Transcription
I've got mad respect for somebody who believes what they say they believe enough to do something about what they say they believe. [Music] What if the richest person in the world did your financial homework for you? What if you could be in a "how to make money" class, and you could sit beside the richest person in the world and they showed you some of their notes? What if you found on the street the playbook that Elon Musk, Elon Musk, used to create Tesla? Let me ask you a question: if you applied the principles that he applied, would your life be better? Because in this video, I'm going to show you three pages out of Elon Musk's 274 billion-dollar net worth playbook. Are you ready?
So Elon Musk, everybody knows who he is. He's an insanely brilliant—if that makes any sense—wildly successful, unusually eccentric, and very, very rich person. His net worth is 274-plus billion dollars; that's over a quarter of a trillion dollars in net worth. And there have been many times in his life he was broke, so he knows what it's like if you're struggling financially right now. Elon Musk knows what it's like to be struggling. I saw a video of him, um, on YouTube where he said, "When my brother and I first started our business, we wanted to save money, so we didn't even rent an apartment; we just rented a small office building, and we slept on the couch, and I worked every waking moment. The website was up during the day, but I coded at night." He said that's what we did when we started our company.
But the business that I want to bring to your attention, the playbook that I want to bring to your attention, is the Tesla playbook. 'Cause the Tesla playbook—Tesla—I, I'm not a fan of electric cars. I don't own one; I'm probably not going to own one unless they get to the point where you can't buy gasoline cars anymore. I like gasoline cars; I just like them. But minding the price of gas, I don't care; I just don't want to have—I don't want to have to drive for two and a half hours and then stop and charge my car for 45 minutes or whatever. I don't want to do that; that's not—that's not interesting to me; that's not appealing; that feels like a hassle to me. But mad respect for Elon Musk, and especially the way he built his first company. And so if we will take some pages out of his playbook and build our first business the way Elon Musk built Tesla. Now, Tesla wasn't his first business, but he learned some things when he did PayPal and some of those other ventures that he could apply to Tesla. And so when he built Tesla, the first page out of Elon Musk's $274 billion playbook is this: Start with a prototype framework. What does that mean?
The very first car that Tesla built was the Tesla Roadster. I don't know if y'all remember when these came out back in the early 2000s, but the Tesla Roadster was a very fast car—but Tesla's a very fast car, like 0 to 60, the fastest car I think in the world because there's no lag; it's just instant torque, right? And so when Tesla built—when Tesla built that first Tesla Roadster, it was built on a Lotus frame. So Lotus is a car that existed before Tesla; Lotus is a gasoline car. Tesla's like, "Okay, this is a small car; this is a compact car; this is a light car. I can build my electric car on this model, and then I can do all of my tests, and because it's lighter, it won't burn as much of the battery as a heavier car, so I'm just going to build it on the framework of a Lotus." So his very first car—production car—was a car that he didn't build from the ground up. He found a prototype; he found something that already worked, and then he built his business on top of something that somebody else already created. And see, part of the problem that you're having as an entrepreneur is you want to come up with some unique idea that nobody's ever done before, and you want to have this unique way of doing it that nobody's ever done it that way before, and you want to—like you want to be the next—you want to be the next ChatGPT, GPT, but you're probably not going to do that. So how do you build on another framework? Like what are some—what are some other frameworks that we can build on? Some other things that already exist that we can use to make profit from? Okay, well, the first one I'm going to talk about, um, is a big one that everybody has access to; it's called the internet.
So if you're going to start with—if you're going to start with, um, a—you're going to start with a prototype framework—I'm just going to—I'm just going to call it a PT—you're going to start with a prototype framework. Work, Ma, I'm pressing too hard. A prototype framework means you're going to build on something that already exists. Well, what already exists? Well, the internet already exists, so you can start with the internet. So here's the question I have for you; it's a practical question as you're watching this YouTube video, as you're here in studio. Here's the practical question: Of the revenue you make, how much of it do you make online? If the answer is none, I'm going to tell you something: you are asleep at the wheel, and you are leaving a fortune on the table. But I don't know how to make money on the internet. Doesn't matter if you don't know how to make money on the internet; that's not even part of the equation. If you're not making money on the internet, you are leaving a fortune on the table. Here's what I mean by that.
So I learned about the internet back in the 90s. My old—my young—one of my—my next to my youngest brother was a, um, software engineer, and he knew about the internet. Like I first started using the internet when it was Prodigy and CompuServe, and it was just billboards. Does anybody remember Prodigy and CompuServe? Okay. And so like—and everything was text, and like you just had to read these long posts, and I'm like, "I'm a slow reader; it'll take too long." It's fine; it's fun to use to look up information, but I'm not going to—like I don't see this thing being a thing, right? So my brother says, "My—I'm telling you, there's going to come a time; they're going to have these stores on the internet, and they're going to have malls online, and you'll just be able to go on the internet and place an order and order stuff online." Do you know what I said to him? This—this is not—I thought—I like—I was like not smart enough to just think it and not open my mouth and say something this dumb, and I said to him, "Why would somebody want to buy something on a computer when they can just go to the store and get it, right?" Like that was what—that was my first thought about anybody selling anything or buying anything online. Now today, my idea—my idea is, "Why would anybody go to the store and buy something? You can just order it online." Like I only go to the store when I absolutely positively have to, or if I'm going with my wife or my daughter or something because they want to go to the store, and I'm just going to go with them because that's what they like. Like going to the store just doesn't make any sense to me, right? Okay, so that's the first one.
Second, my brother—my brother—that's right above him. I have six brothers, by the way. So that was my brother Derek. My brother Dwayne, he was the first person that I knew of that knew how to build a website for a business, and I already had a business, and then I found out about this thing called internet marketing in 2001. I'm like, "Internet marketing? You can make websites online, and you can sell stuff?" And I got this whole set of cassette tapes by this guy named Ron Leir, who was teaching people how to make—he had this internet marketing conference, and he had all these speakers there, and all of the speakers that were there kept referring to this young kid in his 20s or maybe 30s, and they said, "Yeah, I learned how to do this; I learned how to sell books on the internet from Cory Rle; I learned how to do affiliate marketing from Cory Rle; I learned how to build websites to sell from Cory Rle." I'm like, "Who's this Cory Rle dude?" So I found Cory Rle; he had—he had marketingtips.com. I went on his website, bought all of his stuff. Cory had a student named, um, um, Jor Briggs—Jamal Briggs—not Jamal Briggs. Anyway, I know him; he's a friend of mine, and I can't—Germaine Briggs—Germaine Briggs—Germaine Briggs. And Germaine Briggs was this 19-year-old kid who is making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year teaching people how to play the piano by ear on the internet. I'm like, "What does that mean?" I'm like, "This kid is making—he's a 19-year-old African-American kid from California; he's making $400,000 a year." So I see that. I know how to write sales copy; my brother Dwayne knows how to build a website, and I say, "Oh, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go talk to Dwayne, and we're going to build a website together." And we build this website together—like he's going to build a website; I'm going to write the sales copy; we're going to get so rich. So I go to Dwayne; I'm so excited; I'm jacked out of my mind, right? I said, "Dwayne, Dwayne, there's this kid; he's 19 years old; he's—he's—he's—he's—he's making $400,000 a year online, and we can make these websites, but I don't know how to make a website; you do. I know how to do marketing; you know—" I said, "We put it together; we can get rich." He's like—well, see, my brother's idea of making money on the internet was building websites for businesses that don't give you enough information to make the website viable; that always want to change it, and they don't want to pay you for the changes. So to him, building a website was a hassle. So I kept saying, "Dwayne, Dwayne, we got to do this." So finally, one day he got sick of me saying this to him. He said, "Look, man, if you want to learn how to build a website, do what I did: Go to the church library; there's some videos in there called 'Professor Teaches Microsoft FrontPage'; watch the videos and build the website yourself." First, I was a little irritated; he's my little brother talking to me like that, but we're adults, so we didn't—we didn't tussle anymore. So I'm like, "Okay, I'm at your house; I'm going to let you get away with that, okay, this time." And uh—and then—I'm so confused; I'm like, "Why do we have videos in the church library about how to build a website?" The whole conversation didn't make any sense to me. But the next day, I went to—went to the church, got the videos, watched them, built a website, and I launched it. I decided—it took me a month to build this website. Two of the—two weeks of that month it took for me to figure out how to collect payment. Like I knew nothing. Everybody talked—everybody who taught internet marketing back then had—built websites; they talked about it as if everybody already knew what they meant. So they said, "What you got to do is you got to build an index.html file." Okay, what—okay, that's fine; I'm happy to build an index.html file, but what does that mean? And then you got to go into the root directory. What's a root directory? Like there was no point-and-click, drag-and-drop, gooey interface, website building—Wix, ClickFunnels, Kajabi—there was none of that, right? You had to go like Microsoft FrontPage, go in, figure it out, okay? So I did that, launched my first website. This was my goal: If I can make $400 my first month, I'm going to be okay. If I make $700, I am going to be the king of internet marketing mountain. So I launched my first website June 1st, 2005. A month goes by; I didn't make $400; didn't make $700; I made $6,700. My first month on the internet. Like what? I was so confused. Now I was even more confused because this guy named Jeff had me speak on his conference call, and on his conference call, um, he had—he had this like—he'd let me make an offer, and he didn't even want any of the money. So I made an offer on his conference call; $5,700 of the $6,700 came in in one day from that conference call. So I thought it was a fluke. Oh, a fluke. Were it not for me getting on this conference call, I wouldn't have made $6,700, but I would have made more than 700. So I'm like, okay, what was my biggest takeaway? What do y'all think was my biggest takeaway from that experience? My first month? No, my biggest takeaway is not "I need to make a lot of money." I need—my biggest takeaway is, "I got to start a conference call," right? And so I started my own conference call called "The Hour to Empower." I did it every Monday night at 9:00 p.m., like clockwork, for years. And so I thought it was a fluke the first month I made 6,700; the next month I made 5,500; the next month I made 6,100. By—that was June, July, August. By December that year, I had my first $10,000 month. I decided I'm going to have a Christmas sale. I was so shocked; people bought stuff from me on Christmas Day. I'm like, "You mean all this money has been in my computer all these years, and I've just been letting it sit there?" I'm telling you right now, there's—like your computer sitting on your desk is an ATM, and it's got a whole bunch of money in there waiting for you to come make an offer, but you got to build on the platform of the internet. So that's one platform, but the other platform I just told you about—it was someone else's audience. Jeff had the audience; I didn't have the audience, but guess what? Part of Jeff's audience became my audience. So people—where am I going to find the people? You don't have to find the people; all you have to do is partner with somebody who's already found the people. I don't know—this to me is exciting. Do you understand that? Being on somebody else's conference call, somebody else's webinar, somebody else's podcast, being a guest on somebody else's stage is like building a Tesla on a Lotus platform. That's what I said. And then let's—don't even talk about—you don't even need a product. "Mar, you have to have a product." No, because you can become an affiliate and sell other people's products. You can be an affiliate. What's that mean? That means that there are people out there—I, one of them—like next week I will pay my affiliate commissions, right? Next week my affiliates will get paid; I'm sure it will be tens of thousands of dollars; it is every month now. That means that I'm paying out tens of thousands of dollars—whatever I pay in affiliate commissions, that's exactly how much those affiliates made me that I wouldn't have made if I didn't have them as affiliates. So like I make—I make—I make—I make a couple of million dollars a year generally selling other people's stuff, even though I have my own stuff to sell. You say, "Why do you do it?" Because it's there; it's a framework that's already there. I don't have to build it from the ground up. I was having this conversation with Russell Brunson, who's the founder of ClickFunnels. We were on a, um, this yacht mastermind thing that we did going to the Bahamas from Miami after, um, we spoke at Grant Cardone's, um, 10X Growth Con in Miami at the Miami Marlins Arena, and I asked Russell a question 'cause Russell pays a 40% affiliate commission on ClickFunnels if you sell this product. Like, okay, cool, like, um, "Russell, I have a question for you: After you're done paying for like product development, customer support, servers, blah, blah, blah, what's your net-net-net profit on ClickFunnels? Pre-tax net profit on ClickFunnels?" You know what he said? 38%. 38%. You have all of the expense; you have all the headache; you have all the hiring; you have all the fulfillment, and you only make 38% net-net profit. I said, "So when I sell a ClickFunnels account, even though I don't have to hire anybody, I don't have to manage anything, I don't have to have any customer support, when I sell a ClickFunnels account, I make 40%. So when I sell a ClickFunnels account, I make more than you, and you started the company." Like if—if you're not an affiliate building on somebody else's platform—they've already built the product; they've already done the—they've already done the proof of concept—if you're not an affiliate, you are leaving a fortune on the table. And maybe you like leaving fortunes on the table; I, for one, don't like leaving fortunes on the table. This is the first page; this is not all the pages; this is just page one out of Elon Musk's $274 billion playbook. Okay, are you ready for the second page from the playbook of the richest man in the world? It's going to blow your mind; it blows my mind.
Okay, so the very first Tesla was like $170,000. He put it on this Lotus frame; they only made a couple of them a year, but he sold them for $170,000. So my—what's the point of that? Well, the point of that is that he started by selling a premium product first. Like if you will do this one thing, it'll change the game for you: Pick a price. Okay, first you got to have a solution; if you don't have a solution, then it doesn't matter; you can't just pick a price. Obviously, this is for people who already have a solution; you already have solved a problem that the marketplace has, right? So the next thing you want to do—like pick a price that to you is like the biggest price you can imagine; offer it for that price. See, Elon Musk financed Tesla by selling Tesla Roadsters because he knew that the profit center in a $170,000 car was going to be more profitable than the profit center in a $90,000 car. So he said, "I'm going to sell the most expensive version of the thing first." And what a lot of people do is they'll sell the cheapest version first, and then they'll inch it up a little bit from there, then they'll inch it up a little bit from there, and then they'll inch it up a little bit from there, and then they'll inch it up a little bit from there. Now, the one thing that I, as a coach—business consult—consult people on that's made them the most money—the most money in the shortest period of time—is selling from the stage. In other words, like getting on a platform and making an offer to a group of people—one-on-many selling. That's the thing that I've taught people that's helped them make more money than any other—in a short period of time—any other thing I've helped people do. So I remember when I first created that offer, I made the price so high, Danny, that I literally thought nobody's ever going to pay me this amount of money. Like—and see, here's the problem: See, you think you need the money the most. I know you need the practice the most, and I knew I needed the practice more than I needed the profits. And so what I did was I made the super-crazy high price for this offer, and I had a room of about 15 people; I made this offer to them, and two people said yes. I started looking around like, "Okay, maybe they didn't hear me say it was $3,000," because this was back in—this was back in 2004, probably. Maybe they didn't hear me say $2,000, $3,000. So I said, "Okay, cool; two people bought it; they were happy with it." I'm like, "Okay, the price was too low." So the next time, man, I raised that price. Nobody's going to pay me this—$4,000. Made that offer; had about 50 people in the room; seven people bought it. Wait, what? What if you have a real solution—not a fake solution, not a promise with no substance? If—if you have a real solution that really helps people—not just that you're parroting something you think you heard me say, or something you think you heard Tony Robbins say, or something you think you heard Russell Brunson say, or something you think you heard some other quote guru say—but you actually have a real solution that you've worked out, and you know it works, and you've helped other people—don't inch up to the price; just like launch with it. I sold that product for over a decade and a half—almost two decades, actually—over a decade and a half, not quite two decades before I stopped selling it. I stopped selling it in 2018. When I stopped selling it, I was selling it for $35,000, and people were still buying it. What if I had started with $35,000? Well, if I didn't think they'd buy it at three, I knew they wouldn't buy it at $35,000, right? And so I remember a conversation I was having with some—some friends of mine; they're not clients; they were—they were—they were friends; we were peers, and I had them speaking at one of my events here in Tampa many, many years ago; I think probably 2014, and I said, "Hey, guys," I said, "How many of your $50,000 offers are you selling? How many of those are you all selling a month?" I said, "We're not selling any." I said, "Oh, okay, cool." I said, "Would you like to know why you're not selling any?" They said, "Sure." I said, "Because you don't have a $50,000 offer to sell." They literally went and created a $50,000 offer; started selling it; sold like hotcakes. Why? Because it's normal for human beings to equate more pricey with more premium. If something costs more, people think it's worth more; otherwise, why would it cost more? I mean, in a world of equity, why would it cost more if it's not worth more, right? And so—but when I said that to them, I also said something to myself. I said, "Okay, you think you're—after I said that to them, and they said, 'Oh, yeah, that makes sense,' and they went and cre—" I said, "You think you're hot stuff, but why don't you have a million-dollar offer, Tony Robbins, a million-dollar offering?" Well, I don't know how to provide like $10 million worth of value. How am I—like—or even $2 million worth of value? How can I like have a million-dollar offer? Well, figured it out. Okay, so I figured it out, and literally figured out a million-dollar offer; started making that offer; it took seven years before anybody bought it, but that seven years didn't cost me anything, and the seven years is going to go by anyway. And then within a couple more years—three more people bought it. So sell a premium product first. Why? It'll give you the money to get to the rest of your—the rest of your dreams. And then state a powerful, promising future. Now, I personally don't believe that Elon's powerful, promising future is a reality because I don't think he can do what he—his promises, but I—I do believe he believes he can do it, and that is—we're going to save the planet through electric cars. I don't believe we're going to save the planet; I believe that we should not pollute the planet; I believe that we should take care of our environment; I believe all of that; I just don't believe a lot of the other stuff that goes with that, but Elon Musk does, and he believes—see, here's the thing—here's the thing I respect about Elon Musk, even though I don't believe that the thing he wants to do is something that's going to be doable because I believe what the Bible says, and the Bible says that God's going to burn up the old Heaven and the old Earth, and he's going to make a new one. So like we're not saving the planet, but he believes it. I've got mad respect for somebody who believes what they say they believe enough to do something about what they say they believe. Elon Musk didn't say, "You go figure out a way to—to save the planet." He didn't say, "Well, you're rich; why don't you use some of your money?" It's so—it blows my mind how many people think they have a better idea for what I should do with my money than I have. Like when I have—meet entrepreneurs, and they say, "I started a nonprofit." Cool. How's it doing, man? "It's struggling right now," and they want me to give money to it. How much did you give to your nonprofit? "Well, none; I don't have any money." Okay. May I coach you? This is always my answer. May I coach you? "Sure." Okay, I'm gonna—I'm going to give you the problem first, then I'm going to give you the solution. Here's the problem: Rich people are not in the habit of contributing money to causes started by poor people because if you don't know what to do with your money to make it grow and multiply, how could you possibly know what to do with my money to make it grow and multiply? So I'm not going to—so the best—so that's the problem. The problem is you think that your cause—with your charity—would be a good use for my money; I disagree. I don't think my money is going to be a good—your cause—your charity is a good place for my money. So let me tell you how I—how I fund my nonprofit, because I have a nonprofit: Become rich; like go build a for-profit business; get really, really rich; and then have a fundraising party—dinner, whatever—and then invite all your rich friends, and then make them an offer to give to your charity, because when they—when they can see—and then you be the first one to contribute. When they see you contributing your money to that charity—now I believe that's a place that's worth me putting my money—but if you haven't put any money in, why should I put any money in? You believe in it enough for me to put my money in, but not enough for you to put your money in. See, I put my money where my mouth is, and I put my money into my charity, and I use my charity to support widows and orphans and sometimes ministries that I believe deserve whatever. I—an orphanage that I send money to every month in Liberia—South Liberia, West Africa. I have widows that I support; I have ministries that I support from time to time, and people in ministry that I support from time to time. That's what I do with the money that—my nonprofit raises, and I don't even have parties and ask people to give to it; I just give to it myself. But if people come to me and say, "I want to give you some money for—" say, "Here, just make it out to my nonprofit." If I go speak at a church, I won't let them give me the money; I said, "Make it out to my nonprofit." I'll literally spend money to go speak at a church, and then the money that they give me, I have to make it out to my nonprofit, and I put it in my nonprofit so I can support those—was—why I don't need the money, and I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with me taking it; I just don't need it, and I'd rather give the money to my nonprofit. So—but state a powerful, promising future. Elon Musk's is, "Hey, we're going to save the planet through electric cars." What's your powerful, promising future that you're promising people that causes them to not just want to buy your product but to become a part of your movement? Mine is—I believe that you know, when all is said and done in most people's lives, more is said than done, right? But it shouldn't be that way. Like why is more said than done? Like I want to do way more than I talk about. I would like my life to be a more done than said life. And so I believe the Bible is the ultimate truth; it is the constitution of the universe. I believe that Heaven is real; Hell is real; people are going to spend eternity somewhere, but I don't want to just go around telling people that I—
Want to live a life that exemplifies somebody who has yielded to the King? So that even if they don't want to hear what I say, they're willing to listen because they desire what I have. That's what happens when you state a powerful, promising future.
So I teach people business. I teach business development, business, business growth strategies based on biblical principles, because I believe that God has the best ideas. And business is not just a good idea; business is a God idea.
So I hope this video helps you take these plays from Elon Musk--three, three pages from Elon Musk's Tesla Playbook--apply them to your business. I challenge you to come back and tell me they didn't work. All right. Hope this video blesses you. Stay blessed by the best, and we'll see you on the next video. Peace out.