Welcome to the “Making of a DM.” Do you want the ultimate success? I have a strategy for you that I'm going to share today to reverse engineer your way to the ultimate success. With that said, let’s get started.
Mark: Coming to you live out of Parkland, I’m only here for a little bit longer. Maybe from the first of the month of June, we'll be rolling out back up to Ohio for the house, but I appreciate you guys being here. Let me know your name, city and state, a good shout out. I'd love to know who is on here and who is not. [01:00.0]
We're going to start talking today about reverse engineering your way to success, kind of what that means and all that. But I am tired. I'm not tired. I'm tired, but I'm not tired. Does that make sense? I got up so early at four o'clock this morning. I went to bed 9:30-ish, but I slept good and now just getting down to more car practice with Mark. All this stuff is going on, but it's a long day.
What I want to talk to you guys today about is this reverse engineering thing, kind of something interesting to me. I was talking with a buddy of mine. I think I told you guys this last week, but a buddy of mine that I’ve been working with since ’05, in the last three months literally he has accomplished every goal he set out to accomplish.
He literally accomplished every single goal with his new house, his new car, his new surgery thing he's working on. He kind of wants to do some surgery stuff to enhance his beauty, but it was a goal for him and it's been a long time coming. What's interesting about that is I was talking to him. I'm like, Man, it's so amazing that you've done so much, but now we’ve got to talk something bigger. [02:03.0]
Last night, I was hanging out with my buddy, Brian, and he's cranking up along with some business. He's running about a $90 to $100 million a year company and his goal is to sell something for a half a million dollars. That's his goal to sell. Half a billion, I should, say, 500+ million. We were talking at lunch about this and the truth is he's like, Yeah, man, I’d give it five more years. He's 48. He’ll be, what is that, 53 by then? And he's like, Man, I'd give it five years and I'm going to sell this thing for 500 million. I said what's interesting about that is a lot can happen in five years, meaning this thing could be worth billions, and if anybody could do it, it's Brian. I mean, the guy is a machine. It's awesome. We were talking about that.
Anyway, let's talk about reverse engineering your life. There's so much opportunity and so many obstacles I see people tossing in front of them. For example, for me, when you say, Hey, I want to be rich, I remember at 17, when I was 17, 18 years old at my house in Ohio, laying in my bed at my parents' house, I was thinking about how do I make 100 grand a year? And I started reverse engineering that in dollars and hours, because where I grew up, the only way to make 100 grand a year was the work hours and get paid X per hour. [03:11.1]
At 18 years old, who was going to pay me 27 bucks an hour? But I said, Who wouldn’t? I'm worth at least that, right? And I figured out how many hours I'd have to work and how much money I'd have to make 100 grand a year, right? That number has changed drastically, and if I know I'm going to buy a car, a house, build a business, I'm reverse engineering all the time because the focus is on the data.
The problem is, it's like, Dude, I want to be rich. What does it mean? Shit, I might be rich right now and not even know it. What does rich mean to you, right? But what does rich mean to you? At the end of the day, if it's a million dollars a year, a month, what is it? I was talking with another buddy yesterday and he was telling me, he was like, Dude, I just want to make a million dollars this year. He could easily do it. He's in the real estate space. He has other businesses going on, but he could easily do it. [04:07.0]
I'm like, Cool, well sell this piece of this business and you'll make 400 grand right off the bat, because it's an apartment building, whatever. He’s like, I don't want to kill the golden goose.
Brandon says money ain’t easy. My man, nothing is fucking easy and I don't need your fucking money, and not only that, you should just get off here if that's what you believe. But so who says it's easy? Easy is relative. Who says it's money? I don't care about money like that. I have a lot and I'm going to get a lot more, so no pyramid schemes here, buddy. Anyways, if you’d like to sign up for vitamins, shoot me an email. I was just joking.
But what do you want? And the thing is he wants a million a year. He could make 400 right off the bat and then, boom, right? You could go. He could get going. He'd be closer to his million dollars, but he's not, because in his brain, he'd rather make 2,000 a month and make 400,000 out of the gate, you know what I mean? [05:01.0]
For me, at the end of the day, for what he's trying to accomplish, his brain is telling something and his actions are doing something totally different. This is why I talk about data, not drama. At the end of the day for us, it's like, we have to know what we really want, and if you want a million dollars, we have to do what it takes to get a million dollars. Maybe that's not what you want. I don't know why you wouldn't want that, but if that's not what you want, what do you want? More time? If you want more time, you’ve got to get more money. You want more money, you have to build a better business. You’ve got to build a better plan. You've got to build a better mousetrap, if you will, of what you're trying to do.
If I want to travel, I reverse engineer what it's going to look like. It's called planning, right? We do this with travel all the time. I don't know why we're not going it with our lives at that next level, you know what I mean? For you, let's say, a million dollars. I need to make $83,333 a month. That is so easy to do if you're in the right industry and you have the right pieces. [05:57.2]
I'm not saying you're coming out of the gate doing this. It's not that at all. But it's easy to do a million dollars a year. The world wouldn't even know it's even gone. It's a million bucks a year. What are you doing to get it? What are you offering to the world? What are you consuming? What are you creating? We've got to reverse engineer this.
My buddy, Tim, is on this whole thing where he's creating a million dollars in revenue in the next 30 days. He's day 4 into it and he's sharing a story about the journey of what he's going and how he's allocating the money. Guys, you understand, you can make a million dollars fairly quickly once you have the mindset, the team and the pieces to make it a reality.
Most of you are trying to figure out how to make a million dollars in your lifetime. Some people try to figure out how to make a million dollars a year. Some people are trying to figure out how to make a million dollars a month. Some people are trying to figure out how to make a million dollars a minute. It's all relative. That's why I always say your words are so powerful. You can't reverse engineer something if you don't know what you really want. You're out there just tossing words around like it means, Hey, I want to be rich. Cool. I've never met someone that says they don't want to be rich, but what does rich mean? How much do you want? Are you willing to do the work? [07:06.0]
Traction, a great book for business building, it's called. Why Do You Keep Flexing Your Friends Cash? What do you want? Let's create the path and let's go get it. See, when you throw out loosey-goosey terms, they can't help you because you might be right at the edge and quit, because you're trying to chase something that's not real. You don't know if it's real or not.
Back to the point of my buddy. I was talking yesterday. He was like, Dude, I have these properties that make about $23 per asset, X, Y, Z per month, and this and that. I was like, That's a long way to get to a million dollars a year at 23 bucks a month. You need 6,000 units to do that and that's a lot to do, and a lot of debt. Cool with that. Cool, it’s good debt, but you’ve just got to be cool with managing that debt load. There are a lot easier ways to get a million dollars a year, a lot easier ways. I'm not trying to pull him one way or the other. I'm just saying we have to get clear on what we want. [08:03.1]
If you don't want a million a year, in his brain, what's going to happen mid-year is he doesn't have his million dollars and he’s only halfway there. One deal and he could be almost at a million dollars. One deal, and he won't do it because in his brain it's going to kill the golden goose and he’s just going to keep chugging along, keeping muling it out. Yet it’s like, dude, it’s a misalignment of your goals. It doesn't make sense and the last thing I would want is you guys to give up or stop or quit moving towards your objectives because you feel like, I just want to be rich.
You might have 10 million bucks in the bank and not feel rich. I get it. But what are your goals? What are your plans? What are your objectives? What's your bigger vision? Who are you sharing it with? All this stuff, I remember. I've always been that guy that thinks about where I'm going to be, not with where I'm at, but where I'm going to be. So, I'm present today, but I'm also plotting for the future. I really am. I want to be here long term. I'm thinking about that. Shit, I could walk outside and be struck by lightning, I guess, but I'm not that lucky, but we need to plot this shit. [09:05.7]
What does your team look like five years from now? What do you want in your bank account when you open it up 12 months from now? What's your real goal? If you're saying a million dollars, but all your actions, all your activities are $10-, $15-an-hour activities, you're always going to be frustrated because it's fleeting you constantly. You're never going to get close to it. Your brain is like, I want this million dollars. All your actions, you think that that's when it gets you there, it's just activity. It's not equal activity. It's not all created equal. High-level thinking, execution at the highest level is what makes you money.
I just want you guys to know, whatever that number is, you’ve got to put it in front of you. In Traction, he talked about this, GWC, “Get it. Want it. Capacity to do it.” I know everyone wants a million dollars. Very few have the capacity to do it, very few, because they're not willing to do the work to get it. They don't have any thoughts. They're like, Oh, I got a degree on my wall. I don't need to learn anything. I'm smart. Okay, your bank account is not showing that you want a million still. How are we going to get it? Go back to the data. [10:12.2]
For example, Mark, I'm going to do 10 deals this month. Cool, what's your conversion rate? Twenty percent. Awesome, how many people are going to make offers to today? That's how you reverse engineered deal flow. You know that, right? I want to do 10 deals a month. My conversion rate is 20%, so one out of five. I need to talk to bare bones 50 people do 10 deals, bare bones. How many offers did you make today? If every day at two o'clock on my phone, it says, Make three offers, have you made your three offers? By 2:00 p.m. every day, seven days a week, I’ve made at least three offers and I’ve been doing this for months on months, on years on years, on every 10. I’ve been doing it forever. [10:59.3]
And when I say make an offer, it's not making an offer on your house. Maybe I sit in at lunch. I was talking to this guy and I'm like, Dude, you should know my boy, Joe. They're doing this. They're going to that. Just connect. Boom, 300 to 500 grand right there for him and Joe, right? That was an offer. I connected the two. I offered them an opportunity to get in a deal. They got in the deal. They’re connecting, blah, blah, blah. That's one-off, right? It doesn't stop. It never ends. You're making offers all the time. So, we have to look at this at a bigger picture. My team says, Mark, it's not working. Cool, what's not working? Blah, blah, blah. All I say is, Data, what's the data?
See, the problem is you get your emotions tied to these things and you actually start believing your own B.S. I’m doing all the work. Show me. You don't understand, I'm busy. Show me. What does the data say? I don't care if you're working hard. I don't care if your kids don't see you. I don't care if your wife is yelling at you. I don't care. You told me you want to make a million dollars. You're telling me you're doing all this work. Show me the data to back it up. That's all I care about. [12:03.9]
You guys understand that, there's too much emotional warfare going on in your brain, you're playing emotional gymnastics every day. We all do this, some way more than others, but you've got all this emotional baggage and crazy goofy stuff going on, and this emotional warfare is messing with you. It's delusional thinking.
I was talking with John yesterday about delusional thinking. Delusional thinking is a real thing. You know what it is, guys. If my ratings go up, Beacon is going to take all the credit and then say they would come in and see him. That's how he rolls.
Your delusional thinking is actually holding you back. It helps you as well if you understand you’re delusional, but it also holds you back for massive success, because you act like you're doing what millionaires do. Whenever you're active and you do this, it’s what a hundredaire does, someone who makes a hundred bucks, someone who has a thousand in the bank but you're rolling like you have 20 million in the bank. It's a problem. It's delusion. It's not serving you. [13:00.9]
Again, I'm here just to help you. I don't care what you do or whatever, but at the end of the day, there’s enough opportunity, enough money, and enough pieces and people to win at the highest level, but you’ve got to know what you're winning at. You’ve got to reverse engineer these steps.
Hey, Mark, I want to build a company. Cool, what are you doing? Reverse engineer. Mark, I'm at 200,000. I want to make a million. Okay, cool, what does that look like? How many people are on the team? What do the profits look like?
By the way, do you want a million dollar business a year, gross, net, net-net, there are a lot of variables to that $1 million thing, you know what I mean? To make a million dollars gross, shit, that's ultra easy. To make a million net before you pay yourself, it's a little bit different game, but after you pay yourself and everything else, net-net, there should be a million dollars sitting in there to solve the game. Now, if you're trucking along and making a million a year, but you're only keeping 500 bucks a year, that's a problem. Your goals are misaligned with the reverse engineering effect, so you need to get focused on what you really want. [14:00.6]
If you have questions, I'd love to answer them. But how much do you want to make? How much do you want in the bank? How much do you want in the future? Are you plotting and building? Are you making two offers, three offers a day? Are you connecting with people?
Everyone's like, Dude, getting private money is hard. Okay, I don't know what that means, but okay. How many offers? How many people have you asked for money today from? Well, I haven't asked anybody. What are you saying? You say, Hey, do you have money to invest in a deal? That's one way to say it, or, Hey, have you ever thought about investing in real estate, parking your cash, getting great ROI, secured by an asset that you build, touch, feel, see and smell? That's another way to offer it and ask. No, you're just talking shit. It's hard. It's not hard. You're not hardly doing it. You're hardly doing it, I should say. That's what's hard.
Show me the data. That's all you really care about and the problem is you know you don't have any data to back up with conversation. You're all talk. I used to do the same stuff. It used to make me feel good. I was delusional. Man, I worked so hard today. I put in 18 hours a day. Okay, I never got any. I didn't accomplish anything. I didn't close any deals. I didn't talk to any sellers. I didn’t talk to any buyers. Kind of just dug around all day. [15:09.1]
Yeah, I put in 18 hours. The truth is I put in 24 hours. I was awake or live for 24 hours, but I'm not getting closer to my goal. Then you just start building this momentum of stress up. You get overwhelmed. You get frustrated. You get pissed off, get anxiety attacks, you know what I mean? This is the kind of stuff that happens as you start developing.
We’ve got to get clear, guys. The bigger you get, the more important this is because you can get really pulled in a lot of directions. You guys saw recently that guy that sold that company to Microsoft for a couple billion dollars. I think it's called Minecraft. I don't know what the video game is. It’s got 150, 160 million users around the world. He's sold it to Microsoft for billions of dollars and then he wrote this whole article about how he was super stressed or overwhelmed, really lonely, scared, lonely, overwhelmed, all this shit that we all deal with. For some reason, when you get money, you think this solves problems. Money does not solve that problem. That's a piece of you that you have to solve. You have to work. [16:11.1]
It's never solved, by the way. You're always working on it, just like an alcoholic has to always work and be conscious of where they're at, what they're doing at different stages, etc., right? Just because someone gets a lot of money, it doesn't mean they’ve got their stuff figured out. Just because someone doesn't have any money… This is all delusional.
We see this like, Oh, what do they have to complain about? They're billionaires. I mean, you're assuming it's all about the money. People are humans. We have problems. We have emotional warfare 24/7 going on, dealing with our past and/or not dealing with our past. Maybe money actually heightens it. Money just heightens who you are and what you're at. If you're ultra-anxious now and you get a lot of money, you're going to be massively anxious then, right? Okay, delusional thinking is so powerful and true. The right activity leads to data, [unlearn 16:54.7] Justin.
CK knows this better than anybody. My calls with him. He'll tell me everything about everything and I don't even know what the hell he said. I'm like, Dude, what's the data? That's all I care about. If anybody knows CK, they know that's true. He's a talker and he's a great guy clearly, but less talk, more action, right? For all of us. [17:13.5]
That's what I think about data. By the way, everything I'm telling you, I do this to myself all the time. When I'm having a half-assed day and I'm like, blah, blah, blah, but I'm busy. I'm on the run. I'm thinking about this, thinking about that. I'm going, Mark, back to data. What’s the data? Dude, I'm telling you, two o'clock things going to chirp to me, it's going to say multiple offers. How many offers it’ll say. I'm a changer.
I try to push myself as soon as it says the time. Make three offers by 2:00 p.m. Close deals by 3:00 p.m. 5:00 p.m. is buffer time. 6:00 p.m., eat dinner with loved ones. 7:00 p.m., relax and read, check lead flows, deal flows, easy peasy. These are alarms I have set on my phone for years and the only thing I do is keep adding more to them. Three offers a day, times 30 days a month, that's 90 offers. Who do you think does more deals? The guy that makes 90 offers a month or the guy that thinks about making 100 offers a day and makes one offer a month? Who wins the game? Who wins the game? [18:12.7]
By the way, you don't stop at 3:00. That's just by two o'clock you have to make three offers minimum. In the real estate company, we always talk about three by three, make three contacts and make three offers by 9:00 a.m. People are up and moving to work. They're shaking their bacon. If you can get three offers on three prospects on the phone by 9:00 a.m., you're going to have a good day. You're going to have a good week and have a good month.
The thing is most of the people are only talking about the end result, not the actions to get the results. See, the problem is with the end result, that's a lagging indicator of activity prior. That's why the reverse engineering effect is so important. That's why the data is ultra-keen in the situation, because if you're not doing the work today, what you're planning on in the future will never come to fruition, because it's not like you wake up and say, I'm going to do a deal today, and do a deal and it closes that moment. No, it's processed in real estate seven to 21 days, in my experience, with cash deals with title work, getting in the house, getting the tenant out or moving the seller out. There's a million different things that go on, or longer because I’ve been in deals that take forever. [19:18.3]
For you, we’ve got to be thinking strategically about the data. Is it data or data? Whatever it is, data or data. You’re going to be focusing on what you really want and you’ve got to reverse engineer to get those things. If you're not going to work, it’s just what it is. It's just like losing weight, calories in, calories out. If you're working out, you know you’ve probably burned 2,000 or 3,000 calories a day, just idle calories, but then replenishing your body, and then you work out and you burn another 600 to 800, and then you eat less calories. You're going to lose weight. It's absolutely mathematically the only way. That's how it works.
So, thinking about you guys. Reverse engineer this stuff up, guys. If you have any questions, I'd love to take them. I have 25 minutes today for you. [20:00.6]
I’ve got some cool things popping. We're doing some neat things in the market, stock market that is, behind the scenes, helping. I'm participating in some cool stuff. Hopefully, it starts cranking out June 1st-Ish. I might keep you guys posted up on that. If it goes well, definitely you'll hear about it. If it doesn't, just remind me. I’ll tell you anyone. It could go well, or it could go bad. It could be a $200,000 mess, whatever, but I'm in to win, and 200 gees, that's just the beginning of what we could do with it. I want to put a lot more into it. I just want to see, kind of get proof of concept and then develop out from there.
We've got some neat things going on in our immediate world, really doubling down in that space with marketing. I really am. Today at 10:30 and my team, I talked to those guys on the media side. I really want to spend a million dollars a month in traffic. It's hard to do. I can't do it actually. Right now, the traffic is there, but it starts getting sloppy. After 500,000 or 600,000 a month in traffic, it starts getting a little sloppy in my world. Certainly, start having some diminishing return effects. The team can’t keep up, so you kind of have a lot of waste on the backside. This is stuff you want into KPI management, i.e. data. We're trying to push it harder. I really, really do want to get to a million a month on that side. [21:11.7]
You can do it with Facebook. You can easily spend a million dollars a month in Facebook, but not for that kind of company and what we do. It's just that we've tried it. We've spent a lot of money. It's just not converting at the right rate for us, so we kind of pulled the plug on that.
But how do we spend more money? See, the questions we're asking over here are way different now. How do we spend more money? Not how do we save more money? How do we spend more? If someone is on my team, trying to figure out how to save money on an image, Hey, how do I save $3? I just spent $40 trying to save $3, that's a problem. That's a cultural problem and we're driving that narrative every day. At 10:30 today, they'll hear it again. How do we spend more money?
See, the thing is, when you take your focus off of just the money piece and detach the emotional process of money, it's only money, but yet we are so messed up in the head about money—I talked about this in financial PTSD show I did—we have such a weird relationship with cash. I really don't care about money. I want a lot, I'm going to get a lot and I have a lot, but not really for where I want to be. I have nothing. It's like that weird game I play in my head. [22:14.0]
It's all relative, but I do know there's a lot of money out there and I want my share. I want more. I want to give back. I want to produce. I want to create, and just get more and leave a big legacy for the family, a big legacy for the charities I care about and stuff like that. But you’ve got to reverse engineering and stuff and you got to ask your team, How do you spend more money? Not like, How do we get better deals from these leads we already have? That conversation should be going on anyway, but yet you've got to still keep the machine rolling on the front end.
Do you think your company is making money or losing money if you're spending a million a month, million a month, two million? How high can we go? I'd like to spend 100 grand a day. That works. Why wouldn't you? You don't understand, man, it's $100,000. That doesn't mean anything. Spend 100 grand a day, make 120 tomorrow. Why wouldn't you? It's 20% return in 24 hours. Pretty good deal, and those opportunities are out there. It's just a matter of managing them and growing them, more importantly, me not bottle-necking it, me getting over my money issues, me getting over this weird conversation we have all the time like we'd go full forward and then we pull back. [23:19.3]
So, reverse engineer. It's pretty cool. It’ll get you excited. Don't think, though, your reverse engineering gets done without you doing the work. You’ve still got to do the work. You’ve got to push. You’ve got to plot. You’ve got to get around people that don't want to help you through that journey. There's an opportunity if you guys own it.
By the way, if anybody here owns an e-com store making at least 200 grand a year minimum, I'm looking to buy. We do have cash. I'm buying up stuff like that all day long right now and I want to buy more. We have real capital. I have a great team in place to help deploy it if it's a good fit. I'm interested in acquiring top-quality products in the e-com space stuff.
I would be open to Amazon FBA and all that. That's not my thing thing, but I'd be open to that if you have something like that or know someone that needs to sell, or maybe a husband or wife has started something 10 years ago, a passion project, and it's getting a little bit bigger than they can handle and they just want to exit it. I'd be interested in that. [24:13.6]
If you guys know of anybody, that's me, by the way, making an offer today. That's one of my offers today made one at my golf coach today with Mark, about him starting his own thing, because those guys have got pretty beat up, these golf coaches. They didn't work for 60, 90 days, and the only way they make money is by working per hour doing golf coaching, so it’s a pretty rough situation for those guys, so I made an offer to him on what to do. It's not pay me money, by the way. I'm actually making an offer to buy something. I'm making an offer to invest in him, to help him grow, i.e. yes, I’ll make money eventually, maybe, but also I can lose money and time and energy. I'm more worried about the time and energy of loss.
That's why I like to buy and acquire existing companies that are producing revenue. It might not be huge net revenue at 200, but I'd be open to looking at it. If you guys know anybody, keep me posted. I'm in. We can go up to $20 million right now in cash. If the deal is right, I have the team, I have the people and I'm ready to buy right now. We're ready. [25:10.3]
Appreciate you guys being here. If you guys have any questions, hit me up. Come to the show tomorrow 8:30 to 9:00, 9:30-ish, whatever, and, hopefully, if I do this long enough, Spotify will be sending me a big check for $100 million dollars plus. The truth is you guys saw Joe Rogan sold a show for 100 million to Spotify.
I don't know the full deal details, but if he only sold that for 100 million, he got ripped off. It was a terrible agent, terrible negotiator, because the publicity alone that Spotify gets, and I've never used Spotify in my life, and the publicity that Spotify will get in the way they're going to do the content management for Joe, he has so many eyeballs and so much opportunity, they'll make that a hundred million back in the first quarter with advertisement that they bought his company. It would be a no brainer at 100 million. Joe seems like a pretty smart guy. Hopefully, he’s got a better deal on the backside where there will be some residual revenue off the longevity of that name. Shit, I think Howard Stern got paid, what, 500 million with a series? So, multiple times I think. [26:10.8]
Anyway, appreciate you guys being here. Thinking about you guys. Hope you have an amazing day. Make it count. Peace.
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