The Home Service Expert Podcast - Kevin O'Leary | Why the Busiest Home Service Owners Get the Least Done

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://freedomevent.com Recorded live at the Freedom event — Kevin O'Leary sat down with Tommy minutes after walking off stage. Mr. Wonderful built and sold The Learning Company in one of the largest tech deals of all time, runs a portfolio of more than 50 companies, and spent years selling to Steve Jobs — who taught him the rule he still runs his life by: pick the three things that matter, and block out 70% of everything else. In this episode: why home service is one of the best businesses on earth, the contractor-first deal he now makes with every new CEO, why unhappy customers are your most valuable asset, the 70/30 listening rule, and what money actually buys once you have enough of it. As Kevin put it about Freedom: "if you ever get a chance to come to one of these sessions, you should." Follow Kevin O'Leary: https://www.instagram.com/kevinolearytv/ -- 🕐 TIMESTAMPS 🕐 --  00:00 - Introduction  00:40 - Mr. Wonderful, live at the Freedom event  01:25 - Why Kevin still shows up for entrepreneurs  02:15 - "One of the best times ever" for home service  03:45 - What Kevin pays up for: recurring revenue  05:00 - The AI doom question: buggies & burger robots  07:25 - Private equity's biggest mistake: losing the founder  09:50 - The $6,000 earpiece productivity stack  11:50 - $3.75M/month in marketing and a 10X ROAS  13:05 - Wonder Ads: how TV attribution finally works  15:20 - The 4 KPIs that build any company's budget  16:20 - Running 54 companies at once  17:40 - Quit making transactional ads — tell stories  19:35 - "Always tell the truth" — the lesson from Kevin's mom  22:15 - Kevin's rule: contract first, hire second  24:15 - Ideas are cheap, execution is everything  25:25 - Steve Jobs stories: brutal meetings & 70/30  28:15 - Equity done right: 70/30 deals and dilution  31:00 - Unhappy customers are your most valuable asset  34:25 - Listen 70%, talk 30%  36:20 - The $10M restart plan & 31% in real estate  38:25 - "I don't need more money"  39:10 - Your first $5M is a safety net  41:00 - Who inspires Kevin: Musk at 100% signal  42:15 - Own your failures or he won't invest  43:10 - The book that changed him: Keith Richards  45:05 - Close: "come to one of these sessions" 🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://freedomevent.com Check Out My Social Media:  Tiktok ⟶ https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymello  Instagram ⟶ https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/  Facebook ⟶ https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/

You mentioned you worked for Steve Jobs and he was an asshole. 100%. He also taught me about the concept of signal and noise ratio, which I've really adopted. You need to get three things done every day, whatever they are. And that's the signal. You've got to block out 70% of the noise. Now because you're blocking out noise, you're perceived as an asshole.

We would have contentious meetings in the old headquarters. Brutal. Some of my staff would be crying when it was over. People don't have to like you. They have to respect you because you can achieve things. If you try and make everybody like you, you will fail. Today's a very special day. We got the Freedom Event out there.

Today's guest, Harley is an introduction, known as millions as Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank, world-class investor, entrepreneur, business leader, who built and sold the learning company in one of the largest tech deals of all time. He went on to launch O'Leary Funds and O'Leary Ventures, and today manages a diverse portfolio that spans everything from fintech to crypto to consumer brands, best-sellinging author, global speaker, and a straight shooter on personal finance leadership and entrepreneurship. Kevin's not here just to talk about money, but also discipline, decision making, and how to build wealth that lasts. Kevin, I'm really excited that you're here, brother.

Appreciate it. Why did you decide to do this, is my first question. I love working with entrepreneurs, and what that room was full of was entrepreneurs, people that really understand that entrepreneurship is not a destination. It's a journey. we're all in it together and we were sharing our thoughts together. I really enjoyed that session because there's a lot of energy in that room. But that's what it's about. When you start a business in America, it's only a third of the population to pull it off. I mean, it's not for everybody, and I'm not telling people to do it, but if you are going

to do it, you want to talk to other entrepreneurs, you want to share ideas, you want to help entrepreneurs not make the same mistakes that I made. So I kind of go through that journey saying, here's what worked, here's what didn't, here's what I've learned recently, here's what I've applied, here's how it's worked. I want to share, you want to give back. This is the way I look at it. What do you think about the home service industry? It's probably one of the best times ever to be in it. Not only technology advancing it, it's never going away, it's never going to be replaced by AI or any of this disruption stuff. It's the core of most people's net worth is where they live.

and they care about it. It's a spectacular industry. I mean, it reminds me, there's two industries that I admire so much that you're going to be around forever. Climate Control Storage, which I came up in, it's directly linked to the stuff you buy for your home, because after a while you store it. I mean, it's kind of like everything that goes on in maintaining a home or a business is a perpetual business, good times, bad times, recess, whatever. it's always a required service. You know, we run at my company 25,000 jobs a month. And you know what's crazy what happened through COVID

is we were deemed essential. And I've been through 2008, as you know, and the multiples went from 10 to 12 to 14 to 18 to 20X. This isn't that crazy, 20X? and it's hard to do the math, really, of 20x multiples on eBay. And then I learned about annual reoccurring revenue. And you can get a multiple of that. And it's fun stuff.

What do you look for when you make an investment? I look exactly for that. How do I get my money back, first of all? Secondly, how stable is the reoccurring revenue? How risky is that recurring revenue? Like, what would make it stop? I mean, I'll pay way more for a safe investment that has, recurring subscription or whatever it is, to keep continuing every month.

That's what you're describing, and that's why it's valuable. And it turns out the whole market feels that way. And so these multiples have increased for a reason. It's the safety of the investment, first to return the capital invested, and then to accrue the benefits of a renewed pace of free cash flow. That's very, very valuable. People covet those kind of investments. And so it takes executional skills, too.

You have to have someone that can execute that can do it. But if you understand the model and how to acquire a customer and how to maintain it and it generates cash, that's pure gold. And that's what this business is. That's why it went from a 7 to a 20. That's not you or I deciding. The market decided that because that's what the market wants. And so you're very lucky to be in that space right now. Very fortunate.

And I think it's going to 6x in the next seven years. And I watch a lot of people. There's a lot of jobs going away. And it's scary. It's kind of scary in a one way. I mean, what do you predict? I just heard Bill Gates come out and say in 10 years, there's going to be a government subsidized.

You're going to have to pay people to live because robots next year, Elon Musk, they could cook for you, it could walk the dogs. I mean, where are we going? What do you think about when the future? You know, I've listened to that narrative for multiple generations now. And I bet you if you were,

you had a family business back 150 years, ago making horse-drawn buggies and you went and saw the first car roll off the Ford production line with four tires on it and an engine and you say oh we're we're dead I mean we're all going to lose our jobs that's not what happened to the economy new technologies advanced productivity there's a shift in who works on what and where that happens there's just this location but because it's productivity enhancing the economy actually expands it's the same argument of saying, oh, well, television is going to destroy radio. That's complete BS. Radio still exists. It comes from satellites now. I don't worry about that kind of stuff.

I don't believe in predicting doom in the American economy. That's never worked. It never has happened. I've never bet against the American economy. It's provided an 8 to 10% return on average for almost 200 years. I mean, we're good at doing stuff that makes it easier to live and more productive. If I need a robot or a car that's going to drive me, great. And who whoever was going to drive that car is going to do something else, probably a business that's more valuable and make even more money. It's going to free human beings from tedious tasks, like flipping burgers. I saw a robot flipping burgers the other day. I don't care. I'll eat the burgers as long as it tastes good. Yeah. It's it. I think a lot about where business

is going. And just like you just showed the video of you, I can speak in Russian, Japanese, my AI, some of the other tools we're using. I just watched the thing. Have you ever heard of N8N? Yes. It's like Zapier but for AI. I could literally have it research the number one post for home service and build a whole integration that actually goes out, does the research, writes it, I'm talking, builds a thumbnail, which Mr. B spends $40,000 on a thumbnail. And it post and build it perfect for X, TikTok, Instagram. I mean, now you're using the technology. Well, that's what's crazy is I want to talk to you. Like, I know every major P.E company in the space, all of them.

Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, all of them. And they show up with their loafers, their nice watches. I don't want to get in trouble here. I love you guys, by the way. And they think home service is just anybody could do it. And then I watch them fall apart because they lose the culture. They lose the, these blue-collar guys, they weren't raised the same way. Some of them have bad teeth.

We've got to work on that. And they walk in. them like a cog, a will. And they watch it fall apart because they say, number one, you can't cut your way to success. And I've seen very few people pull it off. That's why P.E. just learned never get rid of the founder. Never get rid of the founder. What is that? I don't know if you've ever seen that when they go in and they start looking at balance sheets and income statements and cash flow. And they try to figure out a way to absorb, like make it more profitable very quickly. Have you ever seen that in business?

Yeah, yeah, I see that all the time. The challenges the analysts that do that work have never actually run a business. It's a problem with P.E. and venture capital, until you've actually made payroll on a Wednesday night, you don't know what it's like and how hard it is to run a business. And just use the metrics of, okay, I'll put debt on it or I'll change this, I'll change that, and it's going to be more profitable. Rarely works out. And the P.E. guys aren't that stupid anymore. They're starting to realize they've got to partner with the founder, figure out a way to keep them motivated. Hey guys, I just want to let you know that the $250 off freedom ends tomorrow. Tomorrow night, it's gone. So the prices go back to full price. That's up to $250 off every tier for America's 250th birthday.

If you've been waiting for a sign, this is the sign. October 26th through the 28th at Mandalay Bay, the best operators in business under one roof. Go claim your seat right now at freedom event.com or call our Texas at 602-581-7563 and we'll get you in. Do it tonight. I don't want you to miss this. Figure out a way to keep them motivated. So a founder in their 60s or 70s is looking for some liquidity for generational reasons, but they don't necessarily want to stop working.

And so the better strategy is to partner with them. Maybe you buy, you know, a 80% control position and you cash out the family, but maybe some members want to stay working and they know all the customers. That's a much better model. and you give them incentives to actually work as hard as they did when they controlled it. It doesn't always work, but it works a lot better than just buying it out and thinking you can just parachute in some random CEO that doesn't know anything about the history and the culture. And I would also say something that, you know, you touched on at the beginning of this question about technology.

You know, you should use every tool that you can afford to advance productivity, both personally and in your business. business because your competitor definitely is. And I'll give you an example. Damon got me into this. I'm going to pull it out of my ear. This is an IFB, a Bluetooth IFB, a company called Starkey. I don't own any of Starkey. Why am I wearing this thing? This thing is connected to my phone. It reads to me every communication I'm getting. Even if it comes in a foreign language, it translates it into English for me. I've chosen five different languages because I'm doing business in the Middle East. You can use it for all kinds of purposes. You know, if you've got a You can use it a hearing aid, but if I want to listen to the conversation over there,

I can tune it to listen in over there. Now these are not cheap. $6,000. But this thing has saved my heinie so many times when I travel or I'm doing something like on television. I've got the director in my ear. I'm on live TV and I'm getting my messages on all of my deals. And this ear is reading it to me. And I'm able to absorb that and be more productive.

So the minute I get off air, I can call. Thank you, Damon. Thank you, Sarky. I mean, I'm not the only guy. I mean, a lot of the sharks are using these things now, and Damon brought them to us. That's great. It's very cool, very cool. You know, I'm going to get one of those clips that actually monitor everything I do in the day, and they listen to everything, and I just know. My assistant, my executive, she's right over there. She's the best, Ashley. She's hiring another assistant for her. And I said, they've got to be using Chatsubit V. They've got to be taken. I mean, we use that. I use that every day myself. Our entire companies use it. We all have subscription services. We look at our social media, put it through all of the models to see if we can

change one or two words. You know, a 15-second commercial has 75 words in it, which 75? Because we spent a lot of money on digital advertising. So we're testing. We'll do three versions. We'll put it through chat TVT and other models and say it'll change two words. Then we test it in the Florida market. Boom, it worked better. And so, you know, it's kind of like. Yeah. Yeah, but testing works. I mean, you can do it by geolocking your Facebook buy or whatever you're using. And it's so easy to do it now. Like it's not that complicated.

You know, it's interesting. I just thought of this is I'm a big fan of attribution. I have 7,000 call tracking numbers. Every single landing page has a separate UTM parameters. Like I know exactly. We spend right now on average 3.75 million a month in marketing. And it's important. think you make back on that? They can make $9 million? What do you think? No, I get a, my advertising

budget is 12%. So I almost get a 9.4%. My ROAS, I'm getting almost a 10 times return. Oh, that, that is anything past seven, you've got it nailed. Anybody, listen, I, I see lots, very rarely do I see a business that pass seven ROAS. That's really hard. And if you're getting 10, you fine-tuned it. That's what, that's amazing. I spent a lot of money. on branding. Even our trucks is a logo. It doesn't have a phone number, an email, doesn't have any of that stuff. Doesn't have the BBB or Angie's List or Yelp. It's a driving billboard. But one of the thing that was really interesting is it's been very, very hard for TV radio billboards to get attribution. And I saw that you had changing, changing. And that's what you're, yeah, tell me about that.

So, you know, we spend so much money across 54 companies. And one of them I was involved in called ERC. We all did the ERC loans and I actually built a business to help companies get ERC loans. Employer retention credits. Right, because it was the only way small business could survive. They didn't get anything. And the PPP money was pretty nice too.

It was nice, but that was tougher. You know, the PPP was getting an ERC was much harder than PPP. We need both. We did both for all of our businesses, but the ERC was much tougher. And we started advertising. We were spending about $3 million a week. and a lot of it was digital.

And then I got approached by a company called Tataris saying, have you tried television? I said, no, we're doing, he said, why don't we do a test? And it really worked. We found the Golf Channel was much better than buying digital. So, unfortunately, at that time, it was for only guys that were spending like $3 million a week in advertising. And I said to the owner,

why don't we form a partnership, let's call it Wonder Ads, and create a buying consortium. And so that all of my companies can use wonder ads to do television. And so you go to wonder ads and you run small budgets and we aggregate the buying up to five or ten million of all the wonder ad participants. And then we buy, whether it's golf channel, CNBC, CNN, Fox, Fox business, whatever. But the way you can get the attribution is you put a pixel in it. So you can actually track. And every Tuesday we know exactly which channel produced the highest ROAS.

And we found that now a third of our advertising is done on television and on streaming services. Right. He never did that before. And that was Wonder Ads. That's what we did it for. And so anytime I see a business that works for my 50 companies, I want to share it with everybody. And we form a company. And that's what we did in the case of Wonder Ads.

And it worked. And now 30% of my spend is in the strangest places. I was watching some home shopping thing. and oops, there's one of our company had popped up at 15. And I asked them, do you get any good ROAS? And I said, yeah, it's our number one this week. So you pour the gasoline on where it's working, and you pull back when it stops.

And a lot of people don't know. A lot of people just know what's in their account. What I'm going to talk about here a little bit is four KPIs I track, that I can build the budget, I could go into any business. I don't care if it's dental. I don't care of what country I'm in. Their booking rate, which is your contact center, is when the phone call comes in or the lead comes in.

conversion rate when you're door-to-door knocking and you meet the client, the average ticket, and the cost per lead. I don't like cost per acquisition because this funnel already builds that into it. And with those numbers, I could actually build the future of any company. And I'm like, how do you do more with what you got? Everybody's saying I need leads. Well, in COVID, everybody said I need people. So I look at marketing is how do I attract good talent? And one of the things, if you're going to build businesses, how do you acquire great talent? Like, what do you look for? How do you find great talent?

Why have 54 companies, too, is why not put it all into one? Well, it is in the holding company. They're all owned either through debt or equity, not all in the control position, but many of them. It's a portfolio strategy, and in any one time, you know, within that portfolio, there's a catastrophe happening or a euphoric outcome. I have one that just yesterday told me they're getting sued, and then an hour. hour later I get a phone call from another saying they're going public and they're going to be listed in three weeks. I own a huge piece of that. So I mean, I get the portfolio strategy is

his heartbreak one hour and euphoria the next and I've kind of learned that that's just the way it is in life. You're going to have good, bad and ugly. But having many companies means the outcomes generally I look at on an annual basis. 70 percent. Well, we've had better years. That's not the greatest. Private equity gets 22. So we have some work to do. But 17 is pretty damn. good. It doubles in four years. I just... Yeah, no, it's... I'm very proud of what we've achieved. And that means we're doing a good job managing them. They're profitable. And then, of course, on top of that, we get the distributions every month. I'm getting checks from pretty well everything. And that's, that maintains and

supports the community, you know, the families that work. Our biggest cost increase, social media. Boy, it's expensive. I mean, we're just spending a fortune generating content. And as long as our ROAS is four or better, as you know, our... you know, we're happy with that spend. Have you ever heard of a guy named Roy Williams in Austin, Texas? I have, actually. The Wizard of Ads. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've worked with him, and he said quit making ads transactional. Tell stories. Let people get to know. You talked about that on stage, is let people see who you are. So I started writing ads about me and my dad working in the garage, working on a car, and people just relate to it. And if you could tell stories on ads and not say, we're cutting prices, 15% off, and that works.

But it's kind of a race to the bottom. Walmart figured it out, but nobody could ever be Walmart again, I don't think. Well, their scale of purchase, you can't beat them. But your point is, it's being transparent about who you are. And if people want to be part of that community and that culture and that vision, they're going to become your customer. And those are very valuable. And I agree with that.

That is the Wicked Cupcake Story, what we learned from Wicked Good Cupcakes. That whole thing was unbelievable what happened there. I mean, cupcakes are a total commodity. Anybody can make a cupcake, but they turned it into a massive business, and no one saw it coming. It's crazy. That's a great story you shared. I tell customers, I was in the garage for nine years. I'm an overnight success of two decades.

So I was running jobs. I was running six a day, six days a week, failed relationships, never been married, no kids, but I got a fiancé now. Congratulations. I'm very excited about it. I'm going to be an old dad. But I say, you know, Mr. O'Leary, here's what you need to do. Here's what you should do. And this is the third one that works every time.

My mom worked three jobs when I was a kid. She worked her ass off. I love my mom more than anything in this world. Here's what I'd be telling my mom to do. That's the question? This is what I tell people. This is what I be telling mom to do. Yeah.

And I always give them what I would do for mom. And if I could treat people like mom, they keep coming back. Well, I have a similar story. I learned so much of my mom. mother about how I conduct myself today. She told me something once that I've never forgotten. And it's actually, you know, changed who I am, I think, over time. Always tell the truth. She said this to me. Always tell the truth and you'll never have to remember what you said. Which is very hard to do in the moment because when you tell people the truth sometimes, they don't like it.

It's still the truth. And that in the context of Shark Tank made me the bad guy. But I'm actually the friendliest guy because I'm telling you, you have a bad idea and you're going to go bankrupt with it. and it's, you know, you should try something else. But the point is, you get great lessons from mothers because they care a lot about you. But that one for me was great. And she taught me how to invest, even though she wasn't an analyst or anything,

diversifications, everything, and always get a check, either buy a bond with interest or a stock with, you know, a dividend. And that's kind of what I did, and she was right about that. But, you know, it's really become an interesting journey for me. You always have mentors in your life. And there was another guy named Jerry Pell.

Patterson, who said, you know, you really should focus on things you've got to get done during the day and not listen to all the noise around you. He was actually a hockey agent, the first guy to bring in a Russian hockey player into the NHL, which was really controversial, but he did it. And he was my partner in a company called Specialman Television. We used to shoot the intermissions in Boston and Detroit and New York for the league. Red Wings. So Red Wings.

Yeah, I mean, it was, so I really got involved in hockey instead of 1980 to 85 when Gretzky was in the league. And I learned so much from Jerry just about how to conduct business. And I learned a lot about hockey and the game it's become and about professional sports. There's so many different lessons you're going to learn in your life through your journey. And you should always pull knowledge out of everything you're doing. And it just makes you a better and more productive entrepreneur, I think. You know, I think Ben Hart. Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan.

I don't know if you know them, but they wrote several books, Who Not How is one of my favorite, and just the cliche or the message of who. How do we get the right who's? I love when I walk in a board meeting, everyone says no to me. I have no yes people around me, but you gotta have the data, and I will pull the Trump card every now and then.

But how do you get the right people on your team? What do you look for? Because I hear people way smarter than me, way better at their specialty that they're at. But what do you do to find the talent when you're looking at companies? What I do, and I've changed this recently, the last three years, the right people are ones that can work within the team on a mandate that everybody agrees on, so they're all going the same direction.

But you don't know that when you hire somebody. You're not sure, so don't hire them. Hire them as contractors first. My standard deal is, look, let's work out your contracts as if you were already successful. Let's get that and put it here on the shelf. But I'm going to pay you 30% more to be a contractor for the next six months. And at any time during that six month period, we can change our minds, say you fit into the team, it's all working, or you can walk away saying, I don't think it's going to work

here. And it won't be a blight on your resume. You just acted as a contractor, so you don't have to say you were hired and fired, and I don't have to do the same to you. And then you'll just find out if you fit into what we're doing. And I do this with the CEOs for sure. I just hired a new CEO for WonderCare, and I made that deal with him, and he agreed. He liked it.

This guy's a rock star. And, you know, he's come out of a giant tech company, not necessarily a watch guy because it's a watch insurance business, but that doesn't matter. He understands the tech and how to operate and how to build the website and how to advertise and all the rest of that. But he said, I love this idea. It gets me a chance to feel the groove, get in the cadence,

work with you and the rest of the team, understand what we're doing together, go to all these countries with you. And after six months, if I'm on board and you're on board, we just take that contract off the shelf, and boom, he owns a piece of the company as the CEO, he has an option pool. This really works. It really works.

I've done that. And I listen to you talk about that. Yeah, I know, it's a great idea. And so you're paying 30% more, who gives a damn? It costs you a lot more than that to hire somebody and two weeks later fire them. That's crazy. And so this is my new strategy

and that's how I find great people and they appreciate it. And it just plain works. When you share everything like you do, and people always ask me, why do you give me your playbook? When people come into my shop, my competitors, and I say, well, you know, you're more likely to be a millionaire and I have a six-pack, and I can tell you exactly how to get a six-pack. You still got to do the work.

Less than 1% of the people will do the work, but you share everything. Yeah. I mean, look, you know, I'm happy to share it, because I know the magic sauce is executional skills. You can understand how a business is successful. You can't necessarily execute the same way. Great ideas are a dime and dust, and executional skills are impossible to find.

Great people have them, their ability to set a goal and achieve them consistently over and over again, and that comes from being a great salesperson, learning that way. I like to see people come up through sales because they understand how hard it is at the beginning of a month to be zero and then have to hit the goal every month. I did that for my whole life. Still do. But just because you know how a business is operated and it's transparent about it, I bet you less than one out of ten people can do the same thing. It's very rare. I mean, less than that. You mentioned you worked for Steve Jobs and he was an asshole.

100%. I love the fact that he was just a creator, but I always, I watch all of his videos and he goes, the worst, I love the fact that he goes, if you hire great people, they'll tell you where to go. And that's what he figured out, I mean, but I could see the asshole in him. 100%. He just was really difficult to work with. It doesn't mean he wasn't a genius. He was. He also taught me about the concept of signal to noise ratio, which I've really adopted. He would argue that you need to get three things done every day, whatever they are. Three to five. Three to five. Three to five. Three to to five things you have to get done every day. And that's the signal. The noise is all the stuff that comes at you that stops you from getting the three to five things done. And so you have to identify the three things and then you have to fight off all of the noise coming at you to stay within 70-30 ratio. You've got to block out 70% of the noise so that 30% is getting the three things done. Now because you're blocking out noise, you're perceived as an asshole.

You're just, you're stopping people in mid-sentence saying, I'm not interested, not interested. Just not wasting time is what he was about. He was blunt. He was difficult. He was ornary. He had a woman working beside him back then named Heidi Rosen who would smooth things out afterwards, you know. And we would have contentious meetings in the old headquarters, brutal. And he would just, you know, be brutal.

And some of my staff would be crying when it was over. And then Heidi would call me on the way back to SFO and say, look, we're going to pay you the $12 million for the update or whatever it is. But she wouldn't even apologize for Steve. We were past that. I didn't need to. And he would, there was no text back then. He would email me at 3 in the morning, Boston time, and expect an answer within five minutes. And I would give it to him because he was such a huge client.

I'd wake up for that. That was him being on signal. And so I've kind of adopted that too. You've got to understand. You will get stuff. coming at you all day that doesn't matter. And because you push it aside, people get pissed. I know.

They feel they're not important. Well, the truth is, they're not. What they want from you is not relevant. It's not important for your mandate. And what matters long term is that you're successful. You will keep your friends and family and you will have respect. People don't have to like you. They have to respect you because you can achieve things.

That's what matters. You will always have perspective, you can achieve things. If you try and make everybody like you, you will fail. You will fail because you'll spend your whole day dealing with noise. That's the problem. You know, you mentioned you hire the CEO. When I learned about equity incentive programs, it's a, you could call it phantom shares, you can call it stock options. You know, the biggest best companies in the world, private equity, they'll do a 10 to 15% pool and they know how to use it strategically. When I learned about this, by the way, I hate eating.

ESOPs. There's some tax advantages of the ESOPs, but equity incentive programs gives people a stake in the outcome. And if you do them right, you make a lot of millionaires and you make a lot of owners. You know, how do you feel about equity? I 100% believe in it. You know, my model, often if there's an operating business, someone comes to me and says, let's start this operating business. It's my idea, but I want you as an investor. I'll say, look, I'll do a 70-30 deal with you. 70, you do 30. But the minute you hire somebody that needs equity, we get equally diluted. So we start at 70, 30, and then as new people come in, we equally get diluted. That makes the person who's running the deal, the guy with the 30 percent, sweat every hire. Because he or she is

also taking the hit. The dilution. And so, but I want, they know they have to give away some. And as the business grows, they keep giving away, and they have to, because I believe everybody that's important to the business should have some sweat equity in it, whether it's an ESOP or it's an RSU or it's an option. I don't care what the structure is, depending on the state, the tax efficiency. But that person, everybody is sitting there thinking every day about how do I keep as much of this for myself, but I know I can't be a pig. It's a wonderful dilemma. And we're never 70, 30 by the time the business gets sold. We're fractional by that time. But we've created something of so much value, which is a different model than the agent model and you pay your agent 10% because

they have no outcome. In Hollywood, you know, if I get a roll or something or a Montchartang, somebody's making 10% of my salary for being the agent and 5% for the legales. That's the typical Hollywood deal, but they don't determine the outcome of the performance. So, you know, that's the maximum they're going to get. And those are the two kind of things. You start off a lot more if you're going to be a founder of a business. But if you're just a service provider, you get 10%. And that's kind of the way America works. It's a great, great country.

You know, I was on, I got the opportunity. I was at this Freedom Summit with a guy named Alex Epstein. And I got an opportunity to meet Mike Roe. We clicked. He's a big guy in the blue collar industry. I got an opportunity to be on his podcast. And what I've realized now about myself

is a lot of people love me, a lot of people hate me. And I'm sure you get the same. Yeah. But on his. podcast, there was 4,000 comments. And not one of them talked bad about me. They were all great. And that just goes into the brand. And from your perspective, how do you build a brand of somebody in there that's a million dollars, a million dollars revenue of plumbing? What would you say the

core essentials are to build a brand? Like Mike Roe, everybody loves the guy. Like nobody talks bad about him. He's done a great job of that. Brand building is now storytelling. That's what it is. And I think telling a transparent, honest story about who you are, what you do, how you provide services, what matters to you and your community of customers. That stuff is the only way you can build a brand. And then what happens is if you are a great provider, the customers start talking about your brand, your company, your service. And they're the best ambassadors. They're the best advocates. They're the best advertisers for you. And that's why you have to have to be. to spend most of your energy taking care of them. And the ones that are the noisiest ones are the squeaky wheels that are the most valuable. You know, it's such an amazing thing, and I talked about this in the presentation. Unhappy customers are very valuable because they give you an opportunity to make them happy. And then they become the biggest advocates. And so you should spend a lot of time taking care of unhappy customers. And they become a huge asset

to you. No matter what it takes, you've got to solve. that problem. Even if they don't like you, you don't like them, they will admit after they've been provided the service and they've been made right by you, this is the company that I'm going with. This is the one I use because they take care of me. And I spent a lot of time talking about that in there today because I think it's very important information. I've seen it happen both ways. It's really very important. You know, I used to take all the one-star Yelp or Google calls myself. And I'd call them up and I'd say, listen, I'm so embarrassed that this happened.

And your time's important. Can you tell me exactly what went wrong? And I just, all you have to do is let them talk. And I just listen. And I would listen for 10 minutes and I'd go, that is so embarrassing. I'm sorry. And I'd make it right. And those people became raving fans than my ambassadors.

And, you know, 25,000 clients a month, we make mistakes. Of course. And we learn from those mistakes. Yeah, but you're guaranteed to make mistakes, and you have to learn from them. But that's brand building. I mean, it's customer service in every business, I don't care what it is, financial services, or, you know, HVAC or plumbing, it doesn't matter. It's customer, customer, their employees and then shareholders in that order.

You don't have the business, you don't have customers. It's that simple. I don't know. I think my internal clients are a little more important than my clients. Because if I treat them right and they care enough, they take care of the clients out of automatically. Well, it has to be, to me, I'm always monitoring where we sit in customer satisfaction reporting.

That promoter score type thing? Yeah, it's just, there's so much data you can scrape now online about where you fit in the plethora of competitors on every business and what people say about you. You always want to be monitoring anything that goes viral in a negative way because there's a reason somebody's pissed off. spending energy to make your life miserable. That's the thing about a staff customer. They'll actually spend a lot of energy to make your life miserable. They want some kind of revenge. And you don't want that. It's not good. It's stupid. Sometimes they turn

around and they sue you and I'd rather settle. I'd like to find a way to solve it. You know, it's crazy. That's just the nature of how business works. I ask three questions. And I'm, I love these questions for you in particular. What's one piece of game-changing advice that you wish you knew in your early 20s? To reverse the ratio of talking and listening, most people talk 70% of the day listen 30. You should actually listen 70% of the day, talk 30. Because when you listen, you get more power. You understand where you're at.

I was taught this by one of my women CEOs a few years ago. She said, Kevin, you know, you talk too much and you're not listening. And you should try reversing it and see how powerful you're going to become. and she was right, it helps you a lot to just listen. Listen, go into a meeting and just listen. And sometimes there's an uncomfortable moment. You don't see anything, and they start giving you information they didn't want to because they feel socially uncomfortable.

I don't feel uncomfortable. I'm happy to just listen, and it's very powerful. It works immensely. That's one thing I wish I'd learned in my 20s, because I talked too much back then. But now I don't. I'm very careful. I just listen. What's a millionaire habit that set you apart from the rest?

Not a millionaire. I don't even care about a millionaire habit. Just what's one thing you do? You mentioned seven hours and 20 minutes. You mentioned no alcohol three hours before. The best wine, the best tequila. You mentioned you go for a long walk, 10,000 steps. But what do you think that you do, that you've learned that kind of no one else is really doing? What I've learned, and I've started to do it recently, is I try and spend about 30% of my day doing something that's outside of my comfort zone.

something I'm completely uncomfortable about that I don't know how to do, I'm going to learn it. And that's exercising the brain. The brain wants to do that. You never give it that chance. You're always staying in your comfort zone, and that's very bad. So I'm trying all kinds of things that I thought I could never do, and it's helping me immensely. And recently, I took on acting. I've never been an actor.

I'm dyslexic. I can't memorize lines. Well, I found out a way to do it. And I just, that's helped me on other things. And, you know, it was an amazing journey for me. I don't know what it'll lead to. But it was a hell of an opportunity. And I did it.

And you can judge for yourself. It's a movie called Marty Supreme coming out Christmas Day. Christmas Day, where is it available? The 25th of December. Is it out of theaters? It out of theaters only. It's a big movie with Timothy Chalameh and Gwina Peltro, and I'm in this movie as an actor and check it out.

We will. if you had to start over tomorrow with 10 million, but you still got all your connections, $10 million, what are you doing with it? I would do what I do now. I would diversify my holdings into, you know, I have a very simple rule. No more than 20% in any one sector. The economy is 11 sectors. No more than 5% in anyone's stock or bond or crypto.

But there's one thing I do break the rule for, and that's real estate. I have 31% of my, you know, net worth in real estate and I've been a developer my whole life and so doing you know real estate is what I do it's a core and you know I've done everything from climate control storage to you know luxury condos or whatever it's just and right now the hot sector in real estate is data centers so I'm doing that but I like real estate you can touch it it never goes to zero unless you put too much leverage on it and so you know I very careful about how much debt I put into my equation.

I keep a very low debt ratio. I want to be able to survive debt. And because I went through 2008 in real estate, that was pretty tough. So it's kind of learning from the past experiences, but I take that 10 million and I think I could probably, you know, do well with it by just being diversified. You know, I think a lot, money for me now is a KPI.

It's kind of like, it's not gonna change the way I live. It's just not. But I find that the goals keep getting bigger. The goalpost always moves. No matter how much I succeed, no matter what my body fat is, no matter how much I'm spending time with family, it's just, it's never, I've never arrived.

And you talk a lot about investing. You know a lot, you know a lot of people. At what point, I mean, what's it all for? I mean, you said you still spend weekends with your family. you go anywhere in the world. But, I mean, it'll never be enough. It's always... Yeah, I don't think about it that way.

I don't need more money. I need more time. And so you can't buy time, obviously, so you want to use it the best you can. You know, money is sort of the index by which you can judge as an entrepreneur, success, or failure. If you do something well, you're going to make more money, and you can decide what to do with it,

reinvest it or do whatever you want. But it's a derivative, of what you're doing successfully. It's not the goal. You can't create a business without it, obviously, but it's a derivative of success. If you make more money, it's because you've been more successful. But there comes a point where it doesn't change your life at all,

whether you have, and I would say to young entrepreneurs, your goal is trying to get $5 million in the bank, somewhere making just treasury returns as your safety net. 4 to 5 percent yeah that's all you're going to make but you have it there for whatever happens you know medical emergencies or catastrophes or whatever and after that you're starting to build generational wealth and it's very hard to make that first five really hard it's hard to make the first million but if you can make a million you can make five you can make 50 if you can make 50 you can make 500 it's just you have it in you you only need to prove it to yourself once and then go do it again

and again and again. But it's at some point, I mean, I don't know what the number is for most people. I have 50 million. I don't know. I mean, how much do you need? I mean, what more do you need? You got a beautiful house. It depends on if you're, if you love boats and jets. Okay, well, I get that. You know, what I do, listen, I've owned planes. I, it's, I don't want to ever own a plane again. I want to lease the hours and I want an operator to run it and deal with the pilots. Yeah, charter it. Yeah, yeah. So I, I probably chartered $200,000. 250 hours a year. And so that's a lot of plane time. But I don't consider that a luxury anymore. I just a necessity. For me, today I'm going to be in three cities. I got to get there and I got

to get there on time. And so I'm not excited about getting back on a plane that people think that's a luxury. No, it isn't. It's a pain in the ass. Who wants to do that all day? I would rather transport, teletransport myself, as opposed to sit there, like in a plane for hours and hours. Not that I want to whine about it. I'm just saying, you know, oh, if I could only own a plane. Why would you want to own a plane? It's utility. Well, the deal is all I care about is that I have internet because I get a lot done on a plane. Well, you can. Starlink on planes works better than the hotel internet does. That's one thing. That's what we're looking at, is making sure that we've got great Starlink.

Who's their, if the rest, I don't care if they're dead or alive. Who do you look up to? I mean, Jesus, maybe, but who's somebody that you just are like? man, woman, old, young, dad are alive. Who inspires you the most? And maybe, obviously, I know your mother had a big impact. Yeah, of course, of course. But I think the guys that had most impact in terms of how I look at it was Steve Jobs and now Elon Musk, who's 100% signal. He has no noise.

It's made him very awkward socially, obviously. But look at what that guy's produced and how successfully is in so many different sectors. Every mandate he takes on, he's wildly successful. You know, it's just sort of, he really, really understands the metric of spending time on the things that matter. I've seen him walk out away from a conversation midstream when he realizes there's no value here. Yeah. I'm not going to waste him. You're allowed to walk out on meetings.

You don't feel value. No value. No value. And so I understand why he does it, and I think he's achieved a lot. He's a good example for people to understand the whole noise signal ratio. And I think, yeah, that's, I just look at executional skills. I look at what's the mandate? When does it get done?

Is it achieved yes or no? The rest is all BS. Like, you know, and people that come to me and say, look, I want you to invest in me. I've had a couple of failures, and I learned from my mistakes. And I asked them, you know, why did that last business fail? And they start blaming everybody else except themselves. Blame these two fingers instead of these. And I always say, you know, you own it.

It failed because you screwed up. The only person responsible for failure is you. and you spent the last half hour blaming everybody else, including the market, I'm not going to invest in you. If you don't understand why you failed, why would I want to invest in you? You should, every time you fail, you should own it. If you're an entrepreneur, it's not anybody else, it's you. You're the reason. And if people ask you, you should tell them the truth.

I love it. We're going to wrap up here in a minute. You know, I'm a big reader when I was 2007. my CPA handed me a book and he goes when's the last book you read I said 11th grade to kill a mockingbird he said why don't you read I said I don't really like books he said well read this one for me it's called the E myth by Michael Gerber and I came back the next day I said this is the best book ever he goes here's the ultimate sales machine then he said uh this is the richest man of Babylon and then I just started reading like crazy and I read several books a week what is

the most impactful book and there's several I guess depending on the sector but if you had to pick a book that was just like changed the way you do things how to win friends and influence people is probably one of my favorite but what would you say is a book that is the game changer i think keith richard's autobiography um i've read many books but that one really uh it's a huge book and it's it's all about his life but there's so many lessons to be learned in terms of longevity and um focus in that book about sticking on mandate and even through all of the problems he had including drug addiction and getting arrested and all this stuff, the guy knew what he wanted to do and what he was good at and

how to do it. And look at the success he's achieved. And I think everybody should read that book right from the early days when he was, you know, in junior school in England and just realized there's a lot of lessons. He's very transparent in it. It's there's some tough parts in there. But just his journey in his life, I think, is remarkable. And he's still at it now on mandate, doing what he does.

It's pretty remarkable. That is a book about perseverance, perseverance, and understanding the power of focus. It was really good. What do you think? You're way more connected. Every channel I turn on, you're on there. You pop up on social media.

I follow you. I like that you wear your boxers and a nice suit. But what do you really, I mean, you talk to a lot of people. I mean, shoot us straight. I want to hear the good, bad, and the ugly about what's coming. I'm an optimist, but I want to hear just you're a realist. Yeah, I stopped chilling for politicians about a decade ago, and I only care about policy now. So the reality is you don't make money in politics. You make money with policy. And so the policy and the reason the market has done so well in the last, you know, nine months is it's very pro-business. It's deregulating, which is very good. Tariffs are an issue, but it looks like they're going to be reciprocal at the end of the day. That's what the market believes now,

that if some country tariffs the U.S. at 10, the U.S. will tariff them at 10. So it's like a reciprocal tariff. Or if they want to go to zero, they'll get zero. I mean, whatever it is, we'll see. But it's not, it's not as bad as everybody thought on April 3rd. And so that's a why the markets recovered. I just look for pro-business policy and I definitely see that coming out of the administration. And that's, you know, for me, what I react to. If someone says to me, well, we're going to get to use natural gas again to generate power, then I'm going to invest in that, which we are. The previous administration banned that. Now we can do it. And so, or made it very hard to get permits. I shouldn't say banned it. They didn't even export it.

Now it looks like it's, you know, with the policy coming out of the energy zone, what I mean Doug Bergam. I read all his stuff and it says, we're open for business. Well, that's what I do. And so, you know, I kind of, I'm pretty optimistic like you are. I think things are going to work out quite nicely. I think the whole tariff thing will be resolved by the end of the year. For every country, we'll have their deal, whatever it's going to be.

And I just think you can't bet against the American economy. It just really works. And it works better when it's like. less regulated and it works better when it's pro-business and it works less when you let you know American entrepreneurs do their thing and they do interesting stuff and that's what it's worked for 200 years let's not mess with it the number one export of the United States is not energy or technology it's the American dream the job of any administration is to protect the American dream and die deregulating the economy that's what you're doing is Powell what do you think about Powell just real quick I

I know we've got to end, but with interest rates. He's going to be out in May. Yeah, so I mean, you know, what's important about the Fed, first of all, in every administration, the 101 handbook for the President has always bashed the Fed. Every president always bashes the Fed. It's a sport. And they always say, I want lower interest rates. The Fed's role is to remain independent, which gives us all confidence globally that they're going to do the right thing.

And they, you know, I don't know if they're going to lower rates. in September on the 16th. If they do, it'll be tiny, it'll be 25 basis points. There's no reason to lower rates right now. There's no, there's actually inflation, still above 3%. So it doesn't make sense to me. If you're saying you're going to lower rates, it's because you think the new normal is 3%. That's not the Fed mandate. Because he's going to be out of May, I don't think you can bash him. He just doesn't care. It's important that the Fed not give a poo-poo. That's what makes it work. The system really works. I don't want the Fed controlled by any president. None, zero. I just want to feel about Intel. Intel should be taken out behind the barn and shot.

I've heard you talk about that. I want to keep going, but I know we've got to end. Let's end on this way. It's a loser, and I don't want to be forced to put my tax dollars into a loser. We don't need the government to back up losers. This company lost its way 10 years ago. It should be sold for car parts. The other winner companies, that's how it works in technology, innovation. advances it, the losers go by the wayside, their protein gets reabsorbed. But Biden gave the money out. They just said... No, I think we should cancel that whole thing. That whole Chips and Science Act, I read it was a complete waste of money.

It was stupid. Picking winners and losers, the government can't do it. Take it all back, reduce the deficit, let these companies survive on their own. Either they're successful or they're not, Intel can always sell their parts. And that's what they should do. They have been very unsuccessful as managers for the last decade. It's where money goes to die. You know, it's a hard truth, but it's true. I don't want to be forced to invest in a dog.

Like, nobody even wants their products. What are they going to do, invest in it and then make people buy their products? Nobody wants their products. That's why they're failing in the first place. They missed, you know, wireless. They missed the cloud. They missed AI. These guys missed everything.

Yeah. And they should and deserve to be taken behind the barn and shot. And that's how, I don't mean that, you know, it's an analogy of taking their business and selling it for car parts, because that's what it's worth. All right, close us out, leave us with something for the listeners. And by the way, I really appreciate you being here, brother.

You got it. Well, I really enjoyed it. This was a fantastic day. If you ever got a chance to come to one of these sessions, you showed, it's just a group of entrepreneurs just talking about building businesses, and I think there's nothing more noble than that.