How To Actually Get Rich As A Teenager (ft. Luca Netz)

Lucas just talked me through his blueprint for building a million-dollar business at the age of 18. Lucas Nets is the CEO of Pudgy Penguins, a groundbreaking NFT project worth over $500 million. At 18 years old, Lucas sold his e-commerce jewelry company for $8 million. Today, he is going to teach you the steps he took so you can do the same. So how are we going to do this? What do you want to talk about first? I think we've got three facets on the agenda. First, I want to go into the mindset, the preparation, and ultimately the execution of how we got there. If you can't sit down and watch this video and learn, take five minutes out, then I promise you, you're probably not going to make it. I think the most meaningful moment for me and the moment that single-handedly changed my life was I was listening to a YouTube video of an entrepreneur breaking down what made him successful. I was 15 and a half. My mom, we had grown up basically homeless for 10 years. We'd settled down in Los Angeles. My mom was Airbnb-ing. This was right when Airbnb started taking off. The room in the house, bedroom, one bath, and then my mom was sleeping in the living room. This kind of drove me crazy. Obviously, when we were younger, life was hard. But then when I became a teenager, life started to stabilize a little bit. Then when that happened, the house basically became a hostel. I'd go to school. Basically, this would be like a hostel for people to come and stay on Airbnb. That's what really drove me crazy. Ultimately, I started to lash out at my mom. I used to hate her. We used to fight. Every time somebody wasn't in the home, I used to tell her how much I hated this experience. Then when I was watching this YouTube video, the advice the entrepreneur gave the viewer was, stop feeling sorry for yourself. That was the most important. So true. Because bad luck can sometimes end up being good luck. You just don't realize it. In hindsight, I think my childhood experience, though you may look at it as a deficiency, I look at it as what made me who I am. It made you hungry. So stop feeling sorry for myself was the most important mindset. How did you do it? I want to stop feeling sorry for myself. How did you do it? I think I just took initiatives. One, I stopped. I think the language in which you speak to yourself is incredibly important. You almost self-prophesize your mindset. This idea that's like, I used to wake up every morning. My life sucks. My life is miserable. I am going to embody and manifest that type of feeling. I think right when I heard that, I really digested it. I think the following day, I was like, I am going to take life by the horns and I'm going to take initiative. What kind of started transpired a couple of weeks later was I tested out of school. I took the Chesapeake, which is the California exit exam. I started to work and I started to make money. Within two months, I was making $2,000 a month as a 15-year-old about to turn 16. What were you doing? My first job was actually two. The first money I made was throwing parties and underground rap shows in Los Angeles as a 15-and-a-half-year-old. I basically took all the money that I saved up flipping sneakers and doing all this stuff that I was hustling on the side. You would basically buy a venue for $1,000 for the night. You charge $20 at the door. You can make $20,000 off a $1,000 expense. That's an egregious example, but that was the first way. I made my first $1,500 doing that way. Then my first job, once I realized that that wasn't sustainable, was at a tech startup called Ring. I was one of their early employees. Wow. Do you know what's really bizarre? We have just done a partnership with Ring. People can go press the Ring doorbell, pitch their dream, and we help make that dream happen. When you were telling me that, that was- That's blown my mind. Yeah. I was like their 25th employee. But someone listening, let's just quickly remind. Start flipping sneakers, which is still very relevant today, by the way. Super relevant. Any clothes- Do an events company with some of the profit from there. Yeah. That event made you $1,500. Yeah. Then you did a thing with Ring. Yes, but I kept compounding the events on the side. Right. These are all very easy things still to do today. This is an out-of-date, current, and still current. Then what happened? Then I left Ring. I ultimately saw that there wasn't that much upside. This is part of the story. I don't tell much, but I actually started selling solar over the phone. I believed in sales. I wanted a job where my time, there could be endless upside for my time. I thought sales was a great way. I learned how to speak well, learned how to sell solar over the phone. I became one of the top closers at a solar company in Los Angeles. I went from making $2,000 a month at Ring, plus whatever I made on the events, because the events was a night business. I wanted to find something to do with my time during the day. I didn't want to be at home in this hostel. Then I started selling solar over the phone. I was making $7,000, $8,000 a month doing that. Then I bought an online course. We'll get into that in a sec. That took you from stop feeling sorry for yourself, wake up with a more positive mindset, right? I can make money today. I'm going to make money today. Then the second thing, is it believe? Yes. You started to believe, was it? You started to believe at the same time as stop feeling sorry for yourself? No. This was what got me here. I wasn't really believing in the opportunity that I'd become a millionaire. I just stopped feeling sorry for myself. I grabbed life by the horns. I was like, screw this. I'm not just going to cry and complain and belittle my mom all day. I'm going to go try it and be productive. This is before I even thought that being a millionaire was even on the radar. There was no radar here. $5,000 a month was like life changing. I was making double what my mom was making at the time. Sneakers, events, Ring, then solar. I'm doing events while I'm doing Ring and while I'm doing solar. It wasn't until one day I saw an Instagram ad of a kid basically saying, my brother made $15,000 a day. He's 16 years old. I was like, there is no way he's doing this and I can't do it. I bought the course for $2.99. It taught me about Shopify and this idea that you can start a business from anywhere in the world and sell it online. That's what opened the doors for me starting my first jewelry business. This is nine years ago, right? Just context. I'm 26. It was eight years ago. Wow. That sounds like a lifetime ago. The way you talk about it. Yeah, it does. How does Believe play a part then? Believe is when I started my e-commerce business. When I started my e-commerce business, this is where Belief really needed to kick in because I started, one, to believe that I could do what this kid was doing and two, that I could do it more. Three, talk about the trials and tribulations of starting your first entrepreneurial business. There's going to be real moments in which your Belief is tested. For me, the first couple of months, I was pulling my hair out, couldn't figure out what needed to be done. At this point, I was riding the clock of the solar business. My sales started going down because I was being tracked. I basically was dealt with the ultimatum that I had to quit or do the thing full-time, but I couldn't start my e-commerce business riding his clock while sitting in my little office. I think this is where Belief and believing in myself really came in. I had to make the decision, keep the safe job that was making me five to six grand a month or quit and start my business full-time and not double dip and try to get the best of both worlds. A lot of people will be sitting here listening to this video in exactly that situation right now. They've got a job and they have to make a decision. How did you make that decision? If someone's listening, how did they make that decision? It was instinctual. I can't really reflect what made it, but I knew I just couldn't sit in that cubicle any longer. It was really an idea of like, I couldn't stand that freaking cubicle. The biggest problem people have is sometimes it's not a cubicle. It can actually be quite a nice office with a ping pong table. I got one of those. I know, me too. The point I'm making here is that, I actually think the answer to this, tell me what you think. The answer to this belief thing is people only regret what they don't do in life. When you're 18 years old, let's be honest, you can live on a couch somewhere. Your costs are the lowest they're ever going to be. If you're ever going to take a risk, it's then. Because later it gets harder because you get a mortgage and you get into debt and your lifestyle inflation goes up. This is the time to do it. I love that you said that because that's been my mantra. I specifically have always tried to support the younger entrepreneurs because they don't know how much leverage they have. And like you said, it could be that. It could be a family member getting sick. It could be you getting a girl pregnant by accident. And all of a sudden your risk tolerance becomes so much smaller. When your risk tolerance from your 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, you're actually in the best position in your life to go do things that nobody else can do. And that's where I think belief matters the most. But you have to believe that you can do it. I was able, while I was right at the clock, I was able to get a little bit of traction right before I was able to make that decision. So I was like, hey, I'm either going to pile into something that's going to be able to change my life with endless upside or I'm going to keep riding this. So obviously you can double dip where you can, but ultimately your belief is going to be tested. I built 19 companies. I couldn't do any of them if it wasn't full time. I wouldn't have made any of them work if I hadn't done it full time. And the other point of people listening, again, I don't mind if you disagree, but like people have to realize that if they go and do this thing, let's say you went and did this business and it didn't work. Luckily it worked for you. It doesn't work. I and you will probably still rather hire someone that's actually gone out there and try to do something. Right. They've got the experience of what it's like as us as entrepreneurs. I'm more likely to hire them. And if they stayed at the solar banner company, totally final step in this mindset thing, don't give up. And this goes back to, even when I had gain traction, I got the worst cards dealt. I mean, if you understand e-commerce, they locked up my money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, inventory, wasn't able to get paid for, wasn't able to get delivered. Things that were going to not only take all the money that I had made, but put me into debt. And ultimately you have two ultimatums. Either you're going to get beat up in the corner and you're going to get knocked out or you're not going to give up. You're going to duck, you're going to swerve, you're going to swivel and ultimately fight back and win. And so I think, you know, this is stuff that you've heard a hundred times, but there's so fundamental to this and it sounds corny or repetitive or redundant, but ultimately I think these are the three pillars for me from a mindset perspective that made all the difference. And ultimately I attribute pretty much all my success to these three mindset shifts, starting with not feeling sorry for myself, you know, believing that I actually had the ability to go and believe in myself and do this thing. And obviously when roadblocks, you know, arise not to give up because these roadblocks can be pretty intense if you, you know what it's like to be an entrepreneur. We're going to talk next about preparation, but just before we do, do not give up. I have a little bit of a opposite view on this for a second. I started a comic book business. I spent a million dollars on it and it failed, but I didn't, I initially didn't want to give up. And then I realized it wasn't something I really cared about. So I'm glad I gave it up. So there's a time and a place to give up, right? If you really don't enjoy it, if you're really not feeling it, bring someone else in to do it or give up, you know, like there is something in giving up sometimes, right? Don't do it for the sake of it. That's really good feedback. I would, maybe I'll push back on you on that. Feel free. I think from, I think it depends on who you are and where you are at a certain stage. And I think your example is a perfect example where I think giving up is good. I do think that some people, you can't default assume that everyone's going to have the judgment that you're going to have. And I think, I think anybody who puts their mind to something and stays consistent will be able to make themselves a living regardless of it has exponential upside. I would argue that you made the right decision pivoting and the best entrepreneurs are the ones that are able to shut things down and move on to the next. I do think if you've stayed in that comic book business, you would have found some sort of success. And I think that success would have been better than maybe what you were doing, you know, working a job or prior. Maybe that's my, my contrarian argument. What do you say to that? I think it's true. I would argue though, once you've got the belief bit and you have a business, like I've actually done businesses that for example, the gardening company where it's not scalable actually, and not fun for me. I don't want to be outside in the freezing cold every day. Yeah. So there's a part of me that also thinks if you believe in yourself, if you really get this belief, whatever your, even if you fail, the compound learning means you just keep believing in yourself. I can start a business now and it will work no matter what. I think preparation is also totally underrated. Totally underrated. Sometimes people think they should just do it. You tell us what we need to do. Well, you hear the saying all the time, right? Preparation meets opportunity equals luck. Yeah. Right. And so this is actually fundamental. So I tested out of school, but so, so my whole, give you guys a little 60 second TLDR on my thought process there. I was an A and B student, kind of like a misanthrope in the crew, skateboarder, cool kid, but I always wanted to get good grades because I knew that was the ticket out of my situation. I knew our situation always sucked. Obviously as I got older and my mom did the whole Airbnb stuff, the severity kind of cranked back up. And, you know, that, that was kind of like our, my, my, my core focus. But when I tested out of school, I was studious. The reason why I didn't want to continue with schools, because I knew I wanted to get into business and it seemed really counterintuitive. So you did give up, gave up something very important. Well, I'll give you the thought process, right? I think it takes some level of maturity. So you just can't default assume that everyone I think has that maturity. I think life experience and trials and tribulations gives you that maturity to make that assessment. My assessment was I wanted to get a business degree and I wanted to be a businessman, but it seemed really counterintuitive that I would go into debt to get a business degree. It seemed like a really bad business decision and something a good businessman wouldn't do. And so I tested out of school and I was like, well, I need to make money. I need to make money now. And that seems like a good priority for somebody who wanted to get into business. You can't always go back to university later, right? Once you've made money. And so when I tested out of school, I knew that I also needed to get my education somehow and I needed to be, I needed to get more advanced. I knew I wasn't at the most advanced side of the spectrum. And so I got that education through watching content on YouTube. And a lot of what I was trying to extrapolate in that early content digestion phase was what are the things I need to prepare for and how do I prepare for that moment so that when the opportunity arises, I can strike and I'm prepared, right? And so there's a couple different facets in that level of preparation. I think the first one that I had written down of being decisive. So this one's so silly, but I watched a YouTube video again. I don't remember who these people were, but this guy was like being a decisive decision maker, right? I cannot be undecisive in my decision-making capabilities. And so how I trained that decisive behavior was I would go to a restaurant and I just picked something right off the menu instantly. And I'd pat myself on the back for being decisive, right? And this idea that I have to be able to make decisions confidently, quickly, and this is ultimately going to help my business scale and thrive. And so being decisive, that was my first way that I prepared. And I did it through choosing things on the menu or any decision that came across my peripheral. I was like, okay, I got to make the decision, make the decision quick, and I got to sit in it. And I don't want to spend too much time thinking about a decision. I just need to make it. I think Jeff Bezos is talking about this, like, it's better to make a decision, it'd be wrong to make no decision or take too long to make that decision. It's better just to make a decision. As quickly as you can. I really love that. And the restaurant ordering thing is a great way for people listening to practice. Yeah. Go to the restaurant, make a quick order. It's funny when you said that and you referenced the Jeff Bezos thing, there's actually something specifically, can you repeat that phrase one more time? I want it to marinate for me specifically. Oh, you want me to repeat? Okay. Yeah. He basically said, make a decision quickly. It's better to make that decision quickly and then no decision at all will take too long to make the decision. Failure is more likely to happen in not making the decision than it is in making the decision. You can always reverse the decision. I appreciate that. Yeah. He's of course a genius. Right. Communicate. Yeah. How does this work? This, I think is probably the most important thing that I think I can talk about today, if I'm being frank. The ability to communicate, I think is the single greatest tool that anybody here has in their toolbox is their voice. I think, and you've seen this, I think voices have swayed nations. They have chained, they've created movements. I have a dream. Yeah. They have led countries and I think, and ultimately they have inspired people to build amazing companies and amazing businesses. I think the ability to communicate is the most important thing and the thing that I spent the most time working on as an individual, for my personal life, for my professional life, and it's the single most important skill that I will advocate anybody to practice and anybody prepare for. Introvert or extrovert? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? I'm an introvert, but I'm a good extrovert, but I'm naturally an introvert. Right. I think from my perspective, being able to translate your thoughts is really important. In my case, I'm a CEO. I need to be able to communicate my vision. Half of my job is communicating the vision and making sure that everybody's aligned on the vision, but if I'm not able to communicate that, then obviously people are running around with their heads cut off. I think the other side of it is I'm running a publicly traded startup. I was telling you this a little bit before. I'm in a very unique business and my whole business is predicated on my ability to communicate to the people that are participating and collecting and investing into our ecosystem. My ability to communicate also leads the rest of the troops and makes people excited to show up at work every day. My ability to communicate is the reason why we're in Walmart and in Target and in 10,000 retailers with no movie and no film and no premier game. My ability to communicate allows me to get certain partnerships over the line. This is the backbone of, I think, everything. How did you learn this? This is an interesting one. I was a big reader, so I naturally love to read. I encourage you to read anything. I don't read any of those entrepreneur books. Don't bother reading this piece of shit. I'm sorry. It's crap. No, no, no. What should people read? It's probably a good thing, but I naturally can't read that stuff. I have to read fantasy. I have to escape my world for some reason. For some reason, I can only digest fantasy. It's a good point. Fantasy storytelling is so fantastic if you learn how they tell stories. The reason why I bring this up is some people don't like to read. The suggestion that I'm getting at is find something that you like to read. It doesn't need to be an entrepreneur book. Then people could buy my book. Yeah, then they could buy your book. From my perspective, I think just learning how to read. I actually, funny enough, I didn't get into this part of the story, but when I was 15, I wanted to be a rapper. I grew up in Los Angeles. Everyone was hip hop. I can write really well. Maybe not, but then I was also reading the dictionary because I wanted to expand my vocabulary. Actually, reading the dictionary is a really good one. Probably the most important one was listening to smart people speak. It's all about your sphere of influence. We probably should have mentioned this at some point. Maybe it is here, but you hear the saying all the time, you're around five millionaires, you'll be the sixth. You're around five losers, you'll be the sixth. You don't need to actually know five millionaires to be around. Make your algorithm connect you to those five millionaires. Exactly. That is your sphere of influence. At one point, actually a really important fact that might help people listening. When I was 17, I had a bad friend group in Los Angeles. I removed myself from them and I said, I'd rather have my friends be nobody and then my sphere just be all these smart people that I'm getting fed on my algorithm and let that be my sphere of influence. Your sphere of influence for you to actually, just so you know, I'm a huge believer that you are who you're around. You are what you eat. You are what you listen to. Everything around you, encompasses the sphere of influence. People always make the excuse, well, I don't know five millionaires, so how can I be the sixth? I'm like, well, just stop hanging around all the losers because you're definitely hanging around a bunch of losers and go listen to five millionaires all day and don't go listen to anybody else. Make that sacrifice. Over a year's time, look at how different of a human being you're going to be. Right. Number three, stress management. This is, you and I were speaking earlier before the camera was on, but I basically said, my childhood was actually a blessing. At the moment, it didn't feel like it, but in hindsight, it was. I think one of the biggest things that my life growing up in my trials and tribulations as a youngster taught me was the ability to stress manage. Being an entrepreneur is probably the most stressful thing that you can sign up for. People laugh and joke, and they say that we're firefighters half the time, and it's very much the truth. My whole job is fixing problems, but if you get stress and break every time a problem arises, then you're never going to fix those problems. You're never going to have the energy or the courage to ultimately get in there and do the dirty work. The ability to tolerate stress, I think, is the difference between the people who succeed in business and the people who fail. Ultimately, your stress tolerance is going to allow you to persevere and believe and not to give up. I think it just plays such a huge role in the entire circumference of what it means to be an entrepreneur. Stress managing and being able to take beats and to stand up after you've gotten knocked down. There's ways to prepare for this. On the idea of the preparation, if you're a youngster or you're somebody that's listening to this, every time something stressful happens in your life, take a deep breath and be like, it's okay. This is how you prepare for being an entrepreneur. Again, this is the preparation section. This idea that preparation meets opportunity equals luck. People don't get lucky. They just prepare, and then the opportunity arises, and they're prepared to strike. You will not be able to scale a business to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars or hopefully billions of dollars in enterprise value if you break under stress. I'd argue I don't think you could build a business to be worth tens of millions of dollars. Maybe you could hustle a business to a million dollars. You'll be miserable. If you can't enjoy stress, I look at it that way. You've almost got to embrace stress. Enjoy stress. Have fun with it. Like, yay, I didn't get the funding I needed. Yay, the customer cancelled. That means I need to get two more. Is this stress management? Manage emotions? I think manage emotions is a little bit different. Managing emotions, I think stress management is being able to not completely break or fold like a lawn chair when there's a stressful situation. I think managing emotions is when there's a stressful situation, am I going ballistic in real time? Almost like the 24-hour rule. You've kind of heard it. There's actually a weird American law around it. This idea that when something really impactful happens, outside of stress management, I think it's more like a long-term approach to fixing problems. There is something that happens within the first 15 to 30 to 45 to an hour of seeing a problem, depending on how big it could be, that can make you really go off the wall. I think there's something like the red light rule in some states in America that if you catch your wife cheating on you and you somehow kill her within the first hours is like an egregious example, but the case will go from first degree murder to manslaughter because of this. Do it quick. That's the advice we're giving on this YouTube channel. Just do it quick. But I think it gives you a good anecdote as to this. There's a real visceral scientific emotion and something that happens, the body that kicks in. Don't kill anyone. You have to be able to hold yourself there, but they are kind of one and the same. I think managing emotions is probably a little more short-term versus stress management is more like a long-term. Managing emotion, by the way, is very sublimable. It's just subconscious. So whatever happened when you were zero to seven years old, that is all in your subconscious. We're breathing right now without even thinking about it. This is actually subconscious stuff. So how do you stop this happening? I think from my perspective, the best way that I've learned, and I'm still mastering this as a youngster, I think that you can't stop it outside of putting the 24-hour rule on it. The 24-hour rule is the best thing I have for it right now. So if something really kind of gets you emotional, you shut your mouth, and you kind of go for a walk, and then try to wait 24 hours before you react. What I do, by the way, is I write a really long email, let it all out on paper, and then I sleep on it, and I wake up the next day and say, what did I say all that? Yeah, and I don't send it or I don't use that. That's the way to do it. Yeah, because at least it lets it out. Because if you hold it in, I don't know, you get cancer. That's great. Hey, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. I wanted to ask a quick favor. I've just written a book, guys. It's taken me 35 years to get all this knowledge, and I put it all in here. It'll help you remove any subconscious bias you have for stopping you from starting your dream. The key in this book that I want you to learn is if you want your dream to happen, you've got to make other people's dreams happen first. The link is down in the description. It would mean a lot to me if you bought it. All the proceeds from this book I'm giving away to fund dreams. So please, buy if you can. Thanks. Now let's get back to the podcast. Right, talk to us about the execution, because this is something you've done really well. Yeah, I think this is ultimately the difference between you being able to make a business that makes $100,000 a year, or $10 million a year, is your ability to execute. I think it starts with the idea. What are you doing? I actually have a really unorthodox approach here, but I always think about the hook and the angle, and I almost think with a marketing-first mindset. So I actually think these two are probably a little synonymous for this section. We'll probably harp on this for about five minutes. But this idea that I actually go, what is the idea? What is the hook and the angle, and how am I going to market this? And then everything else is backwards. So you might disagree with this, but I actually believe you don't have a business if you can't market it. I think everyone builds amazing products. Everyone is an amazing inventor. Everyone's an amazing artist. Everyone does a lot of amazing talents and skills, and things that they can create and invent, and ultimately kind of bring from idea into conception. But if you can't market it, it starts and stops there. If you don't have sales, if you can't generate revenue, then it's not a business. So I'm of the guidance that I'm always marketing first. I think of it from that perspective. So if I have an idea, I think to myself, how am I going to market it, and what is the hook and the angle? So for example, if I wanted to get into the health and wellness business and I wanted to start a supplement, I would think about the supplement that I thought could help the most people, one that resonates with me and maybe solves an internal problem. But then I would go to the hook and the angle. So one hook and angle that I know is super powerful that I see all over the internet is, I'm feeling bloated, I'm feeling overweight, and then my product would solve that. So I think the hook and the angle creates the problem. Ultimately, then you fill in the solution, and then you work backwards. Once you have the hook and the angle, which is the positioning and the framing of what your business is going to be, once you have the problem, then once you have the solution, everything else is, in this day and age, chat-GBT-able, and you can just follow those instructions A through Z. The hard part in today's day and age is the go-to-market and the problem and the solution. That's where I would like to focus first, especially in this new generation where, like I said, you have chat-GBT, which should actually walk you through how to set up an LLC, how to do basically every single fundamental part of the business, and probably in a year's time, I'll probably be able to do it for you. I think entrepreneurship today, in this new era, is going to be a game of who has the best idea, who can address the biggest problem with the best solution, and how is the hook and the angle going to be portrayed on these marketing channels that are ultimately going to get you the conversion. I think marketing is also why personal brand has made such a rise. Once you build a personal brand, like I was asked to write a book five years ago, and I said no, although I had the knowledge, but I wanted to build up a brand that when I had the book come out, I'd just share it with the community and it would sell. It took five years before I was willing to do a book, although the idea of doing a book has appealed to me for a long time. I think marketing is so underrated. For people listening, let's say you're 18 years old and you have an idea, like you just said, the cosmetic idea, but let's say you want to launch a clothing brand, because I know lots of people trying to do this. How do you go about ticking the marketing box, for example, in that example? I think it's a matter of the hook. Your story, maybe. Yeah, I think it can come down to the story. What's the purpose? A clothing brand is really interesting because there's a lot of different buckets that you can bake it into. Is it a clothing brand that is there to help the animals? Is it a clothing brand that is all about having the most swag and being the coolest? Is it a clothing brand that is being shipped in a can because it's more environmentally friendly, and then that hook and that angle is viral? Is it a clothing brand that's for relationships and partners? Is it a mental health clothing brand? I think it really comes down to, again, the idea. Once you have the idea, which is clothing brand, you think to yourself, what is a way that one resonates with me and a marketing and an angle and a frame and a positioning that I think can speak to the world? Idea, clothing brand, thing that resonates with me, me specifically, it's animals. I want to save the animals. Maybe I start a clothing brand that every design has some cool animal on it, and then I donate to the animals. There's my hook, and there's my angle. Now I know how to market it, and everything else is back. You work backwards. Finding the manufacturer is easy. The design is not rocket science. That stuff is, again, all chat GPT-able. You can figure out where that stuff is and how to get there. The hard part is the initial conceptualization or the angle, or maybe it's a relationship where one hoodie is half pink, and you put yourself together, and we have a yin and a yang or something. It totally depends on ultimately. What I've learned from marketing is I can only market things that I can understand. I can't market things that I don't understand. Part of that ideation process also has to resonate with you. You have to be able to sell it to yourself. My first jewelry business, I was able to sell that jewelry to myself, so I knew how to speak to that audience. Naturally, animals speak to me, but maybe mental health speaks to you. Maybe you're a fashionista or a fashion guy, and you know what it is to look cool and swaggy, and so you can work backwards. It really depends on ultimately your skillset and your desire and your personal preference. Product. Integrity. Integrity. Oh, this one's a good one. Yeah. One thing that I didn't do when I was younger is I didn't focus on product integrity, but ultimately I do encourage anybody who's starting their entrepreneurship journey to focus on product integrity because ultimately you don't want to keep acquiring customer. I was so good at marketing that I could just lose the customers every time I got them because I'd crack that code. I think that's my superpower for those that are listening, but product integrity is a great way to create a sustainable flywheel that ultimately will get into a sec. It's the backbone of creating enterprise value, which is really what you want to create when you're building a business and being an entrepreneur. So I do encourage everybody to focus on product integrity, and ultimately that's create high-integrity products that you're proud about, that you know your customer will love because ultimately, lifetime values, I think another thing that we'll get into, this idea that one customer can give you $10,000 over their life cycle. That's really important, but if you have low product integrity, the cost to get that sale was $10. They make $20. You make your $2 to $3 margin, and then you never get that customer again. That's not growing a sustainable business. That's running a marketing scheme, and that's ultimately what I was doing, is I was a really good marketer, a really good product seller, but I wasn't focused on enterprise value and brand integrity and ultimately product integrity, which is the root of the entire problem. So if you want to increase your lifetime value, if you want to create word-of-mouth marketing and create a cult in a community around your business, I think product integrity is the first place I would start. There's something really interesting about this terminology. Just to give it a different angle, tell me what you think. Product integrity can also be being honest about your product. The product itself doesn't have to be perfect. My example would be like Zara. It's quite honest about the fact that generally their product isn't the most quality, but it is the most fashionable, and it is reasonably priced. So product honesty is what you're saying here, right? You don't have to pretend, oh, this is the best quality material in the world, and you'll never have to buy another hoodie. You can say, look, it's cheap, and I've made it cheap because I can sell it to you cheap, and then I can make more money to give to my mental health initiatives, for example, right? So it's about being transparent as well, right? Totally agree. I think that'd probably go into the next one, which is customer experience, and this goes down to... I think these all kind of tie into this one idea where it's like, look, you don't want to be in the business of buying a new customer every time you sell them. You want to be in the business of selling to a customer, and then them coming back, and then really creating that loyalty. A perfect example of this is like a bark box. When you die, they send you flowers. When your dog dies, they send you flowers for your dog. Bark box. That's an amazing customer experience. If you ever get another animal, you would go and get your animal supplies from any other place after they just sent you flowers after your dog died. That's an amazing customer experience. You getting your items quickly in the handwritten letter. When you're getting your first couple of sales, again, I'm giving you guys this perspective from an e-commerce perspective, but you can apply this to everywhere, right? Which is this idea that you want to give a positive customer experience to everybody that engages with your brand, I think ultimately makes or breaks the scalability of your business. Whether you're mowing lawns, you want that person to have an amazing experience. You want to be in it at a certain time. You want to be out at a certain time. You want to make sure it's done exactly the way they want it to be done. If you're shipping something to somebody online, you want that thing to come quickly. You want the product to be intact. You want it to be just as you advertise. If you're providing an agency service, you want to make sure that they have all of their questions answered, A through Z, and they get that service provided to them at the quality that they want it to be provided. This is ultimately what we call the backbone of building enterprise value. I think it starts and stops with, again, product integrity and customer experience. I think it's so true. You only need three customers. Most businesses only need three customers to be happy to build a business. Because they know 10 people, that's 30 customers. And they know 10 people, that's 300 customers. The best salespeople are happy customers. If you say, oh, we're brilliant. Well, are you? But the customer says, it's completely different. So undervalued. What else do people need to know? And it just goes down into the LTV, which is the lifetime value. Ultimately, that is the business that you're in. That's going to go into the next point, which we'll get into in a sec, which is really the culmination of all these points, which is enterprise value. But your enterprise value is really going to be determined by a lot of things. But a huge part of it is going to be the lifetime value of your customer. How many customers do you have? And what is their projected lifetime value? And that's ultimately going to get you the premium and the multiple in your business. And so understanding what that lifetime value is, optimizing for extending that lifetime value. This is where upsells and downsells and maybe more the complexities of entrepreneurship and selling your business coming in, which is like when Simon was doing his agency business, this idea that they were providing logos to people. And that was one service they provided. And then maybe they started doing ads, and maybe they started doing marketing campaigns, and maybe they started doing whole brand kits. And so he took one lifetime value that otherwise could have been $50,000 for a logo and expanded it to millions of dollars per client because he downsold them on 10 different things that was within the scope of the agency that he expanded. So he expanded the lifetime value and the premium of his business versus what it was when it sold versus what it was when it started, which was literally making logos for people. It was completely different because of his ability to expand that lifetime value worth for each one of those customers. Thank you for listening. We're off to have some chicken now. See you later.