Flip Businesses With Little to No Experience and Money - Get Paid While You Sleep!

Hey everyone, this is James Pelton. Hope you're having a great Wednesday. You actually get a double dose of James today. I'm really excited for this one. It's been on, I've had it on my calendar for a while, but we have Mike Warren here to talk about Business Mastery University and I'll have him explain what that is and what they do here in a minute. You know I've been scouring the internet just looking for different opportunities to, you know, different side hustles, different passive income opportunities and all those things. So hopefully today can be educational for everybody and also present an opportunity that you might want to take part of yourself. If you are in the audience, what I need from you guys is pretty simple. Just hit the like button and if you have questions as we're going, comment those. We'll bring them up as time permits. Of course I selfishly have my own questions we're going to ask first, but once we get through those we'll start bringing up your guys's questions. So if you need clarification or anything like that. Before we get going, Darren, welcome to my community. Appreciate you being here. Stormy, good to see you. And Sam, appreciate you being here. So yeah, just feel free to comment any questions or clarification that you need as we're going. So turn it over to Mike. Mike, welcome to the channel. Could you start us out by just giving a little introduction of yourself, who you are, and then we'll dive into business mastery. Sure. So hi, everybody. Thank you, James, for having me on your podcast today. I really appreciate it. I love doing these kinds of things and really just sharing information with people and hopefully changing the direction of their financial future or at the very least creating some thoughts in their mind that there are different ways of doing business and making money and supporting their families and creating their own financial legacy. And what I do is I buy, grow, and sell companies. That's what I do. And just to give you an idea, so we take small companies that might be a million dollars or so. Now, this might sound big, but it's really not. It's just like trying to buy a house today. So essentially, all the same strategies that people use to buy houses using creative real estate financing strategies, we take those same strategies, we apply it into the business acquisition world where we're able to buy businesses with none of our own money. So we don't use our credit. We don't use our own money to buy these businesses. And these businesses will throw off anywhere from 300 to a couple million dollars a year in profit without having your credit, James, or my credit or your money or my money in this deal. We structure it a different way. And then we grow that company. And ultimately, we exit out of that if we want to. We don't have to. But generally, you'll exit out, get a lump sum of cash, and then you can go invest that and do other things that you may want to do. So my thing is, and just to give you an idea, right? So one deal that we're working on right now is we're doing something that's called a roll up. And this might be new language to everybody, but this is where you take a bunch of different companies that are in geographically different areas, you combine them together, and you create one larger company. So this is a roll up. So in our current roll up, we've taken it from a one company acquisition that was initially two million dollars in value. We've added almost 40 more companies to that. And in two years, we've taken it from two million, not two, two million in valuation to over 220 million dollars in valuation. And we've done that in two years, all with very creative financing strategies. And these are companies that run themselves. And there's just so much behind the scenes that we can get into. But just to give you an idea, right, so you can buy a company that supports you and your family, no money or credit out of your pocket pays you 100 to $250,000 a year as a salary, you have no cash in the deal, and you get profit sharing in that business, which is typically about 30% of whatever the gross sales are, that's your profit. And the opportunity is really endless. And people just have to say, you know what, I'm willing to open my mind up to something a little bit different. This is not ecommerce, although we do buy ecommerce companies. So this isn't about starting a business from scratch at all. We buy existing companies, have the sales team in place, the employees in place, the profits are in place, everything is in place, you just step in and you take over. Way different than starting a business from scratch. I'm a little long winded there, but hopefully that's good. No, that's good. I love when the guests can monologue a little bit. No, I appreciate that. This is really intriguing to me and I want to dig into this because a lot of the issues that people, my community, my audience tell me is, hey, I don't have capital, I can't start anything, I don't have ideas, I can't start anything. And so I felt like when I was looking around, this was one of the things where I felt like, hey, this kind of takes away those excuses and provides opportunity. Before we dig into it a little bit more, can we hear just a little bit about how did you get into this or what was kind of your first experience? I think it's inspiring for people to kind of hear how someone like you went from being, not that you're not an average person, but going from like normal, you know, nine to five work into something like this. Pretty much average. Yeah. So I started out, so I'm ex-military. After I got out of the army, I'm trying to figure out, okay, what do I do with my life? And I realized that I was okay as an engineer, just okay. But it turns out I'm much better at business. So I love business and I started looking at how do I invest my money, right? And I started investing in real estate. So my actual background is really real estate. And then I transitioned from real estate into business acquisitions, because anything that you talk about with real estate investing, if you replace the words real estate with business, it's the exact same thing. And that's what I figured out. And fortunately for me, one of my early mentors who was teaching me about real estate. And so, you know, I had to pay him to teach me, which was totally fine. It's a pay to play kind of model. And I was okay with that, but I got really in depth on how to make money with real estate, whether that was wholesaling, fixing flips, dealing with foreclosure, commercial property, raw land. I started playing around with all of that different stuff. The challenge with real estate for me is that when I did a deal, I made great money, but then I had to go find another deal. And if I didn't work, I didn't make any additional money. And so that was a little bit frustrating for me. So I wanted something a little bit easier where I didn't have to put in as much work and I would get paid while I sleep. And that's where turning into business acquisitions and owning businesses that other people run for me on my behalf, that I don't have to run them at all. Will I be the chairman of the board and I'll oversee it? Of course. I'm not just going to advocate all my responsibilities. I hope it works. I don't want to do any of that. So I transitioned from real estate in the business and I still do real estate today. I just don't do it the same way that I did back then. And I'm not hands-on with anything. It's just to me, real estate is another business that I run. And then I have all these other businesses. So now I'm a part owner in three different private equity groups. We're buying and growing companies all over. We're doing mergers with other companies. We're doing IPOs. We're doing all sorts of different things. So I went from army to engineer to business acquisitions, which is where I'm at now. Hopefully that will be pointed again. Yeah. No, absolutely. I resonate so much with what you're saying about, I had the same experience in real estate. I was all excited to be a real estate mogul, but then I just found it was too much work. It was really not as much money as some other things I was getting into. So no, totally resonate with what you're saying through that. Can you walk us through what is Business Mastery University and what do you help people through the entire process end to end? Can you just walk through what it is that you offer there? Sure. So Business Mastery University, it's not a real university. First off, it's not accredited. It's not like that. However, the difference between us and what we do and what you get at an actual university is we actually teach you stuff that works in the real world today. So our goal is to educate you on finding a business. How do you negotiate it? How do you do due diligence? How do you come up with the funding or structure to do? And ultimately, how do you grow it and then resell it? So we can teach people from, oh, here's a home study system, which is not my preferred way, because now you're dependent upon that person doing all the work. What I really like to do is more of a done with you model where we will partner with you every step of the way. We'll help you negotiate. In fact, we'll negotiate it for you if you need us to. If there's money needed in the deal, and sometimes there is, if money is needed in the deal, we'll either raise the money or we'll take money out of our private equity group and we'll put it in the deal. But then we become your partner. We're a part owner in the business with you. So we can go from A to Z, holding somebody's hands, doing it on one deal, five deals, 10 deals, whatever, or let somebody learn it and do it on their own. So we have it kind of from A to Z. Okay, very good. No, that's super helpful. One question I know that my audience is going to have is how much capital do you need to get started? I mean, can you do this with no capital or do you need at least a thousand dollars or something like that? And along with that, who would you kind of say that this is for? Is this for pretty much anyone or do you have to have kind of an entrepreneurial spirit or what would you kind of say to that? You know, let me try to answer it backwards and start with the last question first. So I would say that what somebody has to have is they have to have a GSD attitude, a getting ---- done attitude. So if they have a good attitude, I don't care what their education is. I really don't, right? So when I hire people, resumes are most oftentimes, they're not accurate anyway, right? What I care is, do you have the ability to get stuff done? If you can have the ability to get stuff done and you've got the attitude that says, I'm going to figure this out and I'm not going to quit. I'm not going to quit when it gets hard. That's all I really care about. And to answer that first question, which is how much money do they need? They don't really need any money to get started. You know, could you have maybe a couple of hundred bucks if you wanted to do some mailing and stuff? Yes, you could. That'll make it a little bit easier, but there are ways to find off-market deals online that once you understand what you need to say and how you need to present yourself, you know, kind of like a picture frame, you see some pictures behind, right? How do you present yourself to a potential broker or to a potential seller? It's more about that. The rest of the stuff, we could put up the money for you in order to get this deal over the finish line. So it starts making money for both of us, right? So it doesn't really require money. If they have money in education, great, that helps, but it is certainly not a requirement. And I think that's one of the things that's really good. Well, you know, let me give you a little bit of background about me, right? Kind of go back for a second. So when I first started in real estate, I didn't have any college education. I started my college degree when I was in the army, but I finished it when I got out because it was something that I wanted to do. And I thought I needed to do it because of my engineering job. So I got a bachelor's degree in management information system. I didn't need to go any further, but I wanted personally, I wanted to go to school and get my MBA because I thought I wanted to get into this world of mergers and acquisitions and stuff like that. And I wanted to play with a big voice and I needed all these credentials. Well, the reality is I don't need any of that, but I did it out of my own desire. So I got an MBA in finance and an MBA in real estate. 90% of that stuff I don't use today. Today is based on real world activities of how does stuff actually work? Not what you get taught in school. What you get taught in school is years behind and it's theory, right? They say, oh, well, you got to do this. It's like, but that doesn't apply to the real world. Let me give you an example, right? So in my marketing class, in my MBA degree, I wrote up a whole business plan and marketing plan for how to make money with assisted living on single family houses. My professor gave me a C on that marketing plan. I was pissed. Well, I went on to make over $6 million doing the exact same thing I had in that marketing plan before I then sold the business off. So just because a professor thinks it's gotta be his way, doesn't mean it's what happens in the real world, right? So you don't need a lot of money to buy businesses because it's about, well, let's look at this way. If somebody wanted to partner with us to have them or help them go through this process, they can leverage our reputation, our expertise, our teams, which we already have all this stuff in place and then do a deal and then we would partner with it. Would we get a percentage of ownership in the deal? Yes, because we're bringing stuff to the deal. So when I would do, for instance, real estate investing and I had no money to do it, I would get an investor who would put up the cash. They took half of that deal because they put up the money. I did all the work. That's how most real estate deals work. They put up the cash. I do the work. We then split the province 50-50. To me, that was fair because I didn't have the money. Without the money, I couldn't get started. So I was like, okay, I'll give up half of it. And as you build your portfolio, where you build your bank account, then you can actually use your own money and your own deals and then you can start to scale. But real estate is much harder to scale. Business is not hard to scale. Did that answer the question, by the way? Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. So much of what you said, I resonate with. We could probably do a full video on just the deficiencies of the education system. I did computer engineering and they were teaching me computer stuff from 30 years ago and not anything about how to make money with your programming or anything like that. So I totally resonate with that. There's a Bible verse that says, hard work brings a profit. Mere talk leads only to poverty. And I've found that's been so true of so many people who want to get out of their nine to five and so they have all these ideas or whatever, but looking for people who are actually going to get stuff done, like you said, get it done, do it, stick with it and make it happen. So love that. No, that makes a lot of sense. So again, if somebody wants to get involved, they can apply. There's an application that they can fill out. How much time does somebody need to commit to do something like this? I know a lot of people that are watching have a nine to five and maybe just have a few hours in the evenings. Is that enough to make something like this happen? About two to five hours a week is all I ask of any of our new partners. This is not rocket science. It's a methodical process that you go through, right? You got to figure out, okay, well, what kind of businesses do you like and do you have any experience in? Now, if you don't have any experience in it, that's okay. It doesn't mean that we would ignore the deal. So for instance, when we're looking at businesses, we have very specific metrics, meaning that we want a certain amount of revenue, gross sales. We want a certain amount of profit. We want a certain amount of abilities that if we have to raise the money, how fast can we pay our investor back and how much profit is left over at the end of the year, so we have very specific metrics. So we get rid of any guesswork. I hate guesswork when you deal with money. I want to know exactly what it is. So I try to break this stuff down so that people can actually follow a proven system that's worked again and again and again, and it works across multiple industries. So for instance, we own e-commerce, we own kitchen cabinet design, we own dental cabinets, we own engineering companies, title company, you name it. We're probably in almost every industry, which most private equity groups can't figure out how to do that. They have no idea how we do what we do. Now, our specialty, by the way, is focusing in that $10 million valuation and lower. Now, the reason for that is $10 million and higher is where you have a lot of the Wall Street boys, they like to play in that $10 million higher because they have a certain amount of overhead and so they only want certain value businesses. So somebody started out, they want to look at a $20 or $30 million business and they have no experience in the business and they have no money. Well, odds are it's not going to work because you're competing with the wrong market. But if we're working at $10 million or less, there's typically not much competition because here's a statistic for you, is that 8 out of 10 of the businesses that are listed for sale never sell. 80% never sell. Now, the reason could be lots of different reasons. Either the finances weren't right, it was an owner-operator business, or the owner just, you know what, he wanted way too much for it and he decided, you know what, I don't care, I'm just going to shut it down. And it's amazing to me how many businesses literally will just close their doors, even though they have employees who have families, right? They close their doors and everybody's out of a job and that business just disappears. It happens all the time in every industry that you can think of. Yeah, no, and I can relate. Actually, I exited, I sold, I started a business, a software business and sold it back in 2020. So I'm very familiar with this process and so no, this is amazing. And yeah, when you're at that smaller side too, the less than 10 million, they haven't quite hit that inflection point of this, you know, the massive scaling that there's opportunity for. So I'm sure that's kind of what you're hoping to catch. I should ask this because I get in trouble for this a lot. As an American, we forget that the rest of the world exists. This is available internationally, right? Or is it, this is US only or international? Oh no, yeah, we do deals in South Africa, Australia, United Kingdom, Mexico, all over the US. We're now working on a couple of deals in Costa Rica and one in Mexico. Oh, and Chile. So yes, the only difference for me personally is I prefer to work in English speaking countries so that I can understand the paperwork and I don't need a translator. In the event I'm in a country where it's not English as a dominant language and I need a partner on the ground who speaks the language who can then act as that interpreter so that I'm not missing something, whether it's a subtle nuance in a language or how somebody talks. So I need somebody that understands it fluently, not just somebody that's learned the language. Does that make sense? Yeah, nope, absolutely. No, thank you for clarifying that. A lot of times I'll be talking with someone and the audience will get all excited and at the end they'll say, oh, by the way, this is US only. So no, thanks for answering that. No, it's international. The only difference between what we do here in the US and let's say the UK or Australia or Germany even is the paperwork is different, right? So the process and the negotiation, the metrics, all of that, the review of the financial, the due diligence and negotiation, all of that is exactly the same. The only thing that's different is the paper because you have to match it to that individual country. Other than that, it's the same. Okay, gotcha. Nope, very helpful. And then can you talk about, so if somebody fills out this application, applies to work with you, can you kind of talk about the fees on your side of things? Like how do you get paid and will people need some money to pay for, if you get accepted when you apply, what exactly happens next, I guess would be my question. Great question. So it just depends on how much they want us to participate with them. The reality is, right, we want to teach somebody what we do, but we also don't work for free. And I think everybody that's watching this would respect that, right? So we don't just give things away. Where we make our real money though, is on the back end when we partner with people. Some people say, Mike, I want you to partner with me. I want you to help me through every aspect of the business. And okay, cool. We will do that. But somebody could get started for as little as 299 bucks. I mean, that's nothing, right? So you ask the question way in the beginning, does it take money? Well, not to buy a business, we can bring all the money, but I have to train you and educate you on what we do and how you go through this process. It's just like if somebody were to say, oh, I'm going to go out and I'm going to start making money in real estate investing. Okay, well, what are you going to do? Where's their education going to come from? You can only go get so much free information off of YouTube. Sooner or later, you need to dig into the details, look at the actual paperwork and contracts and negotiation scripts and things like that, and models and software. You got to learn all of these different things. And generally you pay in order to play, but it doesn't mean you got to pay a lot. You just have to make an investment in yourself. So one of the things I look for are people willing to invest in themselves versus they just want me to invest in them, right? I used to give all this stuff away for free. You said, well, Mike, we'll give it away for free. And I did. And everybody said, Mike, I guarantee you, I'm going to bring you a deal. And you know what? None of them ever brought me a deal. Why? Because they had no investment, no skin in the game. So they had nothing. So how do I get to whenever? And they went on to the next shiny object. And I don't blame them for that, but if I'm going to take my time and my team's time and invest in you, I want something from you that shows you're willing to invest in yourself, whatever that amount is. Does that make sense? Yep. Nope. Absolutely. I've said that a thousand times. People don't take free information very seriously. If it comes to them free, then they kind of have an attitude that this is worthless information. It's free information. And then not a lot of guys, right? Yep. Exactly. Okay. Very cool. So when someone applies and joins the business master university, and this might be a very, it might be a very broad question, but how long should people kind of expect before they sign up to when they start to see some fruit from it? And I know that might vary wildly, but. Yeah, it's a very broad spectrum. And I'm going to try to answer it a couple of different ways for you. So the first thing I want to say is, I don't know what somebody's desire, their get stuff done, their GSD is, are they going to go at it and go find a deal right away? Or are they going to kind of, oh, I'll get to it when I get a chance. And I'll look at it a little bit here. Oh yeah, I know I got to watch those videos. I'll do it next week because I'm busy this week. And it drags them on before they even go through any of the training or before they get on any of our coaching calls. I don't know, but let's assume they go through some of our materials, they get on our training calls and they start implementing exactly what we're showing. They should start finding deals within hours of going through that. Now, whether or not that deal is a deal that we want to pursue depends on some of the spreadsheets that we use. You put in the numbers, it'll tell you if it matches these numbers, we want it. If it doesn't match these numbers, I don't care how much you love the business, don't do it because we're not going to do it. So if you want to do it, do it on your own. We're not part of it. That should tell you a lot right there. If we're not willing to participate in the deal, the deal is not good enough and it will not make enough money for everybody concerned that, because I don't want a hobby. Okay. And I don't want anybody else to have a job that's a hobby. You know, if you buy a business and it throws off $50,000 a year in profit. Okay, great. For you, that might be okay. But for me, as a private equity company, how do we really make money on that? Even if we split it up 50-50 and we had 25 grand and you had 25, well, now 25, you're thinking, well, do I really want all this hassle in running this company for $25,000 a year? But the answer is no, they don't. So if they follow what we teach them, every business we look at pays the person. So James, I'm going to use you as an example. So you come into our system, you go out, you're looking for deals, you find some businesses that match and the numbers match up. It's going to pay you $100,000 to $250,000 a year as a salary. That's one. Now you look at how much profit sharing is there based on the profit margin of the business. So if we're buying a $3 million business, which happens to be our average size business, we also look at that business having at least 30% profit or more. It could be a little bit less, but we want extenuating circumstances to understand why it might be less. And there's lots of businesses that make 30% profit. So if a business is doing $3 million a year, let's say in just gross sales, and it's doing a 30% profit margin, so 30% of $3 million is $900,000 a year in profit. Think about that. So if you've got a business that's paying you $100,000 to $250,000 a year, James, that's you, $250,000, plus you're getting 30% of all the gross sales, $900,000 in profit. Even if you split that up with us, you make $450,000 plus your $250,000, you're making $700,000 a year. Is that enough for you to pay attention and change your financial future? I think so. I think the answer would be yes, for most people. Yeah, for sure. It really is, right? But can you get those kinds of numbers in real estate? No, you can't. No, not even close. And we can go and triple that number and then resell it. And then all of a sudden, now you're getting a seven-figure paycheck in your bank account when we resell that company two, three, or four years later, or whenever we as a team decide that we're going to sell that company in the future, or maybe roll it up and do a public IPO. I don't know. Okay. So again, now there's going to be another broad question, but I love just asking these grenades, throwing them out there, and then I just hit mute and wait to see what you say. But what would you say is the success rate for people that come through your program? Do 90% of people end up finding a deal that's making them $500,000 a year or something like that? Or what's kind of the success rates that you've seen from people? If I had to guess, I'd probably say it's more around 40%. And I want to be realistic about that. And the reason why it's about 40%, most people don't want to do the work. So they'll look at it and say, you know what? It's just too much work. I don't want to do that because they're focused on other things. They want to go out and party. They're working at their regular job. They've got kids. They've got family. They've got all that stuff. And I get it. So we created an alternative way for people to make money. And that is if they just find a deal for us, put it into what we call our database, our deal database, and then our other partners who are looking for deals get that deal and buy it, they can still make upwards of $20,000 just for doing nothing more than online research. So it's a different way, right? They're not participating. They're not buying a company. They don't want to run it because some of them have no desire to do any of that. And that's OK. But this is a way that you can make a $20,000 check. Or if you want to leave that $20,000 in as equity as we grow the company, over time, it'll be worth well more than that $20,000. So it's a different way for them to kind of get started. So again, it's like, well, how fast can somebody get started? I don't know. It depends on their circumstances. But for the people that stick with it, now that number actually gets up to about 80% or higher for the ones that stick with it. But for the average number overall, it's probably about 40% because a lot of people say, well, I like what I learned. I'll look for deals sometime in the future. But they're in no hurry to do anything now. So the alternative is, hey, if you find a deal but you don't want to do the work, send it to us. We'll pay you a finder's fee for that. And that's as high as $20,000 just for finding the deal. So it's an alternative way. OK. I love that you have different options for different people based on what capital they're bringing in and how much work they want to do. It seems like there's a lot of different ways for different people to make money from this. Let me just throw one other thing in there real quick if I can. People have different money and stuff like that. So sometimes we want investors who want to participate in our deals. So I'll tell you exactly how we do that with our investors. So for instance, if I'm buying a $3 million company, that's going to require about $300,000. Now, it doesn't have to be all one investor. But let's say it is. Well, that investor would get equity in the business. So they're going to give us a loan or a down payment. We will give them equity in the business. And we will pay them back all of their money in 12 months. So they're essentially riding on the bank's money after they got all their money back in less than a year. And they have equity in the existing business, at least 5% equity or more in that business. So then they get profit sharing. We grow the business. They get more profit sharing. We sell the business. They get a big lump sum, what we call equity kicker. At the end, it gives them a somewhere around six, sometimes seven-figure profit at the end of the day as well. So I just wanted to throw that out there as well. No, I love that. My audience knows that this question was coming. But have you ever considered using NFTs to fund some of these deals? We've had a lot of luck raising money via NFTs. So maybe that's something we could talk about offline. If you know how to do it, I've been focusing on what I know works like clockwork. So the process that we go through, it works. So our busiest year, we did 27 acquisitions. So think about it. So that's a little over two a month. So if we did 27 acquisitions, these are multimillion-dollar deals. Our smallest deal in that scenario was $3 million. And our largest was $85 million. So you add all those numbers up, and it tells you the volume that we're working on. And I know this stuff works like clockwork. And it pays me again and again and again. So if you're an expert in NFT, please teach me. I'm happy to learn that way. And if this is a way to make these other deals work, I'm all game. Okay, awesome. We'll talk about that offline. But me and my audience have been doing that a lot. We've been raising money via NFTs for different... There's not a lot of people who have 50K sitting around, but I can get 100 people that have $500 together. And as an NFT, we can go into things together. So we'll talk about that offline. It would work for what we're doing. And then they could share in all of that. Now they can say literally to their friends and family, hey, I own part of this business over here. And it would be true. So yes, I would be very interested in that. Okay, cool. We'll talk more about that. And I wanted to give an encouragement to the audience, which I think, Mike, you would agree with this, that I bring on these different opportunities to make money. And what I see happen a lot, even with myself, is when you first see it, you get all excited and you think, oh, this is I'm going to do it. And you kind of think, oh, it's going to be fairly easy. And you're excited and you sign up. And then all of a sudden you start to see, oh, it's going to be a little some amount of work. And then a lot of people, that's where they're out. They're kind of like, oh, their excitement goes down and they kind of drop out. And what I'm hearing from you is this is the type of thing where if you stick with it, you can be successful. But just like any of these other opportunities, real estate's the same way. If you give up when the going gets tough, then you can't be successful when you give up on things. So I would just encourage people, if you decide you want to do something like this, stick with it, make it happen. And don't jump from one thing to the next, but stick with something and make it happen. So I just wanted to give that encouragement. You mentioned something about when people don't stick with things and they're looking for an immediate payday. So if somebody wants an immediate payday and they want to make an extra $1,000 or $2,000 or $3,000 a month, this is not it. It's not it. But if you want to transform your financial life and you want to have $100,000 to $250,000 just as your base salary on a company that you don't run, somebody else runs it for you, which means if you're making $250,000 a year, you could be in the island. So I live in Colorado and I live in the Caribbean. I have a home in both places. I spend most of my time in the Caribbean and I run my businesses from there. So this is what I do. But if you want to, going back to the topic here, is that if people want to really have a different financial future, yes, it's a four-letter word. It's called work. You got to put in some work. Most people want that. I want to push a button. I want to make money. Okay, you make a couple of hundred bucks. You paid a bill or two. Well, now what? You got to go do it again. Wouldn't it be better to invest a little bit of time in yourself and your future and coordinate with a team to help you do this so that all of a sudden it's paying you six figures every single year whether you really work or not. That becomes financial freedom in my book versus, oh, it's like watching the movie The Secret, right? I'm going to visualize money falling out of the sky. It doesn't happen, right? I mean, that's go play the lottery if that's what you think is going to happen. You got to put some effort into what you want. When you focus in the right areas, you get the same results. Crappy focus gets you crappy results. Determine getting stuff done, GSD, getting stuff done focused means that you're going to get great results. Those are the people that I really want to work with. Yep. Nope. I concur with all of that. That's awesome. Stormy says, James, this is the best project to do an NFT project with. Yeah, we'll talk about that. I think it could be potentially something really good. Dustin says, my dad always said, quitters never win. Winners never quit. Hated hearing it as a kid, but love it now. Yeah, totally, totally true. Transform my financial life. Yes, that time has come. Sounds like, yes, some interested people in the audience. Again, I'm a marketing guy, so calls to action is what I always like to kind of finish up with, but calls to action. If people are ready to go, they heard all this and they're like, hey, I want to give this a shot. It's as easy as just there's an application here. I put that link in the description. I'll post it again here. What if people have more questions? Is there a good way? I know you have a webinar too. Do you want to kind of just give some calls to action? Go back to the other page there real quick. There you go. Right there. That's another 54 minutes worth of training right there. I'm revising it again, but it'll cover some stuff that I haven't quite covered here. But if you do the application, you'll end up talking with one of my team members to answer all of your questions and figure out what's the right path for you. It's not a thing where we're saying, oh, you need to go do this. It's not. Well, tell me where you are, where do you want to go, and what resources, time, energy, relationships, money, whatever it is, these are all resources that you have to put towards the business and how fast you want to get there. Then we'll help you figure out a customized plan. Because otherwise, oh, you got to go do this. I don't know what your background is. We need to know a little bit about you. You'll notice on that second page of the application, it's like, oh, tell us a little bit about you. So now when my team gets on the phone with you, we can actually speak intelligently to try to match what you just wrote and to help you figure out a strategy, a blueprint that gets you from A to Z so that you can get your first business. And by the way, our goal is to get that first business in less than 90 days. That's our goal. A year from now. No, no, I want 90 days. We want to find that deal and get it done. Okay. No, that's helpful. That timeframe's helpful. Scott has a good question. Again, we've had a lot of people on the channel and we've had good people on the channel. We've also had some not so good, more scam type people on the channel before, but he wants to know what percentage of your company's profits are from selling this training versus actually doing deals? That's pretty easy. I don't have the exact number, but I say I would feel real comfortable half a percent to 1%. We don't make our money training and selling training. We make our money by doing partnership deals with the people that we help buy companies with. So let's just go through the math. If we buy a $3 million company and we own half of it, let's just use that because the math will work easier. And that company's making 30% profit. It's making $900,000 a year in profit. Let's assume it's selling for $3 million, has $3 million in sales, has 30% profit. 30% of $3 million in sales is $900,000 in profit. If we are a 50% owner, I make $450,000 on that one company. If I do that at two, three, four or five partners, each one of those, and let's round that $450,000 up to $500,000. So the math is easier in our head. And I've done that across five people. That's $2.5 million every year without doing any additional work. Which one do you think makes more money? Selling information products or actually doing these deals, which has all this profit on the backside? And by the way, let me give everybody a perspective. So I finally did some studies on all the deals that I did and my friends who are in real estate, the deals that they do. And the average small house investor makes about $37,000, $40,000 a year, or excuse me, $37,000 to $40,000 in profit on a small $100,000, $150,000 house, which that's really hard to find now. But you make, let's say $40,000, $50,000. It turns out that the average real estate investor will need to do, excuse me, 97 of those houses to make the same amount of money I make on one business transaction. Just to put that in perspective. And how many people do 97 houses in three years? Not many, right? That's $30,000 a year, right? They're not going to do that, but yet I can make the same amount of money on one business deal that somebody else runs for me than a regular investor would have to do on 97 houses. And I can speak this over here on the real estate from personal experience. So I know, well, hopefully, did I answer Scott's question, I think? I think so. Yeah. And Scott's great. Scott is great at asking the pointed questions. I'm kind of a nice guy, and so I don't sometimes have the hard-hitting questions, but Scott has the good ones. He has one more. He says, is it realistic to find companies that are selling for roughly $3 million doing 30% net? It seems like that would be incredibly cheap and unlikely to find for that price. I might add on with that. Do you find that most of the deals you're doing are on distressed companies, or do you find a lot of, you know, these are settled companies that are good to go, or do you find that most of these, there's a lot of work to do to kind of get them to a presentable state? Okay. So a couple of questions there. So finding companies that do $3 million with 30% profit, not a problem at all. You just go do a Google search business for sale. You're going to find over a billion search results, right? They're out there. And that's just working with brokers. We have off-market ways, meaning we can find businesses that want to sell to make those same numbers, $3 million, $4 million. My biggest thing is I wanted to make 30% profit. The reason I want 30% profit, it's a hedge against me messing up somewhere in the business when I take it over and something's not going right. I still make enough profit to cover all the bills and still make a little bit of profit at the end of the day. That's why we have a 30% margin. And they're all over the place. Just depends on what industry you want to be in, what state you want to be in, or what country you want to be in. I don't really care. I care more about the math, the finances of the business than anything else. I feel like I forgot part of the question on that. Yeah, my question was, do you find that most of these deals are kind of more distressed companies that need a lot of work? Okay. These are all good companies have been around for sometimes 5, 10, 20 years or more. So for instance, we just closed on this kitchen cabinet design company. It's a $2 million purchase. They originally wanted $3 million for it. We picked it up at two. So we got a million dollars knocked off. It makes almost a million dollars a year in profit. It's been running for 20 years and the people are ready to retire. They just want out because they're ready to retire. One guy wants to go fishing. The other one wants to go gambling and drive his RV around the country. Okay, cool. So they're two partners. They want to do that, but we're able to take over the business, which is a thriving business and they have more business than they can handle. And that's typically what it is with the businesses that we buy. We want good, positive cash flowing business. We don't want ones that are running in the red. I don't want to take over somebody's business that has problems. Now we have done that and we turn those companies around, but I don't want anybody that's listening to me right now to look at distressed companies. It's too much work. You don't know enough about how to negotiate with creditors to knock the debt out, to pay it down, to re-engineer everything. Well, let's focus on something that's nice and easy. Focus on a company that's around $3 million making 30% profit and let's negotiate that deal down. And they're easy to do. So let's focus on the good stuff. So all of our deals that we buy, well, that's not true. Not all of our deals. The majority of our deals, I'd say 95% of our deals are good, positive cash flowing companies, have good teams in place. We just step in and we take over a successful business from day one. It's got all the teams in place, the marketing in place, the sales in place, the accountants in place, everything's in place. We just take over and we make money from the very first day. Unlike a startup where you got to build all that stuff and hope to make a profit. Yeah. Nope. Absolutely. Well, this has been awesome. Very educational. I think it really helps me kind of know what's in here. Again, if you're in the audience, you're interested in this, two calls to action. First off, if you want just more info, you're not totally sure yet. You're not, ah, is this something I want to get involved in? Come here and just watch this webinar. And I even have this tool. I can watch it on, you know, speed it up just a little bit if you're, if you want to, but watch that and see, is this something that I think I can do? And then if you want to move forward past that, then again, this application, um, and you can get started with it. And I just encourage you, if you start this, see it through, make it happen and take control. I have a, I have so many people that talk to me. I want to take control of my finances. I want to get out of my nine to five. Um, but it, it takes some work to make that happen. It's not going to happen on its own. Um, and so put in the effort and we can see some good results. So, well, I think we'll go ahead and wrap up their audience. I appreciate you guys so much. Thank you for hopping on. Please hit like on the way out. Um, Mike, appreciate your time very much. I know you're a busy guy and appreciate you taking the time to come present this. Um, we'll be in touch more. Uh, maybe we can chat about the NFT stuff and, um, but yeah, no, appreciate your time very much. Thank you very much, James. Appreciate being on the call. Hopefully everybody that's watching with us, whether it's a replay or watch now, I've got a lot out of it. I mean, hopefully my passion comes through. I love what I do and the difference it makes for people in their lives and not only for their life, but their family. And, you know, it's kind of like that rocking in a, that you throw in a way that ripple effect, because when you succeed, the people around you, they start watching what you do and then their mindset starts to change. And then they start to succeed because at first they're going to poo poo your idea. Oh, that's not going to go. That's not going to work. Go back and get a regular job. And you know, you make 20 or $30 an hour. It's like 20 or 30. I don't want that because I know that I can make this happen and I don't need cash or education to, to actually get these deals done. It just takes that GSD, that getting stuff done attitude. So, I'm done. I'll get off my horse here. I love that. No, I, we could probably just keep going. Cause you know, there's never been a time that I've seen in my lifetime. I'm, you know, fairly young, but, um, where we've needed, uh, more than just your nine to five, we needed more financial freedom than you can get with just having your job. Cause inflation is going up. The price of everything is going up, you know, buying a house for a lot of people in the early twenties, it seems so far out of reach and, you know, just coming up with new income streams like this, I think is going to be key for a lot of people, but it does. I like that, that get GST, uh, attitude is what a lot of people are lacking and what it's going to take to be successful. So awesome, Mike. Well, Hey, appreciate it, brother. And, uh, we'll, we'll be in touch and we'll talk more later. You got it. Thank you, James. Thanks everybody. Thanks everybody. Have a good rest of your evening.