Syed Balkhi: How He Went From $0 To +$100M Before Age 30

yes in the early days i saved everything i mean i did i did not like buy a bed until like i'm married dude just to put in perspective we we were dating no there was no bed yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a less travel what i dude this is a long time in the making episode here i think we've been talking about you for like two years i think you told us you're were like hey guys don't put me on blast like this we were like you gotta come on the show you're like no you're just gonna ask me how much money is in my pocket right now and i don't know if i wanna do that the but somehow some way we convinced you to come on s bulky you're here first why did you just change your mind i i you decide to come on you know i was talking with sam or twitter and that's how it happened well what i told you a lot of people think that sean and i are like really aggressive about questions but what they don't realize is like we'll ask an aggressive question but if you say i don't wanna talk about that we just go alright cool we'll we'll move on like we don't we're not like digging that hard so hopefully that changed your opinion that did that did so s you're kind of an amazing guy so let me just set the table here for people let me just give you a little let me just tease everybody with the appetizer so i think you are one you've done something that i don't even know five other people on earth who have done what you've done which is that you've basically bootstrap a unicorn you've bootstrap a billion dollar company you've done it you're only thirty two years old so you did this by thirty two you also didn't like invent the next big thing it's not like you did this because you're super genius you know you're not you you didn't you're not like a you know vital metallic you know and you're creating ethereum on the blockchain or something crazy like that like you just did a very specific set of like prudent smart actions and it just added up in an amazing way we're gonna talk about it but also i didn't know shit about you sam's known you for a little while he brought you up on the pod a while back he goes i know this guy or met this guy he's really interesting he does this wordpress stuff have you seen him and was like now we went to your personal website i don't if ever got clip but like way back in the day we went to your personal website we were talking about you but we didn't know too much then we do camp mfa which was my my basketball fantasy camp we're invited like twenty five other founders and we had an nba guy come basically treat us like we were you know pretend we're a pro for the weekend and when we were there there's so many people to get to know again i i didn't really get to know everybody at the same time but then mister beast did something amazing so one night we were all in the kitchen basically we're all hungry after basketball and mister beast just sets a chair in the middle the middle of the room and he goes i don't know who any you guys offer because he's like if we've ever been playing basketball all day and now i'm curious like who the hell are you guys you tech nerds basically he's like sit out of this chair you sit out and then he would just inter that person like alright what do you do who are you alright how does that work is that big what's your dream okay cool i then he was like go to the next person and i think you were maybe the third or fourth person in the hot seat and i was like oh this is i actually don't know too much of sai story and then you just blew us away you blew us away your story was so good mister beast was while using interrogating you i thought it was just like the perfect interview if we had just record that podcast i would been happy we're just gonna try to recreate that moment right now well inside you you were the one of the quieter more humble people there and probably the most impressive in terms of like traditional business accomplishments and it was very fascinating what you've done i basically heard about you they're my friend neville and what i know about you is that you had this blog called wp p beginner which wrote really a ton of articles some of it really simple like how do i set up a wordpress site and i think that ended up getting or it still does has a ton of traffic and then if i remember correctly and this is just from an outs outside perspective you'll have to tell me if i'm right wrong you basically started buying different wordpress plugins ins that i imagine you saw were popular on your blog so it was like how do i set up a form to capture emails on my wordpress blog and you it probably got lots of traffic and you're like oh i should just go buy one of these or here are the best here are the five best plugins ins for this thing or here's the five best themes and if you put your cursor over the links on wp p beginner you'll see which of the links are affiliate and i just i'm i'm guessing that like of the top five let's say forms for wordpress base off url you own like three of the top five and through that you've like built this into a business by the way you've never told me i'm guessing that makes high tens of millions of dollars in revenue i don't know sam not tens of not tens of millions nine figures of revenue over a hundred million dollars of revenue oh i did not know that okay wow so just to paint the picture here you have wp engine and we'll talk about how or sorry so wp beginner and we'll talk about how you got to that but that's the content site that's just providing free help you know content to other people like you who were trying to make sites in the wordpress ecosystem that's the the main and so i'll draw on analogy here because we've had andrew wilkinson on the i don't know a dozen times or something he's probably one of the most famous guests and what most favorite guests of the audio of of our community so you have a business that's a lot like his he's got a portfolio of companies you've got a portfolio of companies he had meta lab which was kind of his like core business cash cow thing that allowed him to buy these others you had your your wordpress site that with the the the content site that was your core engine in but i think you've actually done i think your model actually might be a little bit better that's no knock on android just to get people excited here so basically you i think have a more like one ecosystem you're like okay i'm gonna like dominate this wordpress ecosystem the good thing is that wordpress i think powers like thirty percent or forty percent of all websites so it's you know it's huge it's basically like you know a huge chunk of the internet and then all your stuff fits together so you you know you have one customer they're trying to you know make a successful website and grow and and solve other problems you're like great i have the content that will help you then i have the tools that'll help you and you either buy them or you build them and you've created this portfolio that now does you know nine figures of revenue probably worth a billion dollars you own the whole thing yourself with no no outside investors you're only thirty two years old you know you you've built kind of an amazing thing so that's the just to sketch out like the the blueprint here for what what you've done sam that if you think would you add anything to that description well then there's all of his side hobby stuff which like i read his annual report and he's like i bought a gas station or i bought like eight or ten gas station right that's like a whole another conversation but yeah that that's that's a list do a quick thing on the on the origin story so that people people have you told me once on the phone you said i think you were doing consulting or something you like an agency here you're like i was helping people make websites and i was building like crm or whatever for them so and then wordpress came i was like this is way better they should they should be using wordpress so you started to help it you just were a service agency right and then you started then wordpress became became your your core service and then you're like okay i'm just gonna help people make wordpress sites for their business is that right pretty much so remember the very first websites that i built were online proxies because i wanted to play games in school and i was making ad revenue on proxies and some arcade turnkey sites and i was helping small other even local businesses set up their websites so i tried making my own cms with ph p by the way i can code i'm not the best at it i would say now i probably suck at it and what age what what what age was this thirteen fourteen so so i would i would build these websites super cheap call it like two hundred and fifty dollars three hundred dollars i would make you a website back in the day and but what happened is that these clients would always rely on me to make changes to it changes to the websites and as i started doing consulting at a bigger scale i didn't want to do these the small and small end things so and i discovered wordpress around this time this was two thousand six and i said wordpress was only an inception for three years so wordpress started in two thousand so i discovered it in two thousand six to to put in perspective i've been i'm thirty two now i've been in wordpress half of my life you know this the result is compounding in one thing for half of my life by the way you're right thirteen fourteen doing this are you like at the dinner table at night being like my clients are pain in the ass right now mom like you know well what are you saying at home and also how are these people finding you are they coming into your middle school and you're handing out flyers what's going on no no no so we moved from pakistan to us when i was twelve okay my dad the mechanical engineering degree but it did not validate when he came to us so he was working sixteen hours a day as a gas station clerk attendant you know just swiping things sixteen hours a day could you not every day monday to friday and on the weekend he had his third job so i didn't really see my dad my mom was busy because there's three of us and the fourth one on the way right so my youngest brother one was born in us so there was not many dinner conversations happening i wanted to figure out a way to have some chunk of change in my pocket so i can buy junk food like mountain dew and kid kat sneakers and all all the shit that you buy it with you in high school dude your dad was at the gas station man you had the hook up you just you just needed to ask he was like he was not cutting any any breaks there he's was like no way no way my dad would never do that by the you went to high school at age twelve also right yeah i started so i moved here i had just finished seventh grade in pakistan and i came here in march so there's this two month gap the school system is like well we can put you an eighth grade boris case scenario you'll repeat eight grade because that's where you're supposed to be in any anyways but our education system in pakistan is far better than the one we have here in us so they're like you can go to high school so like twelve in high school the youngest person in the school i did not speak english that well i would say probably very little english was if i knew how read english because we were thought alphabet best and such but my communication skills were not there so yeah that that was that was a pretty challenging time for me and i spent most of the time in the library during lunch time i was in the library and i wanted to play games because i'm like i can't talk to humans so i i would just play on the computer and those game sites were blocked i'm how do you unblock this thing and that you know drove me down in terms of how was getting clients it was through these forums online right so you had forms like d forum digital point name pros bunch of these you know og communities online the where you can get you know business and my cousin got me into one of those they don't know your thirteen they're just a guy at a four no yeah well like so we had like a family friend who needed a website and you know they had a bit local business they knew how old i was and they're like oh you can do it and then all thirty you three hundred dollars to build on my website and i'm like okay sounds good and then you know that that's how that that funnel started so you could do insights you're trying to make your own cms you discover wordpress like is way better here's cms out of the box what's what becomes the aha moment and when do we create the blog so had i had discovered wordpress moved these clients over i had affiliate sites so i was doing affiliate promos at the time i was discovering this i had directories that i was telling you about earlier yeah that so i wanted to get more traffic so i had these i created these myspace profiles there were fake profiles and got hundreds of thousand of followers and i would send bulk you know dm at covid which were called bulletin on my myspace right so i would just wanted more traffic and i went down the rabbit of seo which brought me to wordpress and and then because wordpress was dynamic content so i added the blogs to the directories started using wordpress for the clients and i had the social media profiles on dig and stumbled upon that were super power users and such and essentially when i wanted to get rid of this business the consulting business i wanted to figure out how how do you do this i asked other agency owners and they're like well you know we just have these pdfs that we give to our clients and i'm like put wordpress updates all the time how do you keep those pdfs updated then they're like oh no we we updated pdf i'm like that's dumb you should use wordpress to update those documentation so essentially w beginner started that way it was the unofficial documentation for wordpress now wordpress had documentation but it was it was written for developer by developers nothing was for business owners and began what year was this two thousand nine well one good point here is that that's now six years after wordpress started and you're making the beginner site and there really wasn't a great one most people i think there's the lesson i've seen many many times as we talk to different guests which is and sometimes you feel like you're late but you're rarely ever actually late to the wave ends kevin van trump told us this one time he goes for all the best things you always get us always a second turn to get on the train like you feel like you're late you feel like you missed it but often you're not you're not that late actually don't talk yourself out of it there's there's almost always another another another chance to hop on it look according to similar web right now you get like two or three million visits a month the early website shockingly doesn't look significantly different than how it looks now you kinda nailed it right out the gate it's like it was a simple website where you just have articles about picking the right name how to install wordpress selecting the right theme picking the right web hosting but were you writing this stuff because i know you're english as a second language person so were you are where are you actually writing these articles because a of them are long like look fifty five of the most wanted wordpress tips tricks and hacks yeah like these are like pretty like in articles as well as you're playing the game of seo and like you clearly understand like english yeah no by by this time i was already in college right so i i started high school at twelve started college at sixteen by that time my english had gotten much much better so i was writing these articles on w begin i had a team of two other the people that were helping me with with with the website the website looks similar now and what it was in two thousand nine there was a period when when i changed it and there was a mistake people were you know i chain the color scheme too much and the audience were like they they didn't resonate with it so i changed it all back and haven't changed this since then because the big lesson was you know big companies don't really change stuff because they know if it's working don't you know break it if it's not broke don't fix it don't interrupt compounding unnecessarily as charlie mu says so i made it go back to what it looks like and it's been that way since two thousand twelve and what tools do you use to figure out because i i imagine most of these articles are you're writing them based off of what people are searching for is that right yes is a combination of that and what they're asking us through our contact form what they're asking us in our facebook group i think our facebook group has probably over ninety thousand members and support requests are coming so yes we have our own keyword generator if you go on w beginners kinda hidden in on the free tools page is a keyword generator and you can put in anything in there like work wordpress and i we'll tell you what we go to searching for and do you have a lot of comments early on june on in two thousand ten a year or two app starting you already had twenty six responses on just i just clicked on a random article so you're like getting traction yeah so couple things happened that that worked done for me one you do you guys remember dig dot com yeah it was it was really popular so i had a power user profile there so what i like if one out of two articles that i would submit would hit the front page so of course i used that to my benefit and i used that network to my benefit how get a creative profile because there was there's legitimate ways and illegitimate ways to do that i'm curious what how did you end up having that it's just a social circle right so there there these engagement pods that that you go on and back back in the day was on msn messenger and well aim so so we just had the engagement pods so if i submit something like you it was a group chat and everybody would jump dump their items in there and you would upload it so say i was an engagement pods and and what year did this did wp begin cross a million in revenue in annual revenue how long did it how long did that take maybe a year and a half or so oh damn you crushed it right away yeah yeah so you know we had a good revenue stream it's let's let's let me take a step back so there was this business and the list business so collectively past a million in a year and a half so about two thousand eleven down twelve and so you're early twenties basically at that stage you're a millionaire that was my first million how does that feel you said you grew up your you know your dad worked i you told me you're were like if a dad to a gas station and i thought study guy says gas station i know you own gases i was like oh your family owned gases you go no he sat in the gas station he worked he swiped the cards in the gas station and you're were like everybody in my family i knew you were either you worked at a gas station or you're like oh you're you're real smart like you're you get to be a bank teller and that's all you knew in your bubble so tell me two things how did you get because you gotta kinda see the possibility of being a business person being wealthy before you're gonna even do it so how did that happen and how did it feel when like the name of this podcast is my first bill i'm curious how did it feel when that first happened what was do you remember your reaction yeah so i'll tell you how it how i knew it was possible so i used to play cricket which if you have a lot of listeners in pakistan in india you know they love cricket we love i love cricket so i was playing cricket and there are many leagues in us in south florida there was one and there's many now too i met this pakistani gentleman and he was the sponsor for her team he's crazy crooked fan and he became my mentor and now he's a family friend but back then i just see this pakistani guy you know driving s class and you know just super humble super nice and i'm like what do you do are are you like born new money or what what's what's your spiel i was pretty blunt as a kid so so he's like no i have real estate i came to the us with like five hundred dollars in my pocket or a hundred dollars in my pocket you know those typical immigrant story and then he you know after we would win the games he would take us out to eat sometimes he invite us all to his house which is like you know big mega or you know fifteen eighteen thousand square of foot house and his kids were my so we'll just kinda go over to his house hang out sometimes it would go over to his house to watch cricket games because they're happening on the other side of the world so time zones are different and in between breaks i was the one who took interest in his business you know in his kids were all roaming around i was i'm like tell me how this works tell me how this works right so you would tell me stories like oh this is how i took over a burger king for free this is how i did this and this is how i started so i i absorbed a lot of the earlier lessons on business finance just hustle from him right and he was always super encouraging it'll ask me how how is this going how you know and i felt like i could talk to him about it so that's that was the early stage of me knowing oh this is possible because nobody in my family had any well they were just working in gas stations and all my goals everybody and if you're really smart you're working at the teller at the bank so so that was a motivation part in terms of how it felt when i hit my first million you know you would think it'd be like the joyous moment of oh my god look at this i was more scared than than than anything because i was this is this gonna is this gonna last that's the question that you have you know in your twenties you're like you come from nothing and you have this thing you're like is this going to last forever like what what is the what am i supposed to be doing i have no guidance so there was like this inherent fear so i always lived below my means like way way way below my mean so when i was in college i i did not buy any furniture i just left on a on a floor on a on a blanket because i mean that's how i grew up in pakistan so i'm just like i'm not gonna buy any furniture why why why waste time and money with this so in my in my apartment i had a blanket and i i got a desk from goodwill so that's what i worked on and and i mean what's amazing is you said i i would've have thought the first million came sooner than two thousand twelve but because in ten years you've grown that from one to a hundred plus or whatever it is when were the inflection points where you are like alright blogging is cool and it's working yes let's get beyond yeah so i launched opt monster in two thousand thirteen list twenty five and twenty eleven these things started really cranking i had some really sweetheart affiliate deals with certain companies that worked out really really well for me and so that was good in that time you know we were coming out of the economy the recession so real there's still like some real estate deals to be had so i bought my gas station the first one primarily because i wanted to offset offset expenses with an appreciating asset which was the lesson i learned from my mentor rate yeah let let let's let's let's talk about that one real quick so just do a quick quick little monologue on why did you buy a gas station when you found out you're having a kid so one of the things that i learned from i meant for early on i was like how do you how do you like justify buying a mercedes because that's a d depreciation asset and he's like yeah but you know when i drive it this people think of me better like you know there's impression game etcetera and how i justify is i buy something that's an appreciating asset like real estate and i just use the income from that to us pay my lease payment so my principal never disappears and i was like that's a good idea your principal continues to appreciate and you're using something you know the income from it to offset and it also helps you stay disciplined because you're not gonna go you know overs spend your money because normally when you get a raise or something like this everybody just thinks in monthly payments so this takes you away from the monthly payments mindset into thinking a little bit bigger so when i was about to have my son i was twenty six by this time guys like i was i would doing alright you know i i i had all these vc firms reaching out to me you know i i could i could have had a a solid eight figure exit like you know to high eight figure exit i had offers for that at the time and i'm just like high eight figures as in as in ninety as in seventy as a time seventy for the for wp p beginning no no i had and monster at the time and i had the gallery solution at the time and i had i had w before that analytics so the were you close to taking it and how did you decide not to yeah i i i i definitely thought about it up but then i was like what would i do afterwards like my son is gonna you know grow up seeing me not work because i'm i'll always seven with that buddy right it's like i i would not i would not go do anything if you i mean if you have ten million dollars twenty million dollars you you put it in the bank and you're like hey this this is it i wanna year gonna have a lot more than yeah i was gonna have a lot more than that that's what that's what i'm saying even after paying taxes i i would have a lot more i would be set so the the the the factor that my wife and i talked about was what instilled my work ethic was watching my dad work and i wanted my son to at least see that right was the what was the multiple on that for to get to seventy million is it as high as ten x multiple at that time no it it it it was lower than that nope so you turned that down and i turned that down you turned it down was it really you returned it down because you were like i want my son to cb work yeah and also i didn't i i wasn't ready to give up my baby okay and okay so fair enough so you you basically so here's the thing so so at this time my son is about to be born and i'm like okay how much does a baby cost right like what what what what are the causes of the baby and you're like okay well you know you're gonna have diapers you're gonna have you know schooling and this and that and i'm like well now what if i buy something that gives me at least five or six random a month net and a net and then the baby costs are recovered for so like you know it's gonna give me sixty to seventy thousand dollars a year and now i don't have to think about it and my family is taken care of no matter what happens to me so yeah that's that's that's what i i got for a baby shop most people take the money they make and then they're like alright that's what i have to spend and they spend it what you do from your inventories is you take the money you make that has to now go to buy and appreciating asset that will spit off cash flow you and then you could spend whatever that one makes so it's kinda like a a savings program basically so you you you spend what the you you go by the gas station the gas station is gonna pay you and you're like that will pay for this child you know like i'm gonna provide my but i'm not gonna provide my for my family this gas station is gonna provide for my family i wanna put food on the table dude it allows me to one sleep better night and to be more bullish in the deals that i'm doing how many guesses you owe now ten and you own a bank too i i bought yes in wells fargo wells fargo because i you have a cool blog post where you're like i used to go to this bank all the time and i decided to buy it this year yeah i used should ride my bicycle around it i couldn't go to the i didn't have a bank out of time i used to ride my bicycle around that bank because there was a sports authority there in the office depot there i just like ride my bike into that and then i bought that building what it amaze me is is how like i i don't know if you're similar web estimates are right but can do you do you say what your monthly traffic is on wp beginner no but you know it's it's in the millions oh okay so let's just let's just assume that similar web is roughly correct too to five million we'll give us a huge range a month that's a lot that's not that much like what's crazy to me is that i mean that's high intent traffic it's likely people who are coming for to buy something like they wanna in an email software so they're coming for a review right it's just amazing to me that that much traffic has traded so much value i think when you start your online business most people think about maybe a cpm model of monetization or a cp model of monetization there's far are there other other and better models of monetization right you can have cp you can have cpa you can have a combination of cp cpa you can have recurring you know a commit community talking about cpm meaning just third ten dollars per one thousand visitors for display ad versus cost per lead or cost per acquisition which is someone buys something they give you a hundred dollars per month if it's a mailchimp and it's someone's paying five hundred dollars a month they'll say alright you get a hundred dollars per month while they're a customer correct and there are articles that are not available on w beginner because i remember i was telling you i i did a lot of affiliate marketing as well there are articles that will pay you on a lead basis and hundreds of dollars just for a lead not for not for a commission like as an affiliate not like you made a sale just a lead we'll get you hundreds of dollars and and so so i did it a lot of those and i still do so that that's that's a good cash cow so those verticals are available where you can go and promote something and get over a hundred dollars in lead has the wp begin revenue grown like the rest of the business or is that just like you're like i'm i'm perfectly fine with it just being a steady ten or fifteen million dollar a year thing and i use i bet you it's super profitable i'm at your team page i would bet you make fifty percent profit or something crazy and you're like i'm just gonna take that profit and buy more stuff and i'm okay with that being steady pretty much you on on a content business you cannot compound it as much you know eventually what what happens is you will hit the traffic mass that you hit and you can unlock as many levers that you can but it the compounding will stop because it's a reoccurring revenue you know like the person that i referred this year is something is not gonna compound next year i'm not gonna get that plus new customers which is what happened in a software business which is recurring revenue so yes your assumption is right that while beginner has grown it hasn't grown at the same pace as the software companies and that's like a very big you know mental shift in between recurring revenue and recurring revenue for all the creators that are listening because once you understand that you'll start thinking about your business a little differently so i i took all of our profits and invested in you know software and tools i i still have niche tools that are not even related to wordpress that i bought off of flip and sometimes just private outreach because i knew those verticals were gonna be lucrative because i had a better offer than they were promoting and i paid like one guy i think like fifteen thousand dollars upfront and in the very first month it made me eighteen grand and now every month it makes me over ten grand like and just pure ralph nobody's touches that tool right so i think about that just as good as a gas station because like my hosting cost for that tool is maybe like eight dollars a month right maybe ten and and that's it so so you can have these cash flow income streams that come through and that's how i was able to buy the businesses that i did without any outside financing without any outside debt i was also in a market that wasn't fully mature so so like there there was that advantage that you know those shrewd pe and vcs are not in in the in the market they didn't understand the market and i could see the potential of a business so i i might buy something and you you're saying well this this has no revenue it just has user base and i can come in and say yeah but if i do this and this it can it can be a seven figures business so i might buy something for like you know six figures and then in two years that thing will make seven figures in profit you told me something once that sounded almost like a real estate philosophy so like in real estate they would say or some people say you make money on the buy not on the sale meaning like you should buy something knowing that it has both a margin of safety and that you have the plan for what it's gonna how it's gonna be different than what the current owner values it at and i think you had a similar thing i forgot what the example is what it was sort of like like let let's say for example you're like great i buy this company and they're paying three and a half percent on their payment things but i have a contract with that same payment provider because i have more scale that's at two percent so now i know i have one point five percent off just off the gross from day one because i i have this contract and you kinda have these leads principal of like almost like you make the money on the buy because you already know well i have i know i can throw this much traffic at it maybe from wp i know i can renegotiate these payment terms because i already have the contract with the paper provider or the affiliate contracts with the companies on the other side is that is that accurate hundred percent hundred percent so this was one of the lessons i learned from from a mentor right if and who had a real estate background to the philosophy is very much derivative of real estate you make money in the buy you have to be otherwise if you're paying a high multiple thinking based on future i mean yeah that might work out but it has a bigger risk so from my perspective you know i wanna have heads i've in tails i don't lose much and i got that you know formula from reading mona b book huge fan of his now we're friends but oh yeah so that's very much finding margin of safety explain that more heads i win tails i don't lose much what what does that mean then what's an example so a good example would be the if if a business in your perspective intrinsic value of it is a million dollars and you end up paying seven hundred thousand dollars today heads you know you're gonna win if this business continues growing so tails you know you you'll still have so much of upside that you know because you you pay three hundred grand less thirty percent less than market value that in case something don't doesn't go right it have to be like forty percent doesn't go right and you still only lose hundred grand in that in that situation so you need to be able to look at the deal and say what are downsides you have to invert the situation think about like how are you gonna die in this and then don't go there sort of thing you sorta of had this you you sort of have this like pay attention to the sense and the dollars will follow type of vibe where like you're really not you're not i guess i'm surprised at how maybe i don't know if it's still the same way i'm surprised at how small some of the things that you do and yet because you own thirty or forty of them they're really accumulating exactly so dude when you come from nothing you have you have to have a good sense of where the money's is gonna go right and you have to be very conservative to not lose at all because i came from nothing i don't wanna go back to that so i i'm very very cautious the funny thing about compounding is that if you compounded to help you rate and i i have a very very good compounding trucker what what is a i've i've been compounding it in double digits in for for past seventy years what's that mean twenty percent like what would what would be considered good like you know like free for you you're like oh thirty percent of forty percent that's like i mean that's amazing you can't get that in any normal investment right exactly so mark market compound compounded to what eight percent yeah private equity might is might get you in teens right you know i i'm way wait i'm double private equity more than double so so that and that only happens when you can identify a mis mismatch gym okay when some somebody has a has a business and they might only be thinking about monetized monetizing from one angle then not thinking about it from a full perspective so i can look at it and say well yes this is the current revenue today and i'm getting a bargain on today's revenue but here are my contracts that i have with so many different partners and vendors in such that i'll be able to unlock extra revenue here here here here here so i've turned this business that has one revenue stream to having like multiple revenue streams and and that's how you take something that was doing like no revenue to or or very little revenue to having you know five eight ten million dollars in revenue and you do it enough times and you just let it compound like these businesses are not rocket growth right so this is not a business that's gonna hit one business gonna hit billion dollar in revenue that's not what's gonna happen but these business are gonna consistently compound because more people are gonna need websites the web presence just keeps growing you you had a tailwind which was wordpress was just gonna keep getting more and more and more popular right that's a huge tailwind that's like a generation of tailwind that's huge this is already it's gonna grow faster than like an average growth rate because of that then you could do things smart operationally but i gotta ask you a question so our buddy mo has this phrase he goes the two sexiest words in the in english language are distressed asset have you just said managed gems as a as a catch phrase of something you look for i like that idea but also i'm kind of a lazy motherfucker and when i hear distressed asset or mis gem i think work oh i gotta go clean up i gotta manage this better isn't that gonna take a bunch of work and a bunch of minds share to turn things around versus it's kinda like the buffett cigarette butt companies versus like just buying a beautiful business that's already working and letting it letting it grow for a long period of time am i wrong i must be wrong about the the amount of effort that goes into fixing a mis managed jam or a distressed asset what do you think about that so i think distressed asset from a real estate perspective i would say slightly different than what a mis manage them is my real estate buys sean that i did in in early days were distressed assets okay but it was just the banks needed to get get this off their books right and i was a cash buyer you know i'm not looking to finance anything i'm a cash buyer i had the right contacts so i was able to buy some of those gas station properties they were really leased out to triple at least out to like c start with the canadian multi billion dollar company that own circle k all i had to do was just give cash the bank and take take the you know d so those are distressed asset and i i got lucky i mean i bought a gas station money it was all said and done i paid ninety yuan for it and you're like holy crap how'd do you do that that was a distressed asset because you had to do environmental clean up on that thing okay that was work so so those are distressed assets when you're thinking about a mismatch gem this is a property where somebody maybe due to the lack of effort or lack of experience have not fully understand the potential that is there what are the commonalities of not realizing potential or common mistakes so you know you might you might be creator and you have a lot of user base and you just think about monetization you know all the different potential monetization right that that that can be had in in that one business we have a friend that was doing this they were just looking at businesses on flip or like we have websites to you know products to buy the companies to buy and they were like yeah i just want an owner who just cared a lot about product and care to thought ninety five percent of the brain just had the word product stamped all over it and then you're like cool so what were you doing for marketing and they're like well it's word mouth and they were so proud of the word mouth he's like great as long as their answer isn't facebook ads then i'm just gonna start doing facebook ads or even if their answer was facebook ads like what's the budget like oh you know like eight grand a month it's like why eight grand that's like you i don't wanna spend too much and he's like i wanna spend eighty grand on facebook you know like and basically that was is entire like you think oh this person made twenty million dollars wow they must be a genius and it's like no i just found a business which was so common somebody makes a product and all they like think about is product and they really care about product they don't spend much on marketing it maybe none because they don't know it or a small amount because they're just kind of like they don't think what like they don't ask themselves the question why don't i spend ten times more on facebook ads what would that take and that's literally the only change they that that they did that's the good barometer the other thing that that worked in our favor was the ecosystem effect so if i buy and an analytics software i can cross sell up monster and vice versa you know if i if i buy member us then i know that all the people who are creating a course will need to buy up monster to have lead generation or it will need analytics to track all the things so the synergy effect compounds and and that that was a big big up for us and i read somewhere that you said something like i don't buy whole stakes anymore i don't buy one hundred percent of the company anymore i try to buy forty nine percent because i can't i have too many things i can't run all of them and then in the pre call they did with sean you have this really cool line it's in quotes it says how i manage a billion dollar portfolio without stressing out and that's my i guess i the he didn't say that was sean who wrote that oh really well when i when i met him he was like he said something like you were like i travel i was like what do the you know what do you do with your time like how are you spending your time and you were like i to travel my family we we go travel and i was like i thought you meant like you know like i don't know la or you know like we go to see the grand canyon and were like we're wanna to egypt and they we're going to like ser getty going like i was like oh okay this guy's like doing like exotic travel every month that's cool he you said something like i don't know it's this is exactly right but my brain heard you basically stack a bunch of calls with your kinda operators in the last week of the month and like that's your only time to like stress out or think about like those calls and then the rest of the month you're not thinking about those things you're reading you're playing basketball you're doing other things and so a is that accurate and b like i interpreted that as wow this guy's managing a billion dollar portfolio and he's not stressed out that's awesome yes that that is fairly accurate now it now it didn't start that way i wanna i wanna emphasize that it didn't start that way i didn't figure this out up until maybe two years ago okay so just just to put in perspective in in terms of like me being as chill what was like what were you doing before that you know i would have to go in sometimes i'm clean the business this and you know like oh this is not doing right i will get get involved too much were your hard ass depending on who you ask yeah according to me no according to everyone i ever worked with hell yeah like you you seem like you have a ruthless i do even though you're polite and kind you seem like you could be ruthless i i was sad i could be very disciplined ruthless might not be the right word dude that sound so ruthless the way you said that that was awesome yeah it's a ruthless like this sound like a ruthless thing to say i love it so so the trick is you know like it proves how good people get out the way but that sounds easier than it is so we use eos in our companies and some of your audience might be familiar with it others might not be is entrepreneurial operating system and as transparency accountability oftentimes when you know i found sometimes bought businesses from the founders who who started del but they really ab and then the business went down and then you know that now they're like they're really checked out so now they're like just this thing sucks now i'm back into business and it's a mess and they will come and exit to us that's a mismatch gem by the way because all what you gotta do is put back those accountability thing then maybe put the right team member and this will the this will start kick starting again so you have to delegate but not ab so the eos scorecard and good p and l's ls monitoring will help you with the accountability piece so the p ls for all of our companies are managed by my finance team at the hq level that's cool so you i wanna talk a little bit about ideas so you built this amazing thing and you've been basically kind of like building cool stuff making money since twelve to thirty two so you've had this run i'm curious you know one of the questions we always get is alright well you know now it's easy for you it's easy for you to just keep doing what you're doing but like yep i'm not you so that's you know it's inspiring but it's not entirely helpful well be more helpful is like what ideas or opportunities do use see that like somebody else could get you're too busy to do them or they're too too small for you now what ideas or opportunities do you see that other people could do i think about cash flow so if i had nothing you know of course it's a lot easier for me now i can say hey andrew i wanna spend i wanna invest in tiny i wanna go do this and i can do a lot of those with the means that i have now but if i was starting all over the first thing will be to go build cash flow again and the easiest way to build cash flow is services you know agency business right now content agency since i know content well using ai i will crush it you know because i already know that brands like shopify etcetera are using ai agencies to create top of the funnel content so of course there's some human that they involved but this changes the game because if an article used to take maybe four hours through right now you can do it in forty five minutes right because you if if if you know the game right so a hustle younger version to me that's what i'd be doing content agencies copywriting agencies all ai power plus human review i would i would use like tools like a clay dot com i'm not sure if you if you've seen clay dot com but it it helps you automate your sales outreach reach you dump a profile and it finds all the data on on that person chicken write you can use gp to write emails to them and then just hit them up right just call outreach call outreach call outreach reach because so like not everybody but a small portion will you know take take you up on it deliver great service go above and beyond with them watch the word word take you places you raise prices and i think that's that be the way to go for me if i if i wanted to start all over again step one bill cash flow then figure out how i can take this cash flow to build some recurring revenue stream because an agency you're you still only have recurring revenue stream and so then you would would you buy versus build from there and you talk about that distinction because you started off as a builder you've now bought like i don't know thirty companies or something like that along the way yep and i think you studied not just charlie mu and and warren buffett but also mark leonard at constellation and you had told me something like you read all his annual letters and there was one thing in there that really stood out to you about building versus buying what was that yeah it was one of his earlier letters maybe maybe like a third one or fourth one or something something like that where mark talked about that there was three types of growth that constellation was experiencing one was growth through organic which is just you your business is growing organically in in their case maybe seven eight percent whatever the second part of revenue growth was coming from acquisitions where they would just go by revenue and the third one was initiatives and initiatives would be dink like new bills i have this product and i'm gonna build a second product and he was like these turned out to be very expensive because it required more resourced than time that you plan for it takes away time of your senior people and you're not even counting those things so they're distracted and he's like you know i'm a capital all and from a pure capital allocation perspective the return on invested capital isn't always great because bills have higher risk so it doesn't work out it's crap for the first year or so when you're building there's zero percent return on your investment in that time so the compounding return is lower and this this is my take was you know you can have ad spend of three years c at that point might not just go buy a company that has guaranteed revenue and then you can cross promote so so that sort of took me away from the initiatives idea so most of our focus and all of our focus is on is on buying one thing that i i i imagine sean is a little bit like this but i'm definitely like this where creating products and new businesses is is part self expression where like it's just exciting it's fun to do that shit and i'm not like the most disciplined person when like the reason i don't like real estate is i'm like dude i i i'm not very great at just looking at this excel sheet and unlocking value like that's not that's not what i'm skill at and i don't know if even particularly like that where did you learn how to like unlock like find value that you could unlock and what are some of the like common themes that you see with that i don't know sean you like that to yeah i am but then i'm also a short a a a natural shortcut cutter i like to find the simplest path to the solution and that so like while creating like you you had this thing you said on the pod solar hilarious you're be like i'm an artist bro just an artist they gotta create and i definitely feel that i have a creative itch to me but i also have a path of least resistance itch to me where i'm like oh there's some beauty in just finding a simpler a simpler way to win you know like i agree with that i also think it's fearful or or it's it's fear to put to out to to pay like with the internet you could start with nothing and spend time and you can get something but i think that's you like you could build something new high chance is just not gonna work a zero it's also gonna a long time if you're buying something that's already working yes you out like cash but are you actually taking more risk there's difference between be taking out cash and putting out risk and i think what he's saying is that but that's what i'm asking is the difference between i i'm i'm asking the difference between putting out cat like how do you make that gap small so i'll i'll i'll say this so when i started sam i was very much an artist like you i enjoyed my creation i enjoyed putting my you know fingerprint footprint whatever you wanna call it on those so when if you were looking at the early day of the opt monster or those products you would have my footprint on them and and you had like a twenty thousand dollar bill to the ser with your family of five no like i i i was not doing ser gi when i was building in the business aida i'm not doing ser yet even when i building the business i was very very much in involved but a big mindset shift that happened in my career which has led to i would say a tremendous growth for automotive is the mindset of going from a creator and operator to a capital locator right and this happened when i was studying buffett mu mona etcetera buffet says i'm a better investor because i'm a businessman and i'm a better businessman because i'm an investor now you you read that and you're like okay sounds good too right but when you think about that from a first principles point of view what's the commonality between the two that both investors and the businessman are resource all or capital so when you can when you tie that together that was the aha moment for me when when i think about it okay if i start this new thing yes i will make x but if i buy something if i if i shortcut it and let's say i buy something that's doing two million dollars in revenue i you know twenty percent or thirty percent of two million is always gonna be better than you know ten percent or thirty percent of hundred thousand or a hundred percent a hundred thousand for that matter but see what i'm saying what's the biggest what's the biggest deal that you've bought you don't just say which one but like what checks out what check made you sweat what check made me sweat none of them because i'm not buying like i'm i'm not putting eighty percent of my net worth or my cash in any any one of those deals but if you bought things are tens of millions no no i have i'm not bought anything in the tens of million dollar range but these are so single digit millions and millions single digit that is fucking insane that you've built that much value with like these little small like what's that whatever sean said the cigarette butts like you've made the cigar with it but and are you doing all cash up upfront or i there's no way you do that you're you're you're way too sophisticated mostly mostly all cash upfront you do do that there there might be some pieces of like seller financing but one one of the advantages that that we have compared to somebody offering like a higher valuation is that we can make the process really seamless for for the seller that also allows us to have get get a better in a more attractive valuation but you know you you know if you try to ever sell you like a private equity or vc mostly private equity you if you'll be on in on the hook for like six months they'll be dragging you asking you for all sorts of nonsensical stuff and by the time the entrepreneurs just burned out and this just a shitty feeling with us you know you send you sent me a message over the website and my assistant sourced through it i'll look at it and say okay yeah this is good we'll we'll like look at it and ask you for the p and ls within like a week week or so time will give you an lo and then we can close in thirty forty days after that holy shit are you the only decision maker yes that's insane i i i i like to think that i'm the chief risk officer of the company you told me a story about risk you because i i was like okay you buy all this stuff like how much debt do you have you're like no debt and you're buying you know with a margin of safety and you were like even with his mortgages he says no mortgages no mortgages and and look look there's are gonna be a lot of financially savvy listeners here and i have many many financially savvy friends who are billionaires and they disagree with me on this you know but but the way i was raised in and impacts any culture debt is considered bad it's considered taboo and short leverage can help you grow faster especially when used in a smart way but it also takes away the margin of safety which in troubled times can really destroy your autonomy if you're not being careful so so you know i'm okay with getting res slowly and i think i've done alright for where i am i see myself with a turtle in the rabbit race throw you're a thirty year old like pretty much billionaire dude yeah you didn't go that's slow you know in in sixty years i think i'll be okay it helped me sleep better at night be more bullish i don't sean sam do you do you know about charlie and warren third business partner no no tell the story so see nobody knows about the third business partner so they did have a third business partner his name was rick right rick quarter or something like this and it was just as smartest as them but wasn't a hurry to get rich and mona ass warren about what happened to rick at one of the launches that he he had and this is public i'm not sharing with you anything warren like rick's a bitch no no no what warren warren warren said warren said something along the line but like charlie and i always knew that we would become like you know incredibly wealthy but we were just not in a hurry to get wealthy we knew it would just happen rick was just as smart as us but he was in a hurry so like in the seventies like seventy three seventy four downturn what ended up happening was rick had margin loans he was highly lever and the stock market went down seventy percent so all those margin calls happened and he had to sell his berkshire shares to warren and warren bought for like forty bucks a piece right so now the same share like half a half a million plus i'm gonna get a frame picture of this guy rick on my wall and it's just gonna be a reminder every day don't be in a hurry to get rich it'll happen don't don't be in a hurry i that's going on my wall sean i cut you off what were you gonna ask him i wanted him to tell that story but also i wanted to go back to ideas so you had given us the first move if i needed a cash flow right away i would do service agency maybe something around creating content for brands using it and use ai for leverage or generating leads for brands and create a lead agency you using say for leverage okay that's the get started plan but you don't wanna be in the service business forever and you wanna you you wanna get that's just the get you know the the escape from broke jail print plan okay now you've done that what are what's kind of like level two type of ideas or opportunities you see i i would look into the quick cash how of tools right now there are these ai wrappers right so you think like upload your pdf and we'll turn this into a chat gp there's several of those out there right now but you can make it vertical focused that's what i would like chad gp for lawyers add all of your internal sop and now your team can just talk to it real estate internal processes you can do this my team builds this internally in about a week so it's not very hard to build you can pay somebody you know somebody on upwork to do it and then work with the different ai influencers on tiktok ig etcetera and this can easily get you to ten k plus a month i know as a matter of fact like several kids that are making ten k over ten k a month and some even over a hundred k month doing justice just the ai wrappers so i think that's that that's that's pretty easy i would i would look at how i can leverage the freedom of information act to my advantage what is trying to go into the student businesses are you familiar with for you no what is that okay so basically in the united states this works only if you're in the united states we have such thing called a freedom of information act that allows you to request any kind of data from any government run you know authority so usually journalists use it so we see use it at the hustle all the time so like when big stories break often oftentimes it's because a journalist did that and they like un uncovered some you know controversial fact so now now you can you can get creative it with right so you can you can go and say to a government agency maybe you university or whatever hey i wanna see the contracts of your last three or five construction projects that you undertook and that that will give you an advantage in terms of how to approach terms and pricing that was approved before so when you're submitting your bid it's it's better so but you can get really creative like that i remember i was talking to this this was a while ago was talking a guy he was in atlanta area and he would request student information from universities so public universities and he was targeting like nursing school graduates and so on if you were coming out of nursing school you know he he wanted your information and the schools have to give it to you and you might pay them like a processing fee like a hundred dollars or something like that but you'll get the whole graduating classes name email address the you know their physical address that the university have on file they they give they give that to you and then he would send those students an affiliate offer for student loan forgiveness program that was passed the obama administration right and so the affiliate offer was for a company that would fill out those forms for you right and they would charge to charge you like i don't know five five hundred six hundred bucks and they would pay the guy and he was like i just sent one email i make six figures than would want so i i would find arbitrage opportunities like these to build up more cash flow and then i would go fast so but you know sam when you when you're talking about in the early days you're very focused on a w beginner but there was a lot of creative things that were happening like this that was helping my cash flow grow and that allowed me to invest in or some fun creative cash flow of things you were doing at the time i'm not gonna brag about this there's gotta be one prolific one that that is i've heard a bunch through friends of friends i'm not gonna mention any anyone but i've heard i've heard of your thing i mean like the space that you're in everyone starts sometimes black hat gray hat and then as you like start making real money you're like alright i gotta go legit but i've i've heard some crazy stories about like you used to do that's good yeah justin mayer had a good phrase he goes do whatever you gotta do to make your nut and then go on your noble mission and and i was like i don't know if i agree with that but i like the way you said it let me put it that way and i know several people who have done that where it's like okay you what were you doing before there so i was running you know this dating dating site affiliate you know affiliate ad network it's like okay cool plenty of fish like you know this is not really where you wanna hang out for too long or like these poker you know poker arbitrage poker affiliates there's one guy i on ringtone tones with subscriptions the guy who emailed me that was like i think you said you could say this on the he's like yeah like i go on sports every sports book has a welcome offer so he's like i go on sports book a and they have a welcome offer of like they'll match up to twenty percent of your deposit up to whatever thousand dollars on and b has the same welcome offer and i go max out both welcome offers and i bet on the same game for team a team b i lose the small rake but i take cole welcome offer and i just do that again again again but i was like this is so simple and so funny that you do this what are you have you ever had liquidity from selling a business or is the majority of your liquid wealth come through annual cash flows and are you pulling out a significant chunk from the from the business yes i'm pulling up massive chunks from the business in terms of liquidity event yes i sold two two businesses relatively small you know seven figure exits on both of those one with the youtube channel business and another was a with a software photography software business in terms of the cash flow you know we we operate with a very healthy cash flow so i moved that out to the to the hold call level and then use that cash to invest you know in a private businesses as well as in real estate and public markets if you had a pie a good question sean always asks us is what do you do with your money if you had a pie of your net worth what's that allocation looking like pie chart not just a pie a pie chart or a pie yeah we're pie it's still heavily skewed towards my business to online business portfolio extremely extremely heavily skewed i i'd say then a good chunk is in the in the public stock market and then i have cash do you actively manage your portfolio or are you are you just doing boring shit big chunk of it is boring and you know dollar cost average index i have begun to play with you know a little bit of money to to see what i can do with it i i i don't alright like stocks or other stuff no no stocks stock stocks this is only i don't talking about public investments because real estate is separate you you talked about like kind of coming from nothing literally sleeping on the floor because you're like why would i buy furniture i should not by furniture even when you had money yeah but i believe two things a money is a tool it's not the like end goal it's a tool to to enable you to do something with it and b there's no point of money except for to you know you know enhance your lifestyle other people's lifestyle you know and improve lives in some way right it would be ashamed to just have the money and never use it have you and and spending money and spending money is as much of a skill as making money just you know you just start it later in life have you learned how to spend money and what have you learned what working can you teach us yeah yes in the early days i saved everything i mean i i did not like buy a bed until like i'm married dude just to put in perspective we even were dating no there was no bed i ladies find you a man find you a man with the babe so so you know i i i met my wife in high school so so so she's known reasons i was broke and you know her her parents weren't that while off either so so yeah in terms of learning how to spend the money yes now i have right for me and the culture the and how i was raised we take care of family first and my first thing was to ensure my parents are retired because my dad worked really really hard when you know when we moved to us so my my parents are retired i mean they go to pakistan maybe like four times a year their pakistan sam you know like right now for example so so yeah so that that that that was first thing first in terms of making that impact in terms of traveling i i i realized that i get a lot of creativity and joy out of just going and seeing new places and i spend the money on those those things are you giving equity to your people like is the structure where is there like a hold code that you fully own and then the whole c owns eighty percent of this company seventy percent of this company yes in the early days that's what i did now i don't do that now you don't give equity operator do you regret giving equity no i i enjoy working with those cofounder and i i don't think i would be able to do what i did without them what now you're only thirty two like what are you gonna like how do you get up in the morning feel motivated you know what do you what's what's driving you now i want to build a generational company it sounds like you're there though no i think it's generational one like you know when my kids kids are older and grandkids kids are around i'm i'm probably gonna be doing this till tom dead i enjoy the game i enjoy the fun of it i know sam doesn't get excited about about buying it visit than fixing it up and growing it i i get i get a thrill out of it you know because for me that's the opportunity that's the hustle like finding finding the edge getting that deal you you can say in in some sense take just just getting a unfair advantage but but not knowing those tricks knowing those tactics giving me a head like you know like if you play a basketball i mean we all play a basketball i sucked at it right but there were some people like alex was amazing right because alex have been doing this for a long time and he has tactically you could just cross you over or whatnot i like having those tactics in in the business k what's crazy is you might be like probably in the top fifty richest maybe maybe top one hundred top two hundred richest under forty year olds in america i've kept a very very low profile and the only way this would be validated is if fire i was ever to raise around or if i was to exit right so right now what i can see and looking at our our our numbers and what similar companies trade at and and you know exit at my assumptions are based on that but it actually doesn't matter to me one or another i'm pretty uncomfortable this model of buy don't build and of becoming a hold c and having a portfolio like there's a whole bunch of people who i know that are trying to do this right now i'm sure you get a bunch of questions i think i've called you asking you a bunch of questions about this what do you think they get wrong what's the common mistake or trap you think smart people can fall into trying to do this path or what's a misconception that smart people have when they come into this one thing that i i have noticed noticed several things but this is this is the primary thing is that the excitement takes them away so they they'll over pay on a deal and then regret it later on when when they find out because oftentimes they have taking investors money they are on a timeline you know most of them are trying to raise a fund you know your typical ten year plus two years whatever so they have they they're not disciplined enough to wait and i have no rush like you know if i don't buy a company this year no it doesn't make a difference but you know so it allows me to be more measured and disciplined in in the deals that we do and that's that's probably the biggest thing yeah and and or underestimating the problems that exist in a business the first interview that i saw with you was it looks like it was on mixer g or for an andrew warner it looks like it might have been two thousand fourteen but i think it was even before that and andrew was like how much revenue do you do you do to go you go andrew i told you i'm not gonna tell you this and it was pretty funny i then i asked you to come on here and you're like i'm not telling you these numbers you've told us a lot of shit like it seems like you're you're you're in a different sphere than you were before where you don't mind talking about some cool stuff and i think that that's neat because you're like maturing from like this hacker probably gray hat hacker from you know twenty years ago fifteen years ago to like kind of a ty i think you know when when i was younger i was afraid you know either just from a taboo things but also i didn't i wanna find a radar i still do but i wasn't very vulnerable i struggled with vulnerability and that that change as my network changed as as i continued leveling up you know with but i mean now my my form is amazing and with po but it's not a ipo form when everybody's in the ipo and those those kind of you know groups really really help you mature and find your blind spots and things like that so so i i'm you know definitely appreciative of of the friends that i have who call me out on those things and they helped me become better i'm gonna have to use that little clip for my new company hasn't had thanks we use ai to replace what the company you stay we're have out him in there no man i think by the way if your goal is to have a low profile i have a feeling that's gonna change when the headline of this this podcast comes out because i i don't think honestly that he's trying to keep a loop profile i just feel like you care about being humble and and you came across a lot of humility you know it not false humility you know false humility is basically like i'm gonna downplay everything and not tell you anything and that's actually like a different form of sort of you know i don't know arrogance or na the the non flex flex yeah the non flex flex right or the it's has sort of this close the door behind me on the on the way in so you know i'm in but you can't get in because i'm not gonna really do anything like you know i think the best people are the ones who sort of become the person they needed when they were younger and i think that like you know the younger version of you if you heard something like this alright this guy came from nothing moved here for pakistan i didn't speak english was like sitting in the library because he did not make friends in the school was like i wanna play video games a library hit a firewall so his first business was creating a proxy to get around the firewall and he started given that to other kids as a both the way to make friends and make a little bit of money and then he took money and like he was like okay how do we get more customers and it's not like he's some business sa avant he just kept asking how do we get my customers oh what if a directory posted about me how do i get them to do that what's in it for them and like you didn't use one foot after another so i think you yeah i think you did a good job of basically like without putting yourself in a position where you said something you're uncomfortable with you know you you did share stuff that i think is you know for me at least pretty pretty inspiring you're somebody that you know i gave ben a list of like five people i was like you know who are the five people that we've met because we met a lot of people the last two years i said in the last two years who are the people that we've met that were kind of the most inspiring they seem to have a blueprint for life not just business that was working for them yeah their business part of their life was working but they were also like content and they weren't you know like in the first five minutes of meeting them like weirdly bragging about stuff or like saying something that revealed some like weird insecurity that's driving them still and then they haven't gotten over it it's like i don't know those people are the their characters in fun of be around but like i'm not trying to be them you know like somebody who's you know has a family life that they actually care about so we put you on that list and i'm glad you came on because for sure i don't think most people even know your story and that's a shame you know like i think more people are gonna know your story now after this where should people like follow you or where do you wanna send them to well go from really quick sean before we wrap up i wanna tell you something he has this website so google sci so it i want their listener to google list so s y e d and then his last name b a l k h i and then google that and then the word net worth so he's got this hilarious blog post oh this is yours sam told me about this yeah yes where it says what is what science net worth the first line you're probably thinking and so his his his website comes up first and it's a blog post probably thinking that i'm some sort of narcissist writing about my own net worth and third person it's quite the contrary i was looking through search traffic for my blog and i noticed that i have a lot of type in traffic for users simply searching my name and then the term net worth and then he goes on to explain that it's like it's always changing but it's not but knowing someone's net worth is not gonna help you succeed and he's got this hilarious post that he he and it was really funny and then you also i wanna give a shout out we talked a lot about money and shit you've got amazing post where you do an annual wrap up i've been reading that for years i think you started until seventeen fifteen twenty fifteen twenty fifteen you put a big emphasis on phil so like you have a school i i think you're big on schools right you build schools i i forget where pakistan i think and you like are giving away you you put a lot of emphasis on for phil and then it's you and your wife and your kid and a lot of these stuff and you have your own foundation you're giving away a lot of stuff and so i think it's awesome i think that to to reiterate what sean said about being like a you know he has this joke about being a total man about and in in a way that's kinda like what you are is like you're like a holistic person in your your personal website does a really good job of explaining that yeah you know i i started doing those write up when my son when we found out we're gonna be you know we're gonna have my son i was like okay i should start recap this well we we start trying have a kid i'm like i should start recap what's happening in my life so that way because i'm gonna forget it and at some point you know i i may wanna tell him oh check this out check this out and that's how those year end reviews you know came about and i enjoy writing them and all a lot of people love reading them and including you thank you sam for reading it and in terms of education i do believe that check levels of playing field and that's why we're you know we do what we do was just say same sam gave you a compliment i'm gonna make fun of you the home homepage needs a revamp you go entrepreneur investor and marketing extra with extraordinary and it alex and then there's a a photo of you with the the headset the bottom mic ted the ted bike you got the clicker and you're doing the hand gesture talking about you know you gotta start with why and you're above that now bro you've elevated to tech status now you gotta have the super minimalist thing where it's like yeah all y and it's like you know we buy we buy companies of all sizes please inquire say yeah i like if you have a company for sale i like to buy it if you if you if you if you go to awesome website i i really want people to know about awesome automotive instead of me right if you go on my website i barely spend any time i write once a year that would us the year end review and it's that's really more for me than for anybody else but if you go to awesome automotive dot com or am ceo yeah that website website it says helping small businesses grow and compete with the big guys now that's what we're talking about that's a good one and it has all the companies that you you've that that are in under the umbrella dude this do you wanna come do you wanna keep coming back you gotta keep going back on you're you're fun to talk to you that's sam that was pretty good for was that good for you question yeah no you're fun to talk i enjoyed it i enjoyed it and happy to come back i told you we're not we're not we're not assholes no i loved it more importantly are you in for camp fan part two that we're about to house in a few months i i'm in alright and that's the pod i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like the days all on a goal travel never looking back