In Day 1 of Carl Allen’s “10-Days to Buying Your First Business” series, the focus is on cultivating the right mindset for successful deal-making. Carl emphasizes the critical importance of beliefs in shaping outcomes. He discusses how empowering beliefs can lead to positive action, while limiting beliefs hold people back. He explains how belief, positive thinking, and eliminating what he calls the “bitch voice” are essential for success in buying businesses.

Carl introduces the success cycle, a model that links beliefs, positive action, and results. With strong, positive beliefs, individuals take massive action, which leads to favorable outcomes, reinforcing their belief systems and creating an upward cycle of success. Conversely, limiting beliefs lead to inaction and poor results, which reinforces negative thinking and causes a downward spiral.

He also shares the RPM model, a tool developed by Tony Robbins, which stands for “Results-focused, Purpose-driven, Massive Action Plan.” The first step in this model is to define a specific and measurable goal, such as buying a business. This goal must be clear, actionable, realistic, and time-bound, allowing individuals to track their progress.

Next, Carl discusses the importance of having a powerful why, or purpose, behind the desire to buy a business. He explains that emotions, not logic, often drive decision-making and uses a personal story about quitting smoking to demonstrate the importance of a compelling reason for action. A strong why provides the motivation to overcome obstacles.

Finally, Carl outlines the massive action plan—the how of achieving business goals. He hints at what will be covered in the upcoming days, including deal origination, evaluating financials, and structuring offers. With mindset in place, the next steps will involve applying these strategies to find and close business deals.

Full Transcript:

Hey, guys. Carl Allen. We are on day one of the ten days to your very, very first deal. Dealmakers, what’s up?

My vision is to completely and utterly disrupt the market for buying and selling small businesses all over the world. So yesterday, I walked you through the kind of agenda. And as promised, day one is all about mindset. So mindset’s really, really important when you’re doing anything in life, but it’s super, super important when you are looking to buy a business. So there’s three things that we’re gonna talk about before anything else. The first one is we’re gonna talk about beliefs.

Then I’m gonna walk you through a little model called the success cycle, and then we’re gonna finish with an awesome kind of goal setting tool that, I learned from, one of my mentors, Tony Robbins, and it’s called RPM, which stands for results, focused, purpose driven, massive action plan. That tool really dials in to your why, and I’ve got a really awesome story about I how I was able to quit smoking, about ten years ago because of a very, very powerful why and how you can do the same for buying businesses. So the first thing to talk about is is beliefs. So beliefs are one of the things that are programmed into our brains and drive us day to day.

So if we think about our brain as our operating system of how we function, so our identity, our values, and our beliefs are what really kind of make the difference brain. And a lot of the times with our beliefs, our beliefs can either empower us to do things or they can stop us from doing things, and those are called limiting beliefs. So for example, I’m gonna teach you in these ten days how to buy a business without using any of your own money, so you’ve got no money out of pocket when you buy a business. Now if you’ve never done it before, you might have a limiting belief that says, well, hey.

That’s not true. I don’t believe that you can buy a business without any money, or I’m gonna learn this stuff from Carl over the next ten days, then I don’t believe that I’m gonna be able to find the time to go away and do that. And there’s loads and loads of tools I can share with you about time audits and how you can get a lot of your time back to do the things that are really, really important. But if you believe something to be true, then your brain doesn’t know the difference between imagination, which is where your beliefs are, and fact.

It’s kind of like a gray area. So if you believe something strong enough, your brain actually thinks that you’ve already done it, and then your subconscious mind goes to work on attracting all of the resources and all the things that you need to actually achieve those goals. If you don’t believe that you can do something, if you have a limiting belief, you say, you know what? I can’t do that, then your subconscious brain is like a filter, and it will it will kind of push away all of the resources and all the things that you’re gonna need to be able to do that.

And what sums up beliefs for me, more than anything else, is what I call the bitch voice. So what is the bitch voice? We all have a bitch voice. The bitch voice is that little voice inside of your head that tells you that you can’t do things, and your bitch voice is why you are exactly where you are in the world today, around your finances, around your family, around your business if you own one, around your health and your your well-being.

All of those different things are because of your your bitch voice. And we all have bitch voices. I had a bitch voice on Saturday morning. So it’s Monday now.

Saturday morning, I’ve had a kind of a heavy night out with friends and family on Friday night, probably had a little bit too much wine, and I woke up at six AM.

And I normally go to the gym at that time on a, on a Saturday morning. And my little bitch boy said, yeah. You know what? You worked out four times last week.

You know, you’re getting in much better shape. It’s raining outside. You don’t need to go. And and I literally turned off my phone, put it back on the nightstand, then I went back to sleep.

So that was my bitch voice controlling my intention to go and do something. Right? So we all we all do it, and I’m no different. But you’ve gotta get rid of that bitch voice.

You’ve gotta replace limiting beliefs with what I call empowering truth. So a limiting belief that you might have, which is, hey. There’s no way I can go and buy businesses using other people’s money. An empowering truth would be there’s trillions of dollars of capital in the markets today, and there’s millions of business owners who will let me take their business on like I would lease a car.

I don’t need my own capital to do those deals. I can either find it from a bank or an investor, or I can structure a deal where the seller will take the money over time. So having limiting beliefs is bad. Having empowering truths and getting rid of the bitch voice and replacing it with a boss voice is really, really important.

Now once you’ve got your belief systems dialed in, what’s next is to understand something called the success cycle. K?

So the success cycle starts with your beliefs.

So once you’ve got powerful beliefs and there’s no bitch voice there, there’s just a boss voice, what that does is that puts you into a positive state.

So you’re excited.

You’re ready to crush this, like nothing’s gonna stand in your way. And then when you’re in a really positive state, what then happens is you take action.

You execute.

You get things done.

Education is nothing without execution. You’ve got to get the things done. Imagine you were going to the gym, right, and you wanted to build muscle. You have to go to the gym three, four, five times a week, do your sets, do your reps, and then put the proper fuel into your body. If you consistently do that, if you consistently execute, then it’s biologically impossible for you not to build muscle. In the business buying world, the more deals you originate, the more sellers you meet, the more offers you make. If you’re consistently taking action in doing those three things, and you’ll learn all about those three things over the next ten days, you take action, What are you gonna get?

You’re gonna get results.

And then when you get results, what those results do is then reinforce your beliefs. So your beliefs go up. You think, wow. I have this belief.

I got into a positive state. I took massive action. I’ve now got five deals on the table. I’ve had three seller meetings.

I’ve just made an offer. It’s really, really close. I’ve got lenders potentially gonna back me on the deal, or I talk to the seller, and you’ll let me buy the business over a ten year period with no money at the closing table. Wow.

This is really happening. I can do this. So your belief goes up. What then happens is then you get into an even more positive energetic state.

You get even more excited, then you take even more action, and then you get even better results. So you go in this constant upward cycle.

The converse is you go into this and think, you know what?

I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think this is gonna work.

I can’t see anybody lending me any money. I don’t even know what type of business to buy. Gonna cover that tomorrow, the buy box. You know, I don’t have a time for this.

You know? Maybe I’ll just buy real estate or buy some crypto or do an MLM or get into forex trading or whatever. You know? I I just don’t believe I’m gonna do that.

You go into this, like, not really kind of in that right belief. The bitch voice is controlling your decisions.

You’re not gonna be in a positive state. You’re gonna be in a negative state. When you’re in a negative state, what then happens is you don’t take the right level of action. You take a little bit of action.

Yeah. I’ll try it. You know, I’ll send out a few letters. Yeah. I’ll send a few emails.

I’ll call my CPA, see if there’s any deals that he knows about, and then you get really bad results. And then when you get really bad results, that reinforces that negative belief that you’ve had. So then your belief actually goes down, and then you get into a worse state, and you take even less action, then you get even worse results. So you spiral down.

You can either go up or you can go down. So that is the success cycle, my friends. I’m just gonna wipe this off because now I wanna walk you through something called RPM, which is a really awesome tool I learned from Tony Robbins. These whiteboard, wipes are absolutely amazing.

They’re like, they’re like the things you use with diapers. I got a granddaughter.

And before I bought this from Amazon, I was actually using my granddaughter’s wipes from her diapers to actually, clean my board. But, anyway, so we’re all good. So RPM So RPM stands for results driven sorry. Results focused, purpose driven, massive action plan.

So it all starts with the result. So you can’t just say, hey. You know what? What’s my outcome?

What’s my result? What’s the binary goal that I’m looking to achieve? And you can’t start off just by saying, I wanna buy a business. Right?

You’ve gotta turn that into a SMART goal.

What’s a SMART goal? It’s specific.

It’s measurable.

It’s easy to measure if you buy a business or not. You either buy it or you don’t. But it’s specific. It’s measurable.

It’s actionable.

It’s realistic, and it’s time bound.

So specific. Get really, really specific. And tomorrow, when we talk about the buy box, you’ll know exactly what sectors that you wanna target. You know exactly what size of businesses you’re gonna wanna target, and you’ll know exactly whether you wanna be an owner investor working on the business, doesn’t matter where it is, versus being an owner manager working in the business.

But you might say, hey. I wanna buy an an IT services company within fifty miles of Chicago, between one and three million dollars in revenues with ten percent minimum profit margins. And I wanna close on that deal and be generating cash flow for myself by the thirty first of March twenty twenty three. So you get really, really specific, your sector, location, size, and time.

You gotta time bound it. Right? Number two, measurable. Well, it’s easy. You’re either gonna buy the business or you’re not.

You get to the thirty first of March. You’ve either bought that business, and it’s cash flow for you, or you don’t. So you’ll know. You can measure it.

A is actionable. Is it actionable? Yes. It is. We’ll get to that through the p and the m, the sorts of things that you need to do to be able to further your pursuit of that goal.

R is realistic. Is it realistic for you to go and buy a business as part of that specification? Absolutely, it is. If you said, hey.

Now I wanna buy a billion dollar company, and I’m not gonna put any of my own money in, and I wanna buy that business by lunchtime tomorrow, then that’s not a realistic goal. Like, another example of a of an unrealistic goal would be, like, I’m absolutely terrible at golf. I can’t get round the course in under a hundred because I just never have time to play, and I never have time to to practice. I’m terrible at golf.

But if I said to you, I wanna win the Masters tournament in Augusta next time it’s played, that’s a completely unrealistic goal. It’s physically impossible for me to do that because I’ve never really played the game. So being realistic is super, super important, and then time bound, which we’ve already talked about. So a goal is just a dream unless you’ve got a specific time that you’re committed one hundred percent to achieving it by that day.

So having a very, very specific result that you wanna achieve is the first step of the RPM process. The second is p, and it’s purpose. And, really, it all comes down to your why.

K?

He who has his why can endure almost anyhow.

What does that mean? So your why is critical. Now I’m gonna tell you something now, and you’re gonna think I’m crazy. Right?

But nobody wants to buy a business. Nobody wants to own a business. If you think about the dimensionalized benefits, what are they for being a business owner? Right?

It’s like we don’t buy airline tickets just to fly on an airplane. That’s the feature. The benefit of buying an airline ticket, the why that we buy an airline ticket is that we can go on vacation, or we can go to a business event, or we can go and see family, or we can go and see friends, or we can do whatever we we wanna do. It’s the destination, not the journey, that’s really, really important.

When it comes to buying businesses, you gotta ask the question, why do I want to own a business? Is it cash flow? Is it wealth generation? Is it work life balance?

Is it pride? Is it ego? Is it assurance?

Is it insurance?

Does it matter what it is? As human beings, what allows us to make decisions are those things in our subconscious mind. It’s the emotions. It’s the quality of those emotions that make us take actions.

It’s really, really important that you define your why. Now I used to be a very, very heavy smoker. Obviously, I was a Wall Street guy, spent a lot of time working in Russia, you know, chain smoked. I I was up to sixty cigarettes a day.

Marlboro Reds as well, pretty pretty strong cigarettes. And I just couldn’t stop smoking.

My my wife was trying to get me to stop because, obviously, I smelled disgusting, and I was really unhealthy, and I was coughing all the time. I would wake up in the middle of the night, and and I would go outside for a cigarette. It was absolutely awful.

And, one day, I was pacing around my my garden at home, and and I was on a conference call trying to close a deal. It’s about ten years ago. And I went through a whole pack of twenty cigarettes in that one hour. And I walked in, and I must have absolutely been so stinky and horrible with cigarettes.

My wife said to me, you’ve got a massive problem. Like, you need to quit smoking. But I didn’t have a powerful enough why. I couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine a life where I wasn’t smoking.

So we had a bit of a fight, and and I went to my study, and I opened the window, and I’m literally smoking out the window. I was smoking all the time. And, my little boy, Josh, came in, and he was five at the time. He’s fifteen now.

And he walked into my office. He said, daddy.

I’m like, Josh, my man, what’s the matter? He said, I don’t want you to die.

I said, what are you talking about? Dad’s not gonna die. You know, I was, like, forty two at the time. You know, I was not in great shape, and I was chain smoking, but, you know, I didn’t think I was gonna die.

I said, dad’s not gonna die. He said, well, mom mom says you’re gonna die because she’s smoking all those horrible cigarettes, and he’s gonna kill you. And you’re not gonna be able to take me to soccer games. And, you know, you’re not gonna see me go to college, and you’re not gonna see me get married, and you’re not gonna see me live my life.

And I don’t want that. Do you think I ever had a cigarette ever again? No. I literally threw the cigarette out the window, and I never ever ever put a cigarette in my mouth ever since.

Because now I had a really powerful why. And what went through my brain while my son was really upset is, like, well, if I die, somebody else is gonna be living in my house, and they’re gonna be taking care of my son, and they’re gonna be doing all these things with him. You know, somebody else is gonna be going on date nights with my wife and taking my son to soccer games because I’m dead because I was stupidly smoking. So that, for me, was a massively, massively powerful why to allow me to stop smoking.

So you’ve gotta really kinda get raw with yourself and really get that leverage of yourself and figure out why do I want to own a business? What are the benefits to me of owning a business? You might hate your job. You might be sick and tired of of working for other people.

You might have started a business and failed and and lost a lot of money, and you wanna get that back. You know, you wanna be the guy that walks into the the bar with your buddies and say, you know what?

I’m not an employee anymore. I’m now the employer. I’m the commander in chief. I’m the daddy.

I’m the guy. It’s that pride. Right? It’s that ego. Those are the things that drive us.

It might not just be about wealth creation. It might not just be about cash flow. It might be about some of those other things. So you’ve gotta really kinda go on that journey and think, well, why is it?

Like, what would have to be true for me in my life? You know, what am I gonna get as the owner of one or five or however many businesses you’re gonna buy? So dialing in your why is really, really important. And then the third thing that you need, and you’re in the perfect place for this, is you need a massive action plan.

Okay?

So the r is the what, the p is the y, and the m is the how. So, okay, you figured out. I wanna buy a business, IT services company, within twenty miles of Chicago, one to three million dollars in revenues. I wanna close that deal by the thirty first of March twenty twenty three.

Why? Well, I’m sick of working for the people. I wanna generate three, four hundred thousand dollars a year in cash flow. I wanna grow that business and make five million dollars, and then I wanna buy real estate with that and give to my church and buy my parents a new home and buy a great car and do all of those fantastic things.

And I wanna be able to tell my buddies that I’ve made it. They all own businesses. I don’t. I’m I’m in the club now.

All of those feelings and all of those emotions combined are gonna give me that massively powerful why to absolutely crush this and get to the end result. And then my massive action plan is what do I need to do next. You know, I’ve got the beliefs. I’m gonna take action.

I’m in a positive state. I wanna get those results. Well, this is what we’re gonna cover over the next ten days. It’s all about once your mindset’s dialed in, figuring out your buy box.

That’s what we’re gonna talk about tomorrow. And then we’re gonna get to deal origination. Okay? Gonna go and find deals from brokers and wealth managers and, other deal intermediaries and social media and direct approaches.

We’re gonna teach you all that. And then we’re gonna go and have meetings and teach you all that. Then I’m gonna show you what the seven to ten key financial data points are that you need to look at so you can make an offer and value and structure a deal. Then we’ll get into deal origination and all those different things.

That’s the massive action plan. The massive action plan, the how is what we’re gonna cover over the rest of these ten days. So I hope you found that useful. That’s mindset as a deal maker.

And what’s really interesting about this is watch this video again. You can apply that framework to absolutely anything that you wanna do in life. If you’re in a broken relationship, if you want to get healthy and fit, if you wanna stop smoking, wanna stop drinking, you wanna stop any habit and start a new powerful thing in your life, apply that RPM framework.

Results focused, purpose driven, massive action plan, the what, the why, and the how. Hope you enjoy that, guys, and I will see you tomorrow for day two where we’re gonna get into your buy box. And don’t forget, if you want a lot more training, if you wanna really go to town and have a really massive action plan, check out the link below. You can go into my ten day business buying challenge, where I go into this in a lot more detail, and I give you all of the tools and cheat sheets and blueprints and everything that you need to execute this properly. So I will see you tomorrow. Until then, bye for now.