Full Transcript:

The wealthiest people in the world got wealthy from helping other people achieve their dreams, not just doing it yourself.

It just makes me proud that people will follow us like this.

I said, “Well, why don’t I just become your annuity provider?” She said, “What do you mean?” So, “Well, if you need nine thousand dollars a month for the next ten years, why don’t I just give you nine thousand dollars a month?”

We call it the great resignation, where you had more people quit their jobs than ever before back in twenty-twenty, twenty-twenty-one. You and I paid thirty to sixty thousand dollars in a year to jump into a mastermind. You consult for millionaires. Don’t ever consult for thousandaires because how to find your perfect ideal scenario business owner who has a bleeding problem that you’re able to solve, you’re able to leverage your resources in exchange for equity and get them to offer you equity.

One of the things I’ve noticed, and so a lot of those business owners, they don’t really wanna sell. Right? They’re lonely. They’re absolutely lonely.

First question I always ask a seller is a very warm welcome to the Creative Deal Maker Podcast. I’m Karl Allen, I’m your host, and I’m going to 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.

Hey guys, Karl Allen. Welcome back to the Creative Deal Maker Podcast. I have a very, very special guest today. He’s one of my two major business partners in all of the things that I do inside of my portfolio. Probably the greatest marketer that I’ve ever met. We’ll get into that in a minute. So, very well welcome to Chris Moore. How are you doing, my friend?

“Man, glad to be here. Life is good.”

“Yeah. And, like, you’re not in your normal home office, right?”

“No, I’ve moved offices this week. We’ll talk about that in a minute. You’re down in Jacksonville with the family for the whole summer. One of the great things about being a deal maker is that we can go and live, work, and do whatever we want, right?”

“Yeah, down here for a month, working remotely. We can do that pretty much anywhere we want.”

“Well, we’ll get into a whole bunch of stuff that you and I are doing at the moment because I think it’s really, really important. But a couple of things I wanna share with you right now. As you know, I’ve just done this crazy trip from England to Austin, not on a plane, but on a boat and in a car with my wife, my son, and my dog, Ralph, because we didn’t want to fly him. We decided to send him in an easier way. So, when I rocked up to my new Austin house, my home office here, I haven’t yet figured it out. I’ve got the throne chair. I haven’t put my basketball stuff up yet. I’m still moving in if you will.”

“But when I pitched up here on Monday, two really cool things were waiting for me. So number one was this. As you know, you quarterbacks the whole launch of this for me, my Creative Dealmaker fable book. It’s not a technical book. It’s a book about two people that come together and transact on an acquisition. But yeah, I just wanna thank you for turning me into an Amazon bestseller. I don’t know how many thousands of copies we’ve sold, but the network, they’re eating it up, man. They love the fact that I can talk about the drama, the emotion, and the psychology of a deal through a novel rather than some boring technical book that teaches you kind of the process.”

“We do that in the book as you know, you read it. But yeah, I’m hoping that this book really helps our student base as well, understand those kind of intangibles. Because I think a lot of the times people that are buying and selling businesses, they don’t understand. You and I have been through this in all the businesses we bought, probably fifteen or so in the last year, that seller psychology is key, isn’t it?”

“It’s absolutely key. Yeah, and my pleasure, man. It was fun. And we’re just getting started. I have a plan that you haven’t heard about yet on how to get you another fifty thousand copies sold, almost all organically. So just wait and hear that later.”

“Yeah, you have a habit of doing that, right? Of doing these little things for me, which I really appreciate, and then I only find out about it when it happens. So, yeah.”

“And this is a massive passion project for me, as you know. It took me six months to write the thing. It’s nearly ninety thousand words, and all of you are in the book. Right? You’re in it, Ross is in it, Jeremy Bronson’s in it, everyone’s in it. One of the reasons why I could get so rich about the details is I’m talking about people that I know really well. So when I talked about you, there was a scene where you’re part of the big buyout team at the end of the deal. Right?”

“I think I say ‘Chris Moore, jack of all trades, master of them all.’ You’re sorting out the Apple play so that Ross could look at the slides and stuff, which was pretty cool.”

“I got one thing I want to show you, something I’m really proud of, and I think, you and I together as a partnership have made this happen, but let me go get it. When I walked up on Monday, I got this. I almost burst into tears, man. Like, I tell you, when I got the first one, when we got our two-comma club award, that was special. Right?”

“And that’s still in my UK house that will come over when I eventually sell that property. But to get a Two Comma Club X award, to know that in just one funnel on ClickFunnels, we’ve done ten million dollars in revenues just in one of our businesses, right? And it’s not about the revenue for me, Chris. It’s like every dollar that we generated through that funnel has changed lives.”

“Think of the people that are in our program, like Ross and Michael Scott and Abraham. Those are three nine-figure dealmakers. We’re proud that we’ve done ten million bucks through one funnel in Dealmaker Wealth Society, but we have three nine-figure dealmakers, lots and lots of eight-figure dealmakers, and probably over a hundred seven-figure dealmakers. And that’s why we’re doing this, right?”

“A lot of people say, ‘Why do you run a coaching company when you’re so good at buying businesses?’ Well, we are. We bought fifteen in the last year. We spend eighty percent of our time buying businesses and twenty percent of our time coaching. But the fact we’re doing deals in the market now, we’ve got real-time insights as to what’s changing, and then we’re coaching our community about that. Then they’re taking that knowledge and going and doing their own things. And you know one thing that makes me so proud, Chris? There are lots of people in our program richer than us because of the coaching we’ve given them. Yet when they joined us, they were broke, right?”

“Isn’t that incredible?”

“That’s the thing that, when I wake up every day, makes me wanna keep doing this for a long, long time.”

“Yeah, the success stories are almost endless. I’m hearing every day about new deals closing, and a lot of these deals are big deals too. I mean, deals where people have been forced into retirement, they feel like they still have gas in the tank. They go out and do one really big deal that’s gonna pretty much set them for life.”

“We’ve got other people who, it’s really do-or-die. They’ve got to make something happen. They put in the work, they follow the training, and then they end up changing their entire situation and their entire family’s future. So, yeah, I agree, man. You know, I’m mission over money. And when I decided to work again, I had to shift away from what I was doing before, exited that, decided, ‘Hey, I can go wherever I want.’ You’re the only one I wanted to work with, man, because mission over money is a big part of my world, and that’s where we’re aligned so well.”

“Yeah, the ClickFunnels Two Comma Club award, just so you know. I mean, you’re only about eighteen months away from getting the twenty-five million dollar award.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, there’s a twenty-five million dollar award, and it will be on your wall within the next eighteen months.”

“That’d be awesome. We probably get to meet Brunson to get that, right?”

“Yeah, we can go if we want to. I think he wants to meet us.”

“Yeah. I heard that. Okay. Cool.”

“So, talk about the mission over money thing for a minute. One of the things that we always do, we qualify people that come into our community. When we look at our Protege community, people think it’s kind of a fad, right? But it’s not. We have calls. You and I alternate every week, everybody that’s applied to come into the program that wants to do this, wants a shot. We’ve almost interviewed them. Some of them we let in because we know they’re good people, and some of them we don’t. We have that privilege because protecting our community is everything to us.”

“I’ll tell you why you and I believe this, it’s because one of the major core values we insist on inside of Protege is the core value of being a noble capitalist, right? Because we’re going to give these people the keys to the kingdom. And if in the wrong hands, people can manipulate and do all those different things, right? We teach people how to buy businesses using other people’s money. It’s like the Force in Star Wars, right? You know, I’ve got my Star Wars helmet somewhere that you bought me for Christmas. In the Force, there are good guys, the Jedi, and there are bad guys, the Dark Side, right? For us, we’re the dealmaker Jedi.”

“I think it’s so important. All the people we talked about, like Lenny and Rachel and all these people that have made a lot of money as dealmakers, what they’re now doing is investing to become partners with all the other proteges that are coming into the program, right? So this noble capitalist ecosystem that we’re building, I think is so important. And there are a lot of people out there doing this now. You and I have been partners now for, what, three years after I took the business back out of the guys that bought it, right? Before then, there was only me, my friend Jeremy Harbour, maybe Mike Warren, Ace Chapman. We were the only people in the world that were doing this stuff. Now there are loads of people doing it.”

“And I was on a podcast the other day, and somebody said to me, ‘Does that not bother you that you’re innovating in this market? You’re coming out with all this transfer of value analysis, you’re building multiple models, you’re running AI funnels, you’re doing all this crazy stuff, and within ninety days, everybody else is copying you?’ I won’t name names, but I was watching a Facebook ad, one of our competitors, and that person is quoting all of the stats that we built our model on, like how many businesses sell, baby boomers retiring, all that stuff.”

“And that makes me proud, man. It makes me proud that people see you and I as the real thought leaders in this industry, and they will take all of our innovation to do what they’re doing, right? Some people would get angry with that, but not me. That makes me proud.”

“I agree. You look at Alex Hormozi, he talks about normal, good, bad, and great markets, and business kind of overwhelming the demand. Well, there’s more demand than we can possibly handle. There are so many people out there who are also doing this, and people go and invest in those courses, but unfortunately, they end up coming and seeking us out after because they felt like they were duped or didn’t get what they hoped for. So, I think it’s part of it, and I think we have great competitors in our space. You know, we respect almost all of them, never talk badly about any of them, and I think we’re all out there as long as it’s mission over money. I believe that, and I’m glad they’re in the space.”

“I’ll tell you, Carl, mission over money to me is more of a decision-making strategy as well. It allows you to make decisions in your business around the mission, not just focused on money. You’re not making decisions just about how we can make more money or sell more people, but instead keep the integrity. And I believe it was Jim Rohn or Zig Ziglar who once said, ‘The wealthiest people in the world got wealthy from helping other people achieve their dreams and solve their problems, not just doing it yourself.’ So I think it’s a beautiful thing that we are able to keep that moral compass focused toward the mission and helping people rather than just trying to squeeze all of our customers dry. We want them to win.”

“I really like what we do, and I truly believe that business acquisitions are the best-kept secret, period, in investing. I think it’s no longer a secret over the last couple of years, maybe because of how well we’ve put the word out in the marketplace. There’s nothing else that you can do, whether it’s consulting for equity, using LBO strategies, or doing really big deals and getting outside investment, nothing builds wealth faster and generational wealth than buying businesses. So I love what we do, man.”

“Yeah, I know. And it’s really cool that a lot of the buzzwords now in the market, like transfer value, consulting for equity, annuity deals, everyone talks about them now in the market. Those are things that we invented through doing it, right? We didn’t just wake up one day and think, ‘Oh, that would be cool.’ Sometimes we stumble across these things, like the annuity deal. I’ll never forget it was two and a half years ago. I’m on a call with the seller of a company, and the seller wanted a six-times multiple for this business.”

“As we know, most small businesses are in the two-to-three range, depending on a bunch of different factors, right? So I said to the seller, ‘Wow, you want a six-times multiple for your business. Your business must be best in class to command the highest multiple. Tell me about that. What is it?’ He’s like, ‘What are you talking about multiples? I’ve got no idea what a multiple is. My wealth manager valued my company.’ I was like, ‘Woah. Your wealth manager valued your company? Wealth managers are not qualified to value companies, right?'”

“Surely, it was your CPA or somebody else from the industry? ‘No, my wealth manager.’ So I said, ‘Tell me how he valued your company.’ He said, ‘Well, I told my wealth manager that I need to retire, and I need guaranteed income for a minimum of ten years at a certain level.’ So he ran the calculations, calculated how much tax I would pay for a big monster closing payment, and then less fees and tax and a whole bunch of different things, what would be the cash flow that I would get for ten years through an annuity product, like a money market product from Fidelity or something?’ And I said, ‘Okay, well, why don’t I just become your annuity provider?’ She said, ‘What do you mean?’ So I said, ‘Well, if you need nine thousand dollars a month for the next ten years, why don’t I just give you nine thousand dollars a month?’ And he said, ‘You can do that?'”

“You don’t need to give me a massive closing payment where I’ll pay all this tax?” ‘No. I can pay you nine thousand dollars a month, right? You can have full security over the business. I’ll even leave you with ten percent of the ownership. So when I scale it up and buy other companies and create a really big business, you’ll get a big capital payout for that ten percent, but we can help you figure that out through a trust or some other tax-efficient vehicle.’ And he said, ‘Okay. No problem.’ So he said, ‘What you’re doing, Carl, is you’re giving me my valuation, my price, but you’re setting the terms.'”

“This is why we always talk about there are only two variables in a negotiation when you’re buying a business. You’ve got the price of the deal and the terms of the deal. All deals that close only happen when a buyer or a seller jumps on one of those spots. So, ‘I’m going to control the price. I want a ten-times multiple for my business.’ Well, great. We’ll just pay you over twenty-five years. You can have your price; I set the terms. Or if the seller says, ‘No, I want ninety percent of my money at closing. I don’t want this long-term.’ Could be an entrepreneur who wants to cash out and invest in something else, happy to pay the tax, or they have a tax structure which minimizes the upfront tax liability. They’ll say, ‘I want all my money or most of it closed.’ You then get to tell me what you’re prepared to pay to buy that business.”

“When you’re doing a leveraged buyout, the price is often determined by the financial markets, right? And as you know, interest rates have gone up recently, which means multiples have come down because the debt service on the money you have to borrow impacts what you can afford to pay for that business. So that’s just a story where we innovate something in the market, and then not only does our community start going out doing annuity deals—I can’t remember how many annuity deals have been done, hundreds, since we launched it—but now everyone’s talking about it.”

“It made me laugh. One of our competitors—not gonna name names—said, ‘Yeah, think about an annuity deal,’ and even told the same story I told back in the day verbatim as I just explained it. And again, I’m an abundant person. It just makes me proud that people will follow us like this. It’s like we’re the Alex Hormozi of the M&A space, right? We love that dude; he’s amazing. Every time he comes out with a new marketing strategy, everyone copies him, and they pretend it’s theirs. And he doesn’t care, right? I don’t care when people do it in our market.”

“Yeah, I agree. I think imitation is the largest form of flattery for sure, but I think it’s all about that abundance mindset. We’re in a market that’s continuously growing. And there’s also the mission you started this business around. There’s a lot of sellers as well, not just buyers, but there are all these people who really need someone to come and buy their business or they’re going to go out of business. So having competitors out there also coaching and training on this creates a bigger opportunity for sellers to get liberated. I think it’s all good.”

“Carl, can we talk about some of the new stuff we’re doing?”

“Yeah, cool. Go ahead.”

“One of the things I’ve been working on pretty much every day for the last month, and we should be finished with it pretty soon, is this new program specifically around consulting for equity. I mean, it’s such a huge thing that’s growing in interest. For anybody who’s listening, you may not know exactly what that is. It’s really learning how to do what you do best, but do it as a partner in a business rather than working for someone else. If you have the ability to solve a bleeding problem for a business or a business owner, there are ways to position yourself to get them to offer you equity to be a partner to solve that problem rather than just hire you as a consultant, freelancer, or W-2 employee.”

“There are so many people, I think, coming out of COVID, Carl, who saw that there’s a better way to live life. You have all these people—we call it the great resignation—where more people quit their jobs than ever before back in twenty-twenty, twenty-twenty-one, searching for maybe a new life, alternative job markets, or business ownership. And a lot of them have fallen flat on their face. A lot of people are having to get back to reality and go back to work and get a paycheck, especially with cost of living and inflation going up like it is.”

“But there’s a better way to do that than try to start a business or go drive for Uber or Instacart. That is to really understand the concept of how to position yourself and how to find the right businesses that are in the mindset of collaboration, looking for solutions to these bleeding problems, and be their savior at that point. Be able to do it in a way that’s not slimy or salesy but instead very magnetic. That’s what I teach specifically, that’s what you teach, and we’re coming out with a course called The Equity Partner. It’s gonna be pretty exciting.”

“Hey, man, you look like you’re in heaven right now with your—”

“I know, it’s this beautiful time in the morning. It’s about eight-fifty-five a.m. Austin time right now. The sun, there’s a little panel of glass in that corner where there’s no blind, where the sun just comes in, and I feel very holy. It’ll be gone in a few minutes. It’s just my five minutes a day. That’s why I bought the throne chair. I just feel holy when I’m doing this.”

“But going back to what you just talked about, this is really interesting because if I look at our Dealmaker Protege community, we have like, I don’t know, a thousand people in the community. What’s really cool about that inner circle mentorship group is about a third of the people that come in want to be owner-operators. They’re in a W-2 job, and they want to get their hands dirty, run the business. You and I don’t do that, but that’s a third of our members.”

“Another third of our members want to be owner-investors. They want to build portfolios like you and I. They want to do lots of deals or they want to do roll-ups. We’ll talk about roll-ups in a minute. Then another third, they don’t want to be the owner-investor or the owner-operator. They want to be a consulting equity partner. They want to have five, ten, or twenty different businesses that they have a meaningful investment in, ten to fifty percent or whatever is negotiated.”

“And what’s really interesting about that is they’re deploying a really powerful skill set or superpower, as we call it, that they have. They might be incredible at marketing like you, they might be a real badass CFO, or they might be a dealmaker where, let’s say, you’ve got a business owner who wants to scale by acquisition, doesn’t know how to do it, or doesn’t want to come into a program like Protege and learn because they’re busy running their business and they have other commitments. They’d rather outsource that to somebody that can take a share of the business and then run the process.”

“I know we’ve got Toby in our program who’s incredible with supply chain and goes into engineering companies and deploys that. One of the things you said, when I first heard you speak about this, was at a professional mastermind last year. You gave a presentation on this, and you could hear the jaws hitting the floor when you were talking. One of the things you said that has lived with me to this day is your magic phrase that you say to a business owner to get equity in their deals when they ask you. They say, ‘Hey, Chris, you’re an amazing marketer. I need you to come consult for me.’ You say, ‘I only consult with businesses that I own.'”

“I only consult the businesses that I own. I love that. Where did that come from? It’s one of the most powerful statements I’ve ever seen in a negotiation. Did it just come out of your mouth one day in a negotiation? Where did it come from?”

“No, it came from many years of making people rich. It came from many years of being the magic dust or the secret sauce in somebody else’s recipe. I think it came from the realization one day of finding that, okay, the reason why these have been successful, in most part, is because of my contributions, yet somebody else is getting all the upside. I realized at that point a lot of them were JV deals or maybe I was a very minority partner in projects as a freelancer. But I realized what I had access to, I realized what I was worth, and I realized at that moment that I never wanted to really work for someone ever again. I never wanted to make somebody else wealthy, I never wanted to build somebody else’s business for an exit without being able to get part of the upside. So I just decided one day, ‘I’m no longer for sale. I’m no longer for hire.'”

“Through this equity partner angle, Carl, what we’re teaching is the concept of getting people to offer you equity. It’s all about the concept of learning how to find the exact business owners that have bleeding problems that you can solve, finding them in the right mindset of collaboration, looking for help, seeking help. Not finding some random older gentleman in a wood-paneled office full of smoke who’s never had a partner in his life and would probably try to shoot you if you asked for equity, but instead, have people approach you and want to work with you and say, ‘What has to be true for us to work together?’ Or, ‘I saw what you did over there. I saw the problems you’re solving. I see the success you’re having. How can we do that together? How can you come work for me?'”

“Having that magnetic moment where someone needs you, wants you, and is looking for you to add value in their business, it’s so natural to just plant the seed and say, ‘Listen, I only work in businesses I own. Happy to have that conversation, but that’s the only way I work.’ At that point, you’re training people to offer you equity. You’re not going to have someone come back to you and try to hire you as a consultant. It’s all about stating the way that you’ll work, and it works like a charm, man.”

“We’ll teach inside the equity partner not just the equity partner angle of how to get people to offer you equity, but also a lot of different ways you can leverage the same skill in different types of deal-making. So, I’m glad that you’re collaborating with me on the content. We also have Dan Giordano, who’s been on your podcast, working with us on it. I truly believe the total addressable market for this is as big, if not bigger, than traditional business acquisition.”

“I think it’s ten times bigger.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll tell you why because, if I look at the market, there are about thirty million small businesses in the U.S. today, and about half of them are nonpayroll businesses. They’re LLC holdcodes or doing real estate or whatever. So, there are probably ten, maybe as high as fifteen million real companies. There are about two and a half million businesses for sale, and I reckon more than half of those don’t really want to sell. If you take the rest of the market, every one of those businesses, the ten or fifteen million, wants to scale, they want to be more profitable, and they’re lacking the people inside of those organizations to really move the needle.”

“So that’s the opportunity. I said to you when you told me about this, I fell out of my chair. I literally fell off my chair. I said, ‘Dude, that might be the biggest coaching thing that we ever do.’ I was on a Protege call while you were in Ireland on vacation, and I was talking about it a little bit, and people were like, ‘When is it coming out? We want to get into that.’ It’s going to be really, really cool.”

“Yeah, I think it’s going to be something that also levels the playing field a little bit. Sometimes small business M&A and buying companies require a certain financial profile for some transactions. Of course, people can come in and do annuity deals, but there are also a lot of really young people who have a lot of skills and a great track record who can get their foot in the door with consulting for equity, in ways that it may be more difficult for them to do traditional acquisitions.”

“You’ve got ten to fifteen million business owners who are potentially in some level of distress—not necessarily financially—but they’re hitting a plateau, they want something more, or they have a big problem to solve. Or maybe, like you gave an example, they want to grow through acquisition. There are so many different things people need, and these are cash-flowing businesses, profitable businesses. Believe it or not, that may be a limiting belief some people have, but we’ll break them of that, Carl. A lot of times when I talk about this, people say, ‘Why would someone want to partner with me?’ There’s an art to that, learning how to present yourself and position yourself correctly. We have the six P’s, but I don’t want to give it all away right now because I want you to take the course and benefit from it.”

“There are so many different ways to make yourself magnetic and show people that you’re capable. Demonstration builds reputation, and there are so many different ways to show people and create that magnetic feeling where people want to work with you. One of your buddies, Daniel Priestley, wrote a book called Becoming a Key Person of Influence, which is extremely relevant to this topic. So I’m really excited about it. There are so many business owners who think selling may be the solution, but when they get into conversations, they realize their businesses aren’t even viable, right?”

“You can’t buy it, you can’t finance it, the books aren’t in order, they’re not profitable, and there’s a solution for those businesses through consulting for equity by bringing someone in who has the answers to their problems, making them a partner, and then their world opens up so much from there. So, really excited about that journey. We’ve got some other cool stuff going down the pipeline as well, Carl, besides the equity partner.”

“Yeah, just a couple of things on equity partner before we move into other stuff. One of the reasons I’m really, really excited about equity partner is, number one, one of the things that we look at—we invented this—is what we call transfer value. When we look at a lot of businesses, one of the reasons why they’re not viable is because the owner is the business, right? So the owner doesn’t really have a business, they have a job in their own business. It was my good friend, Michael Gerber, who first started talking about this twenty years ago when he wrote The E-Myth.”

“That’s one of the reasons why most businesses fail. We know ninety-six percent of all startups fail within ten years. It’s because the owner is good at what the business does. The auto mechanic starts an auto repair shop, the chef starts a restaurant, the electrician starts an electrical contracting business. They’re really good at the technical work the business does, but they don’t have the skills to actually run the business—sales, marketing, operations, accountability, all those different things.”

“What I love about equity partner is when we go in and we teach people to go in with the skillsets, we can transfer the value of that business. We can take the owner out of the day-to-day operation and build systems and processes around them so that somebody can buy that business, and it works without the owner necessarily being in there.”

“Equity partner is the perfect segue to drive future M&A, and there are four ways equity partner can drive M&A in deals. Number one, we talked about it before, the equity partner can go in and be responsible for future deal-making—bolt-on acquisitions, tuck-ins, execute on a roll-up, all those different things. Then, there are three other ways a transaction can occur through a consulting-for-equity arrangement. Let’s say I owned a business, and ironically, this is what you did. I owned a business, I brought you in, we went fifty-fifty down the middle. It was a classic consulting-for-equity partnership, and we’re in this for the very long haul.”

“But the three options you and I had available at the time were: I could have had an option to buy you out for real value in the future after all the stuff you’ve done—wouldn’t ever do that; number two, you could have had the option to buy me out at some future valuation if you wanted to take the business forward and I didn’t; or number three, you get the business to a certain level, and then we sell it together into the market for a really premium valuation because of all the things we’ve done working together. I love equity partner as a segue into future M&A going forward. I think that’s going to be really cool.”

“We’re also seeing it as a solution in the middle of deal origination too, where you’re finding people you love their business, but you just can’t buy it. It’s lacking that transfer value, and being able to still make a deal happen because it’s another option available. We’re seeing it all the time, where it’s that catch-22: ‘I’d love to buy your business. Unfortunately, the bank’s not going to finance this acquisition because of X, Y, and Z,’ which is ironic because if I were in the business, I could solve X, Y, and Z and make it financeable.”

“We’re seeing people do these annuity option deals, consulting for equity, no money out of pocket, even getting paid retainer fees day one to get into the business they’re trying to acquire. It’s almost like a BIMBO, but an EIMBO, like an earn-in management buyout, where you’re getting in there, making the changes necessary to make the business financeable, and then being able to buy the business owner out from there. It’s revolutionizing people’s worlds. You’re able to take somebody whose path is doom—you’re not going to be able to sell your business, you don’t have the answers, otherwise you would have already done it—maybe the clock’s ticking, you’re sixty-three years old, and you’re able to help people exit at a predetermined multiple. It’s massive.”

“You and Brunson have the Brunson Allen method, we have the annuity option deal, we have the ability to get in there. Essentially, when you find the right business that has sunk equity, like buying a house that’s way undervalued, you can do that with businesses without paying a dime out of pocket. It’s cool because consulting for equity is not just a solution for dealmakers like us and people that we already teach, but it’s also a solution for someone who doesn’t want to make someone else rich and finance their boss’s boat.”

“It’s a great option for somebody to build a portfolio of cash-flowing passive income by doing the same thing they’ve done professionally for the last twenty years. It’s also a great option for agencies, marketing agencies, CFO firms, accountants, and attorneys to not just help their clients grow and exit, but instead participate in the upside. I mean, it’s such a crazy—”

“Yeah, I love that. I see a lot of businesses now, their offers are kind of contingent on X, right? So the CPA firm will get a percentage of the tax that the business saves. That’s a perfect example of an equity partner deal, where you can say, ‘Hey, I’ll save you a whole bunch of tax, and then we’ll have a lot more money to reinvest in the business, making it more valuable going forward.’ I see a lot of that in the startup world. A lot of startups, especially in tech, don’t have the capital to hire people to solve their problems, so they give away free equity. It’s the same process, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I think it’s the same process, but my suggestion is to stay away from startups. You also have resources you can leverage and trade for equity. There are scenarios where someone could afford to hire you, but they don’t want to spend the cash. It comes back to what makes us different in the marketplace around consulting for equity, Carl, is that equity partner angle. When you go around and ask for equity, you’re going to fail quite often. It’s not wonderful. It feels slimy. But instead, learning the art of getting people to offer you equity gives you so much more leverage, allows you to have more favorable equity positions in the company, and allows you to ask for more money upfront and get paid.”

“It’s a game of inches, Carl. Knowing exactly how to frame it, what to say, you’ve been on my trainings where I teach negotiating consulting for equity, learning how to balance the risk on both sides, learning how to reduce resistance during negotiations, learning how to maintain leverage the entire time, learning how to be the one taking the concession rather than the other party to make sure you’re going to win, going for a win-win but solving for your win first. I think it’s the little things that make the biggest difference.”

“I’m excited about it overall. I think we’re going to have tens of thousands of people over the next five years go through this program and be able to do some really cool things.”

“Yeah, I know. One of the other things we’re passionate about, and we just bought a company that does this, is investing in real estate. I get asked all the time, ‘Should I invest in business acquisitions or real estate?’ The real estate investing market is probably a thousand times bigger than the M&A space. I remember that house you bought, and you used the distribution from one of the businesses we own to make the down payment. That got me into doing real estate as well.”

“What I’ve noticed is there’s a massive transferable skillset from real estate investing to the M&A business market. Real estate investors know how to originate deal flow, build relationships, raise capital, and negotiate. The process of transferring ownership of real estate is very similar to transferring business ownership. We saw a lot of people coming from real estate coaching programs into Protege. We woke up one day and said, ‘We should buy—look, we never start companies. Let’s buy a real estate coaching company.’ So you and Ross went to that event in Tampa and met the owners of Partner Driven. Now we own that company. We kept Peter and Julie in as partners, and we’re really excited about that business.”

“What’s great about doing a roll-up, which is what we’re doing, is when you have one company that has a customer base and a product or offer, and then you buy another company that has a complementary customer base and offer, you can cross-sell, right? We’re going to start doing that. We bought the company in January, and now it’s July. We’ve been tweaking and optimizing it over the past six months, and now we can cross-sell. All of those Partner Driven clients are saying, ‘What’s this business acquisition stuff? I want to get into that.’ All of our proteges are saying, ‘Real estate investing. I’ve bought these business deals. I’m cash flowing distributions. I want to put that money into another asset class.’ That cross-pollination and cross-selling, we’re starting to do that now. That’s powerful, right?”

“Yeah, it’s exciting to see what we’ve done with Partner Driven, what we’re doing with it moving forward, and the synergies between the two. That’s the power of a roll-up. You teach roll-ups a lot, you talk about single silo roll-ups versus multi-silo roll-ups. The two we’re doing currently are multi-silo, around a certain customer avatar, selling to the same customer without the cost of customer acquisition, leveraging cross-selling opportunities.”

“Overall, I love the direction we’re going with Partner Driven. Peter, Julie, Rafa, and Chelsea are incredible. This comes back to the skill of consulting for equity. A lot of deals originate whether we acquire the whole thing or part of it. It comes down to a magnetic approach, where people come to us saying, ‘I see what you’re doing. We’re having this problem. We’re at this plateau. We’re looking for someone to partner with to take us to the next level.’ Most of our deals come from that. That’s the power of blending traditional deal-making with consulting.”

“It’s all about being in the right rooms. You said it really well. We’ve paid thirty to sixty thousand dollars a year to jump into a mastermind. We met in a mastermind like that. There’s a lot of power in getting in the right rooms.”

“On that note, when I rocked up to my house in Austin on Monday and saw the Two Comma Club X award, my wife took a picture of me holding it, and I sent it to our very good friend, Todd Brown. Todd’s a very good friend of ours, an incredible marketer. We met in his Top One mastermind. I sent him the message, and I said, ‘Todd, just wanted to send you another big thank you. Rocked up to my new Austin house with the family today, and this was waiting for me. You taught me what you taught me. I met Chris and some other amazing partners in Top One, and now we’ve built this massive eight-figure business.’ He was like, ‘Love it. So excited for you. Remember when I told you you would be big time and you are? Congrats, buddy. You’ve earned everything.'”

“From the godfather himself. We met in a mastermind, right? We have our own mastermind now, Upper Echelon. We meet four times a year. There are people in there doing billion-dollar roll-ups. We’re bringing capital providers to these events, they’re pitching. You look at what David Gerald’s doing, what we’re doing with Ross, what Aaron Gray is doing—it’s insane. The point of a mastermind, and we learned this with Todd, is how to think bigger. If I had told you a year ago we would have students doing billion-dollar roll-ups, people would have thought we were crazy. The next one we have is in six weeks in Mexico, Playa del Carmen, with the Upper Echelon people and guest speakers we’re bringing in. It’s going to be amazing.”

“You say it really well when we’re talking about this with our community. It’s all about finding your room of zebras. You and I are very unusual people in terms of how we think, and we’re not everyone’s cup of tea, but we found our room of zebras. They’ve got the same core values, the same mindset, we think way outside the box, and as a collective, we can change the world.”

“One hundred percent. Being a part of a group like this allows you to be around people who understand your ambitions. Usually, at home, people don’t understand. When someone asks, ‘What do you do for a living?’ For me, it’s a complicated answer, and I don’t want to open a big can of worms. But the way we think, the way we act, the way we carry ourselves—you’ve got to find people who are like you, and that’s why it’s so powerful.”

“Humble brag for a minute on you and what we’ve done with Protege. So many people have met their best friends just from joining Protege. We even had two proteges get married last week.”

“That’s right. I saw that.”

“Yeah, so I think that’s huge. There are so many people who are alone in their own thoughts. People don’t understand the fact that they want to do something that sounds absurd or isn’t normal. But there are others out there like you. Joining groups like Protege, people are finding not just their best friends, but future partners and accountability for the first time. They’re also getting validated, like, ‘Wow, what I think isn’t crazy. There are other people out there thinking like me.’ It changes everything.”

“We’re building some of the modules and lessons today around the equity partner angle specifically—mastermind groups, conferences, events, Facebook groups, local meetups, trade shows—how to find your perfect ideal scenario business owner who has a bleeding problem you’re able to solve, leveraging your resources in exchange for equity and getting them to offer you equity. What’s cool is these people have a mindset of wanting to better themselves. They have a mindset of collaboration and looking for solutions to a problem. People don’t just join masterminds for the hell of it because it’s expensive. People don’t just go to these big conferences for the hell of it because they’re expensive. We had Dealmaker Weekend three times last year, and people paid seventy-five hundred dollars to be in the room for three days, just to sit in the front row and hang out with us backstage. It’s an investment.”

“My uncle taught me this many years ago: ‘Hang out with the people you want to be in ten years.’ I also heard from another mentor, ‘Always seek to be in bigger playgrounds.’ I also learned from someone who taught me consulting: you consult for millionaires, don’t ever consult for thousandaires. The same problem in time is so much more valuable for people who have more money and success. Masterminds are where you find a seat at the table with bigger players. Mastermind programs like we have are where you find your room of zebras.”

“Yeah, great. Well, Carl, I’ve got another podcast I’m hopping on in just a minute, so I’ve gotta run.”

“Yeah, no worries, buddy. Hey, appreciate you coming on and riffing. We should do this once a month because there’s so much stuff we’re doing right now. We should tell our viewers all the cool things we’re doing. Really appreciate you, man. Have a great day down in Jacksonville.”

“For everybody else, hope you enjoyed the latest edition of the Creative Dealmaker Podcast. We will see you next time. And until then, bye for now.”

“Hey, by the way, if you’re listening to this on Spotify or iTunes, you can always go to YouTube and watch the video because I know everyone wants to see Carl looking like an angel on his throne. So if you’re listening on Spotify without video, you can always go to YouTube, type in Creative Dealmaker Podcast, or search Carl Allen Official, and the playlists are all there with all the episodes and extras.”

“Thanks for the plug, man. See you soon.”

“Yes, sir. Thanks.”