#216 - The Dark Side of Going All In on Your Business | Dr. Thomas J. Powell

0:00 All right, so we were just talking about going to Chile. And I think if you wouldn't have said that, Mr. Dr. Thomas Jane Powell, if you wouldn't have just said Chile, I would have my country self who grew up poor would have tried to enunciate Chile or something crazy like that. So you were you you were talking about you're going skiing, but I want to talk about skiing more, but this is something that comes into my head as an entrepreneur. You said they're having a great snow snow season. And where I instantly go is Kudos for you for building the life that when another continent is having a good snow season, you've built your life, that you get to go.

0:41 Yeah, I have. And thank you very much for that. And thanks for mentioning it. Yes, not only there, every season I ski in Europe with some of the best professionals in the history of world skiing, guys named Franz Klomer, Franz Weber, a number of other Olympians and World Cup skiers, and we do this and we also bring them here to the United States. I I live a life of where I ski between eighty to one hundred and twenty days a year of skiing. It's my passion, it's what I love. And as and it goes through the different, you know, hemispheres as well as The continents. Where'd that come from? So you sitting here with all this professional life experience that we're gonna go to the depths today and we're gonna talk a lot about you. Guys like you always try to redirect and make it about other people. You've built lives that way, right? However, it seems like this skiing thing must be really foundational and fundamental to like tier one.

1:29 It is it is foundational. As a matter of fact, I was just I just had done a speech about maybe a month ago on it about resilience. And I tied it all back because I think, you know, tenacity and resilience are probably two of the key factors that make founders ~ successful because the resilience side, the tenacity is to keep going, and the resilience is to keep going after your brain has said you must stop now, or your family's telling you you must stop now, or good sense is telling you you must stop now. And that resilience is you get back up, you get back up after you've been knocked down. And it's who stands up one more time. And you re just read it over and over and over again. And skiing taught me that at a young age because skiing and snowboarding any snow sport is about falling down and getting back up.

2:12 and the good skiers are about getting a coach and about learning and about applying all these various things. Cause most people get to be at best an average skier, and that's great. It's fun. Right. But to become really truly a professional and an expert and and live in that space, that takes a tremendous amount of purposeful effort with coaching, with feedback, and a lot of falling down. Yeah. Do a lot of these people I don't know, you probably started skiing young, I'm assuming. Pretty young, yeah. So the the superstars, if we're looking at a downhill slalom or alpine, it in their twenties, it's like they're peaking like mid to late twenties, what it seems like in skiing. Maybe it's thirties, I don't know, but so they started young.

2:56 Absolutely. Yeah, Yeah. Michaela's a great example. So you take Michaela Schiffer, who's who's arguably the best skier right now, ~ competitive skier in the world. She's won the most World Cups ever. ~ and and you get Lindsay Vaughn, who really is probably one of the strongest skiers, especially female skiers ever. She's phenomenal. And both of those started very young. ~ You know, Lindsay started on a very small ski hill, like the nonprofit ski hill that I run is also a very small ski hill. And we've got kids out there skiing at, you know, two and three years old. And some of those ha get the just absolute passion about it, or their parents do, but in most cases it's the the kid.

3:38 And you just can't get out of the snow. And that they they just live it because you do live it. You are skiing seven days a week. You're traveling to different hemispheres. It's an expensive sport. You're pulling your family into it and you know, it's just a it's a it's a great experience. But becoming Olympian in almost all categories is My brain went to the story that Michael Phelps talks about. About I think he went I d I don't know the number, it was something like twelve or eighteen or twenty years where he didn't miss one day in the pool. Nope. You don't. Right? And and so it's not just a Cool. He had to do recovery. And that's a big part of what I also talk about is, you know, today now at my age, I spend roughly twenty one ~ hours a week on recovery, on taking care of my body, the yoga, on the acupuncture, on the massages, the PT, all of that stuff because I've been a c you know competitive athlete all this time, as well as everything else I do, and longevity is a big part of it.

4:36 So that is part of that training, not just being on the ski hill. So, what do we do with that when you get all these clients? We're going to talk about the founder's office today, about the advocate. We're going to talk about SEC cases. ~ when people come to you and they want to talk about being successful, or they want they have this big question on how do I do something?

5:19 What to do? Does your brain wanna go ahead and skip to the finish line to just tell them all the things? No, I think the journey's too much fun. Even for you. Even for me. Yeah. I I just I we do help them see around the corner. So we talk about that as, you know, the founders office is a relative new offshoot of one of our companies. ~ and it's because we've had, you know, over five hundred founders that we've helped throughout their ~ their journeys. We've done over three billion dollars of deployment of capital. And so in that, we've seen a lot of stories. We've experienced a lot of stories. We've got a lot of scars. I mean, literally a lot of scars. And so in that, n all of that stuff is not about teaching them specifically, because it's about, it's about helping them recognize that they've already got the knowledge somewhere around them.

6:09 And how do they do that? But it's also recognizing that their advisors, ~ we talk about this a lot with the as a doctor, you have to name stuff. It's just, it's required. When you get the degree, they actually say, okay, now you're gonna have to go out there and name stuff. So I named this affliction called the founder's isolation paradox. And what it is is that all the people that are surrounded around the founder, even if they do talk, they're still centered around the nucleus of the founder. So you've got your attorneys, you've got your accountants, and everything that goes in, they may actually even talk to each other about it, but they're not fundamentally looking at the LLC of how it impacts the tax accounting five years down the road. And so we help them, ~ founders to actually look at those questions that are just today, but also what's going to be thirty years from now.

6:54 How does that set up? How does it do with your family? How are you getting your kids to not hate you, you know, ideally in the future, and or your spouse not to hate you, or your ex spouse not to hate you? I mean, all of that stuff is really critical within there. What's going on with so I have a note. Every once in a while on podcast, I'll come up with something. I'll put it into perplexity or into chat or something like that. So I just I just decided, since I'm talking to the council of millionaires and billionaires here. I just real quick, I put something in and it just occurred to me. I said, We're gonna talk about building wealth, entrepreneurs, ~ coaching on a business level today. We're gonna talk about all this stuff. And I'm gonna give an intro right after this. I'm gonna give you a second to think about this and I'm gonna give you an intro. Okay. But I put into both of them.

7:36 I said, how many millionaires and then billionaires are there in the world right now in 2026? And what it kicked out was there's 60 million adult millionaires globally. And I took it further and I said, How many of them are self-made? I don't mean self-made, but they're first generation millionaires if not. 42 to 48 million of the millionaires, 70 to 80 percent are self-made. 79% did not receive any inheritance. Then down to billionaires. There's 3,300 billionaires globally right now. And then 2,300 to 2,500, depending on which stat you look at, 70 to 75% are self made. That's insane that one lifetime, one generation. 74% of them self made, and the vast majority of them come from entrepreneurial endeavors.

8:32 So think about that. I'm going to give us an awesome intro here. ~ today's guest is Dr. Thomas J. Powell. If you get to know him well enough and he likes skiing with you, I think it's Tom. He's he's founder of the founder's office. Tom spent nearly four decades helping founders navigate the opportunities and challenges that come with building something meaningful. Today we're gonna talk about resiliency. We've already talked about some founder dependency and what it really takes to build a business that can stand the test of time. Tom, welcome to the necessary entrepreneur officially. Mark, that's awesome. Thank you. Great introduction. Thank you. we try to get better every day. Small micro improvements. Yeah. So what's your brain do with the stats we talked about about millionaires and billionaires and first generation and self made and It was a lot fewer when I was a kid.

9:22 ~ it's been this exponential growth, right? So the Four Forbes Fortune Fortune four hundred, right, didn't have a billionaire on it. ~ and I've known ~ you know, Larry Ellison, I was telling my kids this the other day 'cause we go stayed down at at the former chairman's of Oracle's house quite often for a number of different reasons, who's also a billionaire. ~ and Larry Ellison, for almost all of my adult life, has been the richest man on the planet until recently. And so that so that also is that piece. And wasn't a billionaire really until recently, in in most cases. so that is a an interesting piece. I also doing work in Singapore, one of the things that struck me there at the time in the forties, Singapore was one of the poorest per capita countries, and now it's one of the richest per capita countries.

10:11 And at the time, this was probably fifteen, twenty years ago, in the airport. It said one in six people in Singapore are a millionaire. One in six, right? Type scenario. So you start looking at that and say, okay, so what's going on in the world? And it goes to the something I was just talking about before we got on the show is free enterprise saves the world. Period. It doesn't matter where you are, it can be a capitalist or a communist economy. There are still people that are trying to exchange their ideas. for income. They're trying to solve a problem and get paid for doing that. And some economies make it easier than others, but it's still that entrepreneur and that founder that makes the difference.

10:51 It drives the categories. You know, over 50% of the people in the United States approximately are employed. It drives the employment of 50%. One in, you know, one in two people that have jobs work for small business. And of the economy, the GDP, it's almost 50% of the small business. We're talking the most powerful, most largest economic driver in the world. So I'm not surprised. First of all, founders should be compensated. I loved your other other piece of the 74% of the billionaires. Because I don't necessarily agree with someone who's a professional CEO, and Jamie Diamond might not like my comments on there, but he didn't start anything. He didn't build anything.

11:34 It was being built, and he's a great professional manager, but he never took. Personal risk. And so for that person to become specific, it's not to pick on Jamie Diamond, it's but it to to have that type of a person who took no personal risk in ownership become a billionaire, ~ I don't think that that's necessarily correct. I don't know how to change it specifically. But the person who started something, put it on their credit card, borrowed against their house, took their savings out that was going to be their kids going to college, and bet everything on that and continually bet and bet and bet. Great. And they're paid not because of the work they do, they're paid because of the work that they provide and the benefit they provide. So that's a great reason to be a billionaire or a millionaire.

12:15 Do you think it takes for the vast I mean, there's all I didn't pull the stat of how many businesses fail every year, but way more fail than succeed. There's something about this five year number, but so many of those people just pick themselves back up and do it again. I don't know why we continuously just like have a bloodletting of ourselves, but we do. But do you think that in this current environment and current world, the ones that roll the dice and have the vision, have the dream, they're builders, they're visionaries, but they have to execute as well. What's inside of those folks that makes them, I forget who ~ wrote the book, whether it's burn the boats or whatever, but it's an idea of all in. Because you hear so much, you you mentioned Steve Jobs earlier. I'd love to know what you loved about him.

12:56 And but it's do or die. And I that seems like a big statement for people that aren't involved in it. But the folks that I'm around. That are winning, not just fine, that are winning. You see the DNA. There's no option for them to quit. There's no op there's no option for this to go away and them not to give every ounce of blood they have. Does it take that? Or am I being too drastic about the necessary characteristic or all in to really win in this world of entrepreneurship? use a, you know, good as an economist and as as a legal professional, I get to use both this word multiple times.

13:40 It depends, right? So I know successful entrepreneurs that didn't necessarily go all in and still hit it out of the park because generally they were on their third or fourth try. They'd already gone all in. They realize that it's not the going all in that actually makes that deal successful. It's oftentimes another one of these catchphrases, which is, you know, from Dan Sullivan is the the who not how. So they started realizing they don't need to be the only one doing it. They realize they need to really find the right team members. And there's always someone who's passionate about the things that you're not very good at. And they love it. Like there's a people that are passionate about doing the accounting and the books and getting it right and straight.

14:20 And many of the founders suck at that, right? Or being a truly good manager and they find those people and a good COO is usually one of the main people, a third or fourth time founder. discovers they have to have, they have to have a great COO because they suck at that job. And so they find that. And then even within that, they find the right COO who can take them to the ten million. And it's usually a different COO to take them a hundred million. And it's a different COO to take them to a billion. And then it's a different one that takes them public and it's a different one that gives them the exit. All of these various things. That sounds like a lonely journey because right, but and the reason why the context I have is when you go from that person that helped you get you to ten and you gotta let them go and you gotta move on to get to another place to go to the hundred, to maintain those relationships on someone that was everything to you, that's really hard.

15:17 It's incredibly hard. And you do have some team members that are able to stay with that company as it grows, obviously, but they're generally got a skill set that does not change tremendously. The other side of it is there are the anomalies of these people that just never ending growth mindset. But generally that mindset is the founder, right? They're always trying, they're always looking at the next thing, the next opportunity, whatever. And the COO a lot of times is the the steady Eddie or steady Edith that's just making sure that that stuff gets done and they are so good with people and they're able to be consistent, you know, Sunday through Monday, all the way through, you know, eight, seven days a week. And that that does ~ you know, the the COO of ~ one eight hundred get junk, Cameron was a friend is a friend of mine and he talks about that.

16:05 He goes, He was a great COO, up to a hundred million. He knew he could not take it past that, and the company knew. Now, maybe the company could have exited him a little bit better, a little differently, but you know that that's the part of it is how do you do that humanely and say it's you know it's kind of time. It's kind of time. Let's figure out what the next next deal is. Don't chop him off at the knees. Yeah. I guess it's we're talking about interpersonal relationships, you're talking about all your character, all the stuff, because I don't know what book that you know to apply to the exact circumstance and the exact company, the exact timing. It that's really hard, isn't it? It's like there's no directory to flip to to apply this to this moment. No, that's why most leaders are readers and you know you've got and and running it through AI is not reading.

16:49 Getting the synapses of you know, just the quick of the book because reading the book is so critically important or listening to it on Audible or Kindle or however you do it and having all your bent pages of all the different things and having a variety of things because you can t there's so many times I'll quote a movie or a fiction book that's relevant. To a story right now. The Odyssey's out in in movies, theaters right now. And I quote the Odyssey a ton in there. Or, you know, I'll use The Merchant of Venice as another one that I oftentimes will be talking about. And so you know, you look at that and you're able to equate and put that into real life. And so, but there are, you know, there's a handful of books. We were talking about Harvey McKay not too long ago.

17:29 I said, gosh, your your people will do a great job of getting backgrounds. And Harvey McKay had this, you know, 50. And he wanted to know these fifty things about the people they're doing business with. And it's not you go with a checklist and go down the checklist. And now you can use, as you said, perplexity to get a lot of this stuff. But no, it's getting to know them. And now you know them as humans because we hopefully exchange ideas and and opportunities because we're humans, not just a exchange of monetary things. Yeah. What do you love about his book, about the swimming with sharks book? What do you love about it? You know, it was pro my primary takeaway at that time. So you gotta look at this was in the 80s and early nineties type scenario of that. It was transforming what was kind of the Xerox sales method, which was really a methodology of this is what you do, this is how you call, this is how you get past the gatekeeper, da da da. And Harvey's like, no, no, no. That's all important and it's all good.

18:23 But what you really need to know is you need to get to know the people. And that's even the gatekeepers. So I was at an interesting conversation not that long ago where they're like, you know, it's about family offices. And they said, you know, if you piss off a gatekeeper, you're never going to get to the decision maker. And I said, Yeah, that's kind of the truth. But if you piss off anybody in a family's office, you're not getting the deal because that's the that's the way it is. So people will come in, they'll treat me always super nice, and then they'll treat my staff horribly. And it's like, you just killed any chance of doing any business. And by the way, if we go to dinner, which we will take you to dinner because we want to know you with your family, and if you're yelling at your kids and if you are unkind to the food server, you're also not getting a deal.

19:09 It's the people. That's what I loved about that book. It's the people. Yeah. Do you think back to you brought up Xerox? I'm I'm referencing something. Did Larry's did Larry Ellison start at Xerox? He may have. I don't remember that, but you know, I do it was Valley though before. Silicon Valley, yeah. So I was in San Carlos. I'm sorry, I was in San Carlos as Oracle was growing and and it still was the SeaWorld there in Redwood City. So and then they came right across the street right through there. So I was there when the first building of Oracle goes in at that time in the in the eighties, which was fantastic time to be down in Silicon Valley. ~ And we if we'd only known what it was actually gonna be, it was it was crazy, crazy times in the nineties as well.

19:54 So I sorry, you were gonna say about just Just, you know, we these icons of Steve Jobs and Ellison and Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, they end up being tech people, Bill Gates. But everyone's always trying to catch on to what is it? What was it, right? And you know, Isaacson wrote two of the biographies, right? He wrote Steve's and Elon's. Wrote both. And do you think there's is there something different about them just as the individual? There's only just a few unique people like that? Or is there a combination of things that you just couldn't recapture again that like the net cut all? Timing, product market fit, that person, their experience, ~ the team they have around them.

20:38 Or are these outliers, even in acting like a Denzel Washington and Oprah Winfrey, is it just the individual? Well I so I got to serve on a board for many years with Denzel, by the way. So ~ Is he as special as I just put him the level I put him at? No, yeah, I just I think he's phenomenal. And by the way, as a board member, and it was the Boys and Girls Club of America, so I sat on the national board and to sit there with him, he was one of the hardest working board members. And that's how I understand he I never got to see him on stage or I well actually I did get to see him on stage, but I never saw him in his really acting role other than the movies. I didn't see how professional he was, but I could imagine how he was because when he showed up to the boys and girls club meetings, he read his stuff.

21:21 He wasn't a pretty face. He was there, he's asking questions, and it's with all the Fortune 50 CEOs, right? So I mean he knew his stuff. And he sat in there, General Powell was on there, kind of Lisa Rice was on there. So you had all these amazing people that are sitting on this board, and then for some reason, me, some punk kid that was out of ~ out of Nevada. But so is there something different about them? For many of them, and and you take st ~ jobs and Elon as an example, they probably are high on the, you know, whether it's the Asperger's scale whatever. Yeah, they're somewhere on the spectrum. But would you say Mark Cuban is, I, you know, he seems like he's a pretty likable guy at many cases and he's on the on the court, but he is as tenacious and one-minded focus.

22:06 And that is so again, I say say I ski with these Olympians. And when they're in the gate, they're like sh they're like the sharks. Their eyes go back in the sharp of their head and they are just like they're instantly so focused. So people that you think have ADHD all of a sudden become so focused that nothing else is in their way. And that's what Steve would do. And that's what, you know, Elon does at a at a pace that none of us can even imagine. And they also seem to be absent, a a s a potential skill or whatever you call it, that they just don't give a damn of what people think of them. They're not trying to win friends and influence people. It's not a Dale Carnegie, Andrew, you know, Dale Carnegie kind of thing.

22:48 They're like, no, my people get to do that. I am When someone asks you about your career and your perspective, it goes in line with these unique individuals. It's a it's a level of carp compartmentalization that almost you can't even comprehend because they're still existing in this world, but it's almost as if it n like none of it affects them. But I find this hard to answer for me. So I want to when people say, Well, Mark, what did you find hard about? Whatever. What did so becoming an attorney, becoming a doctor, sitting on the board for the Boys and Girls Club, being all these b having the world yanked out from under you 'cause every entrepreneur, what did you find hard? Where does your brain go when someone asks you that?

23:33 What did you find hard about learning to ski or being a a a a top performing skier? Anything. Well, so I think that I'm an incredibly s ~ so I've been in strategic coach for twenty six years, right? So Dan Sullivan, so if you're familiar with strategic coach, and Dan jokes about this. He says his favorite clients are people with deep pockets and are slow learners. So I'm a slow learner, I take but I'm an aggressive forever learner, right? And so that you know that so learning is hard For me in certain ways, and especially learning the lesson sometimes, I have to get beat with a two by four 14 times before I figure out that that's not going to work. But I have continually increased in that scenario.

24:16 The other really hard one is when I look back and see the bodies that are in the gutter that have happened because of things that I did of poor judgment or things that I did where I wasn't kind or things that I thought I was so focused here, I didn't pay attention to. you know, not showing up to a baseball game or to a cheerleading thing or to some, you know, whatever's going on and seeing how that accumulates, cause it all accumulates. Right. So Come. everything everything does. And so where are you going to be? Would I necessarily change it? I don't know. You know, it there's a fantastic, fantastic fiction book I recommend to every founder. Well to just about anybody, but especially if they're going through any challenges, it's called The Midnight Library.

25:02 And the reason it's so fantastic is this gal decides to take her life, and I'm not gonna give too much of the book away, but she goes and she gets stuck in if you if you're Catholic, it's purgatory, right? So she gets stuck in purgatory, and so she's stuck in purgatory, and every book she takes off the shelf is another life that she could have lived. And it's her life, but it's going on. And she's got tens of thousands of books. So she gets to stay in this library and live all the thing where she's a rock star and where she's, you know, an astronaut and ~ all these various things in there. And it's a fascinating story to go through because that's what we live in a regrets if we're always doing that and saying I could have, I could have, I could have, instead of saying I can, I can, I can. But do know it, there's costs.

25:43 And so what we do again at the founder's office is we take this founder's isolation paradox and we try and help the founders understand what the costs are, and that maybe that risk, all in risk, is not what they need to do. Because the all-in risk of putting the house Guaranteeing the business is the separate scenario. No employee does that, right? Nobody, the banker doesn't do that. They don't put their stuff at at risk. And so why are you? We need to be able to get your capital. We use the what's called the capital alignment method. We get the capital aligned with what you're doing. And so that's what is in. You're in because your spirit and your mind and your you're focused on it, but it doesn't have to be every single thing you own.

26:25 You don't need to put your spouse at risk with the finances. They shouldn't be signing on personal guarantees. You know, you y the the credit card is a personal guarantee when you use that every time. Yep. So that's that's kind of it. So that's the regret. Sorry, I went way off on that, but No, I think but y what you're helping people do is reverse engineer their life and their total outcome. Always. I love backcasting. So in almost everything we do, we backcast, which is project yourself. Don't build it linearly. You know, don't do a linear path because you're never it's never gonna be exciting. It's ooh, five percent growth, five percent growth, five percent growth. There Start where the end is, right? Start at the goal. and go, how can we do this? How can I make this little teeny ski mountain an Olympic training center? What would have to happen if I go five years in advance and I look backwards.

27:13 What impossible things today had to have happened for me to actually do that? And so that's how you start looking at it and saying, Well, let me make the calls and let me get some introductions and let me do this and let me do that. And all you what? All of a sudden you get lucky. What I've found about that strategy, whatever we call it, is that it's the only strategy I've found for folks that haven't accomplished the goals that they have yet, that they can remove stress and anxiety and depression from the process. Because there's nothing that you have to think about. Then you if you've reverse engineered it, future casted it, then you have the step by step method of everything that you need to do. There'll be some deviation, something won't go well, but you've ident identified the tactical things in advance.

27:56 That you're gonna need to check off and you're gonna need to do. Mike, thirty years ago in the Fortune th the the Forbes four hundred list, right? I think it was Forbes, not Fortune, but Forbes four hundred list, if not one of those people were billionaires, and today if you are in the four hundred, you're not a billionaire, you're a deca billionaire, what had to have changed? I mean, it is a it's a explosion scenario of that. How do you decide what books to read? Like any given moment, what hap what happens? Yeah, what happens when you choose a book? How's that happen? Well, ~ I always have a stack of books that like I'm getting ready to go to Chile, so it was it was loading up the Kindle to go with me.

28:37 I was I thought I was actually gonna bring some actual paper books with me and and my ~ sister looks and she goes, They're too heavy. We can't bring all these books scenario. So it's ~ it's partly my wife tries to get me to read fiction ~ at times and it's usually what I grab. I'm a huge ~ constitutional buff. ~ I actually hate my doctorate is in constitutional law. I teach federalism at the doctoral level. I have three doctoral students going to get their doctorate now where you know, so if you talk start talking about federalism and I get really excited about that and how does it apply and how does it go internationally? So I've always got one or two constitutional law, some history type book there. ~ and then generally it's something from ~ probably Greece, Rome times of what we were doing at that point.

29:26 And then there's always new business ideas. AI is of course exciting. Everybody talks about AI. I'm talking about AI as a governance. So if we've got this piece here, we've got to have the governance of that because there is a civil society piece that needs to be put within this. How do we do that? How do we operate through there? And it's not gonna be, you know, just a piece that you just think how we operated trains is how we're gonna operate AI. Or how the internet worked or what that's gonna be. So, you know, th these are all the kind of interesting things that make me I'm I have a book always on skiing. Believe it or not, I'm still a very voracious learner on skiing.

30:06 So The ~ all right, so federalism in the constitution constitutional law. Give all of us folks who would fail that exam Give us a basic since you have your doctorate and you teach doctorate level classes to people who are gonna become, ~ give us a minute or two on federalism, our constitution, and how it interacts in two thousand and twenty six for an American citizen. One, I think the founders were all flawed human beings as all of us are. And so when you look at that, they were doing a lot of research about how do you build a government that people join by choice.

30:53 Because what most people don't realize is you join your government by choice. You don't have to have that, but you do if you're not gonna if you're gonna live in a society of three people or three hundred million people, you're gonna have some form of government level in there. And so ours was the first constitution to be written down. It's the oldest living constitution ~ that's written down. And so that document, and here's one of the most interesting, Mark. We just celebrated our 250th birthday. We didn't put the constitution in place for thirteen more years. We were a confederacy of states. Because every state wanted to be autonomous and have its own thing.

31:35 So essentially we almost went the way of of Europe of having these independent fiefdoms. And so they had to bring these thirteen states together, ~ after they were colonies together and get them to agree to play nice in the sands and set up a boundary of rules that Virginia would work and New Hampshire would work. And how do you do that? And so it was it was brilliant. And Madison, who led a lot of that, ~ You know, was looking back at how the empires had fallen and how republics had fallen, because they said, democracy doesn't work. That's mob rule at the end of the day. Whatever whoever the masses are, they're gonna rule at that scenario. So you set up a republic, you set up a, you know, a government where you can go and have a place where they can debate these things that are the important things.

32:20 And by the way, the federal government in the US should take care of very little, and the state governments should take care of very much. And just like your house. You wanna have most of the rules at your house and the least amount set by somebody in D C. Is this similar to Rome and the Senate? Is it similar? It it starts from there as an idea, but what ended up happening because one judicial's not separated and you could have the Rome and then you had to have the common people, House of Commons type scenario, in there because if you don't have all of them in there, you you end up having something that gets these factions.

33:01 And right now we have a lot of little factions, which is not unusual. And a faction could be a far left or a far right party, whatever it is, and It's so brilliantly made that it's very hard for a faction to get total control. And what happened in Rome is that a faction would get control and then they either move to the Senate having control or once again a Caesar would come in and take over. And that's what they were looking at, how not to have it happen. But not just Rome. I mean y you have others as well. Yeah. What was the d if we were the first constitution that was documented and written down, what was the document that came before us in England that supposedly was modeled after? Well, so the Magna Carta was really the first written document.

33:41 Fourteen something. Yeah, yep. And then and the Magna Carta came out and said, Hey King, you're good looking. You only have that job 'cause we let you have that job. If we don't do a good job, we will remove your head from your body and your your riches from your family. So you get to be king as long as you're a good king and you do these things that we say. And during a couple of those times they actually did remove the king. Right. So you had that right almost right before we had our revolution. So you had the this scenario where kings removed because it's like, nope, you're not doing it. And so it was really somewhat the rich and powerful saying, Nope, you get that because we do have our own kingdoms.

34:22 And then that's also where I think one of the brilliant things of Madison specifically, he said, humans, some humans, back to your very first comment, some humans have more ambition than other humans. And so if we pit the ambitions against each other. We are more likely to stay safe. So you have the House of Representatives. Those people somewhere in there is going to have their ambition and they're going to want to be the speaker of the House. And then you have the Senate and somewhere in there it's going to want to be the senior center and the junior center, you know, the head of Senate. And then you have the Senate and the House that get together and say, No, they're not any more powerful at the executive than the combined of us. And then you have, of course, the executive, but they're stopped because of the power of the House and the Senate.

35:07 And then both of those are stopped because you have the judicial. And so that was the battle. But there's one other part that people lose. We have 50 kingdoms that have governors that have all of those same legislative things, oftentimes exactly like the United States. Some of them are different. Louis Louisiana is different. You know, you've got some different things in there. But you have these different, and those are the states that have the power. And it's the ambition of that governor that's supposed to keep that state. free you know, so you've got all these wonderful things that go on to put ambition against ambition. So why has the federal government become so powerful? ~ there's not unusual that I get asked that question, and I have my theory on it. Others have different theories on it.

35:53 But people will trade their safety or trade their their freedom for their safety. ~ my God, we got to do this. And it starts in the local area. Let's have the police, let's have the knights, instead of doing the neighborhood watch, you know, that with then they, you know, they sit in HOAs and they start giving away their power each time. We do that because we want to be safe at night, right? Scenario. That's that's how it starts. What the US government did during Andrew Jackson's time was brilliant if you want to be a big federal government. So Andrew Jackson is the first time we had a balanced budget and excess reserves in the bank account. And he's like, Well, let's start building national roads.

36:33 And the states go, like, you can't tell us what to do. You can't build a road here. You this is that is not constitutional. You cannot build a road. And so he's like, huh. His team gets together and they're like, okay, let's bribe We'll give you the money, but you gotta build the road this way. We'll give you the money, but you gotta do the schools this way. We'll give you the money, but now everybody has to have a real ID before they get on an airplane. And that's what they do now is they suck up the money to the federal government and then they give it back through everything from Medicare to to health, you know, education type things. Yeah, whatever it is. Yeah. When they really should be looking at the borders and, you know, and There's lots of people that want the federal government to be incredibly powerful and have us be fifty unified homogenous states, but that's not realistic. Right?

37:23 So it's like we don't y you really need to be able to look and say, okay, if you live in California, these are the California concerns and they should be managed from California. And if you live in Massachusetts, it may be similar, but it's you kinda gotta manage those through there. And they really don't want California telling them. ~ you know, and we've seen that that doesn't work so well. It didn't work well in Rome because the further it got out, Rome telling them what to do doesn't work. If you had to design, what do they say? Democracy's the worst form of government except for its what, the best of all the worst. What are I would I don't know. Yeah, no, that's it's yeah, it's it our form of government, which is a is a democratic republic. Okay. And just a republic itself doesn't work because everybody wants to feel like they have a voice.

38:08 Now only approximately 50% of our people vote, and they only generally vote in the national elections, which is really crazy because the things that you impact, the things that really impact your life are the school the school board, the the library board, the city mayor. That you won't get anybody to go out and vote for, right? Type scenario. ~ so yes, our form of government. Now, arguably, I went to school with the Prime Minister of Jamaica. And so he's part of the, you know, of Great Britain. So and we're sitting in ~ London and we're having a debate because it's post-COVID and we're talking about how fast they could move versus how slow we had to move in certain ways.

38:50 And he's like, well, because we've got You know, this this scenario where you've got Congress is working better with the with the prime minister and you get these signs and we're like, you know, Congress actually here is supposed to be broken. We're not supposed to pass that many laws. It's supposed to be debated and debated and debated and debated because someone in Arkansas has a voice just like somebody in Seattle, Washington. And they may not like it, but democracy means you gotta let the person you don't like's idea actually get voiced. Would you design it different now? You know. Yeah, the country of co the country of Doctor Tom. Yeah, yeah, I I've I often ha have this conversation with my wife ~ and ~ say I don't ever wish to be sovereign because I think anytime you get ultimate authority, no matter how good you are, you're gonna still make decisions that just you know aren't gonna be you can't do it. So I think we have a brilliantly designed, flawed system that gets to continually improve and grow.

39:56 And it doesn't move fast on purpose. Because people make bad decisions in the immediacy. They make and it's a even go back to the founder's office, where we help a lot of founders see is planting the tree today that seems like it's hard, but 30 years from now you're gonna love the shade. And you gotta do that. So when you get into the accounts of slavery, the way that they actually maneuvered through that, yes, some of it was kicking it down the the the road, but it was still a conversation that they were debating. And we've had the conversation. I had this debate too. It's like, well, so if they hadn't gotten there, what would have likely happened? Well, we likely would have had two countries to start with at best, and probably three or four or the thirteen would have just all been separate.

40:40 And France and and Britain would have turned their eyes on us and we would have become one of them or part of them. And that would have gone. War of eighteen twelve is a perfect example of that. We were too weak and and all of a sudden we start getting attacked again. Right? So It's hard. It's the it's the it's the library again, the midnight library. What if, what if, what if, you know. So I think it's pretty good. I don't think it's great for everybody. There's lots of disenfranchised people. Most of the disenfranchised people is because in many ways they don't feel safe to get off the porch. So, you know, you talked about that what founders do is they get off the porch. They get in the game, and you can't win unless you get in the game.

41:21 What's necessary for people to feel safe? Because it feels like the individuals we were talking about before, they get off the porch even when they don't feel safe. Would you trade your would you trade what level of freedom will are you willing to trade for safety for you? For me, not very much. ~ I will take the pain. The worst thing you can do is take away my freedom of choice. And so for me, that is a core value. And but what I also have to realize, there's an awful lot of people that that's not their core value. So for me, the safety is in my ability to have resilience, the ability to get back up, the ability to live.

42:05 And most people don't even know this. Our founders, it was not freedom of religion. It was freedom of enterprise that all of our constitution is written about freedom of enterprise. And the religion is actually carved out to say you don't bring that in here as a set government religion. You can have your religion. It's just not going to be the guiding path of what we do specifically, right? It'll be your guiding path, but not globally, because we can't figure out one religion to say. So in that, but we can figure out economics. So what are the economics and what do you need to do? Well, one of them you need to be able to do is fail. And the second thing you need to be able to do. Is get back up again. And so in article one, the very first article, they write about the ability for people not to have to go to debtor's prison, essentially.

42:47 Because debtor's prison in the old days took the entrepreneurs who borrowed the money and were had employees. And then when they failed because the economy changed or whatever happened, then they took them totally out of the game. And our founders are like, that's a bad idea. Risk is way too high then, hardly anybody would take it. Yeah. Yeah. So what's What's the f let's go by the way? This is this is a really inter it's just a great Here we go. What's what's the what's the con what's the constitution, the first not even a minute, what's the first principle of the constitution of the founder's office and all these things you're building? What are you what are you weeding with every day that really matters?

43:27 And it doesn't have to be just one word or one principle. What's the idea that you're now marching out here in the world and what's your what what you're passionate about and the things you're trying to move? What is it? What's the underlying thing? So like I said, free enterprise saves the world. Without founders, there's no free enterprise. Okay. And so, but no one's looking out for the founder's best interest. And because they do have resilience, everybody thinks they're so tough that even their advisors are not looking out for them. And I'll give you a very simple one that we try and show. Company grows, they get into something, they need a lawyer, they hire a lawyer, and the founder invariably always says, My lawyer, my lawyer, my lawyer.

44:08 They get into some trouble with something, and the lawyer is like, No, I'm the company's lawyer. And the founder goes, But it's my company. It's like, no, it's not your company. You are separate from your company. It's its own entity. I'm the lawyer. You have to get your own counsel. Now that sounds really crazy, but it actually is exactly like that. And so the accountants are doing the same thing. The C-suite, they don't mind the founder is going to sign on the hundred million dollar personal guarantee, which by the way, I've had a hundred million dollar personal guarantee in my in my life. And ~ it you know that fee How do you? at the time it was fine. It was when it hit a billion dollars and this was this was a true conversation.

44:50 It hit a billion dollars in personal guarantees and me and my other two founders looked at each other and we were all pretty well off. But we looked at it, we said, Do you have a billion dollars? I don't have a billion dollars. Do you have a billion dollars? And so we're like okay we need to start whittling this Down. And I will tell you the last two million of it was actually the hardest because by that time you've gone through all your best assets and everything else. So anyway, your management team will let you sign the personal guarantee for a hundred million because they're going to get raises if you hit it out of the park. They're going to get equity and all the other shares. And it's not that they're just, you know, selling you out, but we use the this analogy of most everybody is the chicken in the ham and egg breakfast.

45:31 The founder is the pig. So they're all involved. The founder's committed. Right. And so when things go down, it's, you know, really literally your ass on that on that plate. Hm. ~ we talked earlier about Congress and when we were talking about the Constitution Federalism that Congress was meant to move slow. It wasn't meant to pass a lot of law. If we try to make this correlation on running companies and and entrepreneurism and stuff, we now have a government that's meant to operate slow with everything else around us operating at such speed.

46:14 What what do we do with that? 'Cause it feels like this AI conversation. I'm assuming the politicians really don't know. Yeah, no, I would agree. I ~ so we spent a lot of time in in AI and how to implement AI. And I think any company that's not implementing some level of AI, and most everybody is now. I mean, it was not even a year ago that would you'd say you use Chat GPT and people kind of like, hmm? Now what you're getting is people saying, No, I don't want to use it and they don't even realize that it's just in the background. So it's the inner internet of things, right? IoT. They didn't realize that everything now is the internet. They didn't realize that their car, their toaster oven, everything is run on the internet, right? That's where AI is moving.

46:58 It's just not even gonna be called AI anymore. It'll just be what is Yeah, it'll just be yeah, exactly. ~ and so government is kind of, I think, in that quagmire of like, how do we get our hands around this? And, you know, Ronald Reagan used to say regulate it, you know, until it doesn't move. And there's people that definitely want to do that. The you know the the big, you know, server farm type things. It's like, and they're using the energy and the water. It's like, is that really what people are afraid of? Or is it they're afraid they're gonna lose their jobs or their autonomy? And so as understanding that I think that's it. That is it. That is it, actually. at the end of the day. And losing autonomy, if you think about it, you know, do you become the Matrix or ready player one type lifestyle?

47:45 Or if you grew up and you saw, you know, ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger and Terminator. You know, or is this where we're headed to? I don't think so. I have a lot of faith that human beings are pretty smart and that it's our creativity that makes us different. And that that creativity is not about asking chat to do something and give me a good story. Well, they use a formula. The great thing about humans is we don't use a formula necessarily. We c you know, we come up with crazy ass stuff. Like, how did they make this work? ~ you know, so government is supposed to move slow unless it needs to move fast. And in most cases, it shouldn't regulate a lot of things, but it does need to regulate certain things.

48:25 Like I went up against the SEC. The SEC was breaking the Constitution. I'm like, you can't do that. And so I go up against the SEC. I wasn't saying get rid of the SEC. I'm saying no, the SEC has to be mindful of the rules that we all agree to play by, which is the Constitution, right? And someone's got to hold them accountable. Might as well be me, I guess. I would have wished somebody else did it, but that that was me. So the same way with with ~ you know, AI and whatever the next AI will be, this isn't gonna be the last thing that we come up with that's all that great. You know, quantum computing's gonna come up and change everything once again. So, you know, who knows? Who knows what that'll be. I'm always wondering what's the thing that we're not focused on that's happening. You know, ~ it's scary, but one of the things we're not thinking about is, and we saw it a little bit with you know, nine eleven. It's the non nationals.

49:19 It doesn't have to be a nation. It's not Iran who we're at war with, it's an ideal that's within that. That's actually also a faction within because most of the Iranian people are amazing people in this amazing country. And same with Israel or Palestine or wherever you go in the world, they're all amazing people. And there's a faction that's taken over somewhere in there, right? And the problem is, at least when they're governments, at least when somebody's taking Nazism and putting it and marching in a street, we see It's when they're not. It's when they're in a basement or they're in a back room and they're designing the next nuclear type fusion bomb or something else. And now with technology they can do that and diseases and other things. So it's not the big science labs, it's the little ones that scare me.

50:02 Yeah. And now we have access to all the information now. ~ you mentioned autonomy. One of my favorite conversations that people feel when they have these jobs, they've been an employee. Listen, I'm not hammered on being an employee. It's where I came from. My whole family was employees. If you if you put the golden handcuffs on, you're a public employee, a teacher, a firefighter, and you have pensions and all that, you see a guaranteed outcome. But so many people that are employees, they feel that it's too risky to start the venture. To take a so-called risk. But yet if they'll just go online and look in their networking group of people that they care about, there's stories every day that the people had this false sense of autonomy, that they had the rug pulled right out from underneath them and they did not have autonomy. They were not safe.

50:53 I just this facade that everybody operates in. I'm okay if we choose to be in it, but everyone that feels safe because they think they've had their job for five and six and seven years. And they like their boss and they like the person that owns the company. There's so much change happening. I don't think anybody that's an employee should feel safe anymore. They ever necessarily should have, even with unions and other things, because you saw plants get closed down, right? You saw the rust belt happen. And so, and you I you know, I remember somebody sharing this story, so I'm stealing somebody else's story. But it was they ~ you know, they they close down the plant, the city starts dying because there's no major jobs there.

51:38 But there's still like four families that stay there, and they are just poor as poor could be possible. And they come in and they're like, Well, the plant's closed down. We just don't have any nobody's got a job around here. It's like, well, maybe while you were working at the plant, if you had gotten some education, I'm not talking formal education. I have a doctorate, right? But I also barely graduated high school. So it took me a while to come to education. And that's not why I made money. I made I got education because I was curious. Okay. So I I made money because I was an entrepreneur and a founder and aggressive about that type of stuff. So But anybody could have learned any skill that they could have then been portable to another job somewhere along the line.

52:20 So if you're in that job and you're working your forty hours a week and then you're not doing something to improve or become scalable, you got a long lifetime. There's no guarantees of these jobs. And so, yes, by being an entrepreneur, you may work a lot of late hours and not have any income, but that at any time you do have that sense of freedom that you're free to go do anything else. There's been times I've been a waiter. while starting a new company because I needed to make the mortgage, right? I needed to have cash flow and I had assets, but I had no cash flow. So how do you do that? Well, you do what it it what it takes. So this ~ As predictable as I like to think things are.

53:04 ~ because that's how we make plans, six month plans. It's how you build departments, it's how you build companies. Most of my business plans, maybe I'm the slower learner than you. I think I'm the tortoise. I eventually beat the hair a lot of times, but man, it feels like the race is long. A lot of my plans, the way I designed it, it just didn't go that way. It's the adjustments throughout. But I heard something this week. They left the Federal Reserve, they they left or the board, they left interest rates the same again. I think it's like five meetings in a row, they've left them the same. And there was a one of the institutional hedge fund investors from years ago, I forget which one it was, but he said none of us can predict interest rates. And so Not one person.

53:47 Right, and but we're basing our lives in thinking like, Man, if that interest rate comes down, man, I'm gonna make this plan because I think it's re we run our lives this way. So what do you do in the founder's office? Is there anything that you do that yes, we can have prediction models, but what should we be doing? Well we're t we're talking about this often in my office is always just for me as well. So I'm a very hard person to take care of. I have a team that takes care of me to make sure everything where I'm going, you know, advanced teams, things that go on is you know, just a weird ass life that I live. And it's always you gotta think of contingencies because nothing works out. And it's not it's not this, you know, gosh, it's you know, that's it it just.

54:29 It's not working against us. It's just whatever it is, right? So you don't control these things. So it's outside of your control. And we actually don't control anything. We don't control our own bodies. We don't control our minds or emotions or anything else. So you kind of go with it. You have your good days, your bad days, but it it is that looking of how do we pivot? And that's maybe an overused word now, but how do we pivot and how do we look for the opportunities within there? So it was very interesting with with, you know, this is our our chairs. first now vote and they we had a split vote on should we raise rates or should we hold them at. And then what you got with the economy's growing at that came out today. So they did that yesterday and then they the numbers come out today and what did the numbers say?

55:11 They said the the economy's slowing. So did they get that right? 'Cause you certainly don't want to raise rates when the economy's slowing, you know, so it feels like inflation and for the general population you're like it's six dollar gas. It certainly is the inflation. Yes. But that's a war that's going on. That's not inflation. That's not supply and demand causing that. So for founders, the number one thing is never think that what you've got going and is working now goes forever. Nothing does. It changes. If you've got a cash cow business, something can change immediately in the regulations and no longer you do. So don't build your lifestyle around that. Build other, you know, in other income streams.

55:52 Look at it. You know, be focused about. And also mostly be resilient. And you can build resiliency. So we do things like my crazy wife, she's a retired lieutenant colonel, and you know, Iron Man triathlete, and I was an endurance athlete. And she makes us do three or four things a year that are absolute endurance. And I always look at them going into them, yes, I can think that they're fitness or whatever, but it's usually me to practice telling my mind to shut up. No. My body can do this. I know it sucks. It's uncomfortable. It's what we're gonna go through, but let's get through there. And then I'm able to equate it back to what it's like when a regulator shows up on the door or the banker says no.

56:35 And now all of a sudden, you know, how am I gonna make payroll? And, you know, all the various things that go in there. So you talked earlier, and ~ I could talk to you for hours, man. I think I could talk to any subject you're gonna have insight on, which is incredible. It's probably the reason why you can build something like this founder's office that you can be the advisor and help other people grow their business. But you said early on something that I ask all my leaders to do, and I'm working on training everyone this. You mentioned seeing around corners. That's kind of what you just talked about now, about right? And so Can you speak to what you meant about seeing around corners? Because I think when you said it, you said it and I didn't spend time on it.

57:16 But for me personally, if you can hone the ability to do what you're gonna talk about here, there's probably not a problem that shows up that you can't solve pretty quick. Some that comes from just experience that there is really hardly ever, again, I give a lot of faith into that when you use the who not how, you may not be able to solve it, but there's somebody who can solve it. And finding out who that is, so building your network and saying who and being not afraid to be the dumbass in the room. I'm gonna back up for just a second. I'm gonna pound on University of Michigan for those people that are listening there. So ~ my wife went to Michigan State. They think they're the rival of University of Michigan.

57:57 University of Michigan does not think Michigan State is their rival. So not dishing on either school, I didn't go to either one of right? But I'm at it's a New Year's football game. I'm wearing my Harvard sweatshirt and the gentleman who had been a very loud, boisterous young man all day and very drunk in a freight elevator, 'cause the regular elevator broke, and he stumbles and he looks over at me and he goes, Ugh He's got his University of Michigan ~ sweatshirt on, looks over at me and he goes, Harvard, huh? Did you go there or did you just go there to get the sweatshirt? And he kind of giggles a little bit. And I go, Yeah, I went there. ~ and I taught there for five years.

58:37 And he goes, ~ I'm usually the smartest one in the room. And it we're in a freight elevator, right? And the door opens up and I'm like, Wow. I said, Maybe you should get in bigger rooms. And I step out of the elevator. Because the last thing I want to do is be the smartest person in the room. I want to surround myself with incredibly brilliant people. And it could be somebody that you deem not that smart. They're maybe doing a manual labor job, but I don't know how to do that. I won't, you know, I need to learn from them. How do we how do you do that? That's super cool. You know, so that that's the way you see around corners is I think by being curious and then being able to synthesize information. But my my youngest daughter has a a doctorate in in industrial organizational psychology.

59:21 And she ~ is back in the family office now. They have to go out, earn their own, and then they get to come into the family office. So she was working with unicorns, so companies that get billion dollar v valuations relatively early on. And so she's working with those. She has an MBA and and a fair amount of entrepreneurial experience. And so, you know, that was great when she got her education. And I said, But honey, you are brilliant, way smarter than me. I said And you've got all this education. What you don't have is experience. I said, so what you when you get experience, you are gonna be unstoppable. But the only way you're gonna get experience is to get out there and get bloodied. And you're gonna learn it. And so that's what, you know, consultants that go to work for McKinsey that graduated the best schools and have the MBAs, ~ They haven't gotten bloody. So they're reading off the playbook of McKinsey type scenario. But they become better because and they do become incredibly valuable.

1:00:16 I've got a lot of friends from McKinsey that are incredibly valuable, but it's not that first year. It's the They're in their but they're in but they're in their forties, fifties and sixties now. Yeah. Cause it took experience. Yeah. You know what we don't have when we're in our forties, fifties, and sixties? The ability to take pain anymore like we did when we were twenty. So it's inverse scenario. But they are saying, you know, we're have more companies being founded by fifty and sixty year olds than we've ever had, which is phenomenal because it's like, okay, what's the economy? I'm not ready retire. ~ yeah. What what do you think? And I'm I probably need to wrap up here. We probably need to. What does your you reference your family office a couple of times. What do you guys do?

1:00:57 ~ well, we're a we're a single member family office. So first of all, we we were early to the family office thing. Now everybody's a family office. Whatever you get ten million dollars and you call yourself family office. I I don't know what it what it is anymore. And most of the family offices are about taking the wealth, getting it to some f wealth advisor, and then kind of figuring it out along that line. And you got wealth advisors that are out there. We're actually much less about the wealth than we are about the family. And so it was about the longevity of of what our ideals and our members are of those families, how do we take care of them? Not in a manner that says none of you are gonna have to work. If you're not gonna work, you better be in a nonprofit type scenario.

1:01:37 And, you know, so if if somebody's ill, how do we take care of that scenario? So it came out of about a thought process of being wealthy, not financially wealthy. And so over the years it has adapted. I tell this kind of story about, you know, ~ my oldest daughter. was we're riding a car and ~ she's got her little friends there and she's like, Dad, what kind of car am I gonna get when you're when I'm sixteen? And it was when the light went on, light bulb went on. I Well whatever kind of car you could you can buy. And she goes, What? And all the friends were getting beamers and Mercedes and whatever and I said, Well yeah and she goes, But Dad, we're rich. And I'm like, No, no, no, no, sweetie, I'm rich. You're poor.

1:02:17 And she hates when I tell that story still to this day. She's like, No, Dad, that's not exactly right. I'm Yeah, it's pretty exact exactly right. But what it led to is, you know, this is a kid who today still has a business with her mom where they go to the thrift shops, they buy the dollar buckets of stuff, they find the things that are there and they resell them on Poshmark or whatever it is because it's a business and she just finds it's a joy and it's one more avenue of income for her. She'll Plenty wealthy on it, but she loves this, you know, she loves doing that kind of stuff. So, you know, 15 different business ideas on there. And I would never worry in our family office about any of my family, my kids, that they're going to need income.

1:03:00 But it's sharing the wealth of the family. My grandfather discovered one of the largest mines. He didn't know, he didn't he didn't know he was even going to be married until he was in his fifties. So he didn't do any estate planning. When he died, the mine went to his partners. All of a sudden my mom is poor from being rich. I'm like, that was an interesting story for me to hear and learn. ~ I didn't have parents. I was abandoned when I was, you know, a pretty young kid. And so my older sister raised me. And by twelve, I started a company, and by sixteen, I was making more than teachers. So, you know, those are the skills that I want to be able to teach in the family office. Hmm. If you took one thing away from your wife, could have been a degree from Harvard, could have been your jurisdoctorate.

1:03:43 If you took it could have been an experience working underneath with someone, it could have been a marriage. If you took one thing away, what would the thing have been that would have most negatively impacted what you've achieved thus far? Meaning if I could change something and not experience that, either negative or positive I asked it differently. Usually people say, What's the thing that's been most impactful? Right. I changed that to say, What's the thing if I took it away from you? Would change my life dramatically in a negative way. In a negative way. For me, I think growing up poor, but around extremely wealthy people, that the best somebody asked me this yesterday.

1:04:30 I was getting interviewed for ~ a thing called Nifty, which is where they teach kids and and juniors, high juniors in high school and and in in early college how to be entrepreneurs. And I said, you know. It wasn't just that I grew up poor. That's the because lots of people grow up poor, right? So that's not it. But I was around a lot of founders and it was through the the kindness of strangers and that benevolence that that thing that they took and they grabbed me and they said, You've got more skill. You've they would see more for me than I saw for myself as a person. And these are people that have names on buildings, I mean big buildings like like Hera's casino and type things, right? So I'm growing up in this area where it's and their kids turned out John Hera.

1:05:10 died couple years ago and you know went through three hundred and fifty million dollars or whatever in you know and had everything you could possibly think of. But I knew his dad and then the people that were around him and all the other founders that were around there. That I would not have traded being cold in a breezeway, not having enough money, not having that opportunity for the world. I mean that that would have changed who I am. So then how do you reproduce? How have you tried to reproduce that environment for your kids as you raised them up? So my kids from a very early age, no, you know, you don't get an allowance, you don't get paid for grades.

1:05:52 You can earn money working in the company, but you got to do a better job than the person we'd hire, and you get paid for whatever that person would be able to do. So, you know, my my little twelve year old daughter's answering the phones and she's got a switchboard and different things at the time. We had a large company that she was working at because we had lots of different companies they could work at and little ones shredding papers. And then when I'd hire people around the house and we had, you know, a team of people doing ~ you know, all the estate and every stuff, and it's like you can do any one of those jobs and you get paid that. And then the kids will joke about this. They say, Well, Dad, you'd come out and you'd say, Hey, I got an opportunity for you. Would you like to? And they always said the answer to that is, and they told their little brother who came on, you know, when he talked about his second marriage and and he's now eighteen.

1:06:37 But when he came on, they said, And my nickname with him is Skier Tom. So ~ so that that's my nickname with him. And they said, if Skier Tom ever asks you if you would like an opportunity, the answer is yes, because you're gonna get paid if you do the opportunity that he gave you. But if you say no, you're going to do it, you're just not gonna get paid. So that's somewhat what it was. It was letting them struggle and understand what the struggle was. And then also, ~ one of the things and they didn't like it, you know. probably psychologists would say it's horrible, but I managed by ~ by other people's experiences. So we talked OPE all the time.

1:07:17 So one kid screwed up, all four were sat down and we talked about it. And, you know, it's like, you don't do that in in in management theory. Well, you're right, because these are employees, but these are my kids. And so I don't want the six year old doing what the twelve year old dumbass just did. You know, I want them to understand that that was an activity that you don't want to do and here's why. And so that those were things that I think did and they all are you know, I'm very thrilled with my kids, their their spouses that they have, the grandkids. It's it's probably the biggest joy. And from a kid who had just an absolute no idea what that was like, ~ it's it's fantastic. Awesome. All right. So to wrap this up, ~ all the success you've had, you're getting ready to go have some fun and ski in the mountains and the hills of Chile. And you go to the Alps, you have, you're building a you already have a nonprofit now, I believe, or a young training center.

1:08:13 Yep. So so local. So whole mountain. We I have a mountain. I have a ski mountain. Yeah. Mount Mountain Tom. ~ Skier Tom, Skier Tom is the is the name. Yeah, there you go. I like it. All right. Good. Yeah. ~ of all of that When you get up in the morning, what's still getting you going? 'Cause you don't have to do this anymore. My wife would sure like to know. She's like, why are you up at four thirty in the morning? Can you just sleep in? And you know, there is something about innate drive. I'm curious. I am curious about everything. ~ and it doesn't matter. If I don't know how to do something, I want to learn how boy, that's really cool. Let's go do do that. And so we have I had coffee with a friend the other day and he's talking about he just started a constitutional center at the university, and he's talking about starting a law school.

1:09:01 And I'm like, Yeah, that'd be really interesting. Okay, so I could Do that. And my wife is like, when are you going to do that? Where does this fit in this scenario? So I don't, you know, I feel so incredibly blessed about the life I do have, ~ that I probably pack too many things in, but I'm also like, I'd rather I want to die withered up and worn out than like I'm preserved and I looked great. That's not that's not what I'm here for. I want a lot of experiences. Yeah. And I want to I want to help a tremendous tremendous amount of people because I've been gifted so much by so many. Are you in place now where you can still drive significant revenue for the things you've built while helping others build too?

1:09:41 ~ I still drive significant like generally our clients pay anywhere from twenty five thousand to to two million a month to work with us. So ~ and so yes, so that and so that drives still a significant amount of level. Now I'm generally the trim tab in there, so I'm not doing an awful lot in that scenario. but that is, you know, it it gets in there and my daughter calls me the New York fixer, you know, fixer attorney consigliere. I walk in, I'm like, that's gotta get done. So yeah, I still drive a fair amount of revenue at different times. And a lot of it is investment income, you know, different things that we have, and then driving those businesses to have bigger, better exits. Most founders today, especially in this IP world, they miss all of the things that they create as ideas.

1:10:31 You've got the light bulb and the brain behind your head. And so that's one of our biggest spaces is how do you transfer your ideas to something that is valuable? Because Wall Street is intangible value, right? Almost all of it. It's not the bricks and mortar. It's not the revenue streams. It's the intangible value that those companies have and the licensing of revenue. So most every founder is one of the things we work with them on in their estate planning is how to separate out their ideas from their company and then license those ideas throughout their company. And then that becomes a value model for them that is an actual basis that they can grow upon. And it it separates it out. Hmm. That sounds like 2026 aligned with AI.

1:11:14 That seems good enough. Doesn't Good. seem like you're gonna be outpaced with that idea. That's awesome. ~ hey, so as we wrap up here, well, what's the one place if somebody said, I don't I I I'm probably bad at this. I don't even carry business cards anymore. I don't, I probably should, I don't. ~ but if someone, if you meet and have coffee and you have a good five or ten minute conversation What do you want to weave that person with? You're at a Starbucks or your favorite coffee and you're like, that was intriguing. That was a curious conversation. You hadn't known them before. What do you want to weave them with? I think the win for me would be let's let's continue this conversation. This was incredible.

1:11:56 I mean, it's incredibly valuable how many people you meet every day, or at least, you know, I seem to anyway. And it's like, and it doesn't matter where you are. It's like if you're interested in what they're doing, there's more to that story. Right. And and if they're sixty years old, there's a lot to that story. There's a lot of lifetimes in sixty years. Right. So I you just look back at that and you're like, tell me about that. How the that? Because then you can put that into your database to help the next person that's going through that struggle. And so I th I I think that that's what what probably is like, you know, let's ride a chairlift together and let's talk about that. Or what are you what are you working on? One of the primary things, Mark, I talk about what in raising capital. Most founders talk about what problem or most most people in the United States talk about what they do.

1:12:42 And every founder should talk about what problem they solve. Right. And the problem that they solve, generally people can't articulate that because they're so focused on they know it, it's what drives them, but they didn't they can't articulate. They're talking about how they do what solves that problem instead of what the problem actually is. And so the loneliness, the isolation of that founder is what we solve with our founder's office. And it's integrated and it changes throughout the life cycle of the founder. The founder that exits it three hundred million dollars has a different isolation paradox, but they still have it if they have not planned on how not to have that, then the one who's got massive amounts of debt and their f relationship is falling apart right now, their primary relationship, their bankers calling them, the kids don't like I mean, but both are in that isolation paradox.

1:13:35 So everybody listening today, if they're intrigued, how do they continue the conversation with Dr. Tom? So you can always find me at LinkedIn, Thomas J. Powell. ~ you know, I was early early guide to most of these things. So Thomas J. Powell works in most places, including when I went up against the SEC. So you can check that out, find that place out there. ~ there's lots of Thomas J. Powell's, by the way. So, you know, so it but that that is generally my moniker. You'll see it out there. ~ the other way is the founder's office. so go to foundersoffice.com and you'll see that in there. We've got a number of different things. So if you're in the capital raising or you think you don't have a capital alignment, You've got tools that you can use. They're free. You put your your pitch in there for what you're raising capital, give you feedback back based off our twenty seven points that we do.

1:14:18 We don't have anything we're selling you. If people want to have us and hire us for coaching, we don't put that out there. They they actually have to be referred to us. So that's a you know something in there. And we don't coach. We advise and it's you know, we come in there and it's it's a it's a much more bespoke scenario. I was gonna wrap up, but I heard something that was important. ~ why do you only work by referral? What is it about a referral? Well, it used to be that when we were truly just venture capitalists and pri private equity, it was part of our underwriting scenario so that we didn't have websites out there that you could find. And so in the underwriting, the the who of the founder was oftentimes who they were surrounded by. And so that was one of our underwriting it's like, ~ Joe, Joe referred man, they wouldn't refer him to us if they didn't think they were a good person. So we'd go ask them and we'd and that's so we just found that that's a great way to do it.

1:15:11 And so we were off the radar. I mean, as for most parts, I you wouldn't have found me doing these things except to be as a professor. ~ those would be the conversations I'd have. ~ so it's just that way. Now I found that I'm a horrible, horrible, horrible pitch person. So my staff will be like, there was 15 different sales things in there. It's like, I used to teach sales, you know, 35 years ago, but man, I suck at this. So it's just not something I do well, and it's just something that just isn't so it's like, okay. People come to us, they've got, I've got a problem to solve. They're usually referred by their accountants or their attorneys or another founder. and a lot of times it's at almost always at an event. So they've got something they got a letter from a regulator.

1:15:53 They got a they're going through a divorce, they need to figure out how to do that. Or they've got a you know, a recent one was a guy, a friend actually, got an offer for ten million dollars. He's in his late sixties, more money than he ever th thought he'd get. on his business. He's like, I didn't think it was worth anything. I sat down with him, I go through and I sorry to t take a second on this, but go through the numbers with him. And I'm like, this is going to be a bad offer for you for all sorts of reasons. I said, for one, you take two million dollars a year off your company. I said, you won't last very long. And he's like, no, I take four hundred thousand. That's my salary. I did this and, you know, I said, No, you don't. I said, look at all the your trips here and everything else. That's all your two million dollars. He's like, And I said, so the other thing is, I said, you have nothing to do after you're done, because you haven't built anything else with your life really to go do.

1:16:38 I said, another part is the way that you've capitalized your company, you're going to pay massive taxes on that 10 million. I said, let's work on a handful of things, which we did. And he got a 45 million dollar offer he closed about a year almost a year ago now. And ~ he had to pay almost no taxes on that ~ relative to that. And in that He'd had up a whole setup of new entrepreneurial ventures that are in the non profit sector with that. And he kept his building that now a credit tenant tenant of it. Yeah. They lease back. And they're a credit tenant. So the building actually jumped up in value by another million dollars because a better tenant than himself was in there.

1:17:19 So that's the kind of stuff that we love to do. Yeah. ~ so since you helped him get an increase of thirty five million, but also other what type of fee did mister Mr. Dr. Tom get? Well, generally we take a part of the upside. Yeah. So we still play the upside side. He's so nice. I knew it. I just asked the questions like you gotta answer the damn thing. Sorry for the polygraph, but it is what it is. Yeah. Part of the upside. Hey, thanks for joining us. ~ great conversation. Yeah, Mark, thank you. Thanks for having me. Enjoy the skiing. You got it. Thank you. All right. All right, man.