Brent Beshore on Deal Making, Hiding, and What Winning Actually Looks Like

First of all, thank you for being here. We're super proud to have Brent join us today for what we hope is a really honest and open conversation about some of the harder topics in business ownership. The more of you that agree not to live tweet this, the more honest we can be. There's a basket in the back, drop your phone in. We'll go on the trust system. Brent and I still have to go out and find opportunities with sellers who will probably still see our tweets, so that's the nature of the ask.

Brent, this is really special for me because you're part of who got me started in ETA. So thank you for being here. While you are the OG of our community, you do something different now. You run a permanent equity fund. But I think what most of us would really like to hear is if we could spend some time going back to the old days. Take me all the way back to the Adventures days when you were starting. How old were you? Were you married? How many kids did you have at the time?

It's funny. I've said this before on podcasts, but I really am the Forrest Gump of private equity. I look at my career and I have very little ways to explain it. When I tell people about it, don't try to pattern your career after my career moves, because they make no sense. They didn't make any sense at the time, and somehow it kind of all works out eventually.

I was getting my law degree and my MBA at Mizzou. I met a girl, she had a couple years left on her PhD. Through a weird series of events, I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer. So I said, hey, I'm going to continue to be in law school for a while, but I'm going to do something different. I ended up starting a business and operated that business for a couple years. It was a regional marketing firm. We had no idea what we were doing. We were just trying to make it. I was terrified. Every day I'd wake up with sweaty armpits, sweaty palms, just terrified of what the day was going to bring. Those days, you're like in a knife fight. You have a knife, you try not to get stabbed, you get back into bed and you do it all over again.

I had a guy who I'd met in St. Louis who said, hey, you should meet this mutual acquaintance of mine. He just got left at the altar for the second time trying to sell his business. I remember that phrasing struck me as odd. I took that to mean I should try to go buy the business. He had no idea. He was just introducing two people in the same area. The gentleman was running a military recruitment marketing firm. We were running a regional agency.

I went into St. Louis. When I say I had no idea what I was doing, I mean, I'd never taken a finance class in my life. I had no mentor who'd bought businesses. I didn't know anything. They don't teach you anything in law school. It's like a hazing exercise.

I sat across the table from this guy and said, hey, I want to try to buy your business. He literally laughed at me. I was 25, 24, 25 at the time. I looked about 14. He literally said to me, two grown men have tried to buy my business. What are you doing here? He told me about the business. He slid the NDA across the table. He knew what he was doing. I made him an offer that was 50% lower than what the two previous buyers had agreed to. He laughed at me, slid me the check, and said, I will never see you again. Have a good life.

I didn't talk to him for seven months. Out of the blue, seven months later, I'll never forget, I was in my office dealing with some crisis. I look at the caller ID on my physical phone. I picked up the phone and he said, Brent, we just renewed our largest account. Business is in great shape. I'm exhausted. I'll give it to you for the price you asked for, but you've got to close all cash 60 days from now. I said okay and hung up the phone. I was like, crap, where do I get a million dollars in 60 days?

I called up a friend of mine who worked for a local SBA lender. I said, I need an SBA loan in 60 days. He was like, that's not really how this works. This is 2009. I said, just put a rush on it. He said, that's not exactly how the SBA works. I called up my lawyer. I said, hey, have you ever bought a business before? He said, I've done tons of real estate deals. I said, is that the same thing? He said, yeah, pretty much. I said, what do we do? He said, we've got to do diligence. I typed into Google due diligence and I pulled up and said, oh, so you just ask questions? He said, yeah. And that led to me buying a business.

I bought it with an SBA loan. I leveraged the accounts receivable from the existing business as the down payment. My wife was like, what happens? What's this personal guarantee thing and what happens if this goes badly? I was like, don't worry about it, it'll be fine. Everything was pledged.

Week before closing, I was doing the math. Okay, so I give him all my money, he takes his money out of the business, how do I make payroll? I literally call him up. His name is Mark. I said, Mark, I'm going to give you all my money and then you're going to take all your money out of the business. What do I do for payroll? He said, we've got a line of credit, right? I said, no, I didn't get one of those. He said, are you an idiot? I said, probably. I said, well, how about this? Why don't you leave money in the business and loan it to me and then I'll pay you back? He said, let me get this straight. I'm going to loan you 40% of the purchase price to have you put back in the business to run the business. I said, that's exactly what you're going to do. He said, no, I'm not going to do that. I said, cool, then we don't have a deal and you're going to be left at the altar for the third time. He said, screw it, fine. So we left the money in and I paid him back.

It was just me. My wife's a scientist, so she was mostly questioning a lot of what I was doing, which probabilistically was very good questioning. I was 25, 26. I was just trying to survive. I didn't have any plan. The business itself, Media Cross, we still own it today, was an extremely attractive business. It had a very longstanding relationship with the military, recruiting civilian mariners and a branch in the Navy. It had long-term government contracts. It was not a YOLO into something I had no idea about.

I was running this business that was project-based. It was incredibly attractive to combine the stability of the government contracting with the creative we had. We had better creative than they had. They had more stability than we had. It was a very synergistic relationship. Within about 18 months, we had quadrupled cash flows of the business. We paid back the SBA loan early. Then it was, okay, now what do we do? That worked pretty well, let's go try to do it again. It took me another five years to buy my second business.

I didn't know it at the time, but that deal followed the experience we've had with every deal, which is it's going to fall apart two or three times at least before you close. You're roughly having to decide on 400 things the buyer and seller have to come to terms on. Usually 20 to 30 get contentious. He got cold feet twice on me and was like, I don't think this is a good deal. I said, well, maybe that's why you've been left at the altar for the third time now. It's a lot of emotions tied up into it. Being able to handle that emotional impact and shock is a major part of the deal making process.

Buffett's got this quote about, I'm a better operator because I'm an investor, I'm a better investor because I'm an operator. I think what that leaves out is there's this third leg of the stool, the deal making side. Deal making is very different than either operating or investing. In order to get a good deal done in this area of the market, you're going to have to learn how to do deal making. The best way I can describe it, and this is something I felt like I intuitively knew back then, is being able to figure out what are the true interests of the other person. It's almost like playing a game of poker, being able to see everyone else's hand and then arrange the cards on the table so that everyone wins in the process. Instead of a game of poker where I win, you lose, everyone lays down their cards and everyone's winning at the same time. That's a very different way than especially new entrants into the deal making space. It feels very bare-knuckle boxing, trying to get the best deal. That temptation leads you astray and causes a lot more problems than it helps.

For first-time buyers, when you have a portfolio of zero, you end up really struggling because everything is live another day. You have no business, no income, your spouse is probably asking why you're going down this journey. My advice, and this is where I stray a little bit from traditional search fund advice, is if I was starting from scratch today, I'd probably budget three years. Try to figure out a way to spend three years nearly full time. Maybe I have something else I'm doing to supplement income, but this would be a major focus. As soon as you can't walk away is when you're getting yourself into really deep trouble. Doing a bad deal is way worse than not doing a deal. Way worse, as somebody who's done bad deals.

Now you run permanent equity, the successor business to Adventures. It's actually the same business. We just changed the name because we were tired of people asking if we were a travel company. We have 30-year funds.

If you fast forward, 2010, 2011 was stabilizing Media Cross, paying off the debt, and trying to get a footing. There was nothing on the internet at the time. There was a little bit from Harvard, a little bit from Stanford on the search fund stuff, but really not a lot out there. We just tried to find people. There was a group of guys in St. Louis who had bought businesses and had a very specific style. They'd say, you buy no more than two at a time, you always sell off the other one you had. I was furiously taking notes.

12, 13 was really putting the hammer down on trying to find another deal. We bought a group of pool companies in 15, but it took two and a half years after we really put the hammer down. Five years from the time I bought Media Cross. When people in this space tell me, yeah, I bought my first business 18 months ago, I bought my second business six months ago, that's incredible to me. It took me a very long time. I would have made so many more mistakes if I had tried to rush it. I had time constraints, expertise constraints, capital constraints. I didn't have any financial backing, so I was just rolling the cash flows after we paid off the SBA loan, stockpiling cash to do the next deal.

I remember going to my wife in 15 and saying, hey, all that money we've been making that you feel secure about, we're going to take 97% of that and put that into the next deal. That didn't go great. Some heated fellowship. Then we bought that business in 15 and started getting interest from groups saying, can we back your capital? I literally knew nothing. The first time we ever got approached by an endowment, I thought it was a professor reaching out to us. I didn't know there were endowments. I didn't know how any of this stuff worked.

They said, you can do two things. You can do the two and 20 model, or you can do a holdco. I was like, well, two and 20 would destroy how I think about business. I wouldn't want to do that. They said, well, that's just how it's done. Or you can do a holdco, where all the assets in your entire life, you'd value them really cheaply and then we could do anything we wanted with them. I said, no, shoot.

Then I met this guy on the internet, Patrick, who now has become a big deal. At the time he was just an analyst at a random firm I'd never heard of. He was like, hey, can I come visit you in Missouri? It was February. We talked for 12 hours, hit it off, and at the end he said, I want my family to invest in what you're doing. I said, here's the problem. Can't do this, can't do that. He said, well, why don't you just tell us what you want and we'll tell you if we can do it or not. I got on a whiteboard and whiteboarded out our current structure and handed it to him. He said, great, tweak this, tweak that, we're in. He said, we know a bunch of rich people. We'll help you raise it. Patrick and Jim were the most kind, generous people. I owe so much to them. I remember twice telling Patrick I wasn't going to do the deal, I wasn't going to follow through on raising the fund. He told me I was an idiot and told me why I was an idiot. He talked me off the ledge. I had a pretty good life before we raised the fund and I was terrified to give that up.

We raised 50 million in 17, 300 million in 19, 30-year terms. We take no fees of any kind, no reimbursements of any kind. There's no cash that comes from the companies or the LPs to the GP. We take a percentage of free cash flow above a hurdle. Our joke is, unless you can buy beer with it, we can't charge fees on it. We try to have complete alignment between us, our investors, and the companies. If there's a great place to put cash, let's reinvest it. We'd be idiots not to. If there's not a great place to put cash, we'd be idiots to keep it. Let's get it out. It's worked out extraordinarily well. Our investors have been great. We typically don't use debt in our transactions.

We also have a 10-year investment period. Two and 20 typical model, you have roughly three years to put it to work, three to four years to keep it, and a couple years to sell it. What that functionally does is create a forced buyer on the front end and a forced seller on the back end. The only way I know how to deal make is to be able to walk away. I never wanted to feel pressure to do deals. I never wanted to feel pressure to sell something. There are good reasons to sell and bad reasons to sell. There are good reasons to buy and bad reasons to buy. The worst of both is to be forced into doing it. Then I could just see my heart in having a 2% fee where the incentives are all just to raise more capital. It would not have been good for my soul to do that.

I want to challenge you. Life is about constraints. We often assume we have more constraints than we actually have. There's this little meme on the internet, you can just go do things. When we launched our fund, people told us we were idiots. They were like, there's no way you're going to raise a dollar into that. No one gives somebody money for 30 years. We'd actually originally asked for 50 years, long story how we got to 30. You can just do things. Telling yourself that you can't do things is a problem. There are these tracks that are grooved in finance. I didn't come from a finance background, never worked at another firm. I didn't have all these things told to me of, this is how things work, this is what's done. The downside is we've reinvented the wheel 18 times. The upside is we weren't in those grooves and tracks, so we just did first principles.

If you say, I don't have the luxury of searching for something for three years, ask why. Are you literally going to starve? Are you going to be on the street? You can find other work if you're smart enough to be able to search for a business. If you're trying to buy a business, you should have pretty marketable skills. There are a lot of ways to do consulting contracts, to hustle on the side. I love the stories of people who say, I'm a consultant doing this, doing that, piecing it together, and sometimes it'll take three or four years, but they finally found the right thing. You just have to have hooks in the water and be talking to people.

The reason people don't is because people are in a hurry. The tracks and grooves provide you a clear pathway if you're in a hurry to go somewhere. The question is, when you get to that somewhere, is that where you actually want to be? When people ask me for advice, I say, what are you prioritizing? If you tell me, I really care about my family, I want to spend a lot of time with my family, I care deeply about my local community, I'm invested in a lot of things outside of work, I think it's a pretty terrible idea to try to buy a business, whip it into shape, and sell it within three years. It's going to be highly disruptive. You may end up making a lot of money. Best outcome, worked your tail off, stressed for three years, made a ton of money, and then you're going to have a damaged marriage, regrets in your kids' lives, all the impact of that. If somebody says to me unabashedly, I want to get rich as quickly as I can, okay, there's paths to do that. But I don't think most people are sitting here saying, at all costs, I want to get rich as fast as I can. That's kind of what the traditional tracks are assuming about human nature.

What I find is the main reason people are getting into this space is to have independence. Independence of time, career, wealth. I think independence is a myth. I don't think we're built for independence. The type of freedom we worship in the West is actually a mirage. The happiest people I know are highly dependent upon others. The quickest way to misery is to demand freedom from this world. You want freedom to be able to commit. Committing in the right mindset is one of the best decisions you can ever make. This is what I do for a living and I love it: working with family to transition a legacy business, serve the family well, serve the community well, serve your family in the process well, create a bunch of value that you can then take a piece of and use for good. That's a way to help flourish the world and your family and yourself. If you are coming at it from the standpoint of, I want no demands on my time, I want to be able to do anything I want whenever I want, I want a bunch of money to be able to do it, you are destined for misery independent of if it works out with a small business or not.

I've screwed up so many times. If you're not expecting trouble, you're naive. I have 16 companies. I guarantee you half of them have some sort of moderate crisis right now. That's just life. Two friends, their wives independently filed for divorce on them unexpectedly in the last week. It's broken my heart. Stuff happens.

I've gone through seasons where I have been crippled with anxiety. In 2019 I went through a season where we had done a deal that started going really, really south. I had internalized so much of the pressure. I'm okay losing my own money. I feel really, really stressed about losing other people's money, especially the families that have committed to us and the organizations that have committed to us. We had a deal that started going south and I just knew it was death.

We had an unexpected death in one of our companies, a terrible tragedy that cascaded into a group of people we were told had the expertise to do the job, but we couldn't really figure out if they did or not. By the time we figured out they didn't, they had run the company into the rocks. I had internalized so much stress, I almost lost my right eye because of a stress-related issue called central serous retinopathy, a cortisol related issue. I almost had to have a horrible surgery. Thankfully got rescued out of that and didn't have to have it, but I had to make a lot of lifestyle changes. I realized how much internalized stress I had put on myself that I didn't even realize, and how much of my identity was in serving these families and not losing money. One of our investors was so sweet to me. I called him up and said, I think I screwed up so badly. He said, sure, we all do. No big deal. I knew you'd screw up.

Having people on your team is critical. We may want to talk about capital formation. It's easy in the moment to say, this capital comes with these better terms, I'm just going to take whatever terms. Money's a commodity. Money's the easy part on the internet. It's not. Money comes attached to people. People really matter. Money may not matter if everything goes exactly the way you think it will, but things never happen that way.

I've gone through seasons where I thought we were going to miss payroll, going to go under. I've gone through seasons where I treated people really poorly and had to apologize for it out of stress and pride. If you're not aware that you're screwing up, you're probably not self-aware. We're always trying to get better.

We've had one, almost two of the businesses fully go under. We've had a lot of interrelational difficulties. Life happens, people change, situations evolve. There's some really tragic behavior that happens. People are messy. I'm messy. You're messy. When we get together, that messiness compounds. Miscommunication happens, resentments can build. If I was going to tie any success we've had to something, it's taking people more and more seriously and taking relationships more seriously. Strategic planning is great and everyone should do it. The thing that's missed in a lot of strategic planning is the interpersonal relationships. Most people say, let's get down to business and do the really important stuff, and then let's go have a meal together or go see a game. Actually, what should be is the exact opposite. Let's go have a meal and go to the game together and spend time together. Let's talk about real life, what do you want, where are we in that process, how can we be supportive and kind and loving long term to you. Then yeah, the strategic planning, what are the ideas we need to do.

You can only sustain something that has trust long term. There are a lot of ways to break trust and not many ways to repair trust. That's why most partnerships dissolve. That's why most marriages dissolve. If we took as seriously our relationships as we do our strategic planning, we'd be a lot more successful. In small business in particular, all you have is your people. I don't care what IP you think you have, what brand value you think you have, what systems you think you have. At the end of the day, what really matters is the people you have and the people you surround yourself with. You better invest in them and take them seriously.

People can tell if you really care or not. If you don't care and you pretend to care, it's the worst of both worlds. You actually have to realize that the way to create long-term value is through relationships. If you were the operator, you have somebody who has a tremendous amount of authority and control over your life. It's a tremendous amount of responsibility and pressure. What would you want? You'd want to know that the person you worked for actually cared about you. How do you actually care about somebody? Be interested in them, be curious about their life, be curious about what makes them tick. Where do they come from? What's their personality? What are they predisposed to do?

I think the two best in combo are Enneagram and Myers-Briggs. Not because they're going to be revelatory, not because they'll change your life, but because they'll give you empathy for a lot of other people. Being able to see how people are very different than you and can see the same situation differently. When I started really digging into that stuff, it made huge changes. One of the best things my wife and I ever did was take a Myers-Briggs test in the presence of each other. It was an inflection point in our marriage.

My wife and I on the four axes are literally opposites. I love to think in the future, I love to plan things. I'd bring a trip to my wife and say, I'm going to sweep you off your feet, I'm going to take you to this island in three or four months. She'd say, who's going to watch the kids? How are we going to get there? I'd think, do you not want to go with me? She'd say, I don't know, I just have to get my head around it. I took that to be demoralizing. The reality was I'm future oriented, she's present oriented. Present oriented people start in the present. What are the current facts? What's around me? Then they work their way slowly into the future. Future oriented people like me start way far in the future and imagine what the world could be like, then bumble our way back into the present. My wife and I were just starting in completely different places. I was on the beach imagining this incredibly romantic vacation. She was stressed about what's going on right now and how the heck would I ever get out of town. That one axis was an example. It was totally transformative for us.

When we become business owners, entrepreneurs, you can get overwhelmed. Where your heart is, you'll have a tough time not spending money, time, whatever resources you have at your disposal. We love what we do and we're excited about work. It's hard for us not to overspend at work. It's cultivating an understanding of what is the proper order of our loves. I see a lot of, and I've certainly experienced this in my career, you get a lot of accolades at work and then you don't get a lot of accolades at home. I'll never forget closing one of the largest deals we ever closed. I came home and told my wife, we did it, this is amazing. She turned to me and said, oh, that's cool, do you want broccoli or asparagus? In her world, that was the most important. My wife is incredibly intelligent, thoughtful, caring, loving. That's just not her world. She didn't care that much. It doesn't change her life that much.

If I say nothing else, the biggest danger we have is that we are in hiding. I see this in so many people in their thirties and forties who are actively hiding. They are struggling mightily with anxiety, depression, addictions, transgressions, and they have no one to confess those to. They have no one to get help from. They are isolated, and the more isolated they become, the more heavy laden, burdened, darkened their lives become. Eventually it blows up. You have to be honest about who you really are. The less you hide, the more you drag something into light, the more freedom you get. That actually is real freedom, just to be who we are authentically made to be.

Oftentimes at work we feel a freedom and we can be this person at work, then we come home and we have to hide at home because we have to pretend like what we did at work wasn't really that fun. I'm not sure there's balance to life. Life just seems full. It can be full of what you choose it to be full of. What I've really tried to do is focus on, I want my life to be full of rich relationships. The only way to have rich relationships is to be authentic and real about who you really are, in all your failings, in all your stressors, in your joys as well, and have people who will actually mourn with you and celebrate with you, including your spouse.

What advice would you leave people with who are just ahead of their first business acquisition or just into this journey?

I'd be really clear on what does winning look like. I don't think I actually knew what winning looked like early on. I knew it kind of looked like buying a business and buying more businesses and somehow making money and somehow doing stuff that seemed to add value, but I didn't really know what that looked like. I was talking with Josh. He's awesome. I'm so proud of that guy. He completely changed his life in the last couple years. He realized he was successful at work and he wasn't being successful at home and with his children. He had the courage, which I rarely see, to say this is not okay, and I'm going to change my life. He has. He took proactive steps to humble himself and to say sorry, to move his family and take a career plunge. There's stress that comes with that. There's a lot of freedom that comes with that.

If you're in a situation that doesn't feel like it's sustainable, I always used to think that my fears were not true. I actually figured out that my fears are usually pretty accurate. They're just not accurate for the reason I think they're accurate. The deepest insecurities I still have to some degree are, if this doesn't go well, who am I? Will I have enough? Will I be enough? The answer is, well, maybe not if that's your attitude. Maybe not if that's the lifestyle you embrace. We're worried that if we don't win at work, we're going to be losing everywhere because we're losing at home. Maybe the real core issue is we need to take a step back like Josh did and say, how should I reorder my loves? How should I reorder my life so I'm putting first things first and second things second?

I can tell you that my business took off when I started putting constraints on my time. I love what I do. I think I have the best job in the world. That means I could work 24/7 and I'd really enjoy it. The more I worked, the more sloppy I became, the more exhausted I became, the more irritable I became, the less my relationships flourished, the more I suffered. When I started saying, I'm going to make it a priority to make my family breakfast every morning, I'm going to try to be home for dinner, I'm going to really work my tail off in between, and I'm going to spend time with my wife when the kids go down to bed and not open back up my laptop. Are there deal seasons and things that come up? The rules are meant to be broken sometimes. But Josh said one of the biggest advancements in his life was taking a Sabbath. Every Saturday he shuts it down. There's no reading to try to be better and win. It's just serving his family, loving his community, being surrounded by people he cares about. He said it changed his life. I'd say the same thing about mine. The more you intentionally put guardrails on your life to put first things first, the more it's going to help everything, including the business. That's the irony.

There are some people online who would very much disagree with that. I think that mentality is a very short-term mentality. The biggest winners long term are the people who can sustain for long periods of time. Look at Buffett. The reason I think the secret to his success is not that he shot the lights out in terms of returns. In fact, his returns have not been stellar for the last 20 years. But he's one of the wealthiest people in the world. How do you do it? He sustained it forever. How do you get to be old when you do? You leave yourself margin. If you can't wait to retire, if retirement is an attractive thing, I think you're on the wrong track. You could actually take that life that you hoped you would have when you retired and do it today. You may have to reorder some things. You may have to give up some things. You'd be surprised at how valuable that is to everything else.

Q: Talk about how you lead with your faith and how you marry that with business.

I'm a follower of Jesus. If you'd told me 12 years ago that was going to come out of my mouth, I would have been the last person you'd expect. I was an ardent atheist. I was bombastic against Christians. I thought they were all idiots. By the way, Christians are idiots. That's the point. The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum of saints. I got rescued, and it totally transformed my life. I made the decision to just be who I am. I'm confident it's lost a lot of business for us. There are a lot of people who don't want to work with us. I'm not trying to impose my values or beliefs on anybody. We have people on our team who share a lot of different types of faith, have a lot of different viewpoints. We're not a walled garden. We don't raise only from Christians, don't buy Christian businesses. That's never been how I see how Jesus would have done it. Jesus hung out with drunkards and hookers and came in contact with everyone.

I've always wanted to go out and make contact with the world. Whether I'm sitting across the table from somebody in a business setting or personal or on stage, it's my job to be an ambassador. I just try to be authentically me. If somebody asks me about my faith, I'm happy to talk about it. I encourage you to be you. The world needs more of who you actually are, not who you think the world wants you to be. It took me a really long time to figure that out, and a lot of pain. If you feel a dissonance between what the world wants from you and who you actually are, the dissonance is in the different direction than you think it is. It's not that you should become more of what the world wants from you, it's that you become less of what the world wants from you. My life totally transformed when I just started trying to be me.

Q: Your year-end letter was really impactful, specifically page 13, where you really go all in and get personal and granular. What was the impetus to write this huge document?

I wrote this part of the letter called Nothing to Fear, Nothing to Hide. I saw more lives implode in the last year than I thought was possible, up close. I had dear friends go through horrific struggles with adultery, addiction issues that came seemingly out of nowhere. It was tragedy on tragedy. I kept seeing this pattern. Why is this happening? Every single one of these situations was born out of hiding. We don't intentionally wreck our lives. No one's sitting here today thinking, what I'm going to do is completely detonate my life.

I watched somebody go from being a leader of a business to literally living on the streets within about 16 months. It started with a back injury. He was prescribed hydrocodone medication that led into different medications. He hid it from his wife, from his coworkers, and started spiraling. He tried to put on a face. I remember seeing him about six months into the issue and you could tell he was desperate, but he was so terrified to let anybody in. All he had to do was raise his hand and say, I need help. If he had come to me and said, Brent, I don't know what else to do, I'm just going to throw myself on the mercy of, I need help, help me, I would have dropped everything and helped him. He didn't, and he let it spiral into worse addiction issues, terrible marital issues, betrayal of their marriage, deep pain. That was one of like 15 things I saw last year. All of them started with an inability to be who they were to the people who cared about them most and just raise their hand and say, I need help.

Here's the irony. If I go up to you and I say, hey, how are you, and you say, good, good, how are you, what we just communicated is, he's good, there's nothing he needs, there's no depth of relationship, I have nothing to hold onto. I'm going through stuff because every human in this room is going through something. If you're not going through something, you either came out of something or are getting ready to go into something. What he just communicated to me is he's all good, he has no needs. I feel shame that I have needs, so I can't communicate. So when he says how are you, I say good, good. That's how we get into this. We're hiding and we're terrified.

If that resonates, the single greatest thing you can do is raise your hand and say, I have needs, and get with people who care about you and tell them the truth. The irony is what you'll find. What you're terrified of is, if people really knew us, they wouldn't love us. If people really knew all the terrible things we'd done and all the junk in the basement we've tried to cover up and hide, no one would really love us. The reality is people can't love you unless you have needs. One of the things I've been trying to do is be really honest with people who love and care about me about my needs. My relationships flourish, and turns out they actually love me more because of it, not less.

The consequences are not just for that person, they're generational. I'm suffering consequences from three generations ago in my family. I didn't know it. It's only been recently that I've even realized it. We think what we're doing is just temporary, I'll be able to fix it, money will fix everything. The reality is, it's generational what we can do, and we can also generationally stop those things from happening too.

Q: It feels like a lot of luck in your story. You mentioned the seller called you back, Patrick offered you money. Now you're creating content and writing. Back then, what did you do to create that opportunity?

It seems like I've gotten a lot of luck, which is absolutely true. I wonder if we don't all have a lot of luck. I wonder if we can't see it because we're so busy and so focused on what we think our lives should look like that we won't take advantage of it. At the time I got that phone call, that was not an opportune time. I had just had a $150,000 fraud. I had been crying that morning in my office about how I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to make payroll. When he called me up, I had the ability to see that opportunity in isolation, separated from everything else going on, and say, okay, I'm going to pursue that right now. There's skill involved in when you take advantage of luck.

What am I doing to increase surface area of exposure to luck? I write things, I talk to people. When people give me invitations to come and speak, I sometimes say yes. I don't have a great answer other than, go make friends. Friends are kind of what rule the world. If you're upset that you don't have friends, be somebody who makes friends, be worthy of friendship. Friends kind of make everything happen. The richest person in the world is not the person with the most money. It's the person who has the Rolodex of people. And by the way, Rolodex has a bad terminology. It's not just transactional acquaintances, but people you can text. If you can text somebody to solve your problems, you're rich. If you can't text somebody to solve your problems, you're probably not rich. Rich doesn't just mean wealthy, it means rich in your life. Try to make 20 friends this year that you can text and ask for things and be helpful to and that really truly care about you. To me, that's the ultimate surface area of exposure.

Before we go off stage, I want to say one thing. Some people get envious of the people who put on events. As somebody who puts on events, I know what goes into doing these things. It may look glamorous, it's actually not. It's really stressful and a lot of work. One of the reasons I came down here is because I really believe the world needs more of what you all are doing. I would love to see a flood of competitors, whatever that means, into the marketplace. I'd encourage you all to take on the same approach. Encourage people to come into this area of the market. Are there idiots? Yes. Are there people who have bad intentions? Yes. They'll weed themselves out. I really want to see this community grow. I want to say thank you to Sam and Kevin and everyone who put this thing on, to all the staff. Thank you for giving an opportunity to convene these people.