Shark Tank Cast REVEALS The 7 Steps To BECOME WEALTHY! | Lewis Howes

the best place to put the money is what has worked where have you gotten your sales give me the sources what has worked that's where you put your money the only thing that people have to understand about this is that now everybody can do it as well everyone you better rise and grind because which one is easier to replace your business or your fiance if you want to become wealthy you've got to learn from wealthy people that's why in this video i bring together some of the top entrepreneurs from shark tank to teach you how to earn more money if you enjoy this make sure to subscribe like the video and leave your biggest takeaway below what would you say are the three biggest habits that you've developed over time maybe you didn't have early on but you develop over time and maybe always telling the truth is one of them that has made you so successful the three biggest habits that you apply well you know i've learned a lot from the ceos i've invested in over the years and there was a woman a few years ago much more probably 10 years ago now and she said to me something really interesting i asked her why she was so successful because she was she said i do something very ordinary and almost boring but i do it every day she takes a sticky note and she writes three things she has to get done before she texts answers any calls or does anything else just three things and she sticks it on the mirror where she puts her makeup on and she really it doesn't have to be business things it can be whatever it is that are deemed to be important to get done the next day maybe it's something that's a holdover from the day before because i've been doing this now for years and it's really effective this isn't tech you're not putting it in your phone it's not a software program it's a piece of paper with and you have it you know right when you're going to bed brushing your teeth whatever you write those three things down you stick it on the mirror i do it every night and then i am myopically focused to get those three things done i don't do before i do anything else i nail those three things you cannot believe how productive you get when that happens because you don't let the distractions of all the other crap that's happening around you i just don't do it until i get the three things done and it's incredibly powerful i tell people to try it most people try it get stuck on it and they stick with it it's really because in life there's so much noise coming at you and every year more noise and all kinds of different distractions and you always say to yourself well i can multitask but you deemed that thing to be very important and you ignored it now it's three in the afternoon you're exhausted or you're busy with other stuff and you say oh i didn't get that done and it's whatever whatever the effects the domino effects are they're going to hurt you and that's why i tell people try it out it's a really great tool okay that's number one what's uh what's the second big habit okay so this one's a little funky chicken um it comes with a story okay um when i was you know i wanted to be a photographer or a musician a rock star when i was you know graduate when i got out of high school and my dad my stepdad said me you're not good you're not good enough at either of those you'll starve to death if i if i were you i would go get any kind of a degree and focus on business which what i did you know i didn't know what i wanted to do but i learned some stuff and i ended up going into postgraduate i went and got an mba which was at that time was a two-year program which you know we can talk about the merits of that or not because i've come to realize what it was worth and what it wasn't worth but anyways i remember on the last week um the graduating class and in those it's sort of like an amphitheater with about 100 people in it and you've been there for two years you've got your little name plate in front and they bring in guest lecturers to talk to you before you jump into the real world and this guy comes in and he says i'll never forget it he doesn't he walks up the the professor hands him the floor and he just goes in the middle and just looks up at everybody for maybe like it felt like forever but it was really maybe 60 seconds didn't say a word and the whole room like you could have heard a pin drop i'll never forget it and then he says you guys think you're so hot you think that you've come here and you've got an mba and you're going to go out in the world and you're going to rock and you're going to be incredibly successful i've got news for you for two-thirds of you the world is going to chew you up and spit you out you have no idea what's going to happen to you you are so irrelevant you have proven nothing you've done nothing you think an mba means something it's worthless and i remember the guy beside me i've been beside me for two years i i we were up in the one road down from the top so we can chat all the time hide a little bit yeah yeah yeah and so i said to him barry was his name i said barry this guy is such a what an what an he is what an arrogant actually is well guess what he was right he was 100 percent right and the reason he pointed that out was the idea that your experiences make you who you are over time as an entrepreneur as a parent as a person as whatever you are as a brand whatever you are it's your experiences and how you deal with them that gives you that equity over time and for many people they can't make it it doesn't work out for them they don't have what it takes to take on the abuse that the world's going to throw at you and just to give you full circle in a kumbaya you know circle of life lion king kind of moment i got caught saying the same thing a couple of months ago at the harvard mba group i and i realized i was saying the same thing that that guy said to me decades ago i said to these kids you're all think you're you're harvard mbas you are nothing burgers you are nothing and and and so there you have it what he really explained was the idea of experience and how you have to listen to your gut to navigate the bombs of your career and you have to trust it you have to trust your gut every time i've lost dough every time and i've lost plenty luckily i've had more successes than failures is when i didn't listen to my gut which is my experience and i shouldn't he was right he was absolutely right it was great information but i couldn't assimilate it because i couldn't put it in context now i understand it so number two is you need to build that experience and all the way through listen to your gut even when you're young your gut will tell you you'll know when it's right and wrong and don't go against your intuition that is actually your radar that's your dna speaking to you figuring out what the next move is going to be that's a powerful story yeah did they say the same thing to you in the back of the room and say what an atlas guy is when you gave him the speech at harvard yeah the well it's um matt higgins who was a ghetto yeah very well yeah yeah so matt um he he emailed me the next day and said hey kevin i got to tell you you're a disturber i mean you know but you know much of the class really enjoyed it but what he was really saying is he pissed a few people off yeah but you know i know hagin's pretty well we're good friends and so you know he's uh you know he's he's really savvy at what he does we wanted to talk about direct to consumer branding and that's what we were doing in that lesson was two hours it was great uh i i work with that guy anytime he's terrific yeah great guy uh great content on linkedin he has he's always sharing that content with me there um and the third habit that makes you very successful well you know it it's um you have to make time in your life for your significant other and your family and it's very hard to do it's extremely hard to do because you when you this is really speaking to more to the entrepreneurial uh community out there which is basically a third of people one-third will attempt to take the entrepreneurial journey it's not a destination is a journey and the challenges of that are very very difficult particularly when you're starting out and i learned this the hard way and again i'm going to go to a story of a class that i i taught years ago in the evening class this is this really sums it up it tells you how important this is um three hour class six to nine we're almost closing you know how ten minutes left this guy hadn't said a word the whole class he finally puts up his hand and he says um listen mr wonderful um i have a question for you it's not about the case what's the case we're doing i need some advice i said okay you know you really haven't participated at all i was kind of a little condescending because i know you guys kind of know who's who's engaged in the class even though it was a huge cohort i think it was something like 300 400 i can't remember was a lot of people anyways um he said i ha i'm a i'm graduating this year i'm an engineer and i've developed a cloud-based software enterprise system that helps hedge funds with less than 250 million dollars be compliant it's and you know it's very difficult to stay compliant when you're small he needs two and 20 hedge funds and his it was a subscription service so these guys could use it on a cloud basis and he he had written this code while he was graduating in engineering wow and he was his run rate was 5 million bucks a year in subscriptions i mean that is like and i said i don't hear a problem here i hear something incredible going on this is amazing and he said well here's the problem my fiancee came to me this morning and i'm really deserved she said i have to make a choice she can't live with me anymore i never attend any of her family's picnics i never see anybody on weekends i'm either studying or i'm working on the code that's all i can do and i asked her to come over and sleep with me when she can and we'd be together but i'm just buried in this and i need to do both i need to get my graduation in engineering and i need to keep my customers happy because this is my business now he said what do i do rooms like this is getting interesting right i mean i said okay which one is easier to replace your business or your fiance and that was probably not the right thing to say at the time but that's what i was thinking in my head and i think everybody else was too this guy's phenomenally successful clearly has gotten engaged to the wrong person that can't take that journey with him most likely outcome is divorce after they marry because he's going to work 25 hours a day eight days a week because he's got a business he's an entrepreneur my point is one of the biggest decisions you're going to make in your life between success and failure as a person is finding that right partner that you know i don't care you know who that is if you're going to take that route they have to be in sync with who you are you can't contort yourself to something else and and i think that a lot of people in their 20s really should think this through because you know not i told you i'm in the wedding industry i've got a lot of companies and i've learned a lot about marriages the reason marriages fail is not because of infidelity any marriage can survive that i talked about it earlier but why they fail while the union breaks up 50 of the time within five years is financial stress one outspends the other they're not in sync together they don't share each other's goals that's the hardest time in your life in your 20s maybe start a family whatever you're going to do the point is picking that partner is the third thing you either do right or you do wrong divorce is incredibly stressful many people try it three four times they're not in sync with their partner i'm just you know this is kind of like a little dr phyllis in some ways but i'm telling you with the ceos i work with and all the investors i work with i see stress in people when their relationships are falling apart and it's devastating so there's a story there's a those are the three things i care about in giving guidance and i think everybody knows what i'm talking about and should think about these what questions should partners be asking each other before they get married around money how honest should they be and what if they have a massive disconnect around money but they have this intimacy and connection and love should they you know just break up before the wedding or what do you think would be the right move to make so i i have given a lot of guidance in this space in fact i've written three books about it called men women and money men women and children it's all kinds of advice about family but here's here's how the journey works you meet somebody it's a great first date you have a second date it's even better okay by the time you're having your third date the only reason you're having your third date is both of you are very interested in each other and that is the time to start talking about the future i know that sounds corny i'm third i understand third date if you're just hooking up for hooking up i get it you don't have to worry about this but if you're actually stopping seeing anybody else and you're on your third date with somebody you've met and they've done the same thing and you're being honest with each other something's going on okay now it's time to start doing a little due diligence because this is going to get serious by the fourth date and you're not seeing anybody else and you're talking about you know doing whatever you're going to do together it's a big deal and you have to understand a little bit about where their heads are at number one is you know talk about family do you want to have one i mean you know it's a question some people don't you got to know that up front you make a decision about it or can you have one it's a discussion got to have tough discussion again staying honest number two what are your goals how do you see yourself in 10 years are you at home are you working or would you be raising kids i know this sounds corny but believe me women want that question and men want it to if you're on your fourth date they're dying to get into this because they're starting to really invest their time in what they think they're going to be anybody in your family bankrupt tough question ooh tough question have you ever been bankrupt then you ask how much do how much debt to have on your credit card tough question do you pay off your credit card every month oh my god and then they say why are you asking me and if they say why asking me this question you say why can't you answer that what makes you feel uncomfortable about this question yeah well what i really i really worry that the reason you know you've got to be in sync with some the great here's the thing about marriage about getting together whether you're married or not or whoever your significant other is if those are aligned if you have an understanding of each other that is in sync that union could last 50 years because after the euphoria is over with you're in business with each other you have to build a financial pillar to support growing old together or raising a family or buying a house or doing whatever you're going to do and you need to be in sync on that stuff three skills you think every entrepreneur should develop whether they're about to launch a business or they're in the process of building their business what do you think are three powerful skills that we should all develop um you have to have an alternative endeavor in the arts if you're focused on business what is it do you draw do you play music do you listen to music do you cook do you paint do you do photography what is it that you do that gets the ying and the yang working together that's a concept in korea of ping and yang and it's very important in business the greatest entrepreneurs are often very good artists in one discipline or another and they spend enough time to hone that talent so i always play guitar every night you know i'm not the best guitarist but i get better all the time and i'm good enough to record stuff that people listen to and seem to like so i like that took me a long time to get there but the same thing with whatever that discipline is and i think that's number one number two you have to get your three things on the mirror every morning i think that really works otherwise you're not disciplined you're not organized and number three and i've said this a million times you got to tell the truth which is very hard to do people say they do but they don't very few people there you know very few people tell the truth you were the king at this and um you know one of the things i love about telling the truth is that you build confidence with yourself you know when you're lying or even a white lie you lack the confidence because you know you're out of integrity with yourself uh and you're obviously the king of of telling the truth especially on shark tank you do it in a very specific deliberate way where you always tell the facts on how you feel about the facts of things or how things will work out how can someone do communicate in a way where they're telling the truth and telling the facts and being honest but also caring for someone's feelings as you might put kumbaya in it like barbara might do how can someone do both or is it not possible should you just say the facts and not care about someone's feelings it's not possible um you know it just isn't you can try and sugarcoat it but if the more you do and you leave hope where there is none that's a huge mistake particularly when it comes to matters of finance it's very binary you don't there's nothing between losing and making money it's just the abyss you either make money or you lose it you have to decide which you know you got to tell the truth and and i think you know there's a lot of angst that goes into people trying to you just can't serve both masters you have to choose one and i prefer the truth and you know you can try and say well i'm telling the truth in a in a sugar-coated way but you're not you're just lying to them that's all that's good was there any investments you passed on that you and your gut was like this is not going to work out this is a horrible idea it won't work out but then years later it ended up being a big success there always are but i don't even think about them i mean i see so many deals now my deal flow is insane i i see so much stuff in in in inside a shark tank and outside of it that you know it's there i don't i just look forward i don't look backwards i don't care you know i might have missed one i might have and i've had another successful one my portfolio we review it weekly we talk to our entrepreneurs i have winners i have losers but you know i also have some fantastic successes and catastrophic failures it's sort of it's a passion play i have people calling me every day you know crying saying i'm we're going to go out of business and i have other people saying i can't believe it somebody just offered us 20 times sales and cash are you a seller i mean i get the same call in the same day wow so you know that that's the nature of being diverse as an investor but also to realize that outcomes are unknown you don't control it you have to just understand that there's some things out of your control and you have to deal with them and if you tell the truth you don't have to remember what you said but and i also and i you know we talked about it earlier i can't make everybody happy so i don't try i really don't yeah and and i don't worry about it i don't spend a single second you know worrying about that because i can't do it i just it's not possible the most miserable people on earth are the ones trying to make everybody else happy that's so true that's a good line right there now sales is number one for you if they're a great salesman you would bet on them if they're a great salesman with something to prove that's like the golden ticket it sounds like so how does someone train to be a great salesman if they don't know how to is it something they can learn or is it something you just have to be a part of your energy well you had question about positive that's the blood that goes through a great salesman seeing the positive side of anything a lot of people see that as bologna i don't it's just like you show me a negative and i'll say you know you're right it's a negative but i can tell you what the upside of that negative is so you have a bend toward being positive so you must have that okay to be a salesman if you don't you'll never become a sales i don't care how hard you try i think it's an intrinsic quality of personality trait i know you're not supposed to say that everybody's supposed to believe you could become a salesman i think if you're inclined to be outgoing and and positive you can become a better salesperson but the real phenomenal sales people that i have worked with and i've made my living my whole life in different venues with phenomenal sales people i am telling you um they come out of the gate maybe not out of the womb but they come out of the adolescent gate as salespeople it's very hard to teach that it's a it's an artistic gift to be able to sell really well because think of how complicated it is you have to read the situation accurately you have to read the person and think of how you could use them in the way that they want to use themselves and thank you in a thank you note 12 hours later thinking it was their idea that's a complicated little thing right and you need to think of how that person could be used for your long-term goal of the picture you want to create so that's very complicated math in the head and that's what great sales people do they pronounce the best salesman i hate to say that i ever met in my life and spent endless hours with miss donald trump really unbelievable salesman how so what was it that made him so great he can read the vulnerability of people you walk into the room he could see what's wrong with you he could just feel and know accurately what's wrong with you and how he's going to use that to get his way it's an instinctive trait i don't know if he was that way at 12. uh but i met him at i guess i worked with him since he was 27 28 he is just a couple of years older than me and we were in the same industry the same town so i had so many good dealings with him over the years until of course he owed me money and i had assumed that he didn't like me anymore that's all right i got the money that's all it counts but he but he is uh he could sell anyone anything i witness it again and again firsthand in his office in meetings uh unbelievable salesman and that's exactly what he did with the american people he sold them wow you know just he's a great salesman what's the vulnerabilities that he would look for and how would he use those to get people to buy what he was selling um oh god i'm thinking of a million stories of him using my own vulnerabilities really yeah but uh they're kind of too long-winded to tell i guess what's one he would use with you and then when you saw him use with someone else like a vulnerability they have and then what he did to lean into that well you know actually i'm like on a scary turf here because i don't want i've been sued by him and he's relentless yes but let me just do a positive way okay my most positive self yeah yeah so for example i would i saw him maybe a silly example but i saw him uh interviewing uh huge ad agencies in new york for an advertising campaign done all the time by large developers right and i saw him promote a building to promote a building he's going to spend a lot of money advertising that's a sizable account for any ad agency in new york and also how to market it how to frame it how to name it uh marketing slash sales but most importantly sales and advertising and um i saw him uh sit at a meeting because i was there judging who was the best person along with them for a development site and i saw him meet person after person like a beauty contest first after person after person and then blow up the ego of one team unbelievable what you created unbelievable and i'm like i don't get it i'm a marketing person i don't get it i don't get it unbelievable unbelievable can you do this can you do that and that was all done and then he did the advertising on his own but he i could see why is he doing this but now in hindsight i see he knew that guy was going to float and work for free because he needed the ego pet so much you know yeah and i'll give you a story of me that will sound you'll think i'm a witchcraft person really not you know but um i had a situation where my husband was a navy captain and was sinking tanks along the east coast and donald had just bought mar-a-lago and they were erosion issues so my husband said to me why don't you call donald trump and ask him if he wants me to sink those tanks in there you know i'll do it right along his coast courtesy of the u.s navy we need the exercise i got the tanks i said i'm not going to ask him for anything he said no it's a favorite i'm not asking freddie he's not the kind of man i want to owe anything to no thank you bill he my husband badger me badgery finally i wrote a note saying just on the off chance you're interested cowardly way to do it i'm writing my note i saw the man all the time just on the off chance you're interested i thought maybe i rewrote it rewrote it rewrote it because i didn't want to look like a favor i was careful okay my danger dream sent them the note got hired for a big job we're at a big board meeting with like 30 people there every captain of the industry of the different trades was there he's building me up for weeks barbara barbara barbara barbara and then he decided he got out of me what he needed and he said did i tell you guys about the time barbara wrote the note i'm like sitting there going no she goes yep she was so afraid to ask me wow that she must have written a note how many times barbara four or five times no way i was like i thought i was in some kind of a horror movie everybody's looking at me she writes a note she's afraid of you only the week before i was amazing he was done with me i knew it didn't want to pay the commission done contract never got done so that is an acute ability to read vulnerability how would he know that to this day in life but i saw him do that over and over he's just he yeah wow do you know when i was selling real estate um i could always pick up between the lines between what people said they would buy and what they'd actually buy so they'd say they wanted a terrace had to have a terrace had to have a terrace they were leaving for the terrorists and i knew as sure as i knew my name that they weren't going to buy a terrorist said i was going to sell them instead on a view apartment a new building versus a terrorist and old building that they wanted because what they're really looking for was charisma that's an ability to read people okay and be able to substitute so that's another version of that but on the negative side wow does that mean you did it in a positive way yeah i could have done a negative way if i had that ability i didn't wow yeah yeah weird story right i'm so sorry you had me tell it because i don't like to talk about mr trump yeah it's okay don't let this one out edit this out it's okay it's okay wow so how did you see this with people then where you could shift what they wanted to something that you could still sell them in a positive way like you said they wanted the terrorists but i knew they just wanted charisma how do you spot that personally when you're selling a home or something else i think most of us if we listen well could sense it i think what it is it's only delivery you know um first of all very often you're selling couples or a single person and you have time to chat if you get below below the person's skin and kind of figure out what kind of person you are very often you know better than they know what's going to make them happy they could be repeating what their peers said they should have or the way they you know you don't know where it comes from but get to know them and you can reach your own conclusions so i really found that the old slogan buyers are liars is really true they don't mean to lie but what you really got to do is in any sales situation really get into the person ask a lot of questions and try it like if if you after you're visiting with someone trying to sell them something someone said what do they like what would you say about them what do they really like what would you say about them that's where you find where the soft material to sell is i think if you were given three questions to ask any buyer potential buyer they came into you you can only ask them three questions yes try to figure out who they really were what they were really interested in or what you could potentially sell them yeah what would you say maybe two or three of these questions that you asked to see what you could get out of them yeah the first question i would ask is when do you need it for urgency is 90 interesting the second question i would ask is when do you need it for and the third is when do you need it for really the rest doesn't matter because if you have a motivated person who needs something you've got to sell it doesn't matter well it does matter you have time to figure it out but you get instead like as a real estate salesman in a typical qualifying and all my qualifying forms that i taught every sales and every manager used my entire life first question boulder the only one when do you need it for because p sales people will say oh so what are you looking for no they miss the big question when you need it for interesting because they will move all over the board as to what they'll actually see and what they'll actually buy and you have all the time in the world because how do you really know that because you haven't spent time with them you're going to actually believe what you hear it's crazy you need to spend the time to form your own impression of what they're really going to buy or what is just really where the sale is where's the opportunities doesn't just have to be in sales it's in business deals you need to have the ability to spend time enough to read them well but the one thing you can ask up front is when you need it for because i had more sales people in the early years uh spin their wheels endlessly with the high priced customer old cash this and that price is no limit but they didn't need it for years and they were going to work with them for years and spend all that camp fair and car services no the the need is the uh most important question you want in any sales situation and any salesman that comes in and doesn't vet that out right away or on the phone is not a good salesman i could tell right away not a good salesman they missed the main question yeah what's the thing you're most proud of that no one knows about there's really nothing that no one doesn't know about i'm sorry what's in my mind is on my tongue out of my mouth you know one of those there's really nothing uh that people don't know about really if i wish i could come up with new stuff i'm so tired talking about what's the thing that you're proud of that you're just proud of the most that you've done that maybe you don't talk about all the time but somebody's done maybe it could be something small or big well two things came to mind big and small so i'll give you both small but somehow feels so big in my life is when i first got my first profit for running the corcoran group and i never made any profit year in year and i paid i was putting that cash back down long before i even had in my hands i was always reinvesting reinvesting because i wanted to see how far i could go but in those years when i finally got my first profit i had about forty eight thousand or maybe like forty forty something a thousand dollars i could see what we're gonna actually have a profit how did that happen and i bought my mother and father brand new car each i bought my mother a bright blue pontiac convertible because she always wanted to lose her favorite color she was wearing a convertible hairline and i got my father a um what do you call those big ass cars that everybody liked they floated uh you know all the all the uh drivers you hire they in the old days they had those big cars and the big backs that one of the lincoln content no lincoln yeah okay not a continental link and i have my uncle richie and his friend drive it out to florida and deliver it wow i remember at the time they were so much in disbelief because we always had a clunky old car with all the kids stuffed in the back it was always and all of us learned how to drive we were always crashing that poor car how my dad put up with it through store windows we were like we were each kid was learning got more dents but i remember that day and i'm so happy i thought of it in the moment because it's bad when you miss these moments i remember thinking i'll never feel more satisfaction or richer than i feel in this moment and it's not that i wish it upon myself but you know that's exactly been the truth i've never felt as rich again or as endowed or as lucky or as fulfilled ever again as that moment you see and so that uh that was that was that okay sure and you s so i wouldn't say proud of that was the most satisfying and such oh my god okay that's cool um the most overreaching uh thing i'm most proud about is i i proved sister stella marie wrong i still hate that she was a nun from hell and i later learned out that she was buried in the nun yard and that she had a drinking problem i wish someone had told me that as a kid that she had a drinking problem who knew that nuns drank other than sunday right i didn't know either okay and of course we were raised by nuns in our catholic school and they were all great except for the one i had sister stella marie so i'm so proud that um that her messaging to me that i'd always be stupid just because i couldn't read that i didn't let that determine my life because i was i i had a hard time getting over that you know and i had the help my mother told me i was a genius so that helps a lot you know having somebody on the other side but the idea that i've proven again and again and now it's a weird thing i'm kind of very thankful to her because i think because of her i tried so hard yeah do you know so really if she she was kind of like a early version of ramon simone you know yeah that she played that role and i'm so thankful uh that i got over that mostly because not only have i had success as a result of it but mostly because i keep that message going out to all these dumb kids at school it's such a sad thing that kids are defined by how they do in school and yet most most successful people i know build their own stuff weren't good in school that's been an mo i see so i like to i feel like i'm lucky to be around to keep getting that message out you know yeah you said most successful entrepreneurs have a lower iq or average iq right yes well i don't really know that but what i like is that is that you know that rejection card is a big kahuna in building anything in life not just business so they're too stupid to lay low when they've been smacked about you know most people get punched you stay low i don't want to get punched again they just keep popping up like a jack-in-the-box keep popping up like and so that takes a certain lack of intelligence i think yeah it does just keep going you don't think about it too much a smart guy would lay low right exactly i'm glad i'm not that smart yeah yeah yeah i'm curious uh you talked about this this the first year you made a profit forty thousand dollars i think you said 47 i think 47 562. well i know about that part yeah if someone is an entrepreneur right now let's just say they had their biggest here ever and they had a bunch of extra cash later just like wow we finally made some money an extra 100 grand an extra 300 grand whatever it is million bucks what should they do with that extra money how should they reinvest it to continue to grow two things i thought of right away number one they shouldn't have that money okay if you're really serious about building a business you're putting the pedal to the metal you're spending the money and putting the bets down long before it comes in so the idea like i made a mistake that one year i had a profit shame on me i mean i made someone good of it of course but you should really have any money coming in over aggressively uh targeted towards something that you do well and i think the best place to put the money and i work with my entrepreneurs all the time on this and they're not so inclined most people want to put the money in on a new idea a new version or a new this you know the best place to put the money is what has worked where have you gotten your sales give me the sources what has worked that's where you put your money all in put a pilot up until it stopped working then you move to something else but people don't do that people always like the new stuff like oh but we if we hire a pr company you know we'll really get no no no the trade show has produced 80 of your money right yeah showing up and building those relationships yourself yeah whatever has worked for you before keep repeating repeating repeating and i just think the money shouldn't be there in the first place do you know my whole life i open offices much bigger than i had any business doing i if the minute i had sales in a company and started seeing that we were doing well and i started smelling a profit like we might get a profit this thing might really start kicking in i was out looking for office space and if i needed if i thought i needed 18 desks i'd go out looking for 36. and i plunk the money down start because i i found that when you threw the money onto your bet in advance you find a way to make it work if you wait till the time is right wait till you have the profit guess what there's a smarter guy out there that's already put the money in your competitor and he's already ahead of you and it's such a quick market when you're competing you've got to like pop up about like this like the timer on you you know get it going good you have to have it done early i think so invest it back in the thing that's worked before for you until it doesn't work anymore and more than you think you could handle because human beings who are talented especially entrepreneurs are remarkable on making things work when the gun's against their head and they're under fire but gives them a lot of leeway and have them plot out they start to go to sleep it's really it's really not healthy for a business that pressure that allows you to really kind of have more urgency and make it happen well you're a football player did you play better in a game or in practice game yeah same difference same old thing yeah okay you said that was the first thing it was you said there was two things potentially did i what was your question again i said if you had a lot of cash left over from the year you just had a you know extra hundred grand a million dollars whatever it may be in your business what would you do with that money okay i actually answered your question i meant to say it better so the two things that i wanted to say was you shouldn't have the money it should be spent way in advance and the second thing is spend it on stuff that's worked before what's been the biggest lesson you've learned about yourself over the last 10 seasons that um i think the biggest lesson i've learned about myself over the last 10 seasons is that i don't know enough um uh you know and that no matter what business i invest in it has to go back to the fundamentals of i love the person i love the business and i find and i want to learn more about it and it's like christmas every day when i wake up to learn the business if it's just a money play it's of no value to me because i can go and put my money in the in the market or bonds or something like that crypto or whatever whatever i put my money in tesla you know elon is not calling me asking me how to build a car right so i have to love the person the business and i have to be i have to wake up every day like christmas to want to learn more about it what do you think's been the greatest negotiation you've ever done whether it be on shark tank or in life um the greatest negotiation i've ever done really if you look at it from a business perspective is when i negotiated out of ignorance with samsung uh textile division when i first got my fubu deal i had um i was a young kid i was very scrappy i was hungry um i was a little ignorant in business i was really very good yes um i had i had mortgage in my house and i was um running my own factory and i had met with samsung textile division for manufacturing distribution probably about six months prior to mortgaging my house and i remember calling the president of samsung all the time of textile division and saying hey what's up i want to do the deal i want to do the deal he never called me back you know it's kind of like how i don't call a lot of people back and just pitch me and i got really pissed off because i felt like he was uh ignoring me and now he had already had the meeting with me he had showed some interest so now i have a hundred thousand dollars from my mortgage of the house and i'm making my i turn my house into a factory and i'm up and running they start to hear about samsung starts to hear about how foo was doing well and everybody's wearing it so he calls back and i remember you know now that i have a hundred thousand dollars i'm thinking that's all the money in the world and i will never need any help and i was pissed off i was like this on the phone man you so full of you know s-h-i-t you know why didn't you call me back i was taking real you know emotional right and i was like the deal i better have is this deal this deal this and they said no problem just come on in because they had offered me a deal that was you know what it was standard but because they were they they saw that i grew and i had this ego like i don't want you anymore i don't need you i negotiated ignorance and it was my best deal ever i would never do that today you negotiated out of the deal right i negotiate out of ignorance and i got the best deal ever oh wow um but as i know myself now and i turn around i was out of that hundred thousand dollars and almost a month later right because i was paying for raw goods 90 days ahead of time i'll pay for my salary and staff and i was giving my um stores terms 60 90 day terms and i would have lost my house in the business and everything else and thank god thank god i did that deal but it was out of ignorance that i did the deal right and uh you know i guess everybody always says you know um you know do you believe in luck and i say no i don't believe in luck but maybe i should now that you asked that question nobody ever asked me yeah maybe that was a little bit of luck it was a little bit yeah ignorance luck yeah yeah timing everything now you said you have a couple daughters right how many i do i have three daughters three daughters 24 year old a 19 year old and this really really nasty and aggressive two-year-old wow yeah she's she's vicious wow she's a heartbeat now when you had your first daughter did you feel like your views of business shifted or the way that you worked shifted did you start working harder more balanced less or did everything stay the same i you know my first two daughters in my first marriage i worked 30 hours a day because i said to myself how am i ever going to be able to take care of these three um these three humans and and now my life is no longer about me it's about providing every single thing i can to them getting them uh you know to have a place they can live that is safe for them and education and medical and things that nature and you know and i would die for them yeah so um i i didn't have a life at that point you know um and fubu was just starting and i never knew that food ward never thought that food would be anything larger than a boutique for my four friends and i to work out over and i was like this is my this is my shot at the big time i'm not gonna let anybody stop me and i really kind of mentally said to myself i'll get to know my daughters when they're 10 or 15 years old because there is no time now i have to be in asia for six months at a time i have to be doing this and that and i i questioned if i if it was the smartest move to do but i said to myself you know what if i was a sanitation worker i would still or not nothing wrong with that but if i worked a city job i would still work every over hour every every overtime i could because i need to be able to provide for them yeah and now you know i have my my beautiful little two-year-old and it's a different way of life now now and going back to this as we'll talk about the book rise and grind now my theory is how much love can i give to this to this little being really yeah because it has changed you know now my life obviously i i am in a better place you know and i have the opportunity to be able to give as much love as i can to to her not that i don't give as much love as i can to my my other daughters they're my driving force as well right so do you feel like you have a little bit more balance now even you're working just as hard but you feel like you take that time to i do but that's exactly how the theory for the book came around i was because i don't see you slowing down really right so so what was happening was i looked at and i said you know i'm going on nine years of shark tank i have hundreds of companies i work with and or deal with and i'm investing in a bunch of them you know um i have a new two-year-old i i have work-life balance i want to get home to my lady you know i want to do the things i love to do fish or you know archery or whatever snowboard or i'm really i'm really good on the board baby but um i want to do all those things yeah how do i do it and i went and i would go and to speak to other people that i respect and i would say what's the tricks or the techniques you do to have work-life balance they all told me the same exact thing but in different forms and i started to notice that i was i i can improve in certain areas you know again like you and i were talking uh i don't know who was on camera off camera but there is no one area of success or mastery you get to and you go i'm done right you know you can you can be somebody who's a master at judit judicial or or karate or something like that and you know at 40 years old or 25 years old you're a certain master but at 80 years old you don't have the same muscle retention on the same speed so you have to learn to master it a different way kind of like when ali came out of jail and they had stripped him of his prime he had to learn the rope-a-dope to beat george foreman and you know and he had to fight a different way um just sit in the pocket and just grind it all the way yeah you can't you can't do that right so i had to start figuring out how to master my grind today because the damon john at 48 years old was not the grind that the damon john at 28 years old had and and i learned all these techniques from the book and um from from asking these people so what were the big things that people taught you then about this how to navigate well so so so the theory in the book is a i i study these 15 subjects in there and they have uh success from all various ways of life whether it's uh santana or um um um uh tyler the creator the grammy award-winning kid or you know our buddy kyle maynard who army crawled on mount kilimanjaro he's with no arms and no legs right he's one of the most inspiring guys ever he is he i mean he made me feel like an absolute loser right um and they all told me the same thing but they told me in different ways and different formulas and what i found what what i really to take away the takeaway is that everybody is extremely selfish now all successful people are extremely selfish in a very good way like chris sacco always says you know and a lot of these people here will not they'll not they will not answer any emails for the first hour of the day because they believe that you give up all your power if you're answering everybody else's problems when you wake up they'll send out emails and like chris sacco always says his uh you know his inboxes his defense his outbox is his offense they won't look at instagram when they first wake up or anything else because they don't want to hear about how everybody else on the ground is looking beautiful they're sorry skinnier whatever they all got problems right and before you know then they'll then they'll they'll they'll take care of their health in some fashion or form eat a great piece of uh you know nutrition and put adrenaline in their body they'll schedule time with their families you know where most people will say it's so cold i'm not gonna schedule when i'm going to call my mother and tell her i love her or take my daughter out on a little date daddy and daughter day but you know what you'll never get to that if you don't do it right you'll schedule everything else and be on time for everybody else in the world that you'll be on time for when the train runs you'll be on time for when the boss wants a meeting you'll be on time for your friends to go to dinner but you won't be on time for your family and before you know it they're 20 years old and you don't even know your kids anymore you're wiping yourself or your husband you you you don't have the same interest anymore they'll also schedule time to go in a dark place and meditate and or find find a place that they can be very grateful for what they currently have and they want to know what they currently want other than serving everybody else and in the act of doing all these things they become more proficient and also more beneficial for everybody else they're a better person they're on time and they have their faith and they have everything else and number one thing they all do is they they value and take care of their health yeah they go out of the way and and throughout this process when i was like talking to wendy williams and and and she's a vegan now and so many things yeah i learned to ask to ask more serious questions about my health you know if we're in business we're going to always ask you know how do we increase sales and decrease costs we're going to keep asking why why why why why how can we convert more on facebook social media in the store but we don't ask about our health and for many years i've been going to the doctor i'd do the normal thing go get a checkup you know he checks my my throat and he sees if my uh glands are swollen here or not but i started to realize i didn't feel right and some other thing going on i need to look deeper into these things and doing that throughout you know studying these people here i ended up finding out that i got a i got an executive physical i found out i had stage two cancer in my throat really yeah i had a nodule in my throat i had a marble this size of stage two cancer in my throat the doctors felt the doctors touch my throat every year for the last 10 years it probably was in me five years uh didn't know it but i started asking more questions and i started to find out all the things that were wrong with me because i just didn't take the uh physical looks okay right i started going deeper and deeper and deeper and and i end up finding i have stages i'm cancer free now so um so these things all have came out of doing a lot of the practices in the book people will read the book and find out that either they're doing the right thing or there's five other ways to go about it let me try these these four don't work but bang that one's the one you know i always tell people what you don't know can be your greatest asset if you let it because it ensures you're going to do it differently absolutely and when i landed neiman marcus all these people came up to me and said i have been doing this for seven years ten years five years how did you landing and marcus and i said i called them and they just looked at me and i was like why would you do they're like well i go to trade shows and i set up my booth and i'm waiting for the neiman marcus fire to come by and we've been doing it every year for seven years i didn't even know there were trade shows wow so sometimes just not knowing how it's supposed to be done you have to have the courage though to to say even though i wasn't trained in this because a lot of people think well i didn't go to school for this so how could i possibly know but you know it's inside of you yeah and you're willing to be creative and risk you know failure in a way that most people aren't you put yourself out there in a major way and you said hey come to the bathroom with me right and i'm not gonna do anything weird it's amazing it's incredible story my dad used to encourage me to fail so at the dinner table growing up he would ask my brother and me what we failed at that week wow and if we didn't have something to tell him he'd be disappointed and i vividly remember being a little girl and saying i tried out for this dad and i was horrible and he would high-five me and he'd go way to go wow so he was reframing my definition of failure so failure for me became about not trying not the outcome for those that don't know spanx can you share how it all started so we have an understanding of what it is and how you got into it absolutely it actually started with my own butt because i couldn't figure out what to wear under white pants and i'm sure you've had this problem when you're getting dressed all the time so what ended up happening was there was you know our underground options were no good there was underwear that left a panty line and then there was the girdle that was way too thick and heavy and so then they came out with the thong which just put underwear exactly where we've been trying to get it out of wedgie yeah and so spanx was born out of just being a frustrated consumer i wanted to wear my clothes i wanted a smooth canvas i didn't want to see lines or any kind of things going on underneath so um by taking the hosiery material which was meant to be seen on the leg until spanx sort of looked at it with a different lens and said no no no i want the hosiery material to actually be what i create the undergarment out of and it was wild trying to convince the hosiery manufacturers to help me make this product with that in mind because for so many years they've been using the material to be seen on the leg right i said no it's just it's the perfect material to create the perfect canvas for women under our clothes and it opened up my wardrobe it opened up so many other women's wardrobe we could start wearing colors we didn't feel comfortable wearing and the models get airbrushed we get spanx there you go there you go i love it and when was this uh what year this was in um well i cut the feet out of my pantyhose in 1998. wow yes i was 25 yes i was 27 and then um i spent the next two years getting it made i worked at night and on the weekends on the idea while i was selling fax machines door-to-door and then the company was launched in 2000 when i was 29. wow yeah selling fax machines door-to-door where were you living in clearwater florida okay where i grew up fax machines on clearwater beach machines anymore around no i mean thank god i'm not still doing that i don't know what would have happened there are no more fax machines just like no one watches the movie airplane anymore i cannot believe it i need to know is is he the only one on the planet who's not seen a movie airplane i was quoting airplane as soon as they put the headset on i'm like striker you're too low you're too low and you just stared at me like what is she i apologize that's it guys so how long are you selling the fax machines i sold the fax machine sorta door for seven years seven years yes i know and before that i wanted to be a lawyer but i failed the lsat not once but twice and you wanted to be a lawyer that was yours i wanted to be a lawyer i was like i'm gonna be a lawyer my dad was a trial attorney i used to watch him in court when i was a little girl and i'm a terrible test taker and so i am the worst are you the worst type of i was in the bottom four of my grade my class all through high school because i could not take tests and i always felt like the dumbest kid in the world isn't that doesn't that suck i mean it's it was like the most insecure feeling yeah and we ranked we had rankings on our grade cards so i knew exactly how dumb i was oh no always in the bottom four is miserable yeah test taking why is it so hard test taking i don't know i have trouble reading and comprehending me too i really do i like i those sras are you too young for sra's what's that okay forget it oh my god i don't know but everybody in school i used to take the sras and i would read the paragraph and be i remember vividly reading it halfway through i'd be like remember what i'm reading remember what i'm reading remember what i'm reading and i looked at those four questions at the bottom and be like i don't know what i read so i'd go back up and start over again you're speaking this is my life really and i would just like make stuff up constantly whenever i had to comprehend i would just read the same page over and over and i'd be daydreaming so much that i couldn't remember it as well i either made stuff up or i sat next to christina yeah she best friend growing up she ended up going to dartmouth and was like valedictorian or something i'm like i'll just sit next to chris do you have scantrons do you remember that okay you can't remember we were doing things it's like a long sheet with a multiple choice all multiple choice did you have that multiple choice we had to fill in the bubbles yes yeah okay that's scanning and when you skipped a bubble and then time's almost out and you realize you've just done all the wrong bubbles on the whole page and you're like no exactly but i'm on the same page you're bringing up a lot of you i'm remembering all that i used to cheat because i couldn't comprehend so i would have incredible vision i would be like this but i could see through and like see all this stuff like that that's a dead giveaway like any kid in the class like this just you knew that they were cheating no one ever caught me so all right it's how i got through school was cheating i could not have made it through class without it christina you had your girl that's hilarious you were a cheater as well well i'm just saying christina sat next to me you're an innovator i was being resourceful exactly i like it i was being really resourceful but so you wanted to be a lawyer but it didn't work i wanted to be a lawyer i failed the else out not once twice so then instead of going to law school i drove to disney world and tried out to be goofy but you have to be five eight and five six and you didn't wear heels no i didn't wear heels i didn't wear heels and so i was the height of a chipmunk oh so you got the chipmunk i got the chipmunk part but i didn't end up doing it i put people on rides in a brown polyester spacesuit at the world of motion and horizons at epcot epcot center and i would see people that i hadn't seen in a while and come through yeah i'm walking on the moving sidewalk putting people on rides and they'd go hey blakely is that you didn't you graduate from college and my big mickey mouse here said sarah blakely and i'd be like get on the ride oh my god but that's what i did and then i sold fax machines door-to-door for seven years seven years did you wake up every morning and say this is my dream to sell fax machines door-to-door were you thinking no what am i doing in my life exactly so what happened was a lot of people think that spanx started when i cut the feet out of my pantyhose but actually it started long before that it started when i was selling fax machines door-to-door and getting my car business card ripped up in my face being escorted out of buildings all day every day that i woke up one day and just thought i'm in the wrong movie like how did this happen this is not my life cut scene director like call the producer and i got out a piece of paper and i wrote down what am i good at and the only thing in the good column was sales and i thought okay what am i going to do with that and i ended up writing in my journal i'm going to invent a product and sell it to millions of people that will make them feel good and then i asked the universe for an idea and i was very specific and it took two years and i only cut the feet out of my pantyhose one time and i was not going to squander any idea the universe gave me because i had really asked for it and then the minute i cut the feed out i started trying to make it i started looking up whole manufacturers on the internet this is before alibaba wasn't it yes because i joined this i did this about eight years ago and i used alibaba for something and it was easy to find like a manufacturer in china and yeah test different things but how did you find a manufacturer at that time a website called thomasregistry.com and it lists all the manufacturers in the country based on category and that's when i found out that a lot of hosiery and undergarments were being made in north carolina oh really yeah so you got it local yes yeah so i called and called and no one would take my call and they'd either hang up on me or say they weren't interested so i took a week off of work and drove around in person and just showed up and i just showed up yeah i want to create a sample yeah because if they weren't going to get a big order for something they're probably like what's i'm not going to do a little sample for you right i showed up with my lucky red backpack from college it's always with me you still haven't yeah of course and you didn't bring it here come on it's with me it's with me in l.a yeah oh wow yeah so um anyway i went into the ho the manufacturing plants and they asked me the same three questions and you are let's say sarah blakely and you're with like myself and you're financially backed by and i was like sarah blakely so you can imagine how those went like well have a nice day honey and good luck and um about you know a few weeks after i made all those rounds i got a call from a guy in north carolina who had took pity on me and said sarah i've decided to make your crazy idea wow i'm going to ask him why he had the change of heart he said i have three daughters yeah so he ran the idea by them and they're like dad that sounds interesting you got to give that girl a chance amazing so he called you back you didn't follow up with these people oh yeah i was following up but to no avail but he he fought up and said yeah we'll give it a shot yes we'll make this so what was the next step was he just making a sample for you or testing different models or sizes or yeah so um it just set up to make the garment while i was making it with his manufacturing plant i was also wanting to patent the idea and i was also trying to come up with the name for the invention so i was doing those three things simultaneously driving up on the weekends and working with ted in the back of the manufacturing plant that i'd become very close with and driving to north carolina from florida no from atlanta i was living in atlanta what's that about eight hour drive six hour drive um about four and a half well it's not bad yeah it's not bad and so anyway um ted ted became my buddy and i went to get it patented but all the patent lawyers wanted between three and five thousand dollars and i had five thousand dollars set aside to do this that's it yeah so i wrote my own patent i went to barnes and noble and i bought a book called patents and trademarks and i wrote the patent and then i called one of the patent lawyers that was the nicest to me and said please please please rewrite the claims over the weekend for a discounted price i've done all the other rest of the patent the legwork you've done yeah you just kind of need to button it up and yeah you need to do it the legal part and so he did he actually admitted to me that when i came to visit him he thought i'd been sent by candid camera which let me put it in your word camera i know i thought he was being punked of course of course wow yeah he thought he was being punked okay and he thought where's dashan where's ashley yeah exactly he thought that his friends were playing a joke on him no way yeah he goes who's this girl sarah i mean like you're not the typical person who walks in the door saying i've got a product and i want to pat it so anyway he did that then at the same time i'm trying to think of the name i had horrible names written on scrap pieces of paper all over the place in my apartment in my car in rental cars on the back of like avis agreements and um you want to hear how bad the runner-up name to spanx was yeah open-toed delilah's no way yes i cannot believe that was even an option it was it was the runner-up like how bad is that open-toed delilah i so wouldn't be sitting here with you right now if i named it that is the horrible yeah it's so bad wow yes so anyway okay so what's this bag stand for well it's all about the butt and it makes your mind wander a little bit nobody ever forgets it i had no money to advertise it was risky it was fun at the time listen now it's become a household name but when i first invented it i would call people and say hi i'm sarah from spanx and they would hang up right because i was probably like a porn yeah they thought i was pranking them i'm called them i'm like no really i'm sarah my company really is called spanx and i had department stores across the country that wouldn't sell it they thought it was too risque of a name yeah and um my mom sent her whole lunch into the wrong website when i first started i was like mom it's with an x oh so yeah anyway i hadn't ended up buying the word spanx from a man who said he was holding out from the porn industry funny enough that you say that i bet yeah i paid with an x i paid money for that but um anyway yes so amazing named it spanx it came to me because i narrowed down my thinking i knew that kodak and coca-cola were the two most recognized names in the world at the time and i thought what do they have in common i like to think about words and phrases a lot they both had a strong k sound in them and the man that created kodak liked the k sound so much he took a k and put it in the beginning and the end of the word and played with letters in the alphabet so and i also had a bunch of friends who did stand-up comedy and it's this weird trait see secret among comedians that the k sound will make your audience laugh so i put all that together and i'm like okay i want my product name to have the k sound in it for good luck and literally spanx came across my dashboard in my car in my mind and i pulled off the side of the road i wrote it down i went home that night i typed it in my computer for 150 with my credit card and at the last second i backspaced the k and the s and put in an x and hit so it was accident kind of with the no idea yes i know i you backspace catch i backspaced because i stared at it for a while and i had done research that made up words to do better for product than real words and they're easier to trademark yeah so then then i had the name and i had the the um patent in the works got my prototype and my patent lawyer said sarah i need to know what's in this garment in order to write the patent i said okay no problem we'll call ted so i get ted on the phone i'm like ted can you talk to the manufacturer yeah like in the back in the back i'm like ted can you talk to my patent lawyer he's like yeah so we're all talking and he goes i go can you tell him what's in it he's like yeah well it's 70 percent nylon and 30 lacquer and i'm like all right and so i'm taking notes my patent lawyer is taking notes and that night i could not sleep i'm up all night and the next morning i wake up i'm like how is there lacquer in this product what is lacquer just saying i'm aware so i called ted i go ted can you spell lacquer he's like yeah l-y-c-r-a i'm like oh my god lycra oh yeah yeah i was like got it don't all change on lacquer immediately my uh that lawyer was laughing you know how fast you would have gotten a patent if you um tried to make this out of paint thinners like they would be like sure so was it challenging to get it did you get the first try the pattern i did wow usually it takes a few turns doesn't it i got the patent the first try and i got the um trademark name spanx amazing yeah so it didn't seem like there was that many challenges once you submitted it or whatever you kind of got the things you needed in place you got the the orders in was was there a lot of challenges after that once you got the patent the trademark that was a really hard part it's just i heard the word no for two years yeah all the manufacturers nobody thought it was a good idea and um and also when you're just yourself trying to break into an industry like you mentioned the manufacturers it's not really in their best interest to slow down machines or try to give a girl with a couple grand a chance unless you're gonna give them a bunch of money for a big order of something yeah right so that was the hard part and then once i had it i cold called neiman marcus and that was the first account i called on did you get it yes well you were great at sales well you could sell it i was so excited it was my moment i flew to dallas i called them and said if you give me 10 minutes of your time i'll come and meet with you and she said all right this is the buyer oh yep the buyer i first called the atlanta store they're like girl um we can't help you we have a buying office i'm like well where is that give me their number and um i went in and halfway through my pitch i could tell i was losing her so i said you know what will you please come to the bathroom with me and she was like so buttoned up i mean neiman marcus like her pen matched her belt that matched her shoes and she was like what are you like what am i gonna do in the bathroom i was like just follow me to the bathroom and show you my own panty line and i went in the stall with spanx and my pants and without it in my pants and she was like oh i totally get it it's awesome and i'm going to put it in seven stores wow yeah okay just like that just like that it was so unbelievable i was so nervous and then of course i had to call sam i'm like in the rental car on the way back to to um to the um airport i called the owner of the manufacturer i'm like sam sam it's sarah i need more i just landed neiman marcus and he's like what he was in shock he goes sarah i thought you're giving these away his birthday presents for like years and i said no neiman marcus just bought it anymore and he patched me through to ted he goes okay you talk to ted okay so ted comes back in he's on the phone and i go ted i need more and he goes i go i just landed neiman marcus he goes well that's great but what you can do about the crotches the crotches yeah exactly that's what i said i go what don't they come with crotches we've been making them with crotches he goes well yeah but we only got one crotch machine and it's being used by somebody else no way yeah so what do you do then so i just landed even marcus and i have no crotches oh my gosh i don't know where to go for a crotch do you i mean like i don't know where do you go i actually looked in the yellow pages crotch making machines yeah i just well i looked up crazy watch machine i looked up crosstalk how you spell crotch okay listen this is what i learned i'm gonna teach you something okay so i didn't know that's yellow pages again yeah oh my gosh it's a big book it's yellow it's what we used to like things like hilarious um and what's instagram oh yeah you just got it okay i just joined it seven days ago all right so um where was a crotch machine yeah so anyway in the yellow pages it's not under crotch so i learned there's a fancy word for crotch named gusset gusset yes what gusset never heard that word so i started calling gusset companies they were like fedexing me crotches from all over my roommate would come home and be like you got another crotch in the mail and then i ended up finding a man by the name of jean bobo that worked for a crotch company just 20 minutes north of where i lived in atlanta and he saved the day and they made the crotches and then i could deliver neiman marcus so you had the leggings they made the crotches and then you sewed them together because that's how it works yes apparently yes gotcha okay so you had to know how many did you print the first time um three thousand three thousand three thousand pair of the first spanx one one uh skew right or yes one score twenty dollars one sku three sizes or like four four four sizes yep and 3 000 of them yes and that's what neiman's ordered and then i sent them to this they sent him to the seven stores i had no packing and shipping department so the semi trucks were pulling up to my apartment in atlanta and i was shipping them myself to neiman's this is amazing and um then i called every friend i had in those seven cities like people hadn't talked to in 20 years hey go buy a few of these go yeah take your girlfriends there hi christina remember me i used to sit next to you all the time in grade school will you please go buy this product called spanx i literally called them and i said and i'll mail you a check so i paid all my friends and friends of friends to go buy the product that is brilliant to get some more yeah i said go in i said i gave him a whole script i'm like go in and say i've been looking for this all my life i can't believe it's here and create all this excitement that's amazing and then of course a week later the new i talked to the neiman's buyer and she's like sarah we are blowing out i'm like you don't say no way i was buying them all yeah brilliant you have to wow you have to you have to ensure your own success absolutely so then once i started running out of money oprah call and put it on as our favorite product of the year how long was that for until the time was in neiman marcus to oprah calling like a month it just happened like a month or a month and a half how did she even hear about it i sent it to her in a gift basket and her andre who dresses her put it in her dressing room and she put them on and has basically worn them every day since shut up i'm not kidding it was so unbelievable i had no money to advertise in the back of my apartment i was selling fax machines like a month before that but i have to say i was working every night and on the weekends for two years quietly trying to get this man building this thing yeah building it i've interviewed a lot of people and there's one side of the spectrum where the successful entrepreneurs say you know what lewis the key to growing your business is going all in on one focus that's the key right that's what some say yeah but there's others like yourself who've invested in every business in the world it seems like and seen lots of them grow and been successful in that way do you feel like um is that just like your your creative nature where it's like you want to invest this is your part of your path right now where you want to invest in lots of brands because you did so much in one thing for so long no i think i think i i'm more towards the person here um so when i invest in brands and companies um i invest in them because they're i'm allowing them to they're allowing me to be part of their dream but i'm also learning from them which is in return allowing me to go back to my special skill set and improve it so i'll give you you're learning from the people you invest in i'm constantly learning every single day so in powershift i have i i highlighted my investment on bombay socks now these guys are the number one sock the number one investment in shark tank history the only the only the ring who did not get an investment when it did really well get a billion dollar billion to sale crazy right yeah and and and good for you you were there when yeah i said no and you know jamie ended up becoming a guest shark one time and he said he said when he came in the tank he was asking too much money and but but i believe that because we tenderized him like that and he went out and raised money i think we deserve five percent but that's just i'll leave it up to him yeah exactly but i think that that i sent him an email every other day saying hey just five percent all right i'm gonna go four and a quarter but the socks but the socks is the best investment you made and it's the number one it's the number one product in shark tank history really in terms of how much it's grown how much is grown and how much is gross now i want to make sure that you want to because i know you interview a lot of people so if you ever interview the underachievers that sit next to me in the tank i want to make sure that you remind them that you're the number one investor i am king kamehameha all right just make sure it was clear but um let's give you that what was that deal what was that deal and how big has it grown they've done over 200 million dollars i think it's 280 million dollars more importantly they're very so their deal is a sock and every time you buy a pair of socks they give a pair away to the homeless because they have a big challenge that's cool and we don't normally talk about the number it's more important that we've given away 30 million pairs of socks right cool thank you thank you and it's really it's really uh you know dave and randy's company and they they've done it all um i they've gotten very little to almost no advice for me because they're so great yeah but i'm gonna give you an example on the negotiation they come into the tank the only shark that doesn't want clothes is somebody who has 10 clothing companies and eight are dead i my my my reason for being on the tank beside investing other people is to diversify my portfolio so when i talk to a retailer i go well i'm already taking a real estate in the clothing area i want real estate and electronics area i want real estate lotion the last thing i want is socks also i have i don't know 20 000 units of socks that i can't sell you know when i can't sell side i just send people over to people's houses they steal one yeah and then you have to buy a pair because you just think you lost it right so it's looking silly plus if i do the deal i'm the logo you can't if anybody in this room were in this building were wearing bomber socks you couldn't tell so how do i get the advertising out of it but they managed to make me understand that today's generation wants to give every time they purchase instead of at the end of the year they want impact they want impact they and they don't want to buy from people who are just making money they want to know what did you do for somebody else so that's one thing i learned that i applied to all my businesses because you couldn't do that before social media you could but you couldn't get the word out and then plus you would have to advertise or for people's hardships right you wouldn't have self-generated content of people saying thank you right so i learned that i also learned that because the consumer purchased and was part of a movement they talk about at the dinner table at the water cooler and that's your advertisers you don't need the traditional form of advertising because people want to brag when they're doing something well and then last but not least they were showing me how to sell directly to my consumer and not being at the mercy of a retailer who still doesn't know what they're doing so they shifted the power in the room to get me to do a deal so you weren't interested i wasn't interested what else was everyone no not all not everybody else was interested but i was the last shark to be interested because i'm too jaded by the fashion industry lo and behold i do the deal and that's what a power shift is being able to know your target know what's beneficial for that person no way you're willing to draw the line and know you know really know how to relate to that person and communicate with them what is it that they said that shifted the power inside of your mind and say okay i gotta get into this well they showed me that the technology on socks were really good because they didn't have the toe the seam in the toe when me being a manufacturer i didn't know how they did that at first it was a simple change but i used to get irritated and toes when doing that um they then but more importantly you have to put it on a certain way yeah of course more importantly they showed me that the data they received from their consumer was able to give them the ability to keep selling their consumer and keep talking directly to them and that they no longer were at the mercy of if a retailer makes the best decision or puts your socks out over here or advertises your socks or discounts them or anything else right so they were showing me how to control the business it's very much like content sending it out and getting to know a dashboard are you a consumer and i learned so much from them but it was it was them understanding that damon i'm going to take you out of the old way of you doing business and move you into the new way of doing it and guess what if it doesn't work out we're going to do another business together and we're going to make some money and or change the world and more than likely have some fun that's cool who has taught you the most in the last 11 years of this show them them they have i learned i learned you know i joke about my fellowship but i definitely learned from them just because they pay you the most every month you're going to check every month i see the business operating i see i see them i see them being laser focused i see a lot of things that they do they have probably taught me the most yeah who was those someone that you didn't invest in that talk to the most whether it be like a good lesson or a lesson you're like okay that's not what that's what not to do somebody that i didn't or maybe someone inspired you but you didn't see the right fit for you and they taught you something uh you they i listen i learned i learned i i'm not saying to be warm and fuzzy i learned from every single one of these entrepreneurs how they operate the business or how they fail a lot of time when they fail it it confirms theories that i have um because you know whenever i fail i look a checklist of all the things and i go why didn't why did i do this this is this is this is not what i do yeah why why did i not take my own damn advice you know so um i can't name just one of them you know but you know i i look at entrepreneurs like uh jeff bezos and learn and go as big as you are you are affecting the world and you will still be scrappy enough to say hey amazon workers you want to make a couple extra dollars when you're going home you can take a package home and you let why is that beneficial well first of all the worker gets to drive home and takes home a package and makes more money you you're a worker of amazon so amazon trusts you with the box and amazon saves on shipping like takes a package home that you bought for something no meaning just take anything you want you no take it and drop it off oh drop it off someone on your neighborhood yeah wherever hey hey i gotta drive two mile i gotta drive ten miles but i looked in the system and seven houses on the way the ten miles wow let me let me make extra money doing that you can make action yeah that's pretty small i'll be picking up whole truck loads and it wins for everybody right but when i look at a when i look at an entrepreneur like jeff bezos who does stuff like that i go he's still scrappy he's still thinking you know what i mean all this money in the bank but he's still trying to still maximize yeah yeah he's still scrappy who's someone um that you've been a shark with whether it be a consistent uh shark or someone who's come and gone that maybe you weren't sure about in the beginning but the power shifted over time where you dated something or you did something to renegotiate the relationship where you started doing more together you started to have a respect more for you know nobody's ever asked me that and i don't think i've ever told her we're on the school greatest you know yeah that's true i didn't even tell her but she's in the book bethany bethany frankel so i had met bethany with one or two other sharks i forgot when it was like on backstage at gma and i had already seen the show a couple of times and you know of course they're drinking and cursing at each other and we say hi and she just like brushes us off and walks by and and i remember saying to myself i don't i don't really like that woman i don't get a good feeling from her so when they casted her to come on as a guest shark i said i said it first listen i don't want to be on the panel with her because i already have this kind of like you attitude to her and it may come up wrong because it'll look like i'm either beating up on a new shark or i'm being too aggressive to a female wow by mistake they scheduled me to be on with her by mistake or by no no no on purpose no bible say by mistake they started me being per oh no here's what i'm sorry we all meet at one place for the shark dinner prior to production i was like you know she seems all right whatever and then they scheduled me to be on with her and when i was on with her brilliant person like she wasn't about herself she really cared about the entrepreneur which we all do but we thought i thought i'm not gonna speak for other that she was gonna come on and be self-absorbed and do the reality show thing from where she's at she made fun of herself she was very you know she had a humbleness of humility and then when we left that set she went directly to mexico for the earthquakes and various other things and she called all her friends and said if you got a private jet do me a favor pack it up for i got i got supplies and food and whatever the case is i need these just for puerto rico for mexico and she spent the next month going out and um really being there hand to hand and giving people stuff and i fell in love with her after that wow and and she is like somebody that i i super admire yeah wow let's go have you guys done deals together or are you we haven't done a deal together but and we're so busy we can't always catch up but you know she's all for me to stay over in our home in the hamptons and and my wife loves her and she's just she's just an amazing individual that i i walked in the room at first and i was like she's an yeah you wrote her off and then now you're inspired and now she inspires me yeah and who's the person who's taught you the most whether it be a consistent shark or someone who's come on for a couple episodes no single shark has taught me the most um because i learned from all of them they're all really really they all are really fascinating in their space i think barbara though sometimes is the one that can influence me the most because you know i love marketing and branding yeah but i'm a one-trick pony you know i'll get it on a celebrity get it on a famous show or get it on whatever cases and then i'll make inventory barbara will come with ideas out of nowhere just out i mean she pulls it out of the air and they're brilliant ideas and they're not they're very rarely are they similar really yeah they're not a one-trick pointing she's she's just so she'll think of a creative idea for a specific thing and not just say oh i've got this celebrity who'd be great correct every time or correct she's she's just she's a genius when it comes to yeah we had her on she was great did she touch you no comment okay yeah she's a predator full full printer she's a sweet woman her husband right there when and he's usually like this no i think i actually posted that she was on and i think that was the first thing you texted me yeah yeah she'll touch she'll touch she's great though i like her a lot um so power shift how do you just remember your text to me i think you're out of the dad joke in there as well um what i like about this i went through a lot of this he did it and yeah i usually don't read anything but i say yeah but i went through a lot of this and i'm trying to find the bookmark that i had on one of these pages but what i like is that ever the end of every chapter you talk about these kind of like uh little bullet points to break things down you break things down and i relate that in this book now you've done a bunch of books in the past yeah why do you need another book what's you know it's like so you know i think that's a good question i don't write books to write books and this is my third one in five years and me being dyslexic it is not an easy i know the feeling man it's really not easy um i think that a lot of people out there are misinformed they need and they need um they need information and i think if you look at some of you know a lot of your books my books and various other people that we happen to know each other but i believe that if you read a vast amount of things and you start to see that all these people don't know each other but they're all saying something very similar and if you're applying that to your life that's how it happened to me by reading uh no pulling hill thinking grow rich or the greatest salesman of babylon or blue ocean strategies all these and i started to see these things that come come together it gives you uh it gives you more power to go out and execute so the reason i wrote this book is because a lot of people that came up to me and started saying i can't take control of my life or they or i've heard people say or or act like somebody else is supposed to issue them power or somebody took power away from them and i realized that people always thought negotiation first of all you're negotiating every minute of your life you know you're negotiating to get into the bathroom before your husband and wife or getting your child off the school bus yeah you negotiate right and and i and i realize that people always thought negotiations purely transactional when you get to one you get to the table i'm sitting across from you right and it's not it's about building influence then it's transactional and the transaction needs to be what's in it for the person across the table not what's in it for you and then more importantly it's it's developing that relationship and letting it grow over the course of time and doing 10 20 30 40 of the deals or having 10 20 30 40 other people telling other people how great you are to do all the deals um and people always thought that it was like that so i influenced you yeah so i end up putting in the book the other book i have is marked up now i'm remembering the two things i wanted to talk about in here um one is a story about 6x now you don't give yourself enough credit about how creative you are because you said you're a one-trick pony you'll just find a celebrity yeah and put the merch on them and put it on a big show or something but something you talked about was a story on how when you were getting started out you started developing 6x t-shirts yeah with your logo on the back i thought that was brilliant because it's the biggest real estate in the club yeah so so what happened was it's amazing it happened so so i guess that's a good point so the story goes that i didn't have i didn't have a lot of money for shirts um and i wanted to get i grew up in hollis queens and everybody's from hollis queens ella cool j run dmc ja rule 50 cents uh salt and pepper trap gold quest uh a lot of these people from queen but i could if i gave you a shirt you everybody was approaching you it's just like going up to an influencer they didn't want the shirt i didn't want to give it to the sk the kids with the funny mustaches and the skateboards because they would just wear it once and throw it away right but i realized that the big celebrities were probably had oh well they had entourage around so what do i have to do i had to build influence and how did i do that well i had 50 shirts that i could buy so i bought 50 5x and 6x shirts i realized the big guys never had fashionable clothes to wear because all they had was like big black shirt a big white shirt or they'd have to pay a massive amount of money to get a custom made i bought 50 of these shirts i handed them to all the big guys i knew or i would see those big guys ended up being the guys in front of the red rope of the club the guys who were the bodyguards for people the guys who were just big billboards and joyous right and they would wear the full boots up 10 times a month because they finally felt fashionable wow what would happen that at that point is after the rapper saw it on these guys for about a year the rappers would go yo what's up man am i shocked where's mine i'm like i couldn't get to you you're you're too big of a stop i ain't trying to i ain't trying to bother no no i'll wear it because then they would ask the big guy who normally is like the bodyguard and he they don't they don't have no nothing to say to them maybe like hey where's that little dude and the big guy feel good oh i'll see if i got my guy i know exactly yeah i see if i get you one and that is how i started building influence internally you know with my customers that's smart yeah when i read that i was like you're more creative than you think no i get it but but i generally narrow myself down to i'm a numbers person and then it was numbers to me it was like they'll wear it 10 times every one time i got somebody else to wear it there's not many of them and their selected number of group around to select the number of people yes more more about the numbers when i read that story i was like okay who are all the assistants of the most iconic people that you want to know exactly what can i send them that will make them be reminded of me and every time i want to call or say hey is you know is oprah ready for the interview or whatever yeah it's like they might push it in a little bit and and i take it even a step further you know some of your digital courses you give to them you give to a bunch of people you say you're a part of a select community i know you're the gatekeeper of these people but i know that also if you find value in this stuff not only am i enriching your life but sooner or and give me some l criticism that i can do it because you're seeing everything across your plate right i like that creating a select community the power of 6x i like that story and then i read i think it was in the middle of the book and one of the end parts i think you were doing research from like all the top universities that said that you should lead with the offer first yes when you're making a negotiation where i've always heard that you want to wait for someone to make the offer that is a very common don't you think that it's like you never want to show your cards yeah i like they say that the firs the one who says the number first uh is the one that loses and things that nature i actually like the negotiation part of laying it on the table here's where i'm at with this here's what i seek um here's what i want here's what i want and here's what value that i could bring to you and i think it just takes the it takes the question out of the room you know but what if you could have gotten more or less well then you could have gotten it more but what if what if what if you say something somebody will we're not even in that ballpark right right you can always upsell you can always say here's here's where i would like to be and uh then someone said and here's what i'm going to give and they'd be like oh well we want more than i'd be like okay but i gave you where i was at but it cost me more right it cost me more time or energy or product or inventory or whatever the case is or relationships you know yeah you sounded like an online marketer the upsell word here of course listen uh you know there's only uh what do they say there's only uh three ways to deal with a customer acquire a new one upsell a current one or make one buy more frequently so in three ways recurring yeah that's the best way right now exactly what's the best negotiation you feel like you did not where you gained the most but where both parties won the most now you're like when i negotiated my deal with uh bruce and norman weiss fell over at samsung um i negotiated out of ignorance but i got the best deal at first i i was a young kid i was 19 or 20 they they interviewed me they heard about fubu they were interviewing various other people because they were thinking about getting into they were already in the outerwear space but they want to get into the denim rate-aware space they interviewed a couple of people um once i got interviewed they said we like yeah we think we may do something with you i called the guys for six months they never picked up the phone this is before cell phones out i felt insulted and rightfully so but also they were looking at other opportunities it's not their job to answer my call again after that but i think they should have said hey man we're not interested i go to the trade show the magic trade show um in vegas they're sitting at a table or and and one of the big buyers from like a store was like holy is that the fubu guys and he talked to his boy and they said you better get those guys right now all of a sudden my phone's on fire the next day by these guys i'm like huh hey remember me yeah yeah i was hungry at the time and that's exactly how you talk to you that's baby boy so um so a normal like a designer deal i'll call it in in fashion is generally like if i'm going to put up all the money and all the resources we're going to split this thing up 25 to you or 30 to you and 70 to me because i may have a little inventory i got to get rid of you don't have any personal guarantees at hand i got to deal with all the risks i'm taking a lot of risks but you're making clean money but because they pissed me off so much i had said listen if i come in tomorrow we better sign a deal and it better be a real distribution 50 50 even split deal for the distribution you guys had all the distribution financing this is that and then i'll go ahead and and out of ignorance that became the deal we've been partners for you know 25 years and we've made massive amount of money but we always felt aware that we could see eye to eye and it was just out of that ignorance what is the greatest mistake you've made that you're so grateful for that you made because it made you a better person from the lesson you learned or from the thing you got out of like you mentioned that your previous boyfriend a boyfriend back in the day married a secretary and it was the greatest gifts that you had because you got out of a relationship that wasn't going to work or you met your partner is there really like a challenge or a mistake you made in business or life besides that um i don't think i'm the type of person that is brave enough to admit i've made a mistake honestly because i think things have not worked out along the way where things just didn't work out as i hoped or dreamed them to be and but i don't see them as a mistake because as quick as you were thinking oh poor me you start to see the light of the door that it's opening that couldn't have opened without it okay so i don't have like a regret if this was a big mistake that was a big mistake but i have to also say i have my whole life been very cognizant of doing anything and exposing myself to anything even when i didn't want to do it because i'm deathly afraid of feeling like i would regret like what if i don't do it that's more of a motivation for me than doing me too you know just like well well i look back a little you know like for example with dancing with the stars i did not want to do it i'm an old babe the last thing i want to do is practice four hours a day you were great you were you think i was so great not the judges they didn't think so i was the number one person on dancing with the stars last season number one rejected now there's a record okay but so you might say that was a mistake with all the work that that led up to and it was a social embarrassment i thought i'd be rejected maybe number three or five or six but number one i never saw it coming and so i was kind of a little mortified on that one but you know what i'm so thankful i did it and the minute i recovered by the next morning i'm like thank god i did it and thank god it's over it's a lot of work it's a lot of work because i didn't want to i said yes because i didn't want to wonder what it would have been like you know so what did you learn from the experience about yourself i learned i'm not a good dancer i swear i've looked at the tapes now one year later when i thought i same tapes i looked at a year ago i thought you know i really got this but i look at the one year i'm like i'm stiff as a board what was i thinking missing steps so so what i learned from that is that i can't dance well but inside my body i feel like i'm a good dancer and i'll get out on any dance floor do my own makeup steps and people really smile as i'm dancing because i don't really give a crap and i look like it you know yeah but what did i learn i learned that i learned the same lesson i learned again and again which is thank god i did it thank god and and the the injury of oh god you did so poorly dissipates quickly but there's an echo to not trying something that's going to sting here i think not not that i know that because i really don't do that but i'm afraid of it it's like it's like fear of a nightmare that might happen i don't know why because i don't really have that in my life but i'm fearful of it yeah i think that'll sting you for a long time too that fear of regret of like oh i had the opportunity to do this dance with the stars and i didn't do it how many years would you think about not you know maybe a year but still a bad year you know um you know what uh regret does i think and and why i've been able to build up my personality and whatever i can get out of and give to life as best i could um what regret does is it quietly takes down your confidence a notch because in short you're a coward you shied away even if the right decisions to shy away once you shy away you quietly without even consciously thinking think a little less of yourself now i say that from experience because i've watched many people get stronger or people where life makes them weaker and there's a lot that goes into that but i really believe that that regret peace is not given um enough do you really have to try everything and try your best because even and listen two out of three things i try don't work out you know but people just remember the success that's right but i know what the failures are but still i got confidence out of failing each time a little notch up a little notch up so then you conduct yourself with more power in life because you feel better about yourself and ironically you have more to give you're a better package to get more because you've you've put a lot into that basket by just trying try and try and try you know do you feel like you're more confident even though you're the first one out of dancing with the stars that you oh you did it and you absolutely absolutely i'm more confident i got a lot of confidence out of that because every female friend and male friend i had that was even close to my age they were like i can't believe you even went for it right they said you're out they would discourage you out of your mind but i want all their respect and they constantly say that was amazing that was amazing so even my friends that kind of took me for granted think better of me i went up a notch in their head you know it takes a lot of courage to do that it takes a lot of courage to publicly fail but i happen to be very good at public failure really because i've done it my whole life and i'm that doesn't bother me i think uh what i think what i didn't want to happen was that i would look foolish or old dancing with a 24 year old ripped stud on the floor until i realized it feels really good to lean in on that guy let him spin you around that floor and how my girlfriends are having to dance with anybody like that lately there you go that's a good way yeah what would you say um why did you not why are you not afraid to fail publicly because you know what i've learned nobody's really watching nobody gives a yeah everybody's so about it the next year or whatever maybe even in the moment because the truth is that people most of all are thinking about themselves so just when you think the limelight's on you and everybody's going to say god is she's stupid why would she say that or do that the minute they've given you that one moment of attention they back on to their own problems their own selves so it's like overstatement of your ego to think you're really that important right you know you could just move right on we could distract people you try the next thing their eyes on that if you're lucky so no it doesn't really amount to anything it doesn't really amount to anything yeah it's self-ego that is not really true that's interesting because you say that most people are focused on themselves so when you mess up publicly or you fail publicly they'll think about it for a moment but then they're on to their own thing if you're lucky and they notice honestly most people won't notice it just feels like everyone notices yeah definitely what a shame right exactly what about when you want people to have the attention on you for the things you're doing good how do you keep the attention on you the relevancy of yourself as an entrepreneur an individual when people are focused on themselves so much how do you keep them thinking about you your brand your business your work your mission you have to think of a way uh to grandstand you know what do you mean by that uh good old-fashioned grandstanding like i built my corcoran group brand on the backs of the new york times and the wall street journal in new york post without a doubt i would think of all kinds of crap to get media attention okay as long as my brand name was in there the best single best thing i thought of which was really just an attempt to get publicity when i couldn't afford advertising because it was a bad market was my corcoran report and all that was a was a one-page report giving giving the average sale price of apartments in manhattan is how i labeled it i didn't i was too stupid to know that that was the wrong label it was just my 11 sales but it was on the front page of the real estate section and i was quoted on the first line and boy that was an eye-opener that's how i learned that publicity can build a brand today's version of publicity that i look for in all the entrepreneurs i invest in is how good are you at social media i don't care if you're in the sock business if you're in hardware or what what's going on how good are your social media what's your fault and those are the key questions now how how well how good are you at at building uh attention through social media because that's the new free ride not really free but to a large degree free just like the new york times and wall street journal my free ride okay so you have to be creative i think in thinking of how you can grandstand and so what's uh like i don't know i'm thinking what's a business right today like well i don't want to use cousins we already talked about cousins like grayson lakes which is a start out as a baby sock company phenomenal entrepreneurs i have this the long like the long lady stocking yeah with a little lace on top i bought some of those for a girl before yeah and they make girls look sexy and they're well priced and they're beautifully nice they're elegant they're sexy well now it's a full fashion line and it's uh i think 17 million dollars in sales this year but what are they particularly good at is there's a husband and a wife team melissa the the the wife of the team has gorgeous long legs you may remember her from shark tank her husband's more of a nuts and bolts guy but great at business what she does is she constantly models and talks directly the camera she has so many people that love her she has limited dishes out constantly constantly she's great at social media she knows how to primp herself right look sexy talk to the ladies and get sales okay so she uses her assets but she does on social media and that's built their entire business social media yeah and did i answer your question because i feel like i somehow got lost in my life how do you stay relevant when things are going good because when your things are going bad they'll look at you for a moment maybe where it seems like everyone's looking at you but then they forget how do you stay relevant while you're growing or well things are kind of going the same i'll give you another example i have a company i just bought in this past season i was out of my mind to buy into them it was two guys with a product called comfy it was a sweatshirt blanket you slip into it it's like a sweatshirt but it's actually a blanket okay why i say i was crazy to buy into it none of the sharks they were smart enough not to is because they're two loudmouth guys having a good time pitching their product and they had no inventory they had handmade their own product two prototypes had no idea what would cost to make what they'd sell for who they sell to they had none of the answers but they're a great salesman and i i said i'll take 15 or 40 percent whenever i got it boom just because they're great sales people all right and what they have done is they've done in the first year 11 million dollars in sales they found a way to produce it and sell it but a couple of weeks ago it was very quiet they have had social media coverage to the moon and back but it was very quiet and they hand delivered and i wish i could remember the famous actress name sexy cool long-legged actress i'm so bad with names whoever she was i think she was the same actress who closed the uh oscars the other night i might be telling you i didn't watch it ah shame on you oh my god oh come on all right well anyway i saw your little party watch party on instagram oh so lonely but anyway they sent hand delivered to her front door how they found it in hollywood the package and she put on video her jumping on her bed in it they quicker than a second starter social media campaign people competing with the jumps they're johnny on the spot that's smart business okay they're causing attention they made it happen and then they're going to write it again and it's going to be all over social media all over they're annoyed with me that i'm here because i don't have their product because they want me jumping on the beds you know what i'm going to do i'm going to put the hood on i one girlfriend that has gorgeous long legs i'm going to photoshop my head in to her long legs and i'm going to win the contest [Music] so grandstanding now is like more influencer marketing if you can find creative ways that's a fancy way to put it with an audience maybe it's a micro audience or a large audience or create an audience of your own one by one but you really have to be able to grandstand yeah i know you talk about uh the keys to entrepreneurial success a lot but for those who haven't heard you talk about it what are what are you think some of the smart ideas in business right now the smart industries to go into if someone's maybe talented maybe they sold a company or they're trying to start as an entrepreneur what's an industry you really like a product uh section you really like you know is software is it coaching is it consulting is it an agency is it physical goods what food what's the type of category you really think no really none of the above okay it's not my cup of tea to think of an industry that's that you can uh there's certainly leading industries i don't believe that's where your head should be if you're thinking of going to business i think your head should be is what do you enjoy what are you naturally inclined to be good at what were you always good at things these these abilities don't change much whatever you're you know if you're gregarious as a young kid you generally don't wind up as a bookworm you know when you get older and get a head on your shoulders is still gregarious so i think what you have to do is think what would suit me what could i visualize myself doing where i could picture a happy picture of myself you know and i think most people are capable of dreaming that up i don't think it's an analytical kind of left brain kind of thing where you apply yourself to your best shot like going and playing back blackjack and putting your chips on the right thing no i think you have to figure out you're the table where should you put your chips what what's on you what's true to you okay and so for me it took me 22 jobs to find real estate but the minute i was out opening keys you know opening the doors and chatting people up and it didn't feel like work and i was the boss i knew i was going to be the queen of new york real estate i knew it as sure as i knew my middle name was in i just could see it in my mind's eye i never had that vision when i worked my other 22 jobs and the other thing it's sort of related what you ask i think it's such a such wrong thinking that you have to choose your spot i think it's like finding out what clothing you look good and you got to go try a lot of on the rack and see what works with you and then you kind of little by little kind of get your look on what looks well with on your body type your personality the colors that are good i think you find yourself little by little it's very hard to sharp shoot it's not that kind of a thing and you know often the people i know so many entrepreneurs well beyond a well before shark tank peers of mine in many industries that have succeeded no one ever went out for that industry and so that's what i want to do but you know what made the biggest difference in a myriad of those if that's a word a selection of those people that made the biggest difference was they came along someone they worked for who believed in them getting one good boss that gives you an opportunity is worth a million intellectual thoughts and harvard mbas grouped up in a pile because you kind of can sometimes need somebody else to see that light or you get into something you never thought you'd be interested and you really love your job and then that winds up being what you do for a lifetime and so i don't believe that you've named the big industries that's more of mark cuban stuff he's like high level um investment strategy stuff but i'll put my businesses against this any day one two one and because i think i'm so good at seeing who's got that talent that matches where they are you know if uh if someone's approaching you for uh investment or to partner with you and you could choose only three qualities that you would dream that they would have whether that's you know never giving up a grid a positive energy whatever the quality might be and you could say if they had these three qualities it doesn't matter what business they're in maybe timing and the economy might play a little bit apart here and there but like if they had these three qualities they're most like i would bet on them any day yeah well that's what i do every day on shark tank yeah and i've gotten better at it because i've learned to hone in on those um i could think of two maybe i'll come up with a third if i keep talking all right number one is uh salesmanship i have never succeeded with any business uh where the principal didn't know how to sell i mean sales is the guts of every business if you don't have sales you're not in business any business applies to everything okay so okay if you're a technology nerd and really are in a technology space but you better have a partner who could sell this out of it or it ain't gonna go anywhere okay so selling is number one the other uh thing i look for and maybe it sounds weird to you but i've learned it to be a great um almost insurance policy i look for injury i look for anger in the individual if i could find someone uh and this is true of all my successful business interestingly enough if i could find someone who had injury at an early age and has something to prove i got myself a winner it's like insurance okay so when i say injury meaning they were dumps in school like three out of four three out of five sharks were dumpsters at school they're they're out to prove you know um i have i i don't want to out them so i i wouldn't use i'm inclined to use the names but i won't i have entrepreneurs usually successful never had a father and then when they went on shark tank their father after 35 years was back into how insulting enraged them okay i have on entrepreneurs who were sports figures uh almost uh going to be professional sports people had an injury but were fiercely competitive with someone who wound up in their space they hate that person because they played against them in ice hockey crazy all i have to do is name the other person their sales go up wow so i think uh anger improving uh is very much part of a lot of successful stories out there it's an overcompensation overproving over driving like i'll show you give me the i show you something that went wrong earlier and you've got a motivated person and it gets you through hard times really well and then um i'm coming up with a third i can't there's a million other ones but none of them as serious as that it's those two you have to be able to sell and if you have injury uh to prove something it's a wonderful insurance policy how important is a positive attitude with those two things oh you don't let me tell you you're not even going to get out of the gate well there's negative people all right you know what i'll be trying to prove people wrong and always nasty about it you know forget it let me tell you what's true about a negative person you will meet them in the entrepreneurial space you know why because they are far more comfortable criticizing the next guy than doing negative people are blood suckers they just suck your energy away you know the nicest thing i did for all the people that worked with me over the years was get rid of negative people the men and i spotted them i didn't care if i had cause they were out you know why because it's like it's like letting the enemy quietly into your camp and giving them free reign negative energy is the enemy of all business especially i've always been in sales-related businesses you let a negative person into a sales force they have a pity party all of a sudden they need one more person to feel sorry for them or to point out what's wrong it's terrible i would spot them my way feel their vibe do you have a few minutes on friday i'd love to have a chat with you because i felt like i was saving my good people you know they were good positive people i don't mean criticism it's invaluable in business you need to have your criticizers to let you know when you're off and what you could do better but i'm just talking about real blood suckers you know you know everybody's mad at you before we continue this video make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day how do you choose which opportunities to take on when you have so much thrown at you on shark tank but also just email and twitter and people just say hey here's my idea can you invest very very hard oh well how do you make money when you have so many things you're working on yeah well first of all i don't really invest in other companies outside of shark tank because uh that takes up a lot of it's my money and it's a it's time um and if i would follow my own rules then if i were to invest in other companies then i should go invest in myself even further whether whether help bring fubu back or or uh my other companies that i own why you know the grass is not greener on the other side you know kind of work on myself working myself how to how to maximize social media and empowering people and things like nature so i really don't invest outside of shark tank um but no it it it is a there's a massive massive uh uh job to decide on where to where to focus your energy and your staff because it's really easy for me to say to my staff hey why don't we go do this well now you put five ten twenty thirty people in and you gave them all four uh ten hours of work a week it's not you and then all of a sudden you're going to ask well why is this crumbling well boss you told me to do this yeah right so it's a it's a lot of responsibility and it it's it's it's it's rise and grind it's writing down goals a's and b's on your goals and finding out what you want to do the best yeah what do you think is the one thing you could do this year to help you drastically increase your revenue or income with everything that you're doing is it you know the food booth thing are reinvesting back in yourself is it taking a couple things and going all in with a few things or um i think today you know if i was going to maximize then it would have to be you know really looking at the 80 20 at the company and and personally meaning what is the 20 of stuff that is creating 80 of the revenue and or joy or time in my life whether it's personally or whatever the case is and really digging deep into that thing and a lot of times people don't want to look at the 80 20. i do look at it as often as i can but i'm human as well i get caught up in some things that may be from uh a reason i think needs to be done uh and i and i get off track but i have to go back to my goals and look at them but yeah it would be the 80 20 like what are what are what are providing the the the 80 of revenue and or joy from my staff and myself and keeping people there um what do you think that is right now um i would say that fubu right now is doing really well we have a collaboration out with puma nice um and that's that's having a resurgence uh of course um whether it's 80 20 or not the the new people that come on the shark tank i need to invest in because they gave me the opportunity to invest in their dreams and it's it's it's their time right now and and i i took on that job of making sure that i did the best for them so um that's that's where and then my personal brand as i get out there and i start to educate people because you know for a long period of time i didn't want to necessarily um i didn't feel like uh you know i want to go out and educate because i didn't want people thinking oh my god he's trying to make money selling us books and curriculum but you know better than anybody else you don't make money for books right you do it because you want to change people's lives and now i realize that unfortunately there's too many people out there selling people insecurities in this world and that i do need to come out with more products and ideas because i was put on this public stage to show people that my dumb ass can make it everybody else can yeah and then i need to create more curriculums like damon on demand or like rise and grind or the power of broke or my dj success formula or speaking engagements or whatever to empower people and not feel guilty that hey you know what i gotta charge you because i gotta i gotta keep the lights on i gotta pay this staff that's traveling around other writers and everything else so i i think to improve more of what i'm giving the people to show people that you can make and you don't have to have a lot of money you gotta just be able to ready to bust your butt and get out there and do it so again investing in myself to get this information out to the world or my podcast and things of that nature yeah yeah because you did the part you did the new podcast around the book right yeah i did the new podcast around the book it was me kind of like you know giving people an insight on how i'm uh you know the questions i'm asking individuals and um really fascinating stuff my rising ground podcast has been doing really amazing and i put people on there that weren't even in the book people like barbara you know man you know of course i had a really great conversation yeah i've learned so much from barbara she's she's really a brilliant person the reason i like that is she comes at things with a very average every day the people shark type of approach very simplistic yeah you know i learned like even you know she said stuff that's really amazing like listen i put down i i used to write down what i love and what i hate and i made sure the things that i hate i outsource it or got people away from me that created this hate for whatever this is and i focus on what i love and as i did this everything else mentally started to shift here and i got rid of these things right and so she has such a simplistic approach to things but she's a brilliant brilliant woman yeah what would you say is the thing that you're excited about the most right now you got so much going on um you know i you know i'm excited i'm excited about everything i do be very honest but i'm going on 10 years on shark tank um the next oprah winfrey or steve jobs or bill gates is in their pajamas eating cereal watching shark tank and they're going to get up here and the film nights of the world they're going to go and they're going to change the entire world and they're 12 years old right now eating cereal in their pajamas saying i'm gonna be that next person so shark tank is absolutely amazing having books when you when you know you're so close to it a lot of times that when you finally put it out and you see that it's changing people's lives um i'm really really excited about that of course like like i said i'm i'm so i'm so i'm so on this health thing that i'm realizing how screwed up i was prior right um and that i'm gonna figure this thing out uh i have my my my my little girl of course and my two older girls and my two older girls as most people watching or listening to this with uh most parents would say to themselves you know was i a good parent and did my my child grow up to change the world and i'm seeing my two older girls and being the the grown up to be the women that i wanted them to be and that they're they're adding a positive impact to this planet um i'm really looking forward i'm this year i'm looking forward to to acquiring a lot more dad jokes to just make me that guy i gotta i'm gonna send you some i'm gonna find something i'm gonna tell you you gotta send me some damage i mean dad jokes are really really important they're high on my list what's your favorite one of all time the pirate one was pretty good no i have a lot of there's no one favorite dad joke and they come any time right so they can come at any time and then you won't even laugh at them right then you may laugh at them later yeah a lot a lot later like you know like what does a pirate say when they they turn 80 years old uh uh i maybe [Laughter] oh man what about what's the thing you're most proud of um i'm most proud of being able to escape the clutches of everybody else's goals that they set for me when i was 16 and 20 years old like most of the people that grew up in neighborhoods that uh that people told them they were going to be dead or in jail or that they weren't good because of their color their skin or education because they didn't have any money and i escaped those i escaped those goals that were set for me by society by people in the neighborhood who may not have had the right support system around them and i defied those those odds and i became a person that i'm very proud of who i am today and people could look at me and say if he can make it i can make it um and that's that's the thing i'm most proud of if i die today or tomorrow or 50 years from now i don't there's nothing in my closet that i need to hide yeah there's nothing that i i need to second guess and it was it was okay it was okay doing the right thing when i when i had like everybody else listening to us had the option to do the wrong thing it was okay to do the right thing yeah yeah if dad jokes bring you the most joy and laughter what's the thing that uh pulls at your heart the most is there are things that happen to yourself it's just these causes it's those causes to uh it's causes to find out that um you know there's a meat market for dogs it's crazy you know to find out that that there are people who who who can you know you can put your trust in them to have your kids go and be gymnast and then all of a sudden they abuse your trust and they they violate your your children and anything like that you know those things those things cause me pain yeah yeah yeah what's been the most painful thing in your life um getting divorced when i was uh my first marriage because you know um my ex-wife is a is a is a driven brilliant person and um you know my life my my marriage was sacrificed due to me working hard me being young and dumb and you know you don't give a 30 year old you know a couple of million dollars and fame at the same time and right and and that doesn't have an adverse effect you know what i mean um um so you know you know you are together four are married for um uh we probably married for about four years if you know what it was but we were together she was with me before the food was success yeah you know and still she's still she's still one of my closest friends and um and biggest inspirations she's she's the best partner i can ever have so we're just not married any longer but very supportive right that was a challenging transition for you well of course it was challenging transition but as you look back i mean you know when would you ever you know not want to be in your family's lives and stuff like that knowing that you could have controlled or you could have made a better effort to be a better person right but being human is human you know there's so many different aspects and things that come in your life and many people who are business people you know they're on their second and third marriages you know um yeah but on the flip side listen you know my my wife now and my baby now wouldn't be here if that didn't happen so everything happens for a reason i don't ever regret anything that happens it just becomes a a pain you know that you think about do you ever think about your family as a business in terms of like running it like a like an entrepreneur would you um i didn't in the past but i do now almost um again because of of some of these studies i'm having here i realized that making the family a priority and running it like a business is is great it may seem cold but it is very proficient if you do it's effective right it's effective yeah how do you run your family like a business now then yeah well you schedule your schedule time first of all you look at the investment that you're doing into future education and or you know it all is going to be time generally it's going to be personal time educational time relaxation time you know and and and solving problems you know i think one of my friends said to me you know when he had a problem with his wife he said um you know the wife said well why aren't you trying to work this out he's like i don't have time she said but if i was a client you'd make time you'd make time right you have to work this out right right if i was paying you you you wouldn't want to lose that deal right why do you want to lose this relationship or this discussion we need to have and um i realized that and that you know and that was that was that was something somebody said in the book and i started to put in more time and if you look at this you know a book like uh the seven habits of highly effective people as you talked about i realized throughout that time you know um you you start to find out more about yourself as you start to look at your your family you see what you're doing good better and different and you start to understand yourself and you become more proficient in other aspects of life you know when fubu really went down it was right around when i had my divorce really i don't think it was a coincidence yeah you know i mean it was a real it was reality you know i was miserable at home um i was taking it out on my work i was making bad decisions and i think that we just don't talk about family and health and all that stuff in in regards to how important it is for success in business it's huge yeah why is it do you think that's in some entrepreneurs will have not have those conversations with their partner or their wife or fiance but they're willing to have those negotiations with their fields i think because it's more fun on the other on the business stuff or if it's i think that i think i think that that business is a very very clear thing it it's a number right tomorrow you have money for payroll or not right right and you have to address it you can try to hide it if you want and not talk about it but the rent needs to be paid on the first or the 30th right and or the inventory is sitting there so it's something you have to address and all these other personal things they're personal right i i've seen the biggest titans of industry uh be someone who will do billion-dollar deals but yet they're afraid to have a conversation with a woman at at a bar because they feel uh they feel too open and vulnerable right when they can hide behind a pen a checkbook or desk or a wall right um so i think that the personal aspect of life uh is something that people don't want to address because it's so fluid and it's scary it's scarier right yeah the heart like the heart yeah you know you you wanna you know listen i can sit across the table from you and i could say i'm gonna give you you know this 50 for this and you say give me 70 i say screw you right because you know you're just negotiating with me but even if you're personally sitting across from the table you go like you know can i hold your hand and a woman or a man goes get the hell out of here you'll remember that for the rest of your life it hurts because i really listen yeah i remember when this girl didn't want to kiss me i was 16 years old that damn lisa that's why he went and built that food booth that's right show you show lisa she's crazy as hell though yeah who cares yeah wow i'm still thinking about the beginning the the pirate beginner yeah um i had a question i want to ask you but it's escaping me now do you let that roll through the podcast like you think email mm-hmm yeah yeah that's good because i like that because i want people to know that you're you're processing the information yeah i had a really good thought sometimes when i'm interviewing i have really good thoughts but my goal is to be still present yet then the thought escapes me um gosh what wasn't that it'll come to me i'm curious this is what it was got it you've seen so many deals yeah over the last 10 years you've been in business for a long time yourself yeah pre-shark tank now with cryptocurrency and just everything online and what what companies like airbnb and uber and these other companies have been able to do to scale so quickly dropbox things like that they've just built massive businesses very quickly over the next 10 years what do you see as a great opportunity to get into in business is it more physical goods and clothing is it more food products is it more online digital software products if you were to recommend for an entrepreneur starting a day knowing that so much has been changing and so much is going to continue to change what would you put what would be like the best industry business idea to again well it would be hard to tell me to tell somebody what the best industry is unless if they're just a passive investor and you can look at industries like i play the market i'll play infrastructure and i'll play you know technology and various things right because i don't need to operate the business yeah but if you're really going to operate the business it has to be something that you're fascinated in right or you yeah something that again is christmas every single day so it's christmas every day for someone or whatever that is i think that no matter what it is it doesn't have to be anything specific it has to be something though that is converting direct to the customer you're cutting out all the middlemen because right now with all the noise it's very hard so i like companies whether you're selling socks or you're selling food or you're selling fitness products or curriculums you're talking directly to the customer and you have various different platforms you're talking to them because you know i'm finding out like you know i was talking to one of my guys and he was like well vine is gone right now so what happened with those people who have five million people online but they don't have any emails right where they were they're they're going now they have five million people they work so hard for that so whether it's um right whether it's a membership and you're selling somebody a subscription model or whatever the case is you know or your amazon you got that button on your uh you on your on your washing machine that boom you hit that tide it's coming right to you you just eliminated everybody advertising all kind of other uh things because your creature habit you're gonna hit it or if your credit card is built five dollars a month you're not gonna take that damn five dollars off by the time you call those people they're gonna give you such a heartache on taking the five dollars off you're gonna give them another 50 right so i think it's anybody that is delivering something straight to the customer and they have full margin they know their analytics they know who their customer is so they can upsell their customer and or provide better value and get also real-time information on what is working or not working from the customer so no matter what it is that's what that's that's the business you know that's why i love the online world right now just there's so many opportunities i feel like i got it at the right time i knew nothing about business 10 years ago right i got kind of lucky of timing and just like curiosity and working really hard to be able to understand this now it's online this is this is where it's at no inventory the knowing we're talking about that's it i mean and even if it is inventory you can probably turn your inventory fairly quickly and not have to worry like i said the 60 90 days turn and things of that nature so exactly fascinating fascinating time but the only thing that people have to understand about this is that now everybody can do it as well so you better get up and bust your ass you better rise and grind because everybody can do it so how do you separate yourself from the noise it goes back to the fundamentals of being able to get up before everybody else and go to bed after everybody else you know yeah what would you say is your unique superpower good people yeah i am i am i am not um the smartest person in the world but i have uh you know i have this knack for picking good people i have the snack also for allowing people to fail and seeing the good within them and when everybody else goes uh you know they're short-tempered with the people or whatever the cases i figure i figured that just like in entrepreneurship if this stuff has failed between you and i and you didn't do a good job i know one less thing i can give you but now where can i give you stuff that is that makes you uh who you are and i think that um that that's my neck i give a lot of people a lot of chances but they it ends up coming back to me double and triple in value because they are amazing people yeah yeah what's the thing you see that you look for when you can pick them is it like yeah feeling right away is it no you never feel right away there's no feel right away because they have to unfold the the you know they're you know everybody's on their best behavior when you first meet them take the onion off and yeah exactly so it's drive right it's that they think outside the box they're problem solvers they're also able to communicate throughout a team and the system and they have a very clear vision on the things that they like and they know how to communicate that to everybody else so everybody else could kind of see their way they may not be good in one area but it doesn't matter if i i you know i you know if i pick a person i'll put them in any area you know what i mean and they'll figure it out those type of common sense those type would drive and some level of respect honesty and stuff like that yeah i mean you you just can't you can't lose when you have somebody like that you have somebody ready to bust their ass and you can't if they're they're never going to stop they're going to figure it out one day you can't beat those people yeah and they're going to if you don't work with them they're going to go off and be your competitor exactly if you're looking to become rich then check out this video about the seven things poor people do that the rich don't do the difference between them and other people is their sequencing if my order of steps i take to go here isn't as efficient as yours because your sequencing is better you're going to get there faster than i am

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 325,991

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation

Id: sXRJCkp2l6E

Length: 137min 40sec (8260 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021