254 - 3 Paths to Quickly Replace Your W-2 with Chris Sacchinelli

22:48And we were talking about this before the call. I was excited to dive into it. Kind of going back to the like, know thyself. What motivates you? What are you looking for? A lot of times you get into entrepreneurship and you think, well, I want to have a hundred million dollar business or a billion dollar business, or I want to own 10 companies. I saw this clip of Chris Krohn talking and he's like, I'm really deep into private equity. My goal is to own 10 ,000 companies. And I think any entrepreneur who has experience would understand nobody wants 10 ,000 businesses. It's so much headache. It's so much complexity.

23:19And so when you're starting out, you don't necessarily know all of these things, but you kind of know that you want freedom. you want the ability to not have a capped upside you want to control your schedule and your life you don't know any other path than entrepreneurship and every entrepreneur that we've seen on the news is like mark zuckerberg is a hundred billion dollars you know elon musk has 500 billion dollars and so you think that's what you're supposed to shoot for what i've learned over time however is that many people lose sight of that and they think they think they look down on the two, three,$400 ,000 a year pressure washing business.

23:55When in actuality, that guy's living the life that we all thought we wanted when we started out. Controls his schedule, has good money, is well known in the community. You know what I mean? And so we chase a lot of these bigger things. So to your question about running these businesses, I realized kind of over time that operating dozens of businesses is really hard. Yeah. It's at scale. It's really, really hard unless they are all the same type of business or you have like a centralized office where you offer a couple of services and then are really hands-off. If you're trying to like roll up different businesses and different industries, like we have a tree trimming business, we had a crypto mining business, we had an RV park, we had a digital agency, home health, hospice, medical practice management.

24:45None of those are similar. And so there's a lot of operational complexity to executing well on any of those individual businesses and your context switching all the time, it makes it really difficult. So what I would say to somebody who's trying to scale, I don't think trying to get to a hundred million or a billion dollar companies, bad thing. If you're trying to scale, pick an industry and stay in the industry or pick a function, centralize that function and just be totally hands off. So you're either Jeff Bezos and you have one company effectively, or you're Warren Buffett and you have 50 different companies that you own big stakes in, but you're totally hands-off.

25:24In a nutshell, I would say that's kind of my lesson in hold co-building. Oh, like without a doubt, a thousand percent agree with all of that. And I think that right now it's becoming more of a popular theme. So I've been building Simple Holding since 2012. And when I started, nobody knew what a hold co - It was not like, I literally be like, what are you doing? Like, what is that? A business that owns other businesses? What do you do? How's that a thing? And now it's starting to become like more and more popular. And as things start to become more popular, obviously more people get involved with it.

25:59And when more people get involved with it, not all the right people are getting involved with it, just a lot of large numbers. And that's like a great formula for a lot of mistakes to happen. And when a lot of mistakes happen, there's loss. and I one of the things of this show I would hopefully like to help folks do is avoid risk and avoid loss right mitigate the risk decrease the risk increase your upside so one thing for folks listening is like don't make that and don't make that the pursuit right like that's not the goal you got to figure out how to get yourself there is the goal and you just gave a couple of really cool things for us to get into first was like the ability to not have capped upside That's like a cool quote.

26:42That's a quotable. The ability to not have a cap upside is like super cool, which means you have an objective of putting yourself there, right? So you have a goal and then you have a thing you need to focus on. And then in approach from specifically the whole co-perspective, we said industry focus or function focus. And you're quite literally thinking right now through this, right? So early in the show, you said like literally something you were quite literally thinking through. Let's work through it together. Like, I love this. I obsess over this. This is what I live. When you're thinking about it, how do you differentiate?

27:17Like, what is your core objective? So on the whole co side, it's the ability to not have capped upside. What does that even mean to you? Because you said not just money. You said also time. Like, you sprinkled in a couple of things after, which I thought was like, oh, that's brilliant. That's awesome. My brother-in-law started a company eight years ago. He literally bootstrapped it to a$500 million company today. He's still operating that company. Great company. And he said to me early on before they even got the ball rolling, he was like, you know, I just got tired of relying on other people's generosity.

27:49I think many times when you are in a job, you're relying on your boss to say you do a good job and maybe give you a bonus or maybe give you a raise. And the metrics aren't really clear or objective. So when I say uncapped upside, the inverse is also true. You have downside. Like you could go bankrupt and lose everything, but it all of a sudden it's dependent on you now. And so now I'm not just going to get that 10 % raise a year or maybe a$20 ,000 bonus. Whatever I do could be as big as I want it to be. If I execute well, there's something freeing about that, that I really like. The other sides of the upside are, I want to spend my time with whoever I want, working on the projects that I want.

28:34To me, that is what brings joy and fulfillment in life. So if I am creating my own opportunities, my upside is not capped because now I've got the potential of financial upside. I've got the potential of intellectual fulfillment and I've got the potential of emotional fulfillment and stability. So, you know, money, mind and people. So that's why I say like there's an uncapped upside when you're looking at growing these businesses. I feel like we subscribe to a similar sheet of music. We're reading off a similar sheet of music to a certain extent. I'm a big believer that money is a short-term motivator.

29:12I think that money is a short-term motivator for people, whether you're in a job or whether you're an owner. It's there when you don't have it, but then as soon as you do, it becomes very much so less valuable and other things in life become more valuable. and we're living in a world of real constraints and scarcity. And we are at the end of the day, allocators, whether we accept that we are or not, all of us as humans are, we have a certain amount of time to allocate to anyone, which thing or heart or anything really care. When you're thinking about this, like what is the frame? So mind, money, mind, and people, how do you rank them?

29:48Like what is your rank and retrieve to make decisions around? What's your framework? Because you mentioned a framework earlier a couple of times, and I also want to squeeze out the framework itself. So I'm trying to... My ranking is mind, people, money. And mind and people are probably interchangeable. Money is definitely a third. So mind being the intellectual pursuit, mind being the ability to pursue full potential, mind being... Curiosity. Curiosity. Oh, that's interesting. Can we solve this problem? Is it a big enough problem? Could I get people together to actually figure out how to solve healthcare?

30:23Is it going to stimulate me every single day to keep coming back to it? Because if it doesn't, I'm going to be distracted by something else. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And it also ties in because it's like mind is almost like the ability to be selfish, selfish to be selfless, to be selfishest. Mind, I have to identify the thing that's big enough to get people involved. Second, people. So now I need to be able to selflessly get people involved. self-adjust collectively as a whole, we need to pursue this thing and make some money. We need to make some money. Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes a ton of sense when you're thinking about the whole code and you're thinking about what you're doing.

31:01So you have a ton of collective experience. You have experience as an operator, the life experience of needing to do things, right? So we all, we need to do stuff at first and then eventually you achieve and you kind of have more freedom and it's like, what do I want to do? And that's typically like when a lot of shiny objects start to come in and you start doing a lot of stuff because you're like, oh, I couldn't do this stuff before. And now let me do everything. And then you realize, oh, that's a lot. It's not really what I want. It's not optimizing for my life. What do I do now? And now you have this like almost like pressure is a privilege to a certain extent.

31:36You have like you're put in the position of privilege to a certain extent to make the right type of decisions, good, timely decisions. And you also have kiddos and you have all these other things that you need to make employees, team members, all this stuff. What's your frame? So not necessarily where you've been, but where you want to go. Like when you're thinking about your businesses and you're thinking about what you're building, what is your frame that you're deciding with that? So I'll give you the philosophical and then I'll give you the practical. The philosophical is my biggest rule is I don't want to be away from my kids.

32:05Yesterday was our first day of the basketball season and I'm coaching my two boys teams and we, and they're back to back and we got them arranged and I got to coach my eight-year-old and my five-year-old. It was freaking amazing. So good. We had a son that passed away 10 years ago. And that was just a, I mean, you've been through some stuff. You shared some things with me before we started. When you realize what life is really supposed to be about, then you're able to set very clear expectations for yourself. And I'm not saying I always adhere to them, but that's one of them. I want to be around for my kids.

32:40I'm turning 40 and I'm going to be honest. I'm a little bit of a head case about it because I'm like, not because I'm sitting here like, I thought I'd be a billionaire. I thought I'd have five jets. It's because I'm like, my kids are going to be out of the house. And like, then what am I going to do? I freaking love these little a-holes. They're just going to leave someday. So that's my number one. That's my number one when I'm looking at opportunities right now is, do I have to go anywhere? Do I have to be gone? Can I be there for basketball practice? Can I be there for soccer? or can I be there for music or sports activities, et cetera?

33:15And then I would say it's the three that I've already said. Can I work on the thing that I want to with who I want to when I want to? And if it doesn't meet those criteria, then we don't, I don't really pursue them. But once I'm into something, we can talk about like specifically how I'm evaluating things right now. So first and foremost, that was, yes, absolutely. And absolutely on a lot of different levels. And I appreciate that. when you're in that mindset, two-part question would be the structure of approaching that because that seems ideal. And then you need to create the ideal, right? Because literally, you're creating the ability to have the freedom of time to spend with your, invest with your family while also still pursuing what you're passionate about.

34:05And then the byproduct becomes these pursuits that you do, which becomes another level of accountability and you're responsible for. So then you have to have the structure to be able to manage it and maintain it and focus on it. And I guess that also directly ties into what you just said, which is framing of decision. So how do you decide what to do? Well, the first thing I'll say is I know that I'm very lucky. And for probably 99 % of people who are even listening to this, I've gotten to do something that they haven't, which is I had time. You know, I had exits and I had money and I didn't have to jump into something else.

34:39I wasted a lot of time, but like it also just had the freedom to like explore and figure out what was the next swing going to be. And I wasn't ultra concerned about organization and like trying to optimize. Now though, I'm at the place where with my brother-in-law, we just launched a healthcare venture studio, which I'm freaking stoked about. Okay, let's talk about it. So this is the thesis behind the venture studio. He has this healthcare company. They're big. 5 ,000 employees, 8 ,000 patients, 70 facilities, $500 million in top line revenue. And for the last year, he knew that I was doing podcasting and looking around.

35:15We'd been talking about, let's start a venture studio here in Boise, and we could invest in companies. And it was all these things outside of healthcare. And eventually we had a conversation where I was like, oh, and why did we do anything other than healthcare? We know healthcare. We've been better than 99 % of people in healthcare. why wouldn't we just double down and stay in healthcare? And it was like, duh. So we decided let's launch a healthcare-focused venture studio where we can leverage the assets within his company to build other products. And the lens that we look at it is like this.

35:45Do we understand and can we add value to the product? That means probably 90 % of them are going to be healthcare items. And they might even be focused to things that we have experience in, like home health, hospice, home care, skilled nursing, assisted living, etc. But there's going to be 10 to 20 % that are not healthcare focused, but we can still add value to. One example would be, maybe there's an HR software that somebody has created that maybe we want to start up or we want to invest in, or a CRM that we want to build for our own purposes. That's not necessarily healthcare specific, but it is something that we can leverage the assets of Cascadia, who we've partnered with, in order to suss out.

36:26Right. So that's, that's the first question is like, do we have a core competency to actually add value to this thing? The sort of second question is, okay, if we do have a core competency, do we have the bandwidth or the expertise within the team to help facilitate that? So Owen and I might have experience, but maybe we don't have anybody on the team who can actually help spin up a CRM, for example. The next lens layer that we look at is, all right, since this is going to be more of a venture bet, we know that eight out of 10 venture bets are going to fail. We're going to throw a million dollars a year at this.

37:00And so if we're throwing a million dollars a year at this, we at least need a 20 % IRR. We know it's going to be better over time, but at least in like the initial two years, we need like a 20 % IRR. So any project that we take on has to return a minimum expectation of between$100 ,000 and$200 ,000 in value. So maybe we'll have a hit rate of five out of 10. But at least if we just regress to the mean and have a hit rate of two out of 10, we are at least returning that$200 ,000 so that we can have that return on invested capital because we're putting a million dollars a year. And then the third piece is, is it an incubated idea or is it an accelerated idea?

37:42If it's incubated, that means we are going to create it internally. It might be an AI software. It might be a product. whatever it is. There's somebody internally who has an idea. Cool. We incubate that and then we give it an opportunity, but it also might be an accelerated idea. So maybe somebody has gotten to an MVP, but they just don't have a customer to test it with or resources or distribution, whatever. And so is there an opportunity for us to bring in somebody into the accelerator and then grow them? So one of the companies that we're talking to right now is a staffing company. I'll try to be as specific as I can, but remain high level.

38:16A staffing company that has no healthcare experience. So they already have the operational expertise in staffing, but they want to get into healthcare. Well, that's a perfect recipe for our accelerator. Cool. Come in. We'll give you access. We'll take an equity stake in this new venture. You can understand healthcare. We'll give you access to our distribution channel. We'll advocate for you. And now you have the operational expertise. You've already done this before. You can go and run with it. We can drive business your way. It's a win-win for everybody. So they come in for three months, learn the healthcare space and spin out.

38:44And so that's how the accelerator portion of it works. that's like the lens that I'm looking at it through now is like, how do we generate quick wins? Dang it. I have so many questions. Okay. I don't know if you want to go through them or if you're going to want to have the answers on them or not, but I got so many questions. So talk about live, learned experience. So flashback 2012, bootstrapped eight figures, sold, restructured. First thing I thought I had to do was start vesting in companies because I felt like I wasn't a real startup guy. And I had a big chip on my shoulder and I was like, oh, this is what you do now.

39:23So I got this huge space in Norwalk, Connecticut and we just started opening up doors to companies to come in and we called it an accelerator, an incubator accelerator. And I was like semi writing checks to them. We had a semi-structured program that they would go through. And long story short, it was not a success. It was a great way for me to lose my money. Spoiler alert, it was not a success. And what I did pull out of that is a lot of structured process, a lot of things that we ended up productizing and turned into playbooks. And then I ultimately implemented in other aspects of the portfolio in other ways.

40:03So there was value extraction and it was a very real experience. And it was a very visceral experience because we lived it every day and there's a lot of energy. I didn't learn my lesson because in 2016, I repeated the same thing, partnering with IBM and doing an AI accelerator program in Bridgeport, Connecticut, converting a space. So I have this live-learned experience of this approach. So I have these questions and thoughts in mind as well. But the key thing is you define something in terms of a focus. so you are now specifically focusing solely on healthcare whereas previously we just listed a whole spectrum of different businesses that you're involved with it was like tree trimming all the way to x xyz in this moment in time you have this focus so industry so earlier we said that there was two perspectives to take in terms of the whole code am i having an industry focus or i'm having a functional focus, industry focus or functional focus, Amazon, Berkshire, and you decided industry.

41:10So you were focused on health, which is like so cool in the first place. I wish I could get into like being in the healthcare industry because talk about a macro trend. Bro, I love, I talk about that all the time. Warren Buffett has a quote where he's like, Like, what's my favorite business? Or what's my favorite boat? A boat with a tailwind. So, like, I just love macro trends like that. Dude, and, like, so cool. Like, so many things. And, I mean, you have the experience, which I don't think I actually knew. Like, on the in-home living, assisted living stuff. Like, talk about a great, you know, that's a super interesting industry to just nerd out on.

41:48So many different angles to take. Let me hit a couple things that you said. One, I also had a similar experience. Chris and I, my best friend, we launched this company called CoFounders. And the whole idea behind it was like, okay, we have some experience, we have some money, let's invest in people who are starting businesses. And so the tree trimming business came out of that and digital agency came out of that. Yeah, it created the problems that you're talking about. And so what I realized in that was like, first of all, I don't have enough money to do this the way that I'd want to do it. Because, and you probably noticed it too, you would have had to hire like a program director.

42:23You'd have to hire someone who's like, an operator who's in the weeds with each one of these. You got to do a lot of mentorship. You got to get them up and running. Like if you're doing an incubator or an accelerator, it requires an infrastructure that is not cheap. So you might think like, oh, I got a couple million dollars. A couple million dollars doesn't cut it. A couple million dollars a year, but not a couple million dollars to like actually start this whole thing. And so I realized really quickly like, oh shoot, man, that's not the way that I want to go. And then by necessity, I had to focus on industry because I don't know your full background.

42:53Chris's background is marketing. That guy, Facebook ads, organic, Google, whatever. So he can invest in basically any industry that worries about CAC and LTV, right? Because he understands how you go out and get customers. And so that's not industry specific, but that's like role specific. Makes sense for the tree trimming stuff. Yeah, quite literally. Get a lead, sell a lead in a sense, yeah. That's all it is. It's a lead generating company and we're actually pivoting that business. But so that's why I'm saying like, you know, if you're an amazing marketer, you could start a whole co-company that's just providing that expertise to founders.

43:27But for me, I didn't have that specific expertise. So I went the healthcare route. I stayed in the industry. Yeah, I kind of really actually super love it. But you're coming in with a big partner, it sounds like. I am, yeah. I think you mentioned it, Cascadia. Cascadia Healthcare. Don't know enough. Not an SME in the space at all, but it sounds awesome. I mean. Because that's like an anchor. That's like a really strong play because now you can make intros. Network is what works at the end of the day. And we can facilitate. We can source a bunch of ideas. We can test a bunch of ideas. Like, there's a lot of advantages to it.

44:01You talked about 20 % IRR, though. Are you pulling in outside capital? Because, yeah, like, that talk about lessons learned. Like, it is, like, a very expensive proposition to execute. No, I mean, that's another lesson learned. No, we don't want to. I'm talking on the bootstrapping podcast, my friend. I'm not raising any money. Like, no. But no fund economics or anything? No. No, it's just us. And I don't even know that we will spend a million dollars a year. That's what we had like originally earmarked where we're like, okay, we feel good about this. But every decision is run through kind of a committee where we have a conversation like, well, do we need this investment?

44:33Like, does it make sense? So like we're willing to spend up to that, but that doesn't necessarily mean, okay, we've got, we have it. We got to deploy it because we're bootstrapping. Like we're, we're, we're trying to figure this out. We haven't taken money off the table, but what we wanted to do is because this is kind of a new venture for all of us. my brother-in-law and then his two partners are our partners in it as well because it's a new venture we wanted to like learn it first yeah shocking i know and then once we have like a track record and we've learned it then we can go raise money at you know advantageous terms and rates etc but starting out it's just like let's just build a muscle first and then if we really need money to throw gas on the fire then we can go and raise money because that's what money's for Like don't note side, that's something that I made a mistake with.

45:19So I took the same perspective. I was like, oh, I don't have the track record to do this. Like I need to do it myself. I need to prove myself. I need to. So I funded and I was like, I'll do it with my own capital, fund it. And then I'll use that to then go raise a fund and then use the economics of that fund to then carry costs and use the management fees to cover op X and then use the capital to leverage up, do more deals better, et cetera, et cetera. and I never was able to bridge it to the second. And if I was to start it again, I would do it from the beginning. Dude, what you just said is like, I just don't think people understand holdcoats or funds.

45:55Once you create a holdco or a fund, you've now introduced a whole other operational complexity and dynamic. You've got to manage the fund. You've got to manage investors. If you're raising a fund, there are real SEC regulations that you need to comply with. And the way that you report and the way that you do your financials, there's a bar that you have to meet. It's, you know, otherwise you go to jail like Tai Lopez. Yeah. Talk about a story, right? Do you want that? Like that, that's the other question is like, now you're, you're answering to a bunch of different people. And the same is true on the hold co side.

46:25Like, okay, you have a whole co now. How do we run payroll? Who does AP? Do we have a shared banking account? Who's funding things up? Yeah. What's the IT infrastructure? Like it's just specific to the, to the accelerator model, to the incubator accelerator model, which I guess, I guess my difference in perspective is you're thinking about this as the whole co and then within this this is your whole code in a sense plat vehicle and then within that you have an accelerator and an incubator structure within it and i'm thinking about it just as like one functional entity of like the thing in which it's happening and like a better way to support that yeah without over over complexity of it because yeah structuring you could always do like entity structuring to be able to you know silo different different things and make it make sense i guess the structuring is one thing but i just mean now you've got like well i gotta have the quarterly compliance call and I got to send out the fund update.

47:16And I got, it's just like, I don't want to figure all that crap out. Yeah, for sure. And no, I get it. I get it. And things definitely, you know, everything, you know, is a process. So when you're talking about this is, are, these are going to be deals that you're either incubating, which means that you're setting them up or you're accelerating, which means that they're already coming in. And then all of it is flowing up. Are you looking to do like majority ownership? So are you doing like traditional HOKO, I want 80 % of ownership into these things? Or are you doing it more like venture deals?

47:52So the accelerator will be more similar to venture deals. The incubator will be more similar to HOLDCO. But the truth is, I don't know. If you could only pick one, which would you pick? Like if you could only do one type, if you could only do incubator or you could only do accelerator, which one would you pick? I love the accelerator because somebody already has a product. that's so hard to even get to a place where you have a functioning product. And if they come and I'm like, oh, man, we know this person, this person, this one. We're connected in this industry and this industry. I think we could really not only help them on the user experience, but we could grow this thing from a distribution standpoint.

48:27That's where I get excited on the accelerator side. So in a vacuum, probably the incubator. But both of them are just like very exciting opportunities. So like something I haven't really seen happened, because like the accelerator model has been around for a very, very long time at this point. And there's different degrees of them, for sure. There's different spectrums that we've seen across the board. I haven't really seen anybody that does like, almost like a PE buyout program where you're coming in with the intention to sell and the whole co is coming in with the intention to buy. And so now you're actually buying established businesses within the healthcare space.

49:05So I'm not opposed to it. Here's the problem with it, and it might be the fundamental problem that I've had with just holdcos in general, is if you want a proper holdco, you've got to have a person to run it. ETA. Yeah, and those are hard to find, man. It's hard to find really good, talented, consistent, dependable operators. and then to give them the equity that they need in order to stay. Like if they're that good, where they're growing that business in the way that you want it to be grown, they're not staying for like 5 % equity. They're mobile. They can go and start their own business. They can go raise money and have 90 % equity.

49:45So it's hard to do it with just one. And then all of a sudden you're like, well, I want to have 10. Like, all right, well, I got to win the lottery, not only once, but like 10 different times. So I'm not opposed to the private equity model where it's an accelerator and you buy them out. The fundamental problem with that is it then exposes me to, now I got to go replace them. Who's the person? And that's just a hard game to play. No, interesting. Like legitimately, yeah, like all things for sure to think about. I think the concept of scaling this type of business model is really so difficult. And I think like what we navigated to very uniquely on this call is so special because it comes from a super organic place and you kind of have to live it to even be able to talk about it to a certain extent, because that is such a real thing.

50:30It's like you're struggling, struggling, struggling. You're working, you're grinding, you make it. Now you make it. Now you have this freedom. You almost put yourself into as many things. You start saying yes, because you want more. And then you create a more problem in a sense. And then you're like, oh, now I got to really simplify. And it's like, oh, what do I do? And like, we're not all worn, you know, like at the end of the day, like not all warren buffett like and that's what i've done on our own you know and then like life is a real thing dude and i think that conversation about like the kiddos and priorities and all that stuff is like such a real thing but meanwhile you're holding these assets which are really just liabilities disguised because you're responsible for them yes and it's like what do i do what i do with my hands i gotta figure this shit out you know which is why i think conversations like this and like this type of stuff is super valuable i love the idea of hold codes it's just when you actually get into it and you experience it for me it's just for me like it totally could be for other people and it is for other people obviously i'm like i just don't want that like overhead in my mind of like oh that we got the liability with this company and this company and this company that are all different yeah i got a context switch every single time time now if you like that stuff and you're good at that stuff and whatever go for it but for me it's just like that's that's a mental tax that i i just don't want to have and so it's hard what we've been trying to do like what i've been trying to drive through through mental model is same thing same effort of simplicity so like i've you know gone through a very similar thing over the the past five years of a reason and outside reason to simplify and primarily driven by my kiddos so like super cool in terms of the overlap where I landed was the concept of just building an ownable business like I feel like the place to live and the challenge that I've been trying to like master for the past half a decade now of like obsession like nerd out obsession in a closet in a room somewhere it's like how do you build a truly ownable business like an ownable business being a business that anybody would want to buy but yet you would never want to sell That's an interesting framework.

52:48Anybody would want to buy, but you would never want to sell. Yeah. So like a business that's so valuable, everybody would want to buy it. So profitable, you would never want to sell it. And then so simple, you could run it. That's a very good and interesting way to articulate it. I used to do it as well. People crap on these quote unquote small businesses. Oh, they do a million dollars a year in top line revenue and the owner makes 300 grand. It's like, yeah, but he works an hour a week. he's finally gotten to the place where he works an hour a week in that business yeah dude controls his life and it's so like what are we here for like because i want to be at a cocktail party telling people i don't care about things that they don't really care about either like i made a million dollars this year aren't i cool and like they're gonna they'll forget about you in 30 seconds like nobody cares yeah what actually matters yeah right yeah dude i think that's why yeah i genuinely believe like these lifestyle businesses these bootstrap businesses they're life-changing businesses.

53:43I think like, honestly, the easiest way to change your life is to get into like a bootstrapped or even like a blue collar, simple profitable business. Genuinely. I don't think that anybody could just do it. I think like what we talked about earlier in the pod is essential. It is like quite like you have the prerequisite of you need experience and everything starts somewhere, but it's almost like having the goal line. It's not the goal line shouldn't be a billion dollars and raising all this venture money and doing all these things. It should be like, I'm starting this local newsletter because I know that down the line, I'm going to have a power washing company.

54:16And I know that after that, you know what I'm saying? Yes. You know? Dude, I invested in this guy a couple of years ago, a couple hundred thousand dollars. And it was a lot of money. He lost it all. It was a bad bet. But, you know, you miss some things sometimes. And his attitude with it was very flippant. And it was like, well, you know, we tried and tell investments go. And I think the thing that I realized in that moment was like, oh, if you've never made a certain amount of money, you just have no appreciation. You don't. And when I hear people say like, I want to make a billion dollars. Oh, I want to be a billionaire.

54:55I'm like, do you know how much a billion dollars is? Do you know how much a billion dollars is? you haven't even made a hundred grand and you're talking about a billion dollars, the sacrifice, the time, the energy, the luck that it takes to get a billion dollars. Like you just don't even have an appreciation. And I think that unfortunately people don't appreciate it because they've never experienced it. And people have made it not cool to be like, oh, this lifestyle business is doing amazing things. And I'm with you. Like that's what life is about. Control your life, control your destiny, do something fun that you love, give back to the community, spend time with your family.

55:31Who cares if it's a million dollar business or a hundred million dollar business? Like I now architected the life that you always wanted. That's why we do entrepreneurship. All right. Hopefully you liked that episode. And if you've made it this far, you're either really committed or you're stuck doing yard work and you can't actually skip on your phone. So while I have you, the show is growing, but I have a favor to ask of you. Will you please help me grow the show? I want to reach more people. There's a couple of things that you can do. Like and subscribe is the simplest thing. obviously you want to get notifications for when the next episode is coming out but if you go the next step will you leave me a review five star on spotify or apple what that does is it tells the algorithm that oh hey this is a high value podcast because more people are leaving reviews for it and it then pushes it out to more people so that's why when people are like will you like and subscribe and put the five star rating it's not just to make themselves feel better it's actually to get more exposure for the show so if you do that for me i would greatly appreciate it and I'll see you next time.