Transcription
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In 2019, I sold 76 companies in one year for about 1.27 billion. That year, as I sold those businesses, I got to begin living the life that I wanted to live, a life that would have taken me 20 or 30 years.
My very first exit was an unintentional exit. I was just trying to source capital, and some corporate giants came in kind of behind the scenes and took advantage of me at a level that I just didn't even know the game we were playing. At the last hour, it was like, "Hey, by the way, this is about what's going to happen to you." It cost me, you know, like it probably cost me in the long run 20 to 30 million that I could have had personally. It was a big, big lesson.
They gave me 24 hours to make a decision. I was outclassed, I was outplayed, and I had no idea. I really had no business playing the game that they were playing because I wasn't prepared.
So, I'm driving back the next day, and I have to go in and sign some papers, mad and frustrated. The words of my mother kind of came back: "In any low, if you can find gratitude in the moment, it becomes a catalyst for your greatest lessons in life."
I started thinking, and I was like, "You know, this is interesting. I'm trying to get to a place of positivity. How do I actually see the benefit in what just happened to me?" It dawned on me they were actually giving me what’s in the business realm, you know, like in the exiting of companies, what was called a seven times multiple on my EBITDA.
So, like, if I were to work the same amount of hours for the next seven years doing the exact same thing, and I didn't see any increase or decrease, essentially what they're doing is giving me seven years of my life back in this moment. Now, I might have wanted 10 or 20 years of my life back, but they're giving me seven.
I found this moment of gratitude on the way back in after one of the worst days in my business career and thought, "You know what? If I could live my life today as if I'd want to live it in seven years with this revenue, what would my life look like?"
I started thinking, "Who gets that blessing in life?" Then it became the catalyst or the mantra of how I do business. How do I shrink down my time so that instead of trying to live 100 lifetimes and dying with this expectation of giving back later, what if I could actually live 100 lifetimes today in this process of shrinking down time by selling something at an exponential multiple without having to go through the process?
Then take that capital and go do something massive with it. Capitalism, in its right context, is very serving of the general population because what it says is, "May the best service or product delivered in the right way win," right, with the right price.
That part of capitalism is amazing because it serves the consumer. My businesses exist to make money, but my businesses should also have an altruistic look at serving the customer and having a greater reach than just the business itself.
To me, that's where I think capitalism, in its purest form, does the greatest good. There are really five phases to business: there's what we call the startup phase, then we move into perseverance, then scale, and lastly succession.
I have a systematic way of pushing the businesses through every phase with complete intention. That's the problem with most small business owners. You got a guy who's running a small tech company or a dry cleaner or whatever it is. They will get into what we call perseverance mode, where they're making a little bit of money.
Perseverance is like you might be profitable one month, you might not be profitable the next month, you might be profitable for six months, and then you might not be, right? But you don't have the right people in the right seats, you don't have the right systems, and there's no way to scale it.
What they do is they start taking all their revenue and putting it into areas that really shouldn't be invested in until they're truly viable. They misstep because they don't know the sequencing.
What I've realized is there's a sequencing to growing businesses, and it really doesn't matter what the business is. There's a sequencing to it, and if I can actually grow the business properly, hire the right people, create the right governance layers, and understand the right KPIs at the right time, then I can systematically get it through that process faster than just about anyone else.
I've mastered that, and that's how we grow and run and scale and potentially exit all the businesses. Money, resources of any kind, I mean money specifically, but really resources, become the greatest revealer of actually what's inside.
You know, most people, they get to speak from their audible voice. Some people get a megaphone and a microphone, and I feel like the money and resources we get is just like an amplification system of who we really are.
I remember having a real deep thought when I was making my first good money, thinking, "Who do I want to be?" Yes, I can live a good life, I can up my standard of living, but in the end, I want to make sure that this doesn't just serve me.
I think that money is the ultimate revealer. As you see people obtaining this money with greed, you just find more greed. They take advantage of more people. For instance, take somebody like Elon Musk.
Elon's goal is to change how we navigate not just our globe but the entire planetary system. The more money he makes, the more it reveals his real desire, which is to really change how we navigate everything, you know? From cars to rockets to trains, it really just kind of reveals who Elon was.
Well, if Elon was sitting there broke, he might have all these dreams and aspirations, but Elon wealthy is showing that's really who he is.
To go back just a step, I have amazing parents, and I was super fortunate to grow up in an environment where my father was an entrepreneur, but also my mother was an entrepreneur. Both of them started businesses, both of them ran successful businesses, and I learned so much about just the life operating system through them.
I feel like I had a jump start where a lot of people did not. It wasn't really my college education or formal education in any way that led me to where I am. It was the life education and really just some basic principles that were huge for me.
I had a father who understood and had a great relationship with fear. He left his corporate job to try to pursue what was his dream, and I watched him do it. Sometimes he was successful, sometimes we were extremely poor as a family, and sometimes we were wealthy.
I watched that, and he was also present in my life. I saw this great dad who also had the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey. For me, while he probably looks back on those periods of time and says, "I never want to go back to those low moments," I look at those low moments and think, "What's the worst that can happen if I go all in?"
I end up spending time with my family, I end up having a good relationship with my kids, right? He really had a great relationship with fear and taught me and gave me a great gift, and that is to understand what to truly fear.
The fear of loss is really not something we should fear. Sometimes in loss, it brings us our greatest opportunity. The greatest times I ever had with my father were when we were at the lowest point financially.
To me, it's just like watching a person navigate that and experiencing that really helped me deal with fear. The second thing that he taught me is that ego is the enemy. My dad is a quiet leader who is not going to be an alpha, you know, beat his chest.
You're never going to find him on social media touting his wares. He was a guy who led from the back, who was never afraid of picking up the shovel himself, who is quiet, who is a leader in his own right, very demonstrative but in a very quiet sense.
His actions and his results always far outpaced my mother, though, was gratitude. I had suffered quite a bit of loss in my younger life. I lost a sister, then later lost a brother, and my mom, a very strong and emotionally aware person, constantly brought me back to this point of gratitude.
She would say, "Eddie, tell me about..." I would struggle with the loss of my sister, and she would say, "Eddie, let's talk about your sister. Let's talk about your favorite day. Let's talk about the favorite toy she had. Let's talk about what was your favorite moment."
Then she would help me rehearse gratitude even in loss. Some of the greatest lessons I've ever learned in my life were to be afraid of the things that you should intentionally be afraid of, to remind myself constantly that ego actually is the enemy.
Ego prevents me from getting where I want to go, and if I can find gratitude in the low moments, they become catalysts for massive growth.
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