E2: Top M&A Entrepreneurs - Patch Baker, Veteran & Entrepreneur, EPIC OG - 100 Acquisitions

I, I'm good. I, I am good. I am enjoying this whole new meeting everybody in this group, you, everybody. It is really eye-opening. Good, man. That's awesome. That's what, that's what it's all about, right? I know it's this collaboration, collaboration working with uh people with like minds going, hey man, let's work on this deal. Hey, let's work on this deal. Yeah. Yeah, it's fine. I, it's one of the, I, I, I really believe it's why I like my job so much is because I get to hang out with cool people and learn new shit and, you know, just. You know, ultimately be growing every day and learning something new every day and learning new people and new ways to do shit, and new, um, I don't know, just new angles on stuff. It's, it makes, it makes life fun for me. It, it, yeah, I, if you, if you would have known this a long time ago, so like I'd probably would be worth $100 million. Unbelievable. It's, yeah. The the value you bring to companies, I mean, I work in the OTC markets and there's a lot of companies out there, tiny, and just 1 million, and they have no idea. It's like, oh man, if I could just grow organically 10% per year, we're doing great. I know, no, I'm here to show you how to grow 100% per year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you, you, you, you can change people's lives at a frequency. That is so difficult for them to understand. That it sounds like snake oil. It scares them. Yeah, cause I did it to be true. I pitched somebody. Um, that owned the OTC market doing about 500,000 a year, and I said we're going to do this, this, this and this for you. And but we're going to ask for this. And he got scared for asking for that. I said, wait a minute, I'm gonna, within 12 months, I'm gonna make your company worth $10 million with a 3 to $4 share price. And he goes, oh, that's too much. Yeah. Yeah, and, uh, so isn't this funny and ironic though? this, this blows people's minds when you actually put it in this perspective. So, if you tell somebody you're gonna make them. Um, You're gonna make them 16% over a year. They're like I don't know, man. That sounds, that sounds crazy. Surely you couldn't go to 30%. Like, even though those deals are out there, it sounds too good to be true, but Did you know that that's inception marketing? From credit card companies. Yeah. Right? We've been told over and over and over again that making 30% Is mind boggling, too good to be true, don't ever expect it, but People with no money have been told, save your credit card for big purchases. Right? Appliances, right? Single mom, two kids, refrigerator goes out $1500. She didn't have $1500 but she's been told it's OK. Put that $1500 on your credit card and pay it off over 6 months. Right, yeah, but the 29.99% never comes into the equation there. Until 3 years later you paid, you know, $10,000 for a $700 refrigerator. Yeah, exactly. So I mean that is, that is a That's one of those things like taxes, right? We've all been told. I didn't learn about taxes until I actually had money, and the reason being is because I've always been told, pay your taxes or you go to jail. When really What they should be telling you is, pay the taxes that you were supposed to pay no more. And you'll be just fine, right at the latest, don't pay early at the latest point possible at the latest one possible. And the crazy thing is like, When I actually got money, then I started learning about all these write-offs and all these other things that, no, I, I'm not supposed to pay tax. The IRS is the only entity in the world that You, you get something. And then you determine how much you pay for it. Right. When's the last time you walked into the store? You filled up your cart full of shit. You go to the front and they say, how much do you think you ought to pay for that? And then if you say, wait a minute, they had those stores in Seattle, but they go out of business real fast. Well, well, I mean, it's, it's kind of crazy because if you say, I think it's this much. And then they say, OK, yeah, I'll take that, because you said it was worth $150 when really it was only worth $100 but they took the full $50 and they let you walk out the door and they don't say anything to you. But, If you say it's 100, 150, but it turns out to be 200, now they arrest you and they find the shit out of you for the extra $50 right, which is exactly what the IRS is. You guess and tell us how much. If you're wrong, there's a penalty, but if you're, if you pay too much, we're not gonna give you anything back. And it's also it's it's an interesting organization because it's politically malleable, meaning I could if I get powerful enough and get enough big enough group and say hey this is for the good of the people. I can get tax incentives or tax correct options or something. Correct. And, and you can also, you know, you can also say like, well, Amazon does, does that, right, where they pay very little because they paid any taxes, right? And, and they're, I mean, they do pay payroll taxes, but they don't pay, you know, all the, the profit taxes, right? And They can leverage a lot of government contracts, right? You and I couldn't be on this call right now without Amazon, right? Amazon Web Services is, you know, making this and phone calls happen and all that. People are being affected by Amazon in ways they don't even understand. And then they wonder why Amazon doesn't have to pay anything. Well, it's because they are putting their money towards infrastructure, which is helping everybody else out, which is exactly the same thing that taxes are supposed to do because you don't know where your tax dollars go. But we all agree that paying taxes is for the good of the people and it pays for things like roads and education and all those other things, but we don't know exactly what dollar goes where. OK, fine, fair enough, but It is on me and it is my responsibility to know which taxes that I owe, and then from there, like truly. Pay what I owe, not more. And the The rules of what you don't have to pay for. Take up like 80% of the tax code, 85% of the tax code. Just nobody reads that fucking 85%. So that's the who and the how, man, right? But people with money do. People with money, well, that's actually a lot. People with money pay the guy who will read that 85. That's the Jim do guys. That's the Fisher happy to pay those guys for sure. Let me just, let me introduce you. Hey, this is John Stoddard with the top M&A entrepreneurs podcast. It's my second guest, Pat Baker, everybody knows him. If you're an epic, everybody knows him. He's no bullshit, no punches, nothing. He's gonna tell you exactly like it is, and that's why we enjoy doing this course. So welcome Patch Baker. Thank you, brother. I appreciate you being here. So I want to talk about something here and why you are an instructor, because you said this yesterday and I don't think a lot of people know this. So you said you have 44 companies. 100, you made 100 acquisitions, but you started acquiring companies before the Epic course, right? Well, I went to, went to Epic is like the legs, yeah. So, alright, so 100 acquisitions since you've learned this epic, at least, at least, um, and you've uh Sold almost 5 and you're in the process of selling one right now, right? Well, no, so I've sold a lot more than that. So, uh, I've built from scratch and sold 5. I have done a lot of acquisitions and resold those. So the, the, I've, I've probably done, you know, I don't know, I've done a lot, man. I, uh, over, I know it's over 100. I don't know the last time that I actually counted them all out, um, but Uh, it's been, it's been fun, man. Uh, I've got 3 companies now that I built from scratch that I'll eventually exit from. Um, the company that I'm, that I was talking about yesterday that I'm, uh, moving off of, I got into 18 months ago and now we're, you know, we've 10Xed it and we're moving off of it. Uh, it was supposed to be a 3-year plan, but we did it faster. So, um, that is my That that's my jam. I love, I love acquiring companies. I love um the The uh I love scaling them and I like moving off of them. Uh, you had a lot of, you have a lot of the pieces of puzzles in place because you could do from from your Mobius, you can do the, uh, buy and build or the stuff. Is that most of the mix of your businesses or do you buy and Kind of let them run themselves like a tiny capital or Berkshire or something like that. Yeah, so the, the, the funny thing is I kind of run this weird model between the Berkshire Hathaway model and the Virgin Mobile model and yeah, you know, I know you've heard me say this, but I'll, I'll say it for your audience, um, because I, I think it's, I think it's a really cool place to be. This hybrid is uh beneficial in a in a lot of ways. Um, just not a a lot of people take advantage of it cause they just don't know how and they haven't really put the pieces together. But this is where everybody kind of morphs too, it's one or the other. So the, the Berkshire Hathaway model is Um, You, I'm gonna sneeze. I'm sorry. I can't, I can't get it to stop, um. Uh, so the Berkshire Hathaway model is basically you take good companies and you try to make them great. And that's where you get like the Coca-Colas and the Geicos and all that kind of stuff. But even on that model, he knows that he's gonna make 10 massive acquisitions. And that is either going to be You know, through a portion of a purchase or it's gonna be through fully acquiring the entire business and But he also knows that of those 10, 1 or 2 are gonna do really well, 1 or 2 are gonna do OK, 1 or 2 are gonna break even, and the rest are gonna be failures. But the cool thing is, it doesn't matter because the ones that do really well and do OK far outpace the losses that he's gonna take. And it's kind of like running the numbers, right? Now there's another scenario which is the virgin model. And the virgin model is to create an ecosystem. And uh he, you know, uh, Richard Branson knew that if he could get people down to the Virgin Islands, that he was gonna make a lot of money because he already owned the restaurants, the hotels, you know, every, every place that people were gonna frequent. He was gonna make a lot of money off of that. Well, how, how do you get people to participate in that at mass scale? And so what he started doing was building an ecosystem. And inside that ecosystem, you have, you know, how do you get people down there? Well, you buy a failing airline company, you call it Virgin Airlines, and you do $69 flights down. Well, that's, that's a single way, but that's not a whole ecosystem, that's just one thing. So how do you build on that? Well, You buy a failing travel agency and you, you incentivize all of the agents to talk about the Virgin Islands, and how do you get people to stay longer because of cell phone and internet. are terrible, so people can't communicate with the outside world, so they only come and stay for 2 or 3 days instead of staying for a week. Well, you buy a failing telecom company and you call it Virgin Mobile, and you put in the best Wi Fi and the best phone, and you make Wi Fi available everywhere, and now people can call back home and they can run their businesses, and they can talk to people at home and they'll stay for a week or 10 days, and Um, you know, how do you, uh, this is another really cool one, which I do a lot. Um, how do you reduce the cost to operate the airline, the travel agency, the hotels, the restaurants? Well, you reduce the printed material cost by buying a failing print company. And now you get free or at cost menus and posters and travel brochures because you're printing it through a company that you own and that's one of the things that I do is if I'm going to spend more than $100,000 that's the arbitrary number that I put on it. If I'm gonna spend $100,000 in fees to a third party to provide a service, I'm going to really dive in and see if that's something that I could acquire so that now it's not $100,000 in cost, it's a $100,000 investment into a company that I can then own, run every other company at the cost to provide, but also try to build that company in a way that it has its own customers that pay the overhead, much like the, the print company, right? The, the print company for Virgin, they have their own customers that takes care of the overhead and the employees and the machines and all that, but then at cost, he's getting, you know, brochures and menus and all that kind of stuff. So to show you how I do that my company is. Um, let's say, um, let's say every single one of my companies needs to have a website. So I acquire a company that builds websites. They have their own customers that pay for all the overhead, but anytime I want a website for a new company I'm launching, that company does everything at cost. I don't, I, I mean, I basically get them for free. Yeah, that this is really insightful because we have a lot of people in uh Epic that don't know where to head first. Yeah, and if this is the model, this is the building a buy and build model, like just get every book you can about Virgin Airlines and Richard Branson and What he did there and then take your uh whatever is in your circle of influence and your expertise and start there. This is, that's really insightful. I mean, that's the most insightful part of that is not what I've already said, but what I'm about to say, and that is understanding how to service an entire audience over and over and over again. And that's what he did, but he did it so well that nobody realized that it happened to them or for them, however you look at that, right? Yeah. And that is, so when I first started in marketing. I kind of went to the veteran community first, only because I failed miserably talking to civilians when I first got out. Well, I, I spent more than half my life, uh, in the Marine Corps, and, uh, I grew up in a, in a military family and I went to military academy when I was 13 and I mean, that was my whole life. That's the core of who I am. It's in the fibers of my DNA. I can't, you know, I can't get it out, right? Well, when I went to the civilian community, they didn't understand me and I didn't understand them and, you know, my world as I knew it went to shit very quickly, you know. And so the thing that I knew was. Every veteran will allow another veteran, you know, 5 minute phone call. I, I immediately connect to anybody reaches out to me as a veteran, I connect with them on LinkedIn immediately, right? I don't even have to look at it. It says veteran. I don't care what branch. Exactly. So that's what I did. I went to the veteran community first and said, hey, you know, uh, I'm doing, you know, I provide these marketing services. And um they would at least give me the phone call and I, I started very quickly uh in that, in that world, um, and then I moved through that world very, very quickly, um because we did good work and people would, you know, veterans would introduce veterans to another veteran and that worked really well for me to get my, my feet under me. But when I started understanding from that was. If I could wield the audience. Of all of those veteran owned companies. Then I could start creating products. That were veteran owned and start hitting the audience with 11 offer after another, one company after another, because I held the audience, and that's what uh what the Virgin companies did. They would take information that they gained through one part of the company and serve them something else, right? So, Virgin Airlines, for example. They were running a lot of of uh southeast uh routes, but everybody that signed on to the Virgin family got Virgin Islands, you know, stuff sent to them, and print stuff sent to them, and mobile stuff sent to them, and, and he wielded the audience so well in a way that nobody felt like, why did I get this email? Or why did I get this postcard? Nobody felt like that. They understood that because they took Virgin Airlines that they got, you know, a brochure from Virgin Airlines that also talked about Virgin Mobile, and that, that the way that he built that ecosystem to be able to talk to them about any of the Virgin products. Became so ingrained in the recipient and the end user that it was OK for him to do it. And I'm not talking about him specifically, I'm just talking about the, the virgin family became the virgin family. It's a great model. I mean, it's, I've read his book and it's fantastic. I mean, from records to phones to airlines to travel to uh. I mean, he's a dealmaker too. If you if you read the part of the book where he talks about, you know, I need 5 747 Boeings, and he goes to him and said, Hey, can I get these basically for free for some period of time to see if this model works. But the way that he got them to say yes was because they knew that he had a captive audience already, already had an ecosystem. He already had it, and that power. It, I mean, basically what we're talking about there is leverage. He had leverage through his audience to get somebody else to do something to prove how a model, and that leverage is so important, and I do it now. I talk about, you know, how important a team and your network is. But if you don't know how to leverage the network, it's of no use to you. I know tons of people that know very, uh, you know, famous and, and high value individuals, and they kind of pride themselves on never asking for anything. Like a Facebook group that never makes any money. You got a hobby of collecting high net worth individuals in your in your network, but what is more impressive. is when not only are those people in your network, but you can consistently find them deals that are valuable to them. But also valuable to you and being able to set the right leverage in the right place. To talk to a high net worth individual and say, without headache, I'm gonna bring, I'm gonna manage this thing for you. It's highly valuable for you and your life goals. It will be highly valuable for me, and it will be highly valuable to the community that we serve. They almost always check the box and say yes. I, I, you know, yesterday you said this on the call, and I said somebody epic member asked us how do we do a deal with uh Patch. And I thought of it a little bit later, but I, I gotta swear, what Deanna and do and uh Bailey do to manage the time, it's like, I don't know how much time you have, then you have 4 questions people are asking and then they go, well, I gotta try to fit this in. Anyway, somebody said, uh, how do we do a deal with Patch, and I thought, uh, well, I know how to get a second deal with Patch. Yeah, the first one on a platter, right, a great deal. That is true. And what was the, what was the first thing that I said to that person? And this is not a dig on anybody, but do you remember what I said? It's probably not gonna happen. Yeah, yeah, it's probably not gonna happen. And you know why it's not gonna happen or why it's probably not gonna happen. It's because the way that they presented the leverage, they had none, right? Right? They had no leverage, but if they were able to say, You know, I've got a really good deal. I'm missing this piece, but I know that you would like, this is your mission, right? Like if people do their homework, that's the problem. Nobody's willing to do the homework. I, you know this as well as I do. I I have a good connection with Roland. Yeah, I have, I have not asked Roland to do many things for me, and he has not asked me to do many things for him. The reason that I have not done that, and he has not done that, is because we are searching for the right deal that is both good for him, good for me, and good for the audience that we serve. So there's not a rush to get there. It is looking for the right deal that fits all those boxes. And when we, we, when either one of us find that deal, the coolest thing is, it would almost be Selfish of us to not share that deal. If I have a deal and I know that Roland could benefit from it, it would be selfish of me not to share it. On the other hand, if I'm trying to force him into a deal that's not a good fit for him, he's gonna say no, and the chances of me getting a second hit are fairly bullet, man. You have one. Well, you, I mean, I do, yeah, I could present something. I mean, he goes, dude, I'd love to do this deal. This is a great deal. It's not the right time because I just acquired this other company and I'm, I'm, I'm money strapped right now, but if it's still available in 90 days, let me know. And that's not a no. And if that, if, if that doesn't work out, I still get a second shot because he knows it was a good deal. I'm just gonna pre, pre-structure those things. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do my homework. That's one of the things that I do really well is I do homework on people to find the right person who's the person. That not just has the money, cause that's actually a a secondary thought. Who's the person that would, that this goes directly in line with what they're trying to do as their life's mission. Um, I just had, um, I just had, uh, Alan Weiss on Clubhouse, the, the guy that wrote, um, Million Dollar Consulting and that. Yeah, he, he's a phenomenal guy, probably one of the most well respected consultants in, in the world, um, probably also one of the highest paid, but The I had him on and um he said uh he said, The people that really have it figured out. Nail what everybody else is going to say is their legacy, not what they believe their legacy is, but what is everybody else gonna say about them? What I just said about Alan Weiss is going to be his legacy, right? I said he's probably one of the most well-respected consultants in the world. That's what he's driving to do, but it's not what he said about himself. It's what I said about him, right? Well, here's the craziest part about that. If you can understand that, and then I have this deal where we're putting in a youth center and, you know, a town that he would have some affinity to. And what we're going to do is try to teach kids how to be entrepreneurs, and one of the paths that they can take is being a consultant as their life's work. And I go to Alan and I say, Alan, listen, bro, I got this cool thing. We got the land paper checkbook and, and you are the guy that these kids can look up to and you have a legacy of 65 number one, you know, uh 65 books and a bunch of number one bestsellers. You're the guy. You're the guy that we need to have in there, and he goes, you know what? Like you said, you're checking all, he's like, I'm in, I'm in. He didn't say how much he's in for. He just said he's in. What most people are doing is trying to go figure out how to get one person that has a million dollars to give them a million dollars. That is not getting somebody in, right? I approached Roland Frasier. Uh, 6 months ago. Um, and said, I have a deal with Facebook. They came to us and they want a beta test this whole brand new, uh, paid, um, it's, it's a paid course generation uh platform. And I said, look, I know you're launching Epic. On ads, would you be interested in taking this ride with me on the new Facebook course delivery system, where people would actually pay through Facebook to deliver a live course, and he's like, I'm in. Well, so what was your ask and involvement? You did all the technology. I did all the technical work, and he provided all the content, right? And then we took the ride together, which meant good, bad or ugly. It's a beta course we have no idea how this is gonna work out. We're one of 3 people that are gonna do this for all of Facebook. Huh, and why would you give Roland on that? I just, we just split the ad cost and we split the revenue generated from it, OK, right now it could have been a losing proposition. It could have been a winning proposition. It didn't matter to either one of us. We're not talking about big dollars here, but the cool thing was I wanted to participate in the Facebook Beta program. He thought it was cool to participate in the Facebook Beta program. We split the money going into the program and we split the money coming out of the program. He was providing the course content anyway and we run Facebook ads anyway. So it like it for us, it didn't, it was no sweat off our back and both of us get to say we got to participate in the first ever Facebook online course platform. That was one that I brought to him because I thought it would be cool to bring my friend a, you know, a beta program that nobody else in the world got to do. Yeah, yeah, that's perfect. I mean, I, you know what he said, You know what he said? He didn't say how much this is gonna cost. He didn't say, Well, what are you gonna do and what am I gonna do? He didn't say anything. He was like, I'm in. And then we worked out the details of who was going to do what and how we did it, right? That's the thing. People are not doing their homework to find out who's gonna be in. If you can get somebody to be like, I'm in. And then you're like, well, shit, how much is this gonna cost? Yeah, so, so let me give you an example of this. This actually happened to me. So, uh, I, I'm in, I do investor relations for companies, but we, we do more of like selling the stock, uh, you know, promoting the business and who's the people care. Charismatic character behind the business and I have a healthcare company and they are OTC markets and they told me they're going to be uplisting soon. So I know what the multiple is for clinics, 400,000 customers, brick and mortar, face to face stuff. I know what the multiple. It's low. I was in the master resource on Epic, and I saw Sri Avin. He's a technical guy. He's a Stanford graduate, really technical, wicked smart. And he's got this solution. It's an AI platform, telehealth, telemed, uh, decentralized uh blockchain healthcare. I said, I have a very good hunch that this company, my current client will want to buy it. We just got a term sheet for the business, bringing together because I knew they'd want it. It, it matches exactly what they want. It's going to raise their multiple uh immediately to two digits instead of 1. Investors love that and the future is trending towards that direction. All of the check marks right there, what you're talking about in that ecosystem. Yeah, and again, when you pitch them, they, they should be, it it's not about numbers, that's what even rookie. What's this is that here's what he said the CEO, he said yes. Right. Shark Tank actually put people in the wrong mindset. I, I don't like the Shark Tank show. I like the premise behind it. I don't like the Shark Tank show, and this is the reason why I don't like the Shark Tank show. Basically, they boiled, boiled it down into just the transaction, and those are for VC companies. They're not for individual investors, and this is the reason why I say that. I believe more in people than I do in a product or service. Right? Because a product or a service I can fine tune that, right? I can, I can maneuver that to meet the market and should, as a good entrepreneur, be constantly striving to do that over and over and over again. That's not like everybody, again, everybody picked up the word pivot. In 2020 because of COVID, where did you pivot? What are we pivoting to? How do we pivot? I've made this pivot. It's all bullshit because in the grand scheme of things, you should be pivoting nonstop as an entrepreneur to meet the market everywhere they are, right? You're just making slight adjustments. If you bring on a new revenue stream or get rid of an old one, that's part of the entrepreneurial growth, that's part of the business's growth, that's part of every major company that you have ever thought about has done that through time, right? We don't, we, there's a reason why we don't have an uh Apple, you know, uh iPhone one, right? It's the reason why you, you, we don't have flip phones anymore, right? Every Every company does that through time. That is not. That is not just a COVID thing, that is, that's what we should always be doing, right? Well, the idea of Shark Tank has put it in everybody's heads that we need to know the profit in a company and we need to know what the multiple is of the, you know, valuation and. You know, people learned EBITA last year, which was kind of funny because then everybody started throwing around EIDA, even though it's been around forever and ever, ever, but people learn this new word. The new one on the street is NFTs, right? Everybody's talking about NFTs now when they've been around for years, but nobody's known what they are and just through marketing and through, you know, some, some nifty little um. You know, quotes from this paper, that paper, this interview or that interview, or Elon Musk's tweet or whatever. Now it's all the rage, but this is a normal thing. In a business acquisition, I am looking more at the people involved than I am about the business that I'm acquiring because I know when I go into acquire business, I'm gonna have to make changes. That's the whole reason that I'm acquiring the business is to make changes and make it more profitable, to grow it. I know I'm gonna have to make changes, so change is the value that I'm bringing. Because they wouldn't be, they wouldn't be partnering with me if I wasn't bringing change. Change is a constant, so if that's the constant, I wanna know that the people that I'm partnering with are the people that I wanna be working with. I don't care how good the product or service is if I can't get along with the person that's at the helm. If the person at the helm won't learn, won't grow, won't, you know, adapt. Then it doesn't matter how much I want to grow it. I'm never gonna be able to because they're gonna have me in the, the golden handcuffs. How many of these, uh, acquisitions you've seen, I mean, with out of 100, you've got to have to see a number of, well, this guy's a jerk or a dick or she I can't work with her or I've had 3. I've had 3 that didn't work out and we somehow had to part ways. But 3 out of 100 is not bad. When out of that 100, I've had, you know, multiple. Uh, I've had several exits at Extreme Multiple, right? So I'm acquiring them when they're a million bucks and I'm selling them when they're, you know, they grow to 5 million bucks and then I, so that that's controlling interest. Are you taking 5% plus or on its. I mean, I usually don't take less than 25% and I have taken up to 80%, but it, it typically depends on Uh, like, how much am I doing in it and how much my team and am I devoting to it? If I got, if I got acquire a company and bring in my whole team and we're doing, you know, 80% of a digital product, well, I'm probably gonna take 80% because all they gotta do is be the show pony, show up, make the content, and then we do everything from there, whereas, and by the way, show pony is not a bad thing. That's what I do for my company. I mean, I'm literally here now being the show pony for my company, um, but there's, there is. You know, other companies where I'm doing 51% because we are, you know, I'm a combat disabled veteran. So there's some, some incentives there for me to have at least 51% of a company, yeah, because you the contracts, the DOD stuff, yes, yes, yeah, there, there's, there's definitely advantages there. Um, sometimes I'm 50/50 if like we're not going to go after any, um, you know, we don't need any outside funds for anything, uh, you know, I, I do. 50/50 deals. It just kind of depends on, I try to look at it like this. I try to be fair and equitable to everybody, and I try to base it off of Alan Weiss's value-based fees, right? I'm trying to base it off of what are we bringing to the table, what are you bringing to the table, and how does that work out financially. Uh, when I bring my team, I have a lot of hard costs in that, and, um, you know, I make sure that we're coming from that. Yeah, so you're great company that you have the Mobius, so you come in and say if if a company was just coming from the outside and I want to hire Mobius, what are we talking like 25,000 a month or something more than that 2050. Yeah, yeah. So we're definitely in the 150, 250,000 a month. Oh, OK, OK, we're talking about, yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, but I mean, I have another company called Done For You, Dooro.com, and we do, we service a lot of those, you know, beginning stage, you know, startups and, and smaller companies, but that's just, uh, that's another company that I have to serve the market wherever they are, and we, we try really hard to do that and, you know, big companies, they don't want to, to work with companies that are running. You know, $1500 clients like they, they don't, they, it's, it's like, would you, would you, would you pay, just think about this, would you pay? A uh Let's say, let's say you have a Ferrari. Would you take it to the guy down the street that you don't know where he has a two-car garage and just kind of tinkers with shit on the weekend? That's an insult. Why? You would never do that. You're going to be paying, yeah, but why wouldn't you do it? Because you have a Ferrari and you give that Ferrari Ferrari treatment, right? Now, flip it around the other way. Would you pay if you were a, if, if you had a, uh, 1976 Volkswagen bug that you were really proud of, would you pay? Let's say it's not fancy. It's not like it's, it's not a classic. I mean, it's a classic, but it's not been restored. It's just, you know, a little putter around vehicle. Would you take that to the Ferrari shop and pay for them to fix your 76? I, I want to point out something here. I just gave the audience an in here. The first in is if you brought a company that paid Patche's monthly advertising or cost of marketing, and you have a work in and then 6 months later they're doing a great job and Pat says, I want to work with you. That's one in right there. Would you agree? Yeah, for sure, yeah, for sure. But I mean, the point is, you wouldn't take a fledgling business. And pay somebody that's so far out of the realm. I mean, you think about it, uh, just to stick with the analogy. If you took that bug to a Ferrari shop, you're gonna be paying $600 an hour for them to, you know, tinker with something that they don't, that they're not really set up to do. They're set up to work on precision engines and precision cars. They're, they're not well adapted to something that you're trying to piece together and, you know, just keep running for a little bit, so. There's different, there's different agencies built for different things. Done for you as an agency specifically to help startups and small business grow to be medium-sized businesses. Then we pick up with Mobius and we take a medium-sized business to a like full till. Leading industry business, that's what we do. So we have these two shops that are basically set up to to service both parts of the market because they're very different. You don't even run ads the same way in those two organizations. They are not, they are not even close to being the same. And, and people just, they're so oblivious to the different ways that you can market, especially these days with things changing so much. Most people are still running ads, the way that they learned how to do them. Three years ago, 5 years ago, they're still running $1 million yeah, yeah, and, and that's why you get this consistent, uh, you know, million dollar business in 1819, 2021, they're, they're just maintaining and it's, you know, I, I say this all the time and people don't realize how true this is, um. Every month in Facebook is like dog years, right? So if you're doing something the same way that you did it 2 years ago, that's not 24 months ago. That's like 47 years ago. Because the platform is changing so frequently, and the, the add-ons that you can do between Shopify, plug-ins, and remarketing, and, you know, even the way that you attach the Pixel vice, Google Tag Manager, and how you feed information back and forth between the platforms, like all that stuff is dynamically changing so fast, the regular person can't keep up with it. Yeah. And a regular person does not understand all the pieces of the algorithm that you can use for Facebook when you have a substantial amount of money going in. So one of the things that we kind of implemented a couple of years ago that I thought was pretty, pretty brilliant, we, we've helped people um really become millionaires, uh, by doing this, is we would set. Let's just say they have a product for sale, right? And they say, you know, what are your projections for this month? and they say 100. $100,000 or $100,000 or I don't know, let's say they want to sell 100 products, right? So we, we put some, some goal out there. 100 products is what we want to sell this month. So, uh, what I would do is I would say, OK, if we sell more than 100 products, I want you to give 100% of the profit. That's after all your cost and all your whatever, 100% of the profit, I want you to put it back into your Facebook ads. And what we would do is we would sell 140. Now we have profit from 40 of those items, and now their ad spend has dramatically gone up over and it creates this snowball. And because it's creating a snowball, we're able to reach more of the cold audience, which is people that don't know your name, never seen your website, your YouTube page, never Googled you, you know, they don't know you from Adam, and as it started. You know, scaling, now all of a sudden they're spending $10,000 a month and then they're then that moves to $10,000 a week, and next thing you know, you're $100,000 a month, and then next thing you know, you're at a million dollars a month. And it's all because we put, we would never let them. We would never let them bump their growth scale, right? We, we'd always say, OK, what are you gonna sell, you know, we, we started with 100, we sold 140. The next thing they wanna do is they wanna say, oh well, 180 this month. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're going back. What would you have said? And it would be like 120. OK, if we sell over 120, you take anything above 120, all the profit, you put it back into ads and we'd sell 300. And now you got the profit of 200 of these things. You got the profit that's all going into the ad spend. And by doing that, it, it bridged the gap where we were super successful was bridging the gap between marketing and business development. Because there's a lot of people out there that say they are great marketers, but they have no idea about how business works. They just know how to put an ad on Facebook and, and run some budget. Right. But true marketers understand both sides, the business aspect and the implementation of the technical skills to apply a marketing strategy to the business plan, and they understand the business at a level where they can throttle down ads as manufacturing needs to catch up. But not turn off ads so that you lose all the learning and then how those things go in in conjunction with each other is where true Not just growth, but, but a system emerges to where now it doesn't matter what vertical you're in. It doesn't matter, and people call them niches all the time, which I hate that term, um, but the, they understand how they can move through these verticals and it doesn't matter. Or whether they're doing, you know, they buy a water company or a roofing company or a, you know, a widget factory or it doesn't matter at some point you become so good at adapting the system to every single vertical, it no longer matters. You can basically go anywhere and sell anything. Yeah, that's really interesting. That's amazing. I, you know, I owned an e-commerce company selling hearing aids and I did uh bulk of my sales through Google because it was more like a, you know, hey, get this hearing aid and uh You know, it's like a like a plumber's business, you know, they, when they needed the hearing aid and it was a kind of a price-based business and it's a race to the bottom. It was a race to the bottom. And when Google went from desktop to mobile, they moved, you know, it went from 12 to 13 ads to just 4, and my cost per click went from $1 to $4 right overnight. Yeah, I, I, I did not have the ability to buy anymore, so I had to move over to Facebook. Now this is all in the history and I don't really care, just like Do you think I, I would have been able to take that what you're talking about and take the hearing aids into the Facebook this is, this is where true marketers come into play because we know, you know, true marketers, and I am putting myself in that spot, don't, don't be confused. I'm, I'm saying I believe that I am a very high-end marketer and what I would have Been doing right then is getting out all the negative keywords. The most powerful thing in Google is negative keywords, not paying for a click on somebody that's not going to purchase unless you're trying to build a legacy product, right? Like, what is the most famous hearing aid ever? Starky, I don't know. What is it? Oh no, no, uh, uh, you got me, but, uh, what, what is the one that everybody knows people even refer to it miracle here, miracle here, people will say, I need a miracle here, even though they're saying they need a hearing aid, they're using their brand as that thing. Why is that one the most, even though it's not the best product, why is it the most famous one ever? done. Just a great brand like the Bay I need on every TV commercial, every single, like, every prominent back in the day before there was, you know, 700 channels on regular cable now, but back in the day, Miracle year was on, they were on during The Price Is Right. They were on during Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, like all those, uh, I mean, the most watched shows anywhere, they were right there. And what they do they always 70 years old, yeah, exactly. And so they, they did incredible targeted audience collection and it's why I said, I said this a couple of minutes ago, but, um, I really hate the niching down idea because if they had ditched down, they wouldn't be miracle here if, if they, but they created a vertical and they created a vertical at such a level that Middle aged kids would surprise their older parents with a miracle year. They were selling at a higher rate to people that couldn't even use their product but were buying it as a gift for somebody that could. And here's the I, I gotta tell you, it, it was a great time too because there just wasn't a lot of competitors out there doing what they did. Right, and, and the, the crazy thing is, nobody knew, nobody knew, uh, to search for. Miracle year before miracle year became miracle year, but then people started searching for miracle year and all the hearing aid people would go and compete for Miracle Y's keyword. To sell their own uh hearing aid. And again, just to go back, it's the reason why I hate the idea of niching down. I don't like the way that people use it these days. It sounds really cool for rookie marketers and people that don't really understand marketing to say, you got a niche down. You gotta get really niched down, and do one thing, do well, this is the reason why it didn't work. It's an antiquated idea. Did it work? Sure. Do some of the core concepts of, you know, doing, having a core component, do they work? Yes, absolutely, 100%. But creating a vertical is far more profitable, and what you can use that vertical in many, many, many different ways, but they don't understand that, it's all about the product instead of being a vertical, which is more about the audience, because the miracle here had also done. You know, they also let me go back to the, yeah, that's your, that's the ecosystem of Richard Branson, which you're talking about again. Exactly. And, and I can, I can prove this in several ways. So one is niching down is a concept that came out in the all the, the, the great sales books and business books in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, early 90s, right? Before we had this thing called the freaking internet. Right? And, and people are still attaching it because they read it in a book that's a New York Times bestseller. It was written in the 70s. Yeah, right? It's, uh, let me tell you somebody else a niched down, Blockbuster niched down. Right, where's Blockbuster? There's one left in the freaking world now. They had 9000 stores. They were on every major corner in all of America, and they have pulled out early. That's a great time. One lone store in Bend, Oregon. And, and the crazy thing about Toys R Us niched down, right? Woolworths niched down. Leggetts niched down. Those things are no longer alive, but they were the pinnacle of business in the 70s, 80s, early 90s. The pinnacle, that's who everybody wanted to be. I mean, you think about it, if you could be a blockbuster in the 80s, late 80s, early 90s, holy cow, you were just crushing life. They had people literally bidding like astronomical numbers to just be on a waiting list to become a blockbuster. Right? But that idea is so antiquated now because of the internet. The internet changed everything. I can be all things to all people. I say this all the time, but it's, it's worth saying again the. On the internet, I can be the world's best marketer for dentists. If I figure out how to get that flow to work. Here's the cool thing. I can do another one just like it, and I could be the world's best marketer for chiropractors. And I could do it again for roofers, and for plumbers, and for massage therapists, and for yada yada yada. The list goes on and on and on. I could do it forever. But here's the greatest thing, like I was saying, the negative keywords are more important than the actual keywords I pick, is I can segment the audience in a way that I never could before. If I have a brick and mortar, you have no idea what people are gonna say about you. But if I'm online, I can pick and choose who sees what ad and who doesn't. I can also make sure that if you saw my dentist ad, you will not see my chiropractor ad. You will not see my roofing ad, you will not see my plumber ad. So I can negate certain audiences and give only the message I want to give, just like on Google. I can go and I get my negative keywords are more valuable than my positive keywords in many ways. For example, we used to do the marketing for Black Rifle Coffee Company. Love those guys over there. Love those guys. I I love the Matt and Evin. I love those guys, man. They're hilarious. They're, they're insanely good dudes, and they, they want to help their community, which is also incred like they have super high values and morals, not just as a people but as a company. But here, let me tell you a story. I don't know if you've seen it on the internet, but they worked with an interpreter, Walid, and who helped them on their missions. And they brought him, they found out he made his way back to the United States. They brought him wherever he was and gave him a job and he's now United States working at. I mean, yeah, that's a freaking great story. Back to the point, and they do all kinds of stuff like that, like these guys, their character is just above reproach, but the, the thing was when we first started ads on Google. We had people clicking on it that were looking for black rifles. We had people that were looking for black, there is a company called, right, looking for, you know, uh, black rifle company, right, that. It was terrible for us. So what we had to do is systematically go down and start putting in all these negative keywords. Don't serve the ad to this person, don't serve the ad to this person. And as we did that over time, what happened was the profit went up because we weren't bleeding money for people looking for a black rifle. And so it took a lot of time, but the cool thing was, we got it refined in to where when people were looking for black rifle, the coffee company, we were always there and we were not there when people were looking for a black rifle and that cost dramatic I mean they were not bleeding money, but they were spending a lot of money to figure out. What we didn't want. And over time as we increase those negative keywords, what was left over was a prime audience that everybody else was competing for. Against us, against black rifle, not black rifle competing against everybody else. And again, if you had those skills which are really hard to acquire and quite honestly, the reason why you can't acquire them the same way that a company like Mobius can is because Mobius has had so much experience. Built off of spending other people's money. Right, there's there, you're never gonna be able to compete with the knowledge that somebody has when they're spending a million dollars a day on Facebook. You're never gonna be able to learn at that pace. The way that somebody else can spending that amount of money. Like you think about this. Most of the time people, businesses down on the vine of Facebook because it's death by a million paper cuts, right? And the reason why that happens is because they're trying to nickel and dime. They're trying to put in, all right, I'm only gonna do 100 bucks this time and see if it works. I'm only gonna do $200 and see if it works. The problem is they're not putting enough people in to see how people go through the funnel to make data-driven decisions on that funnel. So, but the companies that can pump in $10,000 a day, they're putting 10,000 people an hour on the page, which means now I can go in and I can make a data-driven decision to change this headline to get the thing I want. I can wait an hour and see if it works. Yep, that worked. Then I go to the next piece and I go to the next piece, and you can't compete with that. The next best thing. I take people that have the experience of running that kind of money, and they can see the trends much, much faster. It's, it's a culmination of like arts and science and math. And you have to have all of those things working in conjunction with each other, in tandem with each other, to be able to see the trends, and you kind of look at it like, it's almost like, uh, have you seen the movie Matrix? It's like looking at the Matrix. Right? It, over time you learn just from spending that amount of money and seeing that amount of data, you'll learn how to spot it when other people can't. Um, and, uh, again, it's like the next best thing to spending, you know, boo goodles of money, next best thing is to, to have people on your team that have spent that much money and have been able to learn at that frequency. And let me, let me bring up the point how this concept is really important because what Roland talks about in epic, like, like you've got to have a funnel of 100+ companies so you get down to 3 and you're whittling out all the other stuff to get to the 3, but if you're gonna bring in 1 or 2 at the top, you're never, it's just it's never gonna happen. Well, and I think I, I think we, we are limited by 1 creativity, and 2, The reason that I get to say no to so many deals is because I have a choice. Right, I have 97 more in the pipeline ready to go. So I have a choice, but when I only have two options, I'm instead of taking the best one, I'm taking the The better of the two, right? Yeah, and you're trying and sometimes like, you know, I see some other epic they just keep forcing like, hey, I'm gonna work on this deal for 34 or 5 months, and it's, she said that she said that, but You just gotta get more deals in your pipeline, right? Yeah, because that's the, the reason why I believe people are trying to force them through is because the it's the only one that they have, it's the only option they have and they're trying to make something out of nothing, whereas the best deals in most cases are the ones where. The people are pitching me. On why their business is good to be in my portfolio instead of me pitching them why I'd be a great partner. To be in their business. And that's a, that's, that's a huge difference. That's a great difference. I mean, the, the, the funnel that Roland has created with this epicork is amazing. It's just brilliant, yeah. For sure. And I mean, he turns down deals all the time. And here's the crazy part. Some people get really irritated that you turn down their deal, and you have to be, you know, you gotta have have some tough skin and be like, look, let me tell you all the reasons that you have not landed a deal with me, and they don't like hearing it, but it should be like a A stark reminder of what we talked about originally, which is What are you doing for me? What are you doing for you? What are you doing to the for the audience that we serve? And, and people get it mixed up. I, I, I did a training on this the other day. I'll share it with you cause it's, it's super relevant. Um, The The 3 things that you need to answer people. When, when they're gonna partner is, besides the, you know, the three that I originally said is what is it gonna do for me, what is it gonna do for you, what is it gonna do for the people that we serve. The next 3 that you have to answer. Is what are you uniquely trying to do? Why are you the one to uniquely do it? And then What's in it for me if I take the ride with you? Those Three things, if you put those in your pitch. You almost always. Have a leg up To get that deal done because if you can answer those three questions, you are gonna have a very clear understanding of what you want them to do and you're gonna be able to present the idea without rambling and telling a bunch of backstory. We don't care about the backstories. The funny thing is, in the very 1st 5 minutes, we're determining whether we wanna continue the conversation or not. You know, I think what you just said, it, it's just not just you. I think it's anybody in Epic, if you're going to collaborate with somebody else in Epic, like answering those, it's actually 6, I think, but the last 3, but answering all those questions before I go collaborate with this guy. For sure. Can I check the bars right there? OK, for sure. And, and people just, they, they miss, they miss the boat before they ever even get to the shoreline. And the reason why they do it is because they don't do their homework. If I know for a fact. That you're a veteran, and you have a a propensity to want to help veterans. And I'll say, bro. I've got this software deal that I believe it is gonna make you some money. It's gonna make me some money, and it's gonna help a boatload of veterans along the way. You in or out. You say, definitely interested in learning more. OK, and then I go right down through that. All right, so I'm uniquely trying to get people to come into this system. That's the unique thing. I already have the team that can run everything for us. What I need from you is I need you to introduce it to more veterans, and the last part, what's in it for you if you take the ride with me. I believe that by the time we're done, we're gonna help 700,000 veterans by 2022 and I believe that we're gonna get you at least a 30 to 50% increase on the $100,000 that I'm asking from you. It's like 3 minutes' worth of time, and the very next thing you're gonna do is I'm in, what do we need to do, right? You're gonna start wanting to ask more questions and I'm gonna start feeding you answers, but here's the best part about what I just did, is now, I've got you asking me questions instead of me rambling for the next hour and a half about shit that you don't care about. Yeah, this is back to what I said. Uh, how do you get the second deal with Patch is deliver the first one on a flat. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Patch, we're, I mean, I've, I've had an hour of your time and I want to thank you for this. I want to appreciate that, so. Oh man, this is, this is fantastic. I mean, you're you. Just killed it in the last couple of years with this uh epic in your business. Fantastic. I congratulations and thanks for your service. Well, thank you, man. I appreciate that. I, I, I have tried really hard to be a, a student of Roland's and really a, a, uh, not just a student uh a student, but more like, I don't know, a, a patron of the, the guys that have done it before me and um have done it well, and I I try hard not to copy people. I try hard to learn the concepts and then adapt those to something that I can, you know, be consistent on and maintain. Um, and I, I hope everybody's, I hope even from just spending time with you and the people that watch this podcast, it's encouraging that, uh, you know, reciprocal learning that should happen. More people should learn from this and, and help more people in our community that are trying to do this and hopefully EPIC members are watching this and they'll learn something here that they can pass on to somebody else and I, I think that, you know, making those meaningful deposits in other people's lives, uh, is what ultimately will somebody is gonna introduce me to somebody that's gonna change my life and. You know, I think it's just one big circle, right? It's still that ecosystem that we're talking about before. The more we help each other, the more help we get, and just, uh, just perpetual cycle of, uh, growth and education. It's great. Love it. It's lovely. It's just lovely. That's a perfect daddy too, man. Yeah, man. All right, I'm gonna. Well, I appreciate it, man, and um happy to come back in.