The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Nine-Figure Mindset: How to Go from Zero to Over $100 Million in Net Worth by Brandon Dawson

Episode Date: November 19, 2023

Nine-Figure Mindset: How to Go from Zero to Over $100 Million in Net Worth by Brandon Dawson https://amzn.to/3QLCZ3p Ninefiguremindset.com Cardoneventures.com Behind the life you want to live lies the power you already have to create it. In Nine-Figure Mindset, Brandon Dawson unveils how to tap into the remarkable potential hidden inside each and every one of us. Drawing from his own awe-inspiring journey, Brandon shows that success and leadership are attainable to anyone willing to cultivate the right shift in thinking. Combining personal experiences with actionable strategies, Nine-Figure Mindset serves as a guidebook to next level achievements you’ve never imagined were possible. Brandon Dawson, a very accomplished business icon, shares his wealth of wisdom, earned from his humble beginnings to achieving a record-breaking exit, having sold his last business for $151 million. Are you an entrepreneur with a gleam in your eye but the feeling that you’re running in mud? Do you sense that with the right team in place, you could achieve so much more? Perhaps you’re already successful with an undeniable hunger for more? The question is not whether you are striving hard enough but whether you’re striving for enough and in the right direction. Dawson’s secrets to starting, scaling, and above all leading a positive, independent business will help you cultivate exactly what’s needed to attract exceptional individuals and seize extraordinary opportunities. Discover how tiny shifts in perspective can change everything. Chances are, you already have everything you need to succeed—you just need someone who’s been there to show you the way. Nine-Figure Mindset is your opportunity to grab a front row seat for your business and gain the capabilities to where you want to go. Your dreams are not only possible, they should be your priority—and, by the way, they might not be big enough. Show Notes About The Guest(s): Brandon Dawson is a scaling and turnaround expert, business leadership mentor, and serial entrepreneur. He founded his first business at the age of 26 and went on to build a company with annual revenue of over $35 million. He has achieved numerous awards in business and his companies have been recognized on the Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies lists multiple times. Brandon is currently a partner at Cardone Ventures and works closely with Grant Cardone to help entrepreneurs achieve their personal, professional, and financial goals. Summary: Brandon Dawson, a scaling and turnaround expert, shares his journey from starting his first business at 26 to building a company with annual revenue of over $35 million. He emphasizes the importance of setting ambitious goals and reverse engineering them to create a roadmap for success. Brandon also highlights the significance of mindset shifts and owning your weak spots as an entrepreneur. He discusses his collaboration with Grant Cardone and their plans to build a $10 billion portfolio through Cardone Ventures and Cardone Equity Group. Key Takeaways: Setting ambitious goals and reverse engineering them is crucial for achieving financial success. Developing remarkable sales skills is essential for entrepreneurs to effectively communicate and persuade others. Understanding the financial algorithm of a business and how money fuels its growth is vital for long-term success. Identifying weak spots and seeking mentors who have achieved similar goals can help entrepreneurs overcome challenges and achieve success. Successful business partnerships require commitment, complementary skills, and a shared vision for growth. Quotes: "If you could build a business where your net worth is $25 million, you wouldn't have to work anymore. But if you got to $50 million, you'd have a pretty good life." - Brandon Dawson "Your strategy follows your mindset. What you think is what you say, what you say is what you do,

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Big Show. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. As always, we bring you the Chris Voss Show.

From three to four shows a weekday, 15 to 20 shows per week, we're always bringing you the most amazing content. For 15 years, we've been bringing you the CEOs, the White House advisors, the billionaires, the presidents, the governors, the U.S. congressmen, Pulitzer Prize winners, I think I mentioned that before, all the brilliant people, and you join the elite crowd of the Chris Voss Show folks who listen to the Chris Voss Show and get what we call the Chris Voss Show glow. We have these amazing authors that come on the show and bring you that condensed, juicy, bit version of the brilliant minds that they spent lifetimes putting into

their books and everything else. We have an amazing gentleman today. We're going to be talking with Brandon Dawson on his new book called Nine-Figure Mindset, How to Go from Zero to Over $100 Million in Net Worth. It just came out September 19th, 2023. In the meantime, please refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, Fortes, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortes, Chris Voss, the big 130,000 LinkedIn group, the LinkedIn newsletter, Facebook, chrisfossfacebook.com, and of course, all the other things. He is an amazing gentleman who's achieved quite a life of amazing things. Brandon Dawson is a scaling and turnaround expert, business leadership mentor, and serial entrepreneur whose mission is to help business owners,

their families, and their teams achieve their personal, professional, and financial goals through the growth of their business. Brandon founded his first business at the age of 26 and was one of the youngest people to ring the bell on the American Stock Exchange. With zero debt and no outside capital, he founded and self-funded Onigy Group, ultimately growing annual revenue to over $35 million through organic growth. He exited the company at a 77 times EBITDA for $ fifty one million dollars he's achieved numerous awards in business and his companies have been recognized on the inc 500 and inc's fastest five i'm sorry fastest five i got too many f's in my mouth five thousand fastest growing companies listed five times it's like a thing they're going on. What do they call those

things? There's lots of Fs. Today, Brandon coaches Cardone's venture clients on how to use his proven leadership and business strategies as a foundation for strategic growth so they can follow in his footsteps and create their own legacies and maybe learn how to say long sentences that use the word F a lot. Welcome to the show, Brandon. How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you for having me on your show. Thank you for coming. We certainly appreciate it, sir.

Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? CardoneVentures.com. You can find me on GrantCardone.com. You can find me on BDawson.com. You can find my book on NineFigureMindset.com. I am all over the dot coms. You got the dot coms down there.

So give us a 30,000 overview, please, of nine figure mindset. Yeah, it really breaks down my journey of the last 20 years. And my first business in my 20s, you know, I was voted least likely to succeed coming out of high school. I was a 2.4 GPA, didn't go to college. And by 29, I was ringing the opening bell of the American Stock Exchange with a Warburg Pincus private equity-backed roll-up strategy, buying hundreds of businesses and doing all that before I was 29 years old. The problem was I had to restart when I was 32 years old, 33, because they sold the business out from underneath me. And I was a little bitter and a little pissed.

And I had some great mentors who really reshaped my thinking, gave me instruction on how to get my doing to follow my desires. And I just literally documented the whole journey of going from zero to $100 million net worth by building something that we are expanding on today, teaching other people how to do exactly what I did. There you go. So give us a origin story, hero's journey of, uh, what, how did you grow up? What, what were some of your influences and how did you first get that entrepreneurial bug? Yeah, great, great story. I cover this in my book, but I was in Corvallis, Oregon going to

high school and I got grounded my junior year because I was after I was working at the night deposit as a dishwasher and I was sneaking over to my girlfriend's and getting home late. So my dad grounded me and they were going out of town and we had a walnut orchard and every year we needed to pick $5,000 worth of walnuts for my brothers and I to go to this little private Christian school. And when they were going out of town and grounded me and said, I had to pick up the walnuts. I went to school the next day and it was my first entrepreneur experience. I saw a note on the lockers from the seniors saying they're doing a senior fund drive, trying to raise a thousand dollars. And I thought to myself, if I could get them to come over and pick up the walnuts, give them the thousand bucks, I could go spend time with my girlfriend's girlfriend. Sorry. Before my parents get back into town.

Yeah. I was, I was 17. It's amazing what men do for. Anyhow, they, I thought a couple might come out, but everyone came out. They brought their parents, their family. We picked the walnut orchard clean. I didn't have to do any of the things I hated doing. I ended up selling all the walnuts to their family members for more money. I made up a price because I didn't even know how to calculate.

And, uh, and that was like forever on. I'm like, why would I ever do anything by myself when I can get other people to do it for me? And so that's my, been my mindset. Once you get that bug, that entrepreneurial bug, it's kind of like a virus or a disease. I don't know. Uh, a a disease. I don't know. A good disease? I don't know. It depends, I guess, on how it turns out.

Once you get that bug, it's hard to get rid of it and it's hard to get off of it. So let's talk a little bit about your personal journey through success. Let's delve into a little bit more. You know, you start your companies. What, what, what got you into the first big company that really started making money and being successful for you? Well, the first business I started, so I was 26 years old between the ages. I moved from Oregon when I graduated high school to Atlanta and I became an outside sales rep for a device manufacturer. And I outsold thesold the sales reps around the country

because I just outworked them. And then I got an opportunity to move to Minneapolis and it was 1989 and I would have been like 21 years old. And my boss got fired. The director of US sales got fired within a year of me being there. So they came to me and said, hey, run the sales team of 25 people. And while we look for the replacement, and I created a program that did $26 million in revenue that next year. And so they just never replaced my boss. And by the age of 24, 25, they made me director of US sales. And so at 26, I was sitting at the conference room table with a bunch of 50, 60 year old guys. And I had a commission plan that was going to pay me more than any of them were earning. And the owner said, I can't pay that to you because you're

making more than any of my other executives. And that was my key indicator. It's time for me to move on and go do something different. That was the launch of my first company sonus did you kind of feel like i need to control my uh my future or my yeah it's i need to control my income when i was told i wasn't going to get the check i was supposed to get i decided i wouldn't have somebody else control my money anymore yeah no kidding man i mean that that's that's kind of i think uh what a lot of entrepreneurs lead. And thanks, Leanne, for calling in. Who would have thought walnuts would have started it all? There's a good example. Exactly.

Walnuts and a girl. Maybe you should have put a big walnut on the cover of the book. I don't know. But you've done so much since then. So there you go. So in your book, you talk about mindset shifts for financial success. And you talk about the nine-figure mindset. Can you explain what this mindset entails and why it's crucial for financial success. You talk about the nine-figure mindset. Can you explain

what this mindset entails and why it's crucial for financial success? Yeah, because you tend to say, this is why my partner Grant Cardone, Mr. 10X, this is what's been so amazing about my partnership and relationship with him is I experienced in a microcosm kind of what he talks about with the 10X rule. And I had some great mentors and they said, hey, if you could build a business where your net worth is $25 million, you wouldn't have to work anymore. But if you got to $50 million, you'd have a pretty good life. You could get a couple extra houses at $75 million. You could get a jet at $125 million.

And this was all in the late 90s, the people that were coaching me and mentoring me. So I'd never forget when one of my mentors said, look, Warren Buffett at 27 years old was worth $10 million. At 47 years old, he was worth $75 million. And at 53 years old, he was worth $350 million. And his point to me was, you're not going to become a multimillionaire overnight. It took Warren Buffett 20 years to get from 10 million to 75 million. And so I set those as my targets when I was 25, 26. And at 27, I was worth 10 million. And I had a public company and I was on the American Stock Exchange by 28, 29 years old. And so I thought I arrived. The problem is my private equity group sold the company out from underneath me at 32 and I went back to zero. So I always remembered the next target was 75 million at 47 years old. And so I set that target and I said, I'm going to build a business. I'm not going to let anybody else control me. I'm going to do it

without using other people's money. I'm going to re-engineer what ended up being a decentralized ownership structure, first of its kind. And today, now you have blockchain and decentralized stuff. And I went and created my own business model based on the experiences I had and the research I did. And I launched that business in 2005, and I was able to build it without raising any capital, without taking on any debt. And I built it with super high value in mind because I was targeting $75 million in net worth. So I always reverse engineered the business to do that. And what that taught me is a lot of people just build and build and build, and they don't know what their company's worth. And then they sell. I have friends that built a hundred million companies and sold them for $30 million.

Yeah. So I knew what I needed to build. I knew what I needed to control for market share. And I did that. And then I sold my business in 2016 for 77 times EBITDA, $151 million. And I made my customers, my shareholders, and I made my employees, my shareholders, shared 35% of the economics with my employees, my shareholders shared 35% of the economics with my employees and my customers. And it really was working so well when the world was melting down in 2008 to 2010. I was on the Inc. 500 every year. I was fastest growing company,

Inc. Higher Power Award. I was Entrepreneur of the Year twice nominated by Ernst & Young. And so my world was entirely different than the rest of the world. So I hired an engineering firm to engineer small businesses and to really understand, you know, 97% of all businesses under 100 million fail every 10 years. Wow. So I wanted to understand that marketplace, which also happens to be a $14 trillion market. And I was like, if I could fix and solve a way for these businesses to grow and scale like I'm doing, I could actually create a

business that that's all I do is help them. And so that was my journey starting in 2009. And when I sold in 2016, I needed to integrate what I built for the company that bought me. And we grew them from 1 billion to four and a half billion in 36 months by deploying these concepts into eight countries wow now and then my confidence was pretty high about about what i was going to do the rest of my life there you go so you know a lot of entrepreneurs we start our companies and we're just like hey i'm just going to build it and hopefully it makes money and then hopefully it makes enough money for me to live and stuff do you think that that mindset that you mentioned of reverse engineering of saying i want to build it and hopefully it makes money and then hopefully it makes enough money for me to live and stuff. Do you think that that mindset that you mentioned of reverse engineering

of saying, I want to build a $75 million company and then reverse engineering it backwards so that you knew what your end goal was? In fact, it was kind of more than a goal. You were basically breaking it down into all the pieces. Do you think that mindset was really the key that more entrepreneurs need to engage in? I know it was because I built a $35 million company. I sold for $150 million. For all practical purposes, that $35 million company should have sold for $20 million. Yeah, yeah.

Because I knew who I was going to sell to. I had eight targeted buyers that I had put together 10 years before I sold. I put the profile of the buyer together, and I knew what they wanted if they bought me. So I built the business that would deliver that to them. And then when it came time to sell, I went out and I presented to the eight current targets in 2015, and I had eight bidders from eight presentations. So if I hadn't reverse engineered it and built into intentionality, there's no way it would have happened accidentally that way. There you go. So what role did basically setting these unrealistic goals, because some people say

they're so unrealistic, you know, I shouldn't start a business expecting $10 trillion right away, you know, let's see what happens. What is the advantage of setting these unrealistic goals help spark true innovation? Yeah, great question. So first of all, I think unrealistic isn't lunatic. So I'm going to start a business and be worth trillions of dollars and let's see what happens. That's lunatics. Unrealistic is I'm going to build something that has so much value. People are going to pay a premium for it. It's going to impact the lives of the people it's built for in order to make their life personally, professionally, financially better. And I'm going to be highly rewarded

because everyone's going to realize it's a high business valued system and it's going to involve leadership. It's going to involve operational effectiveness. It's going to evolve, involve leadership. It's going to involve operational effectiveness. It's going to involve high financial returns. It's like setting your targets because it's not a goal. If it's a target, it's a target. So, so I didn't set a goal. I set a target and I always work towards target where people set goals, but they don't put in place the targets to get to the goal. There you go. So, you know,

a lot we're talking about, you know, the setting, these grand expectations or grand plans. What are some common myths, perceptions about wealth building companies in the nature that you did? What are some common misconceptions people have about building significant wealth or that your book addresses?

Yeah. So really the strategy and the mindset behind, because your strategy follows your mindset. So what you think is what you say, what you say is what you do and what you do is what you're known for. So the most important thing is that when my business was sold out from underneath me and I became a victim and I was talking about everything that was wrong, I was reinforcing and programming what's wrong. When I learned how to go out 10 years and set intention statements and visualize what I wanted to accomplish or what I was going to accomplish in 10 years. So I came back to my present moment when I was under pressure, I made decisions that moved me to that 10 year goal versus decisions that kept me where I was at or took me backwards. So the mindset of the business owner, because your actions follow your thoughts. What I didn't realize and what I didn't do the

first time around is I didn't control how I was thinking because I was so busy, always reacting, even though I was smart in the moment and I was busting through, ultimately it caught up to me because I didn't move intentionally towards a stated objective. I resolved fires when they came up and broke through glass ceilings and felt like Superman until it all went away because I just wasn't doing the bigger picture correctly. There you go. There you go. So how can entrepreneurs, you talk about this, I believe, in the book, how can entrepreneurs own their weak spots? And how have you done this over the years?

Yeah. So you have to identify, and in the book it walks you through how to identify your weak spots. The most important thing is finding mentors, people who have actually accomplished what you said was your stated objective. So you're not going to figure it out generally by yourself through trial and error. And if you are, it's a slow way. So for example, this next business I launched in 2019 in collaboration with Grant Cardone, I knew exactly what I wanted to build. I told Grant the first time I sat down with him, Grant, I'm going to build a business in 60 months that's going to be doing over $125 million in revenue. It's going to be valued at over a billion dollars. And then when I do that, the next 60 months, we're going to build a billion-dollar company.

And this is exactly how we're going to do it. And this is how we're going to execute. Here's the people we're going to have. Here's what the profitability is going to look like. And he looked at it and he goes, man, I've heard a lot of crazy stories. But see, I wasn't just talking about it. I actually had it laid out in a pro forma and I showed him exactly how many employees we'd have, what we'd be doing across the 10 elements, because I knew exactly what I wanted to accomplish. And that was exactly four years ago.

There you go. Yeah. That's a lot of people that are entrepreneurs. We have this, I think Tony Robbins calls them scotomas, or other people call them scotomas, where we have these blind spots. Where, as you mentioned, a weak spot, where we can't see things. Sometimes we spend so much time inside the boxes, as it were, of our businesses, we have a hard time seeing outside the box. Or we have a hard time seeing new trends or new innovations that are coming from maybe competitors or the marketplace that could put us out of business overnight. And that's usually where a lot of, you have that business model that's steaming along. You're like, this works great. And then one day you wake up and you're like, wait, the world changed. I didn't get the memo. And yeah, having mentors and people that can come in, advisors that can come in, board members, et cetera, that can say, hey, here's what you're missing and be those eyes and ears for you, I think is real important.

100%. And the thing is, is if you're not, if you don't have that mental image of what you want to accomplish in 10 years, you're just reacting to the moment. You're not, you're not learning to ask the right questions because you got two sides of the spectrum, intellectual ignorance and intellectual arrogance. Ignorance is just not knowing what you don't know. And so you learn the hard way. Or on the right side, it's intellectual awareness and intellectual curiosity, which is a skill set you really must develop if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, because it's not what you know that gets you in trouble. It's the 96%

that you don't even know you should know it until you make a decision that you find out was the wrong one. And so if you know where you want to go, you can ask questions of the people who have been there and they can fill those little gaps in about how they got there. But if you're talking to the wrong people or you're polling, P-O-L-L-I-N-G, what should I do? What do you think I ought to do? And you're asking your lawyers and your accountants who've never done it. if you're talking to the wrong people or you're pulling P-O-L-L-I-N-G, what should I do? What do you think I ought to do? And you're asking your lawyers and your accountants who've never done it. And you're asking your employees who've never done it and who already feel overwhelmed. And you're asking your spouse who feels like you're never home enough already. It's like all the data and information isn't pulling you to target. It's literally pulling you off target.

So I always say to people, look, whatever you want to accomplish, find the living, breathing example, ingratiate yourself to them, find out how they did it and use the resources that they will point you to so that you can move into that clear picture you have for yourself and make sure you bring everybody along with you because nothing great has ever been built without a team working with you to do it. There you go. It's the difference between hunting around for the answer in the dark, as opposed to finding somebody who's got a candlelight. 100%. And I've proven this with Grant because our business in four years from startup,

not using any capital to start it, not taking on any debt. We're in our fourth year this year. This year we'll do $135 million in revenue. We'll We're in our fourth year this year. This year, we'll do 135 million in revenue. We'll make $45 million of EBITDA. Last year, we did 83 with 31 million of EBITDA. I publish our financial results and show my clients when they come through our system so they can see from day one revenue all the way up to what we did last month. We've launched 10X Health, which is a new format business. When we bought that business from Gary Brekka, he was doing a few million dollars a year, two years ago. We'll do 60, 70 million this year and probably 125 to 150 million next year. So we have 2.4 billion of businesses of 10X business owners in our system that were actively managing their business. And we have businesses

going from two or 3 million to 30, 40, 50 million within two years. So congratulations, man, it's, we've proven it works. Now you just have to have an open mind to say you want to do it.

And you got to be willing to accept the responsibilities and the changes necessary to attain that kind of success. There you go. I always tell my nephew, uh, cause he's young and, I don't want him to lock into, um, his thinking and i and try to

grow with expansive thinking and thinking you know beyond the uh basically i give him three principles there's the things you know there's the things you know you don't know and the most important things to try and figure out are the things you don't know you don't know because those are the ones that usually come at you and then those are the ones you usually need to know to build yourself and get to that next level. And that's literally 96%. The things you know you know is 2%. The things you know you don't know is 2%. And then you got to eat the other 90% as you go along.

Yeah. The whole world is out there. And sometimes, I mean, that's where stuff comes out of you the blue to teach us some lessons in life you can believe on why that happens but you know life is a survival game it's uh there's darts and arrows going everywhere and you're going to catch them and uh there you go uh so what advice would you give to entrepreneurs who are just starting out and aspire to achieve a nine figure network. Yeah. So,

so one thing early on I developed phenomenal sales skills and I would say to any entrepreneur, you need to develop remarkable sales skills because you're always going to be selling either why someone should join your team, why somebody should spend money with you, why somebody might invest money with you, why somebody might sell their business to you. Like if you don't master your ability to communicate and persuade people to make a good decision, you're always going to struggle. And remember, 83% of all businesses were founded, if they're under 100 million, they were founded by technicians who are good at something. So they started their business,

but they're not intentionally developing their sales skills. So I say, number one is your ability to communicate and persuade. Number two is learning the financial algorithm to successfully build a business because the chief complaint for why businesses, 97% go out of business, is no demand for product or service, can't hire any good people, and don't have the financial resources. So if those are the three chief complaints, make sure whatever you're doing has been proven in the marketplace. There's no point in reinventing something. Secondly, understand that your communication skills will dictate your ability to lead and guide other people, and you can't build anything big without other people. And then the third thing is simply understanding how money works

and how it's supposed to fuel the business so that you don't make all the mistakes that people make that put them out of business when they actually have a, they've already proven there's demand for product or service. They've already got a team, but then they make the financial mistakes. So solve those three problems and you're going to have a high probability of success. Boom. There's a formula for you. That's awesome. Uh, so you're, you've, you were your collaboration with Grant Cardone.

Everybody's familiar with, uh, Grant Cardone and yourself and in the 10 X program. Uh, uh, well, how did you meet Grant Cardone? How did you get involved with, uh, you know, build the 10 X brand? Great question. So after I sold my business to a billion dollar company, we took them to four and a half billion in 36 months and I was done for that project. So the next iteration was taking all the research for 10 years, all the business systems and processes and technologies that I created. And it was to find a way to go to the

marketplace to do what I'm doing today. And my wife, which is why you want to be surrounded by great people, suggested I look at some of the social media influencers that had legitimate businesses associated with their influence. So we made a list. We went through the whole list. And when we came across Grant Cardone, to be honest, I didn't like Grant at first.

She showed me a video. He was running around with a money gun and a hat sideways doing his hey, hey, hey thing. And I was like, man, this can't be legit. But she stayed on me, got me to read his book. Then I read his next book and his next book. And then we made the decision to go to GrowthCon in 2019 to see what this was about. And no one knew us.

We didn't know them. And we went for five specific things we were looking for. One, does Grant and elena really work in the business together because my wife and i wanted to do something together too the audience that he has is the kind of audience that we can help with everything that i had been researching and studying because we didn't know the third do we have products and services that would complement his products and services or conflict against the The fourth was, is he a legit guy? Or is he just like popping in and doing the entry and then everybody else behind him is doing their thing?

So is he actively involved in the business? And then the fifth, most important is I had already accomplished. Remember my target was 10 million at 27, 75 million at 47, and 350, 350 million by 53. Well, that's 51 and a half years old. And so I had no visibility in how to create an extra $300 million or $275 million in net worth in two years. So the question I had is, is he really successful enough that if I could complement what he was doing by helping me, could we create a $350 million net worth for me? And I'm proud to say that he hit all five of those boxes in the first half of the first day of GrowthCon.

And it really helps to have friends because John Maxwell was a featured speaker there. Oh, yeah. And John and I are very close, and I helped him grow his business in 2012 and 13. So he pulled Grant aside and pointed at us and he said, Hey, if you get a chance to meet those two people, anything that guy tells you is the truth. So when I met Grant, he's like, you came with some high regard from John Maxwell. And that's, it was the start of our relationship. And I told him I was there to see if we'd make good partners or not.

And, and that's how we became partners. That's awesome. John Maxwell wrote some great, uh, but a some great, a lot of great books on leadership. I mean, just an endless amount of books that I've consumed. Number one authority. Yep. And then he did your forward. And I think you're part of his publishing branch.

That's correct. And he's a dear friend, phenomenal mentor. He was actually at my book release to talk about what he's watched me build in three separate companies and what I did to help him in his company to validate that what I wrote in this book is true. There you go. Partnering up with Grant Cardone, what are some advice you can give to entrepreneurs who are looking to form successful business partnerships? Because it's hard. It's hard working with partners sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't work out too well. Yeah, well, in my book, I even put my intention statements in it.

And one of my intention statements is to be the best partner anybody could ever have. So partnerships work when both partners are committed to each other and not self-committed. So the most important thing in a partnership, I do believe collaboration is the highest form of currency. Most people want to go it alone and they want to keep everything themselves. And then when they do partner, it's usually because they want somebody to pick up the slack and do the things they don't want to do. But then they need to be a good partner on their side of the equation and do exactly the same for that partner. So what allows partnerships? And I work in turnarounds.

This is my expertise. And a lot of them have partnership breakups or spousal breakups. It's important to remember out of the 31 and a half million businesses under 100 million, it's important to remember that 93% of those businesses under 100 million, 93% of 31 million businesses have family involved. So when the partnership, if it's a family partnership, it really goes bad if they break up, right? Yeah. So picking a good partner is all centered around what are your skills, what are your contributions,

what are your attributes, what are your competencies, and what are you going to deliver to the business? And it needs to complement, not conflict with a partner. And then it adds value and compounds and accelerates growth. But most people form partnerships because of what they don't want to do, hoping the other partner is going to do that, and then neither partner do it. Because like attracts like.

I think marriages start that way sometimes. I don't know. I could be wrong. But, yeah, i think people do uh you know if people and people don't do what you call talked about early in the show reverse engineer their building uh their business you know do i want to be doing business with this person 10 20 years from now uh what what might change what what goals might change um i think I think some people need to also take an attitude that I seem to counsel a lot of people on. It's like, Hey,

I want to, you know, I want to do business with my friends or wife or husband, whatever. And I'm like, do you really need to make them, uh, you know, give them stock and make them a part of the company? Can you just hire them as an employees? Like you don't need to give up 50% of your company necessarily maybe you should just make them an employee with a maybe a partnership stock option you know something where they can eventually get ownership but at least proving that they can you know they're gonna they're actually gonna hold up their end of the thing in a performance sort of way what great advice and in all my deals, I structure earn in equity vesting structures. So no one would ever get it unless they hit the target that they agreed before we hired them that they were responsible for and they saw through the success of that target being hit. And then they would vest equity in the business. Most equity structures are structured incorrectly because most lawyers don't know how to build businesses and they don't know exactly how to protect their clients. So they

just do general partnership agreements. Too many entrepreneurs are so frustrated and fearful. They give equity to people hoping that incents them and it doesn't. And it usually creates a catastrophic event with the equity structure of the business down the road. If they pull through and make it work, then they're dragging a partner along all the way who's getting paid and getting some of the upside for doing nothing. So it's just really, but this is all the practice of practicing, right? And I think that the number one thing you said when you said there's the knowing what you don't know. And that's the majority of every decision a business owner needs to make because building a business by nature of not doing it before, you're doing it through trial

and error. And so it really is, did this work or not work? And then the follow-up question is, it probably could have worked, but I didn't execute it right. And so the stats show this. Part of the engineering I did was break points. Where do businesses break and fail? 3% of the 97 or the a hundred percent succeeded. What did they do differently at what points in time than the 97%? What were those behavioral or those engagements or those activities? And we documented that. So what we know is there's 10 elements to growing and scaling a business to 125 million from startup. Those 10 elements have principle, 76 principles underneath them.

And under the 76 principles, there's 250 individual unique things that need to be in place from startup to 125 million. That if you bypass those, there are natural places where your business will break because the infrastructure, the structure is not strong enough. There you go. Infrastructure is everything. So what are some of the future plans or aspirations do you have in your collaboration with Grant Cardone and using the book to take it to the next level? Yeah, great question. So we are building this. Cardone Ventures is an education operating company that has a venture component to it. So right now we've gone from startup

to over $2.3 billion in businesses. We're either educating, we're engineering, we're managing, or we're partnering with. And now we're launching Cardone Equity Group, which is our private equity group to complement Cardone Capital. So Grant raises crowdfunding to buy real estate. We're going to be raising capital to co-acquire businesses with those businesses we've engineered with business owners who have demonstrated their ability to operate. And we're starting to target

very specific verticals. The first one we rolled out was 10x Health Format. And we're starting to target very specific verticals. The first one we rolled out was 10x health format. Now we're rolling out 10x HVAC, 10x pools and spa, 10x farms and ranches, 10x roofing, 10x cybersecurity, 10x dental. We've got 10 different specific formats by vertical rolling out right now. And our objective is to build a $10 billion portfolio where Grant and I are in partnership or our investors are in partnership with us with all those entrepreneurs. And then Grant's going to build Cardone Capital to $10 billion. And that's a $20 billion venture equity group that has real estate assets, business assets, and an education company. And then as the basis of that, we're going to paper some of that and bring outside investors into it,

and we'll take it to 50 billion. Wow. You guys have a vision for this. That's just amazing and astounding. Very big. Well, my partner is the king of big. That's the whole thesis of the 10X rule. And since partnering with them, I've thought a lot bigger, but then people always challenge and say, yeah, but it's pie in the sky. But I just want to remind them that when I met Grant four years ago, he had raised 250 million in crowdfunding dollars and bought 900 million in real estate. And that was the most crowdfunding dollars ever raised by anybody on the planet. Fast forward four and a half years, we now have 5.5 billion in real estate and over 1.3 billion raised in crowdfunding. Wow. Grant's business was 50 million in revenue and the training business this year will be 150 million. My business was non-existent four and a

half years ago. This year I'll do 135 million. And I believe with all our companies and the operating companies together, we're approaching almost $700 million of revenue this year. And I think that will 10X in the next 60 months. Wow. Just prove positive with the 10X mindset. Let me ask you, this is one of my final questions. On a synergy of mindsets, how does your nine-figure mindset complement or differ from Grant Cardone's 10X philosophy? Probably a lot of 10X fans out there in the marketplace are going, are these two different or are they the same? Yeah, well, nine figure can go up to 999 million point 99 cents.

So, so look, the, the, the, this book was written because John Maxwell said, if you don't get this book out, cause I, the manuscript for this book, he looked at it in 2012 because I started in 2010. But I never really felt like I had arrived enough to be an example that I was entitled to write a book. So this book was written because John said, if you don't write this book, then your next book, which will be the 10-figure mindset, won't make sense. Because I'm already on my way of going to a billion dollars in net worth just in the last four years. And I hit my 350 target this last year working with Grant. So the point here is I needed to put out nine figure mindset, how to go from zero to a hundred million. Now Grant would tell you if you're making a million dollars, you should 10X

that thinking, which takes you to 10 million. And then when you make 10 million, you got to 10X it again, which takes you to a hundred million. All this book does is tells you how I went from no net worth to 10 million in net worth to a hundred million in net worth. So the next book can explain the principles of the 10X rule and how I went from a hundred million in net worth in a third of the time to a billion dollars in net worth, because that is the premise of the 10X rule and how I went from a hundred million in net worth in a third of the time to a billion dollars in net worth, because that is the premise of the 10X rule. And then the next is the 10 billion. And that is what Grant's saying. And what I want to do is document my live transformation through those cycles. So people can see to get to a hundred million, you first got to get to a million, then you get to 10 million, then you get to a hundred million,

then you go to a billion. There you go. And then your next book will have to be what, uh, 10 or $12 million mindset, right? It'll be a billion dollar mindset. Yeah. It'll be $10 billion mindset. Yeah. There you go. Then trillion dollars, you know, you just be, uh, you know, it's laughable. It is laughable. But look, the fact is that I sit there with people that are worth $100 billion or $150 billion. I broke bread and had wine with some of those people.

So the truth is, Jeff Bezos is a perfect example. What if he hit a billion-dollar mindset and stopped? You know, he's several hundred billion mindset. Bill Gates. I mean, there's people that have done it and I always have this attitude. If one did it, other people can do it. But for certainty, if multiple people did it, then anybody can do it.

That's true. And there are multiple people who have done it. There you go. So give us your final pitch out, Brandon, on people to order up the book, get involved with your services, website, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Look, if you want a 10X your personal, professional, financial life, if you want a roadmap, a blueprint on how somebody has done it, because that was a void, I had to go figure out different mentors at different points in time.

So this book is really me engineering how a 2.4 GPA got to a net worth of a hundred million. But what's interesting is that, that that's where it left off in this book, 2019, 20, where I started with grant. But in the last four years, I've increased my net worth to over 350 million. And so the next book will be coming out and explaining that. And, and I think I'm just trying to document in real time exactly how I identified those gaps in my life, found mentors to fill those gaps in my life, set targets, took action, and broke through as a person who has voted least likely to succeed, didn't go to college, had a low GPA, and sucked at most subjects in school. So if I can do that from a little town in Corvallis, Oregon, I promise you, anybody that wants to do it can do it.

There you go. Give us your dot coms, Brandon, so people can. Yes. So look, this is really simple. If you want the book, there's some free content. It's nine figure mindset.com. And then I have a thousand dollars of free content associated with it or go to Amazon and just order it.

Or go to bdawson.com. That's just my personal site that you can find everything. Or go to cardonventures.com. Or go to at Brandon M. Dawson on Instagram. You can find me all those different places. Or go to grantcardone.com if you can't remember any of those. There you go. People love the show, man.

They've loved having you on the show. Thank very much brandon for coming on we really appreciate it appreciate you inviting me on your show i really respect what you do for entrepreneurs and the message you spread to to people who are looking to grow and scale thank you and you as well uh thanks my audience for tuning in order of the book wherever fine books are sold remember say those alleyway bookstores they can be be dangerous. Nine-figure mindset. How to go from zero to over 100 million in net worth. Available September 19, 2023 by Brandon Dawson. Thanks for tuning in.

Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter, the 138,000 LinkedIn group over there, youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, chrisfoss1, the TikTokity,,000 LinkedIn group over there YouTube.com for Chess Chris Voss

Chris Voss1, the TikTokity And ChrisVossFacebook.com Be good to each other, stay safe And we'll see you guys next time