How to Negotiate and Invest Like A Shark with Daymond John
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I'm going to ask the person, what do they want from me? They want money from me. They want services, time, energy. What do they want from me? So I break down the business and try to understand like I think we talk about you'll always find untapped value in it. But let's really think about business. It's super simple.

increase sales, reduce costs, right? Only three ways to ever deal with a customer. Acquire a new one, upsell a current one, make one buy more frequently. Yeah, only three ways. That's it, right? So when you start looking at these forms of how you're doing it, well, is your margins big, big enough? And you are, are you talking directly to your customer or are you seven steps away from your customer, right? Because when I first started in business, I was seven steps away. I made a line.

Hopefully the department store bought the line. If they bought the line, then I would hopefully get it in on time. Once I get it in on time, hopefully the kid took it out of the distribution center or the distribution center center on time and took it out of the back. The kid who's so busy on Instagram looking now for college and girls or boys.

Right? Then when they put it on the rack, who bought it? Did the mother buy it for herself? Did she buy it for as a gift? And if she didn't buy it, why didn't she buy it? And if she went home, why did she return it? I was seven steps away. So how do you shrink that process and say I'm one step away? Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing,

sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode.

Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.

All right, I got Damon John here. How are you? Midlife crisis, that's why I'm trying to look cool today. About to turn 55, baby. 55! You see the glasses, the back of my hat? It looks good, man. You got the FUBU shirt on. I can't do this on Shark Tank. You know what I'm saying? I gotcha. We got that out of the way. Hold on, I kept it real for a second. I love it. Let's go to the Shark Tank. That's a good clip.

All right, let's go to Shark Tank, Damon. Hey, how you doing, man? I'm doing great. I'm well, thank you. Thank you for being here. We had dinner last night. Joe Posh gave me a call last week. Yeah. And he's like, listen, do you want to go to dinner? Great group of guys. Damon John's going to be there. And I was like, yeah, that'd be great. I'd love to meet him. And, you know, as usual, big fan of your books. Thank you. Big fan of the FUBU success. Shark Tank, I believe you wrote nine books. No, I wrote...

Six. Six. Six, six, six. I've written a bunch. The one I'm proud of is the one for the children. But other than that, are you interviewing me or are you interviewing you? Because you were so fascinating last night, and then you paid for dinner. So you're obviously doing well around here. Well, I wanted to interview you. You're a motivational speaker, a philanthropist. You're an expert at branding and marketing. You started in 1992 with FUBU.

And I just wanted to really jump into entrepreneurship and just hear about where have you been and where you're going? Where have I been? I've been everywhere. Didn't have anything.

Started with nothing. Very fortunate to do something I love. But like a lot of us, I fell into it because I couldn't rap, sing, or dance. And I wanted to. Well, I could dance. But I wanted to be like the rappers. I grew up in a really great neighborhood where there must be something in the water, they say. Because out of this square five miles called Hollis, Queens, must be 40 music artists come from this one area. LL Cool J, Salt-N-Pepa, Tribe Called Quest. I don't know.

Ja Rule, 50 Centz, Fat Boys, I don't know, Waka Flocka, Nicki Minaj, just everybody. James Brown used to live there. And so I grew up, you know, seeing this beautiful, you know, music that was a voice of the streets and I couldn't be part of it because I couldn't rap.

But simultaneously, you know, there was a devastating drug that came into all our neighborhoods called crack at the same time, 86. And I sort of see these entrepreneurs, but they were street entrepreneurs because I didn't see on TV or African-American, you know. But I found a way to be part of not only be one of the rappers, dress all of them, go to all the concerts. That's why I try to tell the kids, you don't need to be Michael Jordan. You don't need to be LeBron.

LeBron has 10, 12 people around him that at the games every single day and they don't have to risk anything of their health and they're having a good time. Lawyers, agents, managers, trainers, nutritionists, whatever the case is. So I started doing that and I went down this path of being an entrepreneur and I love it. And it's a lonely path, but I love it. You said it's lonely and I heard Elon Musk the other day say, you know, I could go to bed with my wife and I've got great kids, but most of the time I don't. He said...

I shouldn't be this lonely, but I am. You know, if everybody understood what you were doing, you would get the lowest common denominator. And if everybody understood and agreed upon it, there's no room for you if everybody understood what you're doing. So a traditional entrepreneur, I mean, is very simple.

They can't tell anybody their problems because they're supposed to walk on water. You can't tell your staff that you're two clients away from closing the business down, right? Because the good ones have a place to go. It's the ones I want to fire that never quit. I don't know why, right? You got financial stress at the house.

Right. You got to listen to everybody else's problems, though, because that's your problem that they have the problem. Right. You often don't get paid. You can run a business and it can be a 10 year business in the bell curve of when things are going well. Do you take in capital? Do you not? Do you give up the freedom? The whole reason you started the goddamn thing. But who got paid? UPS got paid.

The person who owns the warehouse got paid. The people who ship the goods, the people who design, manufacture, the people who shoot social media and advertise in market, they all got paid. You didn't want to take the money out of the business. And what happens? It goes to shit. By the way, you're up every single night at two and three meetings. You're drinking because you want to get numb because you were the asshole clients for the first two meetings. And the last meeting where you were somebody that you want to hang out with. So you want to forget all about your problems.

Right. Your kids, you are the worst person in the world to them because you're the best person in the world until they're seven, eight or nine. And then after that, how dare you?

So they're walking around on your marble floors complaining about what the hell you did in life. Have nothing. They don't know what you've been through. And you did all that so that you can give them the things they never had. But if you give them everything, you make them the poorest person in the world. It's kind of 22. Entrepreneurship is not for the faint at heart by any means. I mean, I think about how many, I've always loved the shark tank and I know you've done deals outside of the shark tank. Jay Abraham was on my podcast a few years ago. Jay Abraham, my mentor. Yeah.

And we were talking a little bit about that, but I was thinking you've come up to this realization that you don't need to just charge money all the time to speak. No. You can work barter deals. Tell me a little bit about that. You know, I think triangulation and bartering is one of the most underappreciated assets that people have because people only look at things as very transactional. I have $10 and you have something worth $10. So I'm going to give you $10 for it.

Well, that thing that you have worth $10, it's a phantom. You don't know if it's worth $10. How do you know that's worth $10? And that's not even where the $10, what is it going to get you? It's going to get you a thing. It may be great. Right. But I remember I was consulting this guy and his wife happened to speak Spanish and she was a Spanish teacher. And I said, listen.

I think I use this one with Joe Pollack, but I have hundreds of them. I wasn't even consulting. I was giving them love because they went through a charity. They donated like a couple of dollars. And I said, well, let me give you, break down your business. But his wife was there. She was a Spanish teacher. And she says, well, we want a new car and stuff like that. I said, well, go down to a local car dealership. And I advised her. And here's what I told her to do. Go down and speak to this local car dealership.

talk to the kids for four hours, you know, on the weekend and tell the car dealership, hey, bring your best clients in. We're going to bring our best clients in. You're going to basically teach Spanish for four hours a day and very fun type of things. She was doing really fun things, right? Well, all these people started to come down. The car dealership looked like they were doing great in the community, teaching Spanish. Half the moms are dropping the kids off now. They're like, hey, we had to do two other birthday parties with the other siblings. Go over there.

And I said, tell them, tell the dealer, give you a, you know, a dealer car for, you know, put a thousand miles on it over the course of the year. The woman only mainly drives the end of the week.

She did that at three separate dealers. She has three brand new Mercedes that she drives. She doesn't take in the income. The dealer pays for all the insurance. She always gets an updated car, right? She's part of the community. And guess what? She picked up 17 more clients to give private Spanish lessons to when she quit her job as a teacher. It's incredible. There's bordering. Yeah. That's it. How much would you have to pay for a brand new car? Brand new Mercedes will always be brand new because they're going to get the newest car.

Right now, you don't have to even go to that school where you were teaching. Nothing wrong with that. She makes her own hours. Everybody's happy as bartering. It's simple, but people are so transactional right now. And so just literal. I'm a big fan of bartering. We barter a lot of garage doors and there's other services rendered. And.

I don't know if Jay talks about this. I think we work with Garage Kings and Garage... Yeah, Garage Kings. That's for the makeover. Yeah. Yeah, they were great. I hope you work with them. You probably work together. That's the next step, right? How do we take care of the whole garage, not just the door and the opener? Yeah. So there's a lot of opportunities out there. Jay, when we talked right afterwards, he goes, Tommy, I kind of want to work with you, but are you greedy? And I'm like, I don't think so. And he's like...

I can get you unlimited leads. He's like, because there's other people that are doing services on the home that could give you leads. And that's, he figured that out in real estate a long time ago. Jay was great. And then I was on Roland Frazier's podcast and he said, I'd like to work with you, but I need Jay Abraham. It's part of it. It's just all worlds go back. These guys, they're like, how long have you been friends and working with Jay? 15 years. Holy cow. He's amazing. He is absolutely the best.

I was doing some research and looking at the deals because, you know, this is about entrepreneurship, starting businesses, and you've done 61 deals across 100 episodes, a total of

8,600,000 invested. And I don't know if this is current up to date. No, because I'm in 250 episodes. So it's over 100 deals I'm at. Over 100 deals. Okay. And when you look at that, you see entrepreneurs. What do you buy into? Them. Their drive, their eye contact, their passion, their excitement. The way they drive their numbers. I drive into their previous failures. Okay. And the failures that we don't know we're going to have together.

I drive into their focus and their understanding on where I add value because to think that I add value just because I'm the apparel guy, I haven't done clothes in years. Yeah. Right? So you're doing the wrong, you know, if you come on the show and you hit me up and only because I'm the apparel person and that's the angle, well, then you're not going to be a good partner because you didn't even do enough research to find out the only reason I went on the show was

It's because when 08 and nobody can pay their rent or mortgage, they weren't buying another shirt. And I had 10 clothing lines and eight of them were dead. So I wanted to upsell my current customer or make them buy more frequently. And how was I going to do that? Well, I've already have 10 clothing companies, eight of them are dead and I'm in Macy's. Well, then I need to find out how to sell dishes.

Fragrance, consumer electronics, because now I can go to them and say, hey, you know me. I already have 10 clothing lines in here, but you know I'm going to take back the goods. You know I'm going to support you in the windows. I'm going to support all this kind of that. You as the buyer, what's in it for you? Oh, the buyer, you're going to be able to go on vacation sooner than you would like to or when you want to. You're not going to have to tell your boss, oh, I don't know. They're not going to take back the goods. The goods came in inferior, right? So I need to go on a show where I get pitched more than just –

clothing brands. And now you come in, Damon, aren't you the clothing guy? I got a clothing brand for you. You didn't do your homework. You're an idiot. Listen, you guys have had so many deals walk through there. I love the Shark Tank because I love the American dream, the entrepreneurship side of it.

And I'm sure you get this all the time. You've got just talking about the show, but I just love the entrepreneurship side of it because you've seen more deals come by your desk than most people. Of course. And how does it all work? And I've read a lot of stuff on this. Here's how it goes. Don't know anything about those people. Never met them. Never met them. Don't even know them. Actually, if I do know them.

They're disqualified. Okay. Now, I may know them in passing. You know, listen, if anybody goes on a show, they should be chronic pitchers. They should be pitching all day, all night. And maybe I saw them someplace else or on TV. No problem. That's not a problem. Even I could have the product at home. Oh, oh, you're that product. No problem. But if I have had a conversation or a meeting with them and went through details on their number, now I have the upper hand on all the sharks.

I can't look at my phone. I cannot look at my phone. I can look at my phone, but it's a trust thing. We've been doing this for many years because I can't go, oh, and look at their rating on Amazon, see how many units move. Because now all of a sudden, it's not going to be genuine, my questioning. It's not going to be, oh, have you sold anything? It's going to be, what happened to your rating?

So I can't do anything about them. An average pitch is one hour long. Just like in this studio, there's at least I see right now at least six to seven cameras shooting us. So now you have 16 cameras shooting these pitches for one hour long, 16 hours of footage for eight minutes. We shoot in June. We shoot 10 episodes, 10 days of shooting. And then we shoot about two weeks in June, two weeks in September.

And we see about an average of 140 people and it narrows down to around 95 make the air out of 40,000 people who apply. So now we're looking at those numbers, right? Those numbers are pretty daunting. Yeah. Out of those deals, we close about 60 to 80% of those deals. Now, I can't say why some of them don't close, but very honest, some entrepreneurs try to game the system. They never wanted to close.

or we find out stuff that we don't, you know, we have due diligence. It takes from six to nine months. Hey, why didn't you tell me you owe the IRS a million dollars? You didn't ask. Okay, no problem. I get it. I can't close the deal. Or I don't like you. You know, I don't need to go on the shark tank to make money. Nobody here needs to pitch anybody to make money. If I want to make money or lose money, excuse me, invest. If I send my money over right now to the market and they put that thing on Apple,

Steve Jobs gonna ask me how to fix a computer? I'm either gonna make money or not. Matter of fact, if Apple goes up for a good amount, I can go 50% and pull out margin and use the rest of the money and leverage it to go buy some Tesla. Elon Musk ain't gonna call me either. So if I'm going to have to deal with people,

And I can get that money out right away. I can either pay capital gains on it or regular on it. You can't do that in a business. So I'm going to have to sit there and talk to somebody and go over and over and over again. I don't want 1X. I want 40X. And I don't want – I have to talk to you a bunch of times because we have to solve these matters ourselves. And that's why Shark Tank is real because –

We sit there and you don't know how many people have messed things up. They've screwed up. They've blown money. I'm not saying anybody had any bad intentions. But when you see somebody up there, hey, man, hey, Tommy, you know, I know you're doing okay with the garage stuff. So how many times are you going to show up at meetings? You're going to go, wait a minute, wait, wait.

You just asked me to give you a half a million dollars. Stop doing what I'm doing all day long and show up at your meeting. I got to give you money to show up and I got to listen to your shit. I'm out. Yeah. Now you got somebody else who is so brilliant. You've seen them go through the hardest things ever. Things that Tommy's never went through.

They're a family. They got all their kids, all their money, all the kids are valuables and they're, you know, they're scholars. They're school and education up at risk. They've been doing this for four or five years as a family. They put themselves in through the shit and they just need one Tommy, just one to believe in them for one minute and it will change their life. And if you happen to help them and be there, it'll be the best thing. It'll be the biggest high you will ever have in your life.

It's the most amazing thing. So here's the part that I want to know. You decide you're going to do business. This is something I look at a lot. Where do you start? You got a business plan. You're looking at the numbers. You're looking at the reporting.

Most of the time, it's a marketing thing. A lot of the stuff is how do you get more people to buy it? In general, you're saying? In general, obviously, there's cash flow issues. Yeah, but you're talking about not shorting. You're talking in general. In general. Okay, yeah. Where do you start the business? Because I typically start at like, do you know your numbers? Are they accurate? How well are your books done? Do you really know your gross profit? Do you know your EBITDA? Do you know this stuff? Yeah.

So, and you go through that quality of earnings or whatever the diligence period is for six to nine months. But when you sit down with them and I know not everybody's the same, but you've done a lot of investments. How does it typically look? Well, it typically, I mean, I think that's an excellent question. I don't know if I've ever really been asked like that because a lot of times I'm going to ask the person, what do they want from me? They want money from me. They want services, time, energy. What do they want from me? So I break down the business and try to understand, like, I think we talked about, you'll always find,

untapped value in it. But let's really think about business. It's super simple.

Increase sales, reduce costs. Right? Only three ways to ever deal with a customer. Acquire a new one, upsell a current one, make one buy more frequently. Yeah, only three ways. That's it, right? So when you start looking at these forms of how you're doing it, well, is your margins big, big enough? And you are, are you talking directly to your customer or are you seven steps away from your customer? Right? Because when I first started in business, I was seven steps away. I made a line.

Hopefully the department store bought the line. If they bought the line, then I would hopefully get it in on time. Once I get it in on time, hopefully the kid took it out of the distribution center or the distribution center sent it on time and took it out of the back. The kid who's so busy on Instagram looking now for college and girls or boys.

Right. Then when they put it on the rack, who bought it? Did the mother buy it for herself? Did she buy it for as a gift? And if she didn't buy it, why didn't she buy it? And if she went home, why did she return it? I was seven steps away. So how do you shrink that process and say I'm one step away? Hey, you, you want this product? OK. Oh, what's keeping you up at night? How can I add more value? What do you like about the last people? Where do you want to go tomorrow? Right.

Right. And so that is how I try to find to squeeze the numbers. I try to get every little piece out of the way until I can make it as tight as possible. Right. So that's where I first find the value in numbers, period. And then where do I add value? You know, is it great? Well, can I go and get a license and add it to an IP and have an intellectual property? I'll give you an example. One of my buddies has a billion dollar company. This company is absolutely amazing called Starkey Hearing.

He is a CEO who is on the cutting edge of a lot of stuff. He is like the biohacking king. The Starkey hearing devices now, you can, I guess in another year probably, you can speak 44 different languages that were repeated in the language of your own, you know, your own native tongue, right? I believe also it's getting to the point where it can indicate if an elderly or somebody, because of their voice, their rhythm, they're going to fall 15 minutes prior to falling.

So what is the issue now? Will you create better tech? Well, Steve Jobs didn't say create better tech. He said, okay, you want me to keep telling you how many gigas is in this thing, gigabyte, whatever it is, or do you want me to put all your goddamn music on an MP3 player in your pocket? Yep. Well, if the stigmatism on hearing devices, hearing enhancement is so bad, well, if I'm going to, as I work with this company, and I love the Starkey Hearing,

To move more units, which will help more people in life, you don't need to necessarily do more AI and all that stuff. You already got that. You know what I need to do?

I need to do a license with Marvel and call it Jarvis. That's what I need to do. You just now broke through the entire wall of everything. So as I look at a company, it's not necessarily a numbers and dollars. How can I position it in a unique selling proposition and get millions upon millions and millions of dollars taken off the table that you would have had to market and advertise to tell everybody, hearing aids are cool.

Some people will never use a hearing aid because it's the theory of I'm old. So you've learned to literally figure out how much time, how much money, what am I going to be required to do? So in your average deal you do, probably the worst time is the one thing you can't buy. So you're literally telling them,

The least amount of time, the more likely you're going to do that. And time is the only thing we're selling people. If you end up telling you the truth, Facebook is only really good at selling you time. You don't have to go over to grandma's house and look at her stinky ass pictures of when she went to Jamaica. Yeah. You just go and go like this, like, now you ain't got to go over to grandma's house and have hair all over your damn pants and swim the dog and all that kind of stuff like that.

You look at somebody like Joe Polish, who I think is one of the best connectors I've ever met. He's a super connector. When you're dealing with these different relationships, is that really what you're looking for? Is how can I connect this with this? I'm looking at connecting with everything I do in life. The connections. Triangulating it. Yeah. If I'm stuck in COVID and I'm used to needing to see other people,

and being on screens all day long, and then I go out into the regular world, and I realize that I'm not as fit as I would like to be. Well, I'm connecting the fact that I'm no longer going to go on a screen, but I'm going to have all my conference calls from 9 to 12 as I walk after I drop my little girl off from school. So I'm going to get a workout in. I'm going to be able to connect on all those people I'm going to talk to. I'm going to connect with the fresh air because I happen to live in Miami, and I'm going to maximize and connect everything I can at the same time. I'm going to multitask, right?

I'm a chronic multitasker. And so there's a lot of different investments that you've done. When you think about the different sharks, how do you differ? I mean, there's a lot of differences.

But one of my buddies did one with Cuban and he does bicycles and he's like, yeah, we get on a call 15 minutes every quarter. And he's like, we just go through over the financials. You're talking about the guy with the really cool bike. Yeah. I like that guy. That guy was the real deal. Yeah, it was. So Mr. Wonderful, for example, he's pretty, he's a jerk. Yeah. But behind the scenes that I was watching this thing years ago where he's like, I have to play that part. It's just a part, but is that real life? Yeah.

That is real life. You want to ask him? He's my Uber driver. He's right outside. It's him.

But the beautiful part about it is he's that critical about himself. But he's just saying he honestly, Kevin is saying everything we're already thinking. I just put it out there. I don't have to play that part because I know Kevin's going to hit you with the hammer. What about the other sharks? Who else? Because there's always they've been moving them. I don't know. There's Lori. She's like, if you want to. But she still talks about QVC. That's the difference between you and her. Right. She's like, oh, that'll be great. And I know QVC.

And I guess you were saying, I know how to get into stores. Give me other products. So in a way. No, I mean, it depends on the episode you see. So what are you trying to really drill down on? I'm just curious, like when they picked all you guys to be on the show. Yeah. What were they looking for? What were the difference of the type of investments? Or you guys are all just serial entrepreneurs? Well, no, I think they had my buddy, Kevin Harrington was on the first season who was a big, you know, he actually created the infomercial.

And then it was me, Kevin. Mark was not on and Laurie was not on. Mark was not on until season three. Actually, Mark saved the show. The show was going to be canceled. The show only stayed on because of Mark Cuban. Really? Yeah. And everybody heard the story about Mark Cuban quitting. He's not quitting. He's leaving Shark Tank next season. By the time he leaves, it'll be 2025 by the time he finishes all the promo because he has personal matters that he's dealing with in his life. Great matters.

that he's dealing with his life. - Or maybe he's still on the Mavericks. - Basically spending more time with, no, spending more time with his family. I think, I personally believe that he's, because he's an empty nester, we shoot during the summer, he's not gonna see his kids anymore. And he wants to spend a little more time being in the moment, which I love about Mark.

but Mark and Lori were not on. And Mark only came on because a lot of the entrepreneurs, the big famous ones, the really famous, famous entrepreneurs at the time said, I'm not going to go onto a show with four or five people that nobody knows. I don't know a Kevin. I don't know a Robert. I don't know a Barbara. I don't know a Damon. And the network was pressuring Mark Burnett, the producer, to put on music artists. Oh, and then they had a show called the Bank of Hollywood. Other people call it crappy shows. Right.

And Mark Burnett said, absolutely not, because no real entrepreneur is ever going to believe that that person up there singing and dancing is rolling up their sleeves running a business. All of us. Nothing wrong with those people singing and dancing. Extremely hard career. But they're not running a business. And cancel the show if you have to. And the reason why the show was not really popular or couldn't get popular was because nobody can explain it.

So if I can't go on to Ellen or Jimmy Kimmel or any of those and talk about the show, well, people go, so who wins the money? Nobody wins the money. Okay, it's on Discovery Channel. It's during Shark Week. No. Well, if they lose, they get dumped into a shark tank. No. Mark Cuban goes on to Twitter.

Being a tech guy. And he sees that as a show marketed to adults, it's a top show watched kids 5 to 15 in the household, parents and kids together, and the top show taught in televisions, watched in school. Excuse me. And he says, I don't care if nobody knows who these people are. This is going to help America's kids. I'm going to jump on this show and I'm going to get the attention it needs. And then he goes and walks the show on to Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen and all those type of things. And that's why the show took off. Huh.

I didn't know that. Now you also think about it three seasons in, at that time we were shooting 30 episodes a season. So now you had over 120 entrepreneurs, local entrepreneurs going out into the market going, no, I really got the money. No, I really am working with Damien John. I'm really working. And that's how it grew. Just like every one of our businesses. That one break, that lucky break. And the slow growth here, putting in the time, putting in the time, putting the time in it, bang, and then it shot out of here.

So FUBU was a massive success, but that I didn't know who Mark Cuban was, even though Dallas is a big basketball team till Shark Tank. And I didn't know. I did not know I was really. So I guess the thing is, is for you, you can't go anywhere now without people recognizing you. But before obviously FUBU was a big brand, but I can go anywhere because there's certain people, music industry, people,

people mainly knew me. So let me ask you this. This is a question. And I talked to Joe Polish quite a bit about this is if you could take back the fame and it's, it's a good thing to be fit. Like people are your fans. They're a big fan of you, what you've done in your life, shark tank and boo boo and, and the philanthropy. But there's a lot that comes with that. I see a lot of people get depressed with fame. There's a lot of people that are like, if I could take it all back,

With fame comes a lot of other problems. There's no privacy. Do you embrace it? And are you like, I got to be there because these people believe in me? Or is there ever times like, turn it off? Like, I just want to go out. You can't. It has its ups and downs and same. And if you do it in the right way, it is what it is. But yeah, it does affect everybody because if Brie is trying to be, you know, this is why I don't allow my wife on reality shows. And not that I don't allow, I'll be very honest. We're in a relationship where she's clearly the boss.

She wanted to go on one, but she's not that type of person. Nothing wrong with those people. But when you allow people into fame, into your life, what happens is Brie can be at the grocery store minding her business. And if it's somebody who is abusing their fame, meaning if you had the wrong way or if somebody came after you and there was a big article about you, she's going to get hammered with the business. Hey, your husband's a piece of shit.

Hey, you shouldn't have done that. Or even the other side. Oh, my God, I can't believe you did all this. And you know what? Your business is out in the world. But that's thank God social media is out because at least you can alter that conversation on social media and say and have a stance. Before when we first started, social media wasn't really I mean, Instagram only came around in 12. We started in 08.

Right. So what happens is fame is crazy. But the reality is I have the best life ever as a famous person. Why? Because I know a lot of celebrities who are singers and stuff like that. And, you know, it's hard when you're walking up or you and your wife are having a discussion at a table and somebody walks up and they think they can sing. Oh, you're like, oh, God.

Me, you know what people coming up to me and trying to do? Tell you about their business. Yeah. And you know what they want to do? They want to feed their children. Yeah. That's all they want to do. They want to live the American dream. So it's fine with me. And the day that I'm tired of it, I need to take my ass somewhere else and not be in the chair. So I don't have any respect for anybody who has cameras on them. And when somebody gets up to them to be vulnerable first to ask for a picture or something else, and they don't have respect for that person.

So it's something you have to just accept. Does that happen everywhere you go? You're getting pitches? All the time. There's this different word, influencer, now if you're big on social media. But you're like, people know you, and the Shark Tank effect is,

It goes viral. Like it's going to do better. Doesn't Strike Take take a piece? Did they ever take a piece? They did try to take a piece for the first three season of four. Cuban came aboard and said, I can't be in here because you can't get any real valuable companies with a 5% bill on them just to air. You know, you just won't. And so the deal flows started to get much, much better. Obviously, there's some deals that have gone crazy that you regret, Mr.

Scrubby, you're what a scrub daddy. That's the only one I regret. And the only reason I regret it is because I actually bid it on that deal. And I thought I was being slick by ratcheting up the deal for making Lori pay more.

And I have the number one invested product in Shark Tank history. So if you end up having to, well, none of those other sharks can bless, their cheeks can't bless the seat after me. But if you ever work with any of those other underachievers, just remind them I have the number one product in Shark Tank history. But Lori has number two all the way up to number 20. She has 12 of the top 20 selling products in Shark Tank history.

The reason why I don't like, I regret that sponge is because every time I go in the store, I see it smiling at me and it hurts. There's always those ones that get away and you probably had a lot of deals that you've looked at. What is it like ring? They don't get away because if I, you gotta be a realist. If I invested in ring, that means I would have invested in all the other ones because

And I would have been in trouble. Yeah. And even Ring, Jamie says, because Kevin offered him a deal. Jamie, the founder, ended up becoming a guest shark for an episode. Absolutely amazing. He said that he himself realized later on that he was asking too much. So there is a debate that Jamie and I have. I think that because we tenderized him so gently on the show and he went out and reduced his ask, he owes us 5% as a consulting fee.

That's what good entrepreneurs do. They figure out a way. I hear you guys talk about this stuff, like a licensing deal and all these different things and royalty deals. Is that you love those? Because it started out. That's like talking dirty to me, baby. You like that? Oh, yeah. So I get the royalties. I get paid back and I take equity. That's what some people say. Sometimes you don't want to take equity there. You want to keep the royalty coming.

Because you remember the equity, you can always turn to zero if times go bad. We had to put money back in the company. Royalty is F you pay me. And that's some of the best deals you like. I love them. Now, you know, a lot of people don't understand, but royalty can also be, they can put a lot of weight and burden on somebody. You know, if you get greedy and we did that at FUBU on one or two things in the beginning where somebody would say, give us a million dollars up front, give us 10%, $4 million the first year.

$8 million the second year and $12 million the third, right? So you got eight and 12 is 2024. We know that a 10% on 24 is $2.4 million we will make over the course of time on this royalty. We don't care. And they're like, oh, we're having a hard time. The market's not good. I don't care. Give me my money. What happens then?

Well, that person now is forced to make all those goods. Those goods now, that person is forced to discount and sell to all kind of places. And all of a sudden, the kid comes out and goes, I see this stuff all over the place. Not only do I not want to buy that ladies division what they have, but in their mind, they don't care about a royalty. They don't know the difference. They don't want to buy the product anywhere.

So royalty, any of that stuff, it's only as good as the business, the sentiment of the business and what you really want to provide for the customer. Because at the end of the day,

It's all about the customer's perception and their willingness to come out of their pocket with their hard-earned money and give you their money. I've looked at a lot of deals, but typically mine's all home service, right? Plumbing, HVAC, electrical. You name the business in home service. But when it comes to goods— There's no pins in there. I want to write down what I can barter for. Electrical, whatever you got. You can get any of that stuff. Solar. Solar.

You don't talk to a shark and just say, I mean, I was negotiating outside over a Snickers bar. Don't say that type of stuff, man. I made a mistake. So what differentiates a great entrepreneur from a good one? And how can people...

Because a lot of people think you're going to go into business. You know how many people I get to text me and say, I want to start my own business. I want the freedom. I want the flexibility. That's what I say. I'm like nights, weekends, holidays, 10 years of grinding. Yeah. Sweat equity. Yeah. Yeah, man. People think, man, this American dream, going to business. And I, you might not like this, but I tell a lot of people, you might just want to go work for a company and be an entrepreneur. Right. Like you go there, you get to put your work jacket on. You know how many millionaires Facebook made?

A lot. Google. I mean, it goes on and on and on. I couldn't do what I did. I can't do what I do now unless there was the American dream of I want to be an entrepreneur. I love being the crazy guy. And I always say that I am, you know, Batman and my team is Robin and mainly I'm Robin and they're Batman because Robin.

Why would I hire you unless you're smarter than me? You got some people running around here with cameras and stuff like that. I bet this younger person is so smart and brilliant. The only reason you're hiring the person is because they're thinking outside the box. They're always thinking when you're not, right? Because you need to do what you do best. But I don't like being Batman and Robin because I don't like saying Robin because Robin was a straight groupie. Anything Batman did, holy buttermilk, Batman. How do you know he's going to poison us? You drank buttermilk? I can't believe you.

I want to be with people like I'm Captain Kirk and there's Spock. Because Captain Kirk was wild. He ran around. He was like, oh, yo, Spock, we're going to do this. And Spock would always go like this. Listen here, Captain. There's a 47,000% chance that that's not going to happen. Captain Kirk, oh, Spock, we're going to do it. You know, Captain Kirk would just run around. You know what Spock did after that? He put Captain's ass to sleep. Yeah.

I want people like that in my company. Put me to sleep because I'm somebody you're not going to stop. So I want to, you know, I want them to keep helping me, helping me, helping me. And I need people like that to say, boss, what do you want to do? Because the way they put me to sleep is, hey, I tell Ted, let's do this. He goes, OK, cool.

Who are we going to take off the project that you said let's do last week that I took off of another project previously? Where is that budget going to come from? Who else is going to help? And by the way, what else are we going to do with this? And I just run out the room. Ah, shut up, Ted. Ted goes right back to what he was doing. So that's what you got to do with entrepreneurs. Try to get them to wear blinders. Focus on this one thing.

I think a lot of us entrepreneurs out there, we all get great ideas. There's opportunities everywhere we look. We know we could kill it in anything we do. And there's ideas everywhere. I think that's one of the biggest things is I, and you get this a lot on Shark Tank. I've seen this happen where they're like, oh, this is only the first of many. I got, I've got a lot of other inventions in the pipeline and that must be the worst thing you could say.

It is. Because you're not focused. Like, you want me to invest all my money. Or like when you come on the show and say, yeah, I'm going to do this and that, and then we're going to have an exit. You're already selling the company? One of the pivotal moments in my career was Indie Giving Sunday, the movie by LL Cool J was in it, Scarface was in it, and we got to put LL in it. We did a really great job. One of the biggest moments of our lives. He's in there. And it was a little company called Under Armour.

And, you know, Kevin concentrated on his, whatever it's called, wick-free, I always mess it up, but that same shirt that we all now know and love. He stayed on that shirt alone 10 years. Me? All my half scarves. What do you want? You want gold teeth? We'll go with gold teeth for you. You know, all kinds of stuff. Kevin was slow and steady and methodical. He now does $4 billion a year because he stayed on what was his winning and unique selling proposition. That reminds me, last night we had

Dean with us. I did a little bit of research, bodybuilding.com, cannabis guy, Aaron change agent, really good at helping entrepreneurs make decisions and get to the bottom line. Joe Polish connector, networker, and Andrew Kahn is a commercial real estate agent. He said something really interesting. He goes,

There's more money to make in real estate. Don't overcomplicate it. You got to, I don't believe in the get rich quick strategy. Hold for 10 years, live modestly, and then it's paid off. And then it's like you won the lottery. Yeah. And I was just fascinated because Joe's talking to him and he's just, he's like, well, how about we get you guys in here in the next few weeks and tour my facility and I'll show you how many properties we've done. And he's naming whole foods, like massive, massive places I know just in Phoenix. And he says, well, that's just Arizona.

Yeah. And I'm like, how does this work though? Because you paid. And the first price he mentioned, he's like, yeah, we paid 30 million for that. Yeah. And I go, how many do you think I have properties everywhere? And he goes, but I paid them off after 10 years. And I'm just fascinated. I kept bringing it back. I'm like, wait a minute.

And he makes it seem like, I mean, he works his ass off. It's obvious. I mean, the guy says, I get up at 4 a.m., go boxing. And he's like, my wife stays somewhere in the summer, goes to Cali, and I stay working. I mean, you know, how did you guys meet? We met because another person connected us and Andrew invested in a company. I think it was called Spiritual Gangster.

and somebody connected us and wanted me to come in. And then I think I didn't do the full investment. We started to help the Bella Twins. They wanted to come out with something.

And just messing around because he's just such a good person and he wants to kind of help people invest. But he's just a really focused, disciplined investor. And then out of just camaraderie and just, you know, I like to work with people that don't need me and I don't need them. And the reason why we're around each other is we find each other fascinating, compelling and friendships develop out of those type of things. So same as it happened with Joe. You know, Joe and I, you know, it just came out of I don't even know who connected us.

But I remember one day I was at a Genius Network and he was talking and then he just, you know, Joe would just flip and say something crazy. And he just jumped up one day. And it was that moment when he just said, please hurry up. Anybody answer the question. And remember, there's no such thing as a stupid question. It's just and he looked at one person said, it's just stupid people who keep asking questions. And I was like, man, do we just become best friends? So you never know how you'll connect with people, right?

So it's just weird stuff like that. But yeah, you know, as we were talking last night, hunters want to be around other hunters, man. I can't have conversations with other people. I can have conversations with anybody and I can appreciate anybody's situation because I came from nothing and I know and I've traveled the world and I see people that come from even less than, way, way less than I have. So I can have conversations with everybody. But when my brain and our brains start working, it's the conversation we had last night. It's hunters talking about this, you know,

different ways to crack codes, what we've learned. I mean, Joe is an encyclopedia. He knows everybody. And what was crazy about this meeting or, you know, dinner last night is he starts talking about ADHD. And I know the number one scholar in the world. And 10 minutes later, he goes, what was I talking about? I go, and you go, ADHD. But Joe just, he's genuine. That's what I like about Joe is like, he's definitely out there. I met him a long time ago.

And what was really cool is I go, you know, Robert Cialdini is the favorite guy I've ever heard about. He wrote the book Influence, Persuasion, all these books. And he goes, oh, you want to meet him? He goes, why don't I just have him at a dinner in two weeks? Meet his wife, Bobette. And I'm just fascinated because this is how I learned how to sell. I like studied his books. And he's been retired for 14 years. He's like, yeah, if you want to meet these guys, he's like,

They're just normal humans. He's like, they're just normal people. And Robert, I just, I really like his mindset on psychology. Just, because in his book, he says you could use this

For evil, you could use this for good. And he goes, just be very careful because you're going to learn how to influence people. Yeah. And Joe's just a connector, man. I really appreciated going to dinner last night. It was fun. Yeah, Joe said to me a long time ago when I started becoming well-known, he said, keep giving. Just give, give, give, give, give, give, give. And I said, well, I'm already giving. He said, keep giving. He said, because, you know, if you keep giving, you buy this human equity that they will come for you.

And they've come for me many times. But he said, when they keep coming for you, it doesn't matter. They're going to come for you. But if you keep giving, those people are going to know. Even the ones coming for you. But those other people are going to know that you gave. And at the end of the day, you're going to be okay if it's coming from a good place. Life gives to the giver. He always talks about that. He says it needs to be E.L.F. Easy, lucrative, and fun. I want to just go to this. You started Rise Nation. You talked about it on Joe's. Tell me a little bit about

What Rise Nation, the mastermind, what it's all about? How do you get into it? You know, somebody said to me one day, they said, one of my friends, he said, you know, you're just a serial giver. And I said, why is that? He said, well, listen, you could have named FUBU anything. You could have named FUBU like Kalk and I named ourselves or Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger or whoever, he said, but you wanted it to be about a community. FUBU, Forrest Bias, right? Of those who love hip hop.

He said, then you go into Shark Tank and then you write your first book. Your book was Display of Power. Same thing that you were saying. You can use the – we all have the same thing under the hood. When are you going to display the power? And you can use it for good or evil and I hope it's for good. Then you go into Shark Tank and you start giving. He said –

So you really just got to be embrace who you are. And I said, well, I just thought the giving part is part of what I'm receiving. We all receive everybody in this room and in the world. When you receive from people, you generally go, you know, somebody gave to me. Let me give to you. Right. I'm a beneficiary of it. But you need to be more intent with it and be very, very clear about it.

So I decided that I do in various ways. I give to a lot of philanthropies, but I created something because what I realized was that you have your startups on Shark Tank, all right? And you don't know what side of the fence they're going to go because that's the gamble they're taking, right? They're startups. But when you are doing...

Around $10 million, the $10 million to $50 million area of business. It's a super lonely business because you came with a bunch of people, but you can't ask the people doing a million dollars how to solve these $10 million problems, right?

You got new staff. You got HR. You got a whole lot of other stuff going. You're not sourcing from one place. You're sourcing from four and five places. You got four and five bankers. You got a lot of things going on here. But you can't talk to a Daymond John and a Mark Cuban. We got other problems.

So who do you talk to? So I create a group of people and you don't have much time. You don't have time to show up at these meetings every month. 10 conferences. Right. So what I do, I create a group. You have to be vetted and you got to also be of value to give to the group. Nothing, you know, being of value, giving information.

Created with Ryan and Roland. Ryan Dice. Roland, you talk about geniuses, right? So listen, it's a membership you have to be approved of. We have a certain amount of people in it. And, you know, you meet three times a year. And we meet Miami, New York, whatever the case is, right? Arizona. Two days. We knock it out.

You know, and you're in the room with a lot of the people. And the beautiful part about that is if I meet you now and I try to do business with you, may work out, may not. And I don't know if I'm going to see you again or how it works out. In this group, you're doing business with somebody in the beginning of the year, somebody else is doing the middle. And then you're saying, yeah, that person is consistent. Yeah, that person. And they're signing off on all each other signing off. And that's part of the community.

Same way you said Joe would say, oh, talk to so-and-so. That's years of having this type of community of thought leaders who he will only recommend you and somebody else on people who give. When he told me you were coming to the meeting, very honestly, didn't know all of you, I didn't care. I knew you were going to be a great person. And then you picked up the check, so you're invited at any goddamn time you want to dinner, my man.

Yes, sir. So that's what it is really about giving access. And then I do another thing was called CEO access, where I have very few CEOs who realize that they're the best at something, but they want, and I only work with probably about four a year where they want to break into the market to be the name of so forth. And they want to be on, uh,

CNBC and MSNBC because they have a real value proposition they're offering. If they want to be a famous CEO because they want to party and drink and hang out, not for me. But if you're creating true change, but you've been in the middle of

Iowa argument sake and this is all you know, but you are changing lives and you want to be known as a thought leader, then I'm going to walk you through those doors. I'm going to save you the time of trying to get on the cover of Inc. And I'm going to do that for you in one year or two years instead. I'm not a PR person, but I'm saying by the value of placing you in the key places.

bringing you to Genius Network, where you're sitting around a bunch of brilliant minds that you never even knew existed because you were busy over here just doing what you do best. So that's what I do. You know, I sat down with Brian Dice, Harry Belcher, Frank Kern. I think Roland was in there. This was Vegas 10 years ago. And he's got some serious brains, man. There is. Yeah, these guys are smart. And I was telling them, you know, they go, well, what do you want?

And I go, I just, I want a big garage door company. I'm like, but I feel like I could share a lot on stage. And I think it was Harry Belcher goes, dude, have you ever met the guy from the started Home Depot? I go, no. He goes, do you know his name? I go, no. And he goes over to 10 other companies. He goes, do you know their name? I'm like, no. And he goes, do you want to be? He goes, we had to figure out what to do with this next conference, how to sell ties. And we had to have it come up with a new thing of how to sell.

He's like, you don't need to get on stages and come up with a new, and he called it a gimmick and they do really great things. Trust me. Like I know that, but he's like, just keep your head down. Keep focused. Don't worry about stages. They're going to come either way. He goes, keep the grind.

Put the blinders on, focus on this one big thing. And he goes, you'll come back to me years later and you'll say, I didn't need to be famous. I didn't need to become an influencer. I didn't need all this bullshit. And he was right. And those guys were right. They sat me down and they're like, very rarely do we meet an entrepreneur that actually can make it in the real world without trying to be famous and everything else. And those guys. And that's what I'm saying. Like, if you put in that grind and now you're a thought leader, I can help you. If you're not putting that grind, like I said, and you want to be famous for the partying, that's not fame.

You can buy that. Go ahead. Enjoy. Well, I'll do this.

Why don't you take the last couple of minutes to close us out? Tell us anything. Obviously there's rise nation mastermind. If there's a few CEOs, he only takes for a year on the CEO access, but close us out with, we talked about a lot of stuff and yeah. We didn't talk about something that was the major conversation about conversation last night that, you know, as we serve everybody else, we don't talk about our health as simple as that. And as you saw, we're in a great room with people, a great table with people, but,

probably about 30% of the conversation was living forever, not living forever. What are we going to chips? What are we going to do with this? Where is the body and the mind and everything going? And we're at the best time of our lives. So, you know, I think from a technology standpoint and, you know, as people, CEOs, you know, CMOs, whoever it is, we serve almost everybody else and we don't serve ourselves. Now, I think that's a critical aspect that we have. And

you know, I was talking males, we're super hard-headed. So go out and, you know, I know I sound all warm and fuzzy and, you know, la, la, la, but go get that colonoscopy, endoscopy, pap smear, mammogram, all that kind of stuff. Because as people who take inventory and look at data, the data is 65% of the time, if you catch something in time, you can beat it. And I've seen, and we've lost a lot of people. I've lost three people in the last month and a half who passed away. They're never going to be here again. And two of them had it

Huge companies. It doesn't mean shit anymore. Their kids don't have anybody to come home to. Their wife or husband don't have anybody to come home to. So I think that we don't talk about that often enough. And that's critical, you know? Can't take it with you. Can't take it with you, man. You really can't. But you can't even, when you're here, you can't even enjoy it. You know, like I was saying about the Starkey hearing system, like...

It takes 10 years for somebody to realize they have a lack of hearing. And when you have a lack of hearing, you don't make it comfortable for yourself. You make it uncomfortable for everybody in the household. You turn the TV up to 20 and everybody, oh, I can't sit around granddaddy. You know what I mean? You know, you're in a restaurant with your wife and you're like, hey, honey, look at her over there. She's like, shut the fuck up.

I mean, I'm doing it in this room. Exactly. You tiptoe it around. You got a baby. You know, actually dementia and all those things settle in because when you don't have the lack of hearing, when you have a lack of hearing, loss of hearing, your mind is not operating enough. You start to move away from people. And what happens? Dementia and Alzheimer's, those things, they also accelerate those things. But why are you not doing it? Because you don't want to see a little device here.

That's why, because a couple of people that may see a little device here, is that more important than hearing your little beautiful son or grandson or granddaughter's little beautiful breath? So it's all about, you know, like, what are you really into it for? Right. Your health is the most important thing. I don't care what it is that you got to do. Hey, man, you're awesome. All right, man. Appreciate it. This is great. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate it.

Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper...

to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.