How Dave Ramsey Built His $300M Empire, Trademarkia, And MFM Rip-Offs

dave's back it dave's back in a big way in the big here's some things that davis said he says he has a six hundred million dollar real estate portfolio that is fully paid off so six hundred million dollars of real estate equity that he that he owns that's kind of insane his media empire which is like you know the combination of his radio shows and then all of the financial like courses training seminars all that stuff that they do outside that he says on their website makes three hundred million a year in revenue alright we're live what do talking about today i've got a bunch of good topics let me bring up one juicy one last year or two years ago you asked me a question you're like who do you admire i think you asked me that and i said this guy named lair hamilton lair hamilton is this like beautiful surfer dude he's like in his fifties now basically he's beautiful like we get we get acknowledge that he's got like beautiful wavy blonde hair and like a nice skin and he's pretty ripped for his age and he always was ripped he's like this tough guy that serves a big waves and whatever he launched this thing called what do you make fun of me because i'm driving with this guy this is not i don't need to make a joke because you've done it all yourself here he's a doll like this is like this is like objective like i've the state facts here he's he's a human ken doll he launched this thing called layered super foods have you heard of that it's like a coffee creamer that's made out of like coconut i think right anyway i they took the company public i don't know why they did that wow but they took a public at a three hundred or four hundred million dollar market cap at the time they were doing fifty million in in revenue look up the company now can you look to can you go and look up the do you know what their market cap is today let me find it i know what it was yesterday i don't know what it is today why would it be said different well nine million dollars nine million dollars so this company i if you click a i have a bunch of notes here you can click them and read but basically this company they sell like a fair amount of like coffee creamer so yesterday i think it was eight point eight million dollars dude so listen they have twenty million in cash no debt at all their revenue is decreasing so it like in q three it was eight point eight million in q3 three of last year it was ten point nine million so what's that like a like a like a four times eight so it it's a forty eight million dollar or or fifty million dollar year business but it's declining they're they have good decent gross profit they have an okay balance sheet but like the business for some reason it's valued so low i i'd have to dive deep into it and really look at the numbers but it's kinda ridiculous right so you were talking about wanting to buy a company you've said this before this is your target dude you get to hang out with a layered ham hamilton sounds like it's your target that sounds like this is like you know those things where it's like we're auction off a date with layered hamilton it's like a hug what why don't you buy this yeah and you you just bought yourself a nine million dollar hug dude why is this why is this company you haven't looked at this but why is this company so cheap no what is going on i don't know how much debt they have but none i said that there so i read their report they had their q3 three report never twenty one million dollars in cash zero debt zero debt so i never understand when when companies trade this far below their just cash value because you know the obvious question that is why do you not buy this thing for fifteen million and just wind it down and distribute the twenty million to yourself and make five million dollars you know like in the in sell the inventory they have like thirteen million or something in inventory okay interesting so yeah so i mean i haven't looked at this because you just mentioned it but but yeah there's a bunch of these right now that are like this there was one the other day that i that i saw that was kinda in the same same bucket but there's a bunch of stocks that are down like ninety five percent right now that seem like you know interesting takeover targets and we have a friend who was interested in doing this and so i made a list of like ten i was like here's ten that i think you could buy is this friend aggressive it's an aggressive friend got it i know okay i know which front it is how tight is that by the way just to be able to say this is an aggressive friend and you're like yeah i know who it is does this friend would would this friends say to a a bottling entrepreneur your business is one google away from me ruining you no i don't think up but maybe they they usually don't say things to to their to their faces like that they they're more just like an under under like you know those sharks that swim him only under the water they don't put the fin out he's more like that got it okay but like wish dot com was the was the other example that that had recently seen that was like this which is wish you know a pretty big brand name because they spent billions of dollars marketing this thing ten billion dollar market cap at one point now three hundred sixty million so ten billion to three hundred sixty million has seven seven hundred million in cash with no liabilities you know so so i don't know exactly you know i don't think i don't know exactly how you could buy these things i think that's the the challenge is like to actually acquire the majority in doing so you would push the price up because people would know what you're doing so i think you have to make like a tender offer at a specific price that's like you know what i whatever whatever you know some something above but you know the board will just reject it they'll say we have more cash than that on the on the balance sheet so we don't need to sell at this price i don't know exactly mechanically how somebody does this i don't know if this is like a you know fantasy math where you're like dude what if shaq was in the you know the hundred meter race you could just knock people over like do this not it doesn't make sense it's not how helping things work in in the real world so you know this like i idea of like public company takeover is not something that i understand you know is that like a trucking conversation you've had which is can shaq one the hundred meter dash you know the one thing about this podcast is the number of on the fly analog you have to create it just really brings it's a that's a different skill that's a different muscle and yeah the muscle not not so strong yet still working on it so anyway layered super food interesting company that i was that i was eyeing layered maybe a little less hot in my book now because as company worth it's only eight million that's a budget three hundred now he's just a really hot fit guy before he was hot fit and rich so he lost the third leg of the stool yeah he's still famous and famous trump's wealth in most cases in in most people's eyes but anyway alright well let me tell you let me tell you about somebody who is rich and somebody who is famous but he's not hot the move can i tell can i tell you dave are you familiar with dave ramsey yeah yeah yeah very tell me what you know about dave ramsey i'm gonna fill in some gaps for you so dave he's like a personal finance guru he's based out of franklin tennessee he's in his seventies he's probably now we started as a radio host where it was just like dave ramsey like show and then he par that like the dave ramsey network so now he has like four or five hundred employees based out of franklin tennessee and they do like four hundred or five hundred million a year in revenue where they sell like personal finance stuff a lot of his i think he's pretty controversial because a lot of his like rules his lot of his personal finance rules are based in like biblical like rules he also bleeds in like zero debt and he he's pretty conservative so people who aren't conservative aren't into him okay well you do a lot more than i would so get from literally guess the segment over like right like dennis you know this stuff what's be put on here he also bought all of his buildings without any debt so he owns like a campus in franklin tennessee yeah yeah so i sorry but said i i don't know recall you know well he spit my food but alright i'm still hungry green so let's go so dave he's sixty two years old he was a realtor turned radio host in the he's from tennessee so basically what happened is by his mid twenties so this like back in the so back in you you didn't know who dolly part was and she's also a tennessee person so like yeah i guess i lesson learned i'm not coming at you with any tennessee trivia or or a ringer of that stuff so by mid twenties he's got like a four million dollar property portfolio real estate portfolio and it's kicking off some cash maybe like five percent a year cash or cash returns so he's making two fifty k year off his real estate portfolio at that stage at this time nineteen eighty eight so the you know the year i'm born his bank basically revoked his line of credit and demands that he pays it back and he couldn't sell fast enough so he gets fore closed on and declares bankruptcy this is like the trauma of why he's like don't know debt no debt he's like dead bad dead bad why because i burned my hand on the debt stove before this and so he's like he got no money now he's you know his marriage is on the rocks he says he's could be you know considering committing suicide but you know he gets back on his feet so this is kinda like his story so anyways today fast forward to today dave's back and dave's back in a big way in the big here's some things that davis said he says he has a six hundred million dollar real estate portfolio that is fully paid off so six hundred million dollars of real estate equity that he that he owns that's kind of insane his media empire which is like you know the combination of his radio shows and then all of the financial like courses training seminars all that stuff that they do on that he says on their website makes three hundred million a year in revenue i believe it which is absurd i you don't know people that go to that what's that no i you know people anybody that goes so dude in the south it's a thing so i had texas employees and like if you're just like a normal couple where each employee makes or each wife and husband makes like six years or seventy grand a year you'll like pay to go to like a dave ramsey like he trains these financial advisors and they host seminars and you'll go to this like five day week nights thing where it's like instead of bible study it's like we teach you how to like save and like invest like guess it's like jesus on the front and a p and l on the back it's like dude this new remix bible i love it and so his his company ramsey solutions is absolute juggernaut or is insane so so okay let's break down down the media side so he launches this thing in nineteen ninety two and basically he's done content for thirty years about the same seven steps it's like this guy just been talking about the same thing i don't know how he feels like hours i have never listened to it to like a full thing but i don't know he feels like four hours a day of radio it's a good show just saying the same thing every time like you got debt pay that off right so he's got these seven tenants so here's this seven tenants alright number one you establish an emergency fund of a thousand dollars that's your first baby step to financial freedom and jesus bliss second one you wanna pay off all your non housing debts asap starting with the smallest one so that because this a snowball so don't pay off like the highest rate interest just pay off the smallest thing you can just to get momentum alright i like that then you increase your emergency fund to three to six months of income then you put fifteen percent into a four one k or ira then you start your five five you know five twenty nine plans or whatever like the college funds you pay off your mortgage and then you now you're fully paid off you got your you got your safety in that now you start to build wealth and so that's his like those are his seven steps his company ramsey solutions is a biblical based common sense financial education media company i'm not gonna lie that's far that's is far i'm absolute far like you know like far dude you know i was like hey youtube editor play that clip of like you know jay the first time he hears like the intro to like you know the with tim ti playing him a beat and he's like nice that's how i feel like i hear that the biblical based common sense financial education media company so that's amazing and then he's got you said you talked about this like nat like this tennessee like empire got he's got a thousand employees working there he wow the real estate so he's got he owns i i don't know this is correct the researcher might had just gone off the rails dude he owns a lot he owns a lot he owns two office towers that are two hundred million square feet that sounds absurd i that's i don't that that's two members not real you we gotta get the researcher you know stop drinking your your product that you were selling from from from college yeah one but but he's got basically like you know a fifty thousand square foot if ed center he's got sixty acres of just like property land that he bought for ten million dollars so owes a bunch of land uses that land to to run his kind of like yeah you know you know common sense biblical financial empire out in tennessee he's doing his show for three hours a day five days a week people call in and they're basically like alright dave you know longtime time listener our first time caller and you know there's part of it that's the sort of like my first meal i actually think we should steal his stick which is he goes yeah they'll call and they'll be like i i'm worth four million dollars and be like how how old are you like i'm thirty two years old we've got fantastic thirty four million he's writing notes this whole time and then he'll be like how much debt and they're like yeah i got my mortgage you know eight hundred thousand dollars and you could just hear him like to sit somewhere with a little a little disc you know it's like dad's disappointed in me and if he'll be like you know i'll make it this much a year i put this much away and blah blah and then he gives some financial advice which is kind of the same financial advice every single time but somehow people like get really into this this thing and and then the other things he does which is just these hilarious segments that he has so he's got everyday millionaire so somebody calls in and he interview somebody that's that's worth a million dollars but then he has and this is good the debt free scream have you seen this before well i i used to think that it was like the equivalent of ringing a bell like the the yeah he had like a he had a thing where people would call him like i finally paid off my debt and they like celebrate it they celebrate it with the debt free scream i think there's things we could learn from this guy i think we should steal some of this guy's stick and and so he's he's he's really got something going here anyway so you you wait you've never heard of him no no i've heard i didn't realize how rich ritchie was i just thought he was like someone's dad that gives basic financial advice because he's got the dad vibe he he's got the vibe of someone who calls diabetes diabetes like that's the you know what i mean like like the thing above your head is definitely a rough at him not a roof he's got that type of percent on the diabetes thing yeah it's so good five and the podcast good i need to now laugh for thirty minutes i don't wanna do the rest of the fine that's that's his vibe he's a little judgmental too and he's like this is the only way yeah he's got opinion i mean he's doctor phil for money he's exactly you know he he's got his thing which is like this is how you do things and he's like a guy with the big belly who wears spend is vibe you know talking about like like that like that type of vibe so is that wrong it just sometimes is energy i think is a little bit judgmental yeah yeah exactly yeah exactly okay i'm i was gonna make a bunch of jokes about his look but i decided to get it to turn the other cheek or whatever he would want me to do so he his his show is like nationally syndicated on radio which i think is like the hack so twenty million people a week apparently listen to this i don't know how they huge but like when i basically drive i would listen to it all the time yeah of course you did of course you're his target market so you know is basically carried by like six hundred radio affiliates i they i think that's amazing so he's got his books he's got twenty three best bestselling books i don't know what that even means but that's like their that's think that means that's their personality so he's got like his daughter does it now and he's got these other people like ken and doctor john and like all these other people that he's created as other other kind of personalities or brands and they're called the rams personalities so he's he's got them in anyways live speaking courses they got an app they have you know all kinds of stuff it's kinda crazy so let me give you some of his some of his tweets some of his tweets or quotes i want you to react to him with a hallelujah or a no brother not for me alright it's the first one if you're working and paying off debt the only time you should see the inside of a restaurant is if you're working there yeah hallelujah i'll give you that i have ordered hallelujah that's fine if you come to work late and they're paying you you're stealing don't steal and expect to be promoted hallelujah i'm a capitalist pig there's nothing socialist about me i'd put my re my receptionist on straight commission if i could figure out a way one hundred percent hallelujah love that one alright dave now you now you're talking about my style alright here we go if somebody calls in and they got more debt than their annual income he'll say that's a small shovel at a big hole i love that love dave bad dave right with that okay then he also says he quotes he quotes the proverbs twenty two seven in states the rich rule over the poor and the borrower is a slave to the lender no i think that that's wrong i think that you can use debt like effectively yeah to help for sure carries a gun guy's guys guy's awesome guy's awesome and i didn't need carries a gun carries a gun he carries a a a forty five with hollow point bullets according to himself you know what a forty five is that's a pretty big round yeah that's the biggest round i know of that's a big that that's a big round yeah so anyways fascinating guy in his sixties that like i i could not believe his empire generates this much cash three hundred million a year is a is a pretty absurd number for this dude and he's been doing that for decades it it shows you how the tony robbins empire must be like tony robbins says this thing during his his things because my business is bringing over five hundred million dollars a year but i didn't know what that means because like it's like when a ad agency guys like i've spent over a hundred million dollars you know you know hundred we've i've generated over a hundred million dollars of revenue like no dude you took the company gave you a budget you push spend yeah the average normal rate and you've done this for ten years and you added up their total revenue number like that that's not you or like you know a lot of people will say they own a hundred million dollars of real estate with and like okay cool you know so what's your equity in that and they're like well it's eighty percent bank loans so with bank loans eighty percent of it and then of the twenty percent down i syndicated that out and so i got a three percent broker commission on it and i own two percent of the of the property it's like okay let's be a little more real about it so to me it was pretty stunning to hear that he's got a six hundred million dollar fully paid off real estate portfolio and a three hundred million dollar year business higher if those numbers are to be believed i could also see this being totally full shit by the way no no no no it's not full of shit it's definitely not full shit i don't have any way to verify it but like i know his reach and i know that that is like very attainable to god yeah it's too to need to read a book on of words christian say that'll dude this flooding i have something in me today have you either going get canceled i'm gonna get a good laugh out of you and that is worth the risk me have you been south of the mason dixon man have you like been in the midwest what mason apparently not you went to duke but duke is not really the south the main of mice skin killers allowed south of the dixon and i don't know what that is have you hung out in like tennessee missouri kansas alabama you've never hung out in many these places have you look out it's something to do there you never even been i drove through but i came to california i had to step through the mud of the new midwest over there here dude you gotta go man you're wanna talk oklahoma i all jokes assigned so you know i got my southern street cr dude that's like certificate just because you've been to the airport don't mean you've been there that's like with this up of thing you gotta get out man even just go to like this sounds very get out is right if you're in tennessee you do gotta get out dude just exactly you're go drive an hour and a half north and go to a walmart and just chill and just watch what people purchase a under the gotta get out you a little san francisco bubble my man you gotta get out and see like there's three hundred fifty million people in america this is i gotta tell you my story yesterday i went to go i left my house for a meeting so i go meet somebody very interesting i might tell you about this later in the pod i go meet somebody very interesting and i'm deciding if i wanna save it to do a bigger thing or he's gonna come on as a guest or maybe i'll tell you about it i haven't decided it yet so do i know them no i i don't think because they're they're not in your world right like you know about dolly part you don't know about like you know the nba you so it's like a different different yeah not a big baseball guy so brought about my wife and kids came with you was like kinda kind of a long driver i was like why don't why don't we all drive down there together you know danny's six just drive them together we'll go to mcdonald's afterwards of my kids love like getting a happy bill toy so it's like we'll do that there's nothing none around us we'll go go out there so we go to this mcdonald's kind of out and you know i've driven an hour away we're go to this mcdonald's out there and there's a so i'm wait i'm like waiting and what i think is the line but we know mcdonald's kind of ambiguous with the line there's not like they don't have like the airport order at the checkout you have the self checkout too no well there's like self checkout like to the left and the right then there's the cashier in the front then there's some people just waiting for their order you don't know if they're in line or not like you don't know what's going on and so there's a guy in front of me and the cashier just like waiting and i was like i was like oh you can go she's ready and then the cashier just goes he doesn't have money i like pete my head in front of like oh yeah sure enough this getting that money and i was like i thought it was such a funny thing for the lady to say now he doesn't have money like so funny to be like so outrageous of a comment like why did she have to say it like that what it was the most direct life the answer like not like no you can go ahead he's not he's not ready or yeah he's not ordering he doesn't have money see while just in the book plants covered and he didn't even front he just kept standing there just hoping that you get out of know take someone's food that didn't show up or something i don't know what you doing i was in the bathroom at the airport recently and there was like there was like a line for the uri but it there was also like a line for the stalls and the guy who walks up to me and he looks at the the stall and he looks at me and he goes and you wait to poop yeah dude you just said the weirdest shit that and did you have to answer too right like you can't not answer at that point you know why am i why am i paying it playing into this it was just a dead base it's just looking at it goes you went to poop i was like a twelve year old i don't know why i thought that was so oh my god i have another business you wanna about business or no yeah yeah yeah course where idiots by the way if you're listening in austin we're doing an event well actually we're doing two events i think the second one's is not confirmed the second one is sean and i doing a live pod late april we're gonna have more on that right bro that's it's confirmed we're doing it we just don't know the venue yet we don't know the venue yet we need to know is it gonna be three hundred people a thousand people or three thousand people that's that's kind of the only thing that that we're missing here is how many of you will show up to this live show in austin where we can we're gonna we're gonna put on a little show we're gonna meet and greet have some fun maybe do a little private dinner with some people afterwards so so i think we should we're gonna do that end of april where do they go to like sign up for that put the link in the description here yeah and then go to what what's our website called m f m pod dot com m f m pod dot com which is like my first million pod dot com and then we're we're doing another one this one is not a weed this is a me sean's not coming to this one it's just a casual hangout session we're doing that mid when is when is that o a week mid march is it march fifteenth so wednesday march fifteenth it's free you could just show up and we're just gonna hang out and you can find that also on m m pod dot com or by the time this episodes air airs i will have tweeted it so you can go to my twitter handle the same part and see it sam i'm in a great mood can i tell you why yes i did something that i forgot is an amazing tactic and technique i'm gonna say it out loud here so other people could do it but also it's a reminder to myself to do it have ever heard of something called flooding no is that when you text someone i let us no i have no idea it could be a lot of things don't urban dictionary it's probably something weird but here's here's how i learned about it tony robbins talked about this thing so he goes somebody asked him to go what's like you know marriage like advice or a thing you do in your marriage that like you know makes it better and he he basically had like two stories that i i really loved i'll i'll skip the first one for now i've told it i teach it my course but i'll i'll skip that one for now the second one that he had said was he goes about once a month we'll do something called flooding which is basically us we sit down on the on the couch you know like we're about to watch netflix or something else but instead of just mindless out to some tv the we watch videos or photos we go of of some part of our pass some some era of our past so maybe like this vacation that we went on or our wedding or whatever and you basically you'll get this flood of memories in a emotion that are linked and anchored to those moments but most people don't like revisit in a kind of like in in a like like a conscious way an intentional way like this and i do this in two ways one i'll do it with like life photos or memories videos or or videos or photos the second one is and this is the one i did before this which is one blog or something ago go old pull up a bunch of videos that were really funny to me back in like the day back in college like back when youtube was like the new shit bombs world and like you know things would go viral but it was like yeah eb bombs world like things would go viral and like everybody knew about that that video you know whatever the charlie bit my finger or whatever but there's this set of videos that were so funny to me and they're not even that now that i go back and look it's kinda like an old movie where you're like dang this movie doesn't it doesn't hold up it doesn't it doesn't have the same juice like things are much funnier or now like take the average tiktok is funnier that the best videos back in like two thousand and six which which videos did you look at okay let's is get sound dumb have you ever received this video you know twelve year old boy disclaimer here we go i've visited this video of this cop pulling over this guy he's got his hands of above his hand like yep yeah yeah and he goes he's pat him down he goes he goes alright let me just check pockets hold on here we go hey what what's this and think guy goes that's my penis and he goes that's your penis and then he continues off and this video breaks me up just the way you go that's what penis get your penis and so there's that but then there's just a whole bunch of these that were like just goofy videos check a lot of them were like you know the news anchors interviewing some like that kid who like i like turtles kid or like the grape stomp video or like whatever this is a whole bunch of these and i want like six of them and they just cracked me up in this like where it's like a simpler time didn't least day wife at a mortgage and i didn't have it you know kid it's just literally that was like those videos were just took me back this is teleport me and so how do they recommend this this idea of flooding you probably have done some version of this on accident but like may it a practice it's pretty awesome and it just puts you in an amazing mood this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the clients whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot hubspot girl at him so i did it recently so i'm gonna tell a story that i we and i were texting about and i can't reveal what i was selling but because it was kind of against the law and i didn't know it at the time but i tweeted statute of limitations you were way past that's it's been more than ten years is that a real such that's definitely that's definitely a illegal speech here's what we'll do we we can mention i'll i'll say it it was alcohol that's all i say it was legal alcohol that i was selling that's all i'm gonna say i was like time you have to specify it was legal probably not a good bing so well so here's a story i tweeted it out that i think i it always bothers me when when people collect domain names that's a that's a pet peeve because i because i'm saying if you're doing that you're doing the wrong stuff because people will say i'm gonna i've got this great idea i'm gonna buy a domain name or even worse so say i've got this amazing domain name i should build something for it i'm like dude don't build something just because they a domain name anyway i tweeted it out i'm like just make money first and just use like a you know store name dot squarespace space dot com for like the initial like hundred bucks in sales and then go get the domain name like and someone's was like you can't do that i was i've done it a bunch of times and like well you're doing it because you have a name i like no i didn't actually college tons and tons of times in fact i found this old website that i had and it was alcohol name dot wordpress dot com right and i went and looked at the old stats and it's getting five thousand views a month still on a wordpress dot com free website in this it's a store it's a quote a store that is a blog post and a click to paypal and basically what i did was there was this really unique drink that was sold in nashville and for some reason only one or two stores were carrying it but this particular type of drink was popular across the country and i thought well i should set up an online store to sell this stuff and i did and i made friends with the person selling at the the liquor store or whatever and i hey i'm gonna sell this for three x the markup but i'll buy a bunch of it from you so whatever and i did it and i didn't i'm an idiot i didn't realize that like as this thing was growing i was making like a lot of money and i went and told the legal team at my college i was like hey i think my business is like working really well do i need to set up like an llc or something and they're like oh you're breaking of the law like you can't you can't sell this without like a liquor license so i was like but it's like a collect basically this being that i was selling it was a it was a very rare whiskey that was in a very particular type of bottle that was like a collector's item and i thought like it was just like collectors out i even know if people gonna drink this thing so anyway it was making like a thousand dollars a day sometimes and i looked at the old blog post that i was selling this and it was hilarious and it reminded me like of a simpler time when i was sleeping on a mattress on the floor yeah and light was good and i was building motorcycles in my living room and it was working out well so i was like building motorcycles in my living room sleeping on the floor and collectors whiskey illegally on the internet it was a simpler time i don't know the american dream the american dream i was one of those kids i you probably had this too i didn't have beer like you remember those college kids that would have like beer cases the cardboard on their walls yeah i wasn't that bad but i did have an american flag i definitely have the american flag so i was pretty trash but yeah i was so i was looking at my old like blog that i used to it i couldn't even remember the password and so i flooded myself a little i'm just flood my pants today it's great yeah everything thing is by the way this whole if you're not watching on you youtube your missing it half like the sam wearing and harvard sweatshirt while we tell these stories we decide about someone ill illegal whiskey way to poop or you made a bunch of jokes about the south this is so stupid oh my god alright i have something for you so there's this company that's for sale that i came across so check it out go to chambers dot com chambers okay yeah like that harry potter stuff chambers chambers and partners is that it yeah yeah yeah okay okay dude check this out so this website they i think they're mostly in europe but they are in america as well is they put out these rankings once a month or once a quarter something like that and they go and they interview lots of i think they have two hundred employees who do this two hundred employees who go out and interview different lawyers they talk to your past clients and they try to like see which cases you're winning and it's all done manually like there's not like a lot of like tech behind it and then they create these rankings for like best legal firm or whatever like that or like you know a good firm for this good firm for that like different niches and then they put out these rankings and if you're a lawyer you can pay money and and get like a plaque they'll send you a plaque and then also they'll allow you to use their like thing in the in there like when you send an email it could be like voted a top lawyer by chambers and you could do and you could do all that dude this company they do forty four million euros or yeah so or sorry forty four million pounds so what's that real real money that's like sixty million in revenue and then eighteen million in profit and they're selling right now for close to five hundred million dollars it's a crazy company because i've been for sale somewhere just like in a trade magazine for media companies that i follow it's like a small thing called fashion flames because this that website they cover like b b media stuff because i'm like been obsessed with b to b of the b b media thing flash and flames dot com i love it okay it's like my favorite site i don't only wanna tell you about it because i don't i like how you tried to just mu it that's it's a good one it's a good one like i'm a paying subscriber to it which is like ridiculous but dude these lawyers pay like fifteen hundred to four thousand dollars a year and they said they have like no churn they're like we have we no insurance some from us because these lawyers wanted it for so much this these lawyers want for so much and i am i'm interested in this and i found like eight or nine other businesses they call them like businesses or databases or intelligence businesses and they're not really much tech but right now a lot of them are selling for eight to ten times revenue and i found ten examples of companies that have sold in the eight to ten times revenue range for one of these data businesses it's ridiculous it's crazy and this sounds like a scheme because what they do is they rank you and then they go hey if you want like to make like a special profile on our website we'll do that and it's forty five hundred dollars a year and what we'll do is like once ranked you could purchase this one pager where you get a profile on our site it's almost like a wikipedia page where they like one of their journal just writes like two paragraphs and it says like this legal firm is known for x y and z and then you you could put that if you're a lawyer you could put that in your email signature and you're allowed to do that and then people can click and see whatever where it's crazy man this is a cape they're pulling off and i and i love stuff like this you know it's like power we talked about you know you know they're smart because their logo is like it looks like a medal medallion and like a like it looks like a special emblem or award like get a see with this like i don't know what you call these but like the pedals going around it yeah put this on the youtube channel i think people could see it but like a reef it's yeah it's like a it's like a reef around it that like just looks like you know what the olympics in athens would would would award their the top performers right so like you you they're they're really playing into the whole thing with their brand so i think that's pretty cool i have a business like and and their name is partners i'm gonna create like something like this so just do you know partners mayonnaise and partners you know we'll just do something for the people you know we break we rank best condiments mayonnaise and partners i gotta figure this out and we could put this on the logo but i love these rating businesses what's the one you have it similar so i was have you ever done like like trademark search yourself know what's when you start a business and you wanna look up is this a good name what do you do do you pay lawyer and say hey could you me if this trademark available do you do that later once you get going do that later once they get going is there is there an importance to having a trademark yeah if they're hard to sell a company without a trademark did you sell the hustle without a trademark tell i didn't have a trademark yeah typically very hard to acquire without owning your name because it's a giant liability so for example like if somebody else owns the trademark if you get six years in you're gonna have to change your name because the more valuable you get the bigger your exposure is for them to say i own the trademark this you have to change your name or or but maybe my name i mean it was called the hustle maybe it was too broad of a name you know what i mean well i don't know there's probably some troll out there listen to this being be like hey hang on let me go get this guy so i'm i'm past the reps and warranty like the escrow has been paid out so there's a great there's a great story i think the early episode where mo came on and told the native story so it's like i don't know episode ten of this podcast mo tells a story about like when they tried to sell native they they got in trouble with it so they go they they have a deal to sell native and as they're doing the diligence or like as they're prepping for the diligence they're like shit we don't have the trademark for native native deodorant and they're like okay well let's just get it and they're like well you can't get it because somebody else owns it they're like what who owns native deodorant there's no other native deodorant look i have the domain and they're like well no there's this guy i think it was like someone in palo alto if i remember the story correctly i might be butchering a little bit of this but somebody in palo alto was like kind of like a patent control type that owned the name to it and owned a bunch of names like this and they were like and he's like okay i guess i can go buy it off them because they're not doing anything with it so he goes them i'm tries to buy for like whatever we're twenty k they're like no he's like okay you know whatever it goes at two k no and like the guy wanted millions of dollars for this name because he knows your business is valuable you need this name you're gonna change your brand name for your consumer package good that's like you know you can't change doritos to go be called you know like like fluffy you know tomorrow it doesn't work yeah you lose a lot of value and so they were like going back and forth i forgot exactly how he got resolved i think he ended up buying it for two million dollars or something like that or mo it i think so or something else happened where they like threatened to they were just like alright screw you we're not gonna do it at all and the guy like realized it was like his last ditch effort and like and they ended up getting it for whatever some amount you know i forgot forgot what it was but they acquired it in the end but yeah anyway so so i've had this problem yeah with the business of mine which was that i i'm i'm like you i'm like oh i don't need a fancy domain and i don't need a fancy name let me just start the business and go and then i start and it goes and it gets popular and like okay i should probably like incorporate the company and do like payroll and do like all these things i should i i should been doing important like i didn't wanna do all that stuff if there wasn't like a real business here and so then you try to go back and some things are easier than others to correct going backwards one of the things that's hard to correct is if you chose a name that wasn't right you know you have a problem and so with one of my businesses i had done the actual search myself i shoulda have just paid a lawyer to do it but i went on the us pto search website which i don't if you ever gone there it's like you know imagine like a government it's like the dmv website and so you go there you try to search and i search for our brand name and nothing came up but it turns out there's like a fancier way to search where it's like yeah that brand name or like with an s at the end they're like with associated other words that would make it too close and i didn't know that and so i remember being so frustrated with this interface and i was like somebody should make a because this is a it's a public database like somebody should just make a more consumer friendly layer on top and then i found a business that does this and i got in touch with the guy who there's a business called trademark dot com so it's like trademark with ia a it's a trademark dot com if you go to it all of a sudden it's like like if you just compare side by side like in the youtube you should do this like take us pto and try to find even where do you go find search for trademarks and then like how that looks versus this where it just says search eleven million trademarks for free search your thing example mickey mouse and it's like you gonna just type in your brand name so like if typed in you know the hustle i'm gonna search for this and it's gonna tell me what trademarks exists for this who owns them this company what kills it what categories that they're okay so so hub spot hubspot owns it now so it says the hustle hubspot owns it it's pending and it was filed december third twenty twenty two when did you sell december third when did the two two years ago what would that be twenty one yeah so okay so wow so they yeah i didn't own it in that they also it also looks like you abandoned one in twenty twenty so you know so somebody did the tried on your team maybe tried it and and didn't get it or whatever tells you what class it's in etcetera etcetera so it's a great great little thing and you could search for like associated names or whatever it it's great website and so i reached out to the guy who owns it i was like dude this is a and so i i i said trademark is a great great idea of brilliant interface you know yeah props to you and he goes so the guy lives in the bay area actually and he goes yeah it's really cool website you know we have five million in arr and i can't you know we've never raised vc five million in arr it was kinda declining from the peak but i just came back to the company removed the subscription i got big plans now you know i wanna talk you about it and you know he shouldn't try to make this like he wants to go for like the billion dollar outcome and i was like dude i think you have a five million dollar year cash cow that you could probably get to like eight or nine with just like some simple tweaks and like you know chill like that that sounds awesome but but i thought this is really cool website again it's just a simple like these businesses are everywhere man these businesses are hidden in plain and in this case it took a public dataset it just put a much more user friendly wrapper on top versus what you were talking about with chambers is they created their own dataset and then have did they own that proprietary data it's called you know an who was it a ana nun from cb insights was on and he was like no we just like taking public data that's messy and we just make it a little bit stronger year to and yeah we just make it clean by the way my first million is owned by advanced magazine public publishers which is a big company in new york and it's a entertainment services namely an online non downloadable video series featuring star athletes explaining their life as millionaires i guess it's that g q thing which i search or where i see when i search on youtube but anyway badass ass i love this you wanna i'm go trademark this before this option episode comes out because now somebody's giving you a squad on this do and a funny story about native deodorant i've always remembered this story i never brought it up to so you and i the hustle office in twitch office was just a block or like fifty yards from each other so if you know there's there was like turning whatever you were and then you were the left if you go to the right there was a little cafe that was lovely that i that i really liked and i believe mo is the so native deodorant is a company called the native deodorant they sell deodorant it was sold for a hundred million dollars in in cash and it probably does hundreds of millions now and it has like really cute branding they make shampoo they make everything and i remember walking by this lovely cafe and i thought this cafe called native two and their logo looks just like native deodorant and i realized that boys worked nearby and so i put kinda two and two together so if you google native c s f yeah you'll see a little you'll see a little cafe you'll see their yelp page they've changed their logo to green but it used to be yellow or sorry it used to be blue the exact same as native deodorant and so i have a feeling that he was just thinking like branding by this and i was like this is i've ever thinking it boys they've ripping off your brand or are you doing it exactly and now it's realized the obvious he was like so alright i need a name looked out the window saw i was like that's my name and my logo down that's mine if you go to this go if you look up a basic pacing is exactly the same it's exactly the same and it used to be blue it looks like they're really good covid like like n blue it was it it was the same with white background with the same blue and now it's green it looks like closed in covid and they moved to a new location but that old location that we were at it was the same logo and it was called native c and i think native deodorant was the domain was also native code for him yes it was it was the exact same thing it and so he must have been just walking on the street and he goes like yep that's me that's mine now you know it's just like there's that meme on the like a stick figure handing an item to another stick figure and hey i made this and the second stick figure looks at it goes i made this that's basically what just happened and i don't think i've ever like said this to him but i would love to hear what his rebuttal is but he won hundred percent stole the entire branding the name everything from this company i don't know if stealing the right word but kinda i mean that one's looks like stealing it looks like he actually went to took a screwdriver took off took their sign off their office moved it across the street and put it on his office it's the exact logo i remember seeing that for years of being like and i just never like put two and two together i didn't realize see worked there but i was like wow it really ripping off his branding no that's that cafe has been there for years i remember walking by it for years well now they're shut down that's that i mean this is like everything that's wrong in society you know he sells a business for hundred million dollars poor cafe you know shuts down you know you know sadly during covid during the pandemic this is the way the world is going dude have you see people ripping us off i don't know if you've seen this but no but that's cool in the next two weeks you're gonna see twitter threads linkedin short videos on tiktok other there podcasts talking about the exact same stories that we tell here there's like this group of ten people that just take our content and then they just that same thing and they just tell that exact same story they're gonna be like dude dave ramsey dave how dave ramsey you built a six hundred million dollar empire animation this that and they're just gonna be like literally steal our stick it's it's kind of annoying i get it michael from our future has done it a few times yeah they do yeah he he's one of the ten that that does this all the time who are the other nine i mean i even really wanna give them shine of of doing that you yeah this is literally if you're one of those people just you know this is have your own silent embarrassment yeah there's nothing wrong with sort of like taking ideas of remix them but what most people do is they just take same idea they just tell the same story the way with that we already told it in their own twitter thread or their own linkedin and and whatever else which is fine but like give credit at least if you're gonna if you're gonna say the same thing be like oh was listening to my first million and they told this great story same check it out right now yeah that that's i think a slightly better way to do it but you know whatever is it is what but this is why so i have a new project i'm actually gonna announce it in a model or three weeks this is why i didn't announce it i've been working on this for almost a year now i didn't wanna announce it copy cats everyone everyone talks about building public i hate building in public building in public is not cool when you're popular building in public is really cool when you wanna get popular yeah exactly but once you already have a following i don't wanna do it like the milk road did you guys have a bunch of copycat cats yeah yeah tons there there's like there's tons of embarrassing ones that are out there there's like people that literally just took the same exact newsletter and they would some people would translate it so they're like oh i'm you know le le whatever and it's like the mexican milk world road and then they would translate to spanish and just like google translate and then publish there's another one that there's one i don't know if i wanna put this guy on blast but someone who tried to buy the mill road and failed yeah i know you know then just tried to copy it it is on like way and did you could just the the funny thing is they very rarely work they don't and it's like kind of surprising why don't they were i i kind of expected them to work like for example when people take our content and then write a thread about our linkedin and like it does pretty good like it that that kind of works for them otherwise they wouldn't really keep doing it but the copy of the whole newsletter thing like for some reason that doesn't really work i'm not sure i'm not a hundred percent sure explain why i know why do you wanna know the so basically if for people who have been raised on the internet they have a very high bullshit detector and do you wanna know the best way to circumvent someone's bullshit detector now don't bullshit you don't bullshit don't bullshit that's how you circumvent that bullshit detector you don't bullshit and people could snip this out and so if they read something and it's like dude you're like a not cool older guy trying to act like a cool younger person i know that this is not good like this doesn't work i told you about the n npr right the the the kfc in china not quite right it's like dude it's the same menu like this is this is the spicy chicken sandwich and it's like that's not quite right and people it just doesn't taste right the police reject it now i believe that when it comes to if i use one product and then somebody tries to copy it i'm like why would i want the shitty copy i'm just gonna keep going with the original but in markets where you're you're reaching a new audience or people who haven't heard of the original i'm surprised it doesn't work and i think my theory of why it doesn't work in those cases i think you're right when it's when people have tasted the original that they don't really want the the shit or when it's like community community brand like personality driven you know it's it's that one moat that peter t it doesn't understand brand yeah yeah the one the as proof yeah that's but the that one as proof weapon we have so you know the the one thing that i think is is true which is like this like iceberg theory which is which is like if you look at an iceberg like a part you see at the top is like you know five percent of the total mass that's there and so what i think people get wrong when they trying to copy a business is that they only see the top the five percent and they're like okay okay i'm gonna copy that but they don't know what goes on underneath they don't know that basically the un copy thing is the the people the personalities the engine underneath that's coming up with the creative ideas that's coming up with the next marketing thing because this one starts to decline and so i think that's the part that's typically hard to copy but honestly i'm surprised that more of them don't work because if you're sufficiently talented i think it i think it sadly does work more often than than it doesn't we should do an episode where we talk about the things that people have copied and become better than the original like there's stories of the sam brothers so it's these three brothers in germany and they have the company called rocket internet and it was a clone factory and they basically it's it was publicly trading till recently but the reason they started this company was they like cloned amazon and all these other companies zappos uber things like that but before they started a company started that company they cloned other things and they sold it to the original so they cloned ebay in germany and they sold it back to ebay for ninety million dollars in like three months and then they were gonna do the same thing with gru on but they got bigger than group on and they realized oh wow once you get huge this business sucks we gotta offload it and then they tried to do that with zappos of the shoe company but they got bigger than the original zappos so the bigger they were their market cap was larger so they couldn't sell it and they like this is their whole strategy it's very fascinating strategy and so far it's not pan off for them other than like hello fresh they did hello fresh and they copy blue apron and hello fresh worked right yeah i think there's an art to there's an art to copy and this is this is a whole whole i think we could do a whole podcast about like if you're gonna copy here's how to do it here's that to do it in a way that feels good to your soul feels good to customers actually works and is not just going to result in like a massive waste of time and so i think there's there's a bunch of different load factors there i think one thing the sam warner brothers did one of the factors for example is they they did the same business in a different country and so i think you know geographic geographic differentiation is important i think that's one that that that you can you can copy and make things work when you do a geographic difference but then there's some traps with that too that we could we could talk about but alright where do you wanna where you wanna finish up i think we should well there is one thing that we should do and yeah i forgot about that you're aware of it i think i'm aware of it i can't seem to find my pen but i need okay you don't need you don't need a pen so basically i thought decide something i'm sort of you do but you you sign it but just with the click of a button so basically at this podcast my first million our content unlike every other content on youtube it's actually not for free right not a free podcast it's not a free podcast because what you have to do if you've seen one more than one episode have to do this thing called the gentleman's agreement which is it's called that because we're not there i'm not behind you to stare at your screen that's why honor it's a gentleman's agreement it's an honor code you have to basically go and click subscribe on youtube because we'll get more subscribers that helps the algorithm we get more views and then we'll do more dumb stuff for you so it's called the gentleman's agreement and watch more than one video you have to do this everyone's doing it i have a addendum to the gentleman's agreement came from a from a listener she pointed it out she goes not only have i signed the gentleman's agreement i i've signed the ladies understanding and i what's the ladies understanding you know there's not many phrases that will stop me in my tracks but i was stopped in my tracks the ladies understanding i thought that was for now the ladies understanding that's actually when you also click subscribe on the itunes or the i pod itunes on the podcast app and the spotify app go that understanding go to that extra mile and give us the ladies understanding along with the gentleman's since we started doing this jet so two things about gentlemen we at number one it's funny because we're were talking about copying you stole the stick from somebody yeah we're trying to i stole it and he called me by the way and he was like isn't that awesome it works so good and he and invited me to go to a five you did it right because you gave credit to him you put your own spin on it and yeah you you credited him most importantly as being like this guy did this awesome thing and i was like wow i i didn't gotta try doing this so you know you credited him and that's cool that you guys are are going to see if fight together that's that's amazing now it's cute the second thing is we have grown a lot since we did this so we started doing this we were had a hundred would you the first time you did i believe we had a hundred forty five thousand subscribers on youtube let's say a month ago we have yeah that that was like yeah maybe forty five days ago something like that and now we're at a hundred eighty thousand and the people who watch the youtube videos they know this in fact i'm looking at a tweet right now which she goes he goes at he just mentioned he goes watching on youtube is better than spotify yeah no shit i told you this it is way better to watch the show on youtube and in fact what i think we should do to really like juice the agreement to even add more you know see appendix a of the gentleman's agreement i think we should do a piece of content that is only good when you watch it so so here's my here's my proposal you sam i think we should do basically like yeah sam is gonna be shirtless with a screen share but i think we should screen share us going through like a pitch deck and making take one from average to awesome or like good great and just show how we would tweak the copy how we would make it looks like better and we'll use a real one and so i think we should do that and put that only on youtube channel because it only makes sense to see it no i think that on youtube you should log in to chase dot com and show show your checking account okay and it will react but we won't say the number that's genius you know this is why if you complete bro gave you a shitty ideas and you you gave me the old yes and we're gonna go chase dot com or whatever bank of a america whatever you use and you're gonna just we're gonna watch you log in and we're just gonna react and that's it by the way the yes you have and is the corn thing that the startup world tried to take from from like the cool like you know people who are actually funny world because actually it's a no but which what you just do there no but we should do this instead is is a better out of people and improv people are are one step below aka capella people in terms of the nerds so like there's no way we're cool and they prop people you have a better run it in improper person since like being around someone who does cross you know like just stop talking about it i can't stand in prop people they're exhausting it's like it's cross irvine with like a hustle dude i i vine said it's like a it's like a a blind jack russell you know what those are it's like that dog does yeah and everywhere and when it's blind you just can't stop it going all over the place that's feel about an improper person yeah i think you're think you're right i did improv so i can confirm this is correct and you're right that it's below aca capella which is below anything that's actually cool yeah i tell is the worst of the worst i remember hanging out people from new england and then like we're bragging about aqua capella and i was like dude shut up why are you talking about that you know what people would know they hear people hanging out with each other and they're like ordering or they're like waiting for their food at the table and then one guy's is like and there's just like i start like harmon as i dude you gotta stop like you know if i get the lion king so i'm more time put a bullet my head that's why i feel want with these people i've ever trapped in a subway and like this they do a flash bomb around beef are singing yeah those other people are are above flash bob people are are are above the capella i'm really do something i'm gonna start vomiting just a out outrageous that's pod of