My First Million - From Blogger To $100 Million Business With Neil Patel

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) sit down with entrepreneur and online marketing guru Neil Patel to talk about his success starting as a blogger to making 9-figures in revenue. ----- Links: * Neil Patel * Photopea * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (03:00) - Neil's business history (07:00) - Minority certification (09:00) - Magic Johnson theory (24:45) - Monthly burn rate (38:35) - Neil's philanthropy (49:05) - 9-figure revenue (56:10) - Photopea ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

To say in your blog post that you go $15,000 a month is all I need. I'm happy. That was like 10 years ago, I think. But you used to say 15,000. Seeing all I know kids, it was easy. Right now, if I had a guess on my burn rate 120 to 180 a month. What? That's insane.

So how does that break down? So what's the bulk of it? So house probably is the biggest one? No, I have no mortgage. Okay. So you're spending 120 to 180K without spending anything on your home. So, Neil, I was telling you a little bit about what you're getting into. We record everything, by the way.

So, like, we just hop into it. But Sean kind of knows who you are. I've been a fan of yours for like 10 years. Can I tell Sean and the audience who I think you are? And you can tell me if I'm wrong and, like, what I'm missing? Sure. Go for it. All right.

So you're Neil Patel. So I know you because you used to have this blog called Quick Sprout. I read it maybe 10 years ago. It's probably a 15-year-old blog. if I remember correctly. At first, it was mostly about SEO, but eventually it kind of like warped into being about SEO, about content, but just about business in general. And you would do like crazy stuff. Like you would build a business that made $100,000 a month in revenue by, like you just picked like a random niche. And I think it ended up being supplements. And you like blog every month about how that

was going. And you used to blog about all types of crazy stuff. But then eventually you also started a company called Crazy Egg, which I heard was doing many millions of dollars a year in revenue. And it was a bootstrapped and you own the whole thing. Then you and Heaton started Kiss Metrics and raised a bunch of money. It didn't end up working out wonderfully, but it was like, it could have been actually quite huge. Heaton wrote a great blog post about like where, you know, where a couple errors were made. But now you've got like a seven or 800 person agency that is also bootstrap, like the rest of your stuff. And you've just kind of been bawling out like for like 15 years in the world of business, just killing it with agencies. Is that right? Did I get everything mostly right?

mostly close. So Crazy Egg came first. Heathen's the co-founder on that. He has it all or, you know, he owns Crazy Egg as well. So it's not just me anymore. And then there's another guy named John Butler, who was also part of Crazy Egg at the beginning. And then Quicksprout came later.

I started blogging on it about business and stuff like that. Kiss Metrics then came. Kiss Metrics didn't. work out. Quick Sprout started to have a big audience related to marketing. We try to create an SEO software on there. I do that with my co-founder. Heathen at the time, he's like, all right, how about we create a company out of this? I'll do the software. And that didn't work out. I don't want to be part of it anymore. He took it over. And he ended up making it, you know, business site, directory, you know, informational site, whatever you want to call it,

has affiliate offers, which you already know about. And then the last one was the ad agency, which is correct. And then there's been a lot of stuff in between here and there. A lot didn't work out. But generally speaking, I tend to do one thing at once, focus, and currently I spend all my time on my ad agency. And that, you're at 6,700? How big is that at the moment? And it's only like five or six years old, right? Yeah, so we're on our fifth year. End of this year will be end of year five. We're at roughly 700 people. I think maybe a little bit more. Maybe by end of year 900-ish, if I had a guess. Who are these people?

These are like 700 anonymous Indians in India? What's going on? Who are these people? We do have some people in India. But what's funny is... How many people do you employ in New York? That's what I want to know. That's my agency test.

You're in Brazil, too, though, right? Yeah, we're in Brazil. Majority of our people are in the United States. If I look at region-wise, the United States has the biggest headcount. We also have offices in Australia, Canada, UK, Brazil, India, I think we're opening up Germany soon. We're looking at Italy. We're looking at France and a few other regions as well.

But our model is like our ad agency in India markets companies in India. It's not really used to outsource American work into India. And what work are people doing? Like what's the service that you're providing? All digital. So like SEO, pay for click, email marketing, conversion rate optimization, organic social, paid social, the list goes on and on.

And do all the customers come from neil patel.com? It used to be that way. Then we started getting a lot through word of mouth. I would have never really guessed that word of mouth drives business. How many, can you say? How many? So most people, I would say, like, our audience would be like, oh, yeah, it's cool to have like a personal brand, but me and Sam have figured out, oh, wow, this shit really does

open up more doors than you would have expected. You've been doing this for a long time. Neil Patel, which is kind of like a personal blog where you're talking about, like, you know, hacks and experiments and strategies that you've, you know, figured out, how many, can you say how many millions that brought in in client bookings, what for the agency? Like what, how big did just the referrals from Neil Patel get you before other stuff kicked in, like word of mouth and being recognized in the industry and other things like that? I think the Neil Patel brand got us to around like 30, 40 million in revenue, and then word

of mouth started kicking in and then other things started kicking in. And employees started bringing in their own deals because they've worked in the space for so long. And then we saw more and more growth, got awards that brought us deals. Being a minority owned business, that helps, believe it or not. There's, if you're Indian and you live in the United States, you're considered a minority. And I was about to say, are we a minority? I feel like I never get minority credit. I feel like you're the majority of CEOs out there.

So, I mean. It's funny because we go through RFPs. and some of them asked if you're, what is it, like MBE certification is something like that. I forgot what it's called or minority business enterprise. And I was like, well, I'm not a minority. There's like one plus billion of me in this world, right? And they're like, oh, you're a minority. I'm like, what are you talking about?

There's like a billion plus Indians in this world. How are we a minority? And they're like, oh, in America, you're a minority. And in some of these RFPs, they're looking, it says in there, we're looking for LGBT. I don't know what all four of the letters are. You have the tattoo on your arm. Yeah, the cue's there. And then women-owned businesses, veteran-owned businesses,

and the other one was minority. And I was just like, wait, there's actually a quota that these big Fortune 500 companies have to hit. And they're like, yeah. And I was like, well, I'm a minority. They're like, well, you need the certification. And I was like, I've got to have a certification to tell you that I'm a minority.

And at first I didn't realize I was a minority. They were telling me, oh, you're a minority. We reached out to you. We're hoping that you'd be a good bit. And I'm like, I'm a minority. And they're like, yeah, you're a minority in the United States. You would help us meet our quota. Do you have the certification?

I'm like, what are you talking about? And then we went through the process and got the certification. You got to get your papers, bro. You got to get your papers right. I would have been offended. And then as soon as I realized, wait, this is to my advantage. Oh, hold on. I also got solar panels on my house.

Does that help? You know, like I'm a dog owner. glasses. Yeah, exactly. I have a vision impairment called a far-sightedness. So what else works in my favor here? You know, like, was the certificate, just turned the webcam on and it looked at you and it was like, yep.

That's not enough. And what's funny is our C-O or VP operations, one of the titles, I forgot what Tracy's title is. She asked me for this like six months before we did it. She's like, hey, need your birth certificate. I'm like, yeah, why do you need my birth certificate? She's like, oh, we need it for this certification. I'm like, whatever. And the moment someone ended up telling me how Magic Johnson generates a lot of his revenue

because he's a minority and gets a lot of contracts, partners with other businesses, white labels it, and uses his name, becomes a quote unquote owner of that business and then outsource. Oh, wait, tell me about that. Give me an example. What's an example of the Magic Johnson formula? Sure. So I don't know if this is true. This is just what someone in the minority space ended up telling me.

So that's the caveat. I don't know if this is true. were real. And they're saying, let's say if someone has a food company and they have the contracts with all all the hospitals that are run by the government, like the VA, they're looking for minorities to provide it, but there's already a lot of big corporations that provide the food. So Magic Johnson may go create a business that's in that space, partner with the big supplier who already provides a food to these hospitals, he'll go get the contracts and then work with them to actually fulfill.

Yeah, wait, Sean, you never heard you, you never heard of this. My in-laws, my in-laws own a moving company and their minorities, they're black, they're Haitian immigrants, and they win deals partially because of that reason. Because like Morgan Stanley or something like that, if they want to move, they want to, they have some type of policy in their company. It says we, we want to get RFPs for, or we want to get bids from these types of companies. I had no idea how, obviously I knew this exists. I just didn't realize how significant was. I definitely didn't know the Magic Johnson formula, which is frankly genius on his part, if that's. If that's actually what he does.

We don't know that far, but it's true. But think of it this way, right? It's a quota. So if I go and I get an RFP, let's say from Boeing, which, funny enough, we lost the RFP because we were over price for what they wanted. And let's see, the price is very similar to the competition. I have awards showing that we were the agency of the year. So like, all right, these guys are good at what they do.

We have the case studies. And if we're similar pricing, like, oh, this is minority, helps us hit our quota. Let's give the business year. Right. Yeah, yeah, of course. You have some merit to go with it. For the first $30 million of business, you got that, and you must have gotten that by year two or so if you're growing this fast. Year three, sorry. Year three.

What was the main service? Like, when I think of like, because I went to your website and I actually submitted a lead to figure it out, there was the maximum. You ask what your website is and what your budget is. and it's like zero to 10,000, 10,000 to 20,000, and then just 50,000 plus. So were you serving like mostly small businesses? And what, like, what were you doing as simple stuff as like making their Yelp page good? Like, what were you doing? Yeah, so it's not that small.

We do have some S&Bs like that, but we actually first started off in midmarket. Our clients would pay us like a minimum of 10 grand a month. And what would you do for 10,000 a month? So nothing was cookie cut. It was all custom. So, like, maybe they need SEO. Maybe they need a help on paid management. Maybe they needed some CRO or email marketing or a little bit of everything, right?

But the plans would start at 120 a year, right, 10 a month and scale up from there to 20 a month, 30 a month, whatever it may be. What was most in vogue as the service when you started, like the trend everybody wanted? And then what's the in vogue thing today? When we first started, it was mainly SEO. And what does that mean, though? What does that mean? You use H.A.

revs or something and your employees like look which terms they should rank for and then you write an article for them? So it was optimizing their on page code, helping build links, creating content, promoting the content and making sure that traffic converted into leads or sales, assuming if they weren't services and it was a positive ROI for the cost. That sounds like a ton of work for $10,000 a month. It would start at 10. It depended on the keywords, how hard they were to ring for, and it would go up from there.

And what about now? Sam, I love when you describe people's businesses because you're just like, so what does that mean? You just Google their name and then it doesn't show up and then you go write an article with their name and it's like, what's the hustle? Dude, you just read the New York Times and then you just cut out half the words and then you hit send in an email. Like, is that what the hustle is?

Yeah. Nailed it. I mean, it can be. Like, you know, there's always more nuance and complication in reality. But like if you can explain things. in a fairly simple way where it's like, what's HubSpot? Oh, they just make software so when people sign up for your website, you can email them and call them.

You know what I mean? Like, you could, I'm just trying to dumb it down a little bit. Yeah, but when you look at the business, when they first started, massive churn, how to add tons of features, how to figure out onboarding, how to figure out training. There was a lot of stuff that went to make HubSpot a multi-billion dollar company, right? A lot of people look at it as email, but they do more than email. They do more than a CRM. They've added actually, if anyone in the space has a ton of traction, they have a history of adding a lot of those features for free, which is a smart model, and then gobble up market share, get them into the ecosystem, and hopefully they stick around.

And so what's the popular? You should do the ad reads for us. That was amazing. By the way, Sam, I think you should make Suburban Dictionary, which is just you explaining businesses without like any of the complicated stuff. Like, yeah, what is it? Well, if you get customers, call them and email them. The three syllable dictionary.

Like, I explain complicated things, but no word is above three syllables. That's what we're going to call it. Exactly. What? By the way, I was just going to say, Ben brought up one point on that minority thing. Ben, you want to say that? That sounds pretty interesting. You slacked us something.

Neil kind of mentioned this, too, but like this is really, really popular in government work. Because the government is, like, very hardcore about hitting their quotas. for racial minorities. And so around here, like, I actually know a couple guys. And basically what they do is, uh, the people I know are all African American. They get the contract. They put their name on the contract. They then outsource the entire thing to like, uh, Deloy or KPMG or whatever. And, uh, they take like, you know, 15% of the revenue or whatever. They create a consulting firm. That's like the minority, minority ink. And then minority ink goes and gets the contracts that farms it out to, to like, Deloitte or whoever.

That's great. I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better. I lived in Indonesia for a while, and they had such a bad traffic problem.

Jakarta has, like, I think, the worst traffic in the world. Like, you're just going two miles. You might be there for two hours. And so they were like, okay, we need to create like a carpool incentive. So how do we create an incentive where if you have three or more people in your car, then you can go in the fast lane? And so it worked for like a month. It was like, oh, wow, this is great.

If we carpool, we get to go faster. And then this little industry sprouted up where people would just stand at the edge of the carpool lane, like a hitchhiker. And they'd be like, I'll get in your car. If you want a third ride or I'll just hop in and we can ride in the fast lane. And then they would get off on the other side and ride back with somebody else. And so they would be a professional like, you know, H-OV lane participants. So they would just spend all day riding with you in your car.

So you'd be sitting there and someone would just get in the back seat with you. It's just like a random Indonesian person. And you would pay them 10, 10, like, rupees or whatever. And then 10 bot. And then they would, you know, get out on the other side of a mile later. It was amazing. You, Neil, was Quick Sprout, Ben, there you go. Was Quick Sprout?

I mean, so that was your main business, Quick Sprout and Crazy Egg were your main business for a while. It was probably just a blog. And then my co-founder, Heathen, ended up taking it over and now it's his blog. So what was your main source of revenue and income? Because like I said, I've listened to you forever. Like you've been crushing it, it seems like financially for like 10 plus years. I don't know if I'm crushing it, but the main source of income was crazy like for most my life.

And then it ended up becoming the ad agency. And Sam, you said something at the very beginning that if I was listening to this, I'd be like, wait. Hold on. I want to hear that story. You said something like, just for kicks, he would like spin up a business that, like, did 100K a month in revenue. What's an example of that? Tell that story because that sounds awesome. Yeah, so everyone thinks like it's really hard to make money online. And then you got these shysters who are like, buy this for $1,000 and you become rich, which never really happens.

Maybe every once in a while, but for most people it doesn't. So I was like, I created a business on anything. People are like, go create a nutrition business. My audience picked, I give them like a lot of different options. They picked a nutrition business. And I was like, all right, let's create a blog. get a ranking, there's some traffic, and then funnel people in through quizzes, through emails, and let's bundle them into supplements, rank higher on Amazon, get traction, and see

what happens. And it did well. And that took you like months, years? No, it wasn't months. It was much more than that. I think it was like... It was a year, right? A little bit less than a year.

I think it was like nine or ten months. So it wasn't like one or two months, sadly, but a little bit. less than a year. So it was pretty good. It was an awesome. It was an awesome blog post series, Sean. You got to Google like, Google like Quick Sprout or Neil Patel, then like $100,000 a month. And it was like a monthly update. It was pretty amazing. I don't think they may have deleted it now. I don't know if it's still a line. But and then so I took the money I made from Crazy Egg and I'll park it into other things. So it's like stock market for a long time, the stock markets had a really crazy run, right? Then you also have things like investments, a lot of venture funds, uh, angel

investments and then sometimes you just get lucky sometimes you don't know this the numbers game we uh had talked about doing a content series like this to grow the podcast i was like you know i think one of the best ways to grow the podcast could be if we do a challenge like what you would described and what one of the ideas is like what if sam created his own uh sam sticky yiki his own a condiment brand and we basically show how we build a d to c brand like from from idea to like branding to and we just do it all transparently to like get people hooked on. Okay, let me see how you guys actually build this thing. Now, it's a lot of work, which is why I think ultimately we didn't do it.

But how well did that work for you? Was that like just kind of like a good content thing? Or was it like, no, that was like drove a lot of growth for the brand and the blog. I'm curious how well that worked for you. It didn't drive as much growth for the brand. But it did help out every little bit. Like I did crazy experience. So I spent like 100 and something or 200 and something thousand thousand on clothes.

and wanted to see what that did in business meetings, spent money flying first class everywhere, wanted to see what that would do. But yeah, I tried a lot of different experiments, and it was just for shits and giggles. And it was also a reason to justify some of my expenses. And I was going to fly first class, because I remember my first time flying first class,

someone I was paid for it. I'm like, wow, I've been missing out. This is a lot better than being crammed up and flying all the way to Europe from Los Angeles, you know, in economy. And then I was like, man, let's do some experiments and let's see if I can justify this expense. But yeah. That's amazing. And you just, did you say early on that you just gave Heaton?

So did you invest in Heaton's other company, Sean, Nira? Yeah. Yeah. So we're both, Neil, we're both investors in Nira, which is, Heaton's your cousin, right? No. Or brother-in-law. Brother-in-law. Yeah, sorry.

And Heaton's amazing. He's a great blogger as well. And Sean and I both invested in his company called Nira, which is either going to be a dud or it's going to be like the biggest company ever. I know. Like it's like a company that's like they're going to close like multi-million dollar contracts, I would guess. It's like a big old business, potentially a big old business. But did you say that you gave him crazy egg? So with crazy egg, what ended up happening is, well, I want to.

wanted to do is we were doing business forever together and then eventually I just said, hey, you can have the monthly distributions and I'm going to go create another business. Why would you give that? Why? He didn't ask for it, nor did he care for it, nor did he want it. You know, he's never been about money. Neither him or I have. And we're not rich. I can't actually speak for him. I'm not rich. I've just done well enough and I don't spend it. I don't spend as much so it's like don't really need the money does that make sense like if you just don't spend money you don't really need much cash at all dude you just said you dropped 200,000 on clothes what do you mean you don't need money well that was like pyramid right but that's not

my daily life like I'm wearing a white t-shirt with stains that my kids spit it's up on um there are probably like 10 20 bucks I don't know what the white t-shirts cost but they're not really white anymore so I try not to do video recordings in front of white walls anymore because you can just tell the discoloration from it. Nonetheless. So did Sam say you live in Brazil? Is that what? No, no.

I have a division in Brazil. Like we do marketing in Brazil for Brazilian companies. And you live in Texas? Where do you live? Vegas. Vegas. Okay. Amazing.

And so have you, is it easy for you to keep your burn rate down? Because like, I was telling Sam this, I spend like, I don't know, $25,000 a month now just like, and I'm not, I don't even feel like, I'm falling out. I think, Sean, you might spend more than that now. I bet you you add it up because I know how you spend. I bet you it's more than 25.

It might be. It might be a little more. But it's not more than 30, I would say. I don't think it's more than 30. So I don't think it's more than 30. But I got two little kids, but they're like babies. Like, you know, like they don't need food. So, you know, there's diapers, sure.

But like, it's not them. It's me. So. I would take 30. You said it's a. steep burn rate or it's a good burn rate I would take it I'll trade with you okay gotcha so when you say you don't spend

much what do you say is your monthly burn rate because I think for most people listening right they're like most people don't talk about how much they make or how much they spend all right how much you make sometimes that's sensitive how much you spend on that if I do you how much I burn on it well but Neil you actually wrote this in a block post you said you said I spend this was I don't know

if you're I have no idea if you're single or if you have a family and you can avoid that if you're great right right now but you used to say your blog post edit, you go, $15,000 a month is all I need. I'm happy. That was like 10 years ago, I think. But you used to say 15,000. Seeing all I know kids, it was easy. Right now, if I had a guess on my burn rate, 120 to 180 a month. What? That's insane. So how does that break down? So what's the,

like, what's the bulk of it? So house probably is the biggest one. No, I have no mortgage. Okay. So you're spending 120 to 180K without spending anything on your home. of property tax property tax for both my homes and HOA dues is probably close to 200 a year okay great

so we've got 12,000 of the way there we're one right yeah yeah so there's okay life insurance is 25 grand a month what my whole life policy has that's 25 to 300 a year

no no wait Wait, what the hell is a $25,000 month life insurance policy? Can you explain that? It's just a benefit. Like if I die, my wife and kids get money, like a life insurance policy. Yeah, well, I get that. But is that normal? I've never heard, like, either I'm dumb or you're dumb.

Who's dumb here? Am I dumb because I've never heard of anybody spending that much on their life insurance policy? It's like an investment account. It builds over time. So it's not like it goes away, right? Most life insurance policies are for, call it 10 years and then you buy another one. Mine just keep going and you can borrow against it.

Just think of it as like an investment vehicle. So that's 25 a month. Okay, I see. I see. Now I understand. Staff, cleaners, nannies, driver. We have a full-time driver. I think that ends up being around 57 a month. 5,700, 57,000?

$1,000. You know, a driver, Uber? Why? I optimize for convenience. In Vegas, I go through this company. They charge a hefty premium. I go through this company and I have decals on my car. So if I do a meeting in front of a casino, the car can just stay in front of a casino and doesn't have to move.

If I'm going to the airport, you can straight up pull up into the plane or whatever you want to do and you don't have to go through terminals or anything like that. So that makes like easy. So part of your strategy, as I'm picking you. this up is that you live the best lifestyle you want and it's all expensive the way you do it. I don't know if it's all expensive. Is that what you meant with a decal? Like it's a company. It's like marketing.

It's like a marketing vehicle for you. So there's a limo company. If I have their default on my windows and pay them, I can end up parking wherever I want in theory, not literally wherever I want, but in most cases I can park wherever I want. The car can just sit there and wait for me. All right, so what else? Anything else? Do you fly private? He's like, I buy a daily Disneyland fast pass just in case I decide to go that day. Yeah.

I fly private for convenience of time. What's been the number one, like, kind of like, where you feel like most people don't, most people think this is too expensive and not worth it. But for me, I get way more value. I'll give you an example in my life, right? So I thought I had burned right until we started talking. So this is great. I'm feeling so much better about myself. But the one thing I did was I hired a private chef.

So I was like, all right, that I think. I always thought that's the lifestyle of the rich and famous. And I thought, wow, that's cool because you eat healthy and it tastes great. You don't have to fuss with time and cooking and dishes and groceries and all that stuff. And so to me, it's like a no brand. I'm like, dude, anybody with any kind of money, you should be like, that should be one of the first, like fancy car later. Private chef now, because I'm like, to me, the value, the reward way outweighed the cost. I think most people don't typically make that trade.

It sounds like you've experimented with many ways of spending money. money. What has been a good reward for, for cost trade that you're like, this one is, is great that most people don't do? I don't know. I mean, I'm in a bubble because I have a lot of friends who are like me, sadly, in which we spend a lot and we don't know what's reality. I know that sounds bad to say, but it's true, right? Cook is not bad. Housekeeper isn't bad so you don't have to do your own dishes and stuff. Although, funny enough, I enjoy doing that and ironing because it's kind of like meditative for me. It's relaxing.

I don't know why watching TV and ironing. Nanny's help so you get to freedom and you can watch your kids when you want to, but you can also do meetings and stuff like that. Probably the best expense I ever spend on is private planes. Not because I like it. It's I don't mind playing commercial. Not really any difference for me. But it helps me optimize for times so that way I can see my.

kids more. That does sometimes do a lot of meetings for work and just going and then coming back the same day, just really in and out really quickly. Like, sometimes I'll be home quick enough, like go from Vegas to Utah for a conference, speak, come back, and I'll be home quick enough to pick up my kid from school. And like, to me, it's really well valuable. That's worth of money. Are you saving any money then? Or, I mean, are you just taking a fat draw from the agency in order to pay for this? Or are you able to expense a lot of it to the agency? How's that work? I don't expense any of it to my company. I just personally pay for it.

So you're just, the agency is just that profitable of a business. It's doing that well. Or investments, or savings. I've done well enough in life where I'm okay. Why did you do an agency? So me and Sam,

I was talking about, like, we have many mottos on this podcast. For example, we don't do public math. For example, you don't say you're rich. You say you're post-economic.

These are things we've picked up from guests along the way. And one of the models that we say is, you know, agencies suck. And it's like, and the reason we say is not because they, like, they do well. There's not that they suck. It's like they suck as a business choice.

Like if I could, I have always thought if I could choose between software or an agency, I'd choose software because it's like, oh, it's not a services business. It's going to work while I sleep and it can scale up. And I don't have to open up offices in Poland and Brazil and all these other places. But you chose that. You did software and you chose agency now.

Why did you make that choice and what's great about agencies that I'm kind of like not giving enough credit for? You're looking at business as in software is more scalable, it's more desirable, public markets, EX HubSpot versus Accenture. Accenture has way worse multiples than HubSpot. Accenture is a bigger company from a revenue, even a standpoint. point. But now take a different approach. Okay, HubSpot's publicly traded companies. You guys are both HubSpot employees, I'm assuming so. Is that correct? Kind of. Sure. Whatever your guys is deal is, right? But you guys are pretty much at HubSpot. Now imagine

creating a business and you don't plan on going public. You don't care for the limelight. You don't care for any of that. In business, what's a successful business? Good revenue growth and good revenue and profitability, right? All that really matters at the end of the day, whether you grow or not grow, is how profitable are you? Would you guys agree with that statement? Assuming you're doing something that's ethical and you're not selling growth. No, I wouldn't agree with that.

I would say there's a third thing, which is like, is this enjoyable and like, do I like my day to day? And with the more people you have, most people would say that's just a little bit more headache than, than that's not software or consulting. Anytime you build a big company, you tend to have a large amount of people. Whether it's HubSpot or whether it's Accenture, everyone has a lot. Yeah, but you can probably have a much higher revenue per employee with software versus, let's say you own a massive landscaping business.

You're going to have to have tens of thousands of people. But what's the difference from dealing with? How many people does HubSpot have like 6,000? I don't know, 5,000, 6,000 is probably a lot. I'm guessing on the number. But what's the difference of dealing with 5,000 or 6,000 people and 20,000 people? There's a point where it doesn't matter and it's a lot of people either way. Like, it's not like you're at 50 people.

You still have thousands of employees to deal with and you need managers and layers and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, but you're hiring some, good or bad, you're hiring a different type of person. So for example, if you're VaynerMedia, they're based in New York. They can probably only afford to pay some of their lower level employees, $70 or $80,000 a year. And so you just have to get a ton of people like that and have to have higher churn versus, say, a bigger company. where you're able to pay a significantly higher salary because the revenue per employee is much higher. So perhaps there's a slightly different day-to-day because of that.

Not necessarily. Let's say you're VaynerMedia. He could be doing it to optimize for profit. One was if I told you his LTV was six, seven, eight years, right? And you have everything. Then at that point, you can still hire high-quality people and pay my arm and a leg. Okay. You get what I mean, right?

Like you look at Accenture. They're charging accounts so much money. and their contracts are long, and I don't know what VaynerMedia's LTV is, but there's a lot of consulting companies that have LTVs of six, seven years for clients. And their clients are spending, you know, a HubSpot, yes, it's more revenue per, you can say potentially in software, you can get to more revenue per employee, but I know consulting companies that only take on contracts that are like five, six million dollars and upwards.

So you have high margins and you can have a high revenue per employee. but either way, no matter what, as you build a big business, you're going to need more people and it's a headache to manage whether you pay them $70,000 or whether you pay them $150,000. It's still more of a headache. And the notion that if you hire someone for $150,000, I'm not saying you're saying this, it doesn't necessarily mean they're a better employee, right? No, it just means different types of headaches. Correct, exactly.

Engineers, for example, are very expensive in this economy, right? So the point I'm getting at is a consulting company, I had the demand for it. A lot of people wanted to pay me for marketing. And there was just so much demand, it would have been silly not to do. And if I'm not trying to go public or I'm not trying to sell, money is money. Green is green. As long as you're happy doing what you're doing, take the cash. Will you ever sell the company?

I want to say I would never sell the company, but I don't care to ever sell the company because I love what I'm doing. We also have good growth too, right? I don't know what we'll grow this year, 60 something percent, which is a bad, you know, with the market going up and down and fluctuating 60 something percent is my guess at our size. It's decent. Yeah, the part I was actually talking about was a little bit more like, I think you're totally right that like if you're going to win big, you're going to end up with a bunch of employees.

And like, you know, it might look like 150. You might look like 1,000. It might look like 10,000. But like, you know, in either case, you're going to have managerial work and headaches and it's just different types. The part I was really talking about was like. Like, you know, I've now built, let's say, a media company, content. And then it's like done educational stuff, so courses, which are like, you know, a different thing.

And then there's like, I built software company. And, you know, we ended up selling that one. And then it's like, and then there's services, which is like client services, like consulting or agency model. And what I hate, what I love about content media is it's actually pretty fun to create. And it's cool because a lot of people consume it to the kind of, you know, you get that like hit. but you got to like you got to bake the cake every day right so like you know the hustle or like the milk road or this podcast it's like we have to come on and create the content again uh you know for the most part we we're not doing like super long evergreen stuff uh so you know like with the

hustle is the daily news that or milk roads the daily news that we got to bake that cake every day whereas software it was like we built one product and yes we might we will improve it over the course of a year, you know, every year we're going to improve it. But like fundamentally, we didn't have to like recreate the product, come up with a new viral story or a new great content segment that would like require like a new genius. With software, like you come up with one genius moment and then you sort of refine it, make it work better over time and get rid of bugs and things like that. So I prefer that part of software, which was like making a product rather than making kind of like a disposable, you know, consumable piece of content. Or like I have

an e-commerce company. And, like, it's a pain in the ass to have physical products that are supply chain constrained and like we have a warehouse. We got warehouse problems with our e-commerce business. And so I'm like, man, digital was sweet compared to e-commerce, but e-commerce is quite profitable.

That kicks off a bunch of profits. That's nice. So every business has these pros or cons. And I always thought agency was like, the part I always thought was a pain in the ass was like the client services. You are reinventing the next campaign and the next winning marketing formula for them.

and you have to keep clients happy all the time and clients are sort of like never satisfied in a way that like, if software is like you can have nameless, faceless customers that like, yeah, some percentage of them will write into your help desk that's in the Philippines or whatever,

but like you're not having to like, you know, send account reports to your, you know, your big clients and keep them happy. Yeah, but you, everyone has their own problems.

In software, a lot of people have turned to this issue and they can't figure it out. Or they have competitors who come into the marketplace and just undercut them on pricing for the same feature. because it's cheaper and cheaper to build software these days, right?

So they all have their own problem. To me, I look at it as if you can find the right people. So every time I start a company, I find people to put in place that have already done it multiple times before because your risk of failure are lower. And they already know everything to do. So I don't have to deal with client relationships. I don't have to deal with customer service or anything like that.

I get to do what I enjoy doing, which is go and create content, be the face, et cetera. And my wife enjoys what she gets to do, right? She gets to donate the money, although we don't really consider it as donations. We look at it as investing. We're investing in people, although we really don't ever collect any money back. It's more so you're investing into making the world a better place or people's lives a better place or whatever it may be. What's a, who are, who are your first three clients at this, at this agent?

I don't know. There were small companies. And right now, who's an example of client? Like a Fortune 100 software company. Like that is a typical company. Think of any big large corporation in B2B. That's a great example of one of our customers or even B2C. Actually, think of any Fortune 500 company.

That's a prime example of a customer. What's a, and who's the CEO of your agency? Are you? No. I'm never the CEO. I'm a terrible manager. I'm one of the worst managers ever. His name is Mike Gullickson.

He was the CEO. Oh, no, he was the president of I Prospect, which is an ad agency owned by Densu. I believe in I prospect. Maybe they had four or five thousand people, is my guess. And what, when you, how early into the business did you have a hired CEO or hired leader? Day one. I won't start a business without a CEO from day one. And what did you pay them in the first year?

First year was my co-founder, so like 100 grand. And that's because you, basically went and drummed up a hundred grand with a business and you're like hey mike uh i got i got this client so to give a hundred grand you want to run this thing for me and and help it get deployed no uh our business in a start off that way i probably put in total of five million bucks into the business and my own money so it was bootstrap but not really bootstrapped if that makes sense it's kind of cheating um and it gets easier and easier as your entrepreneur right the more the more success is you have and i'm not saying i'm successful by any means the more capital you have

to deploy into the next thing so reduces chances of failure. And when it's your own money, this is just my thesis, and I could be wrong on this, I have no data points. When it's your own money, you're much more careful than when you raise like $15, 20, $30 million of venture capital, right? You really look at every single dollar. But Mike was the CEO from day one. He's a great operator, has no agency experience.

Eventually, we got in a president. And then eventually from there, we got in a CEO. CEO. And have you guys crossed 100 million in revenue yet? Yeah, we do nine figures. That's crazy, man. So, I mean, that's just pretty wild that you're able to like parlay this blog. That was all, always kind of a juggernaut, but this blog into a nine figure a year of business. I mean, that's amazing. Yeah, it's been a good run. I hope it's knocking on wood, although you probably can't here because of Chris, but I hope it keeps going. And more so, we're just having fun. Like, for me, what I enjoy doing is building a business. I know I have an expensive lifestyle. I

generally don't do stuff for the money. Like, I overpay, like, house staff, like nannies and stuff like that. When I say overpay, I drastically overpay, not by like 10, 20, 30, 40 percent. Like, I really mean drastically overpay. Because I look at people, I'm like, if you're cleaning a house, how are you going to live on this? Like, I'll give someone six figures to do that. I know that's sounds kind of crazy or stupid, but like, I'm not giving my kids money. So might as well take care of other people in this world who need it more than, um, uh,

we do. Did you just say, you're not giving kids money? Yeah, I'm not going to give my kids money. Nothing. Leave, leave nothing.

We have a trust set up. What they'll get maximum is like, if they're on the street and they can't provide and they're going to be suffering, like I will help pay their bills, um, or put them in a normal home. Or like, if my kid's like, I want to be a doctor and I want to go spend all my time in Africa

helping other people out and I won't get paid for this and I need, you know, X, $5,000 a month to live or $10,000 so I can just go volunteer all my time. I'd like, sounds good. I'll pay for that. But like, I won't give them money for the sake of it. Like if they're like, I want to go travel to see Italy or I want a Honda Accord and like, go buy your own Honda Accord, go travel on your own with your own dime. Like, you know, I don't believe in just giving people money because I think there's other

people who need it more than we do. Sean, are you going to give your kids money? I really thought about it. Like my oldest is two, so I think I got some time to figure that out. But I lean more towards. So I've kind of heard both arguments. Like I know somebody who they, some people are like, you know, I do, there's some people that I'm definitely not in the camp of I do this for my kids.

I want to leave my kids with a whole bunch. So I'm like, that may be the worst thing you could do for them. Not because it means of the ruin. You have drug addicts. Yeah, you take away, you know, agency in a way, right? Like, you want people to, like, it's not that it's good or bad. It's actually just, it's just way lower on the total pool of priorities. It's like, I just don't even focus on that.

It's like, if I'm going to leave them something, it's going to be a certain set of character, character traits and skills and like mentality. And like, mentality. That's what I'm trying to leave. Money is like, I don't know, 15th on the list of like, I don't know, we haven't even gotten to think about that yet. But I've thought a lot about what are the character traits and mentality and like mindset and skills that I think I can. can help build and like that's the focus that's the one that matters that's the that's the gift if whatever else comes from beyond that i don't know we can figure out it's like the foot it's like the footnotes so like we're very similar i have a two-year-old and a less than one-year-old right and i look at

it as you want them to be productive units of society right you want them to be ambitious hungry caring thoughtful happy like whatever it is there's a lot of characteristics that you may want children to be. But I look at it as like they don't need money. Even like with my wife and I, we go over our expenses. And we look at what we spend on travel. And we do some of this because it's easier, but like my wife and I are actually considering cutting out all private and just going commercial now. The main reason our expenses are high is due to COVID. So if it wasn't for COVID, I would just be going to be going in a normal airport. I didn't know how COVID was going to impact with young kids, could afford it. I was like, yeah, just start flying private. And we haven't gone back to commercial

yet, but we're thinking about going back. Because, like, my wife and I look at the money is like, yeah, we spend all this money on travel and airfare and hotels. If we donated the money, people would have a better life. Do we really need it that much? What do you do when you donate that, like, what's a good way to donate, in your opinion? So there's, like, you know, ranging from not donating to donating to donating to one thing, to donate to a bunch of things, to like getting involved or seeing the impact or, like,

you know, I know people who, if they donate to Africa, they'll actually, their family will go take a trip every year so that they're more. connected to the people and they actually see the impact and they take their kids with them so they see the impact. Like, what have you found that's a good way to give? So we have a balance. It's my wife and I team up. This is going to sound bad, but I don't like volunteering my time.

My wife loves volunteering her time. I think it's very inefficient for me to volunteer my time. I should make the money versus volunteering my time because the money for the hours spent, if we donated the money, it would have a much bigger impact to the cause than if I actually spent my time. I don't think that sounds bad. Yeah, and my wife loves spending the time and like from going to soup kitchens or whatever it may be. So she picks the causes.

We have a few thesis. So like one thesis is we or not really thesis, but rules. One rule is we don't like money going to organizations that have tons of high overhead. We actually want our money going to the causes. So if it doesn't go to the cause, then we tend to not pick that organization. The second thing that we look for is organizations who are like self-sufficient, right? It's just like, how can this continue going even if someone wasn't managed? So like a great program, for example, is my wife likes donating to women's education.

We used to donate also to men's education as well. So you find these people in these villages, you say, hey, you can't afford to go to school, get a degree. we'll pay for you to go to college, go get a degree, come back, teach kids in your village for a few years, whether it's under a tree or anything, people can learn anywhere, right? And then, you know, go move on with your life and do whatever you want, but at least you're giving back to your own community. And what we found is when we started giving, because we've been doing this for so long now. Well, actually not that long, but when I mean long, I'm talking about like 10, 11 years where we've been donating. And it's picked up quite a bit over the last like five, six years.

when we started giving the money to men, a lot of the men, we saw a very low conversion rate from them actually coming back and teaching people in the village. Well, when we gave the money to women for their education, a lot of them came back and fulfilled on the promise. Because it's not like you get a signed contract, right? It's just like, hey, we're going to pay for everything,

come back, help people out within your village. What's country? We've done this in both India and Africa. So different parts of Africa and in India. And then another program that we've done is like growing gardens where a lot of people who have AIDS don't take the right, don't take their medication and aren't doing well. They're giving the medication for free, but if your body doesn't have the right nutrients, it rejects it. So what we'll do is we'll do programs like growing gardens. We'll give them money.

They grow food. And then not only do they eat nutritiously or well, they'll more likely take their medication. And you're also growing enough food so that way other people in the village can also. I was like, but my wife picks all the causes. She vets them. She loves it. Like she'll go, this is Wednesday. And two days she'll end up going to a function,

scouting out more nonprofits and organizations. I won't go. Like, I think it's a waste of time. I'm like, if I go make more money, she can donate it. It's a better ROI than if I go spend three, four hours mingling when she could just do that and I can go make more so that way we can donate more. Other than your own private businesses, what have been your best financial investments that's allowed you to donate and make a lot to give away? Stock market has done really well.

Companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, I know Facebook's down, but they still have been a tear if you just bought the stocks early enough. Some of these companies have grown 30, 40% a year in the public market's compounding, right? And it really adds up. Angel investments have done really well for me. and I would say probably those are the two biggest. Stock market still has done well, although in the last six months I've taken a beating because I'm in 100% tech companies.

Like I don't diversify. Like everyone's like, oh, you need some oil and you need this. I'm like, yeah, I'm just going to go all tech. And people are like, oh, you're silly. Look how much you lost. But if you look at the whole time when I first got in, I've done well. And I invest in what I understand. And I'm 37.

So who cares? You know, another 10 years, everything should rebound, assuming you pick the right companies. What's your portfolio look like in terms of percentages? I probably don't have... My public portfolio, if I had a guess, I probably don't even have more than 20 stocks. Amazon, I won't be able to name them all,

but Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe, Atlassian, Shopify. I'm missing some as well. And of your liquid net worth, how much is in public equities versus other? Versus real estate. Liquid not worth. Just non-agency. I think your agency, is your agency the only company that you own a significant stake?

And if yes, exclude that, then what's your portfolio look like? No, I have quite a bit of other companies because it started using a lot of the cash to buy other companies for like three, four, five X EBITA, and then you just fix them and grow up and then just cash flow. I would, so if I look just at cash invested in other companies that aren't mine, like not companies I'm buying that or anything like that, I would probably say 80 to 90% is in stocks. What companies were you buying? Any that we can find that we like.

Like we bought Uber CEDS, there was a software company, bought it for 120, put $3 million into it. It took, I think, less than seven or eight months to get to a million a month in revenue. What? What's it called? Uber suggests. A trust competitor.

That one did well. We just bought another one. A lady named Lisa. Crazy. And then we just bought another one. We haven't announced it. We bought it for 8.6, I think a month ago, a month and a half ago. So we'll see.

It does $100,000 a month. We think we can grow it within 12 months to probably like, four or five hundred grand a month and profit. So forget revenue. We just will look at it as a cash flow. So do you have rules around that like, okay, I have to be able to grow it using neil patel.com or it has to be in the marketing niche so the agency benefits? No, it's like

would you buy like brick, you know, like a fucking laundromat or if I can grow it. I won't do too much brick and motor, but I've invested in other people's brick and motor. Like I have a friend who does a lot of brick and mortar businesses. Like one of my buddies has a roofing company. And I was like, oh, cool. You can buy it for 3X.

It's a good size. And I can show you a few things. And we can probably increase the profit by like 60% within 12 months. So it's like it's just a good cash flow, right? Like if you're getting like 30, 40, 50% returns on your money, it's great. And then you also have to keep in mind because of my history and I've been doing this long enough, I also can get debt at really cheap terms and large amounts of debt. Like, I can get debt at like 3.6% plus sober. So if I'm buying a business for five-ax, in many cases, because of the economics

of my whole portfolio, you know, some businesses I put down, like on the one that was 8.6, 2.6 was paid over 12 or 18 months or something like that. But we put 6 mil up front. I could have got a loan for it, but I was like, it's just easier to put the 6 mil and not deal with the paperwork. But sometimes we'll just do loans on the 100% of it because zero down. Right. And what do you like, okay, so you do what you do now. So you have your time and it's pretty much probably fully allocated, let's say, to the agency and then some of these other things. If somebody was smart but didn't have your, you have a bunch of visibility.

You kind of know where your industry is going. You see adjacent opportunities, but hey, I'm not going to go to them. I don't have the time. what are opportunities that you see that you think somebody listening to this who's just like smart hustler like I got more time than I have ideas I got more time than I have money where would you go if you were that person what would you what would you suggest for them to look at as like you know opportunities that you see today I would look for opportunities in anything that they're good at and I know that's not the answer that you're looking for but what I found

that the issue is when people go look for opportunities that make some money when you're not passionate, you don't put in the time and energy required to actually make it successful. That's a big issue we see. Maybe some people have it in them where they can make something successful because they'll just tough it out. But most people we see will just quit because they just hate what they're doing. And so, but I think a lot of people don't know what they love to do. They don't have like, if they already had what they love to do, they wouldn't be, you know,

looking for opportunities. So, you know, sort of like a by definition problem there, right? So somebody who's thinking about, okay, I don't love what I'm currently doing. I'd like to, I want to get to where this guy's at, which is basically like, like seems happy and successful, right? He seems like he said he loves what he's doing. I'd love to do that, but what if I don't know, right? It's like when my sister was going to college, my dad asked her,

she's like, what should I major? And he's like, I don't know, what's her favorite subject? And she was like, lunch. Like, you know, I don't have a favorite subject. I don't love any of these subjects. So what am I supposed to do? Like, am I just out? You know, I'm just not one of those.

You just have a lot of different until you find what you're passionate about. Because if you try a lot of different things, you'll typically find something that you're naturally good at. usually what you're naturally good at, you'll also tend to favor in what you like and then just double down on that. But if you're looking for industries with opportunities, I see a huge slowdown in e-commerce. Not necessarily the e-commerce market shrinking. I'm not saying that, but the growth in the e-commerce market isn't as what it was once used to be, right, when COVID first kicked off. So you're going to see the multiples go down to buy e-commerce shops, D to C brands, right? So great

opportunity for buying and go fix them up and grow them and scale them. Another great opportunity right now is free. So I look at the whole software market as really backwards. Okay? In which right now, it doesn't matter if you're a HubSpot or Canva, eventually someone can just create a Me Too company and just undercut you on pricing.

And what I've learned is, if you can create a software company that already has a brand that has a free product, and you just make it really good for free and you just keep adding more and more to it, a great example of this is PhotoP. There's this company called PhotoP. It's a...

We love it. Photoshop. And it's like they make very little to no money. So I head up one of my buddies who is great at outreaching and I told him I want photo P. Offered him 10 million. He said no. Offered him 20 million.

He said no. I can take photopi, make it a really good Canva competitor, undercut him on pricing. Whatever be worth 10, 20, 40 billion, whatever they are, no. But I probably can cash flow that thing to like four or five million a month in EBAA. Right? It's like, who cares what it sells for or what it's worth. But you're saying make it free and you're saying a cash flow is like a motherfucker. So how do you take a free product and cash flow like a mother?

How would you explain that? Well, he said a Canva knockoff. Canva knockoff. So you make almost 99% of it for free. You charge for 1%, but that 1% is enough where you can drive in the revenue. So you don't ever make as much as like a Canva or like a MailChimp or a HubSpot. But hey, if you can make millions a month in profit, it's still. Good.

What's your math there? So what's the calculus when you were thinking? So like, let's say photopi, according to similar web, has 10 million uniques a month or something. What was your math? Is that right? Yeah, it is right. Yeah.

We researched it. Yeah. So like what was your calculus to get to $4 million in EBIT a month? Like what would, how many people would you need to run it? And what was the, what's the calculus there? Sure. So I can probably get the thing from 10 million visitors. I can, so let's say I bought it for 20, right?

He wouldn't sell it to me for 20. I've never outreached him, but I had a buddy outreach to him for me who just does all my outreach. So let's say I bought it for 20. I would put another 10 into it, so now I'm out $30 million. I'm really good at growing traffic, and I know I can grow the team to roughly 40 million unique a month. I just have a, I don't know how, but for some weird reason, I know traffic really well and how to calculate what I can get it to and all this kind of stuff, right?

And I've done enough research and competitors of what features drive X amount of traffic, just looking at so many competitors in the space. So let's say if I get it to 40, what is it called? 40 million. And what, what, one of the one or two things that you'd get at the 40 million? Like SEO, basically? So more SEO, more virality, increasing the quality of the templates, increasing features, adding AI in there, like click a button, we can automatically detect backgrounds, remove it,

filters for social media because a lot of people use them for social media. Logo generator website as a lead gen, shit like that. Right. So let's say you got it to 40 million, right? At 40 million, I can easily monetize, let's call it like 1% of the traffic. But let's be even more conservative, like a half a percent, 200,000 people. If I have 200,000 people hypothetically paying $3 a month, okay, that's $600,000. thousand. The reason I give you on average three dollars in certain countries you may want to charge

different pricing like india and stuff like that so it's more affordable. So three dollars a month. And at three dollars a month, if a customer stays for 10 months, that's six million dollars. You can probably run the thing with less than a million, million and a half in burn each month. So then you think, oh, so then for a million and a half burn, you would need. Once you have tons of revenue, right? When you don't have tons of revenue, your burn is much lower on a monthly basis. Yeah, but so then how many people, then if it's, you're, looking at 30 people, you would need to run that operation? I don't even think 30, but let's say 30 total.

So I think I can actually run the thing for under a million dollars a month. Right. So I'm just trying to do the math in my head. But I mean... The revenue was like under a million, too, there. It was like $600,000 or something, right? $600,000 a month. But if a customer stays for 10 months, you're looking at $6 million.

Because you charge up front? No, no, no. Okay, if they're paying $3 a month, If you have 40 million, not 4 million, but 40 million, you're converting a half of percent. That's 200,000 paying customers a month. If they pay you $3 a month, that's $600,000. They last for 10 months. That's $6 million a month in MR.

Over a year, you're making $72 million in revenue. That's crazy. You're a very interesting person. I think I dig you because you've got your hands in so many different things. I honestly don't. at this point, I don't run anything. I come up with ideas. I have really good operators who are great at the execution.

I'm like, go do this. It'll make money. Here's a play with go and just do it. So how many businesses do you own? I don't know. I don't really count. Over or under 10? Over.

Over under 20. I don't know. 20 is probably getting close. So probably under if I had a guess. And how many of those 20, how many of those 20 companies have more than five employees, full-time employees? I don't know.

I don't really count employee headcount. I only know my ad agency headcount because they do reports and I get in my board meeting decks. I was like, oh, we got 700 people. And you own 100% of most of these companies, it seems like. You're not raising external capital. You might, do you give your CEO? I don't know 100% of really anything.

I always give equity to profit share. I usually have a partner who runs things. We'll get equity and then I'll do profit share. What's the ideal setup for profit sharing and equity for your partner? Partner, give them maybe 10% of the business. They run it plus a really nice salary. When I mean nice salary, industry or more than industry. And then you have a pool for employees, like another 10% pool.

So then you lose in total 20%. I'm left with 80 myself. I put up all the money. If it does well, great. If it doesn't, I lose the money. No one else is on the line. If it does well, no one has to pay me back the money. Everyone just takes their distributions the moment it turns profitable from a monthly standpoint.

Does that make sense? They don't actually have to pay back any of the other stuff. And then do you also give them 10% the distribution or do you make that even heavier for them? Well, if I'm losing 20% in total, which is my ideal structure, then 20% of the profits gets distributed on a monthly basis. That's crazy. I love hearing about this. What do you think, Sean? Yeah, I think it's dope.

I had just seen you kind of from afar for a while that I got, I know he'd, you know, loosely, like we're friends, but so, you know, I didn't know a lot of this story. I knew Sam has talked about you before on the pot, I think it's, or maybe off the pot, I'm not sure, but Sam had told me some cool stuff. But I didn't know a lot of this. So for me, this was dope because I got to learn a bunch of new things. Sometimes when we have a guest, it's like, dude, I've already listened to 10 of your things. I've been following you for five years, you know, so it's like, I already know a lot of it. and I'm doing sort of like translation work for the audience. I'm like, tell them about this.

Hey, tell them about that thing you did. Versus in this, like, I genuinely wanted to know a bunch of the stuff. And I thought, you know, this is interesting to me. Yeah, you're great. There's two people that I've wanted to talk to, Sean, who are like Neil. So, I mean, there's Neil. So I want to Neil. I like finding these people that like are doing really well.

And a lot of people know about, but there's also this whole other world of people who have no idea who they are. Neil, you're one of those folks. I've been, I'm an OG reader, so I've known you forever. The other one is Syed. So Syed, we talked about Syed, a bunch on here. Him and Neil, I think, are very similar, which is very generous, but also like pretty cutthroat when it comes to business and has their hands in just dozens of different things. And they're just quietly crushing it and not even talking about it.

And he's a very generous person too. I know he has a school, I think, in the same city I have a school in or a different city. I don't know. He actually went to go see his school. But really generous. guy. Him and I have built schools in their rural countries and stuff like that, Fred. Yeah, it's just like,

you two, you guys are, I don't know if you're like this, Neil, but I know it seems like he's like this where he like has this, you know, software business that's making, who knows, tens of, many tens of millions in revenue and probably that much in profit, but, and he like buys a gas station or like

he like, buy, it just like, dude, are you kidding me? Like you're a, you're like a tech tycoon and you also own like 30 gas stations. It's just kind of funny. Here's the thing. Some of those businesses sell for like 3x EBITDA. You get 33% returns on your money if you have good operators and you can put technology in place in marketing and you can go to maybe 50 times IRR. That's great. It's just the question of can you scale it up and you can you do ones that are large enough? I know. I'm just saying it's cool that you know this stuff. That's what you're eclectic. Yeah. Him and I actually, I shouldn't speak for him, but I'm a little off, right? But the madness or the methodology I think is great for cash flow. It's terrible if you want to be like, oh, I'm going to create the next Airbnb and take this thing public and be like on the Forbes list.

Like, it's not what I do. Is that, are you motivated to become a billionaire? What's your motivation factor? What are you motivated by? Well, I won't ever be a billion. I'm not saying I have the opportunity to, but even if I did, I would never be there because we donate our money. And when I just mean donate, like not wait till you're dead to donate, like actually donate on an annual basis. How do you figure out, how do you figure out how much you want to give?

because there's always like, like when I think about it, I think like, well, I could also invest this money. It's going to grow. I'm going to give more later, but then I'm not helping somebody now. And so what's the right number, what's the right percentage basically for me to be giving on an annual basis? How do you figure that out for yourself? Whatever my wife wants to give?

What percentage does that come out to? We don't have a percentage. Keep in mind, businesses are so large. I can get loans for anything on almost any type of business. I can't go buy a business for a million dollars. billion dollars, but if I wanted to buy a business for $100 million, I can go get a loan on that, like literally for most of it. So I feel I don't have to worry anymore about do I need more of it to invest? It's just, do we find the right causes and is it going to make a big enough impact?

That's more about how we look about donations. We don't really look at it from the aspect of my donate X dollars or there's two higher percentage. We look at it as do we actually think it's going to make a big impact in the next year, short run or two years. We don't want to wait like 10, 20 years to see an impact. We also don't want to put money towards things like cancer research. I think cancer is really important. I know a lot of people who have died from cancer, but I don't have enough money to make it bent into cancer versus, you know,

solving some of the basic things out there. Like I can make an impact on things like education in a region. I can't make an impact on cancer. I just don't have enough cash for that. What is your school? You said, I have a school. It sounds tight. I want a school.

I've never seen it. We have a school. I think it's in Cambodia, and we've done a few others, but I don't really keep track. My wife does. And, you know, the bigger thing is it's not my school. It's more so the kids' school. And are they learning and getting value from it?

I remember the first school that I bought and forgot about. I was going to say, when I buy my school, it's for sure going to be my school. They might attend my school in Cambodia. Yeah. I'm like that. I bought a couple of schools in this couch cushion back here. I just, I just forgot about it.

I just, it's a little scene I played it a while ago. I remember when I was on college campus, I saw like, you know, whoever the Rothschilds or like the Rockefeller's nameplate or whatever on the like, the library at Duke campus. And I was like,

who would do this? Why, what's the point of this? You know, like, it's already nice. Not that kind of schools. I don't have that kind of money.

Mine's like little kids. I didn't understand the appeal until you said, you basically described a school you have and forgot and I've never visited it. I was like, ah, that sounds like something I want. I don't want my nameplate on, you know, the Villanova, like, 10th library on campus. But like, just to know that there's, you know, 12 kids in Vietnam attending my school, they're wondering, why does this name have so many A's in it? Who is this? Who is this benefactor, silent benefactor who has forgotten where our school is? That sounds like a perfect blend of giving and egotomia that I.

I live for. So that's perfect. Neil, we usually, so we don't have guests on often. And when we do, we typically never just ask them questions like this. It's more of a conversation where we're brainstorming stuff. We asked you tons of questions because you're just a very fascinating person. I hope you'll come on soon and you can actually brainstorm like another Uber suggests or something like that, you know, like actually go through some of this. I hope you'll come back again because this is awesome. Yeah, it was so funny. I was doing the interview. I'm like, oh, crap, I should have never told people how much I spend a month. I never told people I donate money. And I was just like, it goes against a lot of what my wife and I do. We're more of, don't tell anyone anything,

live our lives and do whatever makes it happen. Well, you only told it because it's not like you're bragging. We like kind of begged you to tell the, like we were kind of got under, we were like, yeah, tell us, go, go, tell us. It's not like you're like, I don't think that's bragging. It's not even bragging. It just feels where to talk about expenses, right? Because there's so many people who struggle for like clean water or shoes right is it's like yeah yeah but this is interesting those people uh if they ever listen to this podcast they've already been filtered out by our duchiness in other uh episodes so don't worry those anybody who's sensitive to that's probably gone by now but also there's there's actually a lot of good like i actually pretty passionately believe this

like not only am i curious from like a who i want to know i want to learn uh but like i'm actually pretty strongly believe that the way that people are like treat money is a pretty taboo thing actually is like a net, like a huge net negative on most people. So like, you know, people don't know what other people make. Therefore, they don't know what like they don't know when they're underpaid. They don't know what's possible. They don't ever like sometimes the most valuable conversations I have with somebody is just somebody for whom they do something like something is very normal to them.

And it would be abnormal to me. But it has now expanded my worldview of what's possible and what could be normal for me. Like, oh, maybe it could be normal to actually like give more, donate more, have a school. actually that sounds like something I actually going to go talk to my wife about today is like something we should go do that like it's not because you weren't bragging about it. You just kind of were honest about how you live your life, which is no, there's nothing wrong with that.

That's great, in my opinion. And it expands other people's worldview for something that maybe they want to go do or something that they haven't considered. And like, it's really weird to me that we keep the stuff under wraps. And if somebody's just honest about like the way they live their life, it's sort of like, there's like all these like negative taboo around it. And like, fuck that. I don't like that at all.

And it's been like when Sam first met me, I think I've told the story before, but like the second day I met him. And then like the next day he messaged me on Facebook, was like, so like, well, how much you make? And he was like,

what do you pay yourself? He's like, so then what do you? And then I like, I was like, well, that's like super forward. And he's like,

but he told me why. He was like, because I'm trying to figure out how much to pay myself as an entrepreneur. I have no fucking clue. And like my investors think I should make this much. But I don't know if, is that normal? And like,

I can kind of ask you and dance around it or like, I'm just asking like five friends what they make and the same role as I am. It's like startup CEO and like that'll help me figure out what's normal. What's the range of like possibilities here? And then after that he was like, so what do you do with the money? Like what do you invest? He's like, wow, that's a lot.

Are you investing that? I was like, yeah. He's like, what are you investing in it? I started telling him and he's like, cool, I'm investing in this. And now I got new ideas about what I could be investing. And it really became very obvious to me in that moment. I was like, oh shit. You're at a massive advantage.

if you have a few people you trust that you can talk openly about this sort of thing with. And the podcast was basically taking that and doing it at scale. I was like, all right, well, what if me and Sam were pretty honest about like the shit we do? And like, what if we could get guests to be honest about the shit they do?

They're like, that's actually pretty valuable resource for people who don't have five. They don't happen to have that lucky group of five friends who are all motivated entrepreneurs who are also open and honest about what they do. It's like, well, not everybody is located in a place where they have five people geographically around them that they can trust to talk about that stuff.

And so the pod kind of like serves as that. So that's my justification for why you shouldn't feel bad about sharing that information. Did it work, Neil? Do you do not feel bad? But if you want, we'll bleep it out or whatever if you feel like that too. Okay, it is what it is. I still feel bad, but it is what it is. Mission to call.

I thought it was a great speech, Sean. I felt good about that. Thank you, Neil. It was a great speech, but I still feel bad. Because I look at money as like a tool to help other people. And I'm not saying that's right or wrong. That's how I just do. But I also know I spend more than I should.

And I probably should cut back and live a more humble life and spend a lot less. Yeah, dude, I'm inspired by how you spend and how you live. And, you know, you've done some good in the world by inspiring me.