The Billionaire Blueprint: Deal negotiation Insight, structures & strategies

In this episode, Richard C. Wilson, founder of the Family Office Club, shares his valuable insights on successful investing, decision-making, and business strategies, drawn from his extensive experience working with high-net-worth individuals and billionaires. Richard emphasizes the importance of conducting due diligence, the benefits of second-order thinking, and positioning yourself for inevitable future trends. He also discusses the concept of being "anti-herd"—rejecting conventional wisdom—and highlights the importance of passion, focus, and resilience in both business and personal success.

Key Takeaways:

- Due Diligence: Always conduct thorough due diligence on potential partners, investors, or clients before committing to any partnership.

Billionaire thinking: 

- Second-Order Thinking: Understand the long-term consequences of decisions, particularly when anticipating future trends like AI's impact on industries.

- Anti-Herd Mentality: Reject conventional industry practices and challenge the status quo to create unique opportunities and competitive advantages.

- Focus and Extreme Focus: The power of single-minded focus in achieving success, a lesson from billionaires like Warren Buffett and Peter Thiel.

- Sunk Cost Immunity: Learn how to let go of failing projects without emotional attachment, a mindset embraced by successful entrepreneurs.

- Reading and Learning: The importance of continuous learning, pattern-matching, and diving deep into niche areas to gain an edge over competitors.

- Controlled Chaos: How high-net-worth individuals embrace multiple projects and experiment with new ideas, while focusing on what works.

- Networking and Proximity: Surround yourself with successful, ambitious people to elevate your thinking and actions.

Richard also discusses inspiring stories of billionaires, such as Larry Connor, Elon Musk, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who defied conventional paths to achieve monumental success. 

The episode includes Richard’s recommendations of top business books authored by billionaires, which serve as invaluable resources for those looking to grow and succeed in their entrepreneurial ventures. Go to https://billionaires.com/books/

Transcript

AI at all, but just thinking down the line and then positioning yourself so that
something that the founder of Under Armour says, "If you see something as inevitable
and you don't know whether it's going to take seven, 10, or 12 years, we'll just
work on expediting the inevitable and then you'll be ahead of the trend and on
trend and being confident in that, even if it doesn't pay off in the first year
you do it, but you know over in the midterm it's going to be amazing for your
this, then they invest heavily in areas like that. Second one is just being anti
-heard. If someone is in a meeting and they say, "Oh yeah, that's how everyone does
it. We need to do it that way." Their hair goes up and they almost instantly
reject that idea. Or if somebody says, "No, we can't do it. The industry best
practice is this." They lean forward and want to challenge that. And so Larry Connor
was on stage. He grew a $5 billion real estate portfolio. We did a billionaire
fireside chat with him at our last event. He's been in outer space, has been to
the bottom of the deep sea in the submarine. And he said that when he got into
the apartment building business, he hired people from the industry and they were so
restrained with how they were trained. He never did that again. He only hires
outsiders to run his properties because a normal maintenance technician at a
multifamily property will handle four to seven tickets a day. they handle 24 tickets
per day with one technician because they break assumptions. They don't work off of
how the industry works, you know, everyone says it's the best practice and because
of that, they have a better NOI and they run it like a business, not like a real
estate manager. They said that's been key to their success is rejecting what other
people think is common sense in doing almost the opposite of everyone else and
making sure that if you're in a meeting and everyone's agreeing, everyone's saying,
"Yeah, that sounds good that you reject that idea sometimes and like when Elon said
we're gonna try to maybe catch a rocket and everyone said that's dumb that's not
possible it won't happen and one person said well maybe it could eventually if we
could figure out these few things he pointed that person said okay you're gonna be
in charge of the catching the rocket project because everyone else just rejected it
as impossible to do.
Average is is boring and a lot of of the most successful people I meet are fast
moving. They're excited about what they're doing. They only want to work on things
that move the needle. They don't want to do something that looks average in any way
or is going to perform average. They look for the outliers. Kevin McGovern on stage
at our summit in December said that all a business is pattern matching. You figure
out what works. You do 10 times more of it. Figure out what doesn't work. You try
to fix it one or two times, And then you get rid of it if it doesn't work
We had a pro athlete on stage in December as well as Matt Fraser who won the
CrossFit World Championship games five times And then retired when he could have won
it more, but he just got bored I think And one of the pro athletes on stage says
well just table stakes is you have to have a maniacal passion about what you're
doing, but you could have that and still not even be competitive or make Um, so
it's not enough to have that, but on the pro athlete side to be at the top 0 .1 %
to do what you're doing at a level that others won't want to match or can match
within business, then many times, obviously that helps, um, Arnold Schwarzenegger is
an example of that. Um, he, I read his book to my daughters, we read it together
and he said in the book that his real secret was that he enjoyed every minute of
the working out. He loved it and he'd work out with his bodybuilding partners in
the morning for two and a half hours, which is the standard amount to work out.
And then he would work out with different partners in the afternoon for another two
and a half hours because no one partner wanted to work out five hours a day. But
he did and he did twice as much work and enjoyed it much more than other people
and then crushed everybody because of that. And then when everyone said, "We can't
even understand What you're saying you don't speak English very well and no one can
pronounce your last name You should change it and they laughed in his face when
they said that he wanted to be an actor And he turned down bodyguard and dance
club bouncer roles He said no, I'm going for the leading man roles and then he
became the highest -paid actor in planet Earth for a while there and so That
determination and the crystal clear vision is something that I've seen within a out
of the billionaire books we've read and interviews. Another example of it is the
Home Depot founders. They wrote this book built from scratch, which I definitely
recommend. And they talked about it was just an exciting adventure. Others see it as
like, oh, they work so hard. All they do is work or oh, that takes so much work.
I would never want to do that. To them, it was like an exciting adventure and they
had fun working on it. So others could judge it as too much hard work, but if you
love what you're doing and you're excited about it, then maybe it doesn't feel so
much like work compared to others. I saw someone recently who's a definitely a
centimillionaire. I don't know if they're a billionaire or not or they say that
publicly, but they said that they try to treat doing business like being the lion.
They try to be relatively calm and thoughtful, but then every now and then they put
an enormous amount of energy into launching a project, scaling something, getting
something done that's worth their time to really chase. And then the other times
they're reserving their energy and preserving it. And I've seen that in several cases
as well. Peter Thiel says extreme focus is a superpower. And he talks about that
ability to have focus is why PayPal became what it did. And then the PayPal mafia
of all these billionaires that spun off from PayPal have this mentality of saying,
what is the bottleneck? put all the energy into the bottleneck until that's solved
and don't have 10 priorities, have one priority and every manager in the company
have one priority and you get that one thing done and you live or die on that one
thing as your chief objective. Warren Buffett says, "If you're really busy, make a
list of all your priorities and write down all 20 of them and then cross out 19
and focus on the one top priority." And so extreme focus comes up again and again
and again. It's better to have one unit complete and shipped and go to the next
unit versus up a lot of things that you make dissipated progress on. And then you
just have a lot of half done things and nothing got shipped.
What's interesting about studying billionaires is like one, it takes quite a while to
read the 245 books they've authored. But what's interesting is that they are
voracious learners themselves. And so it's interesting to like read how much they
want to suck in information and then that should encourage you to study them even
more as well and be kind of a self -supporting process. But Mark Cuban said that
when he got his first job at a computer software company, he read the computer
manual to 140 pages long. No one else did, including the owner of the software
company who was selling the software they had a license to sell. So everyone that
came in, he could answer the questions to, and nobody else could, because nobody
wants to read the manual. And that's something that Larry Naimer didn't have a
chance to ask him that question, but I read his book, and yesterday we did the
fireside chat with him, and he said in his book, no one else read the manuals, he
would just simply read the manual, and then he would have the technical expertise
and the knowledge that other people didn't have through that simple act, because no
one wants to do the hard work, everyone wants the shortcut, the easy way, the lazy
way, you know, there's no time to read every manual for every piece of software we
use these days, but if it's your business, then you should probably read the manual,
right? And so Mark Cuban also says it doesn't matter about your capital or your
network. If you focus on a niche that's highly valuable, and you read everything on
that niche, and you suck it all in, and you work hard, then you'll run circles
around everybody else, because most people don't want to work card. Most people don't
focus and almost no one reads the manual. So if you do those three things, no one
can really compete with you and you'll attract the capital because of your superior
ideas. Sunk Cost Immunity is a mental model of essentially not carrying the already
invested hundreds of hours in a project or millions of dollars or hundreds of
thousands of dollars. If it's not working, you got to take it out back, like Kevin
O 'Leary says, and take it behind the barn and put it down and like just move on
from it. And getting tied to some emotional connection of a project, or,
"Oh, we already spent this money. Oh, we already spent all this time with this
partner." And just moving on and focusing on what works is something that a lot of
billionaires have the ability to do, which is slightly different from mental liquidity
and the ability to be fluid of going into a meeting and thinking, "Oh, probably we
should go this way." And in the meeting, you get clear feedback that you should go
the other way and the data supports that. They need to be able to very quickly
change your mind and not be stuck in your thinking. And there's a flexibility and
an agility and adaptability to a lot of the billion dollar plus net worth people
that we've interviewed or they've written some of the books them referring to. David
Rubenstein here is someone that we're trying to interview right now. We have a
couple leads into him, including his PR right -hand man who's been with him for 17
years. If anyone's friends with him would love to interview him next, but he's super
productive. He's always moving. He doesn't watch TV. He tries to read a couple books
every single week and his team says he's like a shark that never stops moving.
He's always processing things. He'll be at a baseball game on national TV sitting
right behind the dugout and he'll be replying to emails from institutional investors
and sovereign wealth funds instantly and there'll be a group email to 10 private
equity executives that all manage tens of billions and he'll reply instantly and
everyone else takes a week to get back to people and he says his ability to get
back immediately and be super helpful in real time to people is what gets him
access to deal flow relationships and things that other people don't get access to
because he's so active and fast moving all the time. And that's a real common trait
of a lot of the people that I work with. One of them sold his business for $800
million and he runs around with the Bluetooth in his ear and he loves what he's
doing. He's always negotiating the next transaction, running his business, et cetera.
And it's fast moving, fast acting and very decisive. Bezos talks about how when you
have 70 % of the data, you just have to decide and go and even with millions of
employees they try to be super decisive and fast -moving and not be slow and wait
and think about it and no decision might be the the worst decision. We interviewed
Tony Robbins many of you know because of someone in the room that helped us get
that done so we appreciate that. If you know anyone else they don't need to be
famous it's actually almost better if they aren't because they don't have 100
gatekeepers and it won't take weeks to follow -up. We love to interview via a Zoom
call or on stage, but we can do an interview via email. We can do an interview
via audio message, which is what Tony Robbins said. He just recorded his answers and
sent it to me on his iPhone, and then we got the interview done. But Tony Robbins
talked about the power of this community, which is the power of proximity. When
you're around other people that are raising tens of millions a year or are worth
tens of millions of dollars or a hundred million dollars Plus, or if you fill your
brain with 120 books written by billionaires or play with a billionaire collective
intelligence tool, and you're having ideas come into your brain directly from
billionaires and not mass media about the latest thing that was done in politics,
etc., then what do you think that's going to do to your brain and where your focus
is and what you're going to notice in the world and what you're going to be taking
action on, right? It's going to affect you. Controlled chaos is having a lot going
on, and new knowing that's okay. Not everything is going to work that you try, but
you're trying many different things as experiments, and then your pattern matching
that and doubling down or 10x down on what's working. And we see that really
commonly among the billion dollar plus families. And then the last idea here is just
that a lot of people think like, "Oh yeah, well, they're really well -known." So of
course, they have this massive advantage, because they have all this capital. They
have all this credibility or this huge network. What I found is that they don't put
up with bad partners or bad employees. They expect excellence around them. They have
access to capital. They have a better reputation. They seal CDLs first. And all of
these 10 things on top of each other stacked is not one plus one plus one. It's
really a multipliers. And so it's just exponential because at each layer, they're
stacking these advantages. And the more you can stack those same advantages for
yourself, then probably the better things will go. So here are my top 10 books that
recommend you read, 9 of the 10 are on Audible in case you want to get through
them easily while traveling. These are books all authored by billionaires that are,
in my opinion, pure gold for most of us here in the room. I do have a list of
all 245 books if anyone wants that. Then you can talk to Jennifer Outfront or our
team members and we'll send you the PDF. And if you just go to billionaires .com
/books, you can just click on the Amazon links and just purchase these today for
yourself if you want. It's not an affiliate link. I don't need to make 30 cents
off of you for buying the book, but I think you'll love the books. They make for
a good gift for someone on your team as well.
And I'll talk about that tool later. So for the sake of time, we'll get moving on,
but I hope all of you enjoy the event today. I hope all of you get to try out
some of the AI tools that have developed for you and give us feedback. If there's
other ones you'd like to see us put out for the community and would like to invite
up our first fireside chat speaker of the day is Isabel Cloud up to the stage and
then we'll get started with that interview in just a second. Welcome Isabel.