A Masterclass On Flipping DTC Brands For Millions With Mehtab Bhogal

it will go down as one of the best private equity deals ever over the nineteen years they put two hundred twenty six million in to weight watchers and got five point three seven billion out four point seven billion of realized profits alright what's up we are back and we got another episode we got a guest here today may tab is here he's a he's a friend of mine who most people i think probably probably haven't heard of unless you're in the d world or you're on twitter or you know what's going on that in that area but i wanna introduce you because you're somebody who a has helped me a bunch of my d brand you like no bunch of tips and tricks and hacks and shit like that so i'm like i basically have a little score board in my head and everybody's attributes are there and in yours it was like business hacks was like filled up and then the other thing was that you i don't know if you listened to the show regularly but you would send me little nuggets of like oh you should talk about this she's talk about this and so i kinda got confidence i was like oh i think he's just got his back pocket full of interesting stories that are off the beaten path and so i kinda like that do you listen to the show first let's start there yeah all the time almost religiously so say to shower podcast oh that's that's perfect we are the number one rated to shower podcast for the country i millions of men lat to us so sam i sent him a picture of the vancouver show where like the stadium or like the the theater was filled up and he goes wow oh that's a lot of virgins and i that's hilarious not true that's a good my my fiance listens to the show religiously too and she wouldn't use chat gp when i told her about it maybe a month or two ago and you guys mentioned it the other day and she was sending you screenshots so guys car heard using that dude the der pod i i think you're referring to the da mesh pod i've been using it all again after talking to him i implemented a lot of the stuff that he was talking about man he got me hyped up also what a lot of people don't realize this you is da mesh pods always get tons of views on youtube and finally sean like texted da mesh chat i was like hey da what are you what are you doing it goes oh nothing really and i go really and he goes well i'm just taking you a few things and he like gave this like very detailed list of like internet marketing not hacks but he was like i'm just like testing like buying ads like five hundred dollars here just to test this and then i'm like responding to comment just like the small stuff that you wouldn't expect someone who runs a twenty billion dollar company to like be doing and it it's very tactical we don't even do it with it's our own podcast we don't do any of this stuff like people are like oh the thumbnail the the title people don't realize we don't see those we don't approve those we don't know about those we're not involved in it we don't do a lot of this stuff that we probably should but you know can't be bothered to do all that stuff but he did he did do said they say the devil and the details and i ain't trying to hang out with him dude he's the man like he was like i'm not doing anything then he had this like what really long actually mate you said us phrase to me the other day i called you and you set a phrase that i've stole and i've just been saying all around town i've just been saying it everywhere even when it's not really appropriate because i thought it was so funny sam i was talking to him and i was like oh you lived in like are like you're living in utah why utah like aren't you like canadian and you're like indian like what's going on here and he was like said yeah my wife something something and i go i i asked you something about your wife he goes he goes yeah you know me he goes yeah you know i i looked like i got beat with the ugly stick but somehow ended up with an awesome wife and i'd that happens that happens come here beat with the ugly steak was so funny i've been using that everywhere i use it to refer to my business finder all the time so oh you take him down with you oh always yeah it's might don't too i don't know google with him he he's pretty handsome how how old how old are you i'm twenty nine wow i'm looking interesting because he does stuff that like you say words that most of people don't say so i i pay attention to vocabulary so for example in the tech world in means and sam used to live in san francisco and you couldn't go outside you couldn't poke your ear out the window you wouldn't hear the word eb nobody says eb in san francisco nobody knows about it nobody talks about it it's not a thing but then when you get into like the cash flow business kinda world that's all you're gonna hear a bunch of a bunch of different people talking about words i have to do with profits you say a bunch of other words like dividend recap distressed buyout and he talks about all these things that i frankly don't know what they mean what they do how it works but i know that you come from a little bit to different world so i'm excited because i wanna talk about some ideas from your the your neck of the woods you're part of the business world that is less of stuff i'm less familiar with personally and so i think i'm gonna i'm gonna learn a little bit where where do you wanna start what what what topics should we start on you set to doc with some things i wanna i wanna look at some of these let's start with one that on sean i need a little bit of background here so you you basically i like i read your medium post so if i understand this correctly the name of your holding company you guys buy into or you buy entirely outright distressed or d only okay performing d to brands and you make them great is is that the summary yeah that's the gist of it and less of a avoid cohen and more of a an independent sponsor sir if that makes sense and that just means you on a deal by deal basis so the equity that you're working with might be very different on a deal by deal basis that doesn't make sense i don't understand what's fine what do you mean when you say fine so it just means that we're the ones making the investment and say on one deal sean's a c investor with us and then on the next deal only sam's on the cap table with us and you run it or you hire ceos or what it depends on the the portfolio company right now i am day to day with one of our portfolio companies and how many do you have like seven i think no there there's three platform companies and then there's another eight ten kind of minority equity and debt positions that we have and the whole thing is roughly of what size so me and listeners understand the core platform companies which is what our would count is part of the revenue because we own the majority of those companies is well are the eight figures it's kind of that that minute eight figure range got it is the biggest one the the flowers company no that went slightly smaller than the succulent company but the flower company is the one of most bullish sean that with solo wood flowers dot com and that's just because there's a lot of room for margin expansion yet so what's that that's the one you talk about the most so so let's give let's get let's give you said three platform companies so you said a succulent company mh solo wood flowers so it's a like a wood or fake flower company correct yep made it made in our other language john that yeah be exactly so made in india people buy them for like weddings and things like that right because flowers are super super expensive at weddings and so these look really good but they don't cost as much as fresh flowers or whatever let's like what's the third like majority owned company that one's an apparel company not apparel company okay yeah and so you own these three let's talk before we go into the details about each of these i wanna know the origin story because you've told you've told me some interesting things like i think you met your c cofounder on reddit like in a subreddit yeah yeah and so get take us back go go all the way to i i see here something about about about getting sick at seventeen start there and then tell us the story of how how you got to this this spot now when you're twenty nine years old yeah so the quicken dirty version is essentially diagnosed with spinal stenosis and to generative distances disease when i was seventeen so meant you know obviously doing anything physical for work was kind of out of out of the picture so i decided to learn more about e commerce and entrepreneurship and just kind of stumbled i i started a a facebook page called guitar porn and this is back when organic reach was awesome you know you post something people would actually see it facebook blessed with so much free organic reach it was the greatest time ever almost like tiktok is now right and then i transitioned i started doing basically guitar runs like semi me custom guitar runs with big brands and we'd partner with a a retailer dealer this is before brands of work with you directly right and we would sell out these pre order runs to basically take cut eventually we cut out the retailer and became the retailer ourselves that got kinda low seven figures that was nice because there was no capex so we didn't have to have much cash right it's all pre orders after that i started a men mentor product company which is really ironic i'm i'm sick so i i don't cut my hair and i was turban and so did did that with one of my best friend that also scaled the kinda low seven figures along with a guitar company that scaled the low seven figures and then after that i decided you know these are all fairly small like tam really small for niche guitar pedals so i decided to start investing realize hey you know no it's gonna come to me just given weren't even doing guitars you were doing guitar pedals specifically so the first company was a guitar retailer like actual full long guitars and then do you have the one that was really profitable was guitar pedals just because the margin wasn't insane and i partnered with a a guy who had met flipping guitars like trading guitars with and he was grammy dominated guitar right he is it plays a bad called periphery for any metal nerds and so that went well like those were both flowing well in terms of cash where small opportunities were your products any good or were they kinda you're just good at the marketing because that's my that's my kinda rub with a lot of d companies is they have pretty shitty products but slick marketing what no the products are awesome i mean i have like thirty or forty thousand posts in guitar forums by the time i was eighteen so i really was in guitar play six to ten hours a day so i i definitely knew when it took to me to good product so oh okay cool yeah i mean like a lot of these companies like i'll see like dude these are shit or like this is some alibaba crap that just wrapped up and something a little bit nicer but it's still pretty crap like there's no r and d like made it as a cis superior product you know what i'm especially with like a lot of the cosmetic stuff like lotions and stuff i'm like i don't know man this is kinda crappy so did you go to college because it sounds like you were doing these when you were like eighteen nineteen twenty twenty one is that right yeah i was in school and then i dropped out but just didn't make sense to stay in school what did your indian boys think about that they were not they were not big fans of it that was yeah what was your like dropout out point was it like i'm making x dollars and the x was just like too big to or you just didn't have the time to go to school what why did you drop out it just didn't seem like the value was there relative to who i was had the opportunity to interact with on the business end and it just seemed like there was more opportunity there if if that makes sense that obviously i doing okay in terms of cash flow so so how old were you when you made you know this podcast all my first million how old were you when you ended up making your first million in cash or or equity yeah cash i don't know i'd probably put it like mid twenties early twenties like twenty four twenty five and so you you did that through these kind like smaller e comm things and then how'd you get into this kind of like private equity style thing where you go and you buy these distressed companies and you turn them around so how did that happen yeah so yeah in the great recession but i was a kid reading about it i was thought it was interesting reading with private equity firms that made money no matter what like if the company did well or it failed and i thought hey that sounds great i hate being an entrepreneur because obviously it's the company doesn't do well you fail right and that's still a case it's not like yeah it's just not as black and away anymore so i started i figured having explain that why would it why would it make why would it work whether the company does well or not that does well explain how that works yeah we can try that a little later but part of our thesis is essentially investing on how much liquidity or cash the company can generate in a short term basis so if you can invest today and pull most of your cash out within two or three months there's a lot less risk right versus say you bootstrap something new you're always putting more and more cash on the working capital side you need to fuel growth right if if you're doing a traditional consumer where brand it's less of an issue for something asset light like saas right but but that's case then you you don't actually end up pulling cash out of it for so long so where most people focus on equity appreciation you guys focus on liquidity you guys focus on how quickly can we pull cash out whereas most business people just think how do i make this worth more which often results in putting more cash in is that correct right and that's just one facet of it we're okay with holding to the long term or being more long term focus if if it makes sense and sometimes we're just more of a short term partner and like it's not uncommon for a software company to sell on the low end for three times revenue on the high end if it's fast growing ten times revenue what you just said was you're gonna buy a company for basically one six times because you said you wanna get your cash and i can't do that math but you wanna get your your cash back in two or three months so you're buying at one six times profit or of cash flow i mean like like nothing give us give us a sample deal economics so in a situation where that happened yeah so we invested in an adult health from wellness on this retailer which is a nice way of saying sex toys that's i'm in utah so you yeah but what what why don't say the name of the brands because you don't wanna you don't wanna talk about it well if they're distressed it's just kind of got it okay yeah just culturally kinda mean to them so i i'm not like that but the and i i can send them over i think i shot them over to sean but yeah so we we invested essentially at it's a a fairly far below market evaluation just because others were unwilling to invest in in that kind of company and this was twenty eighteen back when it was a little bit more taboo than it is now now there's a few publicly venture funded brand like dame etcetera in that space looks become more socially acceptable but we we got in for our below kinda of market valuation the come give give us a gives us a sense so revenue was about x and then what was the distressed what why was it distressed they had too much inventory they had a debt problem and what was the i would say it was more of a case of really bad margins and there's a clear case to improve those margins they were so just originally a drop shipper they're doing like six million here this is one of our for deal so they're very small they're only doing six million a year and i'd say market for that for valuation like the growth equity side would have been like ten fifteen million as far as valuation back then we got in it like one and then the company paid us a royalty until we paid back in full and that initial cash investment and then there's a few other kind of structural things going in but we got involved and we helped boot up there why would a company like that sell for one million dollars i think that's i think if i'm listening that's my question right like yeah he said that total six million and normally that's like ten million of value but they bought it for one and how you're you are you just mister charming or what why were you to to buy at at that price so that one was a minority equity investment and we got involved like really hands on operationally so my c founder who jumped in and he helped them food up there their physical operations and transition from a drop shipper to holding their own inventory and booting up ops here in utah he helped them launch that facility make their first few hires gm etcetera and then i helped them raise debt to fuel growth and that kinda took them from that six to twelve ish mark gotcha gotcha okay and then we sold our equity just by a secondary to to vc firm that invest later once that value been created okay gotcha so so continue on so you you you've done some of these so you see so i wanna go back to to sort of how did you get this idea so you you read about this you're like alright private equity has this trait where they can buy stuff at a certain price or on certain terms so that they get their money back quickly whether they they you know their equity portion is small they have a lot of debt and they get the money back quickly you read about that but still you've never done that so how'd you decide to actually go it how'd you figure out how to do it yeah so i just started posting on reddit to try and find initial deal flow and then i met which sub one guy just the entrepreneurship one so i'm at my c founder who i still work with now alex through that subreddit and that i met a lady who was one of the first few engineering hires at uber eats and she had ended up retiring like eight months after we start working together when when uber ipo and then the other one was someone with a very traditional background in private equity and he's the one who had taught me a lot about private equity if you're just what building a relationship through reddit dms or like how are you like i don't meet anyone on reddit what what is actually happening here sounds like you met some pretty high quality people and actually trusted them enough to partner with them yeah it's the same way you meet people through twitter i guess right just posting can you know people i'd say that the community there is very low quality on reddit versus twitter and some other private forums like you e ipo what sam has going on right so there's was a lot of filtering to be done but we did sort the deal through that that's how the succulent company was was found okay gotcha okay so sam what do you wanna do for you wanna talk a little bit about flower company thing or you're talk about other brands that that that he's got on this list i wanna talk you have you have three whoa wow shit you have five categories or four three categories you have frameworks you have interesting ideas and opportunities and then you have under the radar companies i would like to start at number one under the radar company i read those i read that reverse order number one under the radar companies do you have things that i've never heard of and i like i'm pretty good at finding these unheard of things yeah so let's start with simple one so tell us about josh frogs yeah and like this one of these types of companies this is one of my favorite companies says all the characteristics of a company we'd love to invest in oh and i've i've been trying to invest in it since twenty eighteen but he he says no so it's okay though i still love so basically josh frogs does exactly what it sounds like they i don't know if you call it farming breeding they read their own frogs and their exotic and they also grow the bugs that they eat and they sell the food but they do all of that in house in michigan and they ship it to customers so if sam wants a frog tomorrow he could order one from josh frogs and they've scaled really cleanly totally bootstrap josh is awesome i called him on a sunday and the guy was catching frogs with his kids i couldn't believe it you know i think he's been doing this for fifteen and twenty years and he's still loves frogs and frogs basically do you know the price of a frog know what frogs are going for dude i'm looking at it i'm looking at it now i would've have thought like so you can buy a chicken at tractor tractor supply for like five bucks like a chick or yeah frogs are way more expensive and delicious yeah i mean they're the frogs here range the most expensive one is four hundred dollars it looks like the average one is like sixty to a hundred bucks for a frog these are peep they're beautiful but like i you know these are for pets like people want a pet frog so the go totally yeah this sixty dollar black poisonous his dirt frog right fair enough later on you you guys should watch the tour of his facilities it's really cool and so you like this business because what so what i what i really like is the steep ops mode so no one else your typical e commerce guy is not gonna go out and boot up a frog operation right it it's just too intense for they don't really like physical things we have to show up a lot of guys just use three p and it requires a lot of specialized knowledge the same time you know that someone oversees not gonna undercut you and it doesn't become a race to the bottom with v products because you you can't really ship a live frog from china or directly overseas to the us it's just not viable thank god so with that there's a very strong operating mode you're only really competing against other companies in the us right so you're your cost acquisition competing against like only people weirder than himself which is yeah exactly only gonna be like three other dudes in the your cpa you're sticky get cost acquisition of customers stays consistent doesn't really spike the way you see it spike in other like you know space josh frogs jack's frogs sam's frogs and you herbert frogs those has the the big four in the frog in street if you're josh if you're josh if you're josh from josh is frogs what what would you sell this business for or like what would be the threshold of okay this is interesting i'll take the offer or i'll maybe take the offer yeah i obviously i can't say what his eb does and if i gave you a multiple i would kind of tell you what his eb does is but i would say there's probably what let's say your average d business his size might sell and i'll just use a range for eight to ten x he would get a premium of a few turns on top of that because of that operations boat and it's not something just knock off right yeah it's a super super def defend yeah okay so and how did you even find this you know this guy personally or you found a need him i i met him through i did a podcast on commerce fuel and then he reached out and we just got along and i i always stay in touch with them him we like to it out we have similar the problems with their businesses so it's fun to discuss them with him like implementing lee etcetera by the way i just read i just googled josh frog revenue so it looks like they're on the ink five thousand so you can find it there but according to some articles they're in the range of like fifteen million dollars a year in terms of frogs i don't know if that's accurate and i haven't actually researched it but that's like just some sorry top searches that are showing that that's pretty wild yeah i think they're they're bigger than that now that's yeah this why there's picture of him on the about page and he just looks so happy this guy looks like he's in frog heaven right now i'm so happy for this guy just this one picture just like i i i hope to be happy as this man right here this is a good one i like this and i i think what's cool when you so invent in in the sort of like tech world right all the discussion is always just about like happy the future dream like the dream and state it's like what could this be if everything goes great and what i've learned as i talked to guys like i andrew wilkinson or the guys from enduring joint ventures or you with people who are buying you wanna buy you know solid stable cash flowing businesses that are profitable that's not the you know it's not the pie in the sky sort of thinking that you get silicon valley and instead it's basically what could go wrong so instead of what one could go right it's what could go wrong if i bought this company and that's why people love businesses like this that are that have this like you know def this moat so it's like no one's gonna compete with me not internationally because you literally can't ship the frog locally you know the average commerce bro is not gonna wanna like take this on now so who am i competing against i'm competing it's basically nobody which will let me that which means my business is extremely def and so it's just a different way of thinking that is less common when it comes to tech which is sort of like half asking to grow you know can this become huge can this kinda unicorn it's a different sort of like mindset altogether what's another example of an under the radar business that that's worth we're talking about talk about this fast growing trees one i think that one's a great example so similar similar similar operations about where obviously they're kind of growing the trees hey no one wants to be a tree farmer right it's not sexy tuxedo it's gonna go out and raise capital to become a tree farmer no no right that sounds kinda neat to me wait so so literally what what what what is it they sell seeds or they sell that tree what's going on both and the company i i first stumbled across the same way the company was being sold six or seven years ago and i think it went for between a hundred million to a hundred and twenty million dollars and it looks like they've grown quite a bit since then i wouldn't be surprised if they're worth closer to double that now just with their website re etcetera they a very like do really traffic estimate shows it went from it's like at almost three million unique a month that's pretty crazy for free website their website shows flower so here's their h one flowering trees are it you'd hate to miss out on the hottest trees of the season wouldn't you shop now over one point five million happy customers and so what you see is i don't know what type of tree this is but it's like a grown tree that's purple it it does look beautiful it looks it's a beautiful tree and i just think it's hilarious you'd you'd hate to the house flowering trees are it that's like you know like the like gen z people like he is him she is her if you seen this like this trend flowers trees are it this is awesome i mean it's it's a really def defense business it's cool kind of no no one really would really expect something like that to be that large right and so what do you buy you buy a tree that's mostly grown already and then they come and plant it i think you plant it i think it shows up happen and then you plant it my your property so if you want if you wanna treat to like for more privacy say privacy hedges or something similar or just trees in general this is where you go how much remedy do you get do your fix i have no clue now again i'd be really surprised if it was less than a hundred million in revenue this is yeah i a product closer like one fifty and what private prop what's about net margins would this be or net income or eb i'd be really surprised if it was below twenty percent probably closer twenty twenty five this is crazy and they probably don't they probably aren't buying too many ads i i they had a couple google ads but like it seems i bet you this is a type of company that they i mean they called their company fast growing trees for a reason i i imagine that was a search thing yeah yeah it's an older company it's been around for a while under a few different owners think private equity for runs it now ben who would've have thought that like you know when the internet came out it's like yeah people are gonna be able to like buy things online it's like there's some guy out there was like they'll buy trees online it's like no no no way no way why would i buy tree online it sounds like the most far fetched thing and then here we are hundred million dollars selling fast growing trees online you could buy this by way look at this italian cypress it's like the be perfect for the airbnb sam yeah i am bit i'm looking at this and i think this is pretty awesome like i like the it's they have some beautiful hedges there's like fruit trees i mean this is pretty amazing i understand this i'm getting to the aged now to where i appreciate a good tree yeah this is this is really crazy okay i like this one give us another under the radar business yeah what seems more appealing to you the numbers well let's do the betty one and then we've talked about this cs generation thing and we should but you have more info on it than than we do so let's do betty and then do the cs yeah so betty is really interesting business what i love about it you strong ip mode so if you go to their website well you can tell what they do what what do they do it's like a bed cover thing for kids i actually don't know how to explain it very well but it may it's so your kids can basically change the bedding really easily but they have it it's patented intended to have proper ip mode and when you go to their website you can tell it's stock very optimized but they've been crushing a totally bootstrap great people a very healthy eb margin and you know that i it's a duvet cover it's a duvet cover that's easy to zip which i have a zip duvet cover as well duvet covers are are pain on the butt to to it's it to dos it's meant for little boys so that makes sense so this they bootstrap this to forty million that's pretty impressive yeah i i'm pretty sure it's right around there yeah that's pretty good and you can tell it's all pm f like killer product market fit killer product killer ip mo and they've done a really good job with that end of the business what do you think are some of the app like i i i don't think this is like everything can perfectly do this but i think that when you like look at like a software company you think alright so what are the attributes of like a great software company that could scale you think like well they have to have good net retention meaning most people come back constantly ideally you can it's a expensive and enough product that you could afford to hire a sales team think like things like this like there's like a handful of checklist and then there's lots of examples of things that don't check check the checklist that still succeed but what are the handful of of check boxes that you have when looking at or building a d company particularly things that people don't think are true like for example like in the cool kids circle and when you're twenty two you wanna create like you know cool shit that gen z buys you're none nothing that you've mentioned it fits in that category right for us what we found is the most consistent mode and some people are are different right that's just the moat that's worked for us is that operating mode so anything that requires physical manufacturing has do had reason for the manufacturing to be in the us or mexico is great and we found that like i'm not sure if you guys are familiar with lean manufacturing it's just like a philosophy behind i guess running a manufacturing operation toyota thing do yeah exactly it ports over very cleanly from company to company but marketing does not right what worked with your paid ads for a company with let's say low ao but really fast consideration period so you know something like clothing i see clothing i buy it's very simple compared to the marketing side for something was a long consideration period that's very different different teams totally different strategy nothing will really carry over cleanly but on the manufacturing end it it carries over cleanly the company the company the company so for us that's that's our favorite amount so it summarize you you want a low consideration period and you want something that can be made in america because it has some type of manufacturing mode anything else well sorry we don't actually care about the consideration period i think it's just like an natural challenge in any vertical you get into right if if if that's there but for us we only really care about the manufacturing and now and then obviously the way we enter the deal is really important too and that just you know if you pay next to nothing for something the odds of making it work and making money on it are much much higher than if you over pay on entry i wanna talk about this agency stuff because you know the interesting thing about you know people like you and the d world is there oftentimes really really good at acquiring customers because it's kinda like like the d folks oftentimes are pretty good now before it was the gaming company so like if you met someone from a gaming company or from the the world like that meant that their internet marketing shops are like pretty good now that d or now that facebook is harder to buy ads on the people who are succeeding oftentimes are quite good at that and sean and i have a bunch of friends who are starting recruiting companies and right which is really interesting because recruiting companies isn't new outsourcing isn't new but people are putting sexy new packaging on it and i guess from what i'm guessing because you have it on here is they're doing a really good job or historically i'd been done a poor job of acquiring customers and you wanna apply that to that space is that right yeah i just think it's a really interesting space in general but i i think some of these agencies are really heavily focused on say the philippines or other countries in southeast asia we've noticed this a lot higher quality talent in places like mexico and you don't lose the same negatives associated with hiring the philippines are not there in mexico so for example you could build an office out there and fly out and be there in person in a few hours if you live in texas right and the wage disparities is not as high as you would think for really really good talent you're only paying a just a large number but you know it's not actually that bad a thirty percent more than you would be for someone who's great in the philippines maybe forty percent more in mexico but again you can visit them in person which is really big you can have them fly out and again it's big for us because we do a lot of manufacturing right so they can actually understand the product or interact the team in person so your retention goes up the quality of work is much higher and we found the quality of applicants is much much higher in mexico too so if i did start an agency would be focused on solely talent mexico and that just for for example when we're hiring a customer service role like a new manager of director we're getting people who used to head up you line but are you guys familiar line i just use it to buy like boxes yeah we use it a ton for like the when we had our our warehouse yeah for their customer service is awesome but we got one of their former directors and his salary ask was really reasonable like i think five thousand dollars a month but his tally was the equivalent of someone who's has two hundred thousand dollars in the us i can find this client in poll have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets are doing databases hubspot grow better yeah do you have one agency idea on here that i think is a is a no brainer which is site speed so yeah we have this problem with our store but i think everybody everybody has this problem like yep basically if you're selling something on the internet one of the easiest levers of the biggest levers you have is your site speed because if you have a slow loading thing you're just gonna lose traffic you're gonna lose customers as you have a slow loading page you're also gonna suffer in terms of your google rank because google takes into account your your page speed as well and it's really easy in the e comm space to have slow pages because what happens is you start with a shopify store you install fifteen plugins ins just to get your your shopify store to do anything because like you you can't basically run a shopify store just out of the box you have to you're gonna end up installing a bunch of apps and each app inject a bunch of code into your page and even if you delete the app the code stays there's so like you have to like manually clean that up which is kind of insane and probably a business of its own but basically site speed is a problem that we i think we've hired three different folks to try to fix our site speed and all of them i'm like they claim to do something i have no idea really if they're if they're doing a great job or not i don't think that they are because the next guy comes in and says oh man your side sweet sucks let me fix it so so i think this is a this is a a a product that i wish existed and i think could clean up because it's a it's clearly acc to the person but explain your you're thinking on it what did i miss yep so it doesn't really require much in terms of dev skill it's not like you don't have to be great at the dev to actually do host of these changes and it's almost like a checklist that's very portable company to company the company it applies very cleanly so for example changing the order in which your pixels fire for google analytics facebook ads etcetera you can delay some of those very slightly and dramatically increase site speed and it won't really hurt the business that much right that's just an example of one quick fix you could do or certain apps do not compress images properly so judge me the review app on shopify for for a lot of sites it does not properly compressed so if you just apply more compression to those images your side speed goes up at the product display page level or wherever those reviews are so how yeah would you acquire new customers for this honestly i would probably just just go have you guys used built with before yeah we love it yeah i just go to bill with full list of websites make sure they're they're doing a certain amount of revenue at least have meaningful revenue coming in just cross check that against suddenly that shows traffic right like a alexa or something and from there i think you just kind if their site slow right yeah just cold email i think it's just the way to go with this if somebody out there wants to do a site speed shop just dm me because this is a no brainer i'll be your first customer it'll help you get the ten because had you even just charge this you could charge purely on contingency two it's really cool because you can see a black and white effect yeah if you've done a good job and again it's really easy to do a good job it's just nobody specializes in this for some reason so yeah and it's a moving target like you'll do it and then like six to twelve months later they'll need it again because they've installed a few more things they hired somebody who didn't know how to compress images before putting it up they started using this new tracking software for for heat maps and then boom now you need it again because you you've gone a rank back to a c c rank have these like these site speed graders that are that are out there i'm surprised the the site speed graders don't have these agency or maybe they do i haven't actually looked but does gt matrix or were these companies that have the the site speed score do they not set offer a button that says by the way we could fix this for you no they should though to your point oh my it's really easy especially if all these e commerce sites are around shopify right it's very yes checklist yeah so that's the other move you should buy that site you should buy the site speed site that checks the speed and then just add this button at the end that's the agency service to to fix the problem if they don't do that already that's kinda crazy how are you how are you balancing your time it seems like you've got a bunch of stuff going on and these i mean you know ideas are worthless but it seems like a pretty good idea to me and when i hear when i'm hearing this i'm like oh that's kind of an i actually seems like that has legs you've got a good network you could probably spin something up fairly quickly and scale nicely how are you balancing doing everything that you're doing about fifteen percent of my time on the investment managing our minority equity and credit positions and then the rest of time just spent on the floral business there's a pretty big lever that we're pulling right now with booting up another operating base like a manufacturing base in mexico and that'll get our eb to kind of five million or six million and then from there it's it's a pretty good valuation so we just wanna get that over the hump that i'll probably slowly phase out but my c founder is solely involved in that company and that's the that's called solo wood flowers yeah yeah sam when i met job i i heard what he was doing i was like i i i told him two things i i think i go how do i invest in this because if you're willing to go down and move to mexico and build your manufacturing facility you're gonna win like po has this essay that he wrote called like sc and he's basically describes the guys from stripe as being willing to do do the sc work and he's like you know in a lot of businesses there's basically someone amount of sc that you have to do and for stripe they had to do all this like banking stuff that was kind of like a annoying and bureaucratic but they didn't really view it that way they were hey they were so young they didn't really know all was gonna happen they they didn't really realize how much they would have to do and b they were just willing to do it and and you know you you are willing to do the sc like you're like oh you know you're like i'm looking for operationally intensive things that's the opposite of what i'm interested in i'm like i want the least operationally intensive thing but i get why you would want it because it's super def defensive once you have it it's very valuable right once you do it that's very simple once it's fully set up if that makes sense once you've once you have like the best practices for lean manufacturing running it's very simple to keep a manufacturer running versus like a d brand that's really reliant on the marketing right yeah exactly and so i told you i remember being like hey can i invest in your mexico thing like facility there i think that's a great idea and then i also told you i was like man i feel like you play the game on hard mode you're super smart and you are like i'm gonna go do distressed turnaround of d businesses that's like multiplying three hard things together and i was like why do you do this you could just you know there's easier options and you were like no i like this i like you know it's fine playing in the mud once you get a really good deal you can't go back i'm i'm i need to get a good deal need to get a good price so yeah i think that's actually what it is i think it's a genetic that you're like oh you best deal possible a company that's burning to the ground you can exactly you can get it for nothing you're also i'm trying to find it but so your website's really good but you have this blog post or you have a bunch of blog posts on medium so card ventures card with a k k k should be on subs stack now i killed the medium so oh i found it on medium but but yeah it looks like it is also on subs but you're really good with language so like your thing starts off with like your your first sentence is just it's just good this is a guide and tend to give distressed commerce heavy business to give distressed e commerce heavy businesses with ten million to fifteen million revenue a high level overview of turnaround management basics and resources to dive into that's a great first sentence so you're telling me exactly what i'm getting and then you do a really good job of explaining kinda your background with alex your c cofounder founder you say you started up these things in your early twenties you took passive roles or you sold them and then you like help turn around ice dot com which is now called ice trends you met on reddit and then you say we welcome complex opportunities that others are unable or unwilling to tackle as a result we can invest in non control opportunities we can grow quickly but you just basically say oh here's another good line my team and i are responsive discreet and avoid pointless formalities we understand how critical speed is both in turnaround in high growth environment and we could tell you within twenty four hours if we're a fit and so you like you just do a really good job of being very crystal clear about what you're offering is and you right are direct but you're not rude and it's just a you you have a really good voice and you also like cite a lot of the books that you read so you talk about turnaround corporate artist tree and you have like a quote in the book and so anyway your language is wonderful sean said pays attention to vocabulary so do i you you have really good words you your your and your rhythm is nice what did you read to kinda come up with your perspective and how do did you how'd do you become a good writer you're you're you're you're quite good at explaining complex things i think we all grew up during the era of hardcore i don't know what it was but for some reason copywriting and being into copywriting was really popular from two thousand ten to two thousand thirteen maybe earlier what did you what did you learn for that or who where'd did you turn you for that one of my friends is just really into it so i got dragged into it too and just reading random books i think there's a compilation of like a hundred of the all time best sales letters that's back when like people used to distribute swipe files and stuff like that right so you just be on in a random group and someone would just distribute it and you just ripped through it and that's kinda how i picked it up it's good you're you're very good and what what were some of the other books that you read to learn this topic because you you learn this at a very young age yeah it's a corporate turnaround around artist industries one of the greatest books ever but it's written by mentor jeff stands and that guy is an absolute beast he's turned around handful of fairly large nine figure industrial like manufacturing companies everything from bakeries to i think large restaurants the ro restaurant groups etcetera and that guy is in his fifties i i think i hope he doesn't kill me if i got that wrong but and he just he just shows up so he sound like lumber mills etcetera he just shows up and turns the round within six twelve months absolute machine and his book gives you it's probably the most value in a book that i've read in a really long time it's just like tip after tip after tip and you can just take it and apply even if your company is not distressed it'll use juice profitability if that makes sense really awesome guys it's a complete machine i'm convinced he could drop them into anything and he'll just make it more profitable in six months and that's because what what does he like world class at doing does he do when he drop him in i'd say he's just very fast at making decisions he doesn't hold back in a lot of ways running a turnaround is like running a start up you you don't really have the benefit of sitting around to make decisions right like you're not gonna hire mckinsey to run a full blown study to see if you should do something you're gonna go and do it right and maybe you have some light directional data but you're not gonna wait for a ton of data and you're not gonna run some crazy q trick survey right you he's gonna go out and get it done and that's that's what he's really good at it's just taking action he'll show up for example when he turned out that that canadian lumber mill he he's americans so he just he moved and you have combine his kids etcetera but he still just moved showed up to lumber mill in the middle of nowhere canada and turned it around he's got it done no one also really do that right and there's a premium for that what part of this brings you joy why are you doing this other than it that makes you a lot of money i just say it's really satisfying and it's fairly repeatable so and i think the speed at which you learn is really really good right and it doesn't require a lot of equity to keep scaling if that makes sense so for example you can probably buy a relatively distressed brad doing a hundred million for maybe ten to fifteen million in equity i we had we're friends at mo and su ali so they right mo started native deodorant and i was like mo we're in san francisco why are you selling deodorant why not like do software and be normal make more money and he goes i'm a merchant man i'm a retailer like listen is just it's in my dna like i just exactly i make products and i figure out how merchant that's what he i've been working on these t shirt i've i've been working with the t shirt designer to do things and now i'm just on the lookout for these quota i'm a merchant he's that's totally said he he goes he goes i'm a merchant what that say it says carter cog and then this is a banana that says irr like internal rate of return that's so funny well and mo also said he goes foldable my second frame or he goes my first favorite phrase in the english dictionary distressed asset and and it was funny but he goes he goes i'm a merchant man like i and it says i don't know if it's like a like an immigrant thing or what it is but like his because i know their their family also owns homes like lots of single family homes that they rent out and they own gas stations and a lot of my indian friends of pakistani friends all do that they have gas stations things like that and i'm like i don't know ma'am maybe it's just something in the culture where you just like you're just geared towards small business but yeah and like for you is it the product that you like or is it just like i just like making stuff something that provides value and i just like optimizing it profit i mean what what do you think is driving you towards this yeah it's trying distressed sides it's really interesting because it's like a game of chess with the existing creditors existing cap table and kind of figuring out how to squish it together to make it work right for so maybe you have like really angry senior your lender and just convincing them like hey you know give me the position at decent price i'll come in and i'll turn it around and eventually you'll get right side up or at least you'll make more than you would just liquid these guys and then convincing with guys that you're getting the company from because they're often really upset right say companies during twenty or thirty million it's still run by the original founders in most cases and they'll be really emotional about it right rightfully so right so kind of figuring that side out is really really interesting and then obviously the operating end i i don't like it as much as my c founder he really loves the operating end but that can be a lot of fun too just coming in getting rid really the bad apples very quickly and then building out a team and kind of vaginal culture there's a story of what's the what's the famous the famous hedge fund guy who's probably in his nineties now but you you guys will know how carl icon yeah carl icon he tells the story on youtube but he's like i bought this company and it was not doing great but i thought it could be great and so we owned like twelve floors in this one particular building and i just went from in one hour from floor to floor to floor and i laid off the entire floor and he tells the story laughing he was like it was the greatest thing ever the the audience is like why you know you're ruining jobs and he's like but i'm making it better like we're gonna we're gonna have a better outcome and like i go both ways with them i'm like well you're kind of just you know like these hedge fund guys i'm like you're just like an excel monkey and you're just like squeezing every juice canyon you're not providing a lot of value but i do understand the satisfaction of just like getting something that's not fulfilling potential and achieving potential you know exactly you know what story i'm talking about where you like yeah i know the exact one what's same video did i get it wrong no you you know that you know that yeah he goes through four by far and and he he does exactly what he said and he's like glowing with like he's like pride i'm like carl you're just like ruining these people blushing no yeah layoffs just get a mont bothered yeah he's like i'm getting a semi just lay these people off but yeah and and i guess you're you're kind of in that position a a little bit i guess it really depends on the company right a lot of cases you have a few really good apples people left for really passionate about the company they wanna see succeed and they're their last people left and then you have all these people who are more or less just leaching off like the corpse right well what do you think about how elon done this with twitter i think it's great i think a lot of those people are really self entitled and they have no perspective on anything in a lot of ways they're they're kind of like the modern version of this companies the nineteen eighties that were really fat and over paying executives etcetera don't really feel bad for someone who's making up hundred gram losing their job right it's more people are working blue collar jobs where they're making forty sixty grand and they're working their ass off i definitely don't feel bad for any software engineer making three hundred grand who's upset they have to work ten hours instead of six don't disagree with you i just wish you would be less of an asshole when he was doing it you don't yeah yeah yeah yeah so that was kind of pointless like i think he made fun of someone who is disabled or something that's obviously horrible it's super appropriate brit and you you mentioned something about being in america and how like you know you like things that are in america when i does it ever give you like do you have any sense of pride around like creating american jobs because i know on your website you said we've created or saved two hundred different jobs in america let alone overseas do are you into like the whole made in america thing for like the sense of pride thing or is it strictly like this just this the if it makes sense it makes dollars yeah i think it it's a mix of both i think it really does make sense and i'm i'm canadian but i'm obviously crave for the opportunity that exists in the us know americans is just much more gun h about entrepreneurship they're more willing to write a check and just get involved than canadians are if you go to vancouver where i'm from it's a lot of older real estate families so they're not really willing to write a check well and get into something the way americans are they love taking rest and i really appreciate that about the us yeah man there's a was the thing i've noticed recently about what i call like the north star formula for for a business and so i like when you can boil down a plan into like a very simple equation so let me give you an example like sam with hampton i think i texted you this but i just said ten thousand times ten thousand so you just need ten thousand ceos we're gonna pay a ten thousand dollars a year and you have a hundred million dollar business ten thousand times ten thousand so it's like can i provide enough value where somebody's willing to pay ten grand a year and then can i get ten thousand people to sign up for that value your whole business comes down to that one equation ten thousand times ten thousand when i met when we were hanging out with andrew wilkinson i was like how much equity did you put into tiny originally and i think it was something like you know don't quote me on this but i think it was something like six million dollars he's basically turned six million dollars into like six hundred million dollars just says round numbers and six million to six hundred million if you wanna be the next tiny you you could just take that thing sit i'm turned six into six hundred okay how how we're gonna do that let's work backwards from that simple formula well i think i would need to compound at forty five percent annually okay how am i gonna do that well i need to buy businesses on these terms at these prices you a formula can be very instructive we have some friends that just raised eighteen million dollars somewhere where else was like what do you do with that eighteen million and they go we're just trying to figure out how we could turn we're like the the goal is to take this eighteen million of equity and turn it into ten million a euro of free cash flow i said like okay like that's a a clarifying equation and i'm curious mid have for you like in a best case scenario how will this have played out so like you you you go to the start i don't know how much how much equity did you and your cofounder put in as like your seed capital to get your whole business off the ground well kinda weird for carter we both had a few exits beforehand like he sold a company that he got cut low eight figures in his early twenties he'd put a bit of cash but we put in i wanna say a couple hundred grand like two three hundred grand start making investments you and so and maybe you've put in more over time i'm not sure but like whatever that we reinvest everything more or less yeah but like just the out of pocket like initial not not reinvestment from the proceeds of what you've been doing but just have you had to take something out of the checking account or savings account just to to to re to recap the business in any way or no was like two three hundred grand and then anything else we put in was reinvestment from what that two or three hundred grand has made us it was reinvestment from what that two three hundred grand that we put in initially was okay amazing so you're gonna go from let's say three hundred grand and like if this all plays out the way you want you know fast forward i don't know the ten years or however long you you plan to to kinda do this what would be the big win for you how much would the portfolio be worth for this to be like a you know a home run outcome for you guys yeah we are really goal driven we're a little bit weird that way but we both wanna tackle increasingly large distress deals so that's what we get pleasure from i guess just kind of fun doing it it we'll just keep doing it until we don't have fun so our goal really is get this floral company think can usually get to a hundred million in top line like our our allowable customer acquisition costs will go up by thirty forty percent once we finish with a few manufacturing transitions hold on so you don't you don't have you you're not gold driven what does that mean i i don't even that's like not english to how do you how do you function without without goal i i just like to do stuff just swear it's fun right dude he's like a dominic you're like the dom a pe you just get you just get pleasure just you get you get pleasure for like kinda like oh yeah you like that eb oh that's going on stuff that's funny linkedin some better and you just love the act man you just you just like the act you know someone you you you whisper whisper irr and your ears during you weak at the knees well just fun because he gets to learn from people like like you too or or hang out with other people that are really interesting and that's really exciting too right don't you don't you have them like a like a you know every a lot of people who get business they've like one day i wanna make all this money so i can buy you know a thousand acres or i want to create a school that does this or i want to be able to make sure that everyone in my family never has a dream medical a dream initial dream my initial dream and my c founders through this before we had i just turned out we had like the same target was to make like five thousand dollars a month that was it that's how it starts man how it starts so you really funny then you realize it you know you you know what i've noticed i i have all the same hold on hold on what i noticed this dude you didn't start like this i had the same and the goal always changed but you said when you started you guys have had wins under your belt so i mean before that like oh okay okay like early on like i did my first i was like i'm gonna be stoked if i make sixty grand a year okay yeah of course of course of course but what about now you know like what's like the what's like the vision the long term vision that you you that kinda keeps you excited maybe sometimes it's sometimes it's buying shit giving shit away helping your family whatever stoked right i think getting this one portfolio company the next level either selling it or re leveraging it taking out cash and then raising a large fund is probably like our our immediate short term goal the next two three years to when i was college that's so not what i thought was gonna be sorry go ahead what when i was in college one semester me and my my buddy trevor and our our the friend dan we we had read the the card counting book this was before the movie came out twenty one but oh my god the book bringing down the house was out and and we were like oh not only are we account cards we decided to create an underground blackjack club on campus and so we started preparing and we were like and because we had read this card counting book instead of just doing the obvious thing of being like cool let's just invite some some friends over to play blackjack at low stakes let's see how it goes and we'll go from there right that's how you would do it if you had any like any ounce of iq in your brain instead we were like okay let's go by this like fancy blackjack table okay cool we we now we're in the hole and we've got this like fancy thing and then let's run all these practice simulations to see how bad we could get beat and then what if somebody comes in count cards how much our security gonna be we're worrying about all this stuff that didn't matter and we spent no joke we spent like the entire semester at college which is like that semester cost each of us probably like forty grand just to be there and instead of focusing on the forty grand that we put into being there we were doing this thing and i remember one night we were calculating we were like oh my god if we do this we could make three thousand dollars and then we all started giggling like like can you imagine that like we were like dude what if we made three thousand we just think that's a thousand each and we were so pumped about this and it was like it just took over our mind like a mind virus for for for three or four months it made no sense but it was like you know the it was the humble beginnings scheming it was like the it was the first of many schemes to come with this same group of people we ended up starting a a company together and and did many more things together but like that first taste of the scheme and how hilariously bad your plan and your goals are like now when i look back i look back with a lot of fondness on that totally yeah it makes sense it's always starts small and then you when are you like your bought you bought the safe to keep the cash before you even had the cash and the cash came we never yeah we never even ran the ran the club because we like we were too worried about getting kicked out of school because we found out how illegal it was well basically we had one simulation where i was the okay we were big into these simulations and i walked in and i played i lost a hundred dollars and then i go give me all the money or i'm gonna tell people about this club and i was like yeah what are we gonna do if somebody does that like at any point in time somebody could just literally take all the money because there's no recourse what are we gonna do call the cops and tell them that somebody stole from our illegal gambling club if we look how this won't work before i sold my first company i was using some type of like mint dot com style service and there was like a thing where you could manually you know you connect all your accounts and it shows you your your net worth and whatever and they had this option where we can manually add something so i manually add this really big number and i would log in to this everyday day like six months in advance and i'm like sick this is awesome and i remember like when the money then actually came in i was like damn i i kinda like felt most of that joy in that six months leading up just like i kinda tricked myself and into already believe this was real the the the simulation kinda gave me like a lot of the joy it's pretty cool you can kinda like trick yourself into believing these things are true and you get a significant amount of satisfaction from that fake thing compared to the real thing yeah you you because what people want is the feeling you don't want the thing if feel if you ever say oh i really want x to happen why do you want x trick if you if you just keep asking why do you want that the the the obvious answer why you want anything of a relationship money whatever it is to have a a six pack whatever it's some feeling it's a sense of accomplishment it's a feeling of relief of real of less anxiety less stress whatever it is and then you realize oh it's not the thing i want it's the feeling and then you might be able to get the feeling through literally like faking it you might be able to get the feeling through something much simpler that's not gonna take you you know seven years and a bunch of heartache to get there and and also if you've never had that feeling before even when when that thing happens it'll be your first time having that feeling and you'll suck at it which is why a bunch of people feel after they get success they get like kinda let down because the feeling wasn't as great as they they wanted it to be the anticipation was better than the result and the reason isn't it because the feeling is actually a let down it's because it's the first time they've let themselves try that feeling and the muscle just very very weak and so yeah big big life tip is to realize like what you want is the feeling and then start practice having that on a daily basis through like much smaller things yeah it works may you i'm looking to you on twitter you have five thousand followers i think that being popular in social media it doesn't really matter in most all of business it in fact sometimes it's like negatively correlated to how popular you are but in your case i at least i know with andrew like when he's buying a lot of companies having some like you know it's basically being on twitter's a billboard for him so when he reaches out someone they're like oh you know i think i've heard of you fine let's have a conversation for how good it seems like you're doing and how smart you are your your social presence is significantly smaller is there a reason for that no i just don't really like it i i just love to post content about stuff that i actually care about and i'm fairly open and then i guess you on the distressed side i've when you're buying a business they're more in a forced seller right everybody talking to a lot of these senior lenders if you're working with it's a lot of guys that are in their fifties or sixties and they're very conservative traditional like banker types right they're not that don't really care about social media or anything like that so i'm i'm sure it does help the deal follow the growth equity side or buying healthy businesses but i've just never really been into it yeah i mean you have you have you do tweet interesting stuff it looks like what's a daniel roth wash it looks like a pretty fancy fan that you just a nerd about like neo vintage and vintage watches and then as well as some newer brands but mostly smaller ones it just kinda it's a lot of it's like angel investing it like if you buy into an early independent brand which just like a watchmaker basically going at it sometimes they can appreciate value significantly and you get a pretty cool watch for the money plus you support a small business they'll build you whatever you want so it's like a win win yeah your your social media is actually pretty cool i'm gonna follow you but you have some interest stuff but like compared to some of the stuff you're doing i know a whole lot of people in the d space that are significantly bigger than you and are much more of a little pip and don't ever walk the walk like you like you are you know what i'm saying yeah yeah i mean interesting leave us with this example of this weight watchers thing so explain explain what happened with weight out weight watchers than what we'll wrap super high level weight watchers saw doing so well and this guy this tiny firm thought not super small but relatively small he convinced oprah to join them and they absolutely crush it that's the very high level overview what he did and so this guy what what what what like what were the numbers so they what are they buy up and then i i have to pull it up okay so how do this guy know oprah by the way that sounds like you know oh simple he got oprah board that that's not doesn't sound that yeah twenty fifteen oprah is was a big deal that's pete yeah that's pete oprah that's like twenty twelve twenty twelve obama i'm like yeah that's speak oprah so in twenty fifteen he did a deal with win winfrey to acquire a ten percent stake in weight watchers since then the company stock is soared by almost six hundred percent they sold one billion dollars of weight watchers stock and oprah gained at least four hundred million so far okay that's pretty impressive it will go down as one of the best private equity deals ever over the nineteen years they put two hundred twenty six million in to weight watchers and got five point three seven billion out four point seven billion of realized profits yeah pretty good that's pretty good not including the stock that they still that's scale but they only bought ten percent of it to i thought they bummer more i think they kept buying more over time i thought they kept deploying more and more cash into it dude do we have to do a pod on oprah like i i love her i grew up watching her and like i i you know she's seventy now i just looked her up or she's sixty eight or something we forget or i forget like how big of a baller she is i'm like just googling it's like oprah buys another thousand acres in came from nothing and she peed bootstrap thanks she basically you know got got her net worth face something absolutely insane yeah what what's what's her story so what what what what do we know about the beginning of her story four born into really poor town abuse growing up etcetera and then absolutely crush it and she should runs for president i would totally i think she i think she was born in like an abusive family and like i think i think there was even like like pregnant at fourteen or something yeah and i think that there was some like sexual assault or some some some like some horrible of a tragic stuff and then at age twenty four i think she becomes like a weather woman or like a like a what what i they call we you're a news person but you're not actually in the office you're like out on the street street yeah she did that and then eventually when she's like thirty two or thirty three she gets a talk show but it's not like a hit right off the bat but it slowly starts picking up and then eventually she like makes some like groundbreaking deal she did like one of these groundbreaking deals sort of like michael jordan did nike what lucas films did with star wars where it's like you know we'll just take a percentage of the upside and and then that like turned out to be like one of the most you know one of the best deals of all time and and it's worked out and you know she did this all people were very very racist saw like that yes like i think was out of nashville national tennessee that she's doing this so the south and she kinda killed it we we need a how to take over the world episode on oprah what's what's going on where is our where is our definitive oprah episode why have you not done this already it's a real question for you ben put it on the list john you you put on the list you put at the top of the list but almost do this after this after this after this done yeah you got it i i'm mine my oprah on amazon dot com buying oprah bio is there an oprah biography i would totally buy that of course there is there has to be it i mean i she's she's the best i i'm a big fan of her and she like did this all a out of chicago so i think she still owns like the penthouse and the sears tower which is like you know one of the largest buildings in in in the world but no she's the best you know i always freaking about this so like i'm in austin and there's all these nerds talking about crystals you know you go to a therapist and they like recommend a crystal like there's like pretty woo woo shit out of here she was pretty woo woo but for some reason she made it very very likable like you guys remember that booked the secret where it's just like it's like if you think about it enough and like put it in place in your brain they the first grant you this yeah and like she like would she was talking about that stuff before eddie that stuff was even popular and for some reason when she does it it's a very tasteful other times my friends do it it looks like you know they're one of those women wearing like a coachella brown hat like you know and it's not cool at all don't know about those wide bread hats whatever i a zebra wet with turquoise jewelry i i run away i'm a choice you know if you work if you're wearing cowboy boots turquoise turquoise out yeah no wide hats hats for me i'm out you if you wear one of those things i i'm not part of this but for some reason when she does it i'm in well that's what i wanna know like i think the the story i've heard is like grew up in these terrible conditions if overcame and became super successful but i literally wanna know like what was the successful part like meaning how did she get her break and then like what led her what was she doing was it literally just better content like was she just that damn good and dynamic as a talk show host was it like the microsoft ibm deal where they like you know how does microsoft take over the world like well they cut this really great deal for the operating system where they could be you know with multiple providers at once and and they use ibm to boot bootstrap and that's how they got bigger like it's like was there like a growth hack was there a a smart you know deal that she struck was it the timing because like you know those show you know cable started spreading it into every home in the country and like she was one of the top three shows and just like at she got to surf the cable wave or whatever like i wanna know what actually led her to the the mega mega fame what were the actual those those things it's not like a simple answer but that's what i'm actually curious about because you could like in the air in the topics that i know about those stories are always the most interesting and i feel like when you when i go into other topics like i was like oh like what happened he was like oh started off bad now the best it's like yeah but act two the middle part that's the part anybody who actually wants to make shit happen in their life you wanna focus on too like hollywood focuses on act one and three right like the the bad origin and then the the happy ending but it's the montage the training montage wouldn't like you go from like sc to strong the training montage that they speed up through is the part where all the interesting shit happens i already told you gin i go billy the week on wednesday oprah i'm on it yeah there's this really cool book called messy middle have you guys read messy middle it's by what's the scott bell yeah the most dreamy guy of all dreamy guys scott be is the math scott be basically started there's guy scott be he started be pants which is where developer or designers would host their portfolio he started at b strapped it had a hundred and seventy five million dollar exit before it became very successful he said he had like fifty thousand dollars and he invested like fifteen thousand into pinterest at a three million valuation fifteen thousand into uber at a three million dollar valuation each of those you know fifty to a hundred million hour out come plus he owned seventy five percent of his company when it sold for a hundred and seventy five million dollars so very very very successful now he's it it's looking like he's gonna become the next ceo of adobe so huge deal he's got this awesome book called the messy middle and it talks about how like tom you know starting things can be somewhat easy but once you start that then there's once you you start it and there's the middle and you have the end and the ends the kind of the easy part you know things are just kinda working but the messy middle is that ten year period where like is this working it's a not working it's a really cool book on how to like navigate that period and it's and and i love that title the messy middle yeah great title great guy he came on the pod once a long time ago we should bring him back it's yeah he's on your like mount rushmore of dreamy dudes i feel like you got hub men up there you got be who else it's basically like men yeah i gotta yeah but jaw yeah yeah you need a you a good jaw and a clear cut john dude i've seen scott be john man he's got a strong i don't i'm gonna go chin talk talk about talking about not a distressed asset okay chi yeah means that's the blue chip stock right there yeah he also just dressed us well if feel like dressing well is this like really easy thing to do that nobody does and and he does an amazing job of it especially in tech i know he's he he's the man because he lives in new york dude all those guys are stylish he lives in new york yeah so he's got that leg up dude yeah i've never been to his house but i've been to his house i know exactly what a guy like that house looks like it's basically i can picture it so clearly in my mind of how imma like the design is under that guy's house he invested in the hustle you wrote us a very small check and i've got the paperwork for where to send the docs to immediately i looked up and i like saw and i could tell you i could tell you all fair it's exactly what you're describing you didn't even just you didn't even describe it other than do the big words and it's exactly your on here i wait i tried to in twenty eighteen when be hunting for deal flow i stumbled across the house like this is awesome i should try to invest in it so i messaged you on facebook but no reply so oh i'm sorry you should go pull it up it's just kinda funny this is your no i'm sorry sorry it's it's kinda funny if i would've have got that would've have been a good investment but it would it one of them i'm sorry you and maybe you would have known scott know i could help you connect with my with my boyfriend scott maybe you too could've have zillow scott wow he yeah we're we were friendly we're not friends but we've i've googled his house he's not googled mine you yeah i could tell you what couch has though but dude thanks for coming off thank you fine you're awesome i'm gonna go and find that i'm i just pulled up facebook i'm gonna find that message it's just kinda funny it's from twenty eighteen it's like hey i'm an angela angel investor please let me invest i'm like what you're doing what's your is here does your last name start with bog if you just type in b oh yeah i see it sorry there is thursday good deal flow would have been there i should have messaged you more your should've asked you dude i saw a a post on reddit yesterday it was a map i don't know if this is this might be fake news but it's the top who's is like one of the most popular popular post on reddit yesterday it's a heat map that shows the average life to life expectancy by town and there's literally a twenty year age difference between like new york california versus like the size it's like you know people in the south are dying at like sixty something and people on the coasts who are living like you know sort of the yoga and salads lifestyle are living till they're eighty on average and and then you can see these small pockets like in florida it's like the retirement community where people like migrate rent to yeah like they're all for a long time yeah the yorkers who moved down there they're living for a long time everything around it is surrounded by the walking dead of people who are gonna die at sixty something and there's like it's like boca rat kills it and then like short lauderdale it's like as a thirty year shorter life expectancy i i asked my data guy i said please overlay the a map of chick f a's and it was a perfect sequence to like to the dying early crowd which is unfortunate for me because i love chick f a chick f is not healthy over screwed dude thanks for doing this we appreciate you yeah the worries thank you