In this episode of the Creative Dealmaker podcast, Carl Allen interviews Brandon Vaughn about his journey in buying, scaling, and selling businesses. Vaughn shares how he bought his father’s window cleaning business for $3,000 a month, scaled it to 70 employees, and eventually sold it to professional buyers. He emphasizes the importance of having documented systems and processes in place for a business to be attractive to buyers.

Vaughn also discusses his experience with Conquer, a coaching program for home service business owners, which he scaled significantly before partnering with Housecall Pro. The program focuses on helping businesses grow by implementing systems and processes that reduce owner involvement. This coaching approach helps business owners prepare for an exit by making the business less dependent on the owner.

Carl and Brandon dive into Vaughn’s latest venture, Hirebus, a behavioral profiling tool that helps companies find the right candidates for various positions. Vaughn describes how the software benchmarks candidates against custom profiles to find the best fit, reducing hiring costs and improving company culture. They also discuss Vaughn’s success in franchising Wise Coatings, a garage floor coating business that grew rapidly and now has 20 locations nationwide.

The conversation highlights the mindset needed to be a successful dealmaker. Vaughn stresses the importance of taking massive action, being comfortable with discomfort, and building a network of like-minded individuals. He also shares his personal approach to balancing work and family life, emphasizing the need to be present and time-efficient.

Carl Allen concludes by praising Vaughn’s multiple successful ventures and offering ways for listeners to connect with Vaughn for more insights on his businesses. The episode provides valuable lessons on business acquisition, scaling, coaching, and personal development for aspiring entrepreneurs and dealmakers.

Full Transcript:

I’m gonna take over my dad’s business, buy it from him, which I did. I bought it from him for three thousand bucks a month. Oh, wow. So you did, like, an annuity deal with your dad. That’s great. That’s right. Way overvalued. We’ve done some really cool stuff. We have the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest virtual business conference. I know. I was there. It was amazing. What we tell business owners is, you know, the less you can be involved in the business, the better. If we’ve helped the average home service business owner in our program, it grows seventy-seven percent year over year.

Just talk me through that process of starting a business and scaling it versus, like, buying your dad’s business, growing it, and selling it. A very warm welcome to the Creative Deal Maker podcast. I’m Carl Allen. I’m your host, and I’m gonna be interviewing expert guests sharing investor strategies that will completely and utterly disrupt the market when it comes to buying and selling businesses all over the world.

So, hey, guys. Welcome to the Creative Deal Maker podcast. I’m Carl Allen. I’m your host. Got one of my buddies and one of my big entrepreneur friends and partners on the podcast today. Very, very warm welcome to you, mister Brandon Vaughn. How are you doing, man? Doing good, Carl. Good to see you, bro. Great to be here. Yeah. Cool. So let’s get at it. Right? I met you about four years ago. Was it five years ago at top one? Yeah. Me, you, and Chris, you were doing the whole kinda conquer stuff, and then you’ve gone to a completely different level. I think you exited that business, and you still have a role in it. But you’re doing all these crazy amazing things, man. And yeah, just I just wanna talk about it. So, yeah, just give us the potted history of, like, where you came from, how you got into what you were doing now.

Well, my whole life has kinda started in home services. My dad was an owner-operator window cleaner. He started that business in 1978. And so for thirty-three years, he was the guy on the tools, you know, almost forty years, really. But in 2012, he was diagnosed with heart disease. So he was kind of forced to shut that business down. At the time, he had zero employees. Up to that point, I had done a bunch of different small entrepreneurial little ventures. You know, the day I turned eighteen, I went out and got my own business license and had a couple of tiny successes and a couple of bigger failures, and never really felt like I had escaped that DIY death trap that a lot of business owners get into, where you’re kinda doing all of it.

So, you know, I was kind of faced with, okay, if I’m gonna take over my dad’s business, buy it from him, which I did. I bought it from him for three thousand bucks a month for life, which was probably about a thirty x EBITDA valuation. But, you know, it was to take care of mom and dad, you know, so that they could retire. They didn’t have to worry about working. And then I just had to kinda, like, force myself to grow the business, and I did. I was able to scale that business from zero employees to seventy employees over the course of the semester. Yes. Window cleaning, pressure washing, soft washing, gutter cleaning.

And then you exited that deal? I did. It was actually kinda cool. I was speaking at a bunch of different home service conferences, sessions, and trade shows. And I was speaking on how to attract and retain viciously loyal productive employees. Some guys were sitting in the audience at the time, and they came up to me afterward, like, hey. Would you ever consider selling your business? I was like, sure. Why not? And they’re like, let’s go out to lunch. So I took my wife. My wife and I, we went out to lunch together with them, and it was a really great offer to where I basically gave them a verbal acceptance right there on the spot. Because I was ready to make a change, and then I was really enjoying coaching and was getting really passionate about that side. Conker was something that was a potential idea that I had in my brain, and that’s what I wanted to do next.

Cool. And what was the due diligence like on that deal? It was very eye-opening. They were professional buyers. It was almost overwhelming because they had about fifty different documents that they wanted to see. They wanted to see a breakdown of my customers by segments and churn rates, average tickets, cost per lead, and customer acquisition cost per channel. Actually, at the time, they used a bunch of expressions that I didn’t even know of. So I was kind of looking at some of these metrics for the first time myself in the business. And it just taught me a lot about what buyers should look for and what professional buyers look at. It was one of the most educational things I’ve ever been through.

You know what’s really interesting about that, right, is obviously you’re a young guy. You’re still a young guy, but you were obviously younger when you went through that. So you could stand that process. Right? A lot of baby boomers now that are looking to transition out of their businesses, they just don’t wanna go through that, what they call brain damage. They don’t wanna go through that, you know, trade buyer or SBA deal, loads of due diligence, you know, blood samples, DNA. They want everything. And this is one of the drivers that we’re seeing in Protege of a lot of annuity deal structures. One of the biggest benefits of an annuity deal structure is that supplemental income to their retirement pot. The average retirement pot is only a couple of hundred thousand dollars. So they can exit their businesses for a higher value paid over a long period of time and get that extra cash flow. But one of the other trends that I’m seeing a lot now with a lot of my students is sellers just don’t wanna go through that heavy due diligence that anyone paying a lot of cash at close, whether it’s a trade buyer or a bank funding the sponsor, they just don’t wanna go through that. They’d rather give you the business, have you pay them over time, and then almost do the due diligence afterward.

That’s a good point. I mean, it was overwhelming going through that process. And, you know, with Conker, we started coaching business owners, home service business owners, on how to prepare for a sale, how to prepare for an exit. And when they would see what was required in due diligence with all the different checklists of items that they have to have buttoned up, they would even get overwhelmed thinking about preparing for an exit a couple of years down the road. So when you have someone with a high MUD score, they wanna bounce, and then you’re giving them every request under the sun to take a look at, knowing that the LOI is nonbinding. So it may all collapse, and they’re doing all that work for, you know, ending up being nothing. Yeah. It’s crazy.

But what’s really interesting about Conker? We’ll talk about Conker in a minute, but that coaching model that you built to help home services businesses really scale up and do great things, there’s a lot of systems and processes and KPIs that go into that evolution. That’s really all the stuff that a lot of buyers are looking for anyway. The more what we tell business owners is, the less you can be involved in the business, the better. If you’re not the bottleneck, if you have everything documented in your brain. Even just to give you an example, when I bought the business from my dad, he had a little paper calendar, a little paper booklet with all of his customer information, and nothing was documented. Nothing was systemized. He had a Quicken account with very loose, sloppy bookkeeping. He’d get cash payments. And then with customer notes, like, he memorized people’s alarm codes.

That’s so cool. So, you know, we get to a house and be like, okay. So this is the dog, Belinda, and we need to make sure that we don’t let her out. I’m like, where does this exist anywhere? He’d go up and price a house for window cleaning. He’d just do this with his thumb and be like, yeah. This is gonna be about seven hundred and ninety bucks. And I’m like, how? How’d you know that? It was very painful to document all of that stuff for my dad.

It’s like almost a business needs to have an operating manual, doesn’t it? We talk about all the time that only one in eleven businesses that try and sell actually do. That’s the single biggest problem. It’s that owners are working in their businesses, not on their businesses. If they were to leave, that loss of institutional memory, the customer relationships that the seller has, all the systems and processes are just in his or her head. They’re not documented. A new owner is gonna rock up either as an owner-manager or as an owner-investor with a GM to run the business, and they don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to do it.

So I guess it’s the same when you’re buying businesses. But let’s talk about Conker. Talk about your journey because that was a startup, right? You’ve scaled that, did amazingly well, and you’ve exited that. Just talk me through that process of starting a business and scaling it versus buying your dad’s business, growing it, and selling it.

It was definitely different. It was a completely different approach, but actually, it did start with a small acquisition. It wasn’t completely started from zero. There was a small company called Automate Grocel that was owned by one of my best friends, Josh Latimer. He had sold a bunch of digital courses. There were about a hundred and forty buyers on his list of people that had bought stuff. The business was declining as far as how much revenue was coming in. It was really dependent on him. He was like the guru. He was the face of it. So I bought that business for not very much and had him retain ten percent ownership in the new company.

At that point, what I really kind of sat down with was, how do we create a recurring business model for coaching where people could come in and pay monthly? So, I launched Conquer. Conquer is the program that eventually turned into the company name. We sunsetted the Automate Grocel name. We went out and got other business owners who had built seven and eight-figure home service businesses. We had them come in as subcontractors to coach other home service business owners. Now we have over forty. We’ve done some really cool stuff. We have the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest virtual business conference.

I know. I was there. It was amazing. Yeah. It was crazy, you know, timing with COVID and everything else that just happened. We just said, let’s send it. Let’s go for it. But that’s been incredible. The average home service business owner in our program grows seventy-seven percent year over year. Wow. The industry growth rate is about seven to eight percent, so they’re x’ing the market growth.

The biggest thing for me is that people get more time freedom back. We’ve had our conquerors start out small, get to a place where they’re seven, eight figures, and then they’re only working a couple of hours a week in their business. Either they sell and they exit, or they become a Conquer coach. Now they’re giving back just like what they received from their first coach. They get an incredible amount of fulfillment. They don’t make a whole lot of money for it. Cool, man. That’s very similar to the Protege model. Right? As Protege scaled to over a thousand members since I launched it a couple of years ago, I needed to build a big coaching team, and all my coaches are successful dealmakers that have closed deals, and they want to give back. You know, they get a little bit of bear money, but that’s just to say thank you. It’s more about the giving back and serving people. There’s a great amount of fulfillment you get from that.

Holy cow, man. Protege has been incredible for me personally, just to be a part of it. This has really been one of the first times where I’m like, I found my tribe. People that are because I talk to people, and when people ask me what I do for a living, I try to explain it, and they look at me like a total freak. And this is like a group where I talk to them, and I’m like, oh, okay. You’re doing a bunch of crazy stuff like I am too. And it’s been so cool.

So Conker, you exited that business. Correct? We basically partnered up. It was a cash and equity deal. We partnered up with a company called Housecall Pro. It’s been an amazing partnership. They’re software experts, and they have an amazing community with forty thousand customers. We’ve been able to synergize together and cross-sell. It’s been great. I told them that I’d stick around for a couple of years to make sure the transition is smooth, and that’s coming up here shortly. I probably am not gonna leave. I’ll probably just stay involved because it’s the most fulfilling work I could do.

Yeah. It’s the same with me. I probably spend seventy-five percent of my time doing deals. I’m four deals under LOI right now that I’m gonna close before the end of the year, but then I’m spending twenty-five percent of my time coaching. I don’t really make a lot of money out of coaching, but it’s not that’s not why I do it. Right? I do it because I want to educate people.

I’ve seen you cry up on stage, Carl. I know what it’s about. I recognize the look. But you know what’s crazy? And maybe you get this as well in Conker, but the super highest benefit for me for Protege is the partners that come to me with deal flow. Like, every business I own today, I’m partnered with a Protege, which is absolutely incredible. Right? It’s so good. Even the billion-dollar roll-up that I’m executing on right now, that idea came to me from Ross, who you met at the event. He’s one of my business partners. And then a lot of proteges have invested in that. So it’s like a family kind of thing that we’re doing.

So, obviously, you’ve exited Conker, and then you’re still doing some coaching and stuff with them. That’s freed you up to do some really cool stuff. Now the business that you’ve got that I love the most is Hirebus. When you showed me that business, I absolutely couldn’t believe it. I was blown away with that. Do you remember we were in your office in Washington state, though? I was born in the Bronx. I live in Portland. So when you showed it to me and do you remember you profiled me? I’m a visionary. I’m not an operator. I’d be the worst CEO in the history of the world. Right? I remember you profiling me, and it was absolutely like chalk and cheese.

So just talk about Hirebus and what it does and what your vision is for that business because that’s gonna be a monster. Like, I’m telling you. It started out as an acquisition. So I actually found a small software company/behavioral services company, and they go into Fortune five hundred companies, these larger, enterprise-level businesses, and schools. They have this incredible algorithm tool that will take a single question assessment that only takes a few minutes to complete. It’s pretty fun. You go and you basically pick some adjectives, and then the output gives you twenty-one behavioral scores on what’s called the behavioral blueprint—your proactivity, aggression, criticality, endurance, order, and all these different things that are important to humans as behavioral desires. It profiles it out.

The real secret sauce is aside from being able to get a good understanding, some growth recommendations, and some really cool reports and charts, it will benchmark candidates on a scale of one to ten of how good they are as the right seat for that position or not. If someone’s gonna be the right seat for a CEO position, a salesperson, a technician, a general laborer, an office manager, a production manager, etc., it benchmarks it. It’s highly, highly accurate. So what Hirebus has evolved to is I bought that software from them in exchange for equity in NewCo. I was able to take that business and pretty much peel it off, brand it, come up with the Hirebus brand, build the team, raise a little bit of working capital in exchange for a small slice of equity with a convertible note. We’re building it like a true SaaS startup. I don’t have very much day-to-day involvement in it. I have really good operators and integrators that run that business, but it’s growing like crazy.

We’ve actually bolted on the ability to create done-for-you hiring funnels, and we use AI right now to auto-post jobs and read their efficiencies and go back and optimize the copy. We’re building out some really cool stuff that no one else in the space is doing. It’s gonna handle the whole hiring side. Is it purely for home services, or can you scale it into any industry? This works for any business in any industry. We’re talking to people that are recruiters and law enforcement. We’re talking to people that have this for warehouses, manufacturing, sales positions, accountants, and virtual call centers.

The cool part about it is that we can go into an organization, behavioral profile every single employee in their company, match that against their performance data and metrics, and actually create a custom benchmark. We can look for correlations between certain behaviors that are in their best top performers. Then you can create a custom benchmark. Now, when they go out and have everyone come through the hiring pipeline, they can see what areas there are for growth recommendations. It’s not a one-size-fits-all because there are areas that can be coached into it. There are coaching videos and questions that coach people and get them more aware of what areas they could improve in their behaviors to be more successful in that position. It’s a great hiring and coaching tool. It’s a blast, man. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever done.

It’s so cool. All my businesses run on EOS. I use the traction EOS model. The right person, the right seat is a massive core concept in that program. I can see Hirebus being used in that. They have a tool called the people analyzer, which is very much a rule of, like, does this person have all the right attributes for the seat? I think Hirebus could give you, especially in an enterprise, a lot more of an analytical kind of objective opinion.

Yes. We’ve actually been helping some proteges. We just helped one of the proteges hire a CEO for one of his new companies that he just hired. We built out the full funnel for him. We posted all the job ads on Indeed. We ran them all through the Hirebus score, and prioritized his interviews. It’s this unbelievable guy with an MBA and a military background. He’s just a beast, and he’s just come in and hit. When you think about the value of what that can get, you go out to a recruiter, and they’re gonna probably charge you three to six months’ salary for some of those positions. This could kill the cost, or even less. This could kill the recruitment industry.

If you think about it, people hiring salespeople or even people hiring executive assistants, all the way up to CEOs, it’s an absolutely incredible thing. Let’s talk about Wise Coatings. That’s also a really cool thing that you’re doing. You’re building a franchise network. Correct? Yes. It started in January of twenty twenty-one as a YouTube project. I wanted to do a little mini Grant Cardone thing. Rather than an undercover billionaire, I’m not there yet, but I thought, how quickly can we build a home service business from zero to a million from scratch?

So I came up with the concept, picked the industry—garage floor coatings, picked the name, Wise Coatings, got the branding, the website, everything done. We went from zero to seven employees in about forty-five days. We hit a hundred k a month in month four. We hit a million in our first year. Now we’re doing about a million dollars a month in the business, and we franchised it. We now have about twenty locations nationwide, in about two and a half years. It’s been a really cool journey. Again, it’s all about the integrator. I work less than a couple of hours a week in that business and have hired an unbelievable partner who has come in as COO and runs that company.

Where are you recruiting your franchisees from? Well, we got a couple of ways. We partnered up with another YouTube channel, and they interviewed me. That interview went viral, hitting a million views within the first couple of months. We’ve had about two thousand inquiries just from that one video alone. That’s been one channel. Brokers have been another channel. We’re trying to identify a franchise development company, and we’re also running Facebook ads and targeting people. We have a couple of other channels on paying per lead with another agency.

So we’re experimenting, kind of playing with what’s the best acquisition channel for that. And the business model is you’ll get a franchise fee upfront, and then you’ll get a percentage of revenue or earnings, or something like that? Yes. Franchise fee upfront, and we get a seven percent royalty that comes in. But we do things very differently than your typical franchise.

We basically help run all of your marketing. We help out with all the software components that you need to run your business. We set up every system from day one. We have training videos for every position in the company. So when you compare it apples to apples, someone typically saves about sixty thousand dollars plus their first year even paying the franchise fee if they were to go out and do it on their own.

And what’s the exit strategy for that? You know, for right now, I’m just having fun building it. There are really great multiples, but with that business, if I was to ever exit down the road, I’d wanna make sure that it was absolutely the right partner that I wanted to partner up with and exit to, who can kind of carry on the legacy, take care of our franchisees, and not just be some corporate that starts putting a squeeze on our franchisee partners.

What you could do as well, is there’s nothing to stop you from franchising another element of home services. Yeah. We’ve got a couple in the pipeline right now that have been pitched to me that are actually pretty exciting. So right now, my focus is building out infrastructure and a team. So, hire the CMO, have a good fractional CFO right now that I’m working with. Eventually, we’d like to hire a good COO to help build out the vision and manage deal flow because there’s a lot of opportunities coming through.

And are you looking at any acquisitions in the next few months? Have you got anything on this? Yeah. We’ve got a couple of LOIs out right now, and I’m excited about those. Very interested to see what that looks like and how those turn out. And then building out the full funnel and upper echelon. So working with Chris and team. Upper Echelon has been just an amazing group.

Are you coming to the January event? I am. My event overlaps it by one day, but it’s also in Orlando. You’ll be there for days two and three, right? Yes. I’ll be in Orlando, so I can literally just drive right from my event over to your event. How often do you fly from Portland to Orlando? Are you coming over, like, once a month? I was. I was at first. I basically fly in one day, do my events, which was an immersion day for potential franchisees, and then fly out that night.

So just a two-day trip. I was doing that once a month for about the last eight, nine months. Then, I stopped doing that once I had knee surgery, and it was a great kind of turnover. So now my partner’s running all of those and will continue to do so moving forward. Nice. Did you have an ACL reconstruction? I did. Yeah, man. It’s no joke. I had it about ten years ago. It was brutal. My leg swelled up. It was like the size of a tree trunk.

How many weeks are you post-surgery? It’ll be four weeks today. Wow. How are you getting on? Is it recovering? Yeah. Getting along great. I ditched the crutches and the brace about a week and a half, two weeks in. Now, no problem walking, no problem going up and down stairs. They have me doing squats and all kinds of exercises, really trying to strengthen it. It’s still tough, but not nearly as tough as the first two, three weeks. The first two, three weeks were brutal.

Have you got full flexibility in the knee now? Yes. Full range of motion right now. I don’t know if they did the same process with you, but with me, they cut into my knee, went in, cut out a piece of my hamstring, and then they used the hamstring to tie the knee together. But I guess technology has evolved now. You still have that option or you can go for donor tissue that’s basically cadaver tissue. Which is what I did.

So they didn’t take any part of my existing anatomy. They just put in the graft off of a patellar tendon, which sometimes can take a little bit more recovery time because it’s not your tissue, and sometimes your body takes a little bit longer to absorb and restructure everything. But it’s been a relatively easy recovery. I didn’t really wanna lose any hamstring potential for lifting stuff later on. I was scared of something else.

When I saw you at the Atlanta event, back in September, you looked amazing. You’ve really packed on some muscle. Thanks, man. Yeah. It’s been good. I’ve been very structured with my workouts and my protein shakes. I’ve actually just hired a new coach to get me back to being super fit because I’m traveling a lot. I live in England half a month and on the Space Coast of Florida half a month.

I’m traveling all the time and I’m crazy busy doing things. I try to eat reasonably healthily, but like workouts, the only two things I do. I bought a Peloton. Have you ever been on a Peloton? Yeah. They’ll kick your butt. Every morning, I go on it just for thirty minutes because it’s in my garage. Like, I’ve set all the bedrooms up as bedrooms when everyone comes and stays.

We call it the dealmaker house. So they put the Peloton in the garage, and Florida, as you know, it’s really humid. So I’m literally sweating like crazy. Even now, it’s seventy-five degrees outside. It’s pretty cool for Florida. I’m in the garage on the Peloton even at five in the morning. It’s so freaking hot in there. I’ve dropped ten pounds in the last ten days. Good for you, man. Just by going on my Peloton. It’s crazy.

Let’s talk about your mindset for a minute. What motivates you? You’re obviously doing some incredible things. You’ve got all these different things going on. One of the criticisms we get often as dealmakers is that it’s impossible to compartmentalize your life so that you can do all these different things that you’re doing. So, how do you structure yourself? What does a typical day look like for you as you’re executing on four or five major initiatives?

That’s a great question. For me, what I do is I live and die by a personal calendar. The only way I get anything done is to do that. I have my calendar laid out. I block out everything on my days. I schedule everything. I time block. I do not work past five PM ever. I do not work on weekends ever. For me, those are my table stakes as far as a commitment to my family, and my wife holds me to that too. If it’s five ten, she’s like, where are you? I’m like, okay. I’m coming back. I’m coming down.

But what motivates me is time freedom. I hate with a passion being the bottleneck. I hate people depending on me and counting on me for certain things. So I do anything and everything I can to make it where I get to work on fun stuff. I get to work on things when I want and what I want, and that way, it never feels like work. It’s just really exciting.

We don’t buy too many material things. We live relatively simply. We have a Honda minivan. It’s a 2014. We’ve got a 2015 truck. I’m not the car guy type of person. I was that way when I was younger, not really so much anymore. Time freedom is a big one, and now we have two aging parents. My mother-in-law, we just bought her a brand new, eighty-thousand-dollar, wheelchair-accessible van that has really restored her mobility and a really nice mobile chair.

I’ve been able to get my dad new eyeballs and anytime he has things he’s concerned about, we just take care of it. That’s what motivates me: being able to take care of our family, be a source of stability, and take away stress of financial issues for people that are really close to us.

I think you can coach me around some of this stuff because I struggle sometimes, not with overwhelm, but with structuring my time and my day. When I’m in Florida, because I live in Florida on my own, I’ll probably work twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours a day and just crush through. But then when I’m back in England, the deal I have with my wife is that I don’t work. Apart from a board meeting or something that’s critical, when I’m in the UK, I’m fully present doing stuff with the family. So when I’m away, I can get everything done.

At the end of the day, things happen like deals. We try and schedule the closing of a deal, either a business we’re buying or a deal that we’re exiting, for when I’m here, but often it doesn’t happen. Like, the last trip I was flying back to England, it was a Friday. I generally fly home on the Friday night. I said to the team, we gotta close this deal today because I don’t want to be working on this deal on Monday because I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff planned with the family.

Literally, we went right down to the wire, and I’m at the gate ready to get on the plane, and I’m saying, guys, I’m not getting on this plane until we close this deal. The seller yielded on the final point and said, okay. I’ll sign it. So, literally, the deal was signed. I gave power of attorney to my CFO. The deal was signed as I was in the air, the seven-hour flight back to England. Sometimes that doesn’t work.

I think about Parkinson’s law where the amount of time that you have allocated for something will expand to fill whatever you allow for it. As long as the family is happy and content, and they feel like they’re getting what they need, I’ve seen some quotes, especially, you know, I have younger kids, thirteen and sixteen. I’ve seen some quotes where it’s like, you’ll spend an average of nineteen years with your kids until they move out, and then you’ll spend a total sum of one year with them for the rest of your life.

The presence that you have to be, and then once that’s gone, it’s gone. The other part is that the only one that’s going to remember that you worked really late nights and were gone all the time is your kids when they’re older. That struck me to the core. I don’t want my kids having the memory where, oh, yeah, Dad just worked all the time and he wasn’t home. So I’ve been very intentional about just making sure that I’m present. I eat lunch with them every single day. I work from home every single day.

When I travel, I always bring my kids with me, at least ninety percent of the time. Unless they don’t want to travel with me. They’re like, no, Dad. I’m going to skip out on this one. I’ll either bring at least one kid or the whole family with me. We’re going to Orlando in January. I’m bringing the whole family with me and the kids, and we’re going to stay a couple of days after the mastermind events.

We’re going to hit up Disney and spend some time there. I try to be intentional about that. I know. It’s really important, isn’t it? Sometimes I think, do I have the right balance in all of those different areas? Business, family, health, all that stuff, mission. It’s tough. For me, it’s really hard to say no to the next deal. I’m very privileged now because I’ve got so many people that follow me and so many people in my program.

I get pitched so many deals to partner on, and I just can’t say no. It’s crazy. I go through these cycles where I’ll close so many deals, and then I think, well, okay. Which are the ones that are not lighting me up, and I’ll exit those. But it’s really interesting.

What’s one great piece of advice you’d give somebody that wants to be a dealmaker? I’d say that you just have to take massive action. This is not something that you dip a toe in and try to see. You don’t just get a list and call twenty people. You don’t just check out a couple of broker sites and see what’s out there. I’ve been talking to quite a few protege members. I think I scheduled about fourteen calls last week after my session on that Friday.

I was just talking to people and a common thread I heard is, yeah. I’m still looking for my first deal, and what are you doing? Well, yeah, I got this list. Have you called them yet? No. I haven’t called them yet. I’m just nervous about what to say, and I’m like, let’s role play. I’m the potential, so I’ll go easy on you this first time. The more that you just do and you just execute, none of us know what the heck we’re doing. Do we, Carl?

No. Great advice. I was coaching the proteges on Monday on one we coach four times a week. One of the calls on Monday, while I was coaching one of the guys, John, I said to him, why aren’t you originating all these deals? Why aren’t you having seller conversations? He’s like, well, I’m afraid. What are you afraid of? You’re not gonna die. You will not die through that conversation. Then he said, well, I’m afraid of failure.

I want you to take that word failure, and I want to remove it from your vocabulary. I want you to look at anything in life as you’re either gonna win or you’re gonna learn. If you don’t win, you’re gonna learn something. What that does is stack those learnings, which means that you will win eventually. It could be the next call, could be twenty calls, but then the win’s even sweeter because you really have to work for it.

The two mindset things for me that have been most profound are: to get somewhere you’ve never been means doing things you’ve never done. If you’ve never owned a business, what have you done all the way up to this point in your life to give you the result of not owning the business? You can’t do any of those things. Now, you have to do something that you’ve never done before to get to a different level, a different tier. If you had done it before, you’d be there.

I tie being uncomfortable as my touchstone for knowing that I’m doing the right thing. It’s a weird disassociation, but I’m doing deals that I’ve never done before. I’m having seller conversations I’ve never done before. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. You have to get around people. I remember when I came to the top one, the mastermind group that we’re part of. I don’t know if I told you this before.

The first mastermind event that we did in Florida, and we’re all sitting around in that room, in the penthouse suite of that hotel, I almost had a mini panic attack. I don’t know if you remember, but Todd laid into me. He called me out. You need to know this stuff. You need to know what your messaging is. You need to know what actually makes you different, all this kind of stuff, and it really shook me. On break, I went out in the hallway and called up one of my business partners and friends.

I was like, dude, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. Everyone here is smarter than me. Everyone has these huge businesses. I got this tiny little conquer business that’s just doing its first hundred and fifty thousand dollar a month. What the heck am I doing here? I felt so dumb. He told me, hey, man. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. So I guess you’re in the right room if you’re the dumbest person in the room.

I guess. I just had to swallow my ego and go all in and learn. It was one of the best things. I’ve built some of the best friendships from being in those types of environments.

That’s why I met Chris. Chris Moore’s my business partner now in probably half of the companies I own today. Savage. What we’re doing with DealMaker. DealMaker’s seven x-ed in the last two years alone. A lot of that’s down to Chris. Chris runs that business. He drives the sales team. He built the marketing machine. Then every time we acquire a business into our group, he has this SWAT team. It’s really elegant how he’s done it.

He has a SWAT team that he parachutes in with a finance person, a marketer, an ops person, and a salesperson. He parachutes them in, and they gentrify the business and get all the right systems in place and do all those incredible things. Once they’re done, it’s like a mission. It’s like the Delta Force. He extracts them and sends them on another one.

Do they actually go on-site, or do they do stuff remotely? How do they access it? A little bit of both. We bought an incredible company called Authentic Conversion. Nicole, you saw at the event. She spoke at the event. She’s my business partner now, because we bought a majority stake in that business, and then she rolled up a piece of equity into our group, into the coaching role that we’re building.

She built an amazing business. We can still add value to it through our C-suite and our operating machine and our marketing machine to take it to that next level. When you buy an already incredible company and then plug all of these secret weapons into it. We’ve doubled the last couple of months since we bought it. Revenues are double what they were. That’s all down to Chris.

My two superpowers in the world are doing deals and raising capital. That’s what I’m the best in the world at. Growing a business and all that kind of stuff, I can do it, but it’s not my unique ability, as Dan Sullivan would say. Luckily, that’s what Chris is phenomenal at, and his ability to build teams to get deployed is phenomenal.

Brandon Vaughn, thank you so much for your time on the podcast. Been an absolute blast. How can people get hold of you if they wanna learn more about Hireverse or Yeti Books or Wise Coatings or Conquer or all the incredible things that you’re doing? How can people get a hold of you? Sure. Best place to go learn about each one of those services is hirebus.com, conquernow.com, yetibooks.com, godunzo.com, wisecoatings.com. You can check out the sites and learn more about each of those businesses.

If you wanna connect with me, hit me up on Facebook. Add me as a friend there. I use Facebook only for business. I don’t use it for any personal aspect. It’s just for connecting with other business people, and LinkedIn as well. Hit me up on LinkedIn. Add me there. I’m not as good as I’d like to be on LinkedIn, or lastly, shoot me an email. If you shoot me an email at brandon@growpando.com, my assistant goes through and checks those, and we’ll prioritize responses.

Let’s connect these deals. We’ll put all that in the show notes. Brandon, absolutely great to chat with you. Have a great Thanksgiving up there in Portland. I’m gonna be home alone on Thanksgiving, so I’m gonna literally sit in my hot tub with some beers, and I’m just gonna chill out. Have a great relaxing time. Rotisserie turkey and just sit in your hot tub and eat it with your beer. There you go. That’s what I’m gonna do.