How My $250 Million Portfolio Actually Makes Money | Ep 965

0:00Here's how my$250 million plus portfolio actually makes money. Welcome to ACQ. I'm Alex, co-founder of the company. And the point of this video is to help show you how acquisition.com and ACQ actually make money. And so what I want to walk you through is how we turn raw attention, so eyeballs, into money. And then what we do with that money to kind of spin the entire flywheel. And we do all of this in the service of the larger mission, which is to make real business education accessible for everyone. And the reason we made that the mission is because when Laila and I had sold our first company, we were like, you know what?

0:34What's something that gets us out of bed every day? What's something that we're really motivated by? And we are products of the personal development, alternative education, if you will, world. And it's the thing that lights us up the most. And there are very few people who have the credibility to teach business. There's some people who do it. Not all people who have a lot of credibility who do it. And the people who have the most credibility don't do it because they're doing other stuff. And so we thought that that would be a really good void to attack. So let's walk through how we actually make money.

1:01So at the onset, we have eyeballs. So there's this big world of people out here, right? And so these eyeballs for us, the ones that we are really targeting are business owners and people who are one degree from that, which would be business interested, entrepreneurs, seekers, people who want to turn whatever they do into some sort of business. Now, the vast majority of people who are what I would consider the entrepreneurs, we help them directly, but mostly for free. And then the business owners who are sent up are the ones that we end up eventually monetizing and create further relationships with.

1:34And so you can kind of think of this kind of like an onion, and there's going to be a handful of arrows that work around, but I'll do my very best to describe this to you. All right, so this is where we put our media. So this is kind of the first big input that we have as a business. This is where our content goes. This is courses that we have on our site, content, podcasts, et cetera, YouTube videos, all of this stuff goes in here. This is what we create every day. We put money and we put effort and we put team into this, right? This thing gets some of this attention. And so then we move to the next part of this process.

2:05So we have to get this raw attention to then give us some sort of contact information so that we can create some sort of conversion event. Now, depending on where these people are, some people convert because they want to join our email list for the Mosey Minute, which is in some ways a product in of itself, which then gets people on that list so we can further advertise to them. The next thing that some people do is that they'll go to school, which is one of our portfolio companies that we have. So people can start communities online. It's the only big brand association that we've made publicly.

2:34And that company continues to grow and grow and grow. And the rest of kind of the conversion mechanism then goes to books. So this is people who buy books on our site or buy books on Amazon. And through these things, we get these kind of like minor conversions. This is a free trial into a$9 thing. This is a$30 book. This is a free email list. So once we have these conversions that come in, at this point, we can funnel them to the different components of the business that have higher value-added services that we can offer them. Now, as of today, we really only have one, which is AP or the advisory practice.

3:08These are the workshops that we actually hold in Vegas at our headquarters with our associates, our analysts, our directors who help hands-on with business owners. And so we have three levels within the advisory practice. We have L1, L2, and L3. And some of these things may be subject to change, but as they currently exist right now, this is about$5 ,000, this is $35 ,000, and this is$135 ,000. And so people come into L1, a certain percentage of those people then say, hey, I want more help. So they go to L2. And some of those people say, hey, I want even more help, specifically from Alex or more detailed help.

3:42And they go to L3. Very simple names here. Now, underneath of this, this then generates, obviously, revenue. And this is where it gets a little bit more interesting. And I'm going to fill this extra space in in a moment. But as the revenue comes out the other side here, right, and we have revenue that comes in from our media as well, right, and books also create revenue, and school also gives us revenue. But all of these things then shuttle to money on this side, right? All of these are, in some ways, revenue producing. Once we have this revenue, we then redeploy this revenue into various buckets.

4:16So one of them is ACQRE. So that's our real estate arm. This is where we buy real estate properties, typically multifamily. We have a good partnership through ARC. And we've raised funds to do these properties and these deals. And we can also solicit back to the front of our audience and say, hey, would you like to do deals alongside us? But this is one of the prior methods that we reinvest cash, the cash that we have. And part of this is because it's also tax efficient for us as a business. And so that's one of the places that we put the money. The next place is that we put the money. And this is obviously outside of more people, more infrastructure, more tech, the reinvestments we put inside of the business.

4:52The excess cash goes into ACQ Ventures. So this is our venture portfolio. This is where we make either one of two scenarios. We either make very, very small bets on kind of unicorn style tech companies. So we're talking, you know, one, two, three, 5 % bets in smaller companies that we think have high growth potential, or we're actually seeding a company at the onset that we think is a good idea that we can then sell through this distribution base. Now, the reason that this is important for anybody who's joining the ACQ team is that the ultimate career path that I see for anybody who does a really good job, especially like in the advisory practice, is that you get so many repetitions of learning how businesses work, our process of creating value in businesses, that who do we think are the best people to start some of these other ventures that we would love to kind of sponsor on the way in?

5:40Well, the people who actually have implemented our process across hundreds of different businesses, right? And so this is where we will have, you could kind of consider this as a separate arms here, kind of coming this way, but this is where insurance, lending, some sort of sales AI, there's tons of different opportunities that are here that businesses that are in our ecosystem would love to participate in. And we would love to fund those opportunities for people who are on our team. So we have our real estate arm, we have the venture arm. And then beyond that, this is more or less the landscape of what acquisition.com looks like.

6:14So what's all this blank space here? So the blank space here is these pieces as they will exist in the future, right? This is where we will probably have the ACQ network, right? So a business owner association, which is a more scalable offering that costs less than this in-person experience or consulting work that we do. and people would just simply get value from the network of many other business owners. Included in this would be our AI, kind of business consultant that has been trained on all of this in-person experience here. They have obviously the community of other people. They'll have industry calls based on the best practices that we find from the AI that we're seeing in people who are like in-home services or healthcare or brick and mortar or professional services.

6:55And so this is a membership that'll probably be, and this is probably looking at 2026, somewhere in the neighborhood of, $5 ,000 to$10 ,000 per year as a membership. So this is not intended to be some super, super expensive thing. It's intended to have enough of a barrier of entry that it should be only for business owners. But the aggregate value of that distribution base, one, obviously, it provides cash flow for us, which then feeds this entire machine. But also, this base gives us a stronger negotiating position for vendors. So if we say, hey, all these guys want to have an agency. We don't want to do agency work, but we'd love to find a handful of agents that we could pre-negotiate a great deal for them.

7:31Hey, we have a credit card provider that has specific benefits to the size businesses that we look at. Can we negotiate on behalf of thousands of businesses at once so we can get better rates or better deals? All the way across the board. And so this then creates a huge value-added network where the savings accrued and the value-add is so far in excess of this that no one would ever want to leave. And that's kind of the thought process behind this. And so this in the future will actually, in my opinion, sit as the base mechanism. And then a certain percentage of these people will go up and they will send into the various other things.

8:01So it could be advisory practice. They might ascend into sales AI. They might ascend into lending. They might ascend into insurance. They might decide to do a real estate deal with us. We might decide to invest in their business from the venture component. And then the last piece here is that we do have our private equity side, right? And so some of these businesses that come in on the advisory practice or the ACQ network, we eventually say, hey, instead of taking, you know, one to 5 % chunks, we may take a 30 to, you know, 51 or even 100 % stake in this business and allow it to run independently, maybe take some of our talent and put it inside of it.

8:34It's functionally, this is the ACQ universe. And so if we're to fast forward and say, okay, well, like, what's the vision? What does this look like when it's right? So that's kind of the flow of how the money would work. But if you want to have a different visual of how this looks like, we have this big media arm at the top. This is the big brand, right? And then from that brand, we're essentially able to monetize it in many, many, many different ways. And so if you were to think of this like Disney, so Disney is a big brand and they have their Star Wars universe. They have their Marvel universe.

9:03They have their theme parks. They have Disney Plus. And so for us, the Disney Plus version of this is essentially the ACQ network. It's a B2B version of something that would have some level of media and education, but also a lot of ancillary benefits. But it's super scalable. It's meant to be something that everyone can participate in outside of the obviously just the content that the whole world can participate in. Beyond that, they have their parks, right? And for us, the parks translates in a B2B setting as the advisory practice. This is where they come in person. They get a great experience with us.

9:34They get hands-on help from our team, the people that they've looked up to, the people that made a lot of the case studies that come out in our content. They actually get to meet them. So this is meeting Mickey, meeting Minnie, meeting Goofy and all those people, but in a B2B context. Now, the remainder of these pieces are the other spokes. So for the Star Wars, what's the Star Wars universe here? So for us, that would be like school. That's like a franchise that we're invested in for a specific type of avatar. are. There's a lot of people who have knowledge and they would like to monetize that in some sort of community.

10:05And we own the platform, right? Or we're co-founders of the platform. And so this is a mechanism for us to take some percentage of the audience that isn't maybe ready for the advisory practice or ACQ network and put them in here. Now, some of these people are totally qualified for these other things because this can scale, but it's such a low barrier entry at like a$9 a month price point that it completely works, right? Now, the future arms here are going to be the other elements in the future. Like I said, the insurance, sales AI, and plenty of other opportunities that are going to come up. Now, where does the private equity and the real estate arm fit in here?

10:40Well, these are just other spokes that are still on this larger machine. And the difference is that our, I'll call it legacy portfolio, were just companies that we thought we could provide value to. Future looking, we're trying to only do deals, especially in the private equity side, to companies that we think can directly benefit the distribution base of businesses that we have, rather than just be businesses that we're very comfortable growing, instead be businesses that we think can handle the scale of what we bring. And so this is where the types of bets we're doing at ACQ Ventures, which will then stand up some of these other entities, and the ACQRE, which we can obviously raise from the audience.

11:17But functionally, this is what we're doing. We're trying to build this universe where once a business owner comes in, they don't want to leave because we have provided so much value on the media side, so much value in the network. Or when they came out in person to meet us and meet the team and the consulting work that we did, they were like, you know what? I trust them and I would like to invest my money with them. I would like to buy insurance to them. I would like to use their platform for the community that I have for my drumming business or for my real estate business. I put all my home buyers into a school community so I can stay in touch with them.

11:48So this is what we are building. And functionally, the flow of money is straightforward. We put money in effort here. We then capture information here. We convert through different conversion mechanisms. So we had a launch, and this is where we had a webinar that went to the book packages, which for us was 6K. Here, the ACQ network, this might be a checkout. It might be a phone. It might be both. Here, we do almost all of these conversions over the phone. So our phone team then sells people into these various levels. But functionally, that is how the money works and how we make money at acquisition.com.

12:24We make money from our content. We make money from people buying books. We make money from people buying school. And obviously, there's an equity value in that company as well. But we also get distributions from school as well. We make money from all the people who come to our parks, our themes. In the future, we'll make money from the people who join the network. And we'll make money from all the other ancillary services that they choose to buy. And should they choose to invest with us, we would make money there too. But all of this is predicated on the one single promise that has to be true before any of this works, which is that we have to make real business education accessible for everyone.

12:57And we have to make our free stuff better than everyone else's paid stuff. And we have to maintain absolute premium brand credibility that we are who we say we are, that we've done what we've said we've done, so that that reinforces the position that we have in the marketplace. And functionally, this is a position that very few people can occupy because the only people that I think have more credibility than us, most of them don't want to do this part. They're just running their businesses. And I think this is the unique wedge in the marketplace that exists that we are capitalizing on. And at the end of the day, what we're doing is we're helping the people that we care the most about, which is the backbone of the economy, the small business owner.

13:27And from a who is the avatar for this, for us right now, in terms of our monetization, it's usually about$500 ,000 to$50 million in revenue. It's kind of our sweet spot of the business owners that are coming in through this network. Now, for everybody who's less than$500 ,000 per year, it doesn't mean that there's zero, quote, monetization of those people or those eyeballs. It's just different. It's very distributed. And so we're going to get some ad revenue that comes from the platforms. We're monetizing through a lower ticket platform here. Books are, you know, between, you know, the books are free.

13:57But if people want hard copies, they can buy them or they want to buy them on Audible. They can get them. We can make a couple bucks on that stuff. But for these people, the goal is not to monetize in this way. The goal is that these people use these tools to create businesses that then ascend them into this category, which then opens up this entire universe of potential products and services that we can help them continue to scale their business. And then ultimately, maybe we buy the company, maybe we invest as a venture company, maybe they just make enough money to exit and they want to put some of their money with us in the real estate arm, or they just want to buy other services from us.

14:31And so functionally, this is what we're building. And we're super excited to have you on. And hopefully that helps you understand a little bit better of how ACQ makes money. This is actually an internal recruiting video that we share to new recruits. And I thought it would be cool for one, you guys to see everyone, I think, should have a video sales letter that sells your company as the product to new potential candidates. And then second, if you are a true A player, especially AI or tech forward in any kind of function in the department or roles within a business, we'd love to talk to you. Apply if you're a star.

15:02And we are always hiring for A talent. Doesn't matter the role. We're always hiring.

15:10Thank you.