Digital Social Hour - Brandon Dawson On Partnering With Grant Cardone, Losing 8 Million Dollars & Making $150M | DSH #208

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

On today's episode of Digital Social Hour, Brandon Dawson reveals why 97% of businesses fail, how he sold his company for $150M and what traits he sees in the top leaders. APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Gusto: https://www.gusto.com/social LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We use social media for our business. I didn't really think about much of it from a personal brand standpoint, which was a massive mistake on my side. And then came across Grant Cardone, I read his book, she forced me to read his book. And I'm like, okay, this guy knows what he's talking about. And my wife is like, you know what pisses you off about him is that he's got this massive following, millions of followers, and nobody knows who you are. That's probably why you don't like him. Welcome back to the show, guys. Digital Social Hour. I'm your host, Sean Kelly. Got a great guest for you guys today, Brandon Dawson. How's it going? Doing great. Thank you for having me on your show. Man, just from what we've talked about already, I'm excited.

Yeah, good. Me too. Yeah, I don't even know where to start. I mean, where do you want to take it from here? I don't know. Love your show. I know you've had my partner, Gary Brekka, on it. Yeah. And, you know, I'm Brandon Dawson, business partner with Grant Cardone, 10X. Yeah. And we're basically on a mission to 10X everything we touch. So how'd you get involved with Grant Cardone in the first place? Great question. I sold my business in 2016, And I'm a business innovator, entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur. And I was looking to take all the research and work I had done building

my last business to multiple industries. And I was building the strategy to do that in 2017 and 18. And my wife, who's now my wife, she was my fiance then uh she's half my age and she said hey you should look at some of these social media guys and i was like oh okay um i wasn't a big i i we use social media for our business i didn't really think about much of it from a personal brand standpoint which was a massive mistake on my side and uh so so I started looking at some of these social media guys and I went through the list we had a kid create the top 20 list or whatever and I started going through them I'm like nope nope nope nope and then came across Grant Cardone she showed me Grant actually and I didn't care for him much when I first saw him I was like ah this

guy's you know. Mostly social media people, to be honest with you. As a traditional business guy, my first impression is always they're b******, right? And that was my first impression with Grant. And then I read his book. She forced me to read his book. And I'm like, okay, this guy knows what he's talking about. When you're a successful business person, you know what successful business people sound like. And so I read his book, and then I was like, okay, this guy knows what he's talking about. And my wife was like, you know what pisses you off about him is that he's got this massive following, millions of followers, and nobody knows who you are. And so that's probably why you don't like him. It was quite a moment for me to actually acknowledge because I launched my business in 2004 and 2005 using video emails.

I had a domain I bought, Video Ecom for video e-commercials. This is in 2005. Wow. I hijacked a hello world technology where if you were in the military, you could send a video to your loved one. You could see they watched it. And if they forwarded it, you could see who they forwarded it to. Oh, wow. And I use that to launch my business in 2005.

Yeah. And I was like, this is going to innovate the world video. And I was really hot on it. I was shooting so much content. And then YouTube came out in 2006. And I was like, ah, someone's already figured it out. I'm just going to go back to business. And now I go back and I look at like Gary Vee and these guys and i'm like man if i would have just stuck with it that's my biggest

mistake in business is i knew video was going to be a huge thing in 2005 6 and 7 i had a full production studio but instead of posting everything to youtube i posted it on an internal training platform that we used for our clients and i and my team tried to get me for years to post an open posting, and I wouldn't do it. And I look back now, and it's just a huge mistake. So I think that's what pissed me off about Grant, is that he saw that, and he actually did do it, and he blew up. And I think there was a moment where I had to reconcile

my unwillingness to do it, but the opportunity I had to do it. Because I had 200 employees in 2010, and we had 68 in the marketing department. We had full production teams. So I looked at what Grant did. I hired my agency that I used for all my research. I said, hey, this guy's got a sales training business. How many industries that I've targeted I want to go into does he do sales training in? And they said like 63% of the businesses he does sales training in are on your target list wow

so we went to the 2019 growth con never met anybody 35,000 people there and uh within the first half of the first day I'm like this this is home now we just got to get grant to know who we are and propose a strategy to work together and we partner. You didn't get into business to run payroll, did you? That's okay. I didn't either. Now there's Gusto. Gusto not only offers payroll, but also benefits, onboarding, and HR all in one place to more than 300,000 businesses. Maybe you want federal, state, and local payroll taxes to be filed automatically no matter where your employers work, or maybe you want to offer a 401k plan to help your employees save for retirement do you have compliance with regulations three out of four employers say gusto makes it easier to be compliant with the government with gusto's simple guided software and user-friendly interface payroll and hr are

no longer exhausting they are rewarding gusto was built for small businesses from the start. Gusto takes the pain out of payroll benefits and HR and puts the joy back into running your business. Gusto also integrates with your favorite tools, tools like QuickBooks, Xero, Google, and more. Want all this and more with no hidden fees? Try it out for three months for free at gusto.com slash social. That's gusto.com slash social. In 2019. Nice. And you sold your first company for 150 million, right? Second company, yeah. My first company I took public when I was 29 years old. I was one of the youngest people ever to ring the opening bell of the American Stock Exchange. Which company was that? It was called Sonus Hearing.

And for a high school graduate with a 2.4 GPA, barely got out of high school, voted least likely to succeed at my little Christian school. Wow. And by 29 years old, I was ringing the opening bell of the American Stock Exchange. So it was a phenomenal experience. It was a private equity-backed roll-up strategy in the hearing care space. In 2002, they sold it out from underneath me, and I had to start over. So I literally went from being worth $10 million back down to only having a paycheck by 30-something, 31, 32 years old and then i i reformatted restarted and launched my second company which i sold for 77 times ebitda 151 million dollars 16 and then took a billion dollar company deployed into them internationally and groomed to four and a half billion in 36 months that's insane how were you able to get a 77x multiple on that um this is one of the things i teach business owners you know the whole marketplace is set up for business owners to sell on uh what they historically earned right and

i'm a business engineering expert is what i've evolved into and a turnaround specialist and so uh what i recognized based on all the research i did in 2007, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, with big research companies looking at thousands of transactions to understand roll-up strategies, private equity investments, things of that nature. I sold my business not on what I was doing. I sold my business on what the company that bought me would do if I deployed inside their bigger business. And so I basically, my sales pitch, I had eight targeted strategic buyers.

And my sales pitch is, hi, I'm Brandon Dawson. I have a $35 million company that does $2.3 million of EBITDA. But I've built all these platforms and systems. And if you acquired me, I'd add $2 billion worth of value to your business within 36 months, and I want 10%. That's it. I had eight i was told by my bankers and in the head of the banking 10 billion dollar banking company um piper jaffray out of minneapolis he's like dude no one's gonna bite on this i had eight people i

presented to i had eight bidders no uh they all bid on the business wow that's such a good way of pitching it because people look at their own numbers and then they create a valuation from there for the most part. And it's usually not even constructed properly. Most business valuations and sales processes are done entirely incorrectly because the people that you hire to do that for you are looking at their fee. They're not looking at what you're going to get out of the equation. Right. Yeah. Because when Facebook bought Instagram for a billion, that seemed like a steal at the time. I mean, if you think about what it's worth today, it's crazy. Crazy.

One of your tweets was interesting. I wanted to bring it up. You said, society is full of lies. What did you mean by that? I just think that I think you've got a couple things going on. You've got a lot of people with a big agenda. I think we see it in politics right now. We saw

certainly with during with the vaccine. Yeah. You've got, i just look at the school systems the church systems the government systems uh you know it's like most of it is manipulation it's it's not it's not factual um and it's an agenda-based strategy. And I think too many people pay too much attention to what other people are saying and not focusing on what they're actually doing. And the same is true for entrepreneurs. I mean, 97% of all businesses under $100 million fail within 10 years.

They're all listening to the wrong people. They're all getting the horrible advice their accountants their lawyers their friends their you know it's just it's it's people generally give advice based on their own biased opinions not based on any facts yeah and and it's usually done to manipulate or to try to establish some hierarchical intellect over other people. And most of that information is bad, it's wrong, and it's manipulative. So I say society lies because... Yeah, you got to be careful where you get info these days. So how do you protect your loved ones, your family, your kids

from all this information they're getting bombarded with? Well, you try to teach people to look at facts and actually look at behaviors. It's like business owners. They get so much bad advice. So I teach them. First thing I teach them is to ask three really good questions. If you're in business, for example, and you're going to get advice from anyone, anything, because what you think is what you say, what you say is what you do, what you do is what

you're known for. So it's an algorithm so if somebody is giving you advice and that's what they're known for then you got to back up to what did they actually do to justify having the knowledge right and and i've hired a lot of people you know i'm a high school graduate barely got out of high school didn't do any college and i've've had Stanford and Harvard and Wharton. I've had some of the brightest schools, best schools. I've had people work for me that I've gotten rid of because they have the intellect, but they don't have the experience.

And so it's interesting when you see that. And with business owners and stuff, I teach them three questions. One, if you're going to listen to anybody, get any advice. First question is ask the person, what's the most amount of money you've ever made in a year? Second question is, what's the biggest thing you personally have ever built quantified by revenues, number of employees and profitability?

And then third, what's the biggest thing you've personally ever sold? And the reason I teach them that is because, and this is an example specifically for business owners, but I teach my kids and everybody that do your homework. Because I have seen entrepreneurs spend 25 years building a $100 million business to sell it for $20 million because it wasn't built right. And I've seen entrepreneurs build $50 million businesses and sell it for 250 million. So if I'm going to spend my lifetime building something, shouldn't I talk to somebody who actually had a big exit, made a lot of money, had a lot of success, and created a blueprint that I can then follow versus somebody who's got an opinion or these, let me give you an example, consultants and advisors.

Number one thing for business owners, if somebody comes in and you're hiring them and they're a consultant and an advisor and they work for a firm or they work by themselves, you probably shouldn't listen to them. Because if you're an entrepreneur and you want to build a big business, why would you listen to somebody who works for somebody else? And then why would you listen to somebody who works by themselves? Nobody that's actually ever been successful reverts back to only working by themselves. There's no leverage in it. It's intolerable. If somebody's built something big and been successful, they actually can't stand doing anything by themselves because they've learned to build teams. So if somebody's coming to you telling you they're going to help you build a massive business and they're going to

consult with you and they work by themselves or with a couple people and you're a business owner that wants to get big, you should tone that out. Yeah, that's a turnoff now that I'm thinking about it. So you asked me how I teach people. Do your facts and graph. Learn to graph. Learn where were you a year ago? Where were you six months ago? Where are you today? And if they're not growing personally, professionally, or financially, why would I listen to them? It's like John Maxwell is one of my top friends and mentors. And so we used to have a conversation. We'd sit around and talk about, like, my dad was a pastor.

It's like you go into a church and the pastor's like, you know, everyone in the congregation's like, oh, our pastor, he's the best. He's amazing. He's like you go into a church and the pastor's like, everyone in the congregation's like, oh, our pastor, he's the best. He's amazing. He's great. And this church is in a suburb in Portland, Oregon, where you have a population of 2 million people. And that pastor has been teaching and preaching at that church for 10 years and everybody in the congregation loves him. But then you go two hours out of town to a little tiny town out in the middle of nowhere. It takes everyone forever to drive there. And it's got a congregation of 5,000. hours out of town to a little tiny town out in the middle of nowhere. Takes everyone forever to drive there. And it's got a congregation of 5,000.

Which pastor's better? The other guy. The guy with 5,000. Everybody's willing to drive from all over the state to go to. So you need to follow the numbers. Numbers never lie, but people do. So I'm assuming you homeschool your kids then? No, I mean, my oldest daughter's 30 yeah my uh middle daughter's 27 and my youngest is 17 and and they've all gone to private christian

schools okay uh but two years ago my my youngest moved into um into a public high school oh you sent her to public well she wanted to do it because of the sports and the music and all that stuff so yeah it just you know you try to condition her to but she's very wise right and uh she's kind of on to all the so so you know she's strong yeah so what are some traits you see in top leaders because you're acquiring a bunch of companies what do you look for in leadership well the most important thing in leadership is someone that recognizes and understands that it's not about them. Like great leaders, to be a great leader, you have one job. And so when you spot somebody who doesn't understand their job, then you know they're

not a great leader. The number one job of a great leader is to make other people's success easy. That's it. It's not to be the smartest person in the room. It's to surround yourself with remarkable people by creating an opportunity for them to have easier success. And when you're sitting with someone and it's all about me, me, me, I, I, I, they're the smartest person. They're right about everything. Everyone else is wrong. And they're demanding. It's like, that ain't a great leader because most people don't want to be around that. So what I see in leaders that do unbelievably well

is they're focused on their teams. They're focused on the purpose of what they're doing. They're focused on other people's success. They're focused on that versus them. So they got to give up their own ego almost to be a good leader you cannot be a great leader if you've got I talk about the intellectual spectrum the left side is ignorance and arrogance right the right side is awareness and curiosity if you're on the left side you're not a great leader if you're operating on the right side you can be a phenomenal leader and and and if you want to test somebody's leadership ability you simply need to look at how many people are following them that's an indicator you're not

a great leader just because you're the boss yeah in fact just because you have a title doesn't mean anything yeah it it it it just means you could be a dictator you can be an a** you could be a like all those things. Can I say that stuff on your show? Yeah. But a great leader is focused on other people's success and they're focused on those human beings' journey. Now, those human beings could be clients. They could be customers.

They could be patients. They could be employees. But they're not all self-centered and self-focused for sure. A lot of people work in corporate jobs or nine-to-five jobs seem to struggle for sure. A lot of people work in corporate jobs or nine to five jobs seem to struggle with motivation. A lot of employees. How have you been able to see people keeping their staff motivated? Cause it seems like everyone I talk to, they don't really like their job. Yeah. Well, you know, and there's data. So I'm a data guy, right?

Like I, like when people tell me stuff, I'm like, okay, where's the data on? Gallup poll does a survey every single year. They've done it for years. You can go Google it. And what you'll find in the Gallup poll is that two-thirds of 100 million Americans that answer it every single year say that they're disengaged or actively disengaged at work. So that means 30 million out of 100 million U.S. workers say they're actively engaged at work. This is a problem for most companies because where you have a lack of engagement from your employees, you have a degradation in the operational effectiveness and the overall leadership of the organization.

And Jim Collins wrote a lot about this in Good to Great, Great by Choice, and How the Mighty Fall in the early 2000s, studying a lot of businesses to look at what allowed them to fail and it always boils down to leadership and culture and so uh what i have been doing for the last 20 years uh and one of my mentors uh showed me this hector lamarck at prime america he sits like i'd go to his events and he'd have a voluntary army of financial services people that would work all day. And then they would go and train all night trying to build a business in the financial services space. And I think to myself, man, you don't see this in

corporate America. People are not enthusiastic about training. They're not willing to work in late hours. And so the art was, I studied what he did and he sat with every person in his organization and they did what was called personal professional financial goal planning. So it's like, what do you want to accomplish personally from a growth standpoint? What do you want to accomplish professionally from a growth standpoint? And what do you want to accomplish financially from a growth point? And people were so fixated on what they wanted to accomplish, they were okay going to work to fund their life, but then they would go work another job trying to build their training, their communication abilities, and do things that made themselves highly uncomfortable in order to get in front of potential clients. And I was like, if you could take that culture

from what he built and you could deploy it into traditional business. So I deployed 22 years ago, I started deploying the personal, professional, financial goal planning. And unlike most businesses where they build a budget and they have sales goals and they try to push their team, I think of the guy on the horse buggy whipping the horse to go faster. And of course, you're going to have disconnection with your team. You're going to have discontent. You're going to have low motivation. What I found is if you could sit with every team member and plan their personal, professional, financial goals, set targets with those team members, and teach those team members to pursue those through that business, so they're winning, then the business will win automatically.

Wow. So what we built and deployed, and the reason we've had so much success in building businesses, is every employee. We have 20,000 employees across all our companies on personal, professional, and financial goal planning inside the business. We built technology to map to it. I want every employee, when they show up every day, not to come to work for me. I want them to come to work in order for them to hit their goals. It's my job as a leader to show them how they can do that through the business. And what I find is that people will do things they thought they hated, but then end up loving it if it allows them to succeed.

Wow. And so the discontent comes from a lack of awareness and a lack of leadership and showing people, hey, you're only here to pursue your goals. Who cares what you're doing? And the better you train, the better you perform, the bigger the impact. This is how you're going to get to what you want in life. And so we tend to attract a higher level thinker and doer because they're winning for themselves. Yeah, that's interesting because a lot of leaders don't want to bring personal lives

into the business workplace. It's a huge problem. There's three levels of leadership. Me leadership, we leadership, and then when your organization takes over and the people drive your organization, it's us leadership. And that's the cultural leadership of a high performance organization. If you think you have me leadership and you're trying to build a team, until you transfer the true meaning of leadership and multiply it through your key team members, you're never going

to get to us. So business owners plateau because they end up with 10 or statistically 98.2% of all businesses under $100 million have less than 12 employees wow so so they they have their small group but they don't actually learn to multiply leadership so they never go from me to we to us which is why they struggle because they have to do everything themselves and then it wears them out that's interesting do you think every business has a life cycle or do you think certain businesses can outlive us uh a well-run i mean it's there's business has been around for hundreds of years right so um i think i think if you don't properly transfer um and both leadership and uh and ip and your how you do business it will eventually fail

right and a lot of great, when they've lost their founders and they've lost the vision for the business and it becomes pragmatic and dogmatic, they'll go out of business eventually. Yeah. And Jim Collins really did a great job with that in How the Mighty Fall. It's a great book.

People should read it if they want to understand what causes big, huge businesses to... And really what he nailed it down to is a bunch of young people went into the businesses that were hierarchical, traditional, big companies. And the leadership in those companies had some of those people work for 10, 20, 30 years to become the boss. And instead of trying to find the next level of talent, they protected their position.

So young guys like you and I would come in and start flourishing until they thought we were a threat. Hit a roadblock. And then they'd run us off and then we'd go start a new company and we'd come together and be like, those guys don't know what they're doing. Let's start a new company. That new company, five, eight years later, would demolish the traditional behemoth hierarchical because all the talent, up and coming talent that was more in tune with the times emerged. And so that was the whole thesis is that bad leadership drives great people away, great people then aggregate, they come together and then they start something that does a better

job than the big behemoth, lethargic, huge company. And then it put it out of business. That's fascinating because people care about their own job more than the company at that point. And that, that's where you go from me, we, us, that's me, me,

me, me, me, I, I, I. And when you have that in an organization, you're going to be in huge trouble.

Yeah. And a lot of entrepreneurs get trapped there because they push so hard. It's, it's, it's almost, it's not intuitive for them. They push so hard to survive. Yeah.

Remember 97% of all businesses fail. So they're pushing to survive and they become self-reliant. And then they have this false belief that they have to do everything themselves. And this same mentality happens in big organizations with people who spend years working their way through the organization. They finally get promoted and they're like, man, I'm not giving this post up. I'm finally hit making more money. I'm going to protect myself. And anybody that comes up in the system becomes a threat.

Right. So what keeps you going now? Because you've got a lot of money. I mean, you could have retired probably 20 years ago. What drives you now? Well, in fact, I want to promote my book, Nine Figure Mindset. This actually talks about, I'm doing a trilogy. So this is when my private equity group sold my business out from underneath me. And as a 2.4 GPA high schooler who really just grinded my way into raising my first million after hundreds of no's, buying my first businesses

after hundreds of no's, pushing, first businesses after hundreds of no's, pushing, pushing, pushing, and then getting my business listed on the American Stock Exchange. That was such an experience, being worth 10 million by 27 years old and then going back to zero by 32. Right.

And how I had to reconcile all my mistakes and learn from them and lean into my assets. And I made this affirmation in 2003, which when I engineered the business model, I wanted to build businesses differently than traditional businesses. I studied roll-up strategies and franchise programs and things, and I was like,

I'm going to build a business not using anybody else's money. And if I could do that, I could teach other business owners how to do it. So in 2005, I launched that business model. And I grew it without raising any capital, not using any debt, self-funded it, bootstrapped it all the way up to when I sold it for $151 million. And in that window, I made $50 million in profits. But in 2009, I hired a bunch of kids out of Wharton and Harvard and Stanford and University of Portland. And I started studying why businesses fail and hired a research firm out of Chicago. And it was a three-year project looking at thousands of industries.

And I formulated this big, massive data set. And what I fell in love with, just like Gary Brekka was on your show, he's my business partner, he loves human optimization and health. Me, I love businesses. You've got to understand, 94% of all businesses under $100 million are family-owned. Right. So when a business fails, it impacts the family. Well, I came out of a family business. And so for me, I'm very passionate about protecting the family business owner.

And if you can get the businesses to flourish and succeed, the family flourishes and succeeds if it's working together. If it fails, it impacts all aspects of the personal, professional, financial life. So for me, I was like, if I can fix this for me, I can help every business owner. And that became my passion. So what drives me and motivates me is it's so sad to see perfectly good businesses go out of business because nobody's helping business owners engineer the best, fastest, most profitable way to succeed. But in order for me to be an authority on that, I needed to prove it first.

So by building my last business and selling it for 77 times EBITDA and then building a $1 to $4.5 billion business in 36 months, I was like, okay, I've proven it. Now I'm going to go and help thousands of business owners. And teach it. So yeah, I had a lot of money, but I hadn't fulfilled my purpose. And I'm a very purpose-driven individual, as is my wife. And so we launched with Grant Cardone in 2019. Now imagine, I'm an example to every person I work with. So I show my P&Ls. I say, here's the first month when I started with Grant. Here's what we've built month over month over month.

I had one goal when I launched this new business, Cardone Ventures. I wanted to build a unicorn business. And a unicorn business is a business that goes from startup to a billion-dollar valuation within five years. And I wanted to do it organically using the same methodologies I teach. And so I launched this business with Grant and my wife in June 1st of 2019 was our first revenues. And we did, last year we did 83 million and made 33 million EBITDA. Here we'll do 135 million and we'll make 45 million. So at 55, 50 to 60 million of EBITDA at a 20 valuation,

that's a $1.2 billion valuation. So I have until June of next year to have my EBITDA be at a run rate of $60 to $70 million, and I'll be a billion-dollar valuation. Wow. And I wanted to do that because I now actively manage and work with over $2 billion in businesses in our 10X ecosystem with Grant. And my wife's the president of the company. And so we work with thousands of business owners, teaching them, organizing and engineering their business.

Then they hire us to help manage their business, and then I partner with them, and then we go acquire businesses together. So that whole ecosystem has been built in four years. We have 280 employees now between our different businesses. And we'll do, like I said, $135 million this year at Ventures and related companies that we own. Not that we manage. We manage all $2 billion. Our revenues will be $130 million and our profits will be 45 million this year.

That's insane. And our 20X, it's $900 million evaluation. So I'm 100% certain I'll hit the unicorn status in 60 months. And I'm doing that to show business owners it can be done. Yeah. Because I'm doing it organically. And so this book talks about how I got to grant everything I had to do to get to where I had my mind right, to get my money right, to get my energy right. The next book I'm working on right now is going to be the operating system

we built to go from startup to a billion dollars in 60 months. And then the third book is going to be the 10-figure mindset because I'll be a billionaire in the next 36 to 48 months. And then the third book is going to be the 10 figure mindset because I'll be a billionaire in the next 36 to 48 months. And I want to be able to show people that if you set those targets, you take the right action, you can accomplish the right goals. I love that you lead by example. You actually go out and do it, not just talk about it first. Well, and I told you when we're off air that when I first started looking at the social media thing as a non-social media user outside of for the business uh 2013 15 17 i just thought most of those guys like there's so much and and i have guys that come through my programs and they pay me to learn stuff and then all of a sudden i see them

regurgitating it as though they did it yeah and i'm just like man you know i i just encourage people like do your homework. Don't follow somebody because they sound good. Actually ask those three questions. Most amount of money you've ever made in a year. Biggest thing you've ever built quantified by revenues, profitability, number of employees. And then thirdly, have you ever had an exit? Because you can engineer businesses poorly. So you want somebody, whatever space you're in, you want to find the people that had the biggest success because they engineered the

business correctly. Yeah. I love that because I used to find myself listening to people that had no experience, college professors, high school teachers, random YouTubers and Instagram people. But once I changed that to listen to people like you, Grant Cardone, Gary Vee, it really elevated me. Yeah. Well, think about politics. Most of those guys that are sitting there making rules that we have to live by, spending our money, they can't even balance a checkbook. They can't get a job in the private sector for any amount of money that we would pay for them. That's true. Most of them can't even function, and yet they're sitting there voting on things

and making policy that, I mean, that's why we have a 35 billion dollar deficit none of them know how to balance their own checkbook let alone our countries yeah it's a good point you also said on your twitter that collaboration is the new currency and you're basically proving that now with grant i mean this is that uh people ask me like what is the single most important aspect to building a business and i tell them collaboration you you there is if you want to blow up fast you have to collaborate our 10x health business was changing lives and we have a lot of i mean we were featured on the kardashians and we were featured on different and we have a lot of, I mean, we were featured on the Kardashians and we were featured on different, and we have a lot of A-list celebrities,

sports athletes, whatever. But when we were able to impact Dana White, Dana became such a huge advocate. We ended up within six months from a brand that nobody had heard of with over 100 million impressions on the internet. And that collaboration with dana blew up the brand right so when i tell business owners like if you're sitting there trying to figure out now i'll just tell you if you're a business owner listening to this and you're wondering why your marketing's not working and you're frustrated that

your marketing's not working and you're going to blame the agency that you hired and everything, let me just tell you. We've interviewed 80,000 employees in 20 years. Wow. And we asked the employees

on a scale of one to 10, do you have any incentives to promote the company you work at? 10 is high incentives. One is no incentives. The average score was two. Business owners don't even have their own employees running around town telling everybody how much they love working at the company.

In fact, if you go to Gallup poll, two thirds are telling everybody they hate their job. You want to know why your marketing doesn't work? because you can't even get 10 people promoting your company you want a big business collaborate with your employees have them be the biggest mouthpiece in your organization incentivize them to bring you new customers right promote your employees to promote your business. And so collaboration is a currency all in itself because it will generate monetization. And if you're not focused on that, you're just focused on monetization, but not collaboration. Monetization is so difficult. That's why most businesses fail is because they don't have collaborations.

Look at your show here. You show, look at how many followers you have and how many people, I mean, millions and millions and millions. Why?

Because you bring people on the show and you collaborate with them. Yup. I was just going to say that. It's not all about you. If you were shooting a show all by yourself,

you wouldn't have millions and millions of followers. I barely talk on these shows. It's always the collaboration. Yeah, I agree talk on these shows. It's always the collaboration. Yeah, I agree with that for sure. Collaboration is the highest valued currency. But you have to be able to provide some sort of value first before the collaboration. Yeah, you got to give something back.

John Maxwell says, before you ask for a hand, give one. Most people want somebody else's hand. Most people want your money. Most people want your attention. But they're not willing to give one. Most people want somebody else's hand. Most people want your money. Most people want your attention, but they're not willing to give it. So what's made my partnership, my wife and I, when we partnered with Grant and Elena Cardone, what's made that work so well is I said, hey, Grant, listen, we'll go 50-50. I got to be the managing partner because it's my IP. It's my content. I have to run the entity. I need you to promote and trust me, but I don't expect you to do it right away.

So how about this? I'll work with you and your guys at your company. I'll show you what I'm able to do inside of Cardone Training. I'll help out there and I'll just launch my program to your audience. And he's like, all right, let's see how you do it. Because he'd had other partners that failed him. Right. And he's like, all right, let's see how you do it. Because he'd had other partners that failed him. And so within six months, he was like, dude, I've never seen anybody do the stuff you're doing. Nobody in this company had a problem with me.

I didn't have a problem with anybody in this company. And he had people come and go and a lot of conflict culturally. Well, we 5X'd his business at the same time that our startup is now twice larger than where his business was when I partnered with him. Wow. So together, we'll do $350 million this year between our two companies. And his team, I consider it my team, and my team considers himself his team. We're all working together because that's what a leader does. It brings people together to go conquer.

And where you have a problem in business, there's always a person involved. So anybody that's listening to the show and they're like, oh, I got issues. I got problems in business. There's always a person involved. And in most cases, it's the owner themselves because they're not collaborating with other people. They're not listening to them. They're not curious. They're not asking questions.

What do you think? And how can we succeed? They're not inspiring people to go out and be a bigger, better version of themselves. And so people feel they're stuck. And when people feel stuck, you're not going to get the best version of them. Has money or business ever ruined any of your friendships or relationships? Yeah, I say there's two times when business owners fight. And I watch more relationships get devastated from this. And I've lost key relationships

because of this. There's two times when business partners or people fight. It's when there's no money or there's too much money. And I've lost, like I've taken people that their first jobs they've ever had in their life was working with me. And then they're worth $10 million or $12 million. And then they all of a sudden become jealous that I'm worth hundreds of millions. And so then they're like, well, I didn't get enough or it wasn't fair. I'm like, dude, you didn't even, you've never worked anywhere. And that made you worth $ 12 million dollars but when they when you

get when you see people and they get money they they they're like i want more or or or it's unfair so when there's too much money you get all that drama when there's not enough money and you're struggling people fight the the sweet spot is when everybody's making more money than they made before but not enough to where somebody seems like they're able to do everything and anything and everyone else can't. That's a huge mistake business owners make. And it always causes defeat in their business. It's when the business starts doing well and the owner starts making a lot of money. They go buy the new cars.

They go buy the new boats. They go buy the new house, but they're not taking care of their team. And their team sees this. And then the team feels like we're busting our a**. We are we're out of here right and that usually happens between eight and 25 million dollars statistically and that's it causes the business to go to a complete reset and it's and the employees feel vindicated because the owner had a huge slip back and so i i engineered these breakpoints based on all of our research and data for the last 15 years. Breakpoint one is zero to three million.

Breakpoint two is three to eight. Breakpoint three is eight to 15. Then 15 to 25, 25, 45, 45, 75, 75, 125. And then there's four breakpoints to a billion. And what we did is engineered what happens to either allow a business to bust through, break through, right? Break point, break through, or break. And statistically, it's almost exactly the same situation in both cases. So what we do is we engineer businesses to the best case scenario of breaking through versus breaking. And if a business is in a new break point and it has what's called a slip back, so they make a mistake and boom,

they go back, right? You go from 5 million, 6 million, back down to three. You can survive statistically a slip back where you go from one breakpoint to the next breakpoint below. A snapback is when you go more than two breakpoints. So if you're 15 million and you get a snapback, you drop down to three. You're out of business. Right. So we know the elements. There's 78 things between startup and getting to $125 million that need to be done in sequence. And if you build your business outside of sequence,

it's like building a multi-story building with a faulty foundation. It will eventually collapse. Wow. Yeah, it seems like a lot of people, when they get that sudden success, like you said, money starts changing people, you know? Jealousy comes into play and friendships get ruined sometimes. Have you seen that yourself? I've seen it with myself.

I've seen it with a lot of my friends. I'm sure you've experienced it. It's kind of like unavoidable, right? It is. And so I say an entrepreneur, you know, you got to remember, the single most important thing to remember as you start to strive for success is true leadership is making other people's success easy. And nobody has ever built a valuable business system without having lots of other people involved. So the common denominator to success is having lots of people.

The other common denominator for success in the multiplier is being focused on making sure all those people are winning and aligned with the business opportunity. The destruction of a business is when a business owner's things they've arrived,

they disconnect, they win, their disconnect, they win, their team doesn't win, they're in huge trouble. Love that. Brandon, it's been a pleasure, man. Anything you want to close off with and where can people find you? You know, Brandon M. Dawson, at Brandon M. Dawson on Instagram. You know, I just would encourage Nine Figure Mindset. You can go to ninefiguremindset.com, order my book. I've got thousands of dollars of free content narrating the book, breaking down, putting worksheets in there. Nice. My number one mission is to impact the lives of the people we serve personally, professionally,

financially. That's the business owners. It's their teams. I really encourage if you own a business, and especially if you're struggling, there's a lot of pressure right now for business owners due to all the bad policy, quite honestly, that's in the marketplace established by this government. If you're struggling, read this book. I went through and pulled myself out of the abyss. And with, I'm not an educated guy, I'm a self-made guy. I just want to encourage people to have the resilience to win and realize that when they start winning, they got to bring people along with them or they'll fail again. Mm-hmm. And so my passion, our target is to impact the lives of 1 million 10X business owners.

And our average business owner will have more than 100 employees. So if you do the math, it's hundreds of millions of lives. And that's my specific target. So if you're a business owner and you want to get some insight into how to grow and scale faster, create massive value for you, you your team have a better quality of life get the book love it all right thanks brandon thanks for watching guys i'll see you next time