, I would look at the best three.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Say they had six. I would look at the best three. What are the revenues? How long have they been in business? How much profit are they driving? And how much cash are they actually collecting? I would take those three and average them. And I'd say, now, compare that to the next three.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And if the next three were not on the exact trajectory as the first three, I'd say you're crazy for opening the seventh because you're going to go out of business. So the rule of three never lies. It's true with people. It's true with... You could just take three. Three times three. How should you scale a business? One to three to nine to 27 to 54 to 81. That builds a $25 million business.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
It only takes... The total aggregate divided by three to show if it's going to succeed or not. Because we never saw any format that worked. And you see this a lot with franchises. People have one, two locations. They start selling franchises. Now there's 20. They can't support them. Nobody knows what the hell is going on. There's no statistical facts. Everybody gets sued. Things go away.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
By the way, on the investment money side, my partner has been innovating this in crowdfunding. David Weald wrote the JOBS Act under Obama. Grant was the first person to really stretch into it. I was using a different model I created that now, because of the JOBS Act, my model is going to be a lot easier because it was the first democratized, decentralized model, equity model.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
But now you can do it digitally, which is phenomenal. But now Grant's raised 1.7 billion since 19, okay? And now he's combining with the Bitcoin fund, this property we're doing, real estate and Bitcoin. And I had David Wilt come out because I work with David. And David is the most progressive thought leader on crowdfunding, on equitizing, on public company stuff.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And he looked and he's like, man, this is gonna be the biggest thing that's hit real estate because now you get a hedge in traditional real estate. You can do it by location, you can do it by portfolio.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So, if you love Bitcoin, now, if I would never go out and just buy Bitcoin, because I have no control over anything, but if I'm hedging it against something else that has value that protects me, now I'd be like, I'm going all in on it, right? So, we like to innovate these spaces. And so, when you talk about it, you can combine it.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Bitcoin, real estate, you can actually now do both, which now I'm like, okay, I'm in. That's amazing. We want to do the same thing with business. where you can do these hedges.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And that's what I've been creating, is pooled hedges, because if you're in the HVAC space, and you're working with us, and you're growing your business, and now you can be part of a pool of another 200 HVAC people, hedging how well they're doing, sharing data, sharing information, sharing shared economies of scale, and purchasing of other assets that then hedges everybody's business.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Gary had a great personality, very communicative, but he just had no audience, no stage. He was small. And he and Grant actually tried to launch a 10X Health product At GrowthCon, the first one I went to in 2019, and Gary wasn't able to fulfill any of the orders. And so they killed it. And it went away. Well, cycle back 18 months later when I tell Grant, I'm going to do this.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So that's what I've been focused on for the last 20 years is creating hedge pools. And that's why I got 77 times EBITDA because when we sold the business, we didn't just sell the business. We sold something that allowed a bigger entity to hedge what they were doing against what we built. And so if you think of building businesses with hedges,
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
That's why hedge funds become the most valuable because they got multiple ways they can protect themselves. Small business owner doesn't have that. Usually they're key man dependent, key producer dependent, and key economics dependent.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Yeah, it's a great question. We have the Grant Cardone Foundation for Kids, and that is an amazing entity that brings inner city kids and kids without fathers into our ecosystem to give them a perspective, a hope, a vision for the future. And we collaborate with a lot of great organizations to do that. And that was Grant and Elena Cardone's vision.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
For me, 15 years ago I launched the Dawson Foundation and we've worked with halfway houses, family, local family, displaced family, abused and victims, a lot of, and I've been on the, today I'm on the Scottsdale Foundation Police Board In Vancouver, Washington, I was on the Vancouver Police Board. Nationally, I'm on the US Marshals Board for fallen officers.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And we've given a lot of money to things like St. Jude's Hospitals for kids. Our whole team, we have CV Cares. So we'll shut the whole company down, and I did this up in Vancouver with Autogy Cares. We'll shut our whole company down, and we'll go to the food banks, and we'll prep food, and we'll do this once a quarter. And we do these drives.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Two years ago, through a company I'm a chairman of, the American Academy of Hospitality Science, which was a five-star, six-star original certification with Frank Sinatra and Joey Chinquea, uh, 50 years now. And Joey's 90 Frank's obviously dead. So I became chairman to help this, but, uh, millions of dollars a year of toys, toys for tots.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
We work with these other, you know, but I brought it into Arizona. We have 130,000 toys away to kids in, in, in, in, uh, homes and displaced shelters so that they can enjoy the holidays as well.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So we really believe in, and I think where I align with Grant, with the Grant Cardone Foundation and why I'm such a huge supporter of it is because children, they deserve to have somebody that takes an active interest in them. And we're really committed to doing that.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And if we can get kids to see something bigger, something more hopeful, inspire them to be able to take care of the needs and necessities of today by helping the way we can. And me, I do it through law enforcement. Because a lot of these law enforcement, local law enforcements, have programs, but they don't have the funding.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So I like to combine what I'm doing with law enforcement and drive it into the communities so the right people get what they need to get. And we've been doing this now. supporting these and I give millions of dollars away to charity a year and a lot of it to Grant Cardone and then Grant and Elena do so many amazing things through the Grant Cardone Foundation.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
The cruise was one of them where we get to activate business owners to come in and support that. To answer your question, why should somebody do any of this? Look, There's no better, like the biggest joy I have is when a business owner's life transforms because we helped them. The biggest joy I have is one of my team members, their lives transform because we help them.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
The next biggest joy is when the lives of the people that we work with, with the people that work with them transform. Driving impact through human beings, and I've been very close, one of my closest, dearest mentor and friend is John Maxwell, number one thought leader in the world. If you have the ability to create and you don't share it, then you'll lose the gift of the ability to create.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
He's like, you should talk to Gary. We were going to do it with 10X Health. And I'm like, we might as well do a 10X Health brand. So I revived the whole thing. I went back to Gary and said, you want to try this again? But I'm going to, you know, I'll give you 10% of the new company. We'll buy Sage's. and give her 8% and then, but I'm the managing partner and I'm gonna do it my way.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And when you lose the gift of the ability to create, you will lose your superpower. So to me, if you're thinking about yourself and always thinking about yourself, you'll eventually be a miserable person dying a miserable life.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
If you think about the people around you and how you can drive impact and how you can shape and support and invest in those people, and you're able to do that and affect that, then true leadership says you won't stop there. You'll continue to perpetuate it and perpetuate it. But a lot of people don't know how to do that.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So through our organizations, we drive our teams to do it in the community so that they get the gift of giving. And when you do that and they bring their kids along and stuff, and we have kids days and things like that. you perpetuate this idea that if you can, you should, and if you don't, you won't. Wow. And so I'm a big believer of that. You spend the way you buy and you buy the way you spend.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And if you're cheap, And if you're inwardly focused, you'll die cheap and inwardly focused. If you're not concerned about money and you're investing in others and teaching others to invest in others, you will actually drive and perpetuate long-term impactful change. And if you're unwilling to do that in any ways at all, you'll never get it.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Because John says, if you want a hand, you got to give one first. And if you want to be interesting, you first have to take an interest in other people. So for me, I just believe that exchange. It's called law of circulation. And if that circulation isn't happening and it stops, it also stops on all the good shit that's happening to me.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Yeah, of course. Well, you are paying for it because your time is funding these opportunities.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
It's unique to the individual, right? I have three remarkable daughters. I have three great grandkids. I'm expecting to have more. I will leave enough that my kids will never have to worry about money if they maintain a reasonable lifestyle. The rest of it will go to things that will support the beliefs I have.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And we launched that business. We went from one eight to 25 million, 75 million, 120 million. And Gary went from nobody knowing who he was anywhere in the world by Grant putting him on our stages and by Grant introducing him to our community and then a few of Gary's relationships getting on the bandwagon too. It led us to Dana and many other people and blew the business up.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And a big piece of it for me, because my wife is half my age, so she's statistically going to significantly outlive me, a big piece of that decision will be whatever decision my wife makes. And I believe in my wife, I support my wife, but she's helping me create the net worth. She's president of all of our companies, she's actively involved, and she has things that she loves supporting.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
The things she loves are women-driven businesses, minority-driven businesses owned by females. So I am 100% certain that wherever that money is allocated, it will be used well. But if you think about even the most wealthiest people, after a few lines of generations, their wealth is gone because it gets pissed away.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So one thing I can assure you is nobody's going to touch the money to spend the principal. They're only going to be able to spend what the principal generates. And that will determine what happens with the wealth. But I'm not leaving billions of dollars or hundreds of millions to each child. I'll leave enough income that money won't be an issue.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I'll leave enough income that health care will never be an issue. If they want to live a moderate, great life, they'll be just fine. So will my grandkids and my grandkids after my grandkids. But if anybody wants to go and live the life I have, they're going to have to go earn it. I love it.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And I'll be honest with you, it's beyond even my, like that business is such a cottage business, that help, that innovative health space. Cottage pharmacies, cottage service providers,
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
uh no systems no technologies federal laws that are different than state laws and every time you start to figure it out because big pharma doesn't like that competition they change them constantly right right um and it's just the complexity but see i came out of that space so i already understood the complexity as much as it's a pain in the ass i'm still willing to work around it
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And we have now innovated. We're now in 46 countries. We launched in the UK. We're launching in the UAE. We've got multiple partnerships in multiple parts of the world that are happening. We are, I acquired another business in the UK that had spent 10 years on life sciences, doing precision nutrition, IVs, precision supplementation,
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So, I did a global deal with a manufacturer who's a leading state-of-the-art manufacturer in Europe, and I acquired control through bridge financing of this UK company. I combined that IP for the rest of the world, brought in the best of that IP in the United States, and we are the only people in the world, and we're just rolling our app out where everything can be managed, which we can get into.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
But I want to have a global healthcare company that's centered on longevity, health, wellness, and human optimization that can touch 8 billion people. Because my partner said, when we were postulating four years ago, we need a business that can touch 8 billion people.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And I went and thought, the only way to do that is to be in healthcare, be on the front end, and provide value to every human being on this planet. How can we do it? And that put us on this mission.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Yeah. Well, so when I took my first company public when I was 29 and I was a consolidator, I bought about 136 businesses. although it was a phenomenal experience and more than I ever thought I would do from a little town in Corvallis, Oregon, sitting on the tractor, barely getting out of high school.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So I had, I mean, it was a dream come true and I'll never regret it, but I did leave about 400 million off the table because I didn't know what I was doing. And when my private equity group sold the business, I decided I was gonna learn to build a business without using anybody else's money.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And I understood consolidation, I understood platform companies, because for seven years I was traveling around with my private equity group, going to healthcare conferences, looking at what they invested in, meeting other CEOs, and asking a lot of great questions. So I decided I wanted to innovate the small business space. It's a $16 trillion space today.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And I knew that consolidation on a very fragmented basis, small businesses didn't work and very, very rarely worked, which is why private equity needed a platform company. So I thought there's got to be a different way to build a platform company because billion dollar companies are worth a lot more than five, 10, 15, 20, $50 million, a hundred million dollar companies.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So how could I aggregate billion dollars of value bypassing wall street and redistributing that money to back to the business owners who normally don't get it at that size. And that became kind of my thesis. And so I created my own business plan. It was a democratized decentralized collaboration model. I called it back then.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And I had to go through the SEC eight times, finally got it approved, launched it in 2005 here in Scottsdale, actually, at the Phoenician. And the idea was I would swap equity rights. I would give a fractional equity in the management company, which would equitize up to 250 independent businesses in exchange for upside rights in their business and a management fee.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
But I would build a centralized brand, which got around Franchise Lobby because they were owners, so they had the right to use it. And then I would build what a platform company had, systems, technology, leadership, people development, skill sets, R&D on how to scale in your micro market and your regional market. And I would build an acquisition company for these guys.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And then they would pay the management fee, and then they would get the benefit in their marketplace. And everyone said it wouldn't work.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
fast forward i had a thousand locations to 198 equity partners that owned 35 percent of my management company we were only doing 35 million in revenue a couple million in ebitda but what i had built was an engine that if any strategic bought it they could plug it into all the businesses around the world that they were operating and
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
and elevate them to the standard of our businesses, which were three and a half to 15 times larger than their peer groups in efficiency, effectiveness, and market share dominance. And so I took the same research that we did 9, 10, and 11, where we broke down 10,000 businesses across hundreds of verticals for me to understand consolidation, disruption,
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
all these different convergence of multiple businesses into others. And we studied the best by putting all the mom and pop video stores out of business by using a revenue share model versus a buy and rent model and then Netflix.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
and Redbox putting the pressure on Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and then innovation of Wi-Fi and technology and putting them all out of business and all those things happened over a few years. But we did like 20 of those things to create a data set. Then we took all these little businesses and ran them through those data sets.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I did that for three years, had a team of 16 very smart people from Harvard, from Stanford, but I could buy them cheap because 2019, 11, 12, the world was in a meltdown. And I formulated this engine and I found something. And what I found is that if you find the right strategic, they're gonna buy you not on your revenue and not on your EBITDA, but on a synergized value.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And if you could prove the synergy by them buying you and what they could do with their businesses with you. So I did that and then I researched our industry and I found the eight natural most best buyers, all big companies. And I literally, my opening presentation was, hi, I'm Brandon Dawson. I have a $35 million business doing $2 million of EBITDA.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
If you acquired me and integrated me into your business, I would add $2 billion worth of value within 36 to 48 months, and I want 10%. And when I pitched the head of private banking and investor relations and healthcare banking for for a Piper Jeffries out of Minneapolis. He ran the whole thing, $10 billion division. He said, that's the dumbest pitch I've ever heard and it's not gonna work.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I asked him, when's the last time you've ever been out of the office? He's like, what do you mean? I said, when's the last time you did a road show and watched a pitch? He says, oh, it's been years. I run teams. I go, you come with me. Eight strategics. And these are like Siemens Healthcare, EQT, 56 billion under management, all these big public companies. I pitched eight companies.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I had eight bidders. We reported 151. When it was done, I got 189 million. Oh, my gosh.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
2019 was the one I went to as a guest.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Same reason I partnered with the man who had the thought. Mr. 10X himself, Grant Cardone. You know, if you would've met Grant and I in 2010, 11, and 12, you would've said I was the successful entrepreneur, he was the guy making three million a year.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
Yeah, Brandon Dawson, serial entrepreneur, business partner with the one and only 10X himself, Grant Cardone. And we have multiple companies. He and I partnered with my wife, Natalie Dawson, about six years ago. And in six years, we built Cardone Ventures to $120 million company, 10X Health from a $1.5 million business to $120 million company.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I had 68 full-time marketing people on a team of a couple hundred running a thousand locations, and they were trying to get me to launch a YouTube channel, a Facebook podcast all in 2009, 10, 11. They were way ahead of the curve. I ignored them and told them it was dumb that we just needed to focus on our business. And I was doing all this research. I wasn't thinking.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I was working with Michael Gerber. And then I got to know John Maxwell, started helping him double his business and built a relationship with him, Sharon Lecter. And they're like, you have all these authors and Jim Collins at the time. you should be shooting these podcasts. It was 2011. I'm like, guys, guys, guys, nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
We could be spending a little bit of money and you get millions of people. I'm like, guys, guys, guys, stick to the hearing aid business. Worry about our customers. But fast forward to 2015 and 2020, Grant and I took a completely different trajectory. He went from being a guy making three million a year, being a billionaire. I went to a guy, yeah, I was successful.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
I sold my business and made a hundred million bucks. Okay. But the divergence of resources we both had from 10 to 20, he just had this vision and went for it. And he did it. And he did it because he believed it and he put everything into making it happen. I didn't see it. I didn't believe it. And I stuck to the thing that I was good at.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
So I had to really do an assessment because when I sold my business, I integrated into the billion dollar company. And in 36 months, we took them from one to four and a half billion. So I was done. They said, thank you. Other than raising them $400 billion or $400 million euros, they didn't really need me to run the business anymore. So we were looking at what we're going to do next.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And I started looking at Grant because my wife Natalie's like, you got to look at what this guy has done. And it was a little difficult for me, my ego, because I was a type A driver, very successful, had all this research, which I refreshed all that research in 16, 17, and 18 to get it up to current times.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And I knew I was the only guy in the small business space that actually had 10 years of research, force ranking all the different growth and value factors of all these micro businesses. trends, all this stuff. And so I knew I had something, I just didn't know how to bring it to market. So she put me on grant.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
We went to that 2019 conference and I was like, what this guy, I had been running meetings since 2010. with 1,000, 1,200 people. I knew how hard they were put together. I knew how much time, energy, and effort, and how expensive. I walked into that stadium, and I was like, anybody that could do this has to be able to do anything they want to do. And I want to be on that wagon.
The Money Mondays
$0 to $225M in 5 Years with Brandon Dawson 💸 E121
And so that was the moment. First day, first half of the day, I had five things I wanted to see. And if I checked those five boxes, I knew I was going to be Grant Cardone's partner, but he had never met me. Wow.