My Business Experience In A Nutshell | Life Lessons I've Learned

The first business lesson I learned was actually when I was 17 years old and I got grounded to pick up walnuts because I was sneaking away to see my girlfriend. My dad and mom were going on vacation and they said I needed to pick all the walnuts up so I went to school the next day and saw a note on a locker for a senior fund drive. They wanted to raise a thousand dollars so I invited all the seniors to come out and help me pick up walnuts and we cleaned the walnut orchard within three days and I didn't have to touch the walnuts. I just got to tell everybody what to do. I sold the walnuts before my parents got home. I cleaned the orchard because I had so many people helping me and what were the lessons? The more people you throw at a problem the faster it gets solved. Price is only an issue in the absence of value. The value was the parents helping their kids for their senior class. They did all the work for me and the third lesson is prices are always made up. If people were willing to pay the prices then you should be willing to charge them. I sold my business for 150 million dollars and here are the five lessons I learned when I sold my business. Lesson number one, be careful who you sell to. You're not always going to want to be trapped working with certain people just because they paid you money. Lesson number two, make sure you include your team in the sale so you have someone to do all the heavy lifting once it's sold. Lesson number three, negotiate on the front end all the benefits of the sale. Don't assume a buyer is going to treat you any differently once they've closed. They will live by the agreement. They won't offer you more. Lesson number four, be emotionally prepared. It's like raising your children and then having them go off to college. You will detach. Have to emotionally detach from your business but you still need to drive performance in your business. And lesson number five, build a business that represents quality, represents impact, represents a mission, a vision, a purpose and the business will live beyond you and it'll be something you can be full pride about 10 years down the road when your business is still there doing what you established it to do. It's purpose, it's mission, it's vision with people who still love doing it. My favorite lesson from my favorite book, well obviously Grant Cardone is my business partner. My favorite lesson is the concept of the 10x rule which is whatever you're thinking about, whatever you think you want to accomplish, 10x it because you're going to work hard anyway. You smarter to get to your goals and objectives. Most people that I meet that accomplish their goals wish they had thought bigger and created more activity and did more. So my number one is the 10x rule. The most important lesson I've learned from my business partner, mentor and dear friend Grant Cardone himself is small thinking will always get small results. So it's real simple right, it's math. If you are thinking small and you achieve it and you feel like you've arrived then you didn't really stretch yourself as far as what you're capable of doing. So think bigger, push harder and be more innovative in your approach on how to get there. It's the total sum of all activity multiplied and amplified through everyone that shares a mission, vision, value and purpose that allows you to build something huge. So if you have small thinking you have less people you can bring on that journey with you which means you have to do everything which is why you stay small. If you have a huge thinking and you bring lots of people with you like I did on the Walnut Orchard then that allows other people to see their success inside of your success which allows them to propel you to something huge. Small thinking always gets small results. Huge thinking allows others to help you achieve and attain that goal by propelling that vision forward. If I could have a dinner with anybody that's dead or alive the person I would like to spend time talking to is actually Warren Buffett and the reason for that is Warren has been so consistent at creating wealth over long periods of time that I would love to get insight and perspective into what he thought about in his 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and how he was so methodical in programming his approach to value creation. I would love to have that conversation with him and I'd love to learn from him on exactly how he went through that process. My biggest lesson from Warren Buffett is that at 27 years old he was worth 10 million dollars. At 47 years old he was worth 75 million dollars and at 53 years old he was worth 350 million. Those are actual hard numbers from his period of time and my lesson was if I just followed and pursued those targets I would accomplish them.