The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Young Entrepreneur John Magnor Shares B2B, SAAS and AI-Driven Business Success Strategies

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Young Entrepreneur John Magnor Shares B2B, SAAS and AI-Driven Business Success Strategies Youtube.com/@johnpmag About the Guest(s): John Magnor is a successful 24-year-old entrepreneur, primarily focused on building and scaling B2B companies, including software and service providers. With a career that began at 16, he has devoted himself over the past years to expand businesses through developing robust sales teams and streamlining marketing systems. John is the founder of Magner Equity Partners, aiming to create a portfolio of businesses scalable enough to be sold to private equity. His entrepreneurial journey is motivated by a passion for the business game and the art of marketing and sales. Episode Summary: In this riveting episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss engages with John Magnor, a young yet remarkably proficient entrepreneur who has made significant impacts in the B2B industry. Broadcasting from Buenos Aires, John shares his journey from a 16-year-old eager to break norms to becoming a key player in software and service-associated entrepreneurship. This episode shines a light on John’s unique approach to scaling B2B companies, underlining the importance of sales and marketing in business growth. John Magnor narrates his story, highlighting foundational motivations stemming from personal needs and family influence. The discussion flows into the importance of learning sales and marketing, with Chris echoing the sentiment, noting their pivotal role in any business venture. The conversation naturally gravitates towards the future trajectory of businesses, exploring the intricacies of AI technology in revolutionizing traditional market landscapes. With an impressive track record and insightful perspectives, John discusses his investment strategies and shares an exclusive look into his upcoming project, Nova, an AI-driven sales trainer and role player. Key Takeaways: John Magnor started his entrepreneurial journey at a young age, driven by the desire to deviate from the norm and make a mark in the B2B scene by leveraging his skills in sales and marketing. Magnor Equity Partners focuses on helping businesses scale by refining their sales processes and marketing systems, aiming to add them to John’s expanding portfolio. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a crucial element in modern business strategies, offering unparalleled opportunities for growth and efficiency. The interplay between AI, sales, and marketing can drastically improve training and operational efficiency, as evidenced by the introduction of Nova, an innovative AI sales training platform. Chris Voss and John stress the importance of a solid business foundation, emphasizing the benefits of starting young and evolving with market changes. Notable Quotes: “Once you learn sales, you can work anywhere. Sales is an invaluable skill.” – John Magnor “AI is here to stay; companies not utilizing it are left in the dust.” – John Magnor “Business is the best sport…you can do this until you kick the grave.” – John Magnor “Build a foundation in your youth. It creates an amazing arc for the rest of your life.” – Chris Voss “Knowing sales and marketing is crucial. They are the building blocks of successful business ventures.” – John Magnor

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Because you're about to go on a monster education roll. roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey, folks, Voss here from The Chris Voss show. Don't know. Ladies, gentlemen, the earliest things that makes official. Welcome to 60 years of the Chris Voss show, 27 and our episodes, and we just keep making 48 new shows a month for you guys to listen to, to enjoy it, to get smarter, to use your

brains. The part? Damn it, we don't have stuff on the show that wrecks your brain, except I don't know listen to my laying jokes that might be, that might be damaged to some people's like you. But go to goodreys.com, Fortresschusch, Christchristch, Christvost, Facebook.com, Forteschchrisvoss, and YouTube.com, Fortess Chris Voss. All the places over the internet. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect

the opinions of the host or the Chris Voss show. Some guests of the show may by advertising on the podcast, but it's not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today, an amazing young man on the show, we're going to be talking about his journey, and he's done quite well from a very young age in rock and roll. rolling and kicking ass and taking names and all that good stuff. So we're going to get into his entrepreneurial journey, find out what that's about, and all that good stuff.

John Magner joins us on the show with us today. He is 20, huh? I'm sorry what? No, I was just saying, yes, sir. Thanks for the introvert. He is on the show, as you can tell. He is a 24-year-old entrepreneur, mainly focusing on building and scaling B2B companies, whether a software or a service provider.

He's been in the game for about eight years. He started when he was 16. For the last couple of years, he's been devoted to scaling business to business companies. His goal is to build out a portfolio of these companies, specifically software companies to scale. He mainly focuses on growing these companies through building sales teams, streamlining these processes, as well as building marketing systems. Welcome to the show, John. How are you? Appreciate it. Thank you. I'm out here in Buenos Aires, so I've been traveling for the past six months now, so it's been good. I haven't been to the states in a while, so it's pretty crazy.

When is Ares? That sounds like, oh, that sounds as sufferable, just having to deal with probably, I don't know, beautiful weather and beautiful senior paintings. Weather, beautiful women's not too bad. Oh, yeah, you're suffering. I hope you come home soon because you can't have that much enjoyment. So, John, give us any dot coms, any social media websites, wherever you want people to find out more about you on the interwebs. Yeah, definitely. So on Instagram and YouTube, I am, it's at John P. Mag. J-O-H-N-P-Mag, mainly push a lot of content out on YouTube just because I like the long-form.

I try to stay off the short form as much as possible, you know, just with the brain rot stuff, but kind of got to do it. Yeah, it's that short-form stuff. I hate that because I like long-form. I like you say, that short form, you know, we have so many great conversations on the Chris Foss show. And a lot of times you can really take them out of context. store or what the fuck we can be anything about yeah yeah give us a 30,000 overview of uh your company and what you guys do give us the title of the company I'm not sure that I quoted that when I was

reading the bio yeah so I have a holding company so it's magner equity partners I was magner's my last name so essentially what I'm doing is my whole focus is I like coming in with companies that they have a great product and maybe they're just looking to scale whether that's through just building out better marketing systems or really just building on a sales team. There's a lot of good software companies out there where the founder is very, very technical, but he doesn't know how to really grow it, how to get business, how to close those deals. So essentially what I do is I partner up with companies, whether that's consulting, you know, do work up front, work with them one-on-one.

And then my main goal on the back end is to bring them into my portfolio to where I have equity, and then grow them into a business that can ultimately sell the private equity. What's the sort of minimum if I'm out there, you know, I'm looking for investors, a B2B company. What's sort of, how do I know that maybe you might be or I might be a fit for you to invest in? Yeah, great question. So the biggest thing is, so I have two parts. Number one is obviously I have to believe in the product.

I work with a lot of software companies to where I was saying, you know, the guy has a really, really great product. So that's number one. Number two, the numbers obviously have to make sense. That's kind of why I ruled out the consulting company, because a lot of people come to me and they may not be ready for me to come in and take equity in their company. So I would say minimum for me to take equity in the company,

you'd have to be doing low six figures in revenue months. Oh, wow. You mean, I can't have, I can't be like Twitter. I can just be negative for like 20 years. Well, I mean, if there's a crazy potential and there's a, you know,

crazy founder like that possibly, but full-futable. Crazy unicornish potentialish dealish sort of thing. Is there a max number of amount you are looking to invest in or is there is like a cap or if I'm looking for

$100 million dollars? Yeah, well, that's thing. Right now a lot of the things that we're doing is we're doing sweat equity deals. The biggest thing for me is and I will invest in these companies. But a big thing is off the bat,

especially if I'm building a new relationship with these guys, it's like, hey, I'm going to come in with my entire team. So a big thing is for me is recruiting in human capital. Coming in with, you know, sales reps,

a whole new sales infrastructure and then building out the marketing. Once I see that, hey, this is very, very profitable and this can scale. That's when we have a conversation about, you know, me,

ultimately investing and go home. To get a chance to get in, look around, and see what things do. And maybe you can consult with them and help them get up to that level then. Exactly. Yeah. Really smart there because, you know, then you're helping develop your own stuff.

So talk to us about this. I believe you started the company when you were 19. Tell us about your entrepreneurial journey. What got you into this business? What was the influences that got you into this business? Oh, 16, I believe, actually. Yeah, so I haven't, you know, Magner Equity Partners hasn't been together since I was 16. But I've been doing online sales and marketing just kind of as a contractor,

working with different businesses since I was 16. What got you into that? What motivated you? Because most people at 16 are chasing girls at the prom, you know, and doing, I don't know, racing cars or something or I don't know. What motivated you? What were some of your influences? Was there parental entrepreneurs or anything like that?

Yeah. So my dad's, my dad's an entrepreneur. He's more in the manufacturing space. my biggest thing was, you know, I just didn't want to be normal. I kind of just, you know, it was mainly purely profit, but I think, you know, after a while, you start to learn the game, love the game once you get good at it. So that's the biggest thing. But, you know, I had bills to pay.

You know, I had to, you know, some bills, as much as bills as you have when you're 16. But, you know, I didn't want to be just a normal 16 year old. They kind of, you know, do that lifestyle. You know, I love what you're doing. I started my first company at 18 by accident. There really wasn't like an entrepreneurial influences that I had. Although I guess my dad was entrepreneurial. Yeah, he was.

Yeah. But yeah. And I tell young people, I'm like, lay a foundation for the future of your life now. You know, I remember turning to my business partner when we started our first multimillionaire company at 22. And I said to him, I says, okay, should we do this?

And he's like, I don't know, man. And I'm like, okay, we got two paths we can go on. We can do the normal thing where we go to work for a company. Hopefully we rise through the ranks. Hopefully you get a golden parachute, maybe. And then at 50 or 55, you know, we leave the company with a golden parachute, and then we go start our own companies. Or we can do it now while we're young and we have this sweet-ass energy

and we can, you know, we can work 18 hours a day. And I told them, I says, because I got to tell you, at 50s, 50, even if we make that sort of level, I don't know that I got the energy for this shit. And he's like, oh, let's go for it. And boy, am I right, because I'm 50s now. 18-year-old, 18-hour days we used to keep the energy. We used to live on monster energy. So I think it's great that you're laying a foundation for this now because, you know,

it just creates a great pathway for the rest of your life. Yeah. And once you learn sales, too, sales is, sales and marketing seems like a feature that you really focus on. You know, I told my nephew and other young people, I'm like, learn sales. If you know sales, you can go to work anywhere, especially if you're good. Funger with that. If you need, maybe, you know, maybe go to McDonald's. But no, you didn't get good.

I got good. I sucked in it. Right. I get a lot of people reaching out to me trying to figure out, like, you know, maybe they just graduated college. if you graduate at high school and they don't want a college thing, they're trying to figure it all out. It's like there's so much information out there. You know,

maybe they could do crypto. Maybe there's a bunch of different is this models, but it's like, hey, you know, at the end of the day, you know, the most wealthy people in the world are buying and selling businesses.

Business is all about marketing and sales. You've got to learn those fundamentals and that go on and kind of go out and do it on your own. Once you can learn how to sell that widget, it's all widgets, really. Exactly. I mean,

what's the product? widget okay and then like you talk about you know I the way that was one of the great last lessons I got from the last CEO I worked with when I was a kid was learning to make a widget in the smallest cheapest amount of format you know a lot of sweat equity and make that widget and then figure out how can function work and then the profit margins and how you can make that work and then once you can make that ideal then you just scale like you've been talking about and uh that's really It's really as simple as that. Like you say, it's a game after dozens of companies I've owned it.

It's a game. I can do it in my sleep. Now I can start a company. I'll do best. I always say, I mean, it's the best. Business is the best sport. It's like boxers maybe have, you know, two to three years. Football players maybe have, you know, 10 to 15 years.

But business, it's like you can you can do this until you tick the grave. So that's kind of how I love. look at it. That's how I look at it too. I can't ever imagine retiring. I've often, my favorite quote is from Warren Buffett, I'll retire seven years after I die. That's a good water. Yeah, that's a good. You know, I can't imagine. I can't imagine, you know, I mean, hey, you know, if you want to retire and relax and cruise and go on your garden, garden, good for you. That's your thing. But for me, I just love tinkering with business. I love, I love the problem. solving, you know, trying to figure it out.

And that's really key. But yeah, you're right. If you can learn the sales and marketing, what is the, when you're meeting with people in today's environment now, how important is like AI? Are you starting to target more AI? You know, AI's becoming that thing or if it's not ready, actually. Yeah, 100%. I mean, AI is the biggest thing.

If you're not using it, it's like, okay, you're already, you're already behind. You're a lot of. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, a lot of the companies that I work with, it's like their AI SaaS companies. Every company now is using AI. A big thing, too, is with sales and marketing and just growing your company, it's never been this easier. Easy just with AI, all the tools that you have and just, yeah. So that's the biggest thing.

And a big thing, too, is honestly, just getting better at sales has never been easier because we have so many different AI tools that can tell you, you know, what say AI trainers, things like that. So AI definitely plays a pivotal role. And I'm not even like a big tech guy either. I'm sure there's people out there that are utilizing AI way better than I am. But I try to work on that every day. The one downside is, you know, sometimes I use chat, GVT a little too much.

And I feel like I'm almost getting dumber just because I'm relying on it. Yeah, there's kind of that thing, you know, like it used to be like, you know, I knew how to write really well. In fact, when I was in fourth grade in California, they taught us calligraphy. And, you know, with the ink, you dip the ink. And it was kind of that old world sort of writing method of you dip the ink and write your stuff and dip the ink. And then there's a beautiful sort of handwriting to it, a beautiful style, if you will. That's right.

And I thought it was really cool and elegant at the time. But, you know, so I had some pretty good handwriting there for a while. But now that after, you know, you type everything on computer, this stuff. Every day, every day. Yeah. It looks,

people always go, are you a doctor? Because I can't read. You wrote there. It's either, it looks like a psychotic serial killer kidnap note,

or a prescription for something. I don't know what. I'll tell people, you know, if you take that to the pharmacy, they'll give you some. I don't know what, but.

Yeah, exactly. I got to be careful. So are you investing in a lot of AI? Is AI a thing for you or does it have to be kind of like, I don't know, attuned perfectly for what you like? Yeah, as far as the companies that I'm working with. Yeah. Yeah, I'd say big thing is, you know, my main focus, I'd say probably 90% of the sector is like AI SaaS. So there's two things with that. Number one, it's just very, very easy to sell. If my business as a company is scaling these companies,

it's like, I want a product that's going to be a no-brainer for people to buy. That's going to make it very, very easy for us to market and for us to sell. And then number two is, you know, obviously, you know, software companies, especially with tech, is just very, very easy to buy from private equity. Those obviously have the highest multiples. So that's really why I'm focusing on it is both it's easier to sell to other businesses. And then it's also, you know, a hot target for, you know, private equity and, institutions to buy.

The, you know, it's, it's, we have a lot of SaaS companies that come on the show. Um, that's just really big. Uh, I should be doing SASS. In fact, nowadays, there's friends that are, they're building SaaS with AI. They're like, you can code a whole website with AI now. I can't code. I, uh, I evidently dated too many hot women. I was younger.

So, and, uh, my brain doesn't function in a, coding format. Yeah. Interesting. He's you and the nerds. You and you guys need millions of dollars in pocket protectors. But yeah,

the, let's talk about the other company. We mentioned, we talked about in the green room before. There's a company that you want to promote that you're investing in that you, tell us about it. Yeah,

so there's a company called Nova. They're going, they're launching very, very soon. So this is going to be a big thing. Obviously, it is an AI SaaS, but it,

plays a big thing into my personal brand, which is training sales reps. So Nova is essentially an AI role player and an AI sales trainer. So a lot of times, you know, back in the day, when you're training sales teams, a big thing is you're going to go out and do role play. For example, you know, Chris, if you and I were to role play, you know, maybe you would be the prospect, I would be the sales rep and then we're going through the script, things like that. You can give me feedback and things like that. Now we build out an AI to where we can. can actually just have live conversations at any time of the day. It could be, you know, even at 2 a.m. You don't need to call up your buddy. And you can have real live role plates with this AI.

Biggest thing is you can build out avatars to where essentially it's, you know, hey, if you're selling software, you know, this, this AI avatar is going to be the perfect, you know, prospect. Or if you're selling real estate, et cetera, et cetera, it works for any type of sales role. you build out an avatar, you go about your script. After the call, what it does is it gives you ratings on, you know, one out of 100, how well you did. And then it also breaks down each part of the call and actually shows you, here's where you messed up on, here's where you can work on, and then it gives you a summary, gives you some notes.

The second part of that is if you're actually taking live sales calls, you can upload this into Noble to where Nova's going to say, okay, here's a live sales call. here's where you could work on, here's where you can improve on. So every single day, you can kind of take a look at where your calls are falling flat and then ultimately take that to the next day and crush your sales, whether you're a sales team lead, sales rep, or your business owner. You know, it's just wild all the stuff that's going there. Do you see a future of AI? Do you have any opinions on the vision of the future of AI and business or B2B business? Yeah, I mean, obviously the companies that are not utilizing AI are getting left in the dust.

There's a huge market right now that I've seen with just like brick and mortar businesses. Obviously, there's a huge transfer gap of boomers that are selling their companies. And I think like the institutions like private equity are seeing that gap. And ultimately, they're buying these businesses from these older guys who may have not been utilizing AI. and then they're growing these businesses exponentially. So AI is a thing where it's here to stay, you know, it's going nowhere. Also, I would say that, you know, there's obviously two coins of that with technology. It's like things, when things are made useful, it's great.

But also there's a second side of that where, you know, it kind of takes a human to human interaction out of that, which, you know, we've kind of seen that with social media with there being, you know, fakes and things like that, which is good. But overall for growing a business and making it more profitable, I think, AI is good. Yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting to see how this flows into work and designing things. I mean, we use it on the Chris Voss show to make the show notes. And, you know, sometimes it doesn't get people's names right if their names are fairly complex,

the basic English, I suppose, or the AI itself, you know. I mean, it's just going off of what it hears. So sometimes it doesn't, you know, the Prince of the nation. doesn't pick up the spelling. But other than that, it works incredibly well. It designs a, I mean, just within seconds, it designs a beautiful compilation and stuff. And, yeah, it's wild.

Hopefully it will create enough workflow that or work, I don't know, effort or equity that, you know, people can have more time maybe to, I don't know, work a second job. To have a job. years. Boom. Welcome to 2026.

So what I asked you about that I should ask you about on how you do and how you apply it? Sorry, could you ask that last board again? What is something maybe that you want people to know that I haven't asked you about that we should let people know on how they can do business with you or work with you, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah, I'd say the biggest thing is, you know, I'm very, very active on social media. biggest thing for me is, you know, I kind of was in the gutters on social media for, you know, a while. I didn't really want to be that, you know,

guru type of God. But what I learned is, you know, because there is a lot of BS out there information, it's like if you have something good to offer, you know, you might as well go ahead and do that. So that's kind of been my main focus just building out my personal brand for the past year,

which, you know, I got to give you a clause because content is hard. Yeah, it really is. It really is. People think it's a, you know, people get into podcasts. They're like, oh, it's really easy. You just get a mic and you talk into it. And it's easy as hell. And I'm just like, you know, we have, we have book authors from Simon Schuster,

Pengram Random House, top book authors. And a lot of them you'll see on CNN, you know, all the top news channels. We have all the great journalists on from all the different, technically. I come from the old world of papers. So I want to say papers. newspaper. People like, what's that? But they'll come on and they'll be like,

oh, I've been looking forward to your show all day. I have done like 20 shows today and we're going to call my face. Wow. You're like the best interview. And I don't know what I agree with that. But just the fact that they're like, thank God, you'd have no idea what I've gone through. And I've done the podcast circuit. And there's some good people out there.

But we saw it. Honey or what? So what's the future of your, of your company? What do you see you guys? Do you guys are going to grow so you can become as big as black rock or something? Or what's the future for you guys? Yeah, great question. I think right now the big focus is just continually scale up.

It is tough, you know, because obviously, you know, it's easy to get shiny object syndrome when you want to go out and, you know, work with new companies and things like that. But at least for me, it's just to continue scaling up with the portfolio that I have, definitely providing more value as far as my personal brand, doing consulting. And then in the long term, I would like to just be able to outright buy these companies, you know, kind of more like a blackstone, you know, private equity type deal to where I can, you know, buy companies and then just apply what I've been doing for, you know, the past 10 years into that. So companies should reach out to you, even if they aren't.

If maybe they don't qualify for investment, they should reach out to you for consulting help, et cetera, et cetera, and get involved with you there. So as we go out,

anything further, you want to pitch out to us or discuss with us as we go? No, I think that's it. You know, if you want to keep up with me, YouTube would be the main place

and then Instagram. Do you know your YouTube link off the top of your head? So it should be YouTube.com slash at John P. Meg. That's my username.

John J. H-N-P-M-A-G, correct? Let me, uh, it looks like, uh, I didn't quite get it. So, J-O-H-N? Yeah, let me, uh, P-Mag. Yeah, let me put in the chat. Just want to be able to put the link on the show for you. You get that, get that in the chat?

Uh, here, let me check the chat here over here. Yeah, so John, J-O-H-N. Okay, you got to have the ad in there. That's weird. I did not know that. Right. most people don't have. Isn't mine forward slash Chris Voss? I think it works.

All right. Well, so you just subscribe over here. And I swear to God, if you go Chris Voss, mine works, right? Yeah, mine works on Fort Sonsch Chris Foss. That's weird. It did the ad symbol for you. I mean, you've been around a lot.

18 years. 18 years on YouTube. It's crazy. I got to tell you got a lot of dedication because I was scrolling out in your YouTube. I saw videos from 16 years. I'm like, damn, that's... Yeah.

How awful were they, 16 years? How, they were good. What's funny is you were saying stuff way before, you know, Twitter and the power of social media. And then I read one funny one where it said that you can get sued if you make a mean tweet to someone or something like that. It was funny. Yeah.

Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. John, we'll watch what you're doing over there on the big old YouTube channel. You know, that good stuff. It looks like you're giving people a lot of great information that they can do. utilize on building their funnels and conversion rates and all this sort of good stuff. So free is the way to go. And that's how people, you know, you earn trust and reputation and people invest in you. And you invest in them because they're investing.

See how I don't. Give us any other places you want us to check you out online as we go out. I'd say Instagram, same thing at John P. Mag. Facebook at John P. Mag. And then Twitter X. I should call it X. It's at John P. Magner. So full name.

Didn't quite get that a username. But yeah, that's essentially it. I appreciate you for having me on. Thank you for coming. We certainly appreciate it. And boy, what a great entrepreneurial story, man. You're going to thank yourself someday you got started young. Like I, when I started young, I was like, I didn't really get it.

And I did all these things. But, man, now that I'm old and broken down and can't feel my legs and, you know, I have to have like 20 cups of coffee in the morning, wake up. Enjoy, you know, what you've built in your youth. And I hope it inspires other people.

You know, I wish more parents would teach their kids to be entrepreneurs. And like a lot of young people who start entrepreneur businesses like you, they have usually some sort of foundational thing like parents and inspire them or maybe uncles, relatives. But setting that foundation when you're young, it just gives you this great arc through life that's just so,

Like I just pinch myself sometimes and I think, God, what if we never had started that company that day? What if we said, well, we'll do it next week. You know, I just, it's horrified. Yeah, I'm just the pace I would have taken. And we thank you very much, Sean, for coming to the show. Thanks, John, for honest, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, fortuneschis Christchristch, Christfoss, LinkedIn.com, Forteouschristch, Christfoss, YouTube.com, Fortresschchchchchchchchchchfoss. And Facebook.com, be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you next time. You will listen to the most amazing and intelligent one to improve your brain and your life. Lord. I mean too much of the Chris Long Show podcast may lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger. You resist both than human regularly moderate mouths. He's the doctor for his sparing league.