Carl Allen shares powerful insights and strategies for aspiring dealmakers, especially those in their early 20s. Whether you’re fresh out of college, have minimal business experience, or are simply eager to jump into the world of entrepreneurship, Carl offers two game-changing paths to help you start your journey: consulting for equity and partnering with experienced dealmakers.

For young dealmakers, consulting for equity is an excellent entry point. This involves leveraging a skill you already have—whether it’s marketing, sales, deal origination, or financial expertise—and using it to help established dealmakers or business owners grow their businesses. In return, you can negotiate a small equity stake in the business. This approach not only generates cash flow but also gives you a share of the profits and eventual sale price of the business, without requiring you to invest capital upfront.

Carl highlights the story of Alexis Borgen, a 20-year-old real estate wholesaler who joined his Dealmaker Protege program. By utilizing her deal origination and marketing expertise, Alexis secured equity partnerships in businesses and began generating passive income while still learning the ropes of deal-making. Another example is Jade Margets, a college student who partnered with her experienced dealmaker father to source, negotiate, and manage deals, building real-world experience and success.

The second option Carl recommends is partnering with experienced professionals. If you’re passionate about a specific type of business—like a vineyard or a tech company—but lack the expertise to run it, you can find a mentor or co-investor with deep industry knowledge. By bringing your energy, drive, and time to the partnership, you can complement their expertise and acquire a business together, splitting the responsibilities and profits.

Carl emphasizes the enormous opportunity ahead for young dealmakers: over the next two decades, 12 million businesses are expected to change hands due to retiring baby boomers. This creates an unprecedented wave of acquisition opportunities, especially for those with the skills and mindset to take advantage of them.

Even if you lack direct business experience, Carl reassures young entrepreneurs that passion, a willingness to learn, and a strong work ethic can set you apart. Whether you build your skills by working with mentors, consulting for equity, or partnering with seasoned dealmakers, the key is to get started and take action.

Carl’s practical advice and inspiring stories highlight that age is no barrier to becoming a successful dealmaker. With creativity, focus, and the right strategy, you can unlock cash flow, wealth, and growth opportunities—starting right now.

Full Transcript:

If you’re twenty, there’s two things that you could do. They’re both really, really cool. Dealmakers, what’s up?

My vision is to completely and utterly disrupt the market for buying and selling small businesses all over the world. Hey, guys. Carl Allen. Hope all is well. I am just pulling away from my local Starbucks. You know me by now, Carl in the car. He’s always drinking Starbucks.

Starbucks is an amazing business. Right? I was just thinking about Starbucks.

You know, it’s the it’s the largest drug dealer on the planet. Right? Why is Starbucks the largest drug dealer on the planet? Because they sell the two most plentiful addictive substances known to man.

They are sugar and caffeine. Right? So what do I just ordered? A skinny caramel macchiato, all the sugar for the caffeine, and I all I even have an extra shop at it.

But, but, yeah, I I absolutely love my Starbucks, but, that’s not what I wanna talk to you about today. I wanna talk to you about something that’s that’s amazing, and it’s a question that some of you guys have been asking me inside of this YouTube community. So what I love about these YouTube videos is you’re watching my videos, you’re getting value. You’re giving me some very, very nice comments, so thank you for that.

But it’s sparking other questions. It’s sparking things inside of you, and you’re asking me all these other different questions. So I I’m really looking forward to doing these extra videos. So if you’ve got a question on anything about deal making, about business, about entrepreneurship, about life, or anything, it doesn’t matter mindset even.

Ask the questions inside the comments of the YouTube videos, and I will do videos for you just like this. So I wanna talk about something today that’s really, really cool. And it’s a question that I can’t remember the name of the person that asked it. Right?

But the question was, right, Carl, I am only twenty years of age. I don’t have the business experience or the life experience that you have or a lot of older deal makers have. I’m fifty two. I’ve got grandkids, kids.

My kids are nearly thirty. Some of them, I’ve also got a lot of experience. It’s very easy for someone like me.

But if you’re twenty years of age, maybe you just graduated from college and you don’t wanna get a job, you don’t want to go over somebody else, you don’t want to start a business, which as you know is crazy, and very risky. You want to go and buy an existing business or get to dealmaker and walk into cash flow from day one. So if you’re twenty, there’s two things that you could do, and they’re both really, really cool. And I’ve got students inside of my dealmaker protege program that are nineteen, twenty, twenty one, twenty two.

I think nineteen is the youngest Lexus, and they fall into one of these two categories. So the first one is you can go and do consulting for equity deals. So what’s a consulting for equity deal? So a lots of different things.

Hey. Sorry, guys. I gotta just take this. It’s my dentist. Hey. Sorry about that. It was my dentist calling me, making sure that I was on my way to my dental appointment, which I am now.

And it’s quite ironic, isn’t it, that I was just talking about sugar. I’m just having a big dirty Starbucks, all the sugar, because I have a caramel manicata, which has the has the caramel drizzle at the top, and I’m gonna go and get I’m having a really big filling today, which is really interesting because I’ve got board meetings, I’ve got investor calls, and I’ve got loads of other things going on today. And I’m gonna be, yes. So I’m buying this brilliant, roll up company.

I need some investment, and so it’s gonna be quite an interesting day. So let’s go back to the twenty year old, wannabe deal maker. So I started talking before the dentist, interrupted us that, you can go do consulting for equity deals. A consulting for equity deals is where you’re leveraging the skill set that you have into somebody else’s business.

They will give you not only fees for that, you could get a percentage of the equity for that. So I had a student join my deal maker protege in a circle mastermind, called Alexis Borgen. She lives in Orlando.

She’s a wholesale wholesaler of real estate, so she kind of understands deal making to kind of sub degree. But what was really with her is she was talking about, like, hey, I you know, I’m not quite ready to go buy my own business yet on my own. What are my options? So we were talking about consulting for equity.

So she’s phenomenal at deal origination. She’s phenomenal at building relationships because she’s been doing that as a wholesaler, since she was sixteen. So she’s doing consulting for equity projects. She’s going out and finding deals for people to spec.

So people that are busy, I’ve got w two’s, or busy families and busy lives, they they don’t have a lot of time to go out there prospecting for off market deals. As you know, with deals, you go online to brokers, though that there’s that tend to be the best deals. But what he can do is go offline and go originate deals, for people that wanna sell but haven’t listed yet. So that’s what she does.

She goes and finds those deals. You give her a spec, say, hey, I wanna find a web design firm in Chicago million. She’ll go find it.

And then she’ll bring that deal to you. You go and close that deal and then she’ll get then a percentage of the ownership of the business, a small percent. And then for that, she’ll get distribution. She’ll get cash flow.

And she’s doing that for lots and lots of different people. So for her, that’s kind of her odds. Right? It’s deal making.

The other thing that you can do is let’s say your college major was in marketing, or let’s say your college major was in finance, or let’s say your college major was in in in business or some other discipline that’s highly relevant to, to the business world. You might find a deal maker out there that especially a protege that, doesn’t have those jobs. So you might find somebody that’s an engineer that’s working for Chi Yi, knows engineering and process and all of that great stuff, supply chain, and transformation optimization, six sigma, Kaiban, all those amazing things as an engineer, but he said no numbers. He doesn’t know marketing.

He doesn’t know things like that. So if you’ve got some experience of that, if you’ve got sales experience or you’ve done marketing as your major, or you’ve done some marketing as an intern, or you’ve got some financial chops, are you studying for the CPA exam, or anything like that, then you can leverage those skills and work with somebody on a deal, and they will give you a percentage of the ownership of the deal for doing that. The other thing that you could do, if you don’t think you’ve got a lot of experience and you’re concerned that sellers won’t take you seriously, lenders won’t take you seriously, and you just that’s making you afraid to go off a few deals, what you can do is go and partner with other people. So again, you could go and find people to rather do consulting for equity, you could go and partner with somebody fifty fifty. So let’s say you, wanted to buy a vineyard. Let’s say that a vineyard was your perfect deal choice.

Let’s say you’re really passionate about wine, you know, your your parents introduced you to when you were younger. Let’s say you’re alcoholic, but, you know, you you you were introduced to kind of wine and maybe your family took you to vineyards when you were growing up, but, you know, wine’s a big, big part of your passion. And you wanna you wanna buy and own a vineyard, but you don’t know anything about growing wine, fermented wine, storing it, distribution.

You don’t know anything about that. Go partner with somebody inside of one of my programs or part of my community that knows that industry. And then you can buy that business together. What you’re gonna have, if that’s especially an older deal maker, you’re gonna have something that they don’t have, time, energy, drive.

You’re gonna be able to do all of that heavy lifting. So Alexis Morgan, who came into my Proseo program, like a breath of fresh air. She’s out there. She’s hustling.

She’s finding deals. She’s under contract top back roofing companies now where she’s gonna be a co owner. She’s wholesaling deals for the people. She’s really good at marketing as well as deal origination.

So she’s doing all these consulting for equity, projects as well. She’s just partnered with Myrna and Juliana, mother and daughter, dealmakers that are in my Progyny community.

Those guys just bought a large commercial cleaning company and, Weiss have helped with marketing. Lexus is really good at marketing, so she’s now a partner in that business. She’s cash flowing from a business that she didn’t have to buy. She’s just leveraging her time and her skills and her network or a percentage ownership of that business.

And what’s great about consulting property projects, what’s great about getting even a small percent, say, ten or twenty percent of the business is you’re gonna get paid as that business continues to operate. Why is that important? Well, as a partner, you’ll get a distribution, of the free cash flow that’s available, to leave the business to the owners. And then more importantly, by deploying your skills and in Alexis case, it’s marketing, that business grows and then it exits in the future, you’ll get a percentage of the sale price.

So if you own twenty percent of the business, not only do you get twenty percent of the profits every year or every month or every quarter when the company makes distributions, but if that business grows and let’s say it sells for a million bucks, in the future after that the financing has been paid off to buy it, then that million bucks, if you own twenty percent, you run twenty percent, you got a two hundred thousand dollar check my friend heading your way. And that’s just a one deal, but you don’t have to be in there all the time. You could have a portfolio of doing these things. So it’s

really really interesting, You know, I’ve got people in there. I’ve got I’ve got students that are nineteen doing deals. I’ve got students in their seventies doing deals. It’s crazy.

You’re never too old and you’re never too young to be deal maker. You know, and I I look at Alexis and I look at a lot of the other young people in the program, like Jade Margets, who’s in the UK. She’s the same. She’s partnering with her dad, Clive.

He’s a really good friend of mine. He’s in my protege program. He’s in my Kings of Deals private equity group as well. And, she came to an event last year.

She was eighteen. She was still at university, and she she went to the event, and she didn’t know anything about anything. She just came for the experience, because she wanted to come to London to one of our Protege events. And, she she was taking all the content in, absorbing it.

And then I saw her six months later in Las Vegas. She came out with her dad. It’s my annual Protege Mastermind Beats up. They’re about a hundred and eighty of my my top inner circle mastermind students there, and she was sat there on the front row.

And you should have seen the transformation in her. Like, she was out there with her dad going to meetings.

She was out there with her dad doing deals. Her dad, Clive, is a very accomplished deal maker. She was getting involved in a lot of the deal origination.

She’s now practically running his entire deal making team, which is absolutely phenomenal. So, if you’re very young and you wanna get into this, you know, just go find a mentor. I’ll be your mentor or I could find you another one of my protege students to take you under their wing as their mentee and you can do some of the work with them. And what a time to learn these skills.

What a time to learn the science and art of deal making at such a young age. Because I gotta tell you, the next twenty years are gonna be insane. The next twenty years, we’re not gonna see anything like it for, like, another hundred years. And we’ve not seen it for a hundred years before because over the next twenty years, there’s gonna be at least twelve million businesses that are gonna change hands.

It’s the retiring baby boomer generation. And what’s also really interesting is a lot of businesses have come through COVID and have survived COVID, business owners that thought, hey, you know, maybe I should sell my business down. You know, I I I dodged the COVID bullet. COVID was unprecedented.

You know, I’m fifty two years of age. I have never in my life seen anything as as crazy as what happened in COVID. You know, and I’m not I don’t wanna talk about COVID.

And, you know, it was horrible, you know, but what what happened in COVID, I I don’t think we’re ever gonna see again for a long, long time. But it’s kind of put a a lot of fear into people. And it’s really interesting, you know, people think we’re going through into recession. Recessions are actually amazing if you run a business because if you differentiate yourself, I’ll do another video on this, and you shine out in the market best companies, you’ll crush it in a recession. Because all that happens in a recession is that people just spend a little bit less money. Right? Couple of percent per year less in terms of economic growth.

Ninety percent of all the business out there still continue to do really, really well. If you’re in the lower ten percent of businesses that don’t, then, you know, that’s why you’re gonna suffer and they’re gonna struggle. I’ll make sure as a business owner, if you’re working with me, that that’s not gonna happen to you. So we covered a lot of things on this call.

We we talked about, you know, my dentist called me. We talked about Starbucks.

We talked about if you’re young, how you could get to deal making.

And we talked about a lot of great things as well. So, if you’ve got any other questions for me, please hit me up in the comment section, and I will do a special video for you beside of this channel. But have an amazing day. I am off to the dentist. I’m nearly there to get my big canophilic done. So I’m gonna be talking right now for the rest of the day.

But, I hope you enjoyed this video. I will see you guys soon for another Car in the Car. Until then, my friends. Bye bye for now.