Mike Mann, Great interview with MentorStudents.org

Mike Mann: Well, I actually operate a handful of businesses and I’ve built lots of businesses over time. But for me, um, you know, I’m, I’m just a very motivated individual for two reasons. The main reason is I operate charities and I do charity work, and I assist other charities, and I’m trying to change the world, and I’m trying to recruit other people to change the world with me, which is the main reason why I work so hard and why I’m so motivated to create money for my charity work.

Secondarily, I like living a nice lifestyle and having a nice house and sending my kids to a nice school and having a swimming pool and all that type of stuff also, and having a retirement. So I’m super motivated and I’ve always been like that. So, um, in that regard, I needed to start my own business because nobody was ever gonna just hand me any money in my case or in 90% of the people’s cases.

Okay, so that makes sense. We’re focusing on domain market.com. [00:01:00] And so I’ll, so I’ll focus the rest of my answers on domain market.com. But for the record, I also have started a bunch of other companies, and currently I own another company called seo.com. I own part of a company called phone.com and several others.

So if you see my website, mike mann.com, it has links to everything I do. My companies, my books, my blogs. My social media. So you just go to mike mann.com and Google has very extensive documentation, lots and lots of articles about me, lots of interviews, lots of videos. So if you really wanna learn my philosophies, um, there’s an, a, a ton of information online.

Um, so back to domain market com. Um, you know, I started it like 12 years ago, and. I’ve already built a company before that, that was almost exactly like domain market is today. The previous company is called buy domains.com, and I sold that, uh, again, maybe 12, 13 years ago, something like [00:02:00] that. And then I had a non-compete agreement, so I wasn’t allowed to be in the domain business for I think two or three years.

So the day that expired, I started this company domain market.com and recreated my most successful company. My, which was by domains.com. So domain Market, again is a copy of a previous company of mine called by domains.com. Uh, in the early, you know, back then there’s a, there was a lot of smaller internet companies, even more so than now.

It’s, it’s harder to get started now. Back then there was a lot of money and a lot of speculation and a lot of big dreams. So there were tons of tiny internet companies of people seeking their fortunes and their millions online. There still are, but it was even a, just, um, you know. If there weren’t as many big controlling companies that controlled everything back then, so the small people had a better chance of starting tiny companies and making money.

And there were so many case studies of thousands of tiny companies that ended [00:03:00] up making millions of dollars. So therefore, a thousands and millions of people wanted to get online with their little companies. And the smartest ones want a great.com brand because that’s the way to be remembered online. So those are great investments.

Just the domain itself is a great investment prior to even building an asset. On top of it as just as a digital asset, as intellectual property. The domain itself, if it’s a great.com domain, is a great investment if you buy it at the right price, and then if you build a business on top of it, your business itself grows quicker than the competition because of having the great domain.

So therefore you have higher memorability, a higher conversion rate. Uh, your customers are likely to stay with you for a longer period of time because they have an affinity for your brand. It’s all about this branding brand affinity and brand Affinity Online is based on a great.com domain. [00:04:00] Been a lot of speculation in the past that.com would go away and all they invented thousands of other extensions, literally, you know, dot whatever, and.

All those are relatively ir, pretty much irrelevant because anyone that ends up being popular or good just makes the corresponding.com domain worth even more money. So the point being is the.com doesn’t go away. It never gets diluted, it always goes up in value. If it’s a great.com brand name like one that I own is bright future.com.

For all the students out there who have a bright future, that domain name will never go down in value in my lifetime. It’ll go up in value consistently. It’s already worth a ton. And if somebody were to build an asset on top of it, you know, most likely people would think it’s super cool just ’cause of the domain itself on top of whatever they’re building.

So. Well, the one thing that’s, um, the same is real estate is that you can use comparables to value it. [00:05:00] So, you know. Other domains in the same neighborhood in the sense that they have, uh, you know, similar meaning, similar length, similar context. They relate to a similar industry that gives you a comparable price.

But the marketplace for the domain data isn’t as clear as the real estate data. Um, but there’s actually some good things about it is real estate and Wall Street are very, very highly regulated, whereas the domain industry is the wild West. So we can do all sorts of. Things that are unregulated. Uh, so that saves a lot of money and time and, and energy on lawyers and things like that.

There are some regulations, but you know, real estate and Wall Street and banking is extraordinarily, highly regulated. Um, so in any case it’s similar in some other ways though. Um, it’s like, um. It’s a lot like undeveloped parcels of land. In my case, I have 300,000 domain names, mostly super [00:06:00] premium.com domain names.

It’s similar to me owning a bunch of vacant land all over the United States. Some of that vacant land is swamp land that’s worth a thousand dollars in acre, and some is great New York Prime real estate that’s worth a million an acre. So for example, some domain names are worth a million dollars. Some domain names are worth a thousand dollars.

Similar to, um, a one acre vacant lot. Some of them it’s, it’s useless in swamp land. Some of it’s in super premium real estate. Um, and therefore it can be traded and monetized in a similar manner as I own this real estate. This real estate goes up in value, down in value. It can be monetized, it can be financed.

It can be used as collateral as leveraged upon to the extent that it has good appraisals. The real estate market is much better at appraisals, and the domain market’s bad at appraisals. But again, that’s my strategic advantage is in my case, you know, I’m a [00:07:00] great domain appraiser compared to most people.

And, um. Therefore I, when I see all the domains for sale and the data, I have a better perspective as what’s a low price and what’s a high price. So I’m trying to buy low and sell high. Everybody on Wall Street’s trying to buy low and sell high. Everybody in the real estate market’s trying to buy low and sell high.

The difference being is they all have the same access, virtually to the same information, and they have a huge number of competitors. But they also have a liquid market where they can immediately sell their real estate and immediately sell their securities on Wall Street, whereas the domain market is extremely illiquid.

So on one hand, I could conceptually make a lot of money. Uh, I could also lose a lot of money. And also it might take a very long period of time for me to wait for the liquidity in the marketplace to, to get that margin that I’m seeking. So it is similar to real estate, but it’s also different, you [00:08:00] know, it’s digital.

It can be, it’s, it’s great. I mean, it’s really the best thing. ’cause again, I have 300,000 domain names equivalent to acres of real estate, but mine’s all on an Excel spreadsheet that can be transferred in 24 hours. So try doing, try putting, you know, you know your land as a physical thing that needs to be mowed and needs to pay taxes.

And of course you need to pay your taxes on your domains. As far as paying, you know, Verisign, I can, but irrespective of that, um, you know, the, there’s, it’s much more awkward and difficult to control physical land, but it is very similar to Wall Street Securities. You don’t have to take possession of the actual corporation you’re buying.

The domain name isn’t a corporation, it’s only a digital asset. When you buy a Wall Street security, you’re actually buying a portion of a corporation. Or even if you buy gold, like you’re usually buying gold shares or even gold, you’re usually not taking the physical [00:09:00] possession of the gold itself. The real estate that you buy, you’re actually taking possession of that thing You need, you know, an appraiser and a inspector and tax people, and.

It’s very difficult and awkward. It doesn’t transfer as easily as online real estate. So there are a lot of similarities and a lot of differences. Um, well in the beginning I find answered myself because I had sold my other company, so I still had some money left over from that to start this business essentially.

Um, but I burned through that money very quickly because I’m the best domain buyer in the world. I’m also the best domain seller in the world. The thing is, is that buying domains is much, much easier. I could buy thousands a day if I wanted to, which will make you broke extraordinarily fast. But I can only sell a handful a day no matter how hard I try.

So I can be the best at buying and the best at selling, which will leave you really broke really fast. So therefore, I have constant needs to finance. [00:10:00] I could always run a tiny business and stop growing, but for me, I’m all about growth. So again, I bought 300,000. Super premium.com domain names, one at a time.

It’s extraordinarily difficult and it’s in an extremely high volume. So again, um, I didn’t have to do that. I could have bought 3000 domains or 30,000, but I bought 300,000. So it required a lot of financing and a lot of selling, and a lot of hustling. And, uh, that’s why I’m uniquely, you know, qualified to compete.

Most people can’t do that. Um, I have one great accountant from an accounting firm and one great lawyer who’ve done, um, deals with me forever. And actually, like, I’m super hard to work with and they’re actually super hard to work with. So, you know, it’s very difficult. And also they’re very expensive. Like even though we’re friends and have worked together forever.

They do high level, complex work and there’s demand for their services. So they charge me a lot of money. [00:11:00] And you know, we fight a lot because I’m very difficult and I work on complex deals all the time. And complex Plus, I don’t do anything traditionally by the book. I always invent new ways of doing things.

So that drives everybody crazy who’s working with me. ’cause they have to reinvent the wheel constantly. So, having said that, though, I have two people that I trust. I hardly trust anybody. So, you know, I have a lawyer I trust, I’m an accountant I trust, and uh, you know, I pay them a lot. And we work really hard and I’m lucky that I have people that are so good and know my businesses so well.

And also, you know, they quit once in a while, but they eventually come back. So, you know, they stick with me for a long time despite the difficulties. And again, a lot of times I’m broke because. My, my companies are very successful, but it, they suck up a huge amount of capital, so it’s hard for me to pay my other bills, you know, so again, my accountant and my lawyer have to deal with A, me paying them, and B, other people [00:12:00] complaining about their bills and things, plus me complaining about how high people’s bills are so.

It’s very difficult for everybody, and that’s really the lesson here is the nature of businesses. It’s hard and you have to work through a lot of complex people and things in order to keep your structure together for a long period of time and make money.

I don’t, I do that by myself as far as the valuation of the domains. I do that, but I do trust them to do other stuff. Lots of other stuff. Lots of really important stuff and so, you know. I’m lucky. I’ve been in business a long time and I’ve started a lot of businesses. So some of the people I bring with me from other businesses, I can move them around or they want to move around with me.

But again, I’m very, very difficult. So the vast majority of people don’t stick around for business to business. But there’s some people that are very loyal to me and they come with me from business to business. So that’s one of the important things. And then the next thing is, um. [00:13:00] We need very special skills and very, it’s very difficult, complex work, but mostly the software development that we do is very difficult and complex, and so there aren’t very many people even qualified to do it, willing to do it.

It’s very expensive. So I mean, the answer is I have to interview very difficult people and test them out, and usually have a good deal of turnover sometimes. And then hopefully at the end of that, it’s similar to the lawyers in the accountants. The people are very expensive and they’re very difficult, and it’s very hard to make a profit.

But if we stick at it for a long period of time and keep everybody together and work on our goals and our brands, and, um, again, our funnel, the sales and marketing funnel to bring in more clients, um, than we can and do succeed, but there’s no guarantees. Things fluctuate very quickly like. All of my businesses were doing very well.

And then this covid took a huge hit on everything and almost [00:14:00] wiped me out entirely. Um, and now I’m sort of at break even on going upwards in all three companies. I have some smaller companies, but three main companies are all going up. So, and presumably they’re gonna keep going up and up, and I’ll retire my way out of it in that manner, but.

This, nobody predicted a BAT virus destroying my companies. Well, the good news is I usually don’t do the hiring. I have people that work for me do the hiring, but, uh, um, I do hire some people though. I hire the top level people. And again, they’re just so few people that need it. Like when they get to me, they’re already qualified by, you know, they’ve already been qualified.

And then it’s just a matter of whether we can get along, whether how many hours they’re gonna work. I like to make sure that they don’t have a bunch of side projects. I make them sign a difficult contract that promises that we own the intellectual property, that they’ll never [00:15:00] disclose any, um, confidential material that they won’t work on side projects, and then I pay them well if they work really hard and agree to all those conditions.

So there aren’t very many people that meet my needs. So it’s not, it’s not like I’m picking from a huge pool of people. I’m picking, I’m talking to one person and trying to develop ’em and see if they convert. A lot of times I hire people as independent contractors, and if they do a good job for a couple years, they become employees.

Competitive advantage is that I think everybody knows that I’m the hardest worker, so that’s my competitive advantage. I work more hours than everybody else. They’re all on vacation, they’re all sleeping, they’re all doing different stuff while I’m working. So. I mean, I work more than everybody else, and it probably allows me to be three times as productive if I work twice as many hours.

It’s all concentrated in a short period, so I’m actually getting like triple the value. You know, one plus one is equaling three because it’s such a [00:16:00] condensed work environment that I’m creating a, a ton of value and a lot of knowledge. So my competitors are even the best ones. You know, nobody really, um, has dedicated themselves to the degree I have.

So over a period of time, I’ll eventually roll all my competitors. Sometimes it takes longer than other times. But, and in this case, you know the two best ones in the world probably, or maybe three best ones, if you go back long enough, there’s a gentleman named Frank Shilling, who’s the best, you know, premium domain expert in the world.

His company is called Uni Registry, but he just sold it a couple months ago. So he sold it to GoDaddy for a good amount of money. So the point being is he’s not my competitor anymore. He is gone. I actually didn’t really beat him in the marketplace, but he got bought out, so he is gone anyway. And then there’s a gentleman, Michael Burkins, who actually lives in my neighborhood here in Florida, who is one of my other top competitors.

He sold his company to GoDaddy a few years ago. So again, he is not my [00:17:00] competitor anymore. There’s a guy named Young Y from a long time ago who used to be a great competitor. He sold his company to somebody else, whose name I Marchex a long time back. So those guys wiped themselves out. The small people can’t really compete with me because.

I have more automate. They compete in the sense that they take little bits of market share, but nobody can rise, is gonna be able to really rise to my level because I have too much of a head start. I have the people that work for me are too smart. We have too much technology. We work too many hours. We know too many people and too much stuff.

So. The little guys are never gonna really be able to catch up. Plus, the marketplace is extraordinarily difficult. I mean, it’s, it’s a huge monopolistic tax structure where you know, you have to pay all these fees over and over for these domain names. And domain names are a digital blip. You know, your email is probably free, your domain names should be free, but you’re being scammed.

So I’m being scammed [00:18:00] too, which means my expenses are extremely high, which means people can hardly compete with me ’cause they can’t afford those expenses. I wanna discuss the unique selling proposition for one moment. The domains I own are all unique. There’s only one of a kind in the world. So again, bright future.com, there’s only one of ’em.

So that’s the unique selling proposition. If somebody wants that name and that brand, there’s only one way to go is you have to pay me or else you can’t do it. So that’s, you know, so the, the selling proposition is you buy all the best domains and therefore you know there’s nowhere else to go except through your channel at your price.

If somebody wants bright future.com. They have to go through me and pay the price that I want, so that that gives me a unique selling proposition that my competitors just one name at a time. So the point is to own the most great domains. So I have as many unique selling propositions as possible. Each domain is a unique selling proposition unto itself.

We sell these domains and the average sale price is maybe 4,000 bucks or [00:19:00] something like that. So that’s nice. And we make a little profit, but every once in a while we sell one for a hundred thousand dollars or $200,000 and we celebrate and you know, go out to dinner and get really happy. So those are the major exciting moments as far as business goes.

Actually, it’s exciting when we buy domains for $10 that are really worth a hundred thousand dollars, even though they’re hard to sell. The buying experience is exciting, but it’s not profitable because. There’s no cash coming in. The selling is more exciting ’cause there’s actually cash coming in that we can spend.

And also it’s a big relief paying all our bills. You know, everybody’s freaking out about the bills. So when we make a big sale, all of a sudden the bills get wiped out and there’s a huge relief. So that’s the exciting moments. Almost got me to quit. I mean, every day I almost get to quit, but I never do. So.

It’s just, it’s a, it’s so much hard work and, uh, you know, it’s not like [00:20:00] they’re the only potential reward is cash. It’s not like you’re gonna, um, you know, get on the Hollywood Walk of Fame star. It’s just the only, the only potential advantage is cash. So the days you’re not making cash in the years you’re not making cash.

It’s sort of a waste. So you feel like quitting on occasion, but. I’m, I’m different than most people. Most people do quit. I mean, again, that’s part of my strategy. And again, I wrote a book Make millions.com. It’s linked to my website. But part of the strategy is just to get your competitors to capitulate.

So like, just wear them down. It’s like when they thought you were gonna quit, you didn’t quit and you, and then you beat them in the marketplace until they quit. So again, my competitors have mostly quit and sold out and some of it is directly because of me. ’cause they can’t compete. I. Other is for other reasons.

But the point being is, you know, I write about this and I live this, I work the hardest and I have the greatest motivation and the greatest focus to make me the greatest profits. [00:21:00] And again, I need those profits for my charity work. So I don’t want to screw anything up. It’s essentially, I, I treat it like a life or death matter because, you know, if I’m giving money to cancer aids, whatever it happens to be.

Those people are gonna die if they don’t get support. So it, even though it’s a very indirect route, it turns out it is a life or death situation that I win. My competitors aren’t nearly as generous and don’t do nearly as much charity work, so the money’s gonna be wasted on fancy vacations and champagne.

Well, we started selling just search engine optimization, but all of those customers applied it to a website and that website required web development. And it required social media and it required conversion optimization and e-commerce and content and blogging and all these other experiences within a modern website.

So we constantly worked with outsource providers and in-house [00:22:00] people to patch together these websites and. Ultimately it’s a crappy experience. If you have too many cooks in the kitchen, the website’s chopped up and broken and it’s way too expensive for the client ’cause they’re paying a bunch of people.

So in our case, we’ve developed all these services in-house where we can provide all the social media, all the content, um, the domain name in the sense that we own a domain company and the consulting, the entire digital marketing experience. Through seo.com plus they’re very friendly, consultative people, so it’s not like a short-term experience.

It’s a permanent, to the extent possible long-term relationship where we get very involved with their marketing approach and their digital marketing. And ultimately we want them to outsource their entire digital marketing experience into our agency with them consulting with us on a regular basis. And.

We’ve built a ton of great [00:23:00] internet experiences for our clients. Lots of clients make a lot of money because they get to the top of Google or near the top of Google in any case, and then they, the, their customers have a great experience on their website. It looks great. It navigates great. It has the, the proper e-commerce functionality.

There’s no broken links. There’s no typos. The design was done by professionals, so again, that grows their business. Particularly now, more and more people working online, working from home, closing down physical locations, um, the, the need for a professional digital marketing agency is greater than it’s ever been before.

Well, in the beginning we were actually in much better shape ’cause our own website was ranked at the top of Google, so we got. Massive amounts of traffic just because of our domain name and our website ranked super high. It still ranks high in several pages and several keyword categories, but just for the word, SEO, we got [00:24:00] bounced down when Google had an update and they bounced us down.

Um, so, but the point being is the early customers almost all came from the SEO itself, from people going to Google, typing in the word SEO. So our biggest customer was always Dell Computers and we built a huge, uh, digital marketing experience with Dell. And uh, they really helped propel us in a lot of ways ’cause they allowed us to hire a lot of customers to work on, I mean, employees to work on their account and we could use them for a reference to, uh, bring on new customers.

And so we learned a lot of stuff by building and growing, having them as one of our customers. Plus we had Mrs. Fields, I think we still might have Mrs. Fields. 800 contacts. Um, there’s a lot of famous brands. Um, if you go to the seo.com website, you can see like some of the customers and some of the case studies.

Again, everything is also linked to mike mann.com. There’s a link to seo.com. There’s a [00:25:00] link to Domain Market. There’s a link to my other company phone.com. My book make millions.com. I have a guide of best practices called mike man.com/plan. Everything’s linked@mikemann.com, so I encourage you to look around again.

I have a whole bunch of YouTube videos. Um, I just started live streaming two weeks ago, so yesterday was my second live stream. Uh, it goes on Facebook and YouTube trying to figure out how to get it on LinkedIn. Um, so again, I’m just creating a lot of content and media. My company’s create seo.com and the people that work there create a lot of content.

Young lady Alexandra Marshall is the president of seo.com. I’m the CEO, but she actually runs the company on a day-to-day basis, and she does a fabulous job. Her team is super smart, they do great work. They’re building a lot of content, mostly for clients, but we’re building our own content at the same time to try to, again, create more indexing in Google, more traffic, new customers.[00:26:00]

In the beginning, there were a lot of big agencies that pretended to offer the service, but they just barely knew what they were doing, and a lot of times they had to outsource it. So you’d see these large marketing and advertising agencies all of a sudden heard the word SEO and added it to their marketing mix.

Hey, we offer SEO, and then they had to try to figure out what SEO was and how to actually sell it. The reason they offer that and everything is because they have these huge clients built in, baked in, they the same as me. They don’t want ’em to go to outside sources, so they try to offer everything in-house.

But you know, those big advertising agencies eventually realized that I think it was too complex for them to actually literally offer it in-house. So, well, I haven’t, I’m not a professional on their market. Like I don’t know exactly what all those people are offering at the moment, but I. I think most advertising agencies aren’t trying to pretend they’re also the best SEO agency anymore, whereas back then they were trying to use the clients and bring clients in saying they’re an SEO agency.

So that was a [00:27:00] problem. And the web, same with a lot of people. I mean, SEO actually turns out to be a pretty highly specialized, um, service. Getting to the top of Google is extremely valuable, so if you get it wrong and don’t get to the top of Google, you could lose a lot of money and lose your whole business.

So you don’t really want to hire the wrong company, basically. Not only that, um, you can hurt your reputation and hurt if you do things wrong. You can have poisonous links and, and bad content and bad information on your site where Google punishes you. If you hire the wrong company that does the wrong thing, you actually go backwards and may never recover.

Like people might never find you in Google again if you do the wrong stuff. So, you know, in my case, my, the people that work@seo.com are the most detailed SEO professionals and we offer a variety of other digital marketing services that. We’re very skilled at, at the same time under one roof. Mm-hmm. My book is really about starting and [00:28:00] operating a small business with a particular emphasis on online businesses, and it talks about the most assertive strategies.

It really focuses on self-confidence first, and says, you know, teaches you how and why to you can develop this self-confidence and with the self-confidence you can develop an explicit plan that you can. Work on day after day, over a long period of time. A brand name, an explicit plan, a team. And with your self-confidence and with your brand and with your team, you can step through business best practices, including financing, you know, building a funnel, conversion optimization, and outsourcing.

Your legal and your accounting. Every little detail of the business. You can compete and you can take market share and you can beat your competitors. It starts with the self-confidence. ’cause again, in my case. I really hardly had any mentors. I didn’t have anybody give me any money. I didn’t have a good education.

I don’t have any [00:29:00] advantages other than self-confidence and working more hours than everybody else. If you have, if you’re confident like myself, and I keep working and studying and learning and talking to people and testing and trying and failing. Over and over. And then what happens? Then I just go back and go again and again and again with my self-confidence until I win and I’m gonna beat my competitors and I’m gonna be the best at whatever I do.

So that’s what my book teaches and that’s a strategy that works. It’s might not, it doesn’t suit most people because it requires an incredible amount of work and an incredible amount of focus, and even fighting in the sense that you have to. You have to get through a lot of very difficult challenges in order to beat the competitors and to have the success that you want.

So it doesn’t suit everybody, but it’s, it does suit my natural personality. So that’s the way I operate basically. And my book tries to explain it so other people can adopt those methods. And [00:30:00] again, in my case, I’m trying to make millions of dollars, not because I want to be the coolest guy, it’s because I want to do the best charity work.

With my money and with my time, but I use the businesses as a bank to finance my charity. Sure. Well, what happened is I spent several years writing bullet points down of just things that I knew, things that I learned, things that I read about. So all I was doing is just jotting down my own notes, best practices.

So I had, you know, 50 pages of best practices and ideas. Things I studied, things I copy and paste some things I invented by myself that I just thought them through and said, you know, this is a great, uh, concept in theory. Um, so I documented all that stuff and I started just organizing it into sections.

And with all that, I used it as training for my employees in order to make millions of dollars so we could do our charity work and in order to build our charities. So essentially all these best practices and ideas were being documented. Um, in [00:31:00] order for my own, it was for I basically, I eventually built an employee manual out of best practices.

And this is an employee manual on steroids ’cause it has tons of great ideas that have nothing to do with any employee manual. It’s to get my employees to think way out of the box and do really great things. Make lots of money, do lots of charity, inspire lots of people, do lots of big things. So I had the coolest employee handbook in the world and I turned it into a book.

And, um, then I had people who know how to write better than me, edit my grammar and punctuation and things like that. All the ideas are mine, but I’m not a great writer. So they cleaned it up and made it flow properly. So really that’s the story. They’re just ideas and bullet points eventually turned into an employee handbook.

The employee handbook turned into a very, very rough book. Which got edited and then I edited it a second time, just updated some of the ideas and things. [00:32:00] So then I have a really cool book that everybody can read for free that will literally teach you how to make millions of dollars that you can do whatever you want with.

You should do charity work with it, but you don’t have to, but you just read the book. If you read the book, you’ll know how to make millions of dollars. It’s not even that hard to read the book. If you read it, you’ll know how to make millions of dollars. The work itself is very difficult, but you’ll have the information you need in order to make millions of dollars just by reading the book.

And I’m not saying you want to do the hard work or that you know you will do the hard work, but the point is, is you’ll have the information you need and you can be a millionaire and you can do the charity work. You can serve your family, and you can serve society as a result. That’s what I recommend, and the same lesson over and over and over, which is you have to be very careful about who you trust.

There are very few people in the world that I trust, and I have a hard time trusting new people because I used to trust everybody and I brought them all into my businesses and in [00:33:00] my life, and a huge portion of ’em didn’t do what we agreed Let me down in a variety of ways, so I don’t like to be a negative sounding individual, but the reality for your own survival.

In life and in businesses you can’t trust too many people because when the going gets tough, they’ll eventually do what’s in their own best interest, which isn’t necessarily in your best interests, for example. So that’s the biggest life lesson. Uh, the other life lesson again is, um, regarding self-confidence that I, me mentioned before, is that if you can’t give up on yourself, ’cause if you’ve given up on yourself and your own plan, then there’s no reason to expect.

Any good results or anybody in the outside world to believe in you. If I don’t believe I’m gonna succeed and I can’t transmit that energy, then, and you can’t fake it, it won’t work. The people pick up on it like dogs, you know? You’re either confident and a believer and you’re clear or you’re not. So [00:34:00] self-confidence is the second thing.

And the other thing is again, is long hours and hard work and you know, people like to discount that because. It makes it easier on ’em. They say, oh, you know, I can work smarter but not harder. Well, actually, you can work smarter for more hours and then so if you work twice as many hours while you’re working smarter, again, in my mind, you’ve created three times the value just because it’s such a concentrated effort compared to your competitors.

You’re actually getting three time. You’re working twice as many hours as giving you three times the economic benefit. Ultimate in the long run, the compounding of your skills and of your efforts. I’m not saying people should or want to do that. I’m saying it’ll work. I’m not saying it’s a good for you or your life.

I’m just saying it’ll work from a business perspective, which is what we’re here talking about. How does, how to make business work and how to make money. Well, again, in my case, I’m just a, I’m a businessman. I’m a business [00:35:00] deal maker. I am a digital marketing expert to some degree, and I’m definitely a domain and branding expert.

But what I’m not is a software programmer. I can’t program anything at all the tiny webpage or anything. And if I could, I could have helped myself a lot. I wouldn’t have had to hire so many people. I wouldn’t have been so confused. I could have solved a lot of my problems quickly by just doing the programming instead of hiring programmers, waiting for people, paying people.

And, you know, I’m selling these products like, um, digital marketing products, software related products, whether they’re completed or whether it’s the service itself. So the point being is if I were a software programmer, it would’ve provided a much greater value than not being one like so. So I would do what I did do, which was study business, although I didn’t, I only did a little bit of in school.

I would recommend you maximize your school, maximize your MBA, join all the groups, study everything. Um, but again, being a [00:36:00] software program or on top of being an MBA would be incredible. Plus being a lawyer, an accountant on top of being an MBA. I mean, again, if you wanna make sure you’re gonna be really rich and successful, get your MBA.

Be a lawyer, an accountant, and a software programmer, and then you’ll make millions of dollars. It’s almost impossible. I mean, but I, you probably have some super smart students, so a couple of ’em might be able to pull it through. Any combination, any one of those or any combination if you’re either a lawyer or an accountant, or a software programmer, or an MBA, all of those are great.

Any two of those are great. Any three of those are great. If you knocked out four of those, it would be almost impossible, but you couldn’t imagine a better way of structuring your future for business.