300+ Acquisitions in 23 Industries: The INSANE Story of Carl Allen

 Summary

In this conversation, Jon Stoddard interviews Carl Allen, a prominent figure in the M&A space, discussing his journey from investment banking to coaching aspiring dealmakers. Carl shares insights on the evolution of his business, the importance of mindset in achieving success, and the impact of his coaching on students. He emphasizes the value of continuous learning, the significance of strategic acquisitions, and the lessons learned from his experiences with Agora. The discussion also touches on personal inspirations and the philosophy of using other people's money to grow businesses.

Takeaways

Carl Allen transitioned from investment banking to coaching in M&A.
He has over 7,000 students globally in his coaching program.
Mindset is crucial for success in deal making.
Continuous learning is essential for personal and professional growth.
Acquisitions are a strategic way to grow businesses.
Carl emphasizes the importance of using other people's money for investments.
He shares success stories of students achieving significant deals.
The cultural fit is vital in corporate mergers and acquisitions.
Carl's personal experiences shape his coaching philosophy.
He believes in the power of mentorship and modeling successful behaviors.

Watch the Interview:

Transcript:

Jon Stoddard (00:02.774)
Welcome to the top &A entrepreneurs. I have a really special guest today. It's Carl Allen. Carl, you and I have known each other loosely over four or five years because I bought a course from you, Ninja Acquisitions. I just want to welcome you. think Carl Allen is the father of this type of business. welcome. Yeah, thank you. It's really interesting. I started this kind coaching journey.

You're right, five, six years ago, 2015 I think it was, you know, obviously I'd had my Wall Street career as an investment banker doing tons of deals. then the last real job I had was in corporate &A. So I was doing deals for Hewlett-Packard. And then I left to do my own deals, which was amazing. And then five years ago, I was inundated with people asking me to teach them this stuff.

And I didn't want to kind of do the hotel ballroom kind of scenario. So I thought I'm going to create an online, an online coaching program and a system where I can coach people every week on, doing their deals. And, know, I'm blessed to have over 7,000 students now all over the world. Most of them US, UK, I would say that's where a lot of the deal activity, you know, still remains. That's where all the financing is as well. And,

There's been some unbelievable deals done over the years and I'm still doing it. love every new client that comes into my business that I can coach is always a privilege. But yeah, there's life in the granddad yet. I'm actually a granddad in real life now, John, as well. I know since you and I last spoke, my daughter, who's 28, gave birth to a little baby girl in January.

So I have an eight month old granddaughter, which is fantastic. And yeah, five kids, one grandchild, three dogs. And I feel better than I've ever done. I wanna keep doing this. I wanna be the Warren Buffett of my industry. I'll still be doing this when I'm 90, I think. It never gets boring. Until your room temperature.

Jon Stoddard (02:21.121)
I, the course I bought a long time ago was from Ninja Acquisitions. And I know that I just checked your LinkedIn. Now you changed it a while ago, but what would happen to Ninja Acquisitions? Yeah. So it was really interesting. So I'd, I'd built the business up. we, grew very, very quickly, very, very quickly. And I, I had a, you know, I had a really good team in the business that, that were helping me. And I'm, I'm always more of an owner investor. So I, I never.

I don't do a lot of the detailed work in my business. Apart from being a coach in this business, I always had a team that built everything around me. And I felt at the time that they were struggling to keep up with the pace of how fast I wanted to grow it. And one of my affiliates in the marketplace, a company called Agora, they actually approached me about buying the business and partnering with me to

really, really scale it and really put a dent inside of the deal making universe. And we had some great plans. So, so Agora bought the business. We rebranded it to be Dealmaker Well Society. And then about a year ago, Agora went through some, just some big changes in its, in its corporate structure and some big changes in its strategic focus. And my business, know, Agora is a billion dollar company, you know, my business,

was no longer kind of front and central to what they were doing. So I got the opportunity to buy it back. So I took the business back out of Agora, back into private ownership, was able to take the team along with me. And a lot of the great things I learned from being inside of Agora about how to think differently, we took as well. So we're effectively the same business, it's still me.

Obviously the coaching programs and the systems we built, they're changing all the time. We're constantly refining them with the way the markets are changing and the different funding streams are coming online and the different types of deal structures that both I'm doing in my private equity firm, but also a lot of my students are doing. And this is what's fascinating about being a coach is, you know, I've built this framework based on 29 years of being a dealmaker.

Jon Stoddard (04:44.833)
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of deals, tens of billions of dollars of deals done, but you get students that take it and they'll kind of flex it to suit what they're doing and get like amazing results. They'll go off piste a little bit, but still get incredible results. So we're constantly building a lot of those different experiences into what we deliver to our students. I gotta tell you, Jeremy Harbor,

and then one of his students and one of his students. I mean, you have your DNA to Matthew Wainwright, who I interviewed about 10 podcasts ago. They're doing 16 deals a year. Their business is worth almost $250 million now, which is I know it's crazy. It's crazy. know, Jeremy's a really good friend of mine. And you know, I've spoken at Harbor Club. And you know, he and I have done some really cool things together. You know, he's a great guy. There's a lot of charlatans now in this world. lot of people that

There's people teaching this stuff now. They've never done deals before. I won't name names, you know, Jonathan's, sorry, Jeremy's one of the real guys like me. You know, he's done tons of deals. He knows his stuff. Phenomenal deal maker. So he and I are very privileged that we have skill sets that, you know, are able to share with the world. And, you know, I've got students that have done 80 deals and built massive 82? 80.

There's this one student's done over 80 different deals. I'm going to have one student. I'm not going to embarrass him by naming him. I've got one student in Asia that with a little bit of luck will become my first billionaire student. Holy cow, that's amazing. He'll float his roll up on the Australian stock market probably the end of next year.

at a north of $2 billion valuation. I think I know who you're talking about. Somebody already mentioned him to me. He'll own more than 50 % of the shares in that company. And all that's come through the stuff he's done with me. And I love changing lives. I love impacting people because it's a really weird skill to have. Most people don't know how to do deals. Most people don't know how to raise capital. Most people don't know how to

Jon Stoddard (07:11.775)
negotiate and talk to sellers and build rapport. I'm just fortunate to have done it for so long that I've broken it down into a systematic process that anybody can follow and anyone can kind of implement. It does seem like there's you know, there's a skill level. don't know what it is. It's just, there's blocking. It's not as hard as you think as soon as you get on the other side, but it is a big mountain to climb to.

get yourself over, you know what, hey, you can buy, buy and sell companies. Yeah. On the layer, you're like, Hey, get a job, work for somebody or raise capital for a VC. And then, you know what you're doing? What Warren Buffett does. Exactly. It's like being the Buffett of Main Street in a lot of ways. You know, I think, you know, we're taught to go to school and, you know, drop a hundred grand on an MBA and then, you know, go and work for a bank or a consultancy firm and do all those things. Yeah. You can.

You work 100 hours a week, you might make half a million dollars a year, which is great. But if you go and buy businesses and you're an owner investor and you can have other people running those businesses for you, you can have the wealth creation and the freedom of work life balance to match. It's interesting. I work four days a week, probably five hours a day. I never work Fridays. I always spend Fridays with my family.

you know, I never work weekends. It's just great. You know, and I, I've got more money than I'll ever spend in my lifetime. so I, I give a lot of it away. I donate to my community, you know, to my family, to my friends. I just like making people happy and, cause I, I'm blessed to do that. and, this is something that anybody can have. Yeah, I have an MBA. I worked on Wall Street. I've been at this for 29 years, but

You know, I've got people that have come through my programs. They've had to sell furniture to invest in my training. They had nothing. They had no high. They didn't even have a high school education and they've hustled and grinded and pushed forward. And, know, they bought million dollar businesses. So what's really interesting about this is the thing, the difference that makes a difference in people doing deals. It's all about mindset.

Jon Stoddard (09:35.337)
A lot of people come into anything in life with limiting beliefs about what they can achieve and they underestimate what they can achieve if they put in hard work and follow rules and follow a system. And it's all about taking action. It's all about implementing. You know, as I said, I got an MBA and it was a great experience, but it's all theory. What you really learn in anything and especially in deal making.

is when you get out there and you do it, you take the action, you call the sellers, you have the meetings, you talk to the financiers, you put the term sheets in, you get the due diligence done, you get the deal closed. You've got to take action. It's like joining a gym and never going in there just staring at it. You've got to get in there. You've got to lift the weights. You've got to do the work. Same with anything in life. So deal making is not a get rich quick sport. It's a get rich slow sport.

takes work, takes discipline, takes patience. But if you do that, the rewards are pretty phenomenal. Yeah. I have to comment on your library behind you. And this is kind of part of it, just continuously being a student of the business and the learning, how you have to be curious and want to learn more from everybody else that's doing it. Yeah, absolutely. So one of my

one of my mentors in this life is this guy, Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins has a saying, it's all about modeling people. If you want to achieve something in life, go find somebody that's done it and then just model what they've done, model their approach. Don't reinvent the wheel. You can learn from people. So I've got probably nine mentors that I use in my life.

Really funny story about my library. So I read probably three books a week. I'm a crazy reader. books a week? Yeah, three books a week. I was on a podcast, right? I was on a podcast with somebody a few weeks ago and he said to me, hey, he said, I love the image backdrop that you've got. He's like, can you send that to me? I'm like, no, dude, this is like, I'm in my library right now. He's like, no. So I said, I'll prove to him in my library and I reached back.

Jon Stoddard (11:55.551)
and I pulled a copy of my own book out of my library. I got a few of these. But no, the three types of books that I love to read, Ryan, I love to read. I love to read autobiographies. So back to my original point, I think you can learn anything from anybody. So autobiographies, success leaves clues. if you, I love reading about

people that have done great stuff in business and in life. So autobiographies are my favorite. My favorite autobiography is Shoe Dog. It's the story of Phil Knight, founder of Nike. Like I got to tell you, know, anybody that thinks that starting a business is a smart thing to do, go read that book.

and you'll realize just how absolutely dangerous and harrowing it is to create a startup rather than what I do, which is go and buy a business someone else has built and save all the brain damage. So, Shoe Dog's a great favorite book of mine. I love reading books about marketing and about business. So, current favorite of mine is this book, Get a Grip. Have you read any of the traction books?

They're amazing. Traction, yes, not to get a grip. Get a grip. It's a fable. It's a story of a fictitious, it's a fictional IT company that implements the traction. It's called EOS, the system that they use for developing businesses. So that's a favorite book of mine. And I love, I'm a big student, John, of mental toughness. I love reading books about adversity.

and about mental toughness. And my favorite book ever about that is a book called Redefine Impossible. It's about the iron cowboy. It was a Canadian guy called James Lawrence. This guy did the most unbelievable thing in human performance. He did 50 Ironmans.

Jon Stoddard (14:17.343)
in 50 consecutive days, in 50 consecutive states, right? The guy nearly killed himself. He dropped down to like 4 % body fat. And the kind of mindset this guy cultivated in going through that journey, you know, if ever I feel like I can't do something, I read that book. And then...

I can do anything. If you read that book, you're like, I can do anything. If a human being can do what he did, there's a lot of things. We underestimate how powerful we are as human beings and what we can actually achieve in our lives if we really apply ourselves and we really focus in on what we want and why we want it. And then what's the work we need to do to get there. Absolutely key.

you know, that living with the CLJ, it's where he, know, you can, proved them that living with a seal that you can do 40 % more with your body by just pushing yourself and having the right mindset. Yeah. Have you ever read a man's search for meaning like being able to survive something or, know, let me, let me write that down any, anytime, anytime everyone gives me a book, in fact, when I get a book recommendation, I buy it.

I go on Amazon and I buy it. So I love it, man. I spend a ton of money on Amazon, everybody. And I like the hard books because I always highlight stuff with a man's search for meaning. Yeah, there we go. Prime one day. Get it tomorrow by one PM.

I'm gonna buy the hardcover. It's only six pounds. I like hardcover books. Okay, boom, I bought it. All right. There you go. I don't mess around. I don't mess around. Your library looks like that. My library does too. think you've got, reading books just keeps fills your mind with the right source of energy and inspiration to keep moving forward with the idea. yeah. Yeah. I actually have, I have three libraries, right?

Jon Stoddard (16:28.781)
so I have a library in my office. I have where I am now. I have a library in my head. and I have a library in my summer house, which is in Portugal. So, all my favorite books, I have to have three copies of them. So, all my, I have like a hundred favorite books and I have copies of them in all my different libraries. Cause so one day I might just want to pick it up and read it. And I don't like digital books.

I'll buy a digital book sometimes to read on a plane, but I always want the physical copy because yeah, I love having a tangible copy of a book. It's really, really important. I do too. think the topic, whatever issue I'm working on or topic I'm working on is I keep it right on top of my desktop and I usually highlight passages that I'm not familiar with.

how they say it. I'm familiar with the concept, but the way they say it is a breakthrough. So I highlight that and I'll always refer to it. Tay, I got to go back to your deal with Agora because it's interesting. I got a buddy that brokered the deal for, I think it was the, the penny stock trader, Agora bought the penny stock trader and then then sold it back to them. What did you guys, what did you learn from Agora and their

They're massive Intel on emailing people. They're billion dollar, massively profitable. So what was interesting about Agora? So Agora is a great business. And I had a lot of fun. I was in the Agora world for about a year, just over. I learned a lot. I made some phenomenal connections. We did some really, really cool stuff. But I think it was just kind of

kind of the path that they were on. They were just going through some big changes. you know, it's interesting, Gore is a billion dollar company. You know, I wasn't a billion dollar company. You know, I was a multimillion dollar company. But culturally, sometimes that can always be kind of difficult. You know, what drives &A in the corporate world? So I'm not talking about

Jon Stoddard (18:53.451)
like one of my students that will go and get into business for the first time by acquiring a business. If I look at my Dealmaker Empire students that are doing Bolton acquisitions and they're doing roll ups and are building big corporations, there are really three kind of things that drive successful acquisitions. One is strategic fit. So it's buying a business where you can get some leverage between what you already have and what you've acquired, whether it's leveraging customer bases, whether it's leveraging

products or services, then you've always got the cultural fit. And I went through the HP compact merger, which was kind of horrendous. You had Texas Republicans merging with California Democrats. That was never going to work. All the strategic rationale in the world

was never going to overcome, you know, that cultural mismatch. I would have been called off today after five seconds meeting. Yeah, ultimately that, you know, ultimately killed the company. HP is two separate businesses now. They just couldn't, they couldn't play nice together. It was just never going to work. You know, there's been lots of other deals, you know, the AOL Time Warner merger is another example, just culturally was never ever, ever going to work. And then often,

When businesses come together, their systems and processes and their technology doesn't work. That's really kind of a minor thing. if I look at my Agora deal, we didn't fire really on all of those three things. I just thought being part of a larger entity was going to be a great platform for me to kind of have a much bigger, louder voice in the marketplace.

I think at the time they were very keen on doing that deal and it was a great deal for all parties. But to be fair to them, they went off in a different direction just strategically with what they were doing. So my stuff wasn't kind of as relevant as it was before. We had some technology issues integrating them together. And then as I said, culturally, when a billion dollar company buys a multimillion dollar company, sometimes it just doesn't kind of fit together.

Jon Stoddard (21:15.873)
But it was a great experience. I'd do the deal all over again because of what I learned and the absolutely phenomenal people that I met inside of Agora. yeah, Agora has its ways of marketing. It's obviously very successful because it's a big business. It's not the way that I do the marketing. I have a slightly different kind of different way of doing it. But no, it was a nice experience. I enjoyed.

my year and a bit of being part of the Agora family. Did you get a, did you pay more or less, get a good deal, find your own company back? I, I'm not allowed to say, but, yeah, yeah, it, it, it worked. It worked fine for all sides. So, so yeah. Yeah. So I gotta go back. Now you started a company called, and I don't know how to pronounce it right. The PR O X pro capital.

Prox capital. Prox capital. Yeah, and that's a private equity fund for the deal flow from your students and yourself. Yeah, so my partner and I, Adam Markley, we do our own deals through that. So we're leveraging our own capital up with our financing network. And then we give our students the opportunity to do deals with us as well. So a lot of the recent deals that we've done, we've partnered with students that

You know brought deals to us. So so what's great about the two businesses how they fit together so deal makers got 7,000 plus students all over the world scouring Under the rocks for the deals and you know, there's millions and millions and millions of businesses for sale It's easy to find deals, but the key is building relationships with sellers. That's the key So we've got our students going and doing that They bring the deals back to base

and then we've got all the firepower in terms of people and money to get those deals done and then we can own them together or we'll go do our own deals. But a lot of our students, I would say 99 % of our students don't need to partner with Prox. They've got enough coaching and training in all of our systems to go and do it themselves.

Jon Stoddard (23:40.213)
You know, we show them where to get the money. We show them how to negotiate. We even give them a Rolodex of all the different financial resources that they can use. you know, like the SBA program is just phenomenal. know, there's so many people using it now. I read an article yesterday that the 504 version of the SBA, which deals with real estate, is about to run out of money. It's about to hit the federal cap.

placed on it by Congress, but the 7A program, which is really for buying businesses, yeah, there's tons and tons of money left in that program. Somebody told me that also. I talked to Live Oak Bank just a couple of days ago, they have so much, I mean, they don't have to customize their reach to businesses that don't fit their model, that can meet.

the cash flow ratio, the EBITDA turns, everything. I mean, there's so much business coming in. They don't have to reach outside that criteria anymore. No, it's great because I think, what's amazing for guys like LIVO, you know, they're one of the biggest, if not the biggest lender in the 7A program is 90 % of all the money that they're dishing out on deals is federally underwritten. So it's the best business model in the world for a bank. You know, they're taking

They're getting access to my money at half a percent that they're paying me. They're charging it out on deals at six, seven, eight percent and 90 percent of the money is federally insured. So what a great business model. know, so the challenge is, though, there's more money available for deals than there are deals because most people, as I said before, they don't know how to do this. This is one of the reasons why I built this business.

teaching people how to do this because I don't believe people should start businesses. I believe people should buy existing businesses to shortcut the path to success. And for me, if you own a business, you should buy your way to growth. If you want to grow your business, go and buy your growth, buy your competitors, buy your partners, buy in complimentary markets. know, like look at Amazon.

Jon Stoddard (26:00.535)
You know, when Bezos realized one day that all of his book buyers were listening to stuff on Audible, know, did he sit down and think, well, God, you know, I've to get the R &D guys in here. We've got to figure out how do we code a competing product. Then how do we deal with the distribution and the marketing? No, he went and bought them. You know, he bought that business for less than a billion dollars. You know, when he wanted to get into the food retail space because he saw that as the next big thing.

You know, did he figure it out himself? No, when he bought Whole Foods, you know, when Salesforce wanted to get into the the collaboration messaging market, did they figure it out? No. Here's twenty seven billion dollars. Slack. Welcome to the family. So all the big guys and they they're using other people's money. You know, Slack using its, you know, Salesforce using its own share price, you know, to buy companies as is Amazon or HP or IBM. And I've done deals with all those guys.

Everyone's using other people's money to buy growth. If you want more customers, more products, more services, more people, more locations, go and buy them in acquisitions using other people's money. It's just so much easier than hustling and grinding and figuring it out yourself. Life's too short to do that. You read that story about Dell and how he raised...

$65 billion to buy EMC and the other companies and take private. That's just it. Dell's an amazing story. So that guy, Michael Dell, what a genius, created $50 billion worth of value for himself doing exactly what I do, using other people's money to do deals. So he founded Dell and his dorm room, took it public.

You know, grew the business and then realized he could get a much better deal for himself by taking it private. I think he partnered with Silverlight, the PE firm. They took the business private, so they bought it off the stock market and they raised another boatload of money, bought EMC, which had VMware inside of it. And then, you know, did a whole bunch of financial restructuring and then took it public again and made it absolutely separate companies public. It's amazing. then would you add it to his net worth?

Jon Stoddard (28:26.957)
Unbelievable. I like him. I've met Michael Dell. He's a great, great guy. I love his book, that first book. The whole Coca-Cola and the keys stuff, you need to delegate this. love that stuff. Michael Dell is one of my favorites. I was always a big jobs fan. I was always a big fan of Luke Gerstner, IBM, and Mark Hurd.

big mentor of mine when I worked for Hewlett Packard. was my CEO at the time. Jack Welsh, I met him when I was at business school. Absolutely phenomenal guy. And I've learned from all of these people, as I said before about modeling people, a lot of the skills and traits and things that I have, I've just modeled from successful people. No point reinventing the wheel. It's like why I say buy a business, don't start one.

go and buy someone else's creation, because they've put in all the hard yards to get it to where it's at. You can buy that business using other people's money. You don't need to do it yourself. I got to go. This is jumping. I just saw your tattoo, man. That's pretty awesome. What was the inspiration for that? Yeah. So I'll tell you the inspiration about my tattoo. 17 years on Wall Street. When I left Wall Street, right,

I left the corporate life and I said to my wife, I want to do something that's like a little bit crazy and I'd never have got away with on Wall Street. So she said, well, really there's only three things that you can do. You can have a piercing, have a tattoo, or take drugs. Well, I've never taken drugs. I don't like the idea of having piercings. So I thought I'll have a tattoo. So I started off right at the top and then

seven years later got the whole sleeve. So I've got the names of my family on there and the time that I was born. And yeah, there's a lot of meaning and stuff. There's an Asian woman there. Yeah, it's really interesting. I got butters and geishas and all sorts of things. It's different today. I mean, I was in the military a long time ago and you weren't allowed to have tattoos or you were at least weren't allowed to show them.

Jon Stoddard (30:53.395)
leaves down and that's completely different today and my brother-in-law and his wife who's a doctor, like the top doctor at Banner here, they joined CrossFit. Now they're just tattooed all over the place. It's a different, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I love my tattoo. It's a big part of my identity and know, there's a lot of different things that I do. So I'm a Freemason. I've been a Freemason for a number of years and

Like last night, I was in my Masonic Lodge doing practice. So I wasn't in all my regalia like in a normal meeting. We have, you know, practice sessions to learn all the rituals and different things. And I was there in my T-shirt with my big sleeve tattoo and one of my fellow brothers in the lodge, you know, he's got a big sleeve as well. He's got a lot of Masonic emblems and stuff on his as well. So, yeah, I think the taboo around artworks.

not there anymore. It's not. And I remember when I was having the last bit of mine done, there was a guy on the next chair. I think he was in his sixties. He was having a tattoo for the very first time. So it's amazing. It just really hurts though. It's not pleasant, but like anything in life, sometimes you got to go through a little bit of pain to have a lifetime of pleasure.

So having a tattoo is a bit like getting a deal done. There can be painful parts to it, but once you get it through, you got something really proud that you can show people. interesting. I gotta ask you about your affinity for your Sylvester Stallone or Rocky the character. What does that mean to you? Yeah, so I absolutely love this guy.

So Rocky is a big kind of inspiration for me. So I always enjoyed the Rocky movies growing up. And I don't know if you remember the fourth Rocky movie, which is my favorite Rocky four, where he goes to Russia to fight Ivan Drago. That movie came out in 86, I think it came out a couple of months after I lost my father when I was 15.

Jon Stoddard (33:15.981)
So was an only child. My father died. He was only 40 when he died out of a heart attack. And that movie came out right after he died. And I was in total pieces at the time. And I watched that movie and it just completely changed my mindset about myself and about the life that I was going to live going forward. Because in the movie, in Rocky IV,

Rocky's friend Apollo is killed by the Russian and Rocky is like devastated, like I was with my dad. But Rocky decides to kind of do something about it. So I use the death of my father to fuel me into having a great life, studying really hard at school, being very focused on doing very, very well, you know, having my own great family. So whilst it was a painful moment at 15,

kind of shaped my life and it was through a Rocky movie that I got, it was the catalyst really to push me into that direction. So yeah, Rocky's my guy. And what's really interesting is when I, when Agora bought my company, part of the deal with Agora is I had to spend some time in the States. So they're based in Baltimore and there's a beautiful part of Baltimore called Fells Point right by the water. And

I had a really nice apartment in Fells Point that I would stay in when I was in the States. So I'd have two weeks in the US, two weeks back at home with my family. And I was walking down the street in Fells Point one Saturday afternoon and I walked past this art gallery and it's an original oil painting of Rocky. And I went into this and I saw it and he's wearing the shorts from the fight.

where he fights Drago. And I walked into the store and I never normally do this because I'm normally quite frugal with money. But I went into the store and I just said I'd like to buy that painting. I had no idea how much it was. I just had to own it. It just had a special kind of meaning for me. yeah, when COVID hit and I had to get my butt out of Baltimore and back to the UK.

Jon Stoddard (35:40.557)
I brought it with me. yeah, it's on pride of place in my office under my sign Tony Robbins picture. So those two guys taught me a lot about who I am, about mindset and about grit and determination and endurance. So yeah, they're both in my library watching over me. That's a good point about what art does to you. It's so subjective. There's a price value. know, Warren Buffett talks about that. He goes like,

You know, there's a price and there's value. What value that art brings to you or what that brings to your old ecosystem business. There's a saying, isn't there? Value equals benefit minus price. Write that down. Anybody listening to this podcast, write that down. Value equals benefit minus price. Doesn't matter how much something costs you. If you derive more value, more benefit from it, it's going to add value to your life.

So yeah, absolutely correct. I have a lot of great art in my house. Most of the stuff in my office over that side is like sporting memorabilia. I'm a huge soccer nut, huge boxing nut. I got signed boxing shorts on that. You call it soccer. What are you wearing? You're Americanized or what? Yeah, I'm a little bit Americanized.

I'm a little bit Americanized because if I talk to you about football, you're thinking NFL, you're thinking Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers. I love NFL, soccer is my number one sporting love, although I do love basketball. Have you seen The Last Dance on Netflix? Holy moly. Have you seen it? I haven't seen it.

I haven't seen it yet, but I saw the episode of the tall redhead guy from Australia that got he was in the last dance and he was just people are like, man, you were only in the last dance video for 30 seconds, although you were on three NBA teams. Yeah, you have to watch that dude. That is an unbelievable show on Netflix. It's about the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman. What a show.

Jon Stoddard (37:57.153)
That's unbelievable. what a, you know, he's somebody that I've never met that I would look to me. Like what an absolute legend in life, not just in sport. What that guy did was truly unbelievable. I saw an interview with him. He was talking about that center that he had. And what I took from MJ was he was so hard driving about his goal, where he wanted to go, that it doesn't matter.

just contribute to my goal, like I'm gonna get there. I'm gonna get there. Yeah, absolutely. one of his, so his coach, his fitness coach actually wrote a book. His fitness coach was a guy called Tim Grover. And he wrote a book called Relentless. And in his book, talks about in life,

There are three different types of people. You have coolers, have closers, and you have cleaners. And cleaners are the people that everybody fears them, everybody follows them. They just get shit done no matter what. And MJ's a cleaner in the way that he describes it, that will just move mountains to get things done. And I think what MJ did as he got older was he figured out how to use his mind.

you know, to control his destiny. So a lot of that later success was all mindset driven. He was able to kind of build his body to match the power of his mindset. know, mindset for me is the core of everything. Does it matter what you want to do in life? You know, we've been talking about doing deals and things. It all comes down to mindset. If you know what you want, you know why you want it. You've got that emotional attachment to your goals.

and you're prepared to do the work every day, the daily KPIs, the daily activity to move you forward. You can't fail. You can't fail at anything in life. And what stops most people from being successful is just they just get in their own way, you know, that they're not clear about what they want and they don't get emotionally attached to their goals. They don't get leverage over themselves. It's really important. Once you figure that out, life's really easy, in my opinion.

Jon Stoddard (40:21.869)
I think look, 45 minutes in, I think I can talk to you about five more hours and a couple beers. We'll do this again. Yeah, we'll do it again. Hey, Carl, I want to thank you so much. check out Carl. He's on LinkedIn. He's at Dealmaker Well Society. And he's a great mentor in this case. So Carl, I want to thank you for your time. have a great day, Thank you, John. All right, cheers.