Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:34
What was the reason? Start with the thought behind that. At what point were you like, hey, I want to acquire billionaires.com.
Richard C. Wilson: 15:43
Yeah, I bought it in 2023. And I started negotiating for it in 2011. And the thought process was I had already been going on Family Office Club for four years and realized the power of positioning myself as a top five or a top three resource in the ultra-wealthy niche of family offices. If I could replicate that and be at the center of strategies and mental models for billionaires, it would be powerful. And so I realized that four years in and the vision is, you know, many people like an 800 person conference, they’ll say, who’s read like 50 or 100 books and like a lot of people raise their hands.
And I said, who’s read more than 7 or 8 books from a billionaire like actually authored by the billionaire, and no hand went up out of 7 or 800 people. And so all of us are basically being convinced by mass media to read books that sound exciting and were marketed hardcore and made the New York Times best seller list. But why are we reading books from the equivalent of a Duke University basketball player? When Michael Jordan has written a book like I don’t care how badly it was written and how badly it was marketed, I only want to read the books by billionaires to begin with, until I’ve read all 247 of those. And so basically, part of this is like, I don’t care if no one else ever puts value on what we’re doing with it, because I know I’m going to get at least one ridiculously smart idea by studying all these billionaires.
But I also know that if I outwork everyone in the niche and I’ve got like seven ways that we’re doing the brute force approach on this, I can share in a second if you think your audience would care. But like, yeah, yeah, so like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:25
This will be part of your book when you come out with it, so we might as well talk about it.
Richard C. Wilson: 17:29
Yeah. Yeah. So like one way is we’re interviewing 100 billionaires publicly and we’re sharing the interviews transparently. A lot of people that say, oh, I’ve studied 300 billionaires. And here’s how what they do, it’s like, okay, you studied them.
Like, what does that mean? Like, you asked me to study them for you. I don’t know, it doesn’t mean anything these days. So like we’re showing the actual names, the actual interviews, we’re doing 100 of them. That’s very hard because these people are busy in private.
The other thing we’re doing is reading all 247 books, either inaudible or reading the actual book, not a book summary that billionaires have authored. And we’re ranking them. And we’ve got the top ten books ranked. I’ve read 120 of them as I get through all 247, then we’ll rank the top 50 or so.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:10
Where are they on here? Now, if you go to.
Richard C. Wilson: 18:13
Billionaires.com/books, then you can see the top.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:18
Ten.
Richard C. Wilson: 18:18
That we like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:19
The best. Okay cool. Awesome.
Richard C. Wilson: 18:21
We’ve also found that there are 60 info graphics on billionaires. And those are linked at the top of the website there. And then we’ve also found that on YouTube, there are 986 billionaire talks on YouTube publicly available. So what we did is we took the time to transcribe all 986 talks, and then we fed them into an AI, a custom AI tool, so that you can bounce your strategies, your challenges, and your plans against the collective wisdom of what every billionaire has said on YouTube. And basically get coaching from the collective wisdom of billionaires.
And so when we do our in-person events, our summits, we try to have two billionaire fireside chats or strategy sessions at each of those events and have them in person at the event as well. So that’s an example of like, we’re doing so many things that if we keep up at this pace, it’ll be hard to catch up with how deep we went down the billionaire rabbit hole. Obviously, Forbes has put out stuff on him forever, and Bloomberg puts out a ton of stuff on billionaires. But our goal is to be number one long term and be top three. You know, if we’re not already in terms of like the number one source, because Bloomberg covers a bunch of stuff and so does Forbes.
But Billionaires.com is dedicated to just going super deep down this rabbit hole of billionaire scaling strategies, mental models, mindset, etc.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:47
Yeah.
Richard C. Wilson: 19:48
Sorry it was such a big ramble.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:49
No, this is great. You know, because I was going to ask because I know in the videos I watch, you do talk about different tools and software and specifically books, and I took notes on that. But this is great. So people can check out billionaires.com/books. We can see the top ten here.
And it’s kind of what I’m thinking about. You know I know you have three daughters I have two. And one of the things I want to do with them, you know, right now at this point in time, my oldest is going to be a freshman in high school. And I’m like, listen, this is the best education you can get. Like these type of books.
And so I said I’ll see what you think of this. But I said, listen, I’m going to give you my curriculum, okay. My curriculum. And it’s going to be like 14 books a year. And if you finish all, you’ll get paid for each one you finish.
And if you finish all 14, you’re going to get paid like a lump sum even more. So I’m thinking of what curriculum, what should be in the curriculum. And so I’m going to check these out. Like so I’m curious for your daughters what you would include. So I have so far she’s read How to win friends and Influence people teen.
There was like a teen girl version of How to Win Friends and Influence People. The Four Agreements is on that list. 80 over 20 sale I want 80 over 20. Like I think it’s a foundation. You mentioned that with like kind of the when you discover this family office, like why would I go over why would I go after 99%, when this 1% will allow me to raise the funds.
So I want something on 80, 2080, 20. Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall is a good one. Richard Koch has some 8020 books as well, so that’s going to be on the list. But I’m curious what’s on. And I’m going to look at this like I love 0 to 1.
I’ve listened to Sam Zell. Am I being too subtle? Some of these other ones I have not listened to. So I’m going to have to check out what would be on your list for your daughters.
Richard C. Wilson: 21:48
Yeah, so I just sent you what’s on my list on the chat function.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:52
On.
Richard C. Wilson: 21:52
Zoom. It’s a Dropbox link to a word document. And what I tell my daughters, we talk about this often.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:59
Can I bring it? Can I show this live?
Richard C. Wilson: 22:00
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Go for it.
Okay, so what I tell them is that if you know our family values, which are at the top of that word document and you live by those, and if you we read the Arnold be useful book Together. And so I summarized it in this word document. And then every year we read The Success Principles by Jack Canfield book together. And I summarize those here. I told them that like, don’t believe anything that anyone says to you in your life that doesn’t ring true to you and don’t believe your teachers or any authority figure too much.
But if you live by our family values and you can live by everything on this one piece of paper here, then you’re going to be amazingly successful and you’ll be in the top 1%. Because I think the combination between these three sources is so comprehensive and powerful that it doesn’t make it seem too overwhelming. You know, at the same time, exactly what you said, you know, reading maybe the top 100 out of 247 billion books might be more realistic for most people than trying to read all 247. It’s taken me a couple of years so far to get to 120. But yeah, totally agree with everything you’re saying.
Like making sure your kids are groomed to be thinking differently than most people you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:22
So we have.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:23
The Success Principles by Jack Canfield on here and the BS by Arnold Schwarzenegger. What else? Any others that you’d be like, okay, I, you know, for kids, I.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:34
Mean, you know, those are those.
Richard C. Wilson: 23:35
Are the two that I’m, I’m most focused on. But I talk to them about negotiations. I talked to them about the logo I was creating this morning for this deep due diligence and diligence investors kind of subgroup that we’re building out. Like I talked to them about gross revenue, royalty and investments, etc. So but as they get older, you know, my oldest one’s only 12.
Then I’ll probably introduce some more of these books. But right now I’m just trying to get it really deep in their brain, like the success principles, Arnold stuff and our values, because knowing that cold is like a foundation and then other stuff on top of it could be architecture on which way they want to build up. You know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:16
I saw I know you did an interview with Tony Robbins. You mentioned Mark Cuban. Which interview sticks out? I’ve seen you’ve interviewed Jeff Hoffman. He was a keynote at one of your events as well.
Which person sticks out that maybe a piece of advice that you remember from gleaning from them?
Richard C. Wilson: 24:37
Yeah, I think that the two that immediately come to mind was Jeff Hoffman speaking to him. He talked about figuring out what motivates your team. And in one case, what motivated one of his managing directors is that their mom lived in a trailer park, still currently and never lived in a house, but always sacrificed things to make things work for them as a kid. So his goal was to buy her a house one day. So he said, okay, over the next seven years, let’s build this division.
And if you work your butt off and do this, we’ll go and buy your mom a house. And so they did that, and the person worked way harder than if they had just given them a raise or a bonus, etc. and so he likes to motivate people that way. Larry Connor is a real estate billionaire, and he said 90% of problems are people problems and 90% of opportunities are people opportunities. And I’ve seen that thread, you know, pretty commonly. And then Tony Robbins said that proximity is power.
So he made $400 million off of one transaction just by being around the right people. And that’s my point with Family Office Club, I see it as a perpetual learning machine. Selfishly, for myself and anyone who comes to our events, you’re learning from the smartest people in business. But also if you study the mindsets of millionaires and billionaires and you read all these books, it’s just good quality input for your brain. And like, you’re just going to be thinking higher level thoughts, not be thinking small.
So that’s why I do that. I think it’s just fun to play with that type of stuff.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:04
I’m fascinated by the evolution. Right. You know, because even what Google started is not what they ended up being. And so it started really as this idea to provide content. And that kind of gained traction.
And you were, you know, sold advertising. What was the next kind of piece that I don’t know, when the events, maybe the next key pivotal moment, maybe when you started events for it or what? What was next after that?
Richard C. Wilson: 26:33
Yeah, yeah. Next we started our data division. So we have family office databases. So we will sell like a lead list of family offices that exist in certain countries or have certain investment interests or a list of angel investors. And so that took off before the events.
And then when the events started taking off, we were selling event tickets. So we were selling, you know, tickets for $2,500 or for $1,400, and then our revenue would go way up and then like way down, go way up and way down. And we had no portal. And what really was the next turning point for our company is doing more of a membership model, because now the quality of our room is much higher. If you’re not a member, you can’t come to our events.
You can’t just come.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:15
You can’t.
Richard C. Wilson: 27:15
Pay separately. You have to be a member.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:17
Yeah, yeah, you.
Richard C. Wilson: 27:18
Got to be a member because we don’t. It’s really about building relationships, and people who aren’t dedicated to the space are just not going to do well. So otherwise you have someone coming in and they’re in a stressed out three week raise, and they got to raise $3 million, or their partners will be upset with them, and they’re coming in and trying to hard pitch everyone. And then it’s kind of like people don’t even want to like the more high, stressed, anxious, rushed, high pressure you are, the less anyone wants to invest in anything you’re doing, right? Like the person who’s successful and has great momentum and is in demand, there’s a feeling of like, oh, there’s something super valuable and I’m passionate about it, so I’m excited to tell you about it if you want to hear.
But I’m also not trying to twist your arm and get you to invest by today at 4:00 PM like I just met you, right? And like, even if you’re in the market to buy a Mercedes or a Rolex or a vacuum and you’re going to the airport to go to Scottsdale for a long weekend and someone’s like, hey, I got this Rolex. You want to buy it? You might be like, who are you? Like, what’s.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:10
What’s the context?
Richard C. Wilson: 28:11
Here?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:11
Like, no.
Richard C. Wilson: 28:12
I don’t want. No, not from you. You know, it’s like. So that’s really key to our space, I think.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:18
Yeah. I was on a early date with my wife in a place of Chicago. It was a ping pong bar, but it was in this, like, really sketchy area. And literally a guy walked into the bar with. And he opened his coat and had, like, he had, like, stuff on it.
So that’s what I picture. He, like watches or whatever. We’re like, no, we’re good. You know?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:37
Yeah. No, no.
Richard C. Wilson: 28:38
Even if you’re in the market for that exact thing, it’s kind of like the context matters more than the content. So like another way to say it is who refers the deal to you might matter more than the merits of the deal. And Robert Cialdini is scientifically shown that it’s proven that the relationship matters a multitude more than the merits of a deal. And they’ve also shown that meeting in person makes it 16 times more likely for you to close any transaction. So imagine if you’re selecting a wife, buying a house, investing half $1 million.
Do you think you want to meet in person? For sure. Way more than buying a Rolex. So it’s way more than 16 times more effective to meet in person. If you’re raising capital, looking for a joint venture, looking to allocate your money, then trying to do stuff online using some sharp AI tool, there’s definitely a lot of uses for AI, but it can’t replace a meeting in person.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:32
Richard, I know you know, you don’t do this alone. You have a team behind you. And you mentioned Jeff Hoffman about motivating the team. I’d love to hear a little bit about the team and maybe some of the key hires, not people wise, but like position wise, that you put in place to run the family office club and also billionaires comm.
Richard C. Wilson: 29:55
Sure.
Richard C. Wilson: 29:55
Well, one key thing is that there’s a lot of investor clubs out there, but a lot of them don’t host much in terms of in-person events. A lot of them just have a local 30 person angel investor meeting or an annual event with several hundred people. One of our unique edges is we brought on a lot of talent, and we spend a lot on payroll for event management talent, so we’re hosting these 16 in-person events per year. The other side is really technology. We have 17 million social media followers and group members, and we have, you know, six full time people in that division that are constantly, you know, helping us tweak our digital presence, our web portal, our mobile app, etc. I think those are the two big edges.
I think we’re the best marketers in the world, in the family office space and very well positioned that way. We have more thought leadership out than all of our competitors combined that I know of. And I think that the most important makeups of the team, is having just really sharp people on the event management side and then on the tech marketing side, and then the rest of it is the mentality of our people. So we want to have people who on the sales side are on a moderate salary, so they’re respected but really are unhappy if sales are going poorly and they’re very happy when sales are going well. So we’re both unhappy at the same time if we hit a speed bump.
So we’re both leaning forward saying, how do we fix this? And that’s essential. I think that you need to be overly generous when things are amazing, but slightly harsh when they’re not, so you’re both feeling some pain. If the salesperson gets such a salary, they’re never really in pain. They’re kind of good.
Either way, you’re sunk. You’re like, it’s not going to go, well, you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:38
I want to walk through.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:39
You’ve seen some pretty in help facilitate on a variety of levels, certain deals. And so I want to walk through a few. The one I mentioned in the very beginning, which was the $15 million in the medical space investor. If you want to talk a little bit about that.
Richard C. Wilson: 31:56
Yeah, sure. So this was a brother or sister came to me and they sold a business in the healthcare space for $15 million. And we do some of our investments into medical and dental practices. And we had a group with four locations in the dental space doing about 15 million a year in revenue. And they were looking for capital.
So we structured I invested myself and we structured a gross revenue royalty transaction where the investors get their money back off the top line revenue, and they get a multiple on their money. Sometimes we structure those with a kicker on the end, etc., and we’ve done about a dozen or a dozen and a half of those deals now, and we took them from finding that deal, finding 3 or 4 other deals to get it closed. But the important takeaway for investors is that, you know, consider gross revenue royalties, but also consider if you made your money in a niche and you’ve spent decades of your life in it, overinvest a little bit in that niche because you can conduct better due diligence, have more high conviction, and if you haven’t made your money in the niche, find someone who’s spent 30,000 hours in it. Show them the deal first and they may ask to invest in it. If it’s amazing, they may see the value right on the surface, but they’ll also ask questions you would never know to ask, like, oh well, how are you coding this for medical reimbursement?
Or what’s your percentage of Medicaid out of your total revenue? Or, you know, like stuff that like these little nuanced questions that pinpoint key issues. And so it’s really important to bring in investors like that. And that’s how I de-risk deals. But also sometimes close transactions is I look for that person who spent 30 years in the niche, and maybe they want to take half the deal or the whole deal and invest with me.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:35
I’ve heard some of your talk, some of your videos, and you have some interesting ways of structuring deals specifically. You talked about de-risk, and I know I don’t remember the scenario, but it was kind of you said we pay back all the investors. I don’t get paid until all the investors get paid back and then I’m paid back. If you want to talk a little bit about why and how you structure these things.
Richard C. Wilson: 34:02
Yeah.
Richard C. Wilson: 34:04
Yeah. Yeah, sure. So there’s several ways to de-risk deals. And the very first one is to always see if there’s some way to have some sort of collateral in the deal. So many times I’ve been asked to invest in something and we say, well, okay, we’re flying a little bit naked.
If this whole thing collapsed, is there any medical equipment that’s free and clear? Is there any real estate? Are there medical receivables, insurance, receivables rolling in every 60 days and try to have half or all of your investment backed by some sort of collateral, so you’re not totally wiped out if things go poorly just by asking, which is usually free to do. If you do it in a polite way, many times you can get some sort of collateral behind your investment. So that’s one strategy that hopefully anyone could go out and use.
But I think what you’re referring to is that with structured deals in all different ways with royalties to make the other side comfortable. So with one transaction, we’ve acquired more single word domain names in the medical space than anyone else. So we own neurologist com dermatologist com parasitologist com obstetricians com etc.. And the search volume for these terms has gone up anywhere between 30 and 100 plus percent in the last five years. As digital assets grow in value and more people look online for who’s the best dermatologist in their area.
Etc. And when we got that deal done, I had invested a couple hundred thousand dollars. So I went to one investor who said yes to our deal because of the structure. And I feel like investors don’t realize how important it is to structure a deal. Well, and people raising capital think, oh, I just need to get in front of the right investors.
It’s like, yeah, but you mess it up every single pitch. If your structure is horrible and if it’s average, it’s just sitting there on the shelf. You want your structure sweating for you, not just sitting there. And so this is a structure that’s sweat for us. And we basically said, hey, we put our couple hundred grand in as we get equity stakes and flip out of these domain names and get strategic equity in people who want the best Fifth Avenue real estate online for dermatology or neurology, etc. as we get that, you get all your money back first, and then we get our money back and then we’re pro rata going forward.
So let’s say we only get, you know, $300,000 back if they put in $300,000 and I put in $200,000, I lose all of my money and I’m bald and they don’t get a haircut at all. You know, they’re not touched. And so it shows them that, like, hey, if this thing gets messed up, it was my fault. This is my idea, and I’m running the ship. So if we run aground and poke a hole in the boat, then shame on me and I should bleed before you bleed, etc. and win after you win.
And the lesson there is that investors should win at the same time. Ideally they should be de-risked first and then they win a bit before the person who may be structured or is running the deal. So I think that’s like super critical. And so many investors, even if they’re worth $100 million, they don’t think about structure, they don’t know how to structure deals. They just have no experience in it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:50
What’s also interesting about that, Richard, is that you are invested alongside with them, right? So they’re like, okay, this person trusts because you could structure it and it’s just you’re getting the investment, but they’re like, oh, this guy’s putting his hard earned money in this deal as well, right?
Richard C. Wilson: 37:07
So yeah, obviously.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:09
There’s something there too.
Richard C. Wilson: 37:11
Yeah.
Richard C. Wilson: 37:11
Yeah. And a lot of people will say, oh yeah, I’ve got skin in the game. And like almost everyone will say that. It’s so popular to say if anyone’s read a book on capital raising, like, oh, you got to have skin in the game. But a lot of times it’s fake skin in the game.
So you have to watch out for that. As an investor, somebody might be syndicating a deal and be like, oh yeah, I’ve got skin in the game. I’m putting up 10% of the money. But it’s like, are they really? Because if you’ve got a deal and let’s say it’s a big deal, $100 million and they’re using 70% debt, so you only need 30 million equity to buy this $100 million deal.
Well, then that means that 10% of that 30 million of equity is they’re putting in $3 million, which sounds pretty good. But if their asset management fee is 2% on the full value of the asset, you know they’re getting $2 million in year one just from the asset management fee. They might have an acquisition fee of 1 or 2%, a financing fee of 1 or 2%. They might have negative risk on day one. Right.
So it’s sometimes fake skin in the game you have to watch out for because then they’re really just trying to trick you.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:08
Another one that we were talking about before we hit record was $150 million. Family. And what happened there?
Richard C. Wilson: 38:18
Yeah. So that family came to us. Did not have a family office. They had watched, like all of our videos on YouTube. We’ve got this free mini-series called How to Start a Family Office mini-series where we give away some of our most powerful strategies, and they had watched all of that.
So the 67 year old father came to me and said, hey, my son’s in his 20s. He wants to start running our family office. I’m a little timid about it. How do we train him? How do we find opportunities through you?
So we started showing them the best of the best of what we see within our club, and setting them up with a little five minute meetings when they came to our events, and they’ve allocated to several seven figure deals. But importantly, and one of the deals, unexpected things happened. No fraud, but had to work out of an unexpected like permitting entitlement situation, and we were able to de-risk the deal 100%, get all of their capital out of the deal, and reallocate it into a different deal just by working out terms with the capital provider. And it was really a win-win for both parties. And they didn’t get wiped out or damaged at all or lose any money on that deal.
But importantly, it was about the father and the son being comfortable with. How do we look at deals as a family? And many times they brought me one deal I won’t forget because it was a hard money lending deal and they said, oh, this deal looks great. We’re thinking of putting $1 million in it. The returns are 6% and it’s backed in first position by real estate.
And I said, well, do not do that deal because the whole world is getting 9 to 13 or 15% in first position on real estate. So whoever shown you that deal is keeping a huge amount and probably charging you fees on top of keeping a huge amount of that spread, and you can find multi-billion dollar institutional groups that will pay out seven, eight, 9% plus. So 6%, you know, probably not the best to go with that group. So that’s just a quick case study example of sometimes how we help investors.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:09
I’ve heard.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:10
Various explanations. I want a family offices. Can you just tell people how do you when things family office. How do you define a family office?
Richard C. Wilson: 40:24
Sure. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that there’s three types of them. But a family office is really an investment slash wealth management solution for the ultra-wealthy. So if you’re worth $500,000 and you make a mistake and you file a tax return late, or don’t complete great due diligence on one of your ten investments, you might lose $50,000 on one of those ten investments, or you might get pinged by the IRS on a $2,000 penalty at worst. But if you’re worth 5 million.
Penalties are worse. If you’re worth 50 million. Now it’s $100,000. Mistake on one of those little mistakes is at least $100,000 mistake oftentimes. And that would have paid for a full time team to watch out for you play better offense, play defense, file regulatory paperwork.
I have three dozen LLCs. Some of my clients have 130 LLCs. And when you have dozens or thousands of employees, you’re more likely to make a mistake. And every mistake is likely to cost you much, much more. So that’s why you need a holistic solution when it comes to family offices.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:23
Yeah, and it puts other things at risk as well, I imagine.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:27
Right. Yeah.
Richard C. Wilson: 41:28
Yeah, exactly. And that’s it’s something that people usually realize the hard way just after like a deal going bad or just realizing they’re doing dumb deals and not knowing how to structure them or not, knowing they can negotiate on the fees, etc..
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:43
There was another you know, we’re talking about brute force reciprocation for a second. A billionaire that you ended up doing some work with. Talk about that journey a little bit.
Richard C. Wilson: 41:56
Sure.
Richard C. Wilson: 41:56
Yeah. We first got introduced through a member of our club. They came to one of our events a year later, came to another one. We kept in touch, tried to ask them what they were looking for, how to add value to them. And it took six years of them coming to 3 or 4 events.
And then following us on, on social media. And then they came in and we got our first deal done after six years of working together. We’ve since closed 19 transactions with this billionaire and his his team. And we continue to, you know, been to his house 20 times and continue to discuss how to work together further. But it took half a decade.
So sometimes we have deals come together. And 3 to 6 weeks later we end up doing something together. Most of the time it’s more like, you know, 3 to 4 months or 3 to 8 months, or it could be 3 to 8 years, and you have to be fine with that. Like if you’re in the space and you’re you only care about people that can invest with you. In the next three days or three weeks, people will feel and smell that stench of stress and anxiety, and they’ll just back off and not want to work with you at all sometimes.
If there’s a genuine deadline, you’d be like, hey, we’ve got a little bit of a short fuse on this deal, but there’s a way to say that politely, professionally and be like, you know, this is probably not a fit for you because, you know, I just met you, Jeremy. But, you know, we do have this deal closing in three weeks. Casey, here’s someone that maybe has some money that they really want to put to work short term. But this is what we’re doing. This is what makes us unique.
And in a single sentence, you need to tell them what’s compelling, high conviction, unique about your value add process. If you can’t do that in a sentence, then for the busiest of people, it’s going to be tough to position yourself.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:29
I’m going to bring up this site here again, which is Billionaires.com. We’re on the books page. I’d love to hear what you’ve experienced firsthand from billionaires, maybe how they think or some learnings from that that’s maybe changed your belief system or what you do.
Richard C. Wilson: 43:48
Yeah. I think the one of the most common ones, which you think about it, is relatively base for the definition of what a billionaire is. But I think one of the most common ones that’s powerful is rejecting when anybody starts to say, well, this is how it works in our industry, or that’s not realistic. This is the norm. Or, well, everybody does it this way.
So we should do that. When the ultra-wealthy hear that, that are worth 50 or 100 million plus, especially at the billionaire level, there is some cases where, yes, you have to have a mobile app that is like table stakes to play the game, but in many, many cases having to do things that everyone because everyone else does, it means you’ll be average by definition. So when people told them, no, that’s impossible, they would lean forward and say, well, maybe that is the way to go then, because everyone thinks it’s impossible. And if I could pull it off, I’d be solving a huge problem. And some of them instantly reject and are frustrated by the close mindedness of people taking no for an answer or people that laughed in their face.
And this is a very common thing that it’s retrained and rewired my brain a bit. I was just talking to even one of our team members about recruiting someone who once did some consulting work for us, and was like a very small, easy example of how I see this day to day, even with people on my own team where I said, hey, maybe we’re going to try to hire that person and bring them onto our team. And the response was, oh no, they’re not available. They’ve been working with this other team for a year. It’s like, well, that doesn’t mean anything.
We can still hire them to our team, you know? And it’s just like this closed mindedness of like, everybody is doing this. I must follow the herd or like, oh, I don’t know if that’s possible. It’s like, you have to break out of that and not be held back by other people’s limiting beliefs and thoughts and norms and standards and all that stuff, and throw all that out the window and lean forward on things that people say is impossible or not practical, etc. and just focus on things that are exciting that will move the needle.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:51
You know, Richard, I’m on this page. So I have one last question, which is the books page. And this is ranked, by the way, in order of what, Richard, this is an Amazon rank. This is actually what Richard got the most value out of in order. Right.
So I know after this I’m going to go through the ones that are not in my audible. I’m going to go add to my Audible not on this list because I know there’s other ones. What’s 1 or 2 others that is not in this top ten list that people should definitely check out and also include talk about your book for a second as well.
Richard C. Wilson: 46:29
Yeah, sure. I think the number one that I can’t recommend enough is Arnold’s Be Useful. He just goes over six principles, and the book is not only, like comical and funny to read in some in some parts. My kids loved it. I just skipped over a couple of the swear words that were in there when they came up.
When I was reading out loud, obviously, and studying that book and reading it multiple times, I think was pure gold. And then on that last page, he showed everything is available on Audible except for the Warren Buffett annual reports for the last 60 years. That one you have to buy the big, thick book. You might have to buy it used on eBay or Amazon if you can’t find it new in print anymore. But those are two of the most powerful.
David Rubenstein has several books out there, and I recommend checking out his different books because he has a style of interviewing other leaders who are often billionaires. But he is a billionaire himself, too, so it’s a unique dynamic. It’s almost like, you know, Tony. Tony Robbins had a billionaire interview series or something. So those would be a couple of the kind of footnotes of extra ones to check out, I think.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:37
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:38
First of all, Richard, I want to thank you. Thank you for sharing your journey, your knowledge, your lessons, your stories. This is fascinating. I want to encourage everyone to check out family offices.com. There’s a lot of free resources they have on their YouTube channel.
They have them. You can check them out on familyoffices.com too. And if you’re interested in, you know, actually joining their events and becoming a member, there’s a link there. Also check out billionaires.com. There’s a lot of amazing free resources there Richard, thank you so much.
Richard C. Wilson: 48:06
Yeah. Appreciate you having me here.
