Summary

In this conversation, Eddie Wilson shares his entrepreneurial journey, detailing his experiences from starting in media to successfully exiting multiple businesses. He discusses the importance of understanding business valuation, the significance of intellectual property, and the creation of an operating system designed for scaling and efficiency. Eddie emphasizes the role of leadership in managing growth and the strategies he employed to acquire and operate numerous companies effectively. In this conversation, Eddie Wilson shares his journey of building and selling a vast empire of companies, focusing on strategic acquisitions and operational control. He discusses the transition from selling 76 assets to rebuilding a new venture with a philanthropic mission. Eddie emphasizes the importance of service in leadership and how it shapes the culture of his organization. He outlines his approach to finding the right companies for acquisition and his aspirations for future growth, prioritizing quality over quantity in his business endeavors.

 

Takeaways

Eddie Wilson's journey began in media, leading to his first exit.
Understanding business valuation is crucial for entrepreneurs.
The importance of cash flow and profitability when selling a business.
Intellectual property can significantly enhance business value.
Creating a tailored operating system can drive efficiency and growth.
Leadership is key to scaling businesses effectively.
Eddie's Empire Operating System helps businesses navigate growth phases.
Acquisition strategies can lead to rapid business expansion.
Managing people is a critical aspect of operating at scale.
Eddie's success is rooted in understanding market dynamics and business architecture. Eddie acquired 86 companies, focusing on operational control.
He leveraged personal capital for acquisitions, avoiding traditional private equity methods.
Philanthropy became a core part of his business model post-sale.
Service is a prerequisite for employees in his organization.
Eddie aims for sustainable business practices in his philanthropic efforts.
He prefers mid-tier companies for acquisitions, valuing growth potential.
Eddie's new venture focuses on quality over quantity in company acquisitions.
He has a structured approach to integrating new companies into his operational model.
Eddie's goal is to reach a billion-dollar valuation while giving back significantly to charity.
His leadership style has evolved through his experiences in service and philanthropy.

 Watch the Interview:

Transcript:

JON STODDARD (00:01.652)
Welcome to the top M&A entrepreneurs. Today my guest is Eddie Wilson. Eddie's involved in Built Run, more than 115 companies, and Exit 85 of them successfully earning the title of King of Exit. So welcome to the show, Eddie, how are you?

Eddie Wilson (00:17.25)
Thanks, appreciate it, glad to be here.

JON STODDARD (00:19.336)
Yeah, so let's go all the way back. I was looking on your LinkedIn file. Where did you start this entrepreneurial journey? I mean, what was like the first like, I'm gonna launch this company or I'm gonna acquire this company. Where did that start?

Eddie Wilson (00:26.542)
Sure you have.

Eddie Wilson (00:32.578)
I was a TV and radio guy, went to Ohio State and was managing a TV and radio station and built a small show that we exited, three of my partners and I exited to Fox and Fox bought the show. Really it was the first time that I understood that I could create something that had exponential value that I didn't have to wait for 10 years to realize its profitability or revenue.

And I could actually take that off the table then. And it kind of opened my eyes to that. And so, um, after the radio TV days, I started an ad agency and really by accident was looking for capital to take on some additional, um, clientele. And in that process of looking for capital, I exposed, you know, myself and all my business dealings to like all the bigger agencies.

And ended up getting acquired then. And so then I realized like I'm actually onto something here. Like I'm creating something that I can actually realize it's full potential today versus waiting for 10 years down the road. And so then I decided to just start architecting it, you know? And so my first X was in 2002. Um, and then it's been the, yeah, the show. Yeah. That we sold the, um, it was talk. It was talk format.

JON STODDARD (01:44.063)
Yeah.

JON STODDARD (01:48.276)
And that was the TV and radio show that you did? What was the format of that? What kind of...

Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (01:57.527)
Back in the day before podcasts and all this good stuff, you know, and talk radio and television was really the the place to be if you wanted mass media.

JON STODDARD (02:06.6)
Yeah, and what it was talk between yourselves.

Eddie Wilson (02:10.91)
No, it was actually a show and I'm not at liberty to actually discuss what the show, which show it was because the show is still airing today. But the it was actually a show that we produced, had a good idea. Our owner, the owner of the television company didn't see value in it. So we bought airtime and produced ourselves our own money, bought airtime, put our own show on and then ended up selling that to Fox. And it's still airing today.

JON STODDARD (02:37.536)
So how did somebody find, I mean, they saw the episode and how did they, did you actually ask them this is for sale or did you, they come to you and said.

Eddie Wilson (02:47.223)
No. In radio and television, they're always looking for, especially TV, they're looking for things that work. It's why you get on HGTV and it just seems like they just rinse and repeat the same shows over and over and over again. So what happened was, is no one was interested in the show we were producing. We produced it. And this is kind of in the time period of like when Rush Limbaugh is at his heyday and like that whole era of time.

JON STODDARD (02:58.879)
Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (03:11.29)
And we went, you know, we kind of went in a similar vein, but had a very specific way that we did it and launched it in Atlanta locally. And then in Atlanta, it took off and it got ratings. Well then, then you either go down the path of syndication, which we didn't work, I didn't work for a large television organization to syndicate, you know, more than 40 or 50 markets.

and Fox, the producers of over at Fox News, they decided that they wanted to take on. So they actually pursued us.

JON STODDARD (03:42.748)
Yeah. And how do they buy? Do they say, Hey, we'll take a 50% down and then earn out kind of deal. What does that look like?

Eddie Wilson (03:50.762)
No, they buy like big corporate buyers. You know, they bought cash, took it off the table, wanted 100% ownership and control. And had I known what I know now, I would have done the deal a whole lot differently because they've made a whole lot more money off of that show than I would have ever dreamed of making. Yeah, yeah, you're sure. So I didn't understand multiples. I didn't understand.

JON STODDARD (04:08.464)
If it's still running today, I'm gonna assume so, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (04:18.376)
I understood so little of this world back in that day.

JON STODDARD (04:21.948)
Yeah, how much ownership did you own of that company?

Eddie Wilson (04:24.78)
I owe as a quarter ownership, so I own 25%.

JON STODDARD (04:27.72)
Yeah. And did you think after you sold that, you go like, Oh my God, I'm rich. Like I don't have to do anything or, or, or what?

Eddie Wilson (04:32.758)
Yeah, I was 24 years old. 24 years old, I went out and bought some, I'm a third generation real estate investor. And so went out and bought some real estate and thought I was set for life. I really wasn't, but I thought I was at 24.

JON STODDARD (04:47.24)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you moved over to this ad agency and you're building it. What kind of ad agency was it? TV commercials or SEO or what was it?

Eddie Wilson (04:55.955)
Primarily, so really back in that day, there wasn't a lot of digital ad buying. It was primarily just your traditional ad space. So intelligent commercials, billboards, stuff like that. And then we produced, I had a production company with it that we produced a lot. And so we were the agency of record for a portion of Buffalo Wild Wings. We took on a lot of like ad buying for Subway back in the day. That was the...

the agency that I built.

JON STODDARD (05:23.56)
Yeah, and you sold that off after how long?

Eddie Wilson (05:26.494)
Yeah, sold that after four years. Yeah. Because I didn't have enough capital. The way that the ad world works is you could get a big client like Subway. Um, and Subway would say, Hey, we want to place, um, you know, $20 million worth of ads this month. Um, but the radio and TV stations, uh, if you didn't have enough credit built up, um, expected you to pay for it quickly. Like they may give you 30 day terms.

JON STODDARD (05:28.68)
Yeah. Why did you sell?

Eddie Wilson (05:56.162)
However, oftentimes Subway would make you take 60 day terms. So I had this lag in capital. And so as I took on more buying for Subway and other big clients like Buffalo Wild Wings, I had to hold a, I kind of had to hold 20, 30, $40 million worth of float. And as a young entrepreneur, I just didn't have the capital. So I was actually searching for capital. I was trying to find someone who would really play that role of my backstop in capital.

JON STODDARD (06:01.149)
Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (06:24.854)
so I could go get additional clients. So I had all this additional potential, but I didn't have the capital to take it down. So in that, I went out, I was the first M&A lawyer I'd found, I really didn't know what I was doing. I was just looking for somebody to help me find capital. And I was going down this investment route. I went down the banking route, they told me I was crazy. If I didn't have contracts, long-term contracts, they wouldn't lend on it, they needed collateral.

And so I went down the M&A route and I started asking questions like, you know, what's VC and you know, or like, what's, how do I raise capital? And like, ended up with this, um, uh, M&A lawyer that, uh, was out of Chicago. And he was a broker, uh, on the side. He anyways, long story short, he said, Oh, I've got this client to be really interested. I said, Oh, okay. And, um, I thought we were going down the route of somebody, you know, would extend debt to me.

And then we went for 30 days, got all the way to the end, and I never thought I should ask like who's actually going to come to the table. I just thought, well, I trust this guy and we were signing, you know, NDAs and everything else. And then it was one of the top five largest ad agencies in the world. It was actually sitting back there just waiting to eat up all my contracts. And so that's when we got to the end and they were like, Hey, by the way, we've seen everything.

We're actually really interested in acquiring you." And I said, I'm not interested in selling yet. And they said, well, we'll make it very worth your while and let's talk about what multiples look like on these contracts. And it was worth a whole lot more than I ever expected because these contracts oftentimes were five, seven year contracts. So the residual on them were huge.

I was looking at it from cashflow and profitability. They were looking at it from, well, this is a five to seven year runway on a huge client that you've locked down that we could take advantage of and add additional services to it.

JON STODDARD (08:25.68)
Yeah. Did you have to get permission from, let's say, an example, Subway to move that contract to somebody that was going to buy it?

Eddie Wilson (08:34.53)
No, luckily when we had built the contracts, we had transferable or transfer agreements written in there. And I really just was trusting another ad agency that I knew that was just down the road further and they actually let me have their contracts. And so we had those contracts that we easily could just kind of sell over to the next one.

JON STODDARD (08:57.584)
Yeah. About this M&A and tourney, did you, do you feel, still have a good, uh, a feel for him or because things turned out good or did it feel like he was hoodwinked you for a while?

Eddie Wilson (09:03.906)
Yeah. Well, for a while it was a little bait and switch, but you know, you make enough money and all everything kind of goes away. All those feelings disappear. Yeah. Yeah. No, he, he was a good guy. Um, and then I started asking him a lot of questions after the fact, like, okay, like this has happened to me twice. I've actually done really, really well.

JON STODDARD (09:14.185)
Everything goes away, yeah.

Eddie Wilson (09:29.738)
What's the secret sauce to this? Like there's an equation here that I'm missing. And really, I think it was around the year 2007-ish. He said, here's the equation. He said, you're gonna build a business to exit. He said, number one, he said, you gotta worry about your bottom line and you gotta understand your kind of cash position at the point where you start disclosing that you're interested in sale.

He was like, you know, so I just say number one, Ziveta, number two or, or Net. Number two, he was like, you know, manage your own IP. Like he said, have some, some sort of proprietary system that you have, that you manage, that you can, you know, gives you, you know, a unique differentiator. And then number three, he said, you should really consider having an operating system. He said, so that if you're going to try to do this, um, intentionally so that you don't get locked up with golden handcuffs, he was like,

give them a system that the business operates on so they can plug and play management in and build your business on these systems. And so he kind of gave me those three things and really that launched everything for me because I was like, oh, well, if I'm gonna buy a business, start a business, I'm gonna make sure that these three things are taken care of because I keep going down this path where I end up selling the business. So let's just prepare for exit the moment I start.

JON STODDARD (10:50.816)
Well, let's talk about those three things. Bottom line, that's cash flow. EBITDA, was he saying that it needs to be positive cash flow, profitable?

Eddie Wilson (10:59.466)
Yeah, because where I was at, I wasn't in like kind of that pre revenue round, you know, I wasn't in that space. It was like, I was really running operationally sound businesses that were revenue positive, you know, profit, you know, decent profit. And, and so he was essentially teaching me that there's a, there's really a right time to sell a business and there's a right positioning financially when you're selling the business so that.

JON STODDARD (11:12.244)
Yeah, I hope so.

Eddie Wilson (11:29.278)
You don't ever put your business out there as if you're going to sell it. If you don't essentially control that bottom line.

JON STODDARD (11:36.512)
So what was he saying? What's the right time then?

Eddie Wilson (11:40.31)
Well, the right time is, is to make sure that you give yourself at least a 12 month runway where the best profitable, you know, uh, the, like giving yourself the best books on profitability so that they can look back over those 12 months books and go, man, this last 12 months, you are crushing it in profitability. You know, like, yeah. Yeah. Right. And that's what you're saying is like, you know, I understand that sometimes you're spending to acquire talent. You're spending to acquire whatever it is.

JON STODDARD (11:57.756)
It's like an NFL or NBA star having a great year. Like, Hey, yeah.

Eddie Wilson (12:10.27)
If you're getting ready to sell, start managing that bottom line and start creating efficiencies and high profitability.

JON STODDARD (12:16.456)
Yeah, so this number two, manage IP. That's what? Tell me a little bit more about that.

Eddie Wilson (12:19.82)
Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (12:23.446)
Well, I later it came into play for a while there was just a proprietary way that I did things. It's kind of like a lot of people in this space, they look at Shark Tank and you hear Kevin O'Leary say, well, why should I pay you 500 grand for your business so I can just spend 300 and produce the exact same thing? It's kind of that thing. It was like figure out a way to differentiate yourself. In the beginning, I really felt like that was a proprietary way of doing business, like my methodologies.

What I've really come to understand is that as I architect my businesses to exit, it really comes down to technology. You know, if I can infuse or if I can techify something in my space that somebody can't pull off the shelf, I'm getting higher multiples every single time.

JON STODDARD (13:10.336)
So what do you mean by that? You mean designing your own software? Dev? Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (13:14.206)
Anything, it could be software. It could just be a custom instance of a CRM that looks at data a different way in the business than maybe someone else in that space. You know, one of the big exits I had was an insurance company. And there's really nothing proprietary about insurance. Um, you know, even in technology, I mean, like you, everybody wanted us to, you know, they wanted to be able to, and we were in PNC, but, uh, property and casually, and so like, they want to be able to change their, you know, policy on their

phone, on an app, whatever, that's still not really that proprietary. You can pull that off the shelf all day long. What it came down to was it was how we underwrote the risk on our deal. So I actually created a separate company called Rent Facts, which we were the largest insurer of investment properties in the nation, single family investment properties. And so I built another system called Rent Facts, which really just was a small algorithm that scored seven.

seven risk factors in a rental property to tell if there's going to be a rent interruption. And I scored it and we called it a risk score. That gave me another 10 points in my multiple in the sale of that insurance company because I had, and it had two employees over there and a very, very simple algorithm, you know, just because we underwrote differently.

JON STODDARD (14:30.632)
And you gave that away as part of the, yeah. Yeah. So what's the, well, no, I mean, to the end customers using it and the, yeah. And the operating system, what's the secret to that?

Eddie Wilson (14:33.638)
I sold it as part of the deal. Yep. I didn't give it away. They paid it. They paid 10.

Eddie Wilson (14:41.962)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Yes. For the operating system, here's the significance there is that, um, you know, I have exited, I think, you know, the stats you said, I think I've actually exited I'm over a hundred now we've had three exits just this year. And I mean, we're, we're rapidly just increasing the machine and, um, you know, we put out stats and we changed those stats every month. So it's like when you get to the, to the actual operating system, I think that's my true secret sauce because.

I created an operating system called the Empire Operating System. And there's, there's other ones out there like EOS or Traction. There's a scaling up by Vern Harnish, or if you're in the manufacturing space, there's Six Sigma, there's operating systems, you know, there's tons of them. And they're really a dime a dozen in my opinion, even though we've created one. We created one. Um, and in that operating system.

We actually have five phase of it. Now it's a true operating system. So like it has both the technology, like your dashboards, but it also has a model. So it's the way of doing things. It's your language, it's your, how you set your KPIs, it's how you determine profitability, like all that stuff. We overlay that on every single business we have. But not only that, there's about 2000 other companies in the United States that now run on Empire as well. And so it's a separate company that we created, but we overlaid it on our business.

And really the secret sauce in that is that it really starts, it tells you how to operate your business based on the specific timeline of your business. So we believe that there's five phases in business. We call it startup, or you know, that's whether you're starting a business or you're acquiring a business. Next is perseverance. That perseverance period is when you don't have everything figured out, you maybe aren't as profitable as you want to be. You're not running on efficiency. You don't have the right people.

Eddie Wilson (16:40.29)
The next phase is we call viability. That's when the business is actually viable and it has reached at least a leveling out point. We've got terminology on all this. Next is scale. Like now that the business is viable, what do I wanna do with that business? Do I wanna scale it? Do I wanna grow it? Do I wanna exponentially increase it? I'm gonna hit the ceiling of what I wanna do with the business. And then phase number five, which is succession. Succession is now what do I do that I've hit my ceiling or our teams hit our ceiling?

And that's when we sell, right? Or for somebody else that maybe doesn't do what I do, they might pass it on to an heir, they might go sit in a board seat and hire a CEO. But succession is like the end phase. So our operating system actually is just like a dial that you turn based on every single phase to put in the new set of rules, guidance, governance. And now I operate a private equity firm, we've got 13 assets right now.

in the private equity firm and they all run an empire. I know exactly what phase they're in. We know what phase they're in every single month and I'm pacing them all towards phase number five, which is succession.

JON STODDARD (17:49.92)
Yeah. How do you make the call that you've got this system empire and the management or the individual can't fit in or doesn't fit into that or you maxed out the skills of that individual?

Eddie Wilson (18:03.65)
Um, from a personnel standpoint, like, uh, and are you speaking more of like a leader, like the CEO, the leader of the concept? Yeah.

JON STODDARD (18:06.429)
Yeah.

JON STODDARD (18:10.564)
Right, right. So the leaders, you know, there's some people that are great to take a company from one to five, and there's some people take a company from five to 50. And yeah.

Eddie Wilson (18:19.606)
Yeah. I find that a lot of people that take it from one to five rarely take it from five to 50, you know, like that just typically doesn't happen and rarely do you find somebody who's ready to take it to 50 that's actually at the helm of one that's, um, running, you know, one to five. Um, what I find is, and, and, you know, what we've done a lot of is cultivating our people and then keeping them with us to continue down the path of leading another organization. A lot of my.

JON STODDARD (18:26.603)
Right.

Eddie Wilson (18:48.274)
leaders of our assets have led other organizations for me. Now, to go back to your question, how do you know if somebody's hit their potential, or have they hit their ceiling maybe? I think that a lot of that is based on, there's a lot of metrics in there. We run a personnel system called predictive index. Predictive index is a system that...

The founders of it are kin to like Cambridge Analytica. And what they do is they actually dissect down the drive of a human, the drive of a person, and they score a person. It's not a right or wrong score. It's not black or white, but what it does is it gives you a precursor, an indicator of how far they actually have a desire to go. Then it's your job to actually put into them the ability to get there. One of my key staff is...

His name's Larry Yatch. Larry Yatch led SEAL team number three. He led amazing SEAL missions all over Afghanistan and Iraq. And Larry, it's his job. That's his sole responsibility is to take where they are, our leaders, and plot them out from where they are to what their potential is or what they're driven towards. That's his job in the entire company. Because to me, I think the reason you asked that question is this.

That's your great limiter, right? Like your limiter is typically not your product or your service, your limiter is the people that are governing that product or service.

JON STODDARD (20:17.896)
Yeah, what is he taking them to a training and they have to ring the bell if they want out? Yeah, they're gonna...

Eddie Wilson (20:22.755)
Yeah, they got to cry for mercy, man. No, he has a system where we've developed a system called Seal Team Leaders and it's an actual system that we put them through.

JON STODDARD (20:34.316)
Yeah, very interesting. So you put this system and it was kind of rough thesis together and you're like, okay, we're gonna operate on this. So what was next? Did you go out and buy a company or start another company or what was after that?

Eddie Wilson (20:49.93)
No, it actually was a genesis. It was, I was running the insurance company. I was the biggest company, the asset I had and owned and was operating. And I really wasn't meeting the metrics of what I wanted. And I was trying to put everybody else's system on mine. And everybody else, I knew that I needed better operational efficiency if I was gonna get to a place of sale, right? Like that's point number one, which is, figure out, create better bottom lines. And so I was trying to create more efficiency.

The issue with that is that no matter how hard I worked, I wasn't creating any more efficiency. And so I started going after these systems thinking, well, if I put a system on my business, then I'll create more efficiency. The problem with that is, is every one of those other systems out there, the competitors of Empire, really have a one size fits all model. And that's when I, and what happened was I put...

one of those systems on my business and I'd hit the ceiling of that business, I'd say, okay, that system doesn't work anymore, I need a new system. So then I go get a different system and then I would constantly grow, right? And so in growing that, then I realized like I just keep hitting these ceilings and that's when the five phases came to me. It's like, I think all of these systems work if they're just implemented at the right time. The issue isn't these systems are wrong, the issue is that,

the right system at the wrong time still gives you the wrong result.

JON STODDARD (22:14.928)
Yeah. Well, I meant, um, what was next after you put this, this, this architecture together and it's a blueprint of what you're going to do in the future. So what was next? You, did you have some companies and you implemented on that or did you go buy or, or.

Eddie Wilson (22:32.654)
I had 32 companies at that time. I had 32 companies that I owned and operated when I took Empire and I started doing it one at a time and I did it across four different companies. They were at varying stages and phases. My executive team that sat above all those companies, we essentially created that curriculum and that entire system together. It was a ton of trial and error for about two years.

JON STODDARD (22:57.705)
Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (22:58.57)
But I knew I hit stride. My insurance company was at $42 million. I went from $40 million when I bought it to $42 million. My thesis on this insurance company is I'm going to buy this insurance company at $40 million, I'm going to turn it into a $200 million company, I'm going to exit. I thought I could do that in about seven to eight years. We bought it at $40 million, after two years, I was still at $42 million. I just couldn't figure it out. Tried everybody else's system. When I put Empire on the system.

Like when I put Empire, the Empire system on the insurance company, we went from 40 million to 440 million within two years. Then we went to over 800 million in another year and a half. So in five years, I went from 40 million to 880, 890 million, and we actually exited that business in five years for over a billion dollars. But it's like for us, that Empire was everything. And that's what I knew.

I knew I had struck gold at that point, because I was like, okay, I got it. And then we were refining it through all five phases, because I really was still at what I call the perseverance phase, phase two, with the insurance company at 40 million. And then we went through all five phases. Then my executive team kind of went back after the sale and said, okay, what did we learn? Like, here's some new kind of ideology that we should implement. Then we just had enough companies that we just kept refining it.

The nice thing about it is most people that have built a system like this have one company that they're refining it on. I had 30 companies that it was trial and error and we saw all different types of companies, products, services, small companies that were losing money to companies that were doing 100 million in net. We were kind of all over the place.

JON STODDARD (24:48.808)
Well, let's go to those 32 companies. Now, how did those, how did you acquire those, start those, where did those come from? It's...

Eddie Wilson (24:56.478)
Yeah, so after I sold the ad agency, this kind of timeline now, ad agency, I had some capital that I wanted to get an invest in. A guy called me, he said, Hey, I have an insurance company, which is the insurance company I just referenced. He said, and I'm building some captives. My grandfather that is an investor, he said, if you ever get the chance to get in some insurance captives, you should consider it as like always one of those things that I was told I should consider.

So I started going down this path. I flew out to Kansas city, met with the owner. He said, yeah, he said, actually I'm watching your track record. He said, he actually was a client of my advertising agency. And he said, I'm watching your track record. He goes, man, you guys are just crushing it. I don't know how you're doing all of this. He said, you seem to run a really sound business. He said, would you ever consider coming in as a minority owner and also being the operator of this business? He said, I'm in my late sixties. I'm ready to kind of.

walk off the scene. He had already built, he already had about 20 companies that he owned. And so I go in, I started for the first 30 days, I start moving stuff around, I start tweaking, I let go of a few people, hired some new people, I'm, you know, kind of making a mess in the insurance company. But I did a couple of things that he really liked and he came back to me and he said, Hey, I'm going to make you an offer. He said, I have these other 20 some companies.

He said, would you consider making a small investment and I'll put all of these underneath of you. And he said, and I'll let you see if you can operate at scale versus just operating this one single asset. And I thought about it a lot and.

JON STODDARD (26:36.78)
So let me ask you about that. What does he mean operated at scale?

Eddie Wilson (26:40.99)
Yeah. So meaning operated at scale, meaning can I actually do it? It's one thing to operate one single company and you have, you know, your executives underneath of you. It's another thing to step up another level and go, okay, now I have all these executives of these companies. It's managing people. And what he wanted to know is could I take my same way of doing life and business and do it at the next level at scale? Cause it was the one thing he hadn't accomplished. He had all these companies and it was a mess. I mean, like it was a disaster. He had, you know,

JON STODDARD (26:53.297)
It's managing people, yeah.

Eddie Wilson (27:11.01)
people everywhere, half of them weren't making money. I mean, it was just kind of a mess. And he wanted to know, could I do it? And so, and he was wealthy enough that it didn't matter to him if I struggled for a year and he was losing so much money on most of those companies. He had this idea that he could buy data and he didn't care what. So for instance, like he bought a company. It was a risk management company.

but he just wanted the clients of that risk management company to potentially sell insurance for us. So he bought the risk management company to go try to get the clients over to his insurance company. And that's kind of how he was doing business, but they're all desperate. They all were a mess. They all were poorly run. So we did all of that and I began to re-perform those companies one by one. And then that 20, I then started acquiring strategically because he had enough capital.

And I had enough capital that combined, we really could go after some additional companies that complimented kind of the sphere of what we were building. We were really in the real estate mortgage and insurance space is really the three verticals we were messing around in. Um, we added a technology layer and a couple of tech companies in there later on. And then that, that's my springboard. That's how I went from, I really went from 22 assets in.

2013 to the peak of when I owned all the assets was 2019 and we were at 86 assets that I owned. Most of those people did not know him as the operator. They knew me as the operator, me as the person who acquired them. We owned and operated. It wasn't a private equity firm style. We actually owned and operated 86 companies concurrently. We had about 6,000 employees. We had five or six high rise buildings in Kansas City. It was quite the ride.

and then we sold 76 of those assets in 2019. And so that was kind of the big, big ride. Now I'm recreating that again.

JON STODDARD (29:12.912)
Yeah. So you say that wasn't a traditional private equity. Did it, was it still a holding company and a bunch of LLCs down here? Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (29:20.85)
Correct, it was like a C Corp with a series of LLCs or LPs, operational companies that were separate. But the thing is, the money, the capital came from either myself or Mike, the original founder. And there was one other partner in there that put some capital in, but it wasn't like, we didn't have this division where we went out and raised capital to go acquire. We actually leveraged our own capital or our own IP or our own influence to acquire.

JON STODDARD (29:48.608)
Did any of those companies you shut down and just, you know, get rid of or what? Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (29:54.25)
Yeah, out of the 86 we had, we sold 76 of them. There are probably seven or eight of those that were just, you know, they weren't losing money, but they weren't making money. And then there was eight that I shut down and three that I kept out of that whole group of 86 companies.

JON STODDARD (30:16.216)
And so you had this empire system and now you go like, Oh, I got free rain to try this out on all these customers. Did you bring that same management team, the seal team guy and over here and just implement it through the four, six phases?

Eddie Wilson (30:30.582)
Yeah, so what happened was, is I had developed all of that over that time period and I had some pieces of it. And then in 2021, right after COVID, then it was like, I think I'm gonna try this again, but I'm going to, because I had all the exits and I still had a couple of operational companies. I still had a real estate company. I had a big lending association. It was a for-profit association which went stalled. I owned a coffee company out of Atlanta,

facility and coffee company. And I said, why don't we just overlay what we have back on it? We still had Empire. Empire was actually a product at that point helping other businesses. And it was like, we have this system, we have this process, all we have to do is acquire, put the people back in. So yes, I did keep some of the people and I kept the system, obviously. And so then when we started Collective Influence, which is our current group here in Florida, the 13 assets we've...

purchased since 2021. I, you know, Larry, he's the Larry, the seal guy, right? Like he's doing all the leadership. Nick is doing all my operations. He overlays empire on the businesses. My same CFO, Dave that worked for me back then still he's worked for me for 16, 17 years, still works with me. So it's a rinse and repeat process now.

JON STODDARD (31:50.976)
Hey, before you sold these 76 assets, 2019, did somebody come knocking on your door or did you put them up for sale? Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (31:59.306)
Yes. No, I was, my belief was as we are at the peak of the market and there's a lot of M&A activity out there. So I started just kind of, the private equity firm, I had another exit between all of that. I had a small company that I had, my production company that was tied to the ad agency. I had a private equity firm come and buy that off of me.

So I had a private equity firm that I had a relationship with. I called them and I said, hey, like the market just seems really hot right now. Would you ever just consider looking at some of my assets and seeing, I said, I feel like some of them are seasoned well, that, you know, they, they make sense for you. Some of them might be too small. Some of them might be too large. I don't know. And, uh, we looked at two or three of those. He was very, very interested. He actually told every person on the planet about those assets because they were all operating so well.

And then it was a feeding frenzy. Then it was doing diligence on 86 companies. It's by five different firms, and primarily the purchaser of all of those 76 that we sold were private equity firms. There were some private buyers in there, but by and large, it was private equity firms that were buying four and five at a time. Yeah.

JON STODDARD (33:15.496)
Wow. Yeah. And you had how many bids on each one of those?

Eddie Wilson (33:20.438)
Uh, anywhere from three to seven. It just depends.

JON STODDARD (33:24.208)
Yeah. And this guy that was the chairman of the company kind of sitting back, where was he at in this process? He says, yeah, go ahead and do it. Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (33:32.17)
I'm amazed. I think he was in his, you know, late mid to late seventies at that point. His health had really taken a turn. He barely showed up at the office ever. It was running well. He was getting paid very well. He also had all of his other stuff that was outside of that grouping of companies. And the sad story about the whole thing is we built this whole empire and I pretty much sold most of it by...

Uh, October of 2019, uh, he passed away in, uh, March of 2020. So yeah. Uh, what's that? His name is Mike Wren. Yeah. Out of Kansas city.

JON STODDARD (34:08.404)
Uh, who was that? What was his name? What was it? Mike Rand.

JON STODDARD (34:17.236)
Yeah, that's sad to see the culmination, not see the culmination of that. Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (34:22.038)
Well, he saw it and in the end, I think he was, I think it was bigger and grander than he ever imagined. You know, I think it was, he had gotten to the point where it was so far outside of his understanding that he just didn't even come contribute, you know.

JON STODDARD (34:28.33)
Yeah.

JON STODDARD (34:37.16)
Yeah, and you you at that point were what 25% owner or something like that you that what he brought you in in yeah

Eddie Wilson (34:42.858)
Of 14, I own 14%. That was it. I was, and over operation. Yeah. That, and that was the key. True operational control.

JON STODDARD (34:46.704)
Yeah, but in operational control.

JON STODDARD (34:52.348)
Yeah. So you divest all these assets, sell them off, and then you're kind of starting over. What are you working on now?

Eddie Wilson (35:03.778)
So I kept a few assets, more of my passion projects. I had a company called Think Realty, which is a big real estate media platform. About a million people a month touch that platform. And then I owned a company called the American Association of Private Lenders, the AAPL. It was a for-profit association for private capital. So it's one of the largest aggregations of private capital in the world. Primarily they play in the debt space versus equity. And then I owned a coffee company.

And then I owned a small media company. So it's like, I still had three or four assets I was messing around with. And I really went more into philanthropy. I went into my foundations and nonprofit. We were doing a lot of stuff overseas, helping a lot of people that were struggling through COVID and losses and all that type of stuff. And my current business partner, Andrew Cordell, showed up one day at my office in Atlanta.

and said, Hey, we should talk. And he said, I've got a couple of assets, you know, we should do stuff together. We've, we had done real estate deals for years. And, uh, he was at a point of retirement. I was kind of at a point of like, so I just hang it up and, you know, go do my thing or should I try again? You know, what should I, what should I do? And he actually convinced me. He said, what if we actually build what you built before again?

And he said, and what if we only hired rock star people? Like what if we, every single time we buy an asset, we just say, you know what, let's make our list and go after and pay for the most amazing operators, leaders. He said, as opposed to always trying to train. And that was kind of his first thing. He knew after dealing with 6,000 employees for about five years, you get to a place where you're beat up and wore out on employees. And so he knew that was the magic word. And then the last thing he said is, which really

JON STODDARD (36:42.39)
Yeah, yeah.

Eddie Wilson (36:48.374)
you know, got me excited. He said, and what if we took a large percentage of all of our profits on these and we actually support the philanthropic stuff that you're doing. So you're actually, we'll go do what you love to do, which is build, buy, sell businesses, but do it for a greater purpose. And so we actually started a new foundation at that point called Impact Others. And so to date we've given, you know, quite a large sum, you know, to that. And every year we're trying to give

max that out more. Impact Others is a nonprofit organization that we do four things. First of all, we feed malnourished children around the world, feed and educate. So we set up feeding centers to feed them and we have educational centers to educate them. So kids that just would never get educated in the jungles of Africa and India, in the Middle East, we do a lot in the Middle East. We've got about 26 of those feeding centers

JON STODDARD (37:19.904)
What is it? What is Impact Others? What does it do?

Eddie Wilson (37:47.602)
and that also educate these kids. Then we have orphanages. And so number two, we have orphanages. There's some kids that are just, you know, they don't have parents. And so we've built quite a few orphanages. So between the orphanages and the feeding centers, we feed and educate about 4,000 kids a day right now. Number three, clean water projects. The more you travel the world, the more you realize these are massive, massive issues. And so we dig a lot of wells. We're digging seven wells right now.

Ghana, West Africa, two down in Trichy, India, some up in the Lahore area of Pakistan. We're doing a lot of clean water projects. And then the fourth one is building sustainable businesses. So in an area that we have a feeding center, an orphanage, as opposed to going down the model of microfunding and saying, hey, we'll give you 1500 bucks or 3000 bucks to start your woodworking company. We actually will see that woodworking company.

with the expectation that they give a percentage to help the organization that's already there on the ground. So we've started now water buffalo farms in India, woodworking plants in Laos, coffee companies down in Ecuador, taxi cab company in Ghana, West Africa. And we're starting these sustainable businesses with the intent of them continuing to give back and service that local community. And by the way, they all run on Empire, just if you were wondering.

JON STODDARD (39:15.702)
Why these? I mean that's all around the world, but why did you choose these?

Eddie Wilson (39:19.638)
Yeah. Because it was the things that I was, I was most, I was already doing a lot with the orphanages and the feeding centers and the issue.

JON STODDARD (39:28.276)
Now, so how did you come across these orphanages? Were you a Mormon and did some kind of, no?

Eddie Wilson (39:34.466)
No, traveling abroad. I was traveling abroad, a buddy of mine that had a, he was doing some orphanage stuff down in Honduras. I was on a trip to go diving. Just he invited, I went to college with him. He invited me to come over and see the orphanage and saw that he couldn't feed all the kids that were there. Like he had to choose kids that, he had a feeding center in our, exactly.

JON STODDARD (39:58.752)
Some days some kids eat, some days they don't.

Eddie Wilson (40:01.862)
And I said, well, let's fix it. And he was like, well, Eddie, you can't just fix it today. You're either committed and we're gonna fix this for life and we're gonna promise these kids you're gonna feed them for the next eight years or I'm not doing this. He was like, I can't, it's too hard to choose some and not others. And so I actually got involved with him. That was the first step. And then it was like, oh, that was really cool. Super gratifying. And then just as we began to travel, then you start seeing it. Then your eyes are open to these issues.

Then it just kept going on and on. And it's like, but the problem is right now is that no matter how much money you have, you cannot solve all those issues. The issue is just, if you open a feeding center and you think, okay, I'm going to put 150 kids, I'm going to feed 150 kids, 200 show up every time. You know, like it's never, ever enough. And so that's when I realized it was, you know, and then clean water was an issue always with these really.

JON STODDARD (40:52.447)
Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (41:00.958)
you know, difficult areas like clean water, we'd always find we get food there. And then they would say, okay, now we actually have to boil this water. And they bring in this water in order to cook and the water's disgusting. And you're like, how do you know, it's, it's boiling water, just to actually cook with later and just a mess, you know? And so, or they're pulling stuff out of dirty rivers. And, uh, so we started trying to solve that and that just exponentially grew.

And then we realized like, no matter how much we create here, we're never going to solve all the problems that we see every day, so we better help them start creating. And so that's when we went into building the sustainable businesses is that we felt like if we could just create an army of people that, you know, it's the whole teach them to fish model. It's like, if we could just create an army that, that come together with us, then, you know, maybe we could start making a bigger dent.

JON STODDARD (41:49.448)
Yeah, have you always done charitable work?

Eddie Wilson (41:52.298)
No, no, I really didn't. I found a really dark time in my life. When I hit in my mid-twenties, I had enough money, I really didn't need to work anymore. I had accomplished everything I felt like I needed to accomplish and started having those thoughts of like, what's life worth living and what's this all about and what's the point of all this? And that's when I found service. And service was an element that began to gratify and really began to reach into that part of me that was empty.

And that was what began all that.

JON STODDARD (42:22.101)
Yeah.

How has that charitable time you've spent changed who you are as a CEO now?

Eddie Wilson (42:32.65)
Yeah, it changes everything because it is the source. And in our, you know, we're sitting here in the office here, Collective Influence, every one of our people as a part of a, as a prerequisite to coming in has to have a heart of service because we will give a large portion of our profits to these methodologies, like to these projects we have. And if it irritates them, if they're just in it for the money, like they're gonna like...

they're not going to do well in our organization. And we've had some that they just don't see that. It's not who they are, which is fine. But now we attract these like-minded people. When we hire someone, especially a high level executive, we say, now, by the way, the company that you run, Andrew and I intend to give a majority of our distributions and profits a way to help orphanages and feeding centers. And, you know, they, and we're...

going to publish that, we're going to tell the world that's what we do. Like that's what this company is there for. Um, it changes who really qualifies for those positions. So it's changed us, but it's changed our employees and mindset and culture as well.

JON STODDARD (43:41.452)
So what time kinds of businesses or size of business do you look for now where you can find or attract top level talent and give away? What is it? 10%, 15, 20% of a 40% 50% of excess cashflow. Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (43:54.87)
40 to 50% of the profit goal. Yeah, that's the goal. Some are in that place and some are giving more and some are giving less, but that is the goal. So we found a sweet spot with $1.1 trillion worth of liquidity sitting on the sidelines in PE today. That's the largest amount in history, just sitting there on the sidelines. What I realized is the easiest space, because we have a...

proprietary operating system is the best company for me to buy is one that's kind of already solved a lot of their issues, but doesn't have the growth capacity. So they're mid-tier, right? We like the ones that are doing 3 million to 10 million, 3 million to 30 million. We'll grab those, oftentimes allow the owner to play in an equity position with us in a minority role if they decide that desire to. We have to be in control because we may have to remove that person.

if it doesn't make sense for us.

JON STODDARD (44:55.66)
Do you, Curious, do you force them to sell out their shares or can they keep that if they have to move? Yeah, okay.

Eddie Wilson (45:00.758)
They can keep that. Yeah, we can keep that. I want them to play in the deal with us. See, even if I don't believe that they should be sitting at the helm and steering the ship, I still would love for them to play with us because what we do, like we just have such a high track record of performance and success. I leveraged that in the acquisition of this company. You know, like, Hey, look at here. Here's the other companies over here that I've done this with, you know, a hundred times now I can do this with your company.

I'm not going to offer you as much money as you want for this company, but I'm going to let you go along for the ride with us. I'm going to do something you couldn't do by yourself and not, not in an arrogant way, but just letting them like, we just have that track record. So then that performance. So I love that mid that kind of mid range because there are the big whales, you know, the big, big private equity firms. They have a really hard time because they don't have my model. My model is an operational model.

JON STODDARD (45:34.569)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eddie Wilson (45:56.002)
The big firms need to buy a company that they can increase their profitability or leverage something at 10, 20% and then exit again. So, you know, they're buying a hundred million, 110 million, 120 million. So I like playing in that mid tier space because I can take a company that, you know, I feel like they're like minnows and small fish down here and there's the big private equity firms. It's a whale. Well, it's too, it's too much work for a whale to come down here and eat a bunch of minnows and small fish. I feel like I'm the middle size fish that kind of comes and eats all this up

JON STODDARD (46:22.248)
Yeah, yeah.

Eddie Wilson (46:26.134)
prepares for the meal for the big fish, the big whale.

JON STODDARD (46:29.916)
Yeah. Well, when you look at these companies, is this still in the same industries, mortgage, insurance, and real estate, or what are you looking at?

Eddie Wilson (46:41.37)
No, we have three verticals now. One of them is a really broad bucket. But the first vertical is we bought a company and we have a very specific way that we do business today. We have top of the funnel companies in all of our companies. So in our one vertical, which is fitness, we do fitness, health and fitness. It's one vertical. We bought the world's largest fitness convention. So we bought FitCon. They had 3 million person database. You know, we run.

three to five events around the country can have anywhere from 20 to 40,000 people attend these events. That's a massive database of pre-qualified people. And so FitCon's top of the funnel in that division. And then downstream from that, we've bought supplement companies, clothing companies, hormone replacement therapy clinics. We just, we're working on a deal.

I guess I shouldn't say that one yet, but we got a deal that's LOI'd and ready to go and closing on a proprietary way to look at your metabolism through blood work and stuff like that analysis. So it's like we look at that then we have another company over here, we still have Think Realty, which is the company I had from before. So we still have a real estate and what we call real estate or prop tech verticals. We're looking at a lot of technology in the real estate and real estate investment space. And then we have a company called Money Is

which is really a media company, education media company that teach entrepreneurs how to essentially structure their deals in a tax-free way, tax-free environment, if they're doing it passively. And it's hard to explain that company, but that company over here then is more of our entrepreneurial vertical. And so we have a company in there called Tax Free Crypto where you can trade crypto inside of your IRAs and self-directed IRAs and stuff like that.

A bunch of companies like downstream from that. And then we have a one big catch all. We love the event space. Um, it's one of the companies we acquired.

JON STODDARD (48:41.843)
Why do you love the event space? Is that something?

Eddie Wilson (48:44.854)
It's because digital marketing has digital marketing and digital lead Jen, um, is, is where we live today. However, it's less effective than a physical touch in the event space. So if I can get somebody to actually pay 20 bucks for a ticket, come listen to, you know, someone, I have a deeper relationship than them coming through a Facebook funnel or going through a click funnel and ending up downstream somewhere.

And so the lifetime value speeds up for someone that I actually put inside of, if I put that button a seat and I physically have interaction with them or somebody in our company has physical interaction with them, it exponentially increases the lifetime value. And that's what we're doing is playing a lifetime value game and all these verticals. And so we started a tour this year called the Aspire tour, the Aspire tour. And really that's a, even it's like, I told you about the top of the funnel.

It's like top, top of the funnel because it actually fills all of the buckets. And the Aspire Tour, we'll have a couple thousand people once a month attend an event that we have. And we've got, you know, Mark Slimonis and Kevin O'Leary and Alex Rodriguez, and all these guys come and speak for us. And we do them in a big city around America every single month. And again, it's a top of the funnel driver for us that allows us an interaction with or a relationship with somebody that then we can, you know, increase the lifetime value.

JON STODDARD (50:09.012)
Yeah, let's go back to that FitCon you bought, acquired a FitCon. And then you said, or previously you said, we're going to go find top level talent. Did you find somebody to take it, sit in that role?

Eddie Wilson (50:21.334)
Yeah, we found somebody who actually was already in our space, who had actually played a heavy role in an events company over with, I think he had worked the Tony Robbins brand for quite a while. And so he came over, but he was also heavily involved in fitness, health and fitness and in a company in health and fitness. He came over to run it. His name's Pete. And Pete came over. We kept a majority of the staff.

But the one thing that we did on FitCon that was actually, I think our best move was we actually kept pieces of equity that we gave to influencers in that space. So we gave about 15% of that company away to a couple of very large influencers that have, three or four or five million people following them on Instagram because they're fitness influencers. And so they fill up the actual events.

and they're an owner so they have a benefit to do so. But yeah, I ended up taking the original guy out, hired a new CEO, I bought that company 100% and then actually gave some equity away to some large employees.

JON STODDARD (51:30.252)
Was that company for sale or was it off market, on market? Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (51:33.418)
It was off market. Yeah. It came, came through a friend of a friend.

JON STODDARD (51:37.556)
Who is the, who's the influencers that you use? That would I would.

Eddie Wilson (51:40.394)
Um, so the first influencer, his name is, uh, Keaton. He goes by the muscle. He's on a show called, um, uh, the diesel brothers on, uh, the diesel brothers, there are three guys that build diesel trucks that they goof off and they've had like, I don't know, 15 seasons on the discovery channel. Um, yeah. And he's, he's the main guy on there. He has a huge, huge following, but he's, his secondary life is fitness.

JON STODDARD (51:50.432)
Diesel Brothers, yeah.

JON STODDARD (51:59.912)
Yeah, I think I've seen it. Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (52:09.518)
They call him, his nickname is the muscle on the show. Then we gave it to him. Then a guy by the name of Rob Bailey. And Rob is a big influencer on social. He has his own fitness training programs and different stuff like that. And then we got a package deal because we actually got his wife, which is Dana Lynn Bailey, which is the first ever Mrs. Olympia. So she was the first one to ever win.

the female side of Mr. Olympia, right? So she was the first ever Miss Olympia. And let's see, I'm not as familiar with the deal as I should be, but then there's one other influencer and I forget who the other influencer is, but yeah.

JON STODDARD (52:52.896)
Yeah. Yeah. And your, what was the decision to keep these companies for a period of time until they went through the, you know, the empire system first versus a buy and hold Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger kind of thing.

Eddie Wilson (53:08.782)
Right? Yeah. For me, I know that if I was in Warren Buffett's shoes and I had, you know, $80 billion sitting there in liquidity and I had to move larger amounts of capital, I would take his model. You know, I would actually go for the bigger companies that are already proven. I would improve their efficiencies. You only have to improve them this much to get this much out of what they're doing. For me, I like the rinse and repeat model, the replication.

JON STODDARD (53:31.999)
Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (53:38.046)
with smaller amounts of capital and liability in a marketplace like we are today. Right? Like, sure, I could take down some big hundred million dollar company. However, there's a lot less risk for me because I have a system that plugs into them and that has been proven over and over again. So it's a whole lot easier and less risk in an economy like there is today for me to go buy a five million dollar company than a hundred million dollar company. And so especially in the real estate space.

You know, I think fitness is pretty sound right now. Real estate and prop tech, you know, that's a rough space right now. So we're careful there. And then in the entrepreneurial space, like we've got a lot of random companies over there and some of them are high risk. So I think it just takes the risk out of it.

JON STODDARD (54:13.685)
Yeah.

JON STODDARD (54:24.284)
Yeah. What's the goal here? I mean, do you have, do you want to get up to 80, 70 something plus companies like you did before, or just something better quality? Less. Yeah.

Eddie Wilson (54:33.522)
No, I think higher quality. I like to hit as our company, we've been in operation for about a year and a half now, and we just got our, we just did a full valuation, I think in March on all the assets. And I think we're at over 400 billion already. I'd like to hit the billion dollar mark in valuation before the end of the year. And then really I'm trying to get to the $5 billion valuation in three. So just milestones now.

I'm just turning away and all of that, if I can get the five billion in valuation, you know, I'm probably giving to charity somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 million dollars a year. And that's what I want.

JON STODDARD (55:16.712)
Yeah. Do you have an investment banker to set you up? Like you talked about, hey, you got to be ready 12 months before you actually do it. You have an investment banker that you work with?

Eddie Wilson (55:24.174)
We're, we do. Yeah, we do. Um, we, we've been with Merrill Lynch for a long time. So we're kind of on their, their side. It's once you get to that level and you've sold that many, we've got some pretty, pretty good service on, on that side.

JON STODDARD (55:38.624)
to get people to create a feeding frenzy for your businesses. Yeah. Eddie Wilson, that was a treat. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. All right, man. Stop.

Eddie Wilson (55:42.347)
Yeah, exactly.

Eddie Wilson (55:47.35)
Yeah, thank you, John. Appreciate it.