That's like eight hundred thousand dollars of recurring Revenue. If I get two and a half percent, that's 2 million. If I do five percent that's four million. And if you just think about what would I pay for a business? That makes me that much money a year. Like this is like five, ten fifteen million dollars of value. And so, I'm looking at it and going, this is great. I pay for what I'm getting, I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to
All right. What's going on, everyone? We have Andrew Wilkinson on the pot today. Andrews, one of our great, great friends. He runs this company called tiny, which is publicly traded in Canada, it's a holding company that owns like 40 different companies. I think it's publicly traded at like a 800 million dollar market cap. Something like that does 150 ish in a year in Revenue so easy. I was really good insight and we talked to him about a few interesting things. One thing is that sounds kind of like not that cool but actually is cool as he hung out with a few folks that are worth like 10 or 20 billion dollars recently and he like
Talk about what it's like hanging out with people. In that sphere, we talked about meta lab which was his agency that he started, which provided all the prophets in order to start tiny and how it makes something like 20 million dollars a year in profit. And we just said, how the hell does it make so much money? And what did you guys do? So he gives us a breakdown on that. We also asked them which agency who would start. Now we asked him all about his new Twitter experience so why would somebody who is worth all this money? Run a Twitter experiment with that makes 10 or 20 grand a month in sales and he gave us the lowdown on how much
Money. Is that little experiments making? And then we asked him about when you take dividends from a company, like what do you actually do with the dividends? And where do you invest them? Or how much do you pay yourself? And he got really transparent about that. And so it was really interesting. So check it out. This is Andrew Well Kansan, it's Sean and me Sam. So if you guys liked it, subscribe on YouTube. Subscribe on your Spotify. Subscribe on wherever podcasts are and let us know if you liked it. See you soon.
I was before you got by, Charles make it for the badger. He looks like Kevin McAllister's mom and Home Alone
mom,
he looks like he looks like he's a just taken up rollerblading and night and the 90s.
You see I look like Catherine, O'Hara.
They'll look at her character. Is it home alone?
She had a massive wave. It was cool. Let me
push it back.
No, I think I'll embrace the, dude. You look like a bully in a movie. I think you look good. I think it's cool. It's okay, man. She was hot. It was all right. Well, welcome back. There's no podcast on Earth where you will just be welcomed with open insults like my first million.
Yeah, this is great. You guys want to Rose
For another 10 minutes. Yeah, I was, I was supposed to come on what like three weeks ago and then I got strep throat and dude I haven't been that sick in years. I was like on death's door for a year and it up taking like three different antibiotics. So, I'm glad to be
alive and you're on a health kick. Now you've been lifting weights. Yeah yeah. I'm doing a muscle gain
competition with a bunch of friends so that's been really fun.
Sean says, he's Sean has like, I think 40 days left to have abs. How many days do you have left? I'm just, I say I'm perpetually.
Only eight
weeks away from having exactly the
body I want. Problem is it's a this clock restarts every time I doordash, you know, dominoes or Taco Bell or something like that. So
have you tried just doing those em pick? Because like I have so many friends that are taking that and it's just like they're suddenly ripped. Yeah. There's it just doesn't have, it doesn't do it for me and
Shawn's. Very anti like, are you would you, are you, are you a vaccine? Are you anti-vaccine guy, too? No, but I do think that you killed vaccine was not
Vaccine is, I was like wait a minute. So you still get it. You still spread it. All right. Well, I don't sound like mixing me. You're like anti putting stuff in your body. It seems I don't drink caffeine. I don't take like, I guess I take some supplements. Like, I'll take protein powder or whatever, but yeah, I try not to be dependent on anything and, you know, the weight loss thing for me, I'm already married. I got two kids, I don't really care to lose weight, aside from conquering, my mind, and doing something that I wanted to do.
So if I took those epic to do it, it would not be satisfying in the way that it will be. When I just do it myself.
Yeah, I'm just always told myself at one point in my life. I want to look like Wolverine. Even if it's like for one week and then it's over and it's unsustainable or whatever. I just want to get there. I want to have the photo to prove it. So that's my goal for the next year. You should
do the Jesse itzler living with a seal thing. I feel like that's in play for you. Why aren't you doing
that? That sounds. So freakin miserable those
David Goggins then. Yeah, we did you read the book them? No I just remember you guys had them on.
Gotta you gotta read that book. It's pretty good. It's a fun. It's a fun.
It's called living living with and seal or somebody would seal
and he writes it almost like a diary. So it's just sort of like you know, it's not like a long book with like a bunch of Flowery language is very simple. And you know, it's like any David guy can sing gets motivated, but this is like secondhand goggles. You don't even realize, the guy is David goggin because he doesn't say in the book.
And you're reading the perspective, not of David Goggins telling you that your soft and you need to be hard, but like a guy who was kind of soft getting yelled at by David goggin. So you're sort of Second Hand of receiving the info.
Have you guys seen the cover this book? It looks like, you know remember like Ernest Goes to
Camp, it looks silly have like Ernest, very empty handed. Well we and we're having the guy Jesse on the Pod soon and he's scheduled and I was thinking about it Shawn. We've asked our question of like who's like, who has the ideal life? He's up there.
Is Keys kind of nailed it. Well, that's just thing. The life resume, what does
he do? So he just like has these experiments or whatever. I know he went and lived with monks and he's done the Navy SEAL
thing. Well, before that, he was like, I think he'd like a mission. Italy made a little bit of money by having. Like, I think he had like a rap group, and he like made songs for like, the New York Knicks and be like that was his career was writing Jingles. I had a beer rapper was like, all right. Maybe can't be like, rapper rapper, but I can be like commercial jingle rapper,
hit it with that, made a couple
million bucks, like sold the company like four million dollars.
Then he created the fractional Jet Chair Company. Marquis Jets even his buddy and they sold that to netjets which buff it owns. And then he married. The co founder of Spanx are the founders fact that she's like a billionaire. Yeah. And then he also created like a coconut. What's it called? Ziva Waters. He bought into zebra, coconut Waters, even coconut water. Okay zico zico coconut water early on and then help them sell the coke. So he basically just goes like,
Kind of like Mission or passion the passion, but he's had like, pretty good results on your owns. A part of an NBA team. He was like, oh I want to, I'm Into Fitness. So he creates this running club. He actually reminds me a little bit of you in that. Like, I feel like you experiment. Like you like to experiment and you'll get into your experiments and experiments almost start. There's almost like, oh, why is Andrew doing this? Almost silly thing, but it's because there's something in you. That's like you identify something that you have right now. Jesse. It's there's like,
I love pickles and there's no great pickle company. So he's like scouring the Earth to find the best pickle company to buy. He's like there's a big opportunity to pickles and he's like I can't believe you guys are all sleeping. Well, there's a pickle opportunity like this and I just find it amazing how he's getting really into these like Niche, passion Pursuits. But then kind of pulls them off in an epic way.
I think, I think it's really cool. I mean I think we talked about them before but Nick Gray any of these people that build their life around the thing. They actually love doing because I feel like so many
Of us were like, okay, I want to get rich, I want to build a big business or whatever. And so you get into doing something be don't actually necessarily like a lot of those tasks you do wear. If you can build a business, where your job is like to meet interesting people or be a podcaster and speak to really interesting people all the time or do these crazy life experiments. I think that's awesome but I think it's a double-edged sword. I've made that mistake where I will get into a hobby or something like that, and I'll turn it into a business and it will take the joy out of it.
So I think it's a little it's a little hard to find that that right in between
spot. Well that's why I didn't want to do that Twitter thing because you're doing Twitter subscribers. You have like a community now I think you I don't know if you'll say the revenue or not but it's like actually kind of a business six figures a year in Revenue, you enjoying that, you told me you're doing it and I was like I don't want to do that. It sounds hard.
Yeah, yeah. Well let me let me explain. So yeah. So I have about 240 thousand Twitter followers. I've never
So anyway I just, you know, I tweet every day and it's literally like I'm in the shower or I'm on the toilet and I think of something I tweeted at that's always been my life on Twitter and it's been amazing. Like I've met tons of interesting people from it but the issue is and I know both you guys have this problem too. You get endless reach outs from all these people constantly and for a while I had to open DMS, it was just overwhelming. I was getting like 100 GM's from random people pitching me on like crypto scams and stuff. But
Be like 25 people would be some incredible 22 year old, who has this amazing cash flow business? They want to sell me your they need money or something like that. And so I had this incentive to go through it and I would spend like 30 minutes a day going through all these and triaging them and kind of hating my life. And so when I saw this subscription thing I was like okay this is actually a filter so what Twitter lets you do is have gated tweets so you can say anyone who pays to subscribe to me.
Gets these extra tweets. And so what I did is I was like, okay, if someone will spend 29 bucks, which is the cost to basically, buy me lunch, then they can DME, then they can message me. Then I'll, you know, then I'll respond and so I used it as a filter but it kind of surprised me as I started doing the math. So basically, what I did is I said, okay, 29 bucks. I'll do an AMA once a month which you know, I enjoy doing anyway
and video or writing
just video like a big video group or whatever.
And then I made a telegram group and that's it. And I said I won't even respond to the telegram group, you know, that's it. You get the AMA and my tweets or whatever, but when you do the math, like it's pretty crazy, I have about 550 paying subscribers today. That's growing. Pretty consistently. That's about. 16 K of mrr. So about 200k a year, it's basically pure profit. I probably spend an hour a month, two hours a month, doing the AMA or whatever.
If you look at the math like a one percent conversion rate on 200 and what is it 240,000 people? That's like eight hundred thousand dollars of recurring Revenue. If I get two and a half percent, that's 2 million. If I do 5%, that's four million and if you just think about what would I pay for a business? That makes me that much money a year. Like this is like five, ten fifteen million dollars of value. And so, I'm looking at it and going, this is great. I pay for what I'm getting, I'm getting people being filtered out.
Out the dinguses are filtered out. I'm making money and I'm actually getting deal flow. So I've like higher, I've literally hired two or three people from this. I now go to this group and I'm like, hey, I need a CEO for this business or I want to buy a business like this and so it's been awesome. And yeah, I'm loving
it. Same to you pay to follow. Andrew. No. I will think. Okay, I can just text them but I
will. I'm a
dangerously good there in the biggest, I'm paying subscribers. I are you, of course. All right, I'll do.
Are you going to do it? Sean. No. I'm never going to do this. I paid literally to just figure out why the hell is Andrew doing this? And then my mind started going with conspiracies, I texted. And you can, I share my conspiracy theory as to why? Yeah, I am. Okay. So I assumed my Saint Andrew a voice. Note I go, is this is my logic. You're way too rich to be doing this. So there's got to be another reason. So, why would I why would Andrew start using all the paid features of tour? These new paid features of X. Why would he be doing these Patriots?
Subscriber experiments and he's speaking. So glowingly about how this is so cool. I was discovering his true fans how he's getting all this value out of it. I was like this just doesn't add up. It's too much work for too, little money for this guy and so then I was like, I know what he's doing. I've seen Andrew do, cool moves like this in the past where he uses he throws his weight around in order to meet the cool people he likes and admires wants to hang out with. I said, oh, this is the long game because guess who really wants cool.
Trusting people like Andrew using all the paid Twitter features in order to to build a small business and it would love that they're telling the world how great this is the Elan freaking musk and I thought, oh, this is genius. Actually Andrew is using this feature on blast, he's the most legit guy who's doing this with a unique use case and he's got a big following. He's going to be the gold star example, he's gonna get a follow, it might get a DM, he might get in
Vited might get invited to come out to visit. Andrews. Going to end up friends with Elon Musk from this whole thing. That's my prediction. And that's why I sent a voice note to Andrew. Like I cracked the case. Like I found, you know, whatever the shooter for JFK and I was like, I know what you're doing, you're trying to become friends with you on and he's like, no just like yeah, right. I was like, damn, I almost wish that was the answer. That would have been a better answer. Is that true? If she I have
no and I am invested in SpaceX quite a while ago, and I have a ton of friends
Who are friends with Ilan and know him and stuff? I honestly I don't know what I would say to the guy, right? Like I feel like he's like a super genius engineer like super kind of Asperger's e guy. I don't there's a lot of people I would love to meet Elon. I'd love to be at a dinner table with him but I actually don't I don't know what I would say to him. It's like meeting Thomas Edison, like how am I interesting to this guy? Who would you like to be was boring businesses? I really want to meet Larry Ellison. I've been trying to meet Larry.
Listen for like probably two years and I went to Lanai and he owns the entire island of Lanai. It's insane like everything. He owns, they're all the businesses, all the hotels, all the real estate. And while I was there, I was trying to find a mutual connection and he kept driving by me in, he or flipping you off an orange,
the
guy, the guy drives an orange Corvette, and he just rips around Lanai, and I just couldn't, I couldn't meet him. But anyway, he's super fascinating
dude, it's so
You that from the outside. So we'll do an intro to this because we just jumped into it. But so Andrew, you're in your mid maybe late thirties, now thirties now and very, very successful company in the ballpark but billion dollars publicly traded and you still can't meet some people. And so good-looking, it looks like the mom from home
alone and we still can't get it done. It's insane. I claim to fame. I wanted to look like Wolverine and instead, I look like the mom from Home Alone.
I didn't tell the story on the podcast yet but I went down to LA and I did a bunch of these like pod interviews that are gonna be coming out. But I did some meetings that were not podcast just like really interesting people but I didn't I didn't record. I just wanted to go I went to their house as wanted to meet them and see what they're like and one of the people. So I can't say who one of the people. They were showing me around the house. Has a famous successful person in. L.a. I'll just use that General character.
And this is something really insightful. They were talking about trying to get something, they're trying to get their kid into a school and like there's a person who's rich and famous, it could kind of get anything they want. But there's you know, these schools and I lay there is private schools that like there, they get up there thing is that they're like Harvard for kindergarten, they like reject everybody. And so they got rejected at the school and he's like, he's saying this, he goes because I couldn't tell you that morning. He's like I
Felt something that I hadn't felt in seven years rejection he's like nobody had told me no in seven years and I was like wow that's a that's kind of amazing that you know you sort of feel rejection. And so anyways my dear Larry Ellison point, I think it's great. That you have certain things that didn't didn't work out or you got rejecting because when we were in La we made me met maybe 20 people during the week that we had meetings with. And I would say, a very common thing was people were
Of touch with rejection which was either one of two things. They weren't trying enough new things so they're just in their comfort zone or everybody around them. Just said, yes, even to their bad ideas, even to like request, it didn't make sense. And you could see firsthand how that's not a great thing. How you don't want to be in that position has? I don't know if you've been single and successful but Dan Bilzerian has this line. I actually read the damn bazarian book which is shockingly, good. And he's like, being famous is so much better.
For meeting girls, and being rich is like, it's 10 times better to be famous. Then it is Rich. Have you found being successful has helped you with women or do they mostly not give a shit? Well, I
haven't been. I haven't really been, like, single for a very long period of time, it's definitely helped. But I mean, I think It ultimately comes down to status in the room, you're in, right? So like if you're in a club, you know the DJ the guy who's making less than the bartender and is getting paid in drinks. He's the man, he's the guy that all the girls want.
Leap with right. So I think you know whatever room you're in and so you know if I was at like a like a business conference and a bunch of people knew who I was, yeah, maybe that would help me with women but when it comes to data day, I mean, yeah you're way better off being like an Instagram influencers or something like girls actually care about. I think it helps the, I mean, it helps to have your your shit together.
For sure. How do you play the status game? I had an experience recently where somebody? I know I have to be really vague about this. Somebody I know when
To someone's house. Who is a billionaire? That's also famous, and that person entertains a bunch of people during the Summers, it has a bunch of people the house at the same time, all of those people are also rich and famous and the person I know a regular person. You know, not not like somebody would recognize or somebody who's been in People magazine or whatever. And so they felt very intimidated in that social setting to the point where they're like, well, you know, I'm just gonna go eat my room because it's like, I don't really want to
I feel like if I go here I have to engage. I don't really know how to engage. They don't they're not going to care about me. They're really like talking themselves out of it and I think there's a very common situation I know because I've definitely felt that in a bunch of social settings. I think this probably more common than I realized I thought when I experienced it, I thought this was something that was just happening in my head. Then as this person was telling me about it, I realized it. Okay, this probably happens to a lot of people. How do you guys deal with that, like kind of social anxiety? Where
You're in your own head about the status of the people in the room, and how you fit in and where you fit.
I've just realized that everybody wants to talk about themselves and it's the Dale Carnegie thing find out what someone likes to talk about and then talk to them about that. And just keep asking questions. And I realized that if they, if I make them feel good, if they get to talk about the thing that they're interested in, they will leave that experience thinking of me as a very positive person, regardless of
status. Have you read that book, Sean? Do you know what he's talking?
About. Yeah, I have yeah there's like a famous story where this like, young guy is hanging out with this. Like a rich guy who has the power and the young guy just asked questions for 90 minutes of the hundred minutes. And at the last 10 minutes, the rich guy finally, like, ask him just a little bit, and the rich guy leaves the conversation being like, that was the best conversation I've ever had. That person. Sure is great and the other, you know, the nobody was like, dude I barely said anything literally happens to Ben and the business partner all the time, you'll come back from a meeting and I'm like, how to go. He's like yeah, it was great.
Guy. You know, I asked a bunch of questions, you know. He's like he literally I really
didn't tell them anything. I didn't say anything didn't
really ask me too much. He's like I just asked him so many questions that I was interested in about him. He's like at the end of it the guy stood up was like man this is one of the best conversations I really like you
and I was like did it again like he is that he's like
the walking version of that book
and you leave and you're like you know nothing about you didn't ask me any questions and I think it's great. If the person is really fascinating
What the status stuff though where I get annoyed is. So I remember I was at a conference probably like 13 years ago, and at this point my business is making, you know, a couple million bucks a year in profit. You know, it's pretty successful and I sit down at this table next to this VC and he seems very disinterested and, you know, then he says, what is your startup do? And I say, well, I don't have a start-up, I have a business and its profitable.
And he literally just goes, oh a lifestyle business turns his back. I'm just tired, literally just turns his back away from me and just start talking to the guy next to him. And I remember who it is, I will one day there's gonna be like a comeuppance moment, but I always think about that. And then the other thing that happened to me recently. So I was on this yacht, I'll tell you guys about that later if you want do it now. Okay, so so basically I got invited to go on.
100 million dollar-plus yacht which I was actually really really excited about just always been curious like it's this bizarre thing that you really don't get to see very often and so I thought I'd love it but I actually found it incredibly odd it's something that I feel like is very desirable because others desire it and we all have this idea of it but in reality I just don't get it. Like you spend this as the insane amount of money to be isolated in a floating.
Ting Hotel away from all the plebs basically.
Right. What was it? What was the net worth of the guy in order to have a hundred million dollar? Yeah. You're worth like 5 or 10
billion, 20 billion, plus like very, very, very wealthy guy. I won't, I won't say who, but someone who's like a subscriber of
yours on Twitter. Oh, this is say somebody who?
Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Say that not a dig, you know, you know, like you ever like you ever have that feeling of like, um, you know, you're on this you're on this like floating Hotel. It's
Shaking rattling. It's swaying lately which is like in my opinion, not nice. And then you like, have you ever been like a on a really, really nice RV. Like you go on one of those boats RVs and you're like, holy crap, I can't believe this RV has, like the shower, I can't believe it has like a king size bed, but at the end of the day, it's an RV king-size bed, it's not as nice as being in a hotel. And I felt like, that's the rich person equivalent, right? Like, everything on this boat is amazing, but it's not as
Nicest thing in a Four Seasons and it's 100 times the cost. And you've got this thing that costs, you ten to twenty million dollars a year to maintain Away, really dirty stuff for 10 people, literally, this whole boat just has 10 guests on it, right, it's just crazy. But anyway, while I'm on this yacht whole bunch of people there and there's this guy who runs a publicly traded company and you know, I'm doing my thing. I'm asking questions and chatting with everyone and he kind of like his kind of the serious
I seems very unimpressed by me and he goes, oh, so what's your business? And I say oh I've got a, you know, holding company and he goes oh is it public? And I say yes public and he goes, how big is it? And I go I don't know. Trading it like 800 million today and he goes oh okay. And his is like 10 billion. He's like oh lifestyle business. He's taunting you. Yeah, exactly. It was like that same feeling, right? And it's like I still got that same here telling what they're doing and I just feel like I'm not
And apply, I'm like, opting out I just can't deal with
who loves up his legs. I just walked away soups up.
That's no, that's the weird thing with the status camera. It is like, there's no end of it. There's no end like the bill. I remember I was talking to a guy who's a multi-billionaire and he goes, oh my God, you know, Laurene Powell jobs, Steve Jobs Widow. She's so fucking Rich. She's worth like 20 billion and I look at him and I'm like, what?
You not do that, she can and he kind of goes glassy-eyed and he's like super yacht, I can't do a super yacht yet and it's just like that is the most pathetic, insane
thing but you're yet, you're falling into that trap as am. I, I'm sure Shawn is as well, where, you know, I'm not a billionaire, but I'm sure someone looks at what, you know, maybe what I have, and they go. Why would you want more? And in my head I'm like, of course, I want more and I'm angry at myself for wanting that, but it's never enough.
Yeah, it's like leaving
Being a party and you go to that any move to the
next room and then they put you back at the kids table. Like God, I just want to be at the adults
table right now and I just keep getting up at a kid's
table, no matter what level I get to, we were at an event that was a basketball-related event. And I've said this before Ben has like some facial recognition software or something like that because he's like that guy over. There is
the minority owner of this NBA team. I'm like, dude, how do you even recognize the mine?
40 owners of these teams like that. I don't even know who these people are. You see him at an event you're like, that's him. He's standing alone. He's talking to nobody. And so we walk over like, oh, let's introduce ourselves walk over and introduce ourselves. Hey, what's going on? I'll show you what brings you here. You know, whatever. Something like that. So
he he we kind of approach it from the
side. He turns he's got two are pods in, all right? Double are pot. All right. No pink. That's okay. He'll surely take 10.
Out, he looks at us when I say the first line of, he kind of just looks at us. Like are you going to leave or is there more? Oh, there's more. Okay, I see him. He takes out his phone and
he just slides, the volume slider down
halfway. I don't
even even pause is
temporarily. Gave us like some air space and we and we
actually know a little bit again. He's been. Does this guy? He's like, oh yeah, he's really into this and he's business was doing
this.
So I'm like asking him about his thing for a second and you know
this guy if there was a cologne called leave me the fuck alone. It would have been spraying it all over us in that moment it was so
obvious. What this guy did not want to talk to us? Fair enough, we walk away next day, we see a picture of him like, on it on Instagram or something that he's smiling. And we I texted our friend who approached him with us, I was like oh this somebody snapped a picture of him when we walked away like this. That's him smiling. So bright you know
as that interaction.
Action was over, but I feel like it's like, you know, you have to experience these things so that you won't do it to others, right? And I always wonder like what's the moment where I kind of did that to somebody now like I never want to become that. Show me where I'm going to die. So I don't go there
when I want to ask you a question to ask you a question. That's unrelated, I think Sean put this here is actually his last question and I just read it and it's the same question of I've had and we could see this now that you guys are public. So Andrews companies publicly traded.
Tiny.com. You could slash investors, you can find all the good stuff. I think you guys even did, your annual meeting with is a podcast, which was cool. Sean has this question, how the fuck does metal AB make so much money and that is a similar question that I have. It's astounding how your your services part of tiny does so well, some which I think is I don't know what the exact numbers you can clarify, but it's something in the range of Tiny's making 50 or 60
Million dollars a year with really healthy margins, which is just a very big agency. So, yeah, that's the question. Andrew, how the fuck does metal add make so much money?
Yeah, I mean agencies can be incredibly profitable and they're incredibly hard and I think that when you do it for almost 20 years and you have a niche. So for example, with metal a band, we own, you know, the numbers are seeing are the Blended collection of I think six or seven different agencies. Hello.
At a
lab. What's the public number?
Sure, I don't know off for that Division. I really, I thought it was like 60 or 70.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, this is one of the downsides of being public, right? I don't want to say some number and have it be wrong and they're, you know, sit whatever. But, but, you know, anyone can go look at the filings and see, but for the group of those agencies, you know, they can be incredibly profitable if you find a really, really good Niche. And the nice thing with metal AB is that, you know, we basically on product design and building like,
VPS for startups and stuff in 2007 and we worked at it for a really long time. And so when you have that reputation, people will pay up to get you, right? And there's really not that many people that do it and do it well and have the capabilities we do. So you can charge a premium and have really healthy margins. Now that goes up and down depending on what's going on in the market. Depending on how much, you know, how hard it is to hire designer developer, that kind of thing. And the problem with an agency is that it's the most variable business in the world.
World. So, you know they're wonderful. They produce a lot of cash flow, but for the last 20 years, we've actually been aggressively diversifying away from agencies and the agencies. Have just been The Little Engine That Could they just keep on growing and growing and growing. We didn't ever expect that Metalhead would get to the scale. It's at and you know, it's been like an amazing surprise
sound and I were just sitting the exact same
way I do. I had to stop myself like, that was like man, we both like little Shirley Temple.
Right? When I saw that, I was like I'll let him go first but I know that there's so many things here that we're good with simple question,
does battle lab get? Most of us
are like, how many salespeople does metal have employees? Or people that like their core thing is to go sell metal lab as a service to other people. Bring in new accounts. Bring in
business. Well, so we didn't really do a lot of outbound so it's mostly mostly inbound demand. And again, that's another reason why the business is the agencies in general have been profitable.
Like we've basically focused on reputation and organic, whereas a lot of the big agencies and people that have much lower margins. So like a typical agency will have 20 percent margins, 15 percent margins. Even five percent margins. If it's poorly, run often, they have to have a whole bunch of people out there cold calling and selling, we don't have that problem to the same degree. People come to us and want to work with us. So I think the sales team is maybe six or seven people or something like that. The whole company is about 100 and
50 or something. You have
had a bunch of agencies you've had met a lab which is product design, was that? That's how I would classify it. You've had a no code agency, you have content agency, you have like, a bunch of different agencies. Metal table seems to be like the biggest winner by far. Like if they would like, there's like a power law, right inside your portfolio and metal, a bigger has been around for longer, is it because you started at the right?
Time. Is it because you were there as the founder sweating it and grew it into something big. Is it because that Niche is better? Why is meta lab so much bigger? Why have these other agencies? Not had the same sort of scale that meta lab was able to?
Well, we really only started diverting based on, here's what happened. So Meta lab was the Golden Goose that provided all the cash flow that we use to build tiny and buy all the other businesses. And to be honest we really were kind of saying we don't want more agencies. You know, we're happy to own that one.
I will hold it forever but that's not an area we want to
fold. Is that is that beam? Is that, is that division called beam. So here I'll just read it called being. All right here, this is from your 2000. This is from your one of the reports. So, founded in 2006 with zero dollars invested never raised the scent of equity in 2021. It did 62 million in Revenue with earnings of 21 million, 20. Sorry, I was 21 2022. It did 81 million with about 20 million in, in
operating earnings. So those are the public numbers. Yeah.
So so anyway, so we have this problem. So Meta lab was getting to the point where they could only do projects for like five hundred thousand dollars. And so we had tons of leaves coming and we had no board send that, we would just say no. And so we went out and we acquired a small agency in Spain, we spun up 80/20, we kind of basically said look, we've got, we have a sawmill, we've got all this sawdust coming out of the Sawmill, all this demand. We
Go find this into wood pallets and sell it. And so we basically created like a whole constellation of smaller agencies to service, the leads from the big one, and then all of those agencies have kind of moved out of the house now. So they're not reliant on metal a bleeds anymore to the same degree and we've had some amazing successes while they're not as big. Most of those we started for 25 Grand, maybe or up to the biggest one we bought maybe for 500 Grand, you know that business today, does two or three million
Dollars of ebitda. So there we've had some really good wins but I have this whole framework of like one plus. One equals 100 and you guys had Syed on. Yeah. Would you think about that last week? I guess I loved. It is great. And there's so much about the way that he thinks we've read. All the same books a lot. A lot was very similar and I was nodding my head along. But what he did with wpbeginner where he goes, hey I've got this huge source of traffic. I've got all these users that want to be told what plugins to use.
He can go and buy these plugins. That have a customer acquisition problem, they've built a great product, they're built by developer, they don't know how to Market it. They don't know how to Source customers. When you put those two things together, you're basically buying this business on historical earnings but you know, you can't exit tomorrow. And to me that kind of reminds me of what we've done in the agency space. We've said, look, we have, you know, a hundred leads coming in every month that are you know, things we can't service, we might as well spin up all these agencies to make a bunch of money from those two.
And I love that
model, told me that the revenue and the profit. I mean, it's almost 20 years old, that the revenue and the profit. In some years, it's been very lumpy. We're like it went down a significant amount the next year, right?
Oh yeah. It's a roller coaster. This is the thing, is everybody that looks at these businesses goes. Wow, these are incredible. I'd love to own an agency. The reality of an agency though is that it's a whole bunch of people. Their hair is always on fire. They either have
A little work or too much work, maybe they're over hired or under hired and the margins can swing around a lot if you're not very disciplined. So, these are very hard businesses, they're not, they're not easy, but they can be wonderful businesses from a cash flow perspective. And certainly, I mean Syed said as well, but if I was, you know, if I lost everything and I didn't have my Twitter subscribers, I would probably go start an agency. Like, I think that is the easiest way to make 500 Grand a year. Very
Very simply that's changing with a. I probably, but what
Niche agency would you do if you had to start over from scratch? We take away all your money and all your all your audience. Well, I would do
design just because that's what I know. But, you know, that's, that's my world, right? Like, that's where I started, but I don't know. I don't know how that
evolved over time. Sean, do you think about doing an agency? Me. Hell no. Do you know anything about me? I'm looking to get rid of the lazy way. I'm not trying to do the hard
stuff but you can do it. This is what this is, what drives me crazy is you guys have
Nick Huber, Nick Huber has three hundred thousand, Twitter followers, and he basically said, okay, I get five different inquiries. People message me asking for SEO, they asked me for property appraisal. They asked me for web design and they asked me
for no one asks. Nick for y PSI. Yeah,
typically her, I'm sure. But whatever
Nick is, one of my closest friends, he's doing an
SEO agency. I'm like do people asking for SEO like I didn't he
What he's doing. What he's doing is smart, right? So he's a human router. So he's got all these enquiries and then he's writing them in. So, like, what Sean did? So this whole framework of one plus one equals 100, like Sean, what you did was Shepherd, right? You have this business, it perfectly aligns with you, you know, the product, all you have to do is talk about it, a bunch, and it will do well, you haven't. But that is a fucking hard business. That is an agency, right? That's a recruiting agency, which is a brutal brutal complicated business. That's just been
All abstracted away from you and you could do that. You could abstract away, I'm a digital agency. If you guys want to buy a piece of one of my digital agencies and just promote the fuck out of it, I will happily do a deal with you, okay? I will do that because you
know it's easy for me to tell people that Shepherd, lets them hire talented people for 10x lower price than in the United States. It's easy for me to tell people that that they should go to support shepard.com and go do that. That's not hard, right? It's not hard for me to tell people how much insane value there is and how I use that for my businesses, easy stuff to do. Yeah.
And how would the yeah, good plug. And
I feel like, I feel like you guys are like, you know, when I hear you say this, it's like you're looking at it and being like, Oh, a car wash. Like I don't want to get my hands like all wet and I'm like, I don't want to scrub the cars. And yeah, it's like, dude, you just own the car wash? Yeah. But you have to
make sure that the product is good enough that you want to promote, which does involve brainpower and worry. Sure before, I share the shepherd, I tested every product that does that on the market hired, through each of them, I hired multiple
Shepherd met with Marshall. It was like, okay here's the deal. That makes a lot of sense and it's a it's at the right scale where it works versus he's like agencies from zero, I think are a lot harder, but I will say the shepherd experiment has been so great that I can't wait to do the next Shepherd because it is, it's the perfect thing right there Revenue doubles, my income goes up without the operational load. Customers get a good service that they, you know, that they would be need and they wanted. Anyways, that's, that is like so much easier than for example, my econ, econ.
Business is like your agency business. Like, you know yesterday, I'm looking at the inventory forecast, so
we were way under then. We were way over and we're
just constantly going to get this wrong. We have, we need so many people to do all the operations for this because it's a physical product. And you have to do photo shoots, you have to do everything to make this business work. And I'm like, man, this is hard mode compared
to, you know, the easy
mode of what the other side of things we're doing.
Totally. And that's the, that's the thing. I think like to man, with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so it's like, you guys are probably both start newsletters. I'd start an agency. It's whatever you know and is easy, but it's not the forever business. Like I have this whole thing about you want to, you want to before you launch your rocket. You need a launch pad, build the launch pad. This is the launch pad business, right? It just provides you the ability to go and do the things. You're really passionate about. Did you explain the one plus
one equals 100? Did you say what that is?
Yeah. So
Well basically it's the idea of if you have an unfair Advantage. So for Syed, it was he has wpbeginner the blog. He has tons of people that are asking hey what WordPress plugins should I use. And then if you buys a WordPress plugin which you can buy for incredibly cheaply, he knows he can boost it so it's like a guaranteed return to me. It's like you know imagine if you own an airport and there's like 10,000 people in the lobby every day, you know that you can sell them, hot dogs, a hot.
I'll Stand is not a good business, but if you put a hot dog stand in the middle of an airport, I can guarantee you're going to sell a lot of
hot dogs. There's a story after the side thing I started reading about Warren Buffett who I had I knew nothing about and I've been texting Andrew. I'm like I get why you did this like this. I was awesome, you know, of course it sounds awesome. When it's from the best person who's ever done it. But there's a story in the late 60s when he was maybe 35 and he goes to a movie theater and he goes boy, it would be nice to own a
Little bit of all these ticket sales of all these people coming. This movie, this seems like a wonderful business and then he goes, you know, there's this company called Disney that's doing this. They even have a theme park. Let's go. Check it out Charlie. And so they literally go to the theme park to like a figure out and they talked to like the the tendons, at the attendance at the rides and the like how many people come to this thing? And they're like, that's how they're doing their research, is they actually went to the theme park and then he ends up buying five percent of Disney, I think he paid for million dollars, so it was worth, you know?
Not a lot of money back then and knocked out the park. And then there's another story about this guy. He's like, yeah, Warren Buffett was supposed to be this one Durkin investor we had all heard about them, but I was in New York and I saw him walking around New York, like pacing counting his paces. And I asked him what he was doing is like, oh, we're going to invest in some type of real estate deal and I want to figure out how many Paces it made up of this Square block, so I can guess how many like people are going in. It was like something crazy like that. It was really funny. He were here would actually test these things you would look at the financials and that was the most important thing and then he would go.
Like in real life and actually test these things to see like, all right, is this cool? Is this legit? What's this all about? And or he would like there's a story of him literally knocking on the door at Geico, like, hey, can you get, can someone talk to me about this company? Tell me what you guys do because the financials look great. And like, it was pretty funny, how we did some of that stuff. He's very Hands-On.
Yeah, buff it. I'm so glad that you're deep diving on Buffett now because it is, it is the way I think about it, as its business abstracted to the ultimate degree. You think about this guy, he's got
90 or 100 companies, he's got three hundred and seventy-five thousand employees and he sits on his ass reading and Omaha every single day and I just look at that and I go, how do I, how do I do that? And I don't know that sitting on your ass reading all day is the thing you want to do necessarily, but how do you take enough of Buffett you have the freedom to spend
your? Hey I always heard people say that so I was like, oh I could read so I've been really like Thriller novels and stuff like that. I'm like, I'm just like Buffett
just like Tom.
Fancy. And then I read this biography. It's like he's reading and all reports all day that like this woman read on it. I've been really like history books. I'm like, I'm just like Buffett and then I read this book on him and I'm like, he's really like textbooks. Like, that's way different.
Yeah. Chris when Chris and I started tiny, maybe eight or nine years ago we were like, oh, we were reading all the Buffett books and we're like, okay, this is what we're going to do. We're just going to read annual reports all day.
And we print out all these annual reports and I think we lasted like four hours, dude. So I just stole boring and it's these guys are like they're there. So all they want to do is read write like Charlie Munger. He just reads all
day. I think Buffett said 500 pages a day that he would read. It's crazy, it's insane. That's a book a day, 500 a day, it's so boring. I like I also try to do that when I went and look at the annual reports and I'm like they're using the same words over and over again. I don't even know what these were.
I mean it's challenging you have some interesting topics out here want to do the so what is the give me these two cool businesses, so cool. Business number one, no story lost. What
is that? Yeah. So this is really cool. So you guys heard of the business story
worth. Yeah. I'm a big fan of it.
Yeah, it's super smart started by this guy Nick bomb.
He him and I worked out of the same office when he was starting it. So he was, he who I was one of his first customers love
him. Yeah, he's awesome. He's living, living it up on. I think he's on Maui right now. Just
Just living there and living the dream. But basically you buy it for like your parents, your grandparents, your siblings or whatever. I think it's like 99 bucks and all it does is it just sounds like a drip campaign of questions and so it'll be like hey like tell me about your childhood. What was a moment where you struggled in a job, who is your first boss? All these things that you've always been curious to know about your family and you can choose all the questions or whatever and then at the end of the year it compiles it into a book that
Can then print and share with your family, or whatever and I thought, like, wow, this is an amazing idea. So I go and I spend 200 bucks, I buy it for my parents and of course, my parents, fill it out for like three weeks and then they just stopped. And I talked to my dad and he's like, well it's a lot of writing, you know, as a lot of time and so I was a little annoyed but I was like whatever. And then I met this guy actually locally here in Vancouver and he has this business called No story lost and it's like the VIP
IP version of story worth. And so, what they do is you just say, okay, Dad, look, we're going to schedule like three zooms. You're just going to talk to these people and they basically have like biographers they interview your parents or your siblings or whatever, and then they actually write a proper biography of them. So I'm about to get this book, professionally written book about my Dad's life and I'm so excited to read it and my dad was just so much happier because he didn't he just had to talk and like my dad loves to talk. So, yeah, it's a really
Little business. I think it's like two grand or something versus
200. Do not baby biggest businesses.
I don't, I don't think it's very big. Wait, you met this guy? He has a cool business and you didn't
strap him down and water board, until he told you his annual
revenues. I think that's wrong. I actually. And I invest, I think I invested 25k in it on basically like no questions asked given 25k. I think it's doing like maybe a million or something, but I think they're big problem is customer acquisition. So one plus one equals 100. Here I am talk about it.
Maybe blow this up and you don't need that many people to do it in order for it to do very well. But I think the problem is that so Nick makes a shit ton of money. I think off story where you think so, because o, because it's automated, right? You don't need any employees, you basically build it once and and then you just mark it at, whereas this, you got to actually have a writer work with every single person that buys it. So I think it's a much harder business model, but as a customer, I think it's a really awesome idea. I feel like these are the businesses that AI is.
like just really help all their margins because
You can have an AI biographer, like an AI biographer is like a very good use case for these LMS where they can ask questions that they know will poke and prod, they can take your responses and ask follow-ups and they could summarize all the audio that's coming in and transcribe it for. So that the writer then can come in, take the source material and like you could cut the writers work down by something probably like 50 to 80%. Did you guys see the book or the business called? It was called book and a box that it was
Subscribe and Sean was a customer of them but basically my friend Tucker Max started it and he hired a CEO to run it and basically you would talk to someone for. I don't even remember how long it you pay 30 or 40 or 50 Grand, the prices have gone up throughout the years and they write a book for you and it's mostly business people who want to write a book and eventually like it's paid speaking and Consulting gigs but I thought it was doing great and all of a sudden out of nowhere not only
Did it go bankrupt but like there was like, petitions from the authors who were, who worked for the company as contractors are like revolting in like it's caused a lot of controversy but they owe you Sean a book, right? You paid them like tens of thousands of dollars and you just forgot about it or you bail bond it. Yeah. It was like, you know, father I bought paid. I was like, oh yeah. I want to write a book. Great. These people help you write a book. They'll, you know, I'm a guy with more ideas than time. This will save you time. Fantastic. Let's try this and it's the
same sort of idea like they
you have the book
Of the concepts they hop on the phone with you. They help you flush it out. It's a great. I want a collaborator with that and then as you're flushing it out, you're basically, you can talk and they're taking all the notes and then they'll draft in your, you know, in the voice that you want, you edit. Right. And I was like oh that seems like a good idea but I was so busy like we started the milk Road, okay, I'm if I'm operating a business after like do this well and so I paused it and not just that I posit, we have like, five friends, who all bought books and
Then pause them for various reasons nails and I do not build in our mind. The door was always open and yeah, the doors still open. I guess we just have a little more money to get it finished. Now if we want to.
Well, you know, I think I can say this because they tweeted it but enduring Ventures Xavier and see, Ava. They had bought it. Yes,
just yeah, yeah, I wasn't. Is that public?
Yeah, he tweeted it. Like, he tweeted it out.
I heard I had heard about that but I wasn't sure if he was going to do it or not. I don't know what's going on behind the
This. But for a company to go bankrupt that quickly without like any type of signs. I wonder if something's going on but I it seems like it might be a headache, but maybe it won't be. We'll see.
Yeah, I actually did it to like years ago. I was thinking about I'm I'm working on a book actually right now. I ended up not doing it with scribe, but I tried it and I just found that it's great. I think, if you want to write like a corporate handbook that you can hand out to like your employees or something like that, like a Cheesy business.
The book, but if you actually wanna write something like really, really serious, and legit, I think it's a bit hard. I know David Goggins is like, they're, they're hit, he's their head but I think it's just hard again for the reasons we talked about with no story lost. How do you guarantee quality? When you have that much demand and stuff, like I think you'd have to move up
Market go. I've been waiting for you to mention that you have doing the book thing because I wasn't sure if it's public or not Sean, you should read his first chapter, I read the whole thing. Normally people ask me a proof stuff and I'm like, I don't want to and then I started
Reading his I was like, okay, I'm I'm actually into this. It's pretty good. It's been quite good. Yeah, can't wait I think it's gonna be amazing. Thanks T. How far yeah, I'll
share it with you. I just sent the publisher. My rough draft. It's still. I'd say it's still in the phase where like I'm embarrassed by it, but I know that's the important step to making it amazing. So yeah, I think it'll come on 2024. What's your motivation? Why write a book? Honestly, kind of to like muddle through like a there's a lot of lessons.
Essence that I haven't read in other books around business and stuff that we've learned. So it's kind of the story of building tiny but also just to kind of muddle through the exact thing we're talking about before about how everybody wants more. You know it's never enough. They're always trying to upgrade their always trying to get bigger. They're always trying to do the next thing and play the status game or you know, comes from childhood trauma or you know, something else. And so for me it's been about pulling that string for myself. So it's been a bit of
Of personal exploration and stuff. It's been, it's been fun. I really enjoyed it. I probably the thing I've enjoyed most over the last couple
years. Do you want to talk about some of these other companies? I know you have routines on here. You have. I don't even know how to pronounce this one. It looks like a Hawaiian
name. Yeah, let me lean Buzz through both. So routines is really smart. So you know when you listen to Tim Ferriss interview it's like two hours and sometimes you're just like look, dude, like look doctor you know, gut microbiome.
Water. Just tell me what you do. What do you do? What do I take? What do I buy? And I actually was talking to Tim Ferriss about this and I was like, dude, you've got to add like a little segment at the end where you just say, here's the books. Here's the one book recommendation. Here's one product recommendation. Here's one habit. Recommendation from each guest. You never did it too bad, but that's the juice. That's the stuff that I asked people when I'm one-on-one with them. And so, my friend humza who I think, you know,
to Santa, I use this agency.
Good
Tamara. Yeah, their agency is called tambe tamb. A, they do really good work. But um, so he created this site called routines. So it's routines dot Club is the URL. And what it does is it basically runs you through the day of successful people. And so they do like huberman. Tim Ferriss, Peter Atia. They actually just did one on major Wilkinson. Yeah, yeah. And basically breaks down my entire day from start to finish and it's all these things that I wouldn't even think.
Think to share it's like, you know, how do I organize my email? How do I, you know, what supplements? Do I take in the
morning? Your shower in skin routine is huge, right? Shower in
skin, all these random things. What's really funny is he's used, he's used mid-journey or whatever to generate images for all the things. So it's this like terrifying. You look like we read in this version. The first picture first picture. I
mean, this is just a plus added mid-journey is like, you know, the world's greatest
Man here second picture. Now you're if you like this is like these are two different people. These are not the same person but that's, you know, one of the challenges majority. So you wake up 6 to 8 a.m. I think window.
Drinkable. It's depending on if my kids wake me up a big glass of
water with electrolytes. It's Sunday, you make Aeropress coffee. Nice plug. If it's overcast. You use re-timer, what's re-timer?
It's like these little goggles that you wear and they blast your eyes with bright light there, to help you kind of wake up in the morning. Like if it's not sunny out, you know, you remain as like go outside and see bright lights. This is great. You don't have to go outside. Yeah, so you'll have to go outside. I'm looking at like this, if you read through it, it'll take like 20 minutes because there's so
He freaking
thing to do. Take you take 10 supplements,
yeah, like, on and off, depending on what they are.
Well, here's you have a good morning routine by the way. It was it coffee. You snort coke. Yeah. This is the ticket. I shoot up. I
shoot heroin right here in my toes and actually says, we're which foot do it in. But but so here's what's cool about this business is people want to share this stuff, right? It's like a very infinitely shareable like listicle of like here's this.
Persons routine or whatever. But throughout it if you look at the huberman one, for example, he recommends a G1, he recommends cold plunges supplements, it's all affiliate revenue. And so it's just like one of these amazing build the content ones. Updated occasionally focused on SEO, make like thirty thousand dollars a month plus of affiliate it's just a perfect we talked about earlier like the launch pad business. It's not the sexy business. It's the launch
pad. This is cool. I like this.
Like this example do the Maui Nui one, what does
that? So this one is really I thought this was super goofy when I heard about it. And it's so basically me and my girlfriend, we were visiting Maui and huberman was like, oh you should meet this guy Jake who runs Maui Nuit and so this guy picks me up in this like ramshackle truck. He looks like a Navy SEAL. He's like the super jacked guy and he starts telling me he drives us into this huge Ranch that they have. And he
It's telling me about the business and basically, there's these dear called access to here. And there from
Asia, I have a, my Ranch.
Yeah, some Hawaiian royalty, brought them to Hawaii to hunt like 150 years ago and because they had no natural Predators, they're just an invasive species. They're like rats. They're like everywhere and it's actually an environmental problem. So they're like a pest. They actually destroy the ecosystem and so the government literally flies helicopters.
Chapters and takes like, you know, machine guns and just guns these things down. That's their current solution to this. And so Jake was like, hey we could, this is great meet a lot of native Hawaiians hunt the meat and it's super healthy and delicious. They sell it locally but the FDA doesn't let you sell meat commercially. And so he basically spent the last seven years getting approval to actually hunt and sell this meat and it's this like super complex problem. So there's this interesting.
It in the business, it's going to take someone else like seven to ten years to compete. And basically, what they do is they have a bunch of professional Hunters. Go with sniper rifles, and they, in the middle of the night, they just shoot these deer in the head. Right. And it has to be the FDA is like it has to be in the head. Like so imagine this you're a dear. You get to live this awesome life, you are eating organic food, you're running all over Hawaii and then one day in your sleep you just boom. You're dead right? And so I was like
Okay. This is really fascinating. So huberman, Tim Ferriss attea, they all invested to and here's what's crazy about the meat. So not only is it like the most ethical meet you could possibly possibly have because it's like a pest. These deer like killed super ethically and stuff but they've tested it and it has crazy micro nutrient content. So a piece of salmon is like 14 percent protein. This is 20% protein like beef is like nine percent, it's good for the environment, the
Liz live natural lives and then one day, Boom, headshot gone. And so if you're like, you know, you're not eating meat for ethical reasons or for health reasons. This is like an incredible business. And so these guys sell like I think like 10 20 million dollars a year of pepperoni, sticks, and all this stuff. So anyway, go check it out.
Maui ordering this stuff. Did you invest in this? I did. Yeah, can you
tell me and I'm giving you the full picture your sales, which is a
Good Sam. How did you?
You said, you have these all these same, deer on your Ranch randomly Texas. He just told the story about like how this
Japanese royalty brought it to Hawaii and it's like this
whole special drink. Yeah, I got I
got something. There's a backyard. Right? What are you talking
about? Well, so it's just I don't know anything about animals or hunting but out in my farm you can only hunt normal dear. I think for two or three months out of the year but we have this thing called Axis deer. I don't know if Axis deer is like a category.
Of animal or what? No, I'm looking at. It looks the same. They're basically deers with spots on them and sometimes they have like tall ears or and so they kind of look different but they called access to your they have spots and they're all over Texas. I don't know if it's like the same thing or if it's like a category of animal. But yeah, we have them in Texas. I love how this random guy in Hawaii. Just told, Angela, fascinating Story. Come on. I gotta guys.
That's the everywhere. Actually, that's like totally, like they just needed to get this, like, waste product off their hands.
Like, you know, things got 20% protein, 80% luck and 100% power of will, like, it's like buying this. I love this, man. This is great. Like, and yeah and I'll be like, oh, you need an access to your. I got a guy, you know, guys, you know,
like, you know, like everyone, like 20 years ago, was really into like drinking milk, right? Like got milk and then I was almond milk. Then I was open Milk. You guys are gonna love my next business. That's rat milk, are you
serious? No, I could have. I'm gonna order some
Of this beef. I'm so, like over the last two weeks, I've gotten a little soft, you know, I had a little injury so I didn't work out like religiously over the last two weeks and I've been eating a lot of ice cream because it's hot. So, for the next 30 days, Sean you should try and join this with me, I'm only going to eat meats and our plants and animals. I got to get, I got to get back to basic plants and animals. That's good. I like the way you burned it. That that's nice plants and animals. It's for the next 30 days. I got to get my act together. I've been eating too much ice cream, but I'm going to order this stuff. I'm going to
This actually looks great. Is this a fun business to run? It looks fun to run, but it might be a headache. You got to ship this shit, all the way from Hawaii,
I think it's super complicated. I think they can charge a premium because I think they're the only people that are FDA approved to sell it. And you know, they have a story and the brand and the investors and stuff but it's a hard business for that same reason, right? I mean, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of hunters on the Hawaiian islands that want the jobs and stuff. But logistically, these guys are basically going on these like,
Hikes in the middle of the night to go and do these. Like, you know, they're sniping dear and then they have to shoulder, carry them back to the truck and then they've got this whole facility there to process them and
stuff. Is it? The problem isn't the problem with this. So I've got a lot of, like, I've got a bunch of the funny thing about Austin is it's full of like crazy Health people like like, you know, you don't even know, like, are they actually insane? Or are they being serious? Like, you know, they're afraid of Wi-Fi, but every once in a while, some of these guys will say something that's like really
Interesting. And like turns out the right and one of them being is like do you know butcher box which box is boot strap and I think it does like two or three hundred million dollars in Revenue but my health nut friends hate it. They talked trash about it, they're like this is the worst you should never consume that meet these guys will also say like Whole Foods, so they don't even touch Whole Foods Chicken. They're like, you can't. It's got a like if it's not, it doesn't look a certain way. I don't
touch your hanging out with Justin Maris too
much. I didn't want to name names. I don't know if Justin, if Justin has said that explicitly, but yeah, they're in the same
Circle.
Just sounds like something that Justin would say for he's probably correct.
He's probably put that's my thing. Is these guys, I'll be like all right but are you being like conspiracy or you being like truthful? Nor like this one's a little closer conspiracy but then with like the meat stuff like this is close to truthful but the problem with this business I would think is the bigger it gets the worse it gets right.
Well I think when I talked to him about scaling and stuff he was like look there's a lot of Hawaiian Islands. There's a lot of deer that is there though it over time and I think is it yeah, oh yeah. Is it got a line on there?
Well there's six or seven of them were right and they basically they do this on a tiny amount of land as it is right now so I think they probably think you're think about
significantly not a business investment. There might be a business here. This is a Larry Ellison
investment. This is a this is
some rich people do. Which is as you make money, you start investing just in things that are
interesting. We start you start investing and dinner party conversations. It's
like I can't have a whole portfolio of like healthcare
SAS. Like yeah even if that's where, you know, like the most money is made. I Need
It to invest in things that
are interesting to me that are cool people that I want to hang out with that. Do businesses that are worth talking about in life and there's like a, there's a huge positive EV associated with that, that people don't really understand till you, you start doing it. And then you're like, oh, this is nice, you've got to keep the check small and do a bunch of these. And so you have a this portfolio of like interesting
this one day, I think, I would say, I would say you're wrong. So so so imagine like you saying the same.
About athletic greens, right? Okay. So I come to you and I'm like, hey guys, there's like these. These guys, they're like a vitamin but it's powder and you're like that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. What makes athletic greens amazing is that they spent the last 15 years, building relationships with all the most influential Health people in the world. So it's one plus one equals 100, right? They have Tim Ferriss, they have all these people who not only they buy ads with. They also have all these people owning equity in the business. So a million different competitors can
Come out. But if in your brain, the winner is a G1 because that's what you've heard. And all the people that you respect do you will do it and you will pay a premium,
right? Yeah. But that's different like vitamins were a thing vitamins were
thing. Greens, green,
smoothies people. Understood. I should eat my vegetables. That's been around forever. I don't know how many people like Amanda protein content on. My salmon is too low. I need to eat deer any of these Brands bigger than you think it's bigger than, you know what? I'm looking for. A deer that was shot in the head. That's what I do,
but there's a huge
Is a huge audience though for people who go? I want ethically
sourced, I do that. That's why I don't like buying a lot of beach is because I don't like how they kill cows Shawn. You actually kind of turned me on to that about like about the treatment of cows. Well, I think it's very hypocritical. I think you know anybody who's like ethically.
Sourced Meats like even like
agile. Yeah, if somebody's like I think
Ali killed your dog or ethically killed your brother. It's like, you know they do but there's a bad
thing to consume. All right. It's not necessarily killing its raising.
And I think I've been
killing and then crazy Nora. Now, where was I think about it this way so there's there's a broad spectrum, right? So you think about like, industrialized meat is like concentration camps for animals right there. Literally in these pens, and they're fed this horrible stuff, and they've these miserable lives. I don't feel good about eating that. Do I feel good about eating an animal who lived a great life and then got sniper rifles in the head? Yeah, I feel fine. I actually feel a deathless spectrum just to be clear, though. This is still in the
Murdering for our pleasure for our best, pleasure, spoiling part of the
spectrum. And there's a there's a lot more part of this Vector that you go to. If you chose to. I'm I'm totally a bit of a hypocrite on this as an I do eat meat. So I'm not like, I'm not like a vegan telling you this but at least I don't lie to myself and tell myself that. Oh man, I'm doing such a good thing morally here, by killing them the best way. The nice
way might. Yeah. It's like it's like you might drive an electric car and it's better than driving a gas car but your
Still producing tons of toxic chemicals because be made the batteries and stuff. It's just a little bit better. Yeah, that's right. I agree with you though. I do think like, a hundred years. We'll look back at eating meat and be a little
shocked. Yeah, 100%. That's my pinion, Shawn would you would you if we went somewhere, would you like, for example, for Thanksgiving? Did I tell you for Thanksgiving? We killed our own turkey. Now you either tell me that I was that. Yeah, and we're so, would you do that?
No. Wow. Okay about that. I wouldn't do it. I would I be excited to get my excited to go do that now I have what I do it. If that's the thing we wanted to do, sure I'm not like anti the whole experience, but I'm not like pumped about that nor would I like see that experience out. Also, turkey massively overrated, it sucks, certain issue. And by the way, killing it and eating it, it did not taste good at all the fake shit. Like the Butterball turkeys. Taste way better and turkey is a horrible meat but yeah, I agree.
What do we want to wrap up with one or two more things? Yeah, let's do. You have a question
for Sam? I think that's an interesting one. Why don't you do that one? Andrew? Yeah, I was curious. So Sam like, I look at Hampton. Hampton is a business. We, I mean, I've said this to you privately but Hampton is the business that I've thought about starting for 10 years. So I joined something called entrepreneurs organization, 15 years ago. And I was like, this is a very, very good business. Every member of co-pays five,
Thousand dollars and there's all these local chapters they self-organized basically. And these guys just must be making an absolute killing and you have this Total Lock end because once you like your form group, you have these like core core groups. Like you do at Hampton or whatever, people don't want to leave, they're locked in, they pay their five thousand dollars a year or whatever it is they go to events Etc. And so I for years have been like someone you'd start the new e 0 and you have. And so I look at it and I go freak. Damn I wish
Wish I owned that business. What are the things though? Like, just like you guys being like, Oh my God, like, you know, these agencies and drones are the best businesses ever? What are the on the flip side? What are the things that we should know about Hampton that are make it hard to run or surprised you about
run? So the thing about Hampton, so Andrew joined and Sean has been like messaging, like maybe I should join and I'm like, Andrew wanted to. He's like, yeah, just take my money and just let me join in on like, no, no, no. You have to get interviewed, want a little
VIP treatment. I just want a little
past the line. It's like we not done at a note on Friends restaurant and you just get treated as a normal Patron. How does it feel good and sad to say agree that feels a little bad? Wouldn't you think? Well, because we have to have, we have to indoctrinate people, we have to like get them into the values of the system. We have to like teach them how to be a good Community member. So the thing about Hampton is that in terms of like the physics behind it, this is going to be a massive company. I think like there's I always tell our team.
There's nothing holding us back, like there's like very little like, outside factors that are going to ruin it. But the number one thing that sucks about it and that we 100% Can screwed up and I can go to 0 is if you start letting in too many people too quickly so you cannot scale it like crazy fast. I think you can scale it fast, but I think you can't scale it. Like you could have software, you're not just throwing bodies into it. And so, we have to be super thoughtful about it about who we let in and why another thing is
At the feedback loop is fairly short. So people in Hampton have monthly meetings and then now we're have Retreats that people go on once a year or twice a year. So we don't get feedback that quickly and in order to like I can't just like make an assumption or I can't like have like an MVP of a retreat because someone's flying across the country to go to a thing. So it has to be good right away. And that's very stressful that I can't like just like you know, if I own like a Shopify store I can't just throw up a product up there and have someone by it and then just return the money and be like, sorry, I will come soon or this sucks maybe, but
Improve with tech. So that's scary about not having MVPs. But, you know, the thing about Community is once you screw it up, I don't think you can fix it. And so it seems like it's high stakes all the time and so that's why we're trying to be meticulous about growing slowly. I don't know. Andrew what am I missing? You've kind of like,
no, I think you're right. I, it's interesting. The thing that made me Livio. So the chapter, the guy who ran the chapter, super nice guy, like amazing. I love the
I but he let in a couple people who I really, really didn't like. And I found myself dreading going to some of the events and just kind of just sketchy people write like people that ran a bit dicey businesses and gave me bad vibes and stuff. And that was actually the thing that caused me to leave Co and do my own forums. So I now have four forums that I just manage myself, but I don't think most people are like me. I think most people will stick with it, but you do really have to be thoughtful about who
Let in and I think the hardest part and I've had this experience, I've ran a lot of forms over the last 15 years and been in a lot of forums. If there's someone who's toxic the cancer, has to be cut out, but that is an incredibly awkward conversation and it can really piss people off
obvious and we've fired a plunger, but we've kicked people out if they like Rue talk about compensation stuff publicly, but also another thing about this, these businesses, the thing about EO y, P0 vistage. Do you guys know vistage? I think I mentioned them.
Sold for like 1.5 billion recently. They're already doing like half a billion in Revenue. Do they last so long? So why Pio Pio and vistage? I think all we're either started in the 50s or the 60s. And so the cool thing about these companies is if you nail it, right? You can have it for 50 or 100 years. And so, that's why I'm really fascinated by these types of companies because there is zero technological. There zero Tech like Tech everything can change with AI is it will have zero hope I think.
How does
how does it feel to be
sitting on a winner? Like, does it, did you feel the same way with the hustle? Does this feel? No. Yeah, I felt like the hustle like with with Hampton. I'm like well there's a clear path to get to 100 million dollars. You just got to give it ten years if you want in Revenue. Like, I just have to, like, it's just a Time Horizon thing. You just got to sit and wait and you have to work, but you have to wait. Whereas with the hustle it felt a little bit more. Like we were making, we are innovating in a very small space where I'm like, I don't know if the map
Shows that this will work. It might it might not but I'm still learning with this business. I'm like, no, it's 100% going to work. The only thing that screws it up is ourselves. That's why I say there's no like physics allows this to work
perfectly. You also have an unfair Advantage, right? I think that if you, I mean, I guess you launched Hampton privately, you didn't promote a banal that you do. So, unfair, now that you have talked about it, you have like, you have free, customer acquisition, yes, we're not. If my money on you, you almost have 50 million dollars.
A year forces of free marketing by going on podcasts on this podcast and other podcast, Grand and just talking about Hampton and then your brand value as a person being associated with it, is that one plus one equals
100. Yes. And right now I we've had five or six or seven thousand people I forget apply. And so that makes it like the easiest thing ever but if you look at on deck on Deck had that as well and they totally fucked it up. They fucked it up because they treated it like a tech company where they weren't thoughtful enough and they try to just scale and that is my fear of like getting
Edie and growing too quickly. Well, they raised van, they raised Venture. Why would
you raise Venture into this? Like, this is a business that pays for its got, you have negative cash conversion cycle by people prepay you for services, delivered over a year and like it's insane.
Yeah, it's like a great business. I think it's going to be like, I don't think we'll ever sell it but I think it could be like a they can be billion dollar companies, I think so it feels good.
Well tiny if you ever decide to sell it anymore,
bro. IR IR.
If you ever want to take money off
the table think, I hopefully it'll be
Enough. That will be buying you i-iv. We know, but in seriously, when I was looking, the reason Andrew, even though we're friends, I really admire you because when I people haven't been asked to invest, and I'm like, no, dude! This is my metal lab. Maybe like, this could like, this is what I love. I don't ever want to sell it, but it might make a shit ton of profit and we can just use that profit to buy stuff that kind of supplements it and I don't want to take any money because I don't want to have to feel guilty about doing that.
We're going to I'm going to be on a helicopter and
Land on Sam's yacht and then I'll get there and he'll be like, oh, what's your market cap? And I'll be like, oh, like 5 billion and he'll be like, oh, Anton's 25 billion that's que. No, I don't ever remember when we hit 5, those are the days to come up. As always, the, my got a lot of advice for your. Yeah,
I think it's cool but it feels like I haven't talked about it publicly too much is because this is the first time where I'm like, I'm just gonna shut the fuck up and just be quiet and just keep on going.
Because it's working nicely. I think it's actually quite hard to replicate, though. You have to have an audience. It was quite hard to like, get the early customers but yeah, it feels
good. Well, it's it, you're reading the right book, right? Like reading the Buffett stuff and moats, because that, I think that's like the ultimate, like, people think investing is numbers. There's a little bit of that, there's napkin math, but at the end of the day, it's like, assessing like, what is the mo? What's the competitive advantage? And you just have such a crazy competitive advantage in terms of customer acquisition, and then also
customer launch
I know that you're exploring this business even before. I don't even think you told me though, the big learning, it's a logistical nightmare. So not nightmare, but it's very challenging. Like in like, imagine let's say we have 10,000 members and we're doing all these Retreats that's basically a retreat a day. You know what I mean? Like, it's quite challenging logistically. What we need to do is go and hire a bunch of McKinsey nerds, and it's like, here's how we do it by hand automate
it but I don't agree with that. I think so. What EO does is
They've outsourced to everything. So when you co has chapters, there's a Vancouver chapter for example, all the members pay their dues and then there's a chapter head and they are managing that whole thing. And then when they have Retreats there, just told hey, you know, the budget typically is this you guys all self-organized one person from The Forum is responsible for managing it. Here's the handbook on doing it and they just kind of do it themselves. So, I think there maybe there's a better way to do it, but I don't think you have to scale up head.
Let you know, I don't think you do either but you still have thousands of people flying places and you want to make sure that the experience is optimal. So there is still some quality
control. Are you going to do like a massive conference? Like a super Conference of all the people in Hampton with like insane speakers and stuff? Or is that just too much
Logistics? Yeah, we want to? Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out how to do it. Andrew, what is this profit first methodology? That's that book. She like,
I love this. So, yeah, one of the guys, one of the CEOs, the
Actually, the CEO of beam. He sent me this book and I love the idea. So, basically, you know, there's this concept of like if you eat your food on a smaller plate, you're going to eat less. You guys know about that. So basically what you do is very simple, let's say that you earn $100 in your business and you want to have a 50% profit margin, you just take the day, the hundred dollars comes in. You take $50, and you put it in a bank account that you can't see.
That's it. You just put it away and so then you and your team are left with 50 dollars to run the business. And you know, you might have to adjust the number and figure out what sustainable. But what I learned running? All my digital businesses was that we had businesses with ninety percent net profit margins. And if you had looked at that business and said, okay, well it's this kind of business. It should have 20% profit margins. We easily could have run it that way, but because Chris and I were incentivized, we on the whole business. We paid a lot of attention.
In the pl and what was possible, we would try and run it at the maximum profit and so this basically allows you to achieve the same thing psychologically as the smaller plate, You're just showing you basically budgeting for 50% profit and you're saying figures
that cause issues with your CEO of the company.
But we don't do it. This isn't something that we do this is something that we've sent out to all of our CEOs as like hey this is really interesting. This might be something you might want to do but I think it works better for small businesses. I know a lot of people who they talk to me and they're like, oh you know, I have an agency to but we just can't figure out how to make it. Run it, X margins and I kind of go like rip the Band-Aid, right? If you want to make 30% profit margins, take $30 of every hundred dollars that comes in.
You move it to another
bank. Another you told me to do and I've not been comfortable with it yet.
Dude. You yeah. Don't even get me started, Sam, Sam. And I have had like text screaming matches me just being like, dude, you have to Dividend your money out because my whole thing is you don't want to leave excess cash burning a hole in the CEOs Pockets or making them complacent. So let's say you own a business that has a payroll of 500 thousand dollars a month.
A lot of people will leave like 20 million dollars in that business and I think that just lets the CEO feel relaxed. I like them to basically have a month, two months of cash that
you're spending your spending cash that you haven't earned yet.
Well, sometimes, but if, if that's the situation and they need more than they just say, hey shareholders, send me some of that money back, but you say I'm the bank. So, for example, in tiny, tiny the holding company above is the bank and we basically say, look,
Keep your money with us and if you guys hit a snag and you need a little bit of extra money for payroll or R&D or whatever we'll send that right down in, you know, 12
hours. So for prepaid meta customers which I don't actually think you do prepay. But let's say you did, let's say someone prepaid for a project that will take a year and it's 100 Grand and you get that up front, you're happy or you're willing to spend that hundred grand before the years up in the service has been fully delivered. Well, not
always but I think if you can model it at. Look, so
Example, the argument we were having so someone pays ten thousand dollars for a year of service in Hampton. And so you guys have all this cash sitting in the bank. The thing is, you guys have new members constantly streaming in. So you have ten thousand dollars flowing in x times. A day, you have very predictable cash flow from my perspective I would basically just say. All right what's your what's your expected margin and I just take that in dividend it out immediately and I and again it's trying to create a feeling of
Always, always paying attention to the bank account, always pay attention to the balance sheet and the pl. And I just think that when you have a year of cash just sitting there, I think your CEO will naturally be like oh we could do this, you know, we go do a super conference and spend ten million dollars on it or you know what it's okay, we didn't do that great this month because you know we've got all this money in the bank. I think psychologically you want everyone eating from a smaller play
and when you say dividend out what percentage is Andrew Wilkins,
Taking home to buy a home in cars and live versus dividend out to reinvest into your own stuff.
I had like a will, so it's different now that we're public, what I used to do is I would get I owned 80% of of beam basically and I would get, so I get 80% of those dividends. Those would go to my holding company, I would buy stocks or invest my general framework for this though is, I want to spend five percent of what I earn at most and
And so, whatever that number is, if you earn, you know, 10 million dollars a year, five hundred grand a year is just living doing whatever and everything else should get
invested. So you live on 5% of your of your income and the rest goes to Tiny or whatever is the setup for your holding company or is Tiny considered you're holding company.
Make tiny is my well. So, I have a personal holding company where I have my personal assets, but you know, 90 plus percent of my net worth
is in tiny. Hmm. So, and has it
It's been five percent. So when you're earning a million dollars a year, when you're burning a million dollars a year where you only spending fifty thousand
know, I was well I wasn't spending a ton but I was what I was doing is starting a lot of businesses I would I'd say maybe it was 20% or 30% back then but over time it's come down to about 5% or less and it's been there for probably ten years. But yeah, one of the things I see that a lot of people do, that's really quite stupid is
They don't let themselves live it up so the own this amazing cash flowing business and they don't let themselves, you know, go by the beautiful house, go by the great car and so they end up acting in this way where they go. Well, I've got to sell my company, I've got to have an exit and I have had friends, where it's like, dude, the exit was right in your bank account. You know, you could have just given ended the money out to yourself. And then you wouldn't have had this really stressful, horrible experience with private equity and been through all that stuff. So I'm a big advocate of
Like living it up, living a nice life, you know, don't go crazy and by Fabergé eggs, but like buy a nice car in a nice house and whatever and then just invest
everything else ends of your income. Do spent, Sean,
I don't know, I don't even think about like that
is that like, is, are you allergic to that, or would you change allergic to it? But it's like you said, like, you know, I would
say, my income has
10x and my spending has to X. So, as long as that ratio stays about, right, that's fine. Yeah, I don't really look at the percentage versus
First versus earnings so much as like, yeah, but I guess I got the beginning when the earnings were lower right? Like, for a long time I was basically learning like between, I don't know.
Like in my 20s, I would make it like 120 to 160 K year roughly for a bunch of my 20s. And, you know, during that time I don't know, I was probably I was living in San Francisco paying California taxes. Like, you know, I was probably spending if you include taxes, you know, spending the bulk of my money I wasn't really saving that much. Always saving 20% of my money 30, I don't know, something like that. And you know, the Tim Ferriss of this thing on the podcast. I really liked he goes.
Unless something's going to make a shit ton of money, give it away for free. I think that's a great rule in business and content and a great room for creators like us. I think the which is partly why I don't like your Twitter experiment, although I understand the reasons why you do it, I think there's the same thing for sort of like you know where do you put your mental energy around finances. It's like this is the either needs to make a lot of money or save a lot of money or I'm just going to like not pay. I'm going to give it a zero budget mentally because otherwise, I'm just
My mental Budget on too many things. I'm just not going to think, I don't want to think about things unless it's like a large swing. So, for most of most of my twenties, I was just trying to figure out how do you make way more money? Like I'm not trying to go from twenty percent savings rate to 30 percent savings rate. It's like, how do I 10x my income? That was like the first, you know? Like that's all I was thinking about and took me a long time but like that paid off because once you do that, you don't you're so glad. You never worried about the the smaller thing.
Yeah, ramit Sethi has a great book called. I will teach you to scratch and he talks a lot about
At that right. People obsess over like oh you know I used to spend six bucks on a Frappuccino and now I just buy a black coffee and save three bucks and it's like you're so much better off focusing on the macro you know, your mortgage, all those sorts of big expenses and then just focusing on making way more money to the point where I really doesn't
matter. He goes don't focus on three dollar problems like a cup of coffee focus on thirty thousand dollar problems like getting a raise this is with hiring to like you, hire somebody and I'm negotiating like
a 5k or 10K
salary.
And I'm like, okay so you know, you're this basically like an eight hundred dollar-a-month. Gross difference met to them after taxes, going to be like five hundred dollars a month difference. Okay, fair enough. Not saying that that's nothing but like the percentage of their concern around that difference versus like the
role who I am what they're going to
learn from this. Like how like they don't really think about
how do I
use this opportunity to be able to make 10 times more.
Money in the
future or better. What are the terms on their stock options? How are they struck? What's the valuation? Is it reasonable? You are like? Yeah. What's Minds? What is my
incentive? If I could do a great job, what does a great job even look like here and then how much is that worth to you? And can I structure it incentive? Where if I really knock it out the park, I can make three times my salary this year versus this kind of like 10K you know, salary Gap. But you know I guess I'm obviously not everybody cares that way or is takes away but
I don't know. It seems like of 100 percent of the population, it seems like, at least 20% of the population should be asking themselves. Those types of questions, more often in the same way that, like, before I met any business people, I just thought, like, we do after college. You go get a job. I didn't think there were other options. And only once I saw that there's any of these other options in that man, this people doing business, they seem to be having a lot more fun and make it more money like, okay. I guess I could go do that. It's like you just sometimes need to see it or hear it. And then it
Changes the way you think. And I think more people should see or hear the question of like, how do I make three times more in half the time? How do I make 10 times more total? How do I have twice the fun on the same salary? How do I twice the time on the same size? Like there are just better questions. You can ask yourself that the
ones really. Although I will say one thing that I really miss you, do you guys remember, we started that business called buyer where it was negotiation as
assert. That was an awesome idea.
Amazing idea, amazing guy, who ran it Kimia. We ended up selling it to ramp
I didn't really want to sell it. But for Kimmy, I was like his first big X's. So so it made a lot of sense and we're really excited for him, but I really missed that business because that's one thing where I'm just too busy running my business to negotiate things. And you know what, I'm buying like a car or, you know, doing a, I don't know any, like a big by of furniture or like a renovation or anything. I still want that. So, I really just put this out to the audience. Someone needs to restart that business negotiation as a service,
That's in a cube that's a great. Nick Huber
business I agree. Are you going to make money on the stock of ramp ramp does does good? I think
we didn't we didn't take stop stock, we just took cash because we for us we could just take the money and invest it ourselves. So we knew we could get a good return within
tiny do. These are the best podcasts. These are the best podcast. We're just we're just hanging out. I wonder if the listener prefers these where it's like the just hangs, but I like those better
personally. Yeah, that was super fun, guys. If you like it compliment Us in the YouTube comments,
You don't like it. Well, you probably gone by now and that's how I thank you.
I feel like I could rule the world. I know, I could be what I want to.
