Marcus Lemonis on Acquisition, Ownership & Building at Scale

Video Version: https://youtu.be/CC-Ay3DR2-Y

Marcus Lemonis joins the 2026 ACHIEVE Summit as a keynote speaker, bringing a rare combination of operator discipline, acquisition expertise, and national business influence.

Marcus Lemonis brings one of the clearest real-world cases for ownership through acquisition in America. Best known to many from The Profit and The Fixer, Marcus built his career by buying, restructuring, and scaling businesses across fragmented industries, including RV retail and consumer brands, making him a strong fit for a summit focused on entrepreneurship through acquisition, ownership, and long-term value creation.

He studied at Marquette, has deep Midwest ties, and has led major business platforms from the Chicago region—giving his keynote both national credibility and a meaningful connection to the communities ACHIEVE is built to serve.

This conversation is about more than turnaround stories.

It is about what it really takes to buy, build, and lead businesses at scale.

At the heart of Marcus’s career is a disciplined approach to identifying hidden value, stepping into overlooked businesses, and transforming them through sharper operations, stronger leadership, and strategic vision. His perspective reflects a bigger truth that sits at the center of the ACHIEVE Summit mission: wealth is not created through ideas alone. It is created through ownership, stewardship, and the ability to grow what already has the potential to become great.

This keynote is about acquisition as a path to scale, leadership as a tool for transformation, and ownership as the foundation for lasting impact.

Because building something meaningful is not only about starting from scratch.

Sometimes it is about seeing what others missed—and having the courage to buy, build, and lead it into its next chapter. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Are you ready to grow your business, build wealth, and spark transformation in the South Suburbs of Chicago? Visit Southlanddevelopment.org today and sign up for our newsletter to stay connected, get the resources, and be the first to hear about the Achieve Summit, where entrepreneurs, developers, investors, and change makers come together to ignite growth and opportunity. Don't just watch change happen, be a part of it. Join the movement at Southlanddevelopment.org and start building your legacy today. Welcome back to the first million is always the hardest. Today we're joined by one of the most recognized operators in American business, Marcus Lamonis. Known for the profit and the fixture TV shows. Marcus has built a career in buying, restructuring, and scaling businesses across fragmented industries. Marcus represents a different model of entrepreneurship, one rooted not just in starting, but in acquiring, improving, and scaling what already exists. As keynote speaker for the 2026 Achieve Summit, he brings a powerful perspective on ownership, acquisition, and what it really takes to build lasting value at scale. Welcome to the First Million is Always the Hardest, our podcast. Even though the name is talking about money, we actually care about a lot more than that. Impact is an important element of what we do, and we are so excited to have you as our keynote for the Achieve Summit 2026, which is June 4th through 6th at the Wind Creek Casino. You know, I want to confess that our mission as the Southland Development Authority is to focus on ways of growing the South Surbs of Chicago. So we we represent 45 cities, towns, and villages that are represent about 700,000 people. So bigger than the population of Boston, bigger than D.C., but very diverse. And I know you're from the area. So we've got corn and soybean farmers that are next to sprawling suburban homes that are next to very densely populated neighborhoods like Harvey, all within the same area. So it's very unique relative to the rest of the country. But one of the things that is true for us, that's also true for a lot of other places, is there's this huge change that's taking place. The silver tsunami, which I'm sure you've heard quite a lot about, but in our areas, we have a lot of businesses that are ready for people to retire and move. And so there's this huge need for both generational wealth and knowledge transfer. And we decided, and part of the reason we have our conference, is that there are certain populations that have been overlooked that can play a really important role in this. One of them is women. You know, since COVID, women have been the largest number of entrepreneurs in the United States. And women of color in particular have been the largest subsegment. Another population we think is overlooked are veterans. Veterans have a difficult time translating their experiences in the military to jobs that are in corporate America, but much of their experience we think fits very well in the context of being an entrepreneur, particularly buying a business, which we really try to encourage people. The last population may be a little counterintuitive for people, but particularly young folks, we're really targeting folks that are coming out of grad schools and encouraging them to become entrepreneurs and to facilitate their effort to buy a business. And one of the reasons in particular that I wanted you is I had a chance last summer to see you at the entrepreneur conference in Vegas. And there was a woman that you called out of the crowd randomly and asked her to talk about her business. And in the process of that, she it revealed that both her father, I mean her son and her husband had died within the same year. And one of the things that really got me was most people, when that happens, are so taken aback that it was hard to engage. And you didn't run from it. You engaged this woman in a way that I thought really demonstrated your emotional EQ in a way that I thought, wow, you know, this person is keyed into people in a way that's really important. It's very different than the way other people would. And you spent a good amount of time with that woman and did it in such a way that I think she walked away, despite standing up in front of 500 people, she walked away feeling protected in the way that you engaged her. And that really uh really stuck with me as something that said, okay, that's the person that we want to engage with the population that we're trying to encourage to take a risk that might not seem um evident that they are situated to take that risk. And I'm I'm just you know curious when you think about your background, what are the things that have occurred in your life that gave you the capacity to really not run from a very potentially personally uh charged situation with PILKS to really key in on what are the elements about that person that you could facilitate that might be different than what other people would do? And how does that translate into the people that you decide to support or not?

SPEAKER_03 5:04

For me, business is really about relationships. And in order to have a really good relationship with anybody, professionally or personally, there has to be a significant degree of empathy, there has to be a significant degree of listening, and there has to be a significant degree of humanity. And unfortunately, we're living today, 2026, in a society where I believe that humanity has kind of left the room. And uh everything feels very transactional and it feels very remote. And when I engage with a business owner, a current one or an aspiring one, it's trying to really understand, maybe from my own perspective and why I'm motivated to do things, what the context of their motivation is. And when you think about small business owners, medium business owners, I like to call them local business owners, folks that are just getting started, that haven't built a regional brand or a national business, you start to wonder what their motivations are. Why are they choosing to pursue this path? And for me, and maybe the reason that the emotional connection is easier for me is I know why I chose to be in business. I know why I'm attracted to business, I know why I love being involved with other people in business. And that is a great um uh immense, insatiable appetite for relationships with people. And in that process, what I end up learning more than anything else, Bo, is um that context matters. And what in when I met that woman, and I remember it very distinctly, and I was taken aback by it, and it was one of those moments where you emotionally think she suffered significant loss. Yeah, do I want to get away from that, or can I relate to that and do I want to create a connection? And that that that has to happen in a millisecond, but you have to be hotwired to be open to that idea. And most people are not.

SPEAKER_02 7:12

No, uh that really is what struck me is that most people would have run and instead you leaned into it. And I felt that in that moment, because you leaned into it, what you did is you gave license for her to talk about it openly in an environment that maybe she wouldn't normally, but it also gave license to other people to kind of feel that emotion. And your point about what is your reason for why you're doing this, why do you want to be an entrepreneur really sticks with me. I'll tell you one of mine is the idea that I could be in a position to actually help feed people's families. Um, I find that to be sacred. I find that to be something that I'm really proud of. And it's one of the drivers for me of why I've been an entrepreneur since I was eight years old in one form or another. I wasn't feeding anybody's family at eight. But, you know, as I've gotten older being in that position, I, you know, you've mentioned you know your why, but what is that why?

SPEAKER_03 8:09

Well, you know, we come onto this earth, God puts us on this earth, and regardless of what someone's religion is or beliefs are, they have to believe in something, some sort of faith in some kind. And my belief is that I was put here for a reason, and that there are uh things that are uh wonderful about me, and there are things that are not wonderful about me, and knowing when to use those things matters. And for me, the identification of understanding how to relate to people in business, understanding how to educate people uh in a way that they can absorb, understanding how to fight for those folks who others will not is probably more of a function of me feeling like I needed people to fight for me. I'm an adopted child from a foreign country, no brothers and sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles of any significance. And my parents who adopted me are now gone. I look for connections with humanity. And while I'm married and I have a wonderful connection with my wife, outside of my wife, my only connection to humanity is business. And my why is um a deep, deep-seated attraction to two things. One, to be a part of something, two, to allow other people to be a part of something so they don't feel like moments of time where I felt. And business is is that is that one thing. It's the greatest gift, privilege. I call it a privilege, to be able to own a business or be the manager of a business. Because not everybody necessarily is going to start by being an owner. You could start by being a leader and being the manager, and then over time buy it from the from the person that wants to retire. But the the blessing in all of that is that you like much like you said, you have the ability to be the shepherd of somebody else in your town, in your community, in your city, in your state, and bring people along and know that every decision you make has a direct impact on the rest of their life and families. I think, look, you're gonna you're gonna meet plenty of speakers and read plenty of books and talk to plenty of people who are gonna say, I decided to get in business because I'm a capitalist and I want to make money. Right. By definition, a business has to make money. It has to.

SPEAKER_02 10:27

Or it's a hobby.

SPEAKER_03 10:28

Yeah, it has to make money because in order for you to feed your own family and to feed other people's families, you have to have a profit. And this idea that, you know, I want to, I want to do it to give back, I want to do it to change the world. I would say to people like, stop. You want to do it to change your life, and you want to do it to change the people that you are responsible for's lives, and you want to do it to serve the customers that allow you and your employees to live your life. That's it. That's that's the small bubble. It doesn't, you don't need to like solve world hunger. We're not asking to do that. But we are asking you to take care and custody of those people. What a great privilege.

SPEAKER_02 11:07

One of the things that we say, so Southland Development Authority is actually a not-for-profit organization. But we're a little different because we were formed in the middle of COVID, and so we had to operate uh remotely. Um, we had to focus instead of bringing big companies for new jobs to the area. We had to focus on all the businesses that already exist. That turned out to be a blessing because it forced us to work with everybody who'd already made the decision to be here. They already made an investment, they were local by nature, as you were describing, and that changed our model of how we operate. And so one of the things we say is there is no mission without money. You know, yes, our goal is not to make money, but without making money, we actually do not get to carry on our mission. And our mission is bigger than all of us. We are trying to promote the wealth of individuals, businesses, and municipalities. And therefore, with everything we do, we need to find out a way to make it profitable. And um, most investors, as you know, um, and you may not be in this camp, are lemmings, not leaders, as I like to say. They typically don't want to be at the forefront of any risk or any new idea. They want to do it after someone else has proven it. And we've made a point of our organization as a not-for-profit is best positioned to take the risk that the private market won't take. So if we're not taking that risk, we can't prove to them that they should take the risk. But if we can't make money at it, the private sector surely doesn't think they can make money at it.

SPEAKER_03 12:28

I want to address something that you said for other folks that want to lead in a nonprofit. Um, you use the word profit. I want to use the word cash flow.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:39

And I want any business of any kind, profit or not profit, to understand that you have to generate cash flow. And the difference between a nonprofit and a profit is that a nonprofit will reinvest that cash flow into programs, into people, into other things, where a business for profit will may reinvest some, but may return capital to its owner, its shareholders, its lenders, its investors. And so, but the but the but the path to get to that line is the same. The discipline to get to that line is the same. The responsibility to get to that line is the same. And over the years, I've worked with a number of nonprofits. And by the way, that is a business.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 13:26

It's a business. You're serving a different constituency, but it is a business. It requires you to have the right people, it requires you to actually set up rules and guardrails and process sometimes even more discipline because the revenue that gets generated, the goal is for that nonprofit to have something to reinvest or to grant or to do. And if you don't do that, you've eaten up all this money. And so when I think about generating income, I think about generating cash flow, and the line only splits. And if you are an entrepreneur today who um doesn't like to sell things, you're not a natural-born salesperson, or you don't like asking people for money in a different way, that doesn't mean that you can't be in the business world. You could be providing a social service as a nonprofit, but it's still a business. You could be providing education, or you could be running the corner barbershop or dry cleaner or dress shop or bakery or restaurant or tree trimming service. The list goes on and on. But what you're really doing is you're saying, I want to wake up every morning, I want to serve, I want to solve a problem for people, and I would like to be compensated for my work, my intelligence, and I want my people to be taken care of. That's the like in the most simplest form, that's what a business is.

SPEAKER_02 14:50

That's it. But you know, the one thing I will slightly differ with you is that the art of storytelling is everything. The one thing that makes America distinct is we are really good storytellers. May not always be about the truth, but we tell a story really well. And I tell all of my peers, um, because I didn't come from the not-for-profit space, I came from the for-profit space. If you can't tell your story effectively, you can't hire people, you can't find partnerships, you can't raise money, you actually can't even demonstrate to the communities that you serve that you are serving them because they rely on that story as a way to digest the information that you're providing them. So I agree with most of what you said. Well, what's the different part?

SPEAKER_03 15:28

What's the different part?

SPEAKER_02 15:30

Well, I think the only thing I heard differently was the idea it's okay if you're not always able to uh generate the story, as I heard you say it. No, that no, okay. So I may have misheard what you were saying.

SPEAKER_03 15:43

No, no, no, no, no. Because because I story isn't the right word. I want to challenge that. Purpose.

SPEAKER_02 15:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:52

My purpose is a narrative. Why does my business exist? Why do I exist? People like to say it's a story, and I don't, I'm not challenging the concept. I'm challenging why do I exist? Do customers, do and potential employees, does my community, my bank, everybody else, do they understand why I exist and what purpose I'm intended to serve and how I'm going to do that? That's the same as the story. Yeah, no, that's right. I'd like to wrap it in like, why do I exist?

SPEAKER_02 16:26

Yeah. Well, you know, interestingly enough, in the transition, one of the things I've noticed about your businesses that is um, it doesn't have to be unique, but I think it is more unique than it should be, is that you've tended to focus on businesses where there was the ability to create these really vibrant communities, right? Not just that they were consumers of your product, but they were people who were actually going to talk to each other. Now, I have a rare um, this is a little funny. So, you know, I'm actually an RVer from time to time in a camper. And, you know, um, I tell people that when black families go out and RV and camp, it's like other people walk the forest and it's like they saw Sasquatch, right? They like stop and take a double take. Like, wait a minute, did I see what I it wasn't just one person, it was a whole family, you know. And um we go on a regular basis and go out because I really love the outdoors in that way and I love that that spirit. But that community is more than just consumers, right? They are talking to one another. And as I look at some of the things you've invested in, um, it appears to me that your effort around branding is really keyed in on the idea of having these people who love your product talk to one another as much as it is that they are actually buying your product. And I just wanted to get a sense of is that an accurate take? How do you think about that? How does that differ for you versus others?

SPEAKER_03 17:44

I think I'll go back to why do I exist? Why does this business exist? And the businesses that I like to be involved in are exist to solve a problem. The reason that I love the RV space or the reason that I love the home space now with bed bath and container store and all these other brands is because I see um I see a total addressable market, and every business owner should think like, if I want to be in business, is the product or service I'm gonna sell relevant? And then secondly, is there an audience for it? And so when I decided to get into the RV business years ago, I was trying to understand what the industry existed long before I ever came around, and it'll exist long after I'm gone. But what could I do in the period that I have a presence inside of a space, an industry, a segment? And I'm not an RVer. I've you've RV'd more than I have. Um but what I but what I love about it is that I love that people um want to be with their family, want to be in the outdoors, want to see different parts of this country, want to uh unho unhook and unlock from screen time and noise and phones and internet and all the nonsense. And they want to build love and they want to build trust and community with their family, with their friends. They could do a tailgate. So, what I liked is I liked the idea of what they were doing. What I saw is the problem is that there was not one company that stitched it all together to make it simpler and more affordable. And and and I wasn't gonna change the idea. My goal was never to try to take the person outside in New York City and say, you should go camping. It was never about creating millions and millions of converters. I wasn't selling a religion, I was in ingesting myself into a lifestyle that already existed, trying to make it more understandable and simpler to execute for those who were there, which would ultimately make it easier for people who were contemplating it to get in. And yes, it's around community for sure, but it was around why do I exist? What am I going to do differently to leave my thumbprint on something that needs it?

SPEAKER_02 20:07

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SPEAKER_00 20:42

Your listening to the first million is always the hardest. We are now returning to the show.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

Well, when you think about entering and buying a business, whether it's an add-on to an existing platform or even something that's new, I'm curious in your assessment, what is harder? To repair a broken brand, to repair a broken culture, or to repair a broken customer promise.

SPEAKER_03 21:09

The hardest thing is to repair a broken owner and a broken manager. Um it's it's I tend to have a gravity towards the uh misfit toys only because I'm in the same box, toy box with them. And I tend to be really interested in in a couple of things when I'm looking at a business. One, am I excited by it? Do I like it? Is it fun? Is it interesting? Do I do I have a do I have an affinity for it? I rarely have invested in a business or bought a business that I didn't have excitement around. Because if you don't have the excitement, you know, it's like, well, I need to be married, so let me just marry anybody. No, I want to be married to somebody that I'm excited to be with, I want to be in business with. People that I like to be with. I want to sell a product or service that I believe is something that's good. And I think you have to start with that. I think the second thing is do I like the people that I'm gonna work with? And business owners, um potential business owners, buyers of businesses have to put on like a special set of glasses and say, Do I like the business? Yes or no? We covered that. Do I like the people that work there? Could I see myself being part of that culture? Yes or no? And if I'm on the fence about it, why? Is it because I feel like the culture is too capitalistic or the culture is too non-consumer friendly, or the cap the culture is not investing enough in training, or what's missing from that? What I will walk away from a business for, and what I would want anybody that ever listens to this to walk away from an opportunity to buy a business, invest a business, or be part of a business, to walk away from you can't do business with knuckleheads. And you can't do business with people that don't love themselves and love others. And when I say love themselves, that doesn't mean think that they're the most important thing, but have self-respect and to have a knowledge of why they exist. They're there to be servants, to understand the product, to understand. And if you find people that, oh, it's a great deal, the returns are amazing, but I don't really like the people, but the place makes great money. Usually in the end, those things fall apart. I would much prefer to invest in the people that that own the business or work there. The we're like-minded in how we think about life. We're like-minded in how we think about the customer, we're like-minded in how we think about selling our product or delivering our service. And where there's a disjointment is gosh, they don't really have the technical things right, the technology is missing, they don't understand their supply chain, they're not great marketers. And so you should buy a business for its capability, and you should fix a business to make the capability more efficient and yield something for it. But you have to also be capable. So if you told me, okay, I'm gonna bring you 10 businesses, and all the people are amazing, and they all have something missing from them that makes them not as good of a business as it could be, how would you start to parse those out? Well, I would start saying, like, okay, there's 10. Let me get rid of all the ones that I either know nothing about or I'm not excited about. Great. What's the next thing? Let me get rid of the ones that I think the technology can crush it and it's easily beatable. Okay, great. Let me get rid of the ones where I don't like the culture of the business and I don't like how consumers feel about them. I don't like how they think about them, I don't like how they think about each other. Let me get rid of those. And what you get down to is businesses that you and I'll reverse it. You like the business, you're excited about it. You think that people you could have a like a snack with them and you wouldn't want to run away. And you think that you can add something to their existing capability where the yield goes from X to Y. And it is that simple. And and um, I think too often people want to buy businesses that they think are cool or they think people are gonna like you know, wanna they're gonna be able to influence the outcome, but they have no aptitude around it. And I see that happen a lot. Oh, I found this business, it's um, it's a bar, and and I I've always wanted to own a bar. Well, why?

SPEAKER_01 25:42

Yeah, that's a tough, that's a tough gig. Bars and restaurants are tough.

SPEAKER_03 25:46

Unless you work them. And if your life allows you to be able to do that and you want to dedicate your life to serving customers all the time, which is 24-7 in a business like that, then you should do it.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Yeah. Well, you know, it kind of leads me to, I think one of the most difficult things that investors have to deal with, that you that you went through the filtering process, you got down to someone that you actually um decided to invest in, but now you're really evaluating to what degree can the business be rescued? Um, and to what degree should I allow this thing to die? And those are always the most difficult questions, but how do you kind of screen through that process for yourself?

SPEAKER_03 26:26

I would say that that's part of my filter process. Do I believe that there's a total addressable market here? And do I believe that ultimately there's something viable? Um I uh I tend to be maybe the wrong person to ask because I don't want any business to ever close. And I um I'm an idealist in a lot of ways. Uh when I find great people with a good idea, but they just can't find their feet. Um I have made several mistakes over the years where I have chased things because I fell in love with them and I missed one of my filter checks, or I fell in love with them, or I became enamored by the idea, or I let my ego get in the way, or I looked at a business that was struggling. And um I I still have a tendency to do it today, but I've gotten better at it to believe that I could fix everything or fix everyone. And so if you're out there thinking about buying a business, I would strongly encourage you not to believe that you're the only solution that could happen. Because if you're wrong, the business goes bad. Finding the perfect balance between being practical and being passionate matters. I'm passionate about snow cones. Really, really, really passionate about snow cones. I love the syrup, I love the whole deal. But I would not buy a snow cone business in Buffalo.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 27:50

Because I would know that my addressable market was short. And so you have to start thinking practically once you get to like what are the numbers, how do they present them? We didn't cover something um that I need to come back to, which is what's the most important filter after understanding that you like the people and all those things are great is is the data that the the business is providing you, the financial reporting that it's providing you, clean and accurate? Yes. Because if it's not, you either have to A invest money and time to reverse engineer what the actual results are, which is possible, or B, you have to not do the transaction.

SPEAKER_02 28:34

Yeah. I would add to that timely as another one.

SPEAKER_03 28:38

Before you write a check.

SPEAKER_02 28:40

Well, no meaning that the information has to be accurate, but it also has to be timely.

SPEAKER_03 28:44

Oh, like in the last couple of months, not seven years ago. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 28:49

Exactly. And so many small businesses, they struggle with that administrative part because they think of it as almost secondary to running the business without understanding that you don't have an enterprise if you don't have this information. Um, your ability to borrow money, your ability to attract investors, your ability to take the next steps. We we spend a lot of time as a not-for-profit actually working with businesses that are one to three years out from sale. So we work with about 700 to 1,000 businesses a year. Only about 2.5% of them are of the nature that they could be high growth businesses. So it's a, you know, in any given year, there's probably 35 to 50 businesses that we've newly uh targeted that if we really focus on supporting them, they might be the ones that break out and can hire 200 people or a thousand people. Um but a lot of the difficulty that those businesses have is that their infrastructure, their back office, their data, just as you were referring to, is not world class. They may be able to operate and do manufacturing in this particular area in a world-class level, but that area isn't. And so when they look for add-on acquisitions, it's problematic. When they think about you're generating some sort of capital that allows them to grow, they are one to two years away, much to their chagrin, or worse, when they think about selling. Because you know, everyone here in the Chicago area, once they retire, they move to either Tampa or Scottsdale, Arizona for some reason. But when they get to that point, now their businesses are not actually situated to maximize their value. So when you approach either the small investment or even the larger investments, how do you both assess that issue around that data? And how much time would you actually allow for people to kind of get up to speed before you say, you know what, this is more, more difficult, more problems than it's worth?

SPEAKER_03 30:42

I was listening to you describe sort of the scenarios, and you described one that was like, well, there's a manufacturer that uh, you know, they know how to manufacture, but they don't know some of these other things. Those are the kinds of businesses that I tend to be most attracted to, where their core discipline is something they excel at. But the ancillary disciplines that are required to make the business function, they struggle with. So remember, we went through like, yep, they're good people and all that, there's a need for them, but they do the one primary thing really well. But the ancillary things, like understanding supply chain of raw materials or understanding the packaging, or how to distribute the product properly, or how to price it properly, or how to properly cost the manufacturing to have parts, material, labor, and all those things. I look for businesses that um that are undervalued, um, that that I can be opportunistic about as a as a capitalist, which I am, and everybody that's watching this should always think that way. It's okay to buy a business that there's opportunity, there's meat on the bone, but you like the bone, you like the general construct of it and what they do, they do really well. Because the reason that you exist is to fill in the gaps or to find people, bring people in on your team, or outsource certain functions to fill all those gaps in. And that's usually the biggest dilemma is that people like the business, but then they don't know how to fill in the rest of the gaps because of one thing, Bo. And that is they people think they know everything. Ego.

SPEAKER_02 32:19

Ego.

SPEAKER_03 32:20

Yeah, it's like when we were kids, yeah, our moms used to say no one likes a know-it-all. That's right. And so what people do like are the opposite of that, which is hard-working people that that want to put in the time, that understand their core discipline intellectually and emotionally, but understand and have enough self-awareness to know where their gaps are and how they're going to fill their gaps, and how that everybody around them needs to be smarter. Now, it's easy for me to say this in a medium to big size business. In a small business where the resources are limited and the capital to invest in that business and grow it is limited. You can't not, you cannot necessarily apply the same things. So, in that situation, what do you do? Well, if the capital is limited and the resources are limited, and you want to be the big boss on the block, you may have to have another big boss on the block, which is why having partners is really important. If you and I were going to invest in something together, and we both checked all these boxes, and for those folks that are thinking about investing in something, it's always good to find a teammate that brings I agree, brings in those things. People's like, oh, I don't, I don't, I want to own 100%. I want to, I, I want to be, I want to be more than 51% because I want to be in charge. Well, being in charge comes with the burdens. And having the gaps means that your in-charge business isn't gonna make it. Being on a team as an investor or as a manager and having all the gaps filled means that your 39.7% or your 61.2%, it's gonna be worth a heck of a lot more because the people that own the Delta, they're filling out the gaps of the things that you're not good at. I agree. That's really hard for people.

SPEAKER_02 34:08

I think to your point, uh, you didn't call it ego, I did, but one of the things I found, I was a young manager at one point. And so when you're young, often you want to demonstrate that you are knowledgeable. You don't want to be a know-it-all, but you want to be pretty close to it. And so you're constantly answering things like you know. And it took me a little while, but I finally learned the benefit of being in charge is that I don't have to know. The whole point of the people that work for me is to provide me resource uh options for me to choose from. So I get smarter about choosing of the things that are presented to you, which is the best alternative for me to choose. But I don't have to be the one that knows the answer. I get to be the person who works with my team to determine what's the right solution. It for me it was a transition uh that it took for me to get through that. And my experience is that when I find people who have the attitude that they don't have to be the ones that know, those are great people to work with because they're almost they're intellectually curious almost by nature. And I've at least found that intellectual curiosity goes a long way and typically is somewhat coordinated to the ability to um manage your ego. I mean, you want some ego, but you don't want the ego to outstrip everything else. I don't know if that's been at all part of your experience when you're thinking about the managers, even with the new investments that you're making.

SPEAKER_03 35:29

Yeah, well, Bo, it's been part of my experience and not always in a good way, because over the course of my career, I found myself early on in my career being the one with the ego and being the one that thought they knew it all, and being the one that didn't think that they needed anybody else to fill in the gaps because I don't have any gaps. And that that was a big Achilles heel for me. And I find myself as a human, because like you know, we're all human, um, that I find myself uh oftentimes um slipping and and allowing that to seep in. And and uh I always like to tell people like, look, it you don't need to be the smartest person in the room. In fact, if you are the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. Right. And when you um show up to your office, to your company, and you feel like you are the smartest person in the room, you have actually turned out to be a terrible leader. I like to I like to um uh make a list, I do it a lot actually in my journal, of um things that I like about other people. And I would encourage everybody that's that's listening or watching now, get out a piece of paper and on the left-hand side, things I like about other people. You don't have to put their name down, just like what what are the things that you like? Like I like when people are a little bit older than me because they've seen more. I like when people um have uh big families, big could be one or two kids, but they have families because they they have to they have to juggle more. I like people that have had had adversity in their life because they have a little bit more empathy. I like people that don't take themselves too seriously, they're funny, they keep light in the room. I like people that have single focuses of discipline. When I make all those lists, typically the reason I like those people is because they're filling my gaps and I'm attracted to I'm attracted to things that I may not feel like I have. But if you had these skills, you may not be attracted to those people. You're attracted to them because you feel like they're additive to your life.

SPEAKER_02 37:50

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:51

That's how I would build my business.

SPEAKER_02 37:54

Well, I I know we don't have a ton of your time, and I really appreciate what you have spent, but I have two more questions for you before we kind of end. One, I I can't help but ask: when you think about the new acquisitions and the new way that you are approaching business, how has AI or the potential of AI changed your thinking? Especially because so many of your businesses, as we said earlier, are kind of community-centric. Um, how is AI influencing your kind of efforts towards creating uh your brands?

SPEAKER_03 38:27

If you uh had the screenshot of my iPad, I have every AI tool at the highest level. I spend a lot of money on it and I use it emphatically. And years ago, uh using AI as a tool would be perceived as cheating or getting the information, read the whole book, do all the do spend spend weeks. But the reality of it is that I don't have weeks. And when I have ideas in my head, I'd like to be able to do research, to be able to understand the total addressable market, the TAM, to be able to understand and scrape data from other competitors who are doing it well, to be able to do research about how technology can change, shorten times, improve efficiency. If you are not proficient as a student, as a parent, as a business owner, as an employee in AI today and tomorrow, it would be equivalent to you telling somebody a month from now that you don't believe in email and you want to sell facts then.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

That's right.

SPEAKER_03 39:37

And acknowledging publicly that you use AI as a tool to sharpen your skills, to fill your gaps, to organize your thoughts, to plan out your day, to do the research, to educate yourself, to do uh summary reading as opposed to long reading, to be able to uh validate true or false, to be able to question an idea or test out something. Uh if you don't have comfort with admitting that, you are gonna get smoked. And I would much prefer that somebody said to me, Yeah, I took all the ideas in my head. I put I always tell people, last night I took all the ideas in my head and I put them into the machine. And the machine organized my thoughts in a way that allowed me to do it. I wanted to see a 90-day business plan, I wanted to see a five-year plan. I wanted to see what are the things that I'm missing, what are the things that I've and it's not cheating, it's accelerating you. It is, and it's gonna make you sharper, it's gonna make you smarter, it's gonna make you more competitive, it's gonna make you think outside the box, it's going to allow you to put uh sometimes more decision making in your own hands. It's gonna teach you how to launch new ideas quickly, it's gonna teach you how to pivot from a current business that's not working quickly. Um, it is an absolute necessity in every transaction that I'm doing today. I put it into the machine and I talk about here are the rest of my things, here are the things I'm good at, here are the things that I'm not good at. What do I do?

SPEAKER_02 41:12

Yeah, I I fully agree with you. I think this is um the equivalent. It's kind of funny. In 1993, I saw the internet for the first time. It was the first time I was in there. And for me, I remember I called my mom, I said I saw Model T Ford on the street. I was like, this thing's gonna change the world. AI is moving at such a more rapid pace. Um and I remind people, I said in 1996, you were listening on a walkman to music. By 2001, you were listening to an iPod. It changed everything so quickly. I think people are underestimating the speed at which AI is likely to change just the day-to-day things that we do. And I I fully agree with what you just said. Um my last question, this show is about the first million, but it's really about helping people understand, and you mentioned this earlier, that to raise your net worth, you have to raise your self-worth. And for a lot of people, um, knowing and understanding themselves is a really important aspect of them loving themselves, as you said, and actually raising their own kind of self-worth. You know, when you think back to your childhood about dreams and not the dream itself, but the underlying desire, you know, maybe you want to be an astronaut, but the underlying desire was the exploration of space. How have you now integrated the underlying desire of your dreams as a child into your daily adult life?

SPEAKER_03 42:37

Well, I'd like to think about, I want to start from the beginning of what you said. I think about generational net worth. And that doesn't mean commas and zeros, that means sustainability. And you can raise your net worth and not have self-worth. There are people that are doing it today with all sorts of schemes and and get quick rich, get rich, quick ideas, and they're always going to exist, but they're gonna be a flash, and I think you have to decide are you looking to impact your grandkids, your kids, your neighbors, your nieces, your aunts, your uncles, your neighborhood, your church, are you looking to do all of that in whatever way you can? And it doesn't have to be big, it just could be a way, or are you looking to be quick? And if you have uh self-respect and you are committed to learning and doing all those things, which is what you described as self-worth, self-worth, you'll create generational wealth, which is different, which is very different than net worth because net worth can come and go. You look at all the Bitcoin uh folks that have seen money go up and down. It's difficult. I want people to build sustainability, I want people to be able to pass on real tangible assets, a small house on seventy ninth in Essex. Is just as important as a house on Michigan Avenue. And and if it's your piece of the world and it's your piece to pass on, and you know how you did that, and you could leave this earth better than when you left when leave this earth better than when you got here, then I don't know what else there is to do.

SPEAKER_01 44:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:20

I genuinely don't know. If you do all those things, your net worth could be determined by money, it could be determined by societal contribution, it could be determined by your offsprings and the kids that you raise and their contribution, or it could be determined by a combination of all of those. But don't let anybody else's definition of net worth or anybody else's definition of financial success be your definition because what matters to me is going to be different to you. Set your own standard, be realistic about it, make something that's achievable, live a happy life, be 112 payments away from owning your own home and enjoy yourself. Have a little faith in whatever it is. It should definitely be with yourself and love people.

SPEAKER_02 45:06

That's it. Yeah. I love that. I'm going to steal your generational wealth element and add that to my storyline because I think you're you're spot on with that. But I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 45:15

Well, when you leave this earth, when you leave this earth with I'm 100% sure that you're going to, and so am I, what do you want to be remembered for? Nobody's going to remember you for your cool car. Nobody's going to remember you for your courtside seats. They are going to remember you for providing having a good enough business to make enough money that on that one Sunday after church, if you wanted to buy everybody pastries and bring in the donuts and have a barbecue in your neighborhood, or you wanted to do those things, people are going to remember that you were the guy or gal that brought people together, that that was full of love and full of joy. But you were tough. You were tough. You got up at five, you went to bed late, you worked your butt off seven days a week. You sacrificed, you took care of your employees, you took care of your customers.

SPEAKER_02 46:02

They're going to remember that. Yeah, no, I I that's absolutely true. One of the things I've done is um I've written this 25-year business plan. Um for excuse me, for 25 years, I've written a 20-year business plan um for myself, for my life. And one of the things it starts with is the begin with the end. So I do something that for some people thinks is morbid, but I've written my epitaph. Like, what do I want on my epitaph when I am gone? And the reason I do it is because you walk toward things you can see. So if I've said, for example, I want to live to be at least 87 years old, well, I need to be doing things every day that move me in that direction. If I want to be known as a good businessman, then I need to do things. If I want to be known as a person who loved a good story and adventure, I need to do things that move me in that direction. And I use that plan as a way of monitoring myself to ensure that incrementally, right, I'm moving in that direction a little bit every day. And I also timestamp it, right? Because every year I update it. So I can see, did I do the things I said I was going to do? Am I moving in that direction? I can't lie to myself because I wrote it down for me, for nobody else. And it's a tool that I use kind of very similar to what you were describing, which is why I like the concept of generational wealth. Because so much of what you leave behind isn't anything that you did or said. It's those actions that impacted other people, um, the investment that you make in other people, and in my case, and I think yours, the institutions that we built, right, that hopefully stay beyond us, you know. And I'm sure something that you must be proud of is you may not be the one day-to-day operating the RV and camping business, but that business exists now because of your effort and will continue to exist regardless of your level of engagement. To me, that is the measure of whether or not you've really done a good job with something. Can it exist when you're not there, right?

SPEAKER_03 47:52

I I want to leave you with the last fun thought. Um, hard work and and sacrifice are essential, but so is having fun and doing things for yourself. And if if society could stop demonizing success, where uh it's people feel like, oh, they're a bad person because they've achieved a level of success, or they're a bad person because they bought nice clothes, or they're a bad person because they drove a nice car or have a nice house. Everybody should hear this very clearly. You know the difference between living your life right and not living your life right. And living your life right doesn't mean that you can't do things for yourself, that you can't enjoy nice things, that you can't have nice things. You know the difference between having something nice and being irresponsible. You know the difference between doing nice things for other people, which is a wonderful thing to do, but you're not obligated to, and doing things for yourself. So when you achieve success, if you want to buy yourself a Louis bag or you want to drive a nice car or you want to have a nice house, or you want to buy a first-class ticket and take your family to Hawaii, you should not feel bad about it. You should feel that if that is something that makes you have fun and it's it feels fun and everybody's enjoying it, so what?

SPEAKER_02 49:21

I I fully agree. I I really thank you for that. And um, I'm honored that you will be our guest and our keynote speaker for the conference this June, um, and excited to have the opportunity to share your thoughts with everyone and thank you, your wife and Karen for sharing time with us today. We look forward to seeing you.