20 Questions Billionaires Get Asked Every Day

Hey everyone, so I've decided to answer the top questions people ask from billionaires. Here we go. Lots of people want to start a business and it seems that every dinner party, because I'm a shark tank, I end up being the guy in the corner that everybody comes up to and says hey I have this idea. Lots and lots and lots of ideas but you know what the most common question I hear is how do I actually start? Here's my answer. Sell something. Never take advice from somebody who isn't financially invested in the outcome. And I don't mean as an investor, I mean a customer. Just call a customer and go out there and sell something. When Damon started Fugu, he didn't hire a whole bunch of researchers. He took a t-shirt, stood on a street corner, sold it. When I started my first tech business, I didn't spend years thinking about what should I do, the products you should have. I called up a big customer and I sold it to them. If you want to start a business, go sell something. The other day somebody came up to me and they said Robert, tell me about a business that I can start, make a lot of money and not have to spend a lot of time with. You know what my advice was? Don't get into business. Even easy businesses that you think are going to be easy and not require a lot of hands-on, guess what? At the beginning they're all gonna suck your time, they're all gonna suck your cash and they're all really hard. Business is just hard. It takes many years to get to easy. Don't be fooled by trying to start something easy. You know, one of the things that people always talk to me about is work-life balance and they say, my gosh, you're such a great dad, you're always there for your kids, you seem to go to everything, even at the school. But here's the reality, it's taken me many years to get to this point. When you start, there is no work-life balance. It's one of the big lies that people tell you. A business is a living, breathing thing. When it needs to eat, you have to feed it. It doesn't care that you have a school play, it doesn't care that you want to work out, it doesn't care about any of those things. A business is a living, breathing thing. I've seen a lot of businesses start and I've seen a lot of businesses fail. One of the most common mistakes that, in my experience, people make when they start a business is they're not clear what the value proposition to the customer is. They look at it through their lens. So let me give you a quick example. You heard the famous, sell me this pen. Do you know what the right answer to that is? It's not selling the pen, it's before I sell you the pen, tell me who I'm selling the business to. Value is not through your eyes, value isn't through the eyes of the customer. There's an old saying and a famous video from Steve Jobs that talks about product and how to know you have a good product. Steve Jobs said, people don't know they need a product until you tell them about it. Other people say you shouldn't create a product until you have an identified customer experience. Here's my view on it. It doesn't really matter if your product is selling a lot at the beginning or not, that doesn't necessarily identify a hot market. You know what does? A fanatical customer experience. When you sell a product and you give it to the customer and they look at it and they say, I cannot live without this, then you're onto something. Look for the fanatical experience and engagement from your customers, not always the sales. I mean, of course, if you're not selling anything, you're going to go out of business. One day I was talking to one of my old HR VPs and we're talking about what makes a great candidate. And she said, we want to hire somebody who's failed before because that makes them better today. And I was like, Oh my God, that is such bullshit. I don't want people that failed before. I don't want to hire somebody who's had a business run into the ground. Big failure is bad. I don't like entrepreneurs to walk in and say, I had a business and went bankrupt and failed. I'm okay with a small exit, but I don't want complete failure. I want little pivots along the way. So failure is not about big failure. Failure is little things and constant adaptation. You know, when you become successful, one of the most common questions people ask you is if you had to do it again, what would you do different? I've really thought about this question because it didn't have a good answer because I always think you're the product of everything that's happened to you. But you know, media wants a simple answer. So I've really thought about it. Here's my answer. What would I do different if I had to do it all over again? I would dream bigger. My limitation, reason I'm only a billionaire in Australia because of the exchange rate is I didn't think bigger. My capacity for imagining this life, I didn't have that capacity. I really believe a mind once expanded can never go back to its original size. Dream big, but work your ass off. The other day I was doing a speech and somebody came up to me and said, oh my gosh, I wish I was successful. My life would be so much easier. I would be happy every day and all my problems will go away. And I'm like, are you kidding me? People have this misconception of success, that it's finite, that there's this magic door you walk through and it says success on the door. And once you walk through that door, it's all unicorns and puppy dogs and lollipops. Guess what? The problems just get bigger. Let me tell you this. If you're not happy today with nothing, striving, working hard, you're not going to be happy with lots of money either. Happiness is not a result of a finite goal. Happiness is just who you are. Great wealth amplifies exactly who you are right now. Here's an amazing piece of advice that I had to learn that I didn't do. And it's about productivity and how to scale your business. I used to think that I was really good at managing time and knowing all the important things I have to do every day. But guess what? Here's a simple trick somebody gave me. They said to me, you're too busy. You have too much going on. And this is a hack that they gave me. They said, every morning, wake up, take a piece of paper and write down three things, not five, not 10, not 20. Write down three things you have to accomplish today, no matter what. Today, not tomorrow. Do not go to sleep until these three things are done. So what I used to do is wake up every day, forget all the noise and distraction, and write down those three things. Not necessarily tackle them, but my day did not end until those three things are done. Constant forward momentum. I'm invested in a lot of business in the 20 years of Shark Tank, Dragon's Den, Shark Tank Australia. And there's a couple of red flags that really come out for me. The first one is a little controversial for most people. Number one is, I don't want an entrepreneur that's failed. I don't want to invest in somebody that started a business and had to completely go away. I'm okay with little failure or consultation or not a great exit, but I don't want somebody that gave up on something and had it fail. The other one is, I want an entrepreneur who's solid and mentally together. Show me a small business that's in trouble and I'll show you an entrepreneur that's got problems. And then number three is, if you don't understand your numbers, and I don't mean balance sheet income statement, I mean the heartbeat of your business. Every business has two or three key stats that you need to know every day. If I wake you up at two in the morning, you got to know that stat. In my business, it was cash flow, but in your business, it may be completely different. You know, motivation is really hard. It's easy to be motivated when things are going your way. I always say, if you can be motivated when you're having a crappy day and it's raining and your dog bit you and your friends hate you and your spouse doesn't like you on that day and your kids are yelling at you, when nothing's going right and you feel like failure in every part of your body. If you can get up on those days and do the things that need to be done, that's motivation. It's a great saying I heard a long time ago, which is, a great entrepreneur has the ability to go from failure to failure without any lack of enthusiasm. That's motivation. Everyone wants to start a business and people are always asking me, what kind of a business should I start? Here's the most common mistake I see young entrepreneurs making. And what's the best analogy? It's, think of it this way, there's a piece of cheese and all the entrepreneurs are mice and they're all screwing around. They go after that piece of cheese and then tomorrow there's a piece of cheese over here and everybody goes this way. Wayne Gretzky said it best, don't go where the puck is, go where you think the puck is going. Don't get into a business that everybody else is getting into. Get into a business that's going to be the next wave. AI. AI is still super hot. Get into that. You got to know where the puck is going to go. I just got a text from somebody asking me to be their mentor. And it's one of the common things that I hear a lot of people talk about is, can you mentor me? Or how do I find a good mentor? And then people ask me, what was some of the advice you got from a great mentor? I always struggle with that question. Let me tell you why. Because advice is relative to where you are in a situation. Somebody gives me great advice on something and I'm not ready to hear it. I'm not going to apply it. The beauty of life is there are so many great people. Not just me, but there's so many people you can learn from, from YouTube University. But it applies to where you are in your journey. Don't look for generalities in advice. Look for people that can mentor you on a specific problem that you're having now. There is no one pill that answers everything. What's really interesting about business is how dynamic it is and how much it changes and how much it ebbs and flows. One of the biggest impacts that I'm seeing in business that I really believe in is customization. People don't want to buy or get something that everybody else can give. And with the internet and especially with AI, you can recreate and duplicate and scale almost anything. I think what's going to happen is if you can create a product or you can create an experience that feels highly personal to me and customized, I think that's always going to stand out. Sales is the lifeblood of every business. I mean, I have lots of engineers and accounting people, all kinds of people that want to start a business and always say to me, oh my gosh, I'm so scared of business. I say, why? And they say, well, I'm not very good at sales. So we say to them, look, there's a playbook on how to do sales, lots of sales books, but let me give you a piece of advice that's not in any of those books. Authenticity is impossible to replicate. So I had a guy that worked for me years ago and he was awful at sales. Today, he's one of the best sales guys in the world. And the reason he was awful at sales, he wasn't very confident. He didn't know how to talk to people and he was brand new at it. So I sat down with him. He knew all the basics. So we're going out in the sales call. Here's what I said to him. When we go on this call, when the meeting starts, tell the customer, you are so nervous. This is your very first sales call. We go there. He does that. And guess what? The customer wants to help him. People are nicer than you think. And they want to help you, especially when you're young and you're starting out. Now, here's the problem. He kept doing this for the next hundred sales calls and eventually it wasn't authentic. But when you're starting out and you're an engineer, an accountant, just tell people, I've never done sales. Here's why I believe in the product. People want to help you. Money's hard and you can make lots of mistakes with money. The thing I've learned over time is you want to be very careful with mistakes you make with money. Because once you spend a dollar, it's gone. It ain't coming back. One of the biggest mistakes I made was I was in my 20s and I invested in a stock because my godfather told me it was going to go through the roof and we're going to make a ton of money on it. I knew nothing about the stock market. I knew nothing about the stock. I didn't even know what the company did. You know what I saw? I didn't see a stock. I saw easy money. So I took $2,500 and I don't think I even had $2,500. I put half of it on a credit card. And guess what happened to the stock? The company went away. The stock went from $2,500 to I think $200. And because I bought it on margin, I had to borrow money from my parents. So embarrassing to pay it off. Biggest mistake I've made that you shouldn't make, don't chase easy money because there's no such thing. As you start your company, it gets bigger. All kinds of people will start telling you about scale, scale, scale, scale. Here's one of the biggest myths I've learned about scale. And don't forget, I had little companies doing $200,000 a year with two employees. And I had big companies, billion dollars a year with a thousand people. Here's the biggest myth about scale. You cannot sanitize scale and make it clean and repetitive and productive every single day. There's a certain amount of chaos in scale, no matter what you do. If your company is growing, there's going to be chaos. You have to learn to embrace the chaos, but make sure it doesn't break you. I think it was season four of Shark Tank in the US. This couple came out and they were pitching to us. And I think they said something, I didn't really understand the question. And they said to me, hey, you're not listening to what we're saying. And I think I was having a bad day. And I probably was hangry, didn't eat breakfast. And I said to him, hang on a second. It is not my responsibility to listen to you. It's your responsibility to be heard. The biggest investment I've ever made in myself and that you can make in yourself is learning how to communicate. If you can't communicate clearly, no one's going to listen to you. It doesn't matter if you have the best idea or the best product. But if you can't communicate with people and get them to understand it, you're never going to be successful. There's a great quote. So I love to play tennis. There's a great quote at this little tennis club I'm a member at in Newport Beach in California. And it's from Martina Navratilova. And I love this quote. And it says, pressure is a privilege of success. Love that. So here's the point. The more successful you get, the more pressure you're going to have. You're never going to go away from pressure. You're always going to have pressure. So as the pressure builds, how do you make decisions? So there's two caveats I use. In general, my knee jerk reaction is usually the right one. Number two, never make a decision that will kill your business. Big risks like that, I'm very, very wary of. So number one, your gut feel is probably the right feel. And number two, don't make big decisions that could kill your business. And my final point is sleep on it. In a really, really big decision, you have to have clarity of mind. So take in all the data, then get away from it, sleep on it, wake up tomorrow morning, and how you feel right away is probably the right way. Leadership is really hard. I think I was and am a good leader. I was probably not a great manager, but I think I was a pretty good leader. And in general, I think people want to be let, not managed. So my personal feeling is what is great trait of some of the leaders I've seen. And by the way, I've had dinner with all kinds of great leaders. I've had dinner with the president of France. I've had dinner with the prime minister of Canada. I've had dinner with some of the most successful business people in the world, on and on and on. But I actually think where I got the lesson and where the lesson is, it's in the Bible. And what Jesus said to his disciples is, don't tell people, I'm paraphrasing, but what Jesus said to his disciples is, don't tell people what to do. Teach ye with parables. Great leaders have the ability to tell a great story. And a great story engages the audience and engages people. Lead others with a great story. I hope you enjoyed that. If you have any questions, please let me know. Don't forget to subscribe.