Why Billionaires Work Harder Than Anyone and Why "Work Smart" Is a Trap

Speaker A: Everyone says you should work smart and not hard. And you can get to a 5 or 10 million net worth by just working hard a little bit and then being smart or just being super, super smart. But a lot. A very high percentage of people that get to 30, 50 million or hundreds of millions, they work hard and smart and they're always working on how to be smarter while still working just as hard because that's just in their DNA, like it's. Their work ethic is part of who they are. And, and they love it, and it's fun and it's a game.

Speaker B: Welcome to Big Hitters. I'm Larry Wydell, and this show is for people who are done playing small. Each week we break down what it actually takes to win at a high level. The decisions, the discipline, the adjustments that separate those who almost do it from those who do it. No theory, no fluff, just straight talk from someone who spent 50 years building winners. If you're serious about momentum, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. Hello, everyone. We've got a treat today. We're talking with Richard Wilson and Richard, welcome to Big Hitters.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me here, Larry and Richard.

Speaker B: We like to talk about winning. We like to pick the brains of people that have done big things and preferably from the ground up, like yourself, because you learn from the real world experiences, life teachers, you know, the reality is the greatest teacher about if we're standing on solid ground with our assumptions or not. And then as you climb the ladder, you demonstrate the fact that not that you've been perfect, but you made more right choices than wrong ones, as in addition to working like a dog along the way. So from that, you carry with you lessons you're carrying forward, and we want to pick that and see what we can learn from. You know, trial and error is the greatest teacher, but it's great if you can learn from other people's trial and errors and not have to make all the mistakes yourself. So let's get in, folks. We don't get into this subject all that frequently, just occasionally, but the world of the family office. Let's talk about that. Because if you're, uh, an entrepreneur, you ought to think at least maybe it's a goal of accumulating a net worth to where you're going to have to bring in the services of a family office. And you need to know they're available and you know how much easier they can make your life. But every entrepreneur needs to plan for success. We all plan for failure. But you ought to plan for success and don't believe the hype that the world is full, everybody's poor and everybody's broke. I remember the first time, Richard, our, uh, company had a convention in Hawaii. We were down there on the beach and there's a couple of towers down there, the early 80s, I think they'd just been built. And I'm checking in and I'm looking around and there's an awful lot of families here checking in. And they seem to be young, you know, it's not like everybody's old. And the place seemed to be full and the light bulbs went on. My mind is like, there's a lot of people doing well in the world that can afford vacations like this. And so you cannot let yourself be. You know, folks, think past where you are right now. Think long term. That's what I like about the family office idea is get yourself considering the idea of the long term payoff for you and positioning that can come from doing it big. And you do that by getting some of these garbage ideas out of your head, inefficiencies out of your schedule, and not only getting a useful idea, but then turning it into something really big. And you do it step by step. There's no shortcuts on that. But what's great about Richard, Richard is a guy who intersects with billionaires. Billionaires, I think. What did you say? Sent to billionaires or something like that, you know, and they're human beings and they've got problems, they got confused, they got decisions, they have bad days, they have good days, just like the rest of us. That he's earned the right to move himself into that world where he can talk and not only know these people, but be an advisor and be a help to them. And, you know, it's a tremendous achievement, Richard. So more power to you. And congratulations. And people should know that he took this, now this concept of the family office and made it accessible to a wider variety of people by creating basically a community, a, uh, club, the family office, you know, largest investor club in the world. 16 plus million people are members and, um, global network. And so let's hear that. I want to hear that story. But really what motivated, you know, when you were getting started, before you got into this world, how far out of this world did you start? Or did you get a head start being inside this world? Where did you start? Because, you know, you worked your way up into the upper tier. How, uh, far out were you when you started?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I grew up in kind Of a middle class family. I grew up around my dad raising capital for nonprofits. So he raised a billion dollars for nonprofits. But I went to 3 Oregon State University for my undergrad wasn't exactly Harvard. I paid for my own MBA by doing consulting out of my undergrad. And then I looked around after starting half a dozen businesses through grade school, middle school, high school and said who's going to pay me as a 21 year old, six figures a year? Not many people. But if I worked in commercial real estate or raise capital for hedge funds, it's eat what you kill. So I went and got a job raising capital for hedge funds. I had to work for free until they wanted to pay me. And when I got in there I looked around and said it's like the saying, you know, why did you rob the bank? Like that's where all the money was. I looked around raising capital for hedge funds and I was like, well family offices are all the ultra wealthy. Let me only focus on them. And nobody was being helpful to me in doing so. So I started a blog, started writing about it and the whole thing took off from there.

Speaker B: And so, you know, I'm going to get inside your thought processes here. Growing up, you said you started a half a dozen business. How did you look at life and look at things and say I'm going to start businesses. And what attracted you? How did you get yourself going in that direction?

Speaker A: Sure. Well, I was reading Inc. Magazine in grade school. My dad had his own business. They paid me a penny per page to read books. They paid me a penny per pine cone to pick up pine cones. I started mowing people's lawns. I sold Christmas wreaths for the boy scouts. I started um, selling pizza places to put magnets on the sides of cars. That business worked horribly. I had to use textbook business at 8,000 textbooks in my inventory. And my dad bought me a multi level marketing business where I cold called everybody at my high school trying to sell them long distance telephone service. And the only people that bought it was the uh, parents of my girlfriend back then. And so a lot of it was just trial and error of just like wanting to figure out how to do stuff on my own and not just sit around and make stuff happen.

Speaker B: Well, and one thing to learn is your parents or your father there triggered a lot of that thinking by putting incentives in there, getting your mind on that rather than playing the guitar or something. And so the thing is that a lot of people have done well playing the guitar, but I think there's More entrepreneurs out there that are successful. So as you got out in the financial world, you know, you looked around, you know, there's a story. I'm going to tell you this story to set, to frame what you did. One of the most gung ho guys that worked for me early on came in and he was telling me about when he had gotten started in business. He was worked at a home finance place way back, you know, when they had the beneficial and all those. And he worked, he was the assistant manager. He was a bubbly guy, gung ho, and brought in all kind of business. Really made the whole location a hum. So one day he went into his manager and he said, we got to talk. You know, first thing in the morning, we got to talk. And he said to his manager, how much money do you make? And the guy said, I'm not going to tell you how much money I make. He said, oh, yes, you are. And he said, because I'm going to bust my rear. I'm going to knock myself out because one day I want a job like yours and I need to have something in my mind that keeps me driving forward. And the guy thought about it for a minute. He said, uh, okay. He took out a piece of paper, he wrote down a number, shoved it across the desk. My guy looked at, he said, I quit. And he walked out the door. But it's amazing, Richard, how many people don't look down the road and say, I'm on this road. Where is it taking me? That's what you did. And that's a smart thing to do, isn't it?

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, it sounds strange, but when you're in your teens and you're in college, there's only so many priorities on your mind, right? And like, I specifically remember being so broke in college and that one day I leaned back in my chair at lunch and I got the phone number of a cheerleader that I wanted to call. And I didn't have $3 in my bank account to ask her out for a cup of Starbucks coffee. I was so broke. And meanwhile, the football players walk around campus like royalty. They get to skip a class, they get to travel for sports, their tuition's free, their dorm is free. And I thought to myself, I really messed this up. What am I doing here? As a non football player, Like, I really screwed up my life up to this point. And I thought, you know what? In the next stage of life, I'm going to position myself a bit better and I'm going to get positioned even better than the Football players are now as juvenile as that sounds. It just put my brain into like a positioning mode. And I just thought, like, how do I position myself for like. And so that I'm not looking back, not liking my position a decade from now. And that was like one of 20 things that influenced me just to be like, yeah, this is not good. Like, let me switch this around.

Speaker B: Yeah, A uh, brilliant move on your part. In fact, that's what I like to try and get on the table as we start, we move through. Because that kind of thinking, that way of looking at this stuff will kind of influence and direct you forward. Is when you get into investments, get into situations, say, where's all this going to lead? And again, if you've got someone advising you, Richard, you're one of these billionaires, you're looking for advice, you're going to feel better about somebody who's advising you, who thinks that way. And uh, rather than giving a short term type solution or an average.

Speaker A: Yeah. Also like with any business owner or any business person or anyone as an investor, one of the most important things is that your business IQ and your financial IQ must be much higher than the opportunity set in front of you and much higher than your current revenue or net worth. Because if your financial IQ is not higher than your net worth, the world around you will correct that very quickly and your net worth will come right back down to wherever your IQ is. And so you always have to be in close proximity of wealthy folks. You have to listen to deca, millionaires and centimillionaires and ignore most people in the world. So I think that's been a key to a lot of our success as well, is just studying these people, interviewing them just like you do on this show. Honestly, it's the same motivation.

Speaker B: Yeah. And so let's talk about. You got the idea of the blog. You're a nobody, but you became a big somebody. And how did you go through that transition?

Speaker A: Yeah, it was interesting. I just thought to myself, okay, well, if the ultra wealthy have family offices, so if you are a family office, you are ultra wealthy, or you have many ultra wealthy clients in your multi family office, then why don't I just only focus on calling upon them? And it turned out to be harder than I thought. You know, the only trail guides on planet Earth were a, uh, Bloomberg journalist who had never worked a day in his life in the industry and some Financial Times journalist who wrote on it twice a year. And so I said, okay, well there's no trail guide. I'm Just going to study anything I can find, call on these folks, and then share what I'm learning along the way. And I wrote on hedge funds, capital raising in family offices. People cared about family offices the most. And, you know, from 10 hits to a hundred hits to a thousand hits a day. And I got in the front page of the Boston Globe and then spoke a couple hundred times in seventeen countries from the blog, taking off to five and eight thousand hits a day.

Speaker B: And what length of time is this progression?

Speaker A: Um, yeah, it took about three to six months to go from nothing to probably 50 to 100 hits a day. It took another six months to go to a thousand hits a day. And importantly, SEO is just becoming a thing back then in 2007, like more mainstream. And I read one book on it from Perry Marshall on SEO and AdWords and basically figured out there's 500 keywords that people look for related to my niche. And I just did the hard work of writing two blog posts. You can rank twice on Google organically, two blog posts for every single one of those keywords. And just went from writing one blog post a week to writing five to 10 blog posts per day, and the whole thing just took off.

Speaker B: And you probably found that the ultra wealthy are pretty busy, pretty tight in their schedule, and they have their defenses set up around them to where people you've got to go through later, they've got better security than President Trump had at the White House correspondence that are the other night, you know. So talk about your experiences with that. Breaking through.

Speaker A: Yeah, breaking through. I mean, it took me 13 emails to get Mark Cuban to reply to my cold email for my billionaires.com interview I did with him. So I just keep after people. I emailed the owners of billionaires.com for 12 years until they sold it to me. Every three months I followed up till they sold it to me. With other folks, I'll just try unique approaches, Try having a sense of humor, try referring a client to them, try helping them in some way. Everybody is getting a thousand messages a day on all these platforms. Right. And so you have to be the number one most valuable thing where you are giving them clear, obvious, huge value and you're not asking for anything. And then you might deserve a response otherwise, like, you'll get lost in the mix of everything.

Speaker B: Right. And so what's your biggest memory of that other than the Mark Cuban?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, one is Tony Robbins. Like, we got access to Tony by adding value to the CEO of a company that he's on the Board of. And so a lot of it just comes down to reciprocation, adding value first, building a real relationship. And a lot of people get it wrong. They think that whoever offers the biggest ROI or the biggest return wins the relationship. But it's really hoops somebody trusts most. Nowadays, anybody can fake anything. So it's all about meeting in person, adding value first. And people want to do long term business with long term partners. They don't want to waste time doing a deal one time with somebody. So it's all about proximity and who you're around and learning and connecting in person with the ultra wealthy.

Speaker B: So tell me how this thing evolved as you got more and more people clicking on you on a daily basis, how that opened up your exposure and opened up opportunities like the speaking.

Speaker A: Yeah, so after speaking a couple hundred times in, uh, different countries, people started asking for things, we started listening to them, built out a data product, a certification product, and then started hosting our own events. And after we started hosting our own events, we helped set up some family offices for ultra wealthy families, like from Shark Tank. Kevin Harrington helped formalize his family office and he's done a few deals through our club now. And essentially we turned it into a membership. So instead of selling conference tickets, we have a real sense of community. There's basically two layers to our community. Like we were chatting about this before we went live Today, there are 240 different social media communities that we run that have 16 million members in them. And there's like 30,000 posts a month that get posted there and all these different communities and those posts get about 100 million views a month. But the closer net community is when you actually meet someone in person. Right. And so we do 30 events a year where you can hear from investors on stage, deca millionaires who had exits, centimillionaire, a billionaire, fireside chat. And it's at those 30 in person events is where the real business gets done. The rest of it is almost like an exposure net. We spread our education, we spread interviews like this. You know, we try to be as helpful as possible because you create good karma. The more that you just spread best practices out there for everybody to benefit from.

Speaker B: You've covered a lot of ground and you tend to collapse these things. You know, I do the same thing. You know, when you've been in it for lo, these many years, you know, you can't explain every detail, but when you go back and analyze the first steps, you know, you see the, the seeds of multiplication are kind of set in place. You know, like there's a reason why it turned into stuff like that. And so let's talk about. Cause there's a lot of people that like the idea of following these footsteps. And of course the things change and uh, social media's changed and the posting and all. But one thing that's not changed is the secret world of the family office. This is a secretive world. Right. And there's not a lot of, when you go through your scrolling, you're not gonna see endless things, articles relating to that world. And so, you know, that's one thing that hasn't changed. But from you getting going on this, how did you get your first speaking and who was after you for that?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that was the funniest one honestly. Cause I was only 26 and the European Business Summit, um, recruited me to come speak on a hedge fund discussion panel. And at uh, 26 years old, they flew me out there and I arrived and they probably thought I was somebody's son because it was a six day event and there were two prime ministers of countries speaking on stage at different parts of the event. And then I'm here in my 20s and I couldn't even eat that day. I was so nervous to speak and I just had to talk for a couple minutes. Wasn't a big deal. But that was the first time. And a light bulb went off in my head when I spoke there. And I spoke at Monaco at a game conference soon after. And basically I realized that even though I was talking about hedge funds capital raising in family offices, people refer to me as like the hedge fund blogger because I had this hedge fund blog. And I was like, well, that's one's about like the stupidest position I could have ever designed for myself. And I realized at age 26, they hired me because I had written 500 blog posts on hedge funds and Capital Reason and family offices. And so that's when I switched and created Family Office Club, bought familyoffices.com and said, you know what? I want the positioning a family office club and being very well connected in the family office industry. And that's why we bought billionaires.com/cetera as well. Because that positioning will always be powerful whether hedge funds come in and out of favor. And I don't see that ever going out of style. And the hedge fund blogger just sounds dumb. So let me like change that positioning.

Speaker B: Yeah. And there's a funny thing about when you speak of these, I don't know if you found it, I don't know if it happened. That early. But when you're in the green room and it's a funny thing, it's kind of like being at a golf club. You know, if you're a private, ultra exclusive golf club and you're there and you go play, I mean, you might be playing with two prime ministers of other countries or something like. And, uh, you're just one of the guys, you know, it's just like if you're back there, you're one of them.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I think back to your comment earlier. One thing that's attracted a lot of hundred million plus net worth to me and thirty to fifty million is that they're almost all entrepreneurs. They're almost all just super founders. And it's like there's founders, some of them need capital, some are just looking to grow their mental models and strategies. And then there's super founders who have had an exit or make seven or eight figures a year. And the fact that I share with others that I'm not just a suit in a cubicle somewhere, I'm not a journalist, I am an entrepreneur. And built this from scratch attracts people because they're like, oh, I'm just like you, Richard. I just happened to be a little bit further down the road and sold my platform or, oh, like, I could learn that from you, Richard. And here's something that I could help you with. And like. And so it becomes a little bit more of that peer interaction because, like, we're cutting from the same cloth.

Speaker B: Yeah. And as, uh, such, you can relate to what they're doing. It's not institutional type, personnel or structure. And so it's easy for them to let their hair down. They have to keep up an act, you know. And as you go, what surprised you about getting into that community and working with people like that?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, the first thing that surprised me is that a lot of them were asking me for questions when I was 27 years old because they only speak for five or ten of their peers. I was speaking to a couple hundred of them. So that surprised me that they would even ask me questions. The next thing that was surprising is everyone says you should work smart and not hard and you can get to a 5 or 10 million net worth by just working hard a little bit and then being smart or just being super, super smart. But a lot, a very high percentage of people that get to 30, 50 million or hundreds of millions, they work hard and smart and they're always working on how to be smarter while still working just as hard. Uh, because that's just in their DNA. Like it's their work ethic is part of who they are and they love it. And it's fun and it's a game. It doesn't mean you have to ignore your family, doesn't mean you get divorced and abuse alcohol. It just means like you're industrious and your foot stays down in that gas pedal. Whether you've already made your 5 or 10 million that you would need to go retire in Nebraska or not. Like that's not what they're aiming for.

Speaker B: By the way, if you're still listening right now, you're different effort. You don't just consume content. You're actively looking for an edge. And that's who I build the big hitter community for. Not people chasing motivation, people chasing momentum. Not theory. Proximity. Proximity to operators who are actually in the arena making real decisions and winning at a high level. Inside big hitter, you get conversations we don't have in the podcast. Direct access to people who build what you're trying to build in a room that holds you to a higher standard every single week. This isn't a hype group. It's not networking for the sake of networking. It's where serious people go to sharpen their thinking and compress their timeline. If you're done just listening and you're ready to be in the room where it actually happens, head to join big hitters.com or click the link in the show notes. The right room changes everything. I'll see you inside. I've got a theory on that. I don't know if you played musical instruments, but yeah, I wasted a lot of time in a lot of different areas, you know, but one of his musical instruments, you know, Plus I get obsessed about it, you know, Like I've always played the guitar. Then start collecting now before, you know, you have 110 guitars and, uh, play the banjo, you know, I like Foggy Mountain Breakdowns, so Now I've got 10 banjos, you know. But I took lessons from a Grammy Award winning banjo player and one of the things he told me was he said if you get one song, he said the first thing is, you know, because usually your thing is you get a little of this and a little of that. You could play the leads for different things, but he said you got to get one song. You could play like a pro. You've learned it at a performance level. You could play it, add tempo without thinking, without mistakes. And then that sets it up in your mind, like, okay, this is what learning a song is like. And I really think that there is a parallel to people who are super successful. They, like, learn how to work, you know what I'm saying? Like, no, go for it. You know what I'm saying? Go. And they see the results from that, and then everything they do. I think that's why I got 100 guitars and everything. It's going to. In my mind, it was like, you know, totally.

Speaker A: There's about five or six videos I watch every morning to start my day, and one of them is from David Goggins. And, like, he starts out saying, like, if you don't have self discipline, you know, I don't look at you right, because I know you're capable of so much more. And, like, people that have not played competitive sports, people that have not trained super hard and done physically very hard things, and people who have not ran a business for a decade or two and scaled it, they may think they're working hard, and they're really not. And so I think that just being around, uh, people, like many billionaires, say who you spend time with matters more than what you set out to do. And when we tell others, like, some people look at us like, oh, family, office club, like, don't need to raise money right now. I don't know if I should go to their events. And like. But really, it's all about proximity. Being around super smart, super wealthy entrepreneurs, super intelligence, using artificial intelligence in today's world is needed and accessing the intelligence of a community. And then scale. How do you really grow your platform, grow what you're doing? And that might be with capital, it might be with deal structures, it might for you through joint ventures. But that combination of proximity, superintelligence, and scale is really what we go back to all the time on how we try to add value to others and what's made us successful.

Speaker B: Yeah, and the thing is, most people have, if they're in a salary job, they're not really in a structure where they're going to learn to go balls to the wall, you know what I'm saying? They're the idea of, I'm a salaried person and I work like a monomaniac on a mission that disregard. That's not going to happen.

Speaker A: You might get chastised if you do. Right. Like, I worked at a publicly traded company doing consulting, and we had to implement Sarbanes Oxley across, like, all these divisions. And I was assigned a couple departments. And so to make it easy, I created binders, I created checklists, I made it very simple, very systematic. And I got chastised by the head project manager and said, don't do that. Now. We all have to do that. That is such so obnoxious. And I was like, yeah, but it makes it so easy for them. They'll actually do it now. And I got in trouble for being industrious. And my professors told me, don't graduate a year early. Take your time, Richard. And then the next month, I was making more money than my professors were, who told me to take it easy and enjoy the frat life of Oregon State University. And it's like, see you later. Enjoy being a professor your whole life, because there's nothing wrong with that. But a lot of people just have a sedentary, lazy attitude on life. And if you work your butt off and laser focus, you'll probably be very successful.

Speaker B: Well, I'm glad you laid that out there, because we were talking earlier. It's easy to, like, take 10 years of your life and put it into a sentence, but the thing is of learning how to work hard and things like that, now that's a big deal. Like, I was watching this video on YouTube about Lee Trevino, and I really didn't want to watch it or whatever, but I saw it so many times, I said, okay, I'm going to watch it. It's amazingly fascinating because he was, like, the first Mexican to play on the PGA Tour. And back then, it was kind of like the country club guys, where we don't want a Mexican in here, you know? And it's not the image of the PGA with a bunch of stuffed shirts. And this is not the image we want. And, well, he said, you got me. Anyway, you know, when he won the tournament, he said, I hate to tell you, but a Mexican just won your tournament, you know? And he was like, 5 7. He wanted the shortest. Like, Gary Player is, uh, 5 6. But he was a shorter guy, wasn't as tall and a little burly. But they said he would go out there, and here was his standard day. Go to the golf course, hit a thousand balls. I don't know if you play golf or whatever. That's a lot of swing in the clock. A thousand balls. Then he'd go out and putt for an hour, practice putting for an hour. Then he'd go play 18 holes of golf. That was like an average day. Okay.

Speaker A: Wow. Uh, yeah. That's awesome. I mean, you had to think you have to be a maniac, uh, man, like, passionate about what you're doing or you're just not going to make it. At the highest level, like at the highest level, everybody is pretty good or excellent. So you have to be like top 1%. And like Metta World Peace is a, uh, LA Lakers NBA world champion. And he spoke at our event last week and he's spoken at our events many times. And I've inter interviewed Mike Tyson and over 50 pro athlete investors have spoken at our events. And they all say that when we talk to like Navy Seals, like one we featured on stage last week, or centimillionaire billionaires, they all take things to an extreme. Like Warren Buffett says, if it's pouring rain outside, if the opportunity, you don't get a thimble out, you get a bucket. And like, you have to realize when you're getting lucky and then go like really hard. And so I think that one of my favorite athletes is Matt Frazier, who's won the CrossFit World Championships five times. He retired on top because he was beating everybody by 20% or more each year. And I think that the sport paid him to retire because it was making the championships boring. He'd just slaughter everybody. And he has a, uh, saying that says hard work pays off. And I have three of his shirts that I wear anytime I travel, I wear it. When I feel like it, I wear it. And he said the people who win at CrossFit, because he's a short guy too, which made me think about it. The people that win like him. He said everybody's trained hard, everybody's talented, everybody's gifted, they all have deep work ethics. But it's a person that keeps on going and pushing beyond what they think is physically capable. That's the person who wins. And that's why he was a champion.

Speaker B: Yeah. And the thing is, most people are geared for, you know, I want to put in my 40 years or whatever, and then I'll retire or whatever. And so most people are pacing themselves, but the high achievers go like House of Fire. And because they know it's a privilege to be able to find something that you can go like a mad dog, uh, and you're not going to stay there forever because life changes, you know, you go through different phases. The industries change. You might sell the company or what. You know, I used to tell people when I put on a fence, I used to tell them, I'd look them in the eyes, especially their first time I look them in the eyes, I said, shoot bullets, not blanks, you know, and just have that in your mind. I'm going out here and I'm going on the Attack mode. I'm not going to go out there apologizing and backing up. And so the thing is that your moment to shine, I think the High Achievers recognize it. You know, like, this can be special, this is fun. But like, even like we're Tom Brady now seven times super bowl mvp, he's got all of those things now. He's just a guy in a cap playing golf and going, speaking here and there. And, uh, you know, he's on tv, but you know, he's got a whole different life. You know, you don't have to be the Mad Dog Tom Brady to live the life he is now. Although I'm sure he's on full attack mode all the time. But it's not like he's in the countdown to the super bowl right now. So these phases in your life changes. And even with Elon Musk, you know, he had this downtime where he just took time off and he was over here at Mar a Lago, you know, and him and uh, one or two of the boys with him. You know, the boys swinging on the swings out there. But you know, there comes time where, you know, there are seasons. And I think the High Achievers recognize when they get the opportunity to go on attack mode, to go and, and you know, there'll be plenty of time for other stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah, like Tom Brady said when he got inducted in the hall of Fame, that is quite simple. If you want to be the best, you just have to show up every day and work very hard and do everything that nobody wants to do. And because you showed up and did that, then you'll get inducted in the hall of Fame. So it's hard to do, but it's very simple. And so I think that is the hunger you really need to be ultra successful. Like, if I see a path to do something that's going to improve our club, I'll do whatever hard work it takes and do far more hard work than anyone else around me because I enjoy the process and I'm, um, laser focused on it. I'm not afraid of hard work if that creates more of a moat like Mr. Beast says. The reason he's a billionaire and his chocolate company Feastables alone is worth over $5 billion now and does a billion in revenue. He says that he's willing to do what nobody else was willing to do and bury himself alive for seven days. He would do this for seven days. He'd fly around the world 220 days a year and no one in their right mind would do that once you're worth $10 million, but it's because he's willing to do that that no one will ever catch him. That is his moat.

Speaker B: Yeah. And one thing that stuck out to me recently when I heard, I knew and uh, it stuck out to me his Michael, uh, Jordan's hall of Fame speech. And he said, I know a lot of y' all think that I've been too tough on my teammates and too rough and this, that and the other. And he said, and I know why you feel that way and I understand. He said, it's because you've never won anything and uh, just boom, you know, drop the hammer on him. But since that, I've heard interviews of some of the people who played with him for a long time and they said every practice they would have sprints, you know, they would have, uh, suicide drills. You know, you run till you drop. He never lost a suicide run in practice. Every time they're racing from one end of the court to the other, he was always first because he didn't want anyone to hold it over him. But that he earned the right in practice and putting the effort into practice to where he could be that way and they would take it.

Speaker A: Yeah, he's willing to do what he's asking them to do. Right. It's like I asked my team to work hard, but I'll also get up at 2:30am like last month every day I was in Fiji on vacation and worked for five hours before my family's awake. But I don't work while they're awake. I don't ruin the vacation. I just go to bed like a child at 8:00pm and, and then like, you know, it works out but like, I don't ask my team to work hard while I'm lazy. So that's important.

Speaker B: So when you started talk about starting this club, this community, how did that take off?

Speaker A: Yeah, well, at first it was me speaking at other people's events a couple hundred times and I realized most of them didn't really know what they were doing and didn't really work in the industry. They're just a media company or they're just some like nameless, faceless conglomerate offering live events. And so I was like, okay, why don't I host my own cocktail hour? Why don't I host my own half day event? And then that went well. So we started doing full day events with 5 to 10 speakers on stage and would sell event tickets. Then we started hosting conferences and capital raising boot camps and programs for founders to grow their platforms. And as that took off, I realized that some months we brought in a lot of money. Other months we were a nonprofit. So I wanted to change that and I turned it into a subscription model. And the real change was realizing one that being a member built real relationships and real community. So it was better to have a subscription model made our cash flow steady. And it made me realize the real value is in providing the proximity to wealth. And having 75 to 125 speakers on stage in two to three days is so much information, so many inputs, and so many potential networking connections that were the fastest pace investment event series. So uh, like we're like an F1 race where some conferences you have to sit there for 45 minutes listening to some gold hedge fund because he sponsored the event and everyone falls asleep or some professor from Oxford. No one cares about your research. Honestly, no one cares. Right. So we have all practical, fast paced entrepreneurs on stage.

Speaker B: And so what have you found is the ideal period of time to have a live event?

Speaker A: So we do one to three days. We only do a three day event once a year. We usually do one to two day events. But uh, the ideal amount of time for someone to be on stage is five to 15 minutes. If somebody sponsors our events, it's called Deal Flow Talk. They just get five minutes to talk about what they're doing. If somebody's interested, they can go and find you. They don't need to hear the whole life story. Right. If they're on a discussion panel and we have five or six people up there for 35 minutes chatting about a topic. If we have a billionaire or sent a millionaire or somebody who's sold many businesses, then we'll do a fireside chat. And that might last for 20 minutes, maybe 22 minutes at most. But like, nothing lasts for 45 minutes. Nothing lasts for an hour. And I would just fall asleep at these other events because they're created by cubicle jockeys, not by entrepreneurs. Like, entrepreneurs are like adhd, fast moving. Like, all right, what do I need from this? What do I do? Let me go outside network, let me do this. So you have to be fast paced to keep their attention.

Speaker B: You'll appreciate this. My cousin who's no longer with us, my oldest cousin was H. Edward Roberts, and he's the inventor of the, uh, personal computer. And that's where Bill Gates and Paul Allen left Boston and went to New Mexico, Albuquerque, and went to work for him doing the software for the company. But so he was a smart guy. And in fact, before he Died. They both called him on a joint call and told him that they wanted him to know before he passed that he was the smartest guy either one of them had met in their life. And so this is my cousin that I grew up with who most of the time, I knew him as somebody who loved to torment me and tried to kill me every time we got together. But he had this phrase. He said, all entrepreneurs are manic depressive to one degree or another. And, you know, short attention span, super excited, super pissed. And you have to have that element inside you if you're going to be able to throw yourself into things and also to change, make decisions that are tough decisions. You know, you got to be able to get emotional about things, I think.

Speaker A: Yeah, like, Alex Hanold climbed Yosemite without a rope, right? And, like, some part of his brain is not fully activated to, like, have no fear in doing that. But I also think, like, in business, you have to have the ability to obsess over something, go super deep, have crazy extreme focus, and really not care what anyone else around you thinks, or not care about criticism, people telling you you're dead wrong, or you'll never create any value in the world. So you have to have some things that are abnormal and be just like a little bit autistic or a little bit ADD or a little bit obsessive compulsive or all of the above. It's like Elon says, he doesn't have the weakness of caring whether people think about him. If he dies and he knows he did good, he doesn't care if the perception is that he didn't do good, he knows he really did good.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah. I think one of the most useless questions is when they come up and they say, how do you want to be remembered? Who cares? You know what I'm saying? It's like, you got to live with yourself while you're here. You know, why don't you care about what people think of you while you're here? And then when you're gone, opinions change up and down. You know, your hero one day is zero. Another. You and Robert E. Lee, one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, you know, the woke think comes in there tearing down his statues and this and the other. Do you think he's on the other side of eternity? They ruined my statue, you know, Right.

Speaker A: If you're a good person, you know what you did, Then the opinions of random journalists are like, there'll always be some defectors who say something negative. Like one of the most Famous billionaires out there, the founder of Oracle. Somebody in the audience said something about how Elon's an idiot and he said, well, excuse me, who are you? Journalist? Have you landed a rocket on the raft in the middle of the ocean? What have you done?

Speaker B: Yeah. And so it's always important to know who's the experience of the people that are pontificating, you know, in print or on the tv. How do people get into your conferences, where do you have them and how do people get into them? They sound like a lot of fun.

Speaker A: Yeah. So yeah, we'd love for you to come to one as our guest just to check it out for having me on here. I appreciate you having me here.

Speaker B: Let me interrupt you and just say you've done the impossible. Okay. I don't know if you know, but you've actually done the impossible. You've got me interested in attending an event where I have sworn off events. Like 20 years ago I spoke it so much I put on thousands of three day events. It's like I'm done with that, you know, done. And so in sitting in a room, you know, my nervous system just can't the idea of just sitting to listen to, uh, unless they're funny. But your event really sounds like fun, believe it or not. Congratulations.

Speaker A: One thing is we start at 10am so you can go to the gym, get your emails done, have breakfast and then come into the event with your day clean. So that's one thing we do for entrepreneurs. It also allows you to fly into the city that morning if you need to, so you're not away from family more. But basically our 30 events a year are all in Dallas, Los Angeles, Fort Lauderdale and New York City. So for you, Fort Lauderdale will be in your backyard. Our next big event is in New York City, but we also do a monthly webinar. And most importantly, our member portal has over 2,000 investor talks. So when you go into our portal, if you click on Video Vault, then you could go and say, okay, well I just want to stream videos, let's say from billionaires. And you can push on billionaires. I want to stream videos on capital raising or deal structuring or sent to millionaires. And also all of our AI tools are in there. So even if you only come to one event a year, every day you could be using our AI tools, you could be streaming talks from sent to millionaires. Like the inputs into your brain are still changing what your outputs are going to be. Most of our members come to three to five events a year out of our 30, like they don't have time to come to 15 events or even 10 events a year.

Speaker B: So this is like inside your community. And are the events just for your community? Is that how you said subscription model?

Speaker A: That is just for our community. If you go to familyoffices.com um, we do have an offer to get our billionaire AI tool and our guest pass to our portal. The guest pass will show you all the pictures of our event. My welcome letter. You'll get a couple of AI tools for free. You'll get some of my books for free, a couple of fireside chats with sent to millionaires for free. But it's like 1.5% of the portal for free, just so you can see what we're all about and make sure like it's all real and everything. And then basically, if you want to actually get access to the events, it's members only, because otherwise we'll have a bunch of high school students and stuff. There's.

Speaker B: So it's familyoffice.com correct.

Speaker A: Family offices with an S. Family offices.

Speaker B: Okay, fantastic. Well, time has flown and, uh, I've got to wrap up this portion of our interview. So it's customary. I want to give you a final word, shout out for the people who stayed with us up to this point. And I know people, a lot of people are going to want to follow up at your website and your community.

Speaker A: Sure, yeah. I mean, I think the only final word would be just emphasizing that who you spend time with matters more than what you try to do. And if anybody wants link to our free newsletter, our free YouTube channel, our free podcast, or you just have a question and you need help with something, just shoot me an email, just richardamilyoffices.com and be happy to be helpful to you.

Speaker B: Well, the one thing we didn't get into that I want is your phrase proximity. How does that phrase go?

Speaker A: Proximity is power.

Speaker B: There proximity is power. And that's one of the themes of your live events and everything. And folks, I believe the same thing. And greatness is caught and not taught. And so if you're not exposed to it, how can you catch it? So, you know, one of the great things to go back to, first of this deal is you position yourself for greatness. And when you get in, you know, we feel the same way about the big hitter world. When you come into our world, you know things are going to happen. You can't even imagine you're going to learn things you didn't know you need to learn. And I'm sure that's happening inside your world. People come in and you're just getting bombarded with all kind of useful ideas that they had no idea were out there that they needed to know about it. So that's the idea behind your group. My group? You know, the big hitter group. It's like position yourself around people that are going to allow you to. To explode your potential and reach your max. Because it's moving forward, folks. It's the real adrenaline and excitement of life. And you can feel just in hearing Richard talk, you know, he's successful, he knows all these people, but he's living a life that's exciting to him and that's what we want for you. Thanks, Richard. This is great.

Speaker A: Appreciate you having me on here.

Speaker B: That's it for this episode. If this resonated with you, do me a favor. Share it with someone who's ready to level up. Winners, find winners, and the right conversation at the right time can change everything. Want to go deeper? Join us inside the big hitter community@joinbighitters.com that's where the real work happens. And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Remember that you're either growing or dine and there's no standing still. Keep winning and I'll see you next week.